Facing the False-Self – the neglected aspect of Christian Spirituality
Thinking again of the detail within the virtues spiritual practices and postures document, I am struck by how I and others I know struggle with the false self. This is the projection of who we want to be, rather than who we are, which we strive to make real which results in us being very hard on ourselves and others because it is centred on our ego – on our must prove ourselves to achieve in life. This is because of a very deep lie – that we need to achieve for God to love us – conditional love – where to the contrary God is the unconditional love that helps us to change, where we are awakened to a change that is about being more of our real self, and getting away from our false self. Our struggles of countering the construction of a false-self are very difficult – because of our our cultures obsession with consumption, competition and conditional love is all about nurturing a false-self – existing at the surface of the now (the title of my talk at Greenbelt this year).
In his book New Seeds of Contemplation page 34-5, Thomas Merton said this:
Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory personal false-self. This is the man I want to be but cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him, and to be unknown by God, is altogether too much privacy. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside 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. We are not very good at recognising illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. The ones we are born with and which speeds the roots of sin. All sin starts from the assumption that my false self – the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires – 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 pleasures and the thirst for experiences for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false-self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world – as if I were an invisible body that only became visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is o substance under the things of which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structures of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them, but they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed – and when they are gone – there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness to tell me I am my own mistake. The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God, for what ever is in God is really identical with God for God’s infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore, I cannot hope to find myself anywhere expect in God. Ultimately the only way I can be myself is to become identified with God in whom is hidden the reason and the fulfillment of my existence.
I think Merton names here our very real struggle, and by implications, shows why it is crucial that Christianity needs to be about inner freedom of the self alongside outer freedom. This is why we need spiritual practices, virtues and postures that help us maintain an inner freedom – because even our churches of late – neglect this need for inner discipleship. To face the false self, we need to seek for God who speaks to us from within as much as we should be seeking for God’s presence in the world and outside of ourselves. To finish I love this quote from John Finley:
Spiritual practices are a commitment to a daily rendezvous with God where there is no agenda but love to transform our hearts and awaken us.
