Within the traditional framework, the Christian notion of loss-of-self is generally regarded as the transformation or loss of the ego (lower self) as it attains to the higher or true self in its union with God. In this union, however, self retains its individual uniqueness and never loses its ontological sense of personal selfhood.
Thus there is no longer any sense of “my” life, but rather “our” life—God and self. In this abiding state God, the “still-point” at the center of being, is ever accessible to the contemplative gaze—a point from which the life of self arises and into which it sometimes disappears.
Because this was the limit of my expectations, I was all the more surprised and bewildered when many years later I came upon a permanent state in which there was no self, no higher self, true self, or anything that could be called a self.
The first movement is toward self’s union with God which seems to run parallel with the psychological process of integration, wherein the emphasis is on interior trials and dark nights by which the self is established in a permanent union with God, the still-point and axis of its being. In this process we discover that self is not lost; rather, a new self is revealed that functions from the deepest, innermost divine center. Following this first movement is an interval (twenty years in my case) during which this union is tested by a variety of exterior (not interior) trials whereby this oneness is revealed in all its enduring depths of stability and toughness against all forces that would move, fragment, or disturb its center. Thus it is a period of discovering the beauty and intense wonder of this gratuitous union and, above all, of discovering what this wholeness means and how it works in our daily lives in the marketplace. Initially it is a period of becoming acclimated to the relative difference between life with the old, easily fragmented self, and life with a new self that cannot be moved from its center in God. Finally, this is a stage in which, if exterior trials are not forthcoming, the contemplative may seek them because the energy created by this union must move outward (as a unit and not as a scattered force) to find expression, to accept challenge—even suffering—as a way to both reveal and affirm this enduring love.
It seems that at the end of the marketplace a point is reached where the self is so completely aligned with the still-point that it can no longer be moved, even in its first movements, from this center. It can no longer be tested by any force or trial, nor moved by the winds of change, and at this point the
self has obviously outworn its function; it is no longer needed or useful, and life can go on without it.
The immediate, inevitable result is an emergence into a new dimension of knowing and being that entails a difficult and prolonged readjustment. The reflexive mechanism of the mind—or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious—is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after held in a fixed now-moment out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown.
This is not a journey for those who expect love and bliss, rather, it is for the hardy who have been tried in fire and have come to rest in a tough, immovable trust in “that” which lies beyond the known, beyond the self, beyond union, and even beyond love and trust itself.
My purpose then, in writing this account, is to help clarify the second movement, to make it more recognizable and to bring to light, if possible, the ultimate, final realization of the Christian notion of loss-of-self.
For this reason I wrote quickly before the journey became lost forever and life without a self grew as dim as the day of my birth. But at the same time, release from the past has made it possible to write on a personal level—something I would not have dared to undertake prior to this time—because the journey no longer belongs to “me.” I look upon it as I do any other fact of life or event taking place around us. Thus it now stands unalterably by itself where it remains forever—but a thing of the past.
Part I The Journey
Chapter 1
Through past experience I had become familiar with many different types and levels of silence. There is a silence within, a silence that descends from without; a silence that stills existence and a silence that engulfs the entire universe. There is a silence of the self and its faculties of will, thought, memory, and emotions. There is a silence in which there is nothing, a silence in which there is something; and finally, there is the silence of noself and the silence of God. If there was any path on which I could chart my contemplative experiences, it would be this ever-expanding and deepening path of silence.
But I must preface this account by saying that on previous occasions, I had come upon a pervasive silence of the faculties so total as to give rise to subtle apprehensions of fear. It was a fear of being engulfed forever, of being lost, annihilated, or blacking out and possibly never returning. In such moments, to ward off the fear, I would make some movement of abandoning my fate to God—a gesture of the will, a thought, some type of projection. And every time I did this the silence would be broken and I would gradually return to my usual self—and security. Then, one day, this was not to be the case.
For three exhausting days it was a battle to stay awake and ward off the silence that every second threatened to overpower me. The only way I could accomplish the minimum of chores was by persistently reminding myself of what I was doing: now I’m peeling the carrots, now I’m cutting them, now I’m getting out a pan, now I’m putting water in the pan and on and on until, finally, I was so exhausted I would have to run for the couch. The moment I lay down I immediately blacked out. Sometimes it seemed I was out for hours, when it was only five minutes; at other times, it seemed like five minutes when it was hours. In this blackout there were no dreams, no awareness of my surroundings, no thoughts, no experiences—absolutely nothing.
