When I think of myself - when I turn my conscious awareness back on itself, what do I find? What am I, exactly? We awake in a world not of our choosing, hopefully into a family who loves us. A body is discovered, which can move things around, feel pleasure and be hurt. By interacting with those around us, we understand what they think of us, and moderate our behaviour accordingly. Various labels that people give us are subsumed into our mental life, for good or for worse. Our family, our teachers and friends tell us about the world - “the truth” of things, according to their views. Views that inevitably become our own views. We find out what is good and bad, what is real and what isn’t, perhaps who God is and what he thinks of us.
These influences eventually give us words to describe ourselves. I am a Christian, an atheist, a Muslim. I an introvert or extrovert. I am an athlete, or I am an academic. I am beautiful or I am ugly. Our life in this world gives us a mental image of ourselves, a conglomeration of descriptive terms which we apply to “me”. This image of ourselves is causal - it governs our emotional life and how we interact with the world. Some of these terms are, to a degree, accurate - if we have the natural disposition that we are uncomfortable in crowds, then the term “introvert” maps onto us reasonably well. Other terms could be false - lies we tell about ourselves to make us feel better, feel safe, or more powerful.
But is this group of terms which we apply to ourselves what we really are? Or is there something more, something deeper? The group of terms that we apply to ourselves changes over time - does this mean we become a totally different being? No, something stays the same, even if everything else changes. If one day I believe I am good, and the next that I am bad - the “I” doesn’t change. But what is this “I” that is constant, which remains immovable no matter what I think or feel?
In the garden
To investigate our identity, let’s start from the beginning, in Eden. Adam and Eve knew who they were - creatures of God, and their role as keepers and watchers of the garden. They “walked with God” their creator, in the cool of the evening. We can imagine a certain wholeness, an interior integration of their faculties, and an intimacy with God as a result.
However, as the story goes, they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and everything changed. There are many ways to interpret what this tree was supposed to represent. In the context of this meditation, I take it to mean falling into a world of separateness. Good and evil is a basic duality, a kind of splitting up of reality. Prior to thought, there is just “isness” - no good or bad, things just are.
You can investigate this yourself - next time you have some minor pain, try if you can, to investigate your pain just with your awareness, not developing ideas about the injury “oh this is annoying, I hope this goes away soon” etc. If you can enter the present moment, seeing the pain as it is, you will notice that there is nothing good or bad about it, it is just a sensation.
In fact, it only becomes “bad” when it is referred to my sense of myself. It only becomes “bad” when it is threatening to “me” - my own understanding of who I am in this temporal existence. My understanding of myself, though, is just the conglomeration of ideas and memories mentioned earlier. It is a construct of thought, and this thought consists of me being a specific, separate entity who lives and moves in time and space. Pain then becomes “bad” insofar as it threatens this construct of thought.
Imagine if you found yourself so thoroughly united to God, that you had no real thought of yourself, and you were at peace with all that happened, it being the will of God for you (Romans 8:28). Pain then, would not be “bad” but would be an expression of the will of God and you would be at peace in and out of pain. I believe Adam and Eve, prior to their fall, experienced something of this unity with God and were subsequently at peace with God, themselves and the world around them. For them, because they did not consider their “selves”, they did not see themselves as a separate entity from God or the world around them - all was a seamless whole (whole = holiness) that was “very good” (Gen 1:31).
So long as they were established in God, intimately united to Him, they were in His image and likeness, and they enjoyed His attributes (albeit in finitude):
Our Heavenly Father wants all of His children to have His Divine properties. He wants us to be full of love, peace, joy, truthfulness, and kindness.
Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Of course, we know the rest of the story. Perhaps Satan’s main deception was to sow the seed of doubt that Eve was not already “like” God in the proper way - that is, to be united to Him, filled with Him and therefore whole and full of life. No, Satan tempted Eve to be like God on her own terms - apart from God. But, of course, that is impossible. The act of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was to willingly separate themselves from God, the source of life, safety and peace in order to try and obtain these things apart from God’s living united in us.
