The True Self is Hidden and Cannot Be Manipulated

 

Desert spirituality is concerned with stripping away the superficial self in order to reveal our true inner identity present as the bedrock of our being.

"The person who is dominated by what I have called the 'social image' is one who allows himself only that which his society prescribes as beneficial and praiseworthy in its members . . . If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be.  Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become . . . 

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory false self.  This is the person who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him.  And to be unknown by God is altogether too much privacy . . . The shallow 'I' can be possessed, developed, cultivated, and pandered to.  But the deep 'I' of the spirit, of solitude and of love, cannot be 'had,' possessed, developed, perfected . . . This inner 'I'; who is always alone, is always universal: for in this most inmost 'I' my own solitude meets the solitude of every other person and the solitude of God.

. . . There is and can be no special planned technique for discovering and awakening one's inner self, because the inner self is first of all a spontaneity that is nothing if not free . . .Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness and void . . .  The inner self is precisely that self which cannot be tricked or manipulated by anyone.  It is like a very shy wild animal that never appears at all whenever an alien presence is at hand, and comes out only when all is perfectly peaceful, in silence, when it is untroubled and alone.  It cannot be lured by anyone or anything, because it responds to no lure except that of the divine freedom . . .

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 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 if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of His presence."

Thomas Merton

Photo: Slot Canyon in Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 26, 2011