All the spiritual masters speak about a self that has to live and a self that has to die. The language may differ, but it is always there.
JOY PRAKASH OFM
Jesus and all the spiritual masters speak about a self that has to live and a self that has to die. The language may differ, but it
is always there. And we always thought that we need to die to the flesh; we thought that if we kill the flesh, the spirit would automatically ascend. This manner of thinking has done untold damage to the understanding of the Gospel.
The question we should be asking is: What is the self that has to die? For Jesus says if it does not die, something else is not going to happen. It was Thomas Merton, the author of The Seven Story Mountain and The New Seeds of Contemplation who came up with the most clarifying language, and he said that it is the false self that has to die.
And the true self that has to live.
At the heart of Merton’s spirituality is his distinction between our false and true selves, between the pseudo-identities we possess
as conditioned members of society, and the person we truly are, known only by God. Our false selves are the identities we cultivate in order to function in society with pride and self- possession; our real selves are a deep religious mystery, known entirely only to God.
The world cultivates the false self, ignores the real one, and therein lies the great irony of human existence: the more we make of ourselves, the less we actually exist.
If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face,
we will protect it with fabrications, even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to
be the collective endeavour of society: the more busily people dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities – “ourselves”, that is to say, we are regarded as objects. We become Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them that they are real).
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy.
The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction.
There is a paradox that lies in the very heart of human existence. It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: man’s nature, by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problems. If we follow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our
own level of ethics, we will end up in hell. We were ordered to his Divine Self and we are not destined for purely natural lives.
Our culture alienates us from who we are in truth: alienation begins when culture divides me against myself, puts a mask on me, gives me a role I may or may not want to play. Alienation is complete when I completely identify with my mask, become totally satisfied with my role, and convince myself that any other identity or role is inconceivable. The man who sweats his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free. Some have to pay a psychiatrist to scratch them, so as to feel uncomfortable with their mask.
The shallow “I” of individualism can be possessed, developed, cultivated, and pandered to, satisfied: it is the centre of all our strivings for gains and for satisfaction, whether material or spiritual. But the deep “I” of the spirit, of solitude and of love, cannot be “had”, possessed, developed, perfected. It can only be, and can only act according to the inner law which is not of man’s contriving but which comes from God.
The inner self is as secret as God and, like Him, it evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held and studied as an object, because it is not “a thing”. It is not reached and coaxed forth from hiding by any process under the
sun, including meditation. All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart and the indifference which are required for the inner self to make some predictable manifestation of His presence.
True solitude is found in humility, which
is infinitely rich. False solitude is the refuge of pride, and it is infinitely poor. The poverty of false solitude comes from an illusion, which pretends by adorning itself in things it can never possess, to distinguish one individual self from the mass of other people. True solitude is selfless. Therefore, it is rich in silence and charity and peace. It finds in itself seemingly inexhaustible resources of good to bestow on other people. False solitude is self-centred. And because it finds nothing in its own centre, it seeks to draw all things into itself. But everything it touches becomes infected with its own nothingness,
and falls apart. True solitude cleans the soul,
lays it wide open to the four winds of generosity. False solitude locks the door against all people, and pours over its own private accumulation of rubbish. As Merton continued to meditate on what kind of monk he intended to be, he moved closer towards being the person God intended him to be.
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