The concept that the path is the goal and the goal is the path seems like an irreconcilable tautology. What are we trying to say here? It's definitely like saying the means is the ends and the ends is the means. In a spiritual practice, we can often throw the baby out with bathwater, and focus on the gifts without the repentance. In other words, we want the experience of God without ever obeying Him. Esoteric is prioritized before exoteric, when instead it should be proportional to each other.
Bernadette Roberts says, “Where people regard knowledge as a means and experience as an end, I regard experience as a means and knowledge as the end.” So while experience matters, it also matters what is experientially learned. She continues: “In other words, if the means (religion) is not proportionate to the end (Truth), or if the means did not already contain the goal or end to be realized, then religion cannot get us to the end and would be valueless as a means.” It would seem that we can't disconnect the mystic from their religion!
Some skeptics may argue that mystics always end up reiterating the same truths they began with. But we can't have spiritual experiences from a blank slate. Non-symbolic experiences have to be expressed through the symbols we embody prior to our realizations/revelations. We are always mediated in any experience.
Roberts says, “What is ironic about this complaint is that he [the skeptic] does the same thing. What he starts out believing about religion and mystical experience he ends up believing, his conclusions are no different than his premises. Should one's premises be wrong or false, of course, then his conclusions could never be right—it would be logically impossible. So everything depends on the premises you start with because it dictates what you will, or can, end up with.”
Roberts says, “What is ironic about this complaint is that he [the skeptic] does the same thing. What he starts out believing about religion and mystical experience he ends up believing, his conclusions are no different than his premises. Should one's premises be wrong or false, of course, then his conclusions could never be right—it would be logically impossible. So everything depends on the premises you start with because it dictates what you will, or can, end up with.”
So here again, first principles matter—as our experiences only confirm them! Besides, you will never experience God directly as Cause (only Effect), because God is beyond experience. So while we're on this side of the grave, we can only work with what He gifted to us.
If you've traveled in neo-advaita circles, as well as some Buddhist camps, you'll hear about nonduality. The realization that subject and object collapses and all is not-two. But this may be more of a concept than a reality. I've never been comfortable with people expressing their nondual realizations, as if everything can be explained away — including a God, a world, and themselves. Just watch this who's on first performative dance known as the “advaita shuffle” (As a side note: I like Tony Parsons as a person from what I can tell, it's just the approach I find problematic.) This approach just takes the easy way out, that in long run won't make things easier for anyone trying to include and discern all aspects of reality.
Roberts says, “The fact of our natural oneness with God neither makes us God nor robs us of a Godgiven individuality. We are like dependent babes in the womb, dependent yet separate.”
If we look at the dualities of subject and object, absolute and relative, God and man, Atman and Brahman, transcendence and immanence, whole and part; then we then have to ask “If all these dualities are negated, how could we possibly end up with "one" – one anything? Negate these dualities and nothing remains to be called "nondual".”
Negate all dualities, and you are pretty much left with nothing. But last time I checked, there is definitely a something rather than a nothing. Our chosen realities cannot really be independent of our discriminating individuality. Any union is a fusion of God’s attributes, but not a union with God that our identities become fused. Reality exists, and we participate in awareness of this as persons.