Another View 2-8

Since before Abraham, when the nomads would wander in the desert, they would speak about “the Haunting Presence” they met “out there.” They would discover this to be a “common” experience among other nomads. Of course, this created its measure of fear in them, for they began to sense that this “Haunting Presence” wanted something from them. In fact, this was eros -- the longing of this Presence for them.

What did “it” want? Why was “it” always there, waiting for them? In order to give a semblance of order to their fear, they began to give names to this Presence. They named it Other, they called it Holy and Shekinah, for they sometimes experienced it as indwelling Light. What this now-named-One wanted from them was relationship, and a relationship of permanence, at that. Hence evolves this love-hate movement where they desire the Desiring One, or they want to be left alone. This isolation feels like death after awhile, and they turn again towards this Lover (yet another name), only to turn away from the Gaze when it becomes too overwhelming.

Therein is the rhythm of our formation spiritually, unto today. We are not unlike our ancestors, are we? In the world of transpersonal psychology, Ken Wilber has an intriguing way of speaking to this movement. It is, of course, explicated in the symbols accommodated to his realm of experience, and it easily serves as a bridge to deepen the experience that we know of within our Christian symbols.

He addresses this eros/thanatos movement symbolically as translation/transformation. His masterpiece around this idea is Up from Eden, a work describing our evolutionary journey as human beings over the aeons of time, mapping for us the territory of consciousness. The ultimate gift that comes from this movement is freedom, which is intrinsically interwoven and experienced as our sanctification (our experience of holiness).

Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, and a variety of other theologians, reference within each human being a true self and a false self. The true self is the noetic awareness that the image and likeness of God are the first characteristics of the “who” of “me.” It is God’s action, God’s trust and treasure given in total freedom, simply because grace overflows from the Trinity always in this manner. The true self is not all our self-describing, for there is nothing one can say to define it. It is impossible to reference one’s true self in relationship or in comparison to another being, though we do this all the time. There is no better or worse, more unique or less so, or any other differentiation with which we wish to measure.

The True Self is the way we participate in the divine life, and that participation expresses itself in the uniqueness that is the self. It’s uniqueness lies not in the personality of the person (persona), but rather in the manifest ways that any one being reflects the divine. So, ultimately, we are “emptied” of a self, or as the Buddhist would say, “no self.”

Wilber says translation is the cumulative actions of each person that are designed to deny death. In other words, it’s all the substitute gratifications we fall back upon or grasp in hopes that immortality will not elude us. It is a way of expiating the guilt of a self that wants to separate from a true self. It becomes a form of magic, a religious talisman that substitutes what we truly want -- transcendence and immortality. What is sacrificed is authentic life. So, it becomes the attempt to take control of ones destiny. It is the pretense that I have full comprehension of what will bring my life meaning. Hence the descriptive term thanatos enters the picture. The very thing I am attempting to elude (death) become the actual state of being. I am walking, in that moment, among the dead bones of all the descriptions of my life that alienate me from others.

In other words, what is called for is the “shifting of our perception of selfhood and our sense of reality from our past to the transcendent central selfhood that is continuously engaged in the act of living…creating the future in radical novelty of life from moment to moment.” And this, within our sacred tradition, is what is called Resurrection Life.

This is Eros! It is the desire to recapture the prior Wholeness “lost” when we create some artificial boundary between self and other. This we must be willing to give up, to die to that limitation. Wilber intimates that Eros is “the undying power of seeking, grasping, wishing, desiring, perpetuating, loving, living, willing, and so on.”

Relationship cannot happen unless we are willing, therefore, to die to everything we imagine ourselves to be. My truest identity will find its final resting place in the I Am. Anything less will simply mean that I have chosen death rather than life. It recalls the Deuteronomist challenge, “Before you today, you have life and death. Choose life.” Our sacred tradition has always held this, so perhaps we are simply being reminded, and this is not, therefore, Another View.