False Self, True Self

Gregg’s Reflection

As a second son, I rebelled against the expectations of my father and spent my college years in the counter culture. I grew up with the understanding that I was to follow my father into the family business selling heavy construction equipment. My experience of better living through chemistry in the ‘70’s helped me see through the American dream and realize that working myself to the bone to make my family wealthy while ignoring those less fortunate would not make me happy. So, I swore never to go to work for the old man.

Three years after marrying Genie, we were expecting our daughter, and living in a garage apartment near Emory in Atlanta. I made a fundamental choice to defer my own dreams in order to create a home and rear our children. So, I cut my hair and beard, and went to my father with hat in hand and asked for a job.

When I went to work in the family business, I put on a mask that I rarely let down for 25 years. Most of our customers were contractors who did not much appreciate the counter culture types. I knew that the real me would not be accepted by our customers, suppliers and employees. So, I pretended. My father was a workaholic and perfectionist, and the message I heard as a child was, ‘you’re not good enough.’ So I put on a false identity, cleaned up my act, and kept my personal views to myself at work.

I spent nearly 50 years believing I was “not good enough.” Ever struggle with low self esteem? Consider this, “if we are willing to respond to the opportunities God places in our path, instead of saying we are not good enough; if we are able to respond to the nudges from God’s Word and Spirit, rather than make excuses based on our negative self-evaluation; if we are stubborn enough to persevere in following Christ despite our mistakes-then God, through us, can carve a furrow through this earth’s murky waters and leave a shimmering residue of hope and faith in our wake.” Notes on Luke 9:20 in RENOVARE Study Bible. What a hopeful thought!

Robert Fritz and his work on Structural Thinking helped me see that I was living out of a distortion of reality as I tried to prove myself to my long-dead father, and really to God. I realized that the identity I had put on, the mask, was really keeping me from living into the fullness of life as a Christ-follower. Even though I consciously believed in Salvation by Grace, subconsciously I was still trying to prove myself worthy. Take a look here for a post on how identity can limit our spiritual growth and our relationship with God.

In the last dozen years, I have had some success putting space between myself and my structure of trying to prove myself. Yet, the tentacles of structure are still lurking just beneath the surface waiting to reach up and grab me. I have found myself wrapped around an axle, and back in my structure several times. Sometimes, it has lasted months. 

I am now a structural consultant, working with organizations and individuals. I am helping others see the false identity, the mask they have been wearing. It is incredible to see the fog lift when someone sees reality clearly, and sees the distortion of living in false identity. As the Buddhists would say, finding true self is finding the face you had before you were born. Think about that one.

Below is an audio introduction.

False self True self

0:00

/186.2

1×

Journaling Prompts

Are you chasing success in the world, so focused on doing that you cannot just ‘be‘? What would it look like to live true to your deeper self? Can you pull free from what others consider an obligation to follow ’the road less traveled’?

Scripture

If from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.

Deuteronomy 4:29

Awake, my soul! Awake, harp and lyre! I will awaken the dawn.

Psalm 62:1

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Matthew 11:29

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?

Mark 8:36

I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.

John 17:4

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Romans 12:2

You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and diluted by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and clothe yourself with a new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Ephesians 4:22-24

Ancient Writings

Desert ascetics understood that the cultivation of inner freedom was vital to the deepening of their experience of God. As they deepened their interior freedom, all aspects of their false self were removed and a clearer understanding of their truest self emerged. It is this true self that dwells deeply with God. In the abundant simplicity of our true self, we experience deepest joy.

Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian Women, p. 21.

He who knows he’s a fool is not such a great fool.

Chuang Tzu, Kathleen Singh, Grace in Dying, p. 200

Often our trust is not full. We are not certain that God hears us because we consider ourselves worthless and as nothing. This is ridiculous and the cause of our weakness. I have felt this way myself.

Julian of Norwich, Christian Mystics Matthew Fox, p. 53

For He says, “I shall totally shatter you because of your vain affections and your vicious pride; and after that I shall gather you together and make you humble and gentle, pury and holy, by oneing you to myself.”

Julian of Norwich, The Complete Julian, Fr John-Julian

Modern Writings

Jesus, if we do not get some new wineskins, “the wine and the wineskin will both be lost” (Luke 5:37–39). The second half of life can hold some new wine because by then there should be some strong wineskins, some tested ways of holding our lives together.

But that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better. Only when we have begun to live in the second half of life can we see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary.

We cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it. Grace must and will edge us forward. There are at least two major tasks to human life. The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold.

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now, because it is all they had time for. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.

But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task.” Problematically, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, tears, and years that we often cannot imagine there is a second task, or that anything more could be expected of us. “The old wineskins are good enough,” we say.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward, p. xiii–xiv, 2–3.

The self is not the little conscious ego, constructing its logical systems and building its rational world. The self plunges deep into the past of humanity and of the whole creation.  I bear within my mind, my memory in the deep sense, the whole world. 

Bede Griffiths

The neurosis of our age is the fear of being all that we are. Afraid of being all that we are, we pretend to be less than we are. But, because at some level, we know we are pretending, we experience anxiety that our charade will be discovered, and we will have to stand up and become all that we really are and are called to be.