We see an allusion to this act in John’s account of Jesus’ last supper discourses - the famous vine and branches sermon (John 15:5). To produce the fruits of the Spirit - kindess, love, joy, gentleness - we must remain branches on the vine. While the branches can be separated from the rest of the vine, this is not their natural state. On the contrary, when no separation exists, there is a true sense in which the vine is the branches, and the branches are the vine.
The result of the fall is the generation of the sense of a separate self. Cut off from God, we become vulnerable to the world around us - no longer united to the source of life, death becomes real and inevitable. The natural response to this is fear - we hide, both from the world and from God. Insofar as we are clothed with “animal skins” (Gen 3:21), which are our technologies - we hide from the world. These are our ways of protecting ourselves from the world, of avoiding pain and the remembrance of death.
We hide from God, just as Adam and Eve did, interiorly - we built up a notion of who we are and what we like and dislike apart from Him. This is the duality introduced by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil - God is now someone apart from us, an object to be feared, rather than the intimate indwelling Spirit, whom we walked with in the cool of the evening. We now see Him as a threat to the identity and life which we have built up for ourselves - we let Him in only insofar as He does not displace our sacred idols - those things we believe we cannot live without.
This is the origin of the false self. It is false because it sees itself as separate from God, when of course that is impossible. It is false, also, because it thinks it can support itself without God - it thinks it can be like God without being indwelt by Him, without being joined to the vine. Because it is a lie it is ultimately illusory. To dispel an illusion, all one needs to do is look carefully and deeply - if one sits quietly and contemplates the thoughts we have of ourselves, one realises that they are transitory images on a screen, with no substantial reality or firmness. We think we have built our own identity but it is really the haunt of ghosts - our identity is shaped by cultural forces, our parents and family, our fears, even the suggestions of evil spirits, principalities and powers.
The true self
Now that we have considered the false self, what is my true self? All truth is found in God, so what is the identity that God wills me to have?
“Contained” in the Word is an eternal idea that corresponds to my being. This is my “archetypal” or “principial” existence - it is the unique word through which God is speaking me into being in and through the Word. This is the standard Neoplatonic formulation of the Logos, the Word, developed by the Church Fathers.
Yet this idea of me is not distinct from the essence of the Word, for God is simple and One. God the Father does not speak many “words” but rather the one Word. Consider this dense yet profound passage from Meister Eckhart below:
In this Word the Father speaks my and your and every man’s spiritual nature as (being) like the same Word. In this utterance you and I are, as this Word, a natural son of God. For, as I said before, the Father knows nought but this same Word and Himself and the whole Divine Nature and all things in this same Word; everything that He knows therein is like the Word and is, in truth, by nature the same Word.
Meister Eckhart (quoted in https://www.jstor.org/stable/27830389), my emphasis
In the obvious sense, I am not identical to the Word, to God. However, from another sense, you and I are nevertheless “contained” within the one utterance of the Word from the Father. The Ideas of you and I have an eternal existence in the mind of God prior to our existence as a “separate” created self that flowed out, from the Divine Ideas, into finitude and time. Again, Meister Eckhart:
When the Father begat all creatures, He begat me (also), and I flowed out with all creatures yet remained in the Father. In the same way, the word that I am now speaking (first) springs up in me, then secondly I dwell upon the idea, and thirdly I express it and you all receive it; yet it really remains in me. In the same way, I have remained in the Father.
Meister Eckhart (quoted in https://www.jstor.org/stable/27830389)
I exist, then, in two senses - first as thoroughly real and expressing some perfection of the Word, and therefore as eternally one and united with Him. Yet I also exist as a finite creation, an admixture of real and unreal, the imperfect struggling in becoming and the attempt to approach my Image - which is my true self, united and identified with the Word.
Therefore, there is something of an unknowable mystery about my true self - it is as incomprehensible to the finite mind as the essence of God is. I cannot discover it myself, through reasoning or imaginings. Even the tree has an ineffable mystery about it, insofar as it is birthed from the incomprehensible Word:
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him. It “consents” so to speak, to His creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, page 29
So how do I return to the identity that God wants me to have when it is a mystery to me?
