Noise and the False Self
Some mornings meditation happens in the midst of a lot of internal noise. Staying with it anyway. More about false self vs true self
Anyone who meditates regularly knows sometimes it’s all over the place inside your head during a meditation. Random bits of music starting up and ending and starting. Random thoughts and memories intruding. Physical distractions like the tail end of yesterday’s upset stomach. Peaceful without and a cacophony within.
The patience and discipline to return and keep returning, whether to the breath or the sacred word or the mantra, deepens and becomes more reflexive over days, weeks, months and years of daily meditation.
Trusting a Deeper Aliveness
In this excerpt from over 5 years ago of her 2004 book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening on the Center for Action and Contemplation website, Cynthia Bourgeault describes the practice this way:
When we enter [into contemplative prayer], it is like a “mini-death,” at least from the perspective of the ego. . . . We let go of our self-talk, our interior dialogue, our fears, wants, needs, preferences, daydreams, and fantasies. . . . We simply entrust ourselves to a deeper aliveness, gently pulling the plug on that tendency of the mind to want to check in with itself all the time. In this sense, meditation is a mini-rehearsal for the hour of our own death, in which the same thing will happen. There comes a moment when the ego is no longer able to hold us together, and our identity is cast to the mercy of Being itself. This is the existential experience of “losing one’s life.”. . .
Virtually all the great spiritual traditions of the world share the conviction that humanity is the victim of a tragic case of mistaken identity. There is a “self” and a Self, and our fatal mistake lies in confusing the two. The egoic self . . . is in virtually every spiritual tradition immediately dispatched to the realm of the illusory, or at best, transitory. It is the imposter who claims to be the whole. This imposter can become a good servant, but it is a dangerous master. Awakening—which in Jesus’ teaching really boils down to the capacity to perceive and act in accordance with the higher laws of the Kingdom of Heaven—is a matter of piercing through the charade of the smaller self to develop a stable connection with the greater Self . . . becoming intimate with our spiritual identity, the sense of selfhood carried in our spiritual awareness. . . .
As Thomas Merton said (quoted in conjunction with the above on the site):
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
However loud, insistent, and distracting the false self can be in life, during contemplative practice when it desperately tries to maintain its importance in the face of the Presence of the ground of being, in the whirl of life out there interacting with other humans being with and loving,, wherever and whenever, the truth is the false self is not you. It’s not me. It’s not, in fact, any of us.
The Journey to the True Self
Dr. Tam, a spiritual director in Hong, wrote this article in 2003 . “Becoming Real: Thomas Merton and the True Self” is his personal take of Thomas Merton’s 1961 book New Seeds of Transformation, a book I have been trying to read for some months now, and intend to get serious about this month.
When I first became a Christian as a child at a summer camp, I imagined it as a magical one-time transformation. I have learned in the more than 50 years since that that couldn’t be farther than the truth.
Merton wrote,
“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self . . . is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasure and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real.”1
Merton understood so well that contemplation could not just remain at the level of a once or twice daily practice, but that in order to be freed from the tyranny of the false self and walk in the Presence throughout each day, contemplation must become the very fabric of every part of the day to day.
It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us in contemplation God answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer. The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and second, awareness of the answer.4
and
“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.”
–Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
I love that Dr Tam’s article is called Becoming Real. It made me think of the Velveteen Rabbit, one of my favourite children’s books. In it the Skin Horse explains to the velveteen rabbit how this becoming Real happens:
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
So much of what I have read over the years about ‘awakening’ or accessing the True Self or, if you will, becoming Real is cerebral, this intellectual process.
But actually it must be in the context of relationship that the false self is gradually put aside and the True Self is embraced. Certainly our relationships with other humans but most essentially relating to God.
‘Describing union with God, Merton says, “God alone is left. He is the ‘I’ who acts there. He is the one Who loves and knows and rejoices.”6 At this point, the question of false and true self is answered, or, we should say, no such question will be asked. In union with God, whatever we do or think is of God—God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’