Now when something is dead you soon lose the habit of trying to resurrect it; thus when the memory is lifeless you learn to live as one who has no past—you learn to live in the present moment.
It was like a continuous gaze at the great, silent Unknowable which no activity could interrupt. This was another welcomed outcome of the initial experience.
Instead of the usual unlocalized center of myself, there was nothing there, it was empty; and at the moment of seeing this there was a flood of quiet joy and I knew, finally I knew what was missing—it was my “self.”
So I decided that Christ WAS the joy, the emptiness itself; He was all that was left of this human experience. For days I walked with this joy that, at times, was so great, I marveled at the flood gates and wondered how long they would hold. This experience was the height of my contemplative vocation. It was the ending of a question that had plagued me for years: where do “I” leave off and God begin?
couldn’t see it at all, but always my mind had wanted desperately to know: what was His and what was mine? Now my quandary was over. There was no “mine” anymore, there was only His. I could have lived in this joyous state the rest of my life, but such was not in the Great Plan. It was just a matter of days, a week perhaps, when my entire spiritual life—the work, the suffering, the experiences and the goals of a lifetime—suddenly exploded into a million irretrievable pieces and there was nothing, absolutely nothing left.
Chapter 2
Almost immediately the empty space began to expand, and expanded so rapidly it seemed to explode; then, in the pit of my stomach I had the feeling of falling a hundred floors in a nonstop elevator, and in this fall every sense of life was drained from me. The moment of landing I knew: When there is no personal self, there is also no personal God. I saw clearly how the two go together—and where they went, I have never found out.
There was no more gazing within; from now on my eyes could only look outward. At the time, I had no way of knowing the tremendous repercussions that would follow this sudden event.
So I sat there fully awake, healthy, faculties unimpaired, obviously alive; in a word, all systems were functioning as usual—but I felt no life. What do you do now? I decided I might as well get an early start preparing dinner, but as I did so, all the usual movements now seemed so mechanical I felt I had suddenly become a robot, for I could no longer endow my work with any personal energies. I did my chores with no life to back them up and they were all totally mechanical, a mere conditioned habit of movement.
Always I had felt at home here. It was a place of great peace and a mysterious stillness. By experience I knew that thinking would never solve the problems of life, it was just being here, out-of-doors, in the midst of real life, that automatically separated the relevant from the irrelevant, so that upon returning home all the irrelevancies had been swept away and I could see clearly the path I must go.
It was here that nature finally yielded its secret to me in a simple, still moment in which I saw how it all worked. God or life was not in anything, it was just the reverse: everything was in God. And we were not in God like drops of water that could be separated from the sea, but more like … well, the only thing I could think of was the notion of trying to pinch out a spot on an inflated balloon; if you pinch out a spot and try to cut it off the whole thing will pop because it can’t be done. You cannot separate anything from God, for as soon as you let go of the notion of separateness, everything falls back into the wholeness of God and life.
One thing is for sure: as long as we are caught up in words, definitions, and all that the mind wants to cling to, we can never see how it works. And until we can go beyond our notions regarding the true nature of life we will never realize how totally secure we really are, and how all the fighting for individual survival and self-security is a waste of energy.
The secret of allowing an insight to become a permanent way of knowing and seeing is not to touch it, cling to it, dogmatize it, or even think about it. Insights come and go, but to have them stay we have to flow with them, otherwise no change is possible. It is a mistake to think that because we have been thrown the ball, we know which direction to run. Perhaps our greatest insights are lost this way: we plunk them down in our usual frame of reference and go nowhere.
With the falling away of life within, the reception of the Eucharist no longer had any effect on me. Where before it had always drawn me into its mysterious silence, now, no such change occurred. If anything, there was too much silence. Thus, with the failure of the Eucharist to restore a sense of life within, I felt doubly lost and decided I might at least carry it with me in my search to find God without.
I consumed the host and saw all things were in God, that he was closer and more personal than I ever dared to expect. To suddenly realize you live and walk in God is a unique discovery that forever dispels the sense of loss that ensues when the feeling of a personal life falls away.
It was not I, who had abandoned the self to God, rather it was God who had abandoned the self completely; and once beyond the self, everything goes, even “that” which I had expected would remain.
To see the Oneness of everything is like having special 3D glasses put before your eyes; I thought to myself: for sure, this is what they mean when they say “God IS Everywhere.”