Perhaps a phenomenological approach may assist here.
When all my thoughts drop away and I sit in peaceful silence, what am I? In a sense, in those moments, “I am”. This isn’t a claim to a strict identity with the great I AM. It is an attempt to express the “isness” of experience when it is devoid of concepts, thoughts, or sensations. It is awareness, consciousness, unadulterated spirit - and nothing much can be said about it except - “I am”. Awareness is the constant in all experience - it is the prerequisite of experience. Thoughts come and go, feelings come and go, conceptions of myself come and go - but all along there is awareness, like the open sky which hosts the clouds which drift across it.
This observation is nothing outlandish - indeed it can be discovered by anybody, whether Christian, Buddhist, atheist or Muslim, simply by examining their own experience. Sitting quietly and observing one’s own inner landscape, as thoughts and feelings come and go, is all that is required to catch a glimpse of this “bare” awareness, where one falls into “isness”.
What is it to, like the tree, express the idea that God has of you? Is it generate your own ideas of yourself, and then live out those ideas? No - that is to live out your own idea of yourself, not the idea that God has had of you from eternity. Indeed, God’s idea of you is not distinct from His own essence, and therefore, insofar as God is a mystery, so is His idea of you. God’s idea of me is therefore a mystery that I could never figure out or construct myself. On the contrary, it can only be lived and discovered.
How does one consent, like the tree, to God’s idea of you? By surrendering all that one thinks of oneself. By dying to oneself, by letting go of all images, concepts, fears and desires and therefore becoming an empty cup for God to fill with Himself.
Make yourself a capacity and I will make myself a torrent
Jesus to Blessed Angela of Foligno
This is not to say that thoughts are bad, and that we should strive not to have them. This would be impossible in any case, and we need them to perform our daily working and walking in the world. The point of this reflection is that our thoughts come and go, and we should not identify ourselves with them. Rather, our true identity is where we are being spoken into being eternally by God - where our spirit opens up into the infinite Spirit of God.
Our journey is not our own. We cannot hope to build an identity for ourselves, separate from God, for such an identity will be a mere collection of thoughts. What has the infinite God got to do with a mere bundle of thoughts? We are to become God by participation, and we can only do that insofar as “we” get out of the way - and by “we” I mean this sense of self which is created by cultural conventions, the view of our family, our feelings and so on. We can’t expect to become God by participation if we cling to our limited, ego identity. Instead, we are to become the unique word, the unique expression of Himself - the word within the Word - that no one else can be.
The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.
But whatever is in God is really identical with Him, for His infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him.
Ultimately the only way I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfilment of my existence.
Thomas Merton - New Seeds of Contemplation, page 35-36
What happens when we cease to consider ourselves as an individual defined by various thoughts and concepts? Do we become “nothing” - a no-person, lacking any identity? No, what we become is another Christ - a space in which God can act and reveal Himself in the world through your existence in time and space. You will still have your personality, your talents, your family, friends and work - you will still be an individual in the world. But God will be You in you, your nature elevated by grace, and you will be peacefully surrendered to his action in you. You will be “along for the ride” so to speak, unable to tell where you end and He begins.
We are mistaken when we think that the only way to be “me” is to have dreams, desires and projects - a plan that I have for myself which stretches out over time. I want this or that job, I think - I will be happy then. Or, when I find just the right person, I’ll marry them and be happy. At every moment, we feel the need to fill our minds with plans, thoughts about ourselves, past regrets, anxieties, future pleasures and so on. We wrap ourselves with these thoughts and suppose that makes us real. What would we be, we think, if such thoughts were absent? “We” would disappear.
In one sense - yes, the false self, this imaginary person we take ourselves to be, this persona we have created in which we attempt to make ourselves an image apart from God, would die. But in another sense - no. We could become the person who God created us to be. Like the tree, who is docile to the thought that God has of it, and therefore imitates God, we would be spoken into His image at every moment.
We would become real - for only that which is spoken by God is real, and full of His own life.
Anthony just now
This is a brilliant article, thank you! I need to read and reread this several times, it is full of meaning and exactly what I’ve been trying to find!