Rollo May

How far I have to go to find You in whom I have already arrived.

Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 409

Our ever-repeated turning toward Christ becomes like the waves of the ocean that pound against the jagged rocks, making them smooth. The false self fears such a total transformation: the external self fears and recoils from what is beyond it and above it. It dreads the alluring emptiness and darkness of the interior self.

Thomas Merton, the Inner Experience, p. 39

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real and which lives by a shadowy autonomy for the brief moment of earthly existence, and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth and whom he subsists. It is this inner self that is taken up into the mystery of Christ, by the Holy Spirit, so that in secret we live “in Christ.”

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 295

If such an “I” one day hears about “contemplation” he will perhaps set himself “to become contemplative.” That is, he will wish to admire, in himself, something called contemplation. Sad is the case of that exterior self that imagines himself a contemplative...He will assume various attitudes, meditate on the inner significance of his own postures, and try to fabricate for himself a contemplative identity: all the while there is nobody there. There is only an illusory, fictional “I” which seeks itself, struggles to create itself out of nothing, the prisoner of its own illusion.

Thomas Merton, the Inner Experience, p. 4-5

The humiliation of the false self leads to humility and humility leads to invincible trust.

Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God, p. 56

In the beginning, emotional hang ups are the chief obstacle to the growth of the new self, because they put our freedom into a straight jacket. Later, because of the subtle satisfaction that springs from self-control, spiritual pride becomes the chief obstacle. Finally, reflection of self becomes the chief obstacle because this hinders the innocence of Divine Union.

Thomas Keating, Open Hearts, p. 164

If what you attempt is not to change yourself but to observe yourself, to study every one of your reactions to people and things, without judgment or condemnation or desire to reform yourself, your observation will be nonselective, comprehensive, never fixed on rigid conclusions, always open and fresh from moment to moment.

Then you will notice a marvelous thing happening within you: You will be flooded with the light of awareness, you will become transparent and transformed. Will change occur then? Oh, yes. But it will not be brought about by your cunning, restless ego that is forever competing, comparing, coercing, sermonizing, manipulating in its intolerance and its ambitions.

No, the transforming light of awareness brushes aside your scheming, self-seeking ego to give Nature full rein to bring about the same kind of change that she produces in the rose: artless, graceful, unself-conscious, wholesome, untainted by inner conflict.

Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love, p. 83-84

Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project.

We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self – the false self – and no one wants to die. But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love. And it begins with silence. We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want.

Basil Pennington, A Place Apart

I wonder if the greatest temptation is self-rejection. Could it be that beneath all the doors to greed, lust, and success rests a great fear of never being enough or not being lovable?

Henri Nouwen, “Discernment”, 2013

The mystery of the spiritual life is that Jesus desires to meet us in the seclusion of our own heart, to make his love known to us there, to free us from our fears, and to make our own deepest self known to us. In the privacy of our heart, therefore, we can learn not only to know Jesus but, through Jesus, ourselves as well.

Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 4/17/20

Help me, O Lord, to let my old self die, to let me die to the thousand big and small ways in which I am still building up my false self and trying to cling to my false desires. Let me be reborn in you and see through you the world in the right way, so that all my actions, words, and thoughts can become a hymn of praise to you. I need your loving grace to travel on this hard road that leads to the death of my old self to a new life in and for you. I know and trust that this is the road to freedom. Lord, dispel my mistrust and help me become a trusting friend.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 6/30/20

The Trap of Self- rejection. The greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. . . . As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, “Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.” . . . My dark side says, “I am no good. . . . I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned.” Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 1/10/21

Embracing the True Self. The secular or false self is the self that is fabricated. Compulsive is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated, or despised. . . If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same—more work, more money, more friends. These very compulsions are at the basis of the two main enemies of the spiritual life: anger and greed. They are the inner side of the secular life, the sour fruits of our worldly dependences.

Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 1/15/21

Accept Your Identity as a Child of God. Your true identity is as a child of God. This is the identity you have to accept. Once you have claimed it and settled in it, you can live in a world that gives you much joy as well as pain. You can receive the praise as well as the blame that comes to you as an opportunity for strengthening your basic identity, because the identity that makes you free is anchored beyond all human praise and blame. You belong to God, and it is as a child of God that you are sent into the world.

Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 10/4/21

Solitude is a place of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the person occurs.

Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart, p. 27

To try to annihilate your ego, to let the Real Self walk about in you, using your legs and arms, your brain and your voice. It’s fantastically difficult—and yet, what else is life for?

Christopher Isherwood’s Diary

There’s a subtle resonance that arises when we feel at home in our own path. Words in line with this felt sense move us when others do not. That’s the confidence that is so empowering.