I was never to revert back to the usual relative way of seeing separateness or individuality; but make no mistake, the obliteration of separateness is meaningless in itself. What is important about this way of seeing is THAT into which all separateness dissolves. Before going further and attempting to describe this new way of seeing, I would like to say that after discovering God Everywhere—or His Oneness, as I called it—I was compensated a thousandfold for the bewildering loss of a personal God within. It seems I had first to move through the personal and then the impersonal before I realized God was closer than either and beyond them both.
Chapter 3 Eventually it became imperative to make some changes in my life-style. For the time being at least, it had become impossible to feel at one with the constant flow of irrelevancies and noise that made up my usual environment. Having been robbed of the energies necessary to dominate, control, and stay on top of the frequent chaotic conditions in the home, my effectiveness as a mother to four teenagers dropped sharply to zero.
Until the rug (my “self’) had been pulled out from under me, I never realized how utterly dependent I was upon getting around under my own steam—steam of the mind and emotions, that is—not physical steam. It seems we possess an endless array of subtle energies we don’t know we have until they are gone—although later I was to see clearly how these energies are, in fact, the self’s defenses against its own annihilation. For right now, however, it was taking a long time to learn how to survive without the experience of any energy. Learning to live this way was like learning to live all over again, and though I now understand it in retrospect, at the time I was as bewildered and groping as a man who has suddenly lost the power of his limbs.
Without a doubt I was in the Great Flow, so totally at one with it that every notion of ecstasy, bliss, love and joy, pale by comparison to the extraordinary simplicity, clarity, and oneness of such an existence. There is nothing haphazard, idle, or easy-going about forest life. On the contrary, everything there is vital, fully awake, dynamic, and intelligent. It is not a free life. The Great Flow takes its own direction, sweeping everything along, and whether it would go or not, is of no consequence. There is no time to step out of the flow or to take a break; in a word, it is a life completely devoid of a single irrelevancy.
If we have any conception of what God is, certainly it should be changing and expanding as we ourselves grow and change.
Since we do not know in which direction to turn, we must wait like the flower for the morning sun, and with no effort or resistance, be pulled in the direction of the light. Whatever we care to call the ultimate reality, we cannot define or qualify it because the brain is incapable of processing this kind of data. Thus we must ever look upon words as mere descriptions of man’s experiences—the nature of which we do not really know. For myself, the opening up of everything upon which I gazed revealed a reality that was the same throughout, be the object animate or inanimate.
The mysterious aspect of this type of seeing was that while I could focus on the objects around me, I could never focus on myself. To do so would have been as impossible as looking into my eyes without a mirror. For this reason I felt like an outside observer looking upon a Oneness that included everything but myself. It was as if I was not a part of this Oneness, not even a part of the universe; in fact, I couldn’t see where I had any existence at all.
Furthermore, as we all know, the infant doesn’t think, for as yet there is no content in his consciousness, nor does he have anything to remember. All of us then, were born without a reflective, self-conscious type of mind which, to me, is an apt definition of “seeing.” Thus for the adult, seeing may be a kind of return to this original form of consciousness, a form that surprisingly does not seem to hamper the ordinary activities of practical living. Therefore, in the process of reverting back to our original consciousness we have to learn how to live without any self-consciousness—the build-up of a lifetime perhaps—which is not an easy adjustment to make. But it’s exciting to think we can make it at all, and even more exciting to think of what would happen if every man could live as he was originally intended to live.
One thing is certain: with our thinking, rational mind, we’ll never come upon these answers because our mind, limited tool that it is, is so continually taken up in the service of self that it cannot come upon that which lies beyond all such concerns.
This is why, when there is no self, there also seem to be no experiences—no movement, feelings, excitement, or the thousand responses of which the self is capable. From here on, all experiences are of a non-relative character—meaning, the experience is it, and there is nothing outside itself.
Whatever it was, it was gathering itself together from all parts and in doing so, was expanding outwards, obliterating everything in its path. At the same time, it grew to such a pitch of vibratory, almost electrical, intensity that it exerted a magnetic pull on my body. At first glimpse it appeared to be the familiar Oneness, but as it grew in intensity I realized it was something else, something I did not recognize at all. The Oneness had always revealed itself through the medium of form, but if this was the Oneness, it now had no medium and was magnified a thousand times over, a magnification that could not be endured.
