Finding Ourselves by Losing Ourselves

Recently, I have been reading Bernadette Robert’s book, The Experience of No-Self, her journal of a profound spiritual awakening. As I read, I was struck by the similarities in her experience to that to which Christ invites us in the Gospels. What follows are the ideas that intrigued me most.

God is the IS-NESS of all that is, the existential essence of existence itself. 

Therefore, all anthropomorphic representations of God are wholly false. In fact, one cannot truly experience God until one loses all delusions and illusions of God generated by the SELF. SELF is the manifestation of the egocentric core of human consciousness. It is our default position. We interact with everything outside of ourselves through this core. The faultiness of this interaction—at its basest level—is that it reduces all else and everyone else into extensions of our own self. Friends, loves, etc. are only maintained as they feed self, gratifying our own egoistic needs. God simply becomes a hyper-extension of our own ego. We want a God who is useful. Even as we acknowledge God as the source of all that is, we do so primarily as an explanation and justification for our own existence. 

To lose this carefully fabricated construct terrifies us because our SELF fears annihilation—if the god at the core of our existence is proved false, then we will cease to be because the ground of our being ceases to be.

That fear, however, is as false as the SELF that generates it. 

If we will begin to practice the loss of self through, for example, mindful breathing (i.e., meditation), centering on God as God is—the eternal IS—practicing, for instance, the via negativa Eastern Orthodoxy (focusing on what God is not, as opposed to trying to fathom what God is)—we discover that the previous fear vanishes because we realize its essential baselessness. The SELF is a delusion. We are healthier without it.

Awakening to God allows us to see others as they truly are (unique acts of God’s creative will), not as implements for our selfish gratification, but as companions in becoming. We realize we inter-are and are interdependent, finally grasping the full power of self-emptying love. As we lose ourselves, we find ourselves, grasping the true reality of being a child of God.