Rodney Smith, Kathleen Singh, The Grace in Living p. 176

The artisan is an initiated adult fully embodying the fact that she is an artist, but she has a sacred responsibility to her heart, and that her soul work is her art. She is discovering what it means to give her life to the world as an expression of her art. The artisan learns that any pretension gets in the way of her soul work. Her challenges to remain authentic, loyal to her soul, while being responsive to the world's needs. She surrenders any ambition she might once have had to be a great or acclaimed artist in any conventional sense, because her intent is community vitality, not personal fame or aggrandizement. And yet she knows she cannot do without a certain soul-rooted Boldness-a belief in the gifts she has to offer, confidence that the world wants her to do her part. She needs that boldness to risk going out on the limbs the world calls her to.

Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, p. 359

The spiritual journey is about living more and more in that abundant place where you don’t have to wrap yourself around your hurts, your defeats, your failures. Your true self is characterized by radical contentment.

Richard Rohr, Spring Within, p. 230

Consciously, trustfully, and lovingly remaining on the Vine (John 15:1) which is to be connected to our Source, is precisely our access point to deeper spiritual wisdom. We know by participation with and in God, which creates our very real co-identity with Christ: We are also both human and divine, as he came to reveal and model. The foundational meaning of transformation is to surrender to this new identity and to consciously draw upon it.

Richard Rohr, Eager to Love, p. 68

The True Self is who you are because of divine indwelling, the Holy Spirit within you (Romans 8:9). We are all tabernacles of God, says Paul (1 Corinthians 3:16). What happened in Christ, the Anointed One, is an announcement of what is happening in all of us, too. We are children of heaven and earth, both at the same time. Much of the work of enlightenment is bringing those two identities together, just as Jesus did.  

Putting the human and the divine together is what it means to be “the Christ” (Colossians 1:17–20), and what it means for us to be “the new Adam and Eve”  (1 Corinthians 15:45–49).

Ephesians could not make it much clearer: “You too have been stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit that was promised—this is the pledge of your inheritance” (1:13–14). Few Christians have ever been seriously taught about their inherent union with God and will find all kinds of self-hating reasons to deny it. Only the True Self can dare to believe the gospel’s Good News.  The false self, or smaller self, is characterized by separateness. Jewish and Christian traditions call this state of disconnectedness “sin.”

When we’re separated from our deepest Being, we are in the state of sin. When we are disconnected from our True Self in God, we look for various false and addictive ways to fill our emptiness. The small or false self is who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it so. It is our identity created through culture, education, class, race, friends, gender, clothes, and money. That’s all that Adam and Eve had once they left the Garden where they walked with God.

It seems that we have to leave the Garden. We have to create a false self to get started; the trouble is that we take it far too seriously. It is always passing away—in stages and then all at once at death. Only the True Self is eternal. We all suffer from a terrible case of mistaken identity.

The True Self is characterized by communion and deep contentment. It’s okay, right here, right now. The True Self is the realigned self; religion’s main purpose is to lead us to experience this Self, which is who we are in God and who God is in us. It has to do with participating in a Universal Being that is beyond our being. Ultimately, our lives are not about us. We are about life! That doesn’t mean we stay in the True Self twenty-four hours a day. Life is three steps forward and two steps backward. Yet once we know the big picture, we will never be satisfied with the little picture.

Richard Rohr, True Self, False Self, Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 39–42.

Before we let go of our ego, we need to have one. Before Jesus let go of his body, he walked around in it for thirty-some years. You have to have a self before you can die to self.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 150

Spiritual maturity is to become aware that we are not the persona (mask) we have been presenting to others. That is why saints are humble and scoundrels are arrogant. We must become intentional about recognizing and embracing our shadows. Religion’s word for this is quite simply forgiveness, which is pivotal and central on the path of transformation.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 9/13/19

The paradox is that this True Self is immortal and indestructible, and yet it must also be awakened and chosen. The Holy Spirit is totally given and given equally to all, but it must be consciously received. The Presence needs to be recognized, honored, and drawn upon to become a Living Presence.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 1/10/20

The Christian path involves dismantling our false identity. To unmask our false or separate self, we need a kind of “inner observer” or “fair witness.”  At first that sounds impossible, but after a while it becomes quite natural. Our “inner observer” becomes the part of us that’s brutally honest with ourselves—not only in the negative sense but in the positive, too. For example, “You really love God and long for God. You are good. Stop treating yourself so brutally. Have compassion for yourself. You are a child of God.” This helps us to distinguish moralizing from authentic morality, shame from appropriate guilt, false pride from genuine strength.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 3/1/20

The true spiritual teacher is not afraid to give us a dose of humiliation. If we immediately balk at some minor blow to our ego, the teacher knows that no basic transformation into our True Self has taken place yet. It takes a teacher or mentor to teach us that we are not important. Jesus knew that he needed to destabilize a person’s false, separate self before they could understand that they had a True Self, but destabilizing our security systems and our ego is always a hard sell.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 3/31/20

We, in the United States, are a “first half of life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. We try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life. But this is only the first task!

The ego believes that disorder or change is always to be avoided, so we hunker down and pretend that our Order is entirely good, should be good for everybody, and is always “true” and even the only truth. Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and familiar to take on a further journey. Our institutions, including our churches, and our expectations are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life. We are more struggling to survive than to thrive. As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance,” but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.”

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 8/14/20

Your True Self is a little tiny flame of this Universal Reality that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, Light and Fire itself, