No Gap
God is the infinite, all-pervading and all-encompassing Happening happening as all happening. There can be no gap between you and God, between atman (soul) and Brahman, between your “I” and Ehyeh, the I’ing of all being. There is only what the Buddhists call Tathātā: “suchness,” “what is so,” “the nature of things,” reality.
When Jesus says, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:57) and “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6), he isn’t speaking as a thirtysomething Jew from Nazareth, but as the cosmic Christ; not the “I” that imagines itself apart from God, but the I’ing that is God (Exodus 3:14); not the alienated self, but the Self that knows itself as all selves: the atman who is Brahman.
Like Jesus’s interlocutors who cannot imagine how this young man can be older than Abraham, C. S. Lewis is deaf to the deeper meaning of the Gospel and imagines a flat Jesus who can only be liar, lunatic, or Lord rather than a fully God-realized Jesus who knows that “I and the Father are one, and so are you.”
A person who imagines herself separate from God imagines herself greater than God, for she points to her skin and says to God, “You may come this far, and no further.” RR