"God IS our self-awareness." (Rabbi Lawrence Kushner)
"God is closer to us than we are to ourselves." (St. Augustine of Hippo)
I've often struggled with the fact that one of my personality traits seems to be OVER-SENSITIVITY to the opinions others have of me, especially their criticisms. This trait is a royal pain - both for myself and for others. However, these past months, I've been working on taking a positive view of this trait. Is there a spiritual principle at the core of this sensitivity, one that would help me actually feel LESS sensitive to the criticisms of others? I believe there is.
First, I find it is important to remember that - as Franciscan spiritual teacher Richard Rohr reminds us - we humans are the feeling aspect of God. In other words, God feels joy and pain through us. WE are the sensitivity of God. The same might be said of our role in relation to completely spiritual beings - angels. I recall a movie I saw some years ago that featured angels trying to enter into a closer relationship with humans. The premise was that angels cannot have emotions unless they are channeled through human beings.
A similar human function might be seen in our relationship to Mother Earth. Even though individual creatures each have their own degree of sentience, it appears that human beings are the mind and heart of the WHOLE web of beings; i.e., of the ENTIRE Earth.
Of course, this is a difficult situation for us to be in. After all, we can't be sensitive to joy and inspiration unless we are also sensitive to pain. I remember hearing Thomas Keating, a prominent Trappist monk, once say that part of what the Cross of Christ means is the realization that - in it - God is apologizing for the fact that we humans are enmeshed - without our choice - within this predicament of being the sensitive aspect of the Divine. In the Cross, God says that HE is to blame for this situation.
However, I find that I also want to move BEYOND my sensitivity. And to do this, I've found, I need to discover the true nature of the human self. Generally, we think of the self as a separate substance, a singular identity. But what if the true nature of the self is to be a MUTUAL identity? What if the self is not a substance that enters into relationship, but that IS relationship?
Years ago, I learned from James Hillman and Thomas Moore - both of whom were responsible for rehabilitating the word "soul" - that it is sometimes beneficial to view the self more as a polytheistic reality than as a monotheistic one. In other words, the self - in its "soul" form - is innately a multiplicity of presences, all symbolized by the various deities - "gods" and "goddesses" that humanity has been in contact with since the beginning of human history. This insight helps me realize that the soul aspect of the human self (in contrast to "spirit," which is singular) is already a relationship among different parts - e.g., mind, will, emotions, and the passions of anger, lust, depression, etc.
However, I also experience this self-as-relationship in the realization that - according to Christian mystics like Ramon Panikkar and perhaps Jewish mystics like Abraham Heschel - the human self is actually a "thou," not an "I." In other words, the self is innately a "word of God," spoken by an Other. As such, it is a reflection of the primal Thou - "God" - who, as Panikkar points out, is ONLY known in the second Person, as a Thou - through US. What I'm saying is that both God and the human self are INNATELY constituted in relationship, and that the singular "I" is not ultimately real. Here, I am contradicting such thinkers as Ken Wilber, who talks about an "I-I" spirituality. For I believe that God's I - and ultimately, the human I - is completely emptied out in love. The biblical word for this is "kenosis" - self-emptying. A singular I is thus ultimately illusory.
However, there is also a trickster element in the nature of things. The mystery is that God keeps on giving us this sense of I in the very moment when we try to give it away in love! As Rumi laments: "Alas, I want union, but HE wants separation!" Perhaps this move on God's part is paradoxically the very thing that enables us to keep on reaffirming the true reality - that our "I" is actually a "thou." Indeed, without the continual reappearance of this illusory "I," we would not have an endless multitude of fresh opportunities to see that this "I" is really a "thou"! Thus we would also be deprived of the fresh sense of surprise that this continual insight brings. To use alternate imagery, we might say that we need a continually-reappearing sense of "I" to serve as the "fuel" which is then available to burn up in the FIRE of a self-sacrificing love that alone is able to produce the LIGHT of insight - an insight which reveals that "I" to be a "thou"! However, since this process is rooted in an eternal God, we might say that we are somewhat like a celestial star: the light we see now is actually the result of a fire - a "death" - that burned in that star MILLIONS of year ago!
This may be all well and good in theory, but how do we actually EXPERIENCE the "thou-ness" of the human self? For myself, I find that I experience this sense of being a "thou" during contemplative prayer, where I discover that I am GRASPED AND HELD by a magnetic presence - a loving gaze of God - that wells up from the depths of my being. This is the "absorption" that many of the Christian mystics - Teresa of Avila being a prime example - talk about in their writings. And yet God's presence - the One who is the Source of this loving gaze - is ALSO known to be a "Thou" - known only, through me, in the second Person - when I realize that this gaze is occurring. How mysterious! God's gaze - which never fails to see me lovingly as a "thou" - is at the root of my being, and yet the reality of this gaze is only known in MY realization of it! For God's love is so entire that he is LOST to himself in bliss - in his gaze upon me, a gaze that is only known - in the second Person - through me! This, indeed, is a true non-dualism, albeit a relational one.
The upshot of all of this is that I can begin to let go of my over over-sensitivity to other human beings when I realize that a sense of relationship ALREADY resides at the core of my being. Thus, I become less vulnerable to others, because I understand that there is ultimately no such thing as a separate self that is then subject to criticism from the outside. For the true self is ALREADY a relationship - GOD'S thou, and thus is always and forever lovable. May each of us discover the ways in which we are already a "thou" of the Divine, a conviction that thereby enables us to give ourselves in self-sacrificing love to the world.
Photo: Twin leaves, with the Twin Owls formation in the background; Gem Lake Trail, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; October 26, 2012
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