my true self

23 january, 2010

(reading Merton with Abhishiktananda on Arunachala)

I am hollow,
and when all the things with which I clothe myself are gone
there will be nothing left of me but my hollowness, my nakedness, my emptiness.

Stay there on that cross
to be filled with the very fullness of God.
Put your mind in hell and do not despair, says Staretz Silouan.

To discover myself in discovering God...
If I find myself--if I find my true self, hidden in God--I find God.
Within me is an apex of existence at which I am being held in being by the Creator.
God utters me like a word, like a partial thought.

Can you enter into yourself and find the God who utters you?
Can you rest on the ground of your being,
stay still on the ground of your consciousness
until the Divine sings your name across the span of the sky?
Can your ears hear the sound of the OM that resonates in the mountain of your being?

If I am true to that utterance,
I shall be full of divine actuality
and find God everywhere in myself
and find myself nowhere.
I shall be lost in God: I shall find myself.

"I had lost my God,
and in my search for him
it is I myself I have recovered,
but a myself, what a myself!
I have disappeared from my sight into my own radiance." (Abhishiktananda)

This true inner self must be raised like a jewel from the bottom of the sea,
rescued from confusion and indistinction,
rescued from immersion in the common, the trivial, the sordid.
We must salvage ourselves from the abyss of confusion, absurdity and triviality which is our false outer self.
The creative must be saved from the hedonistic addictive grasping craving ego-driven self.

"When I look down to the bottom of the abyss,
in the guha, that cave of my heart,
it is my very own image that is reflected back to me--
that is why I say say ABBA--
but an image that is so beautiful--
so beautiful!--
completely radiant with glory,
a glory that has no beginning or end,
beyond all birth and equally beyond all death." (Abhishiktananda)

Can you enter into yourself and find the God who utters you?
Can you rest on the ground of your being,
stay still on the ground of your consciousness
until the Divine sings your name across the span of the sky?
Can your ears hear the sound of the OM that resonates in the mountain of your being?

But it is more than an emptying and withdrawing to the center of myself that is called for.
From resting on the ground of God
I must call for mercy and wait on the descent of grace.
I must have God--Word and Spirit--dwelling in me in a new way
so that God begins to live in me not only as my Creator,
not only as the Spirit breathed into the mud of my being,
but as my own true self
until it is no longer I who lives but Christ, the great Person, who lives in me.

"And it is to this Great Person who is myself--so'ham asmi--
sun colored beyond the darkness,
that I reach out fervently, irresistibly,
with a view to our coming together, our advaita.
This call of myself to myself,
of myself as human to myself as God." (Abhishiktananda)

My true self is this self
that receives freely, gladly,
in silence and peace,
naked, poor and empty.

Entertain silence in your heart
and listen for the voice of God uttering you.
It is good to wait in silence
for the coming of the Lord.

Can you enter into yourself and find the God who utters you?
Can you rest on the ground of your being,
stay still on the ground of your consciousness
until the Divine sings your name across the span of the sky?
Can your ears hear the sound of the OM that resonat