I never knew how to evaluate this experience, but each time it occurred I thought the end had come and that the light would go out forever. This would have meant a total blackout such as I had experienced before, a blackout in which there is absolutely nothing, an annihilation more complete than just the loss of self—and what this meant, I had no idea.
Chapter 4
Instead of seeing the Oneness into which all separateness dissolved, everything now dissolved into an inexplicable emptiness. Where, for so many months there had been “something,” now there was nothing. In time, this emptiness became increasingly pronounced and difficult to live with. Without an “inner” life or the slightest movement within, “seeing” had become my life; I was totally dependent upon it, and without it, I had not a thing to fall back on.
Somehow I knew that with the birth of fear, self would spring alive with all its weaponry, for it was now obvious that fear—the mother of all inventions—was the core around which the self was built and upon which its life so depended, that self and fear were here, all but indistinguishable. But when no reaction came, when there was no movement of fear, I concluded that self had been frozen and entombed within me in full consciousness of its state of immobility, death, and total helplessness.
But if there is no God, then all along I had only been trusting myself—so which was worse? Somehow they both had a way of leading to similar dead ends. But if you can’t trust either of these, what’s left? That was the real question: if there is no self and no God, what then? I had just seen “what then” and couldn’t live with that either.
For me, the great explosion was supposed to have been a marvelous spiritual blossoming—preferably one with creative overtones. Never in my wildest dreams did I suspect it was my ’self’ about to be blasted into a million irretrievable pieces.
This explains why the contemplative does not have to wait until middle age—as Jung would have it—before he finds his “true self.” This discovery is a byproduct of his union with God, which can be reached at any age—even a very young age—wherein the self is completely integrated when it becomes wholly centered in God.
At the same time, it is well to remember that because the natural and supernatural are equally of God’s own time and making, they are on the same continuum, so that, ultimately, no true separation is possible. One way or the other, God is the only one working in us for our advancement as human beings and as creatures of his own doing. Thus, whether we arrive at our final destination early or late is not, in the long run, all that relevant. Nevertheless, most of us would agree: life gets better, the sooner we get it together.
The other is that this journey is the final process of our natural life-span, wherein self-consciousness is gradually relinquished as we come upon “that” which lies beyond all self. But either way, it is a preparation for a new existence, an entry into a new way of knowing or seeing that is truly the greatest of all man’s beginnings, and in no way an ending.
And in telling us something of this state, there is the revelation of the Creator’s goodness, who has given the little ones to see “that” which the contemplative spends his whole life searching for
and, literally, would give his eyetooth to see. Such a divine dispensation is no more mysterious than Christ promising heaven to the criminal on the cross—a common criminal who, for all we know, may have spent his entire life deriding God and hating his neighbor.
To me, the contemplative’s sole function in society is to shed light on this dimension beyond self, and to tell us about the crossing over, which is a journey few can talk about, but a journey everyone is ultimately destined to make.
Thus the glimpses of a complete loss of self, described by both St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross as merely “transient” (which somehow they did not foresee as a lasting state), become a permanent reality, a reality of yet another step in the Eternal Movement. The only mystic I know who says something about this step beyond union, beyond self and God, is Meister Eckhart. In one sense, at least, this could be understood as his “breakthrough,” his “bursting forth” into the Godhead, his “crashing through to that which is beyond the idea of God and truth, until it (the soul) reaches the in principio, the beginning of beginnings, the origin or source of all goodness and truth.”
It seems that for the Rhineland mystics in particular, the final emphasis was not so much on the Trinitarian distinctions in the Godhead as the Trinity’s essential Unity or Oneness. This is reflected in our own journey where union with distinction eventually gives way to a Unity without distinction—the essential Oneness of the Godhead, that is.
This amounts to saying that union depends on separateness, and in this he is correct; but beyond self this separateness no longer exists, and thus he is also correct in saying that identity of substance (essence, as I call it) between man and God robs the mystic of both his God and his mysticism.
Oneness is by its very nature the ending of the contemplative life—which is why it is the beginning of a new life. In a word, God has become eternally accessible.
For the contemplative to regard such a union as the final or ultimate consummation of his spiritual life is a grave mistake. He is setting his sight at a midway point which, I now see, is too low, too close-in, and too narrow.
That he is, what he is, who he is, where he is, in God these are One, and outside this One, nothing is.
Experiences do not last, they are not eternal; only Truth lasts and is eternal.