In the video below, non-dual spiritual teacher Rupert Spira beautifully discusses the journey from traditional exoteric outward-facing dualistic religion that worships and prays to an external God, and towards higher stages of a more integrated perceiving of non-dual at-one esoteric inward-facing union spirituality, where we realize that “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30).

This spirituality comes to know that God is the very Self of our Being, the “I AM” within each and every one of us, the very ground of our ontological nature, beneath all psychological aspects of an egoic self in our mind, and that we are One with this ground, in this, as this, forever and always. There is nothing we can do that could separate us from this ground, because it is the very basis of who and what we are, although we may lose perception of it, and “fall” away from knowing this union.

In my view this is very much what Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Gautama, and many other saints, sages, prophets, and mystics have realized throughout history, and which they have all pointed towards using a multitude of different words, metaphors, and symbols. When people take their symbols too literally, and lose that deep inner awareness, then the teaching often falls back towards lower expressions of dualistic religion and “preparatory gospels,” where the mystics must rescue it once again to help point us towards the higher mysteries of our Being, in this Oneness that has many names. This is a pattern which has repeated itself countless times throughout history.

Here is Spira’s elucidation: