If I ask, “Who are you?” you might give me your
resume or information that you provide for a doctor about your health history.
This “you” is the you of ordinary everyday psychological awareness. It tends to
dominate our consciousness and absorb our attention. We access this level
through our senses and rational apparatus. It is a marvelous evolutionary
development, but it is only the foundation that introduces us to deeper levels
of ourselves. A further level involves our ego development. It is the “you” that
is your personality and character. One way to bring this out is to ask the
question with a different emphasis, “Who ARE you?” Meaning who are you beyond
your face, temperament, genetic endowments, external activities,
accomplishments, and failures, etc. It is the question that you ask when you are
establishing a deep friendship with someone that involves a commitment of time,
energy and love.
This “you” involves your inmost dispositions, how
you respond to conflict, what you most desire in life. It is limited by the
straight-jacket of particular projects for happiness that were imposed upon us
or that we ourselves invented in our developmental years. When we are disposed
to think of happiness in other ways than those around which we have organized
our lives up till now, the issue becomes finding oneself, whoever that is, and
we begin to wonder whether the first two “you’s”—the resume and the ego
“you”—are really “me” at all?
There is still a deeper you and the question can
now be asked with a new emphasis, “Who are YOU?” This is the mystery of the
deepest “YOU”. This you is in relationship with those who love you; who love
you, not just casually for what they can get from you, but who love you for
exactly who you are, including things that you don’t like in yourself. This is
the relationship that God proposes to have with us in virtue of creating us. It
is accepted when we give up worrying about changing things anymore, and focus on
changing ourselves. Along with this awareness goes the increasing certainty that
we cannot fix ourselves. We don’t know where to begin.
God’s plan is the transformation of our consciousness of our various “you’s”
into the “thou” of union, and into the deeper oneness of unity that opens us to
all that exists—God, other people, the universe, and ourselves. This “you” is
both nothing and everything at the same time. It is no thing. To be no thing is
essential for happiness, because only then are we free to be everything, which
is what God is. We no longer see things as objects to be controlled, but see
them as ourselves. The I AM that calls us as a “thou”, shares with us its own
divine nature and being.
That is what might be called the “True Self ”. To
put it in Judeo-Christian terms, it is the image and likeness of God in us. This
is not a separate self at all, but rather the uniqueness that God has called us
to be as an eternal thought activated in time and space.
Beyond the True Self there is a still a deeper
self. The True Self manifests God and allows God’s love to manifest itself in
our uniqueness. The self that we are at the deepest level is not separate from
God. Distinct – yes. But never separate. In Christian terms, it is God sharing
the divine life with us. It is the divine Self of infinite happiness, joy,
freedom, peace—all the things that we would like to be and which we already are
once we accept ourselves at the deepest level. This might be called Christ
consciousness. It is bigger and greater than any religion. It is the Word of God
made flesh and “enlightening everyone coming into the world” (John 1:9). Our
destiny is to be God by participating in that which is without any limit, while
not losing our own uniqueness. One of the great mystics is reported to have
said, “There is no me but God” (Catherine of Genoa). That is the peak of
humility as well as transformation. The contemplative dimension of the Gospel
awakens the ultimate YOU. The I AM of God and our “thou” become one (John 17:21
ff).
Let
us tune into the level of our being that is more us than we normally
perceive ourselves to be. A series of questions might focus on this ultimate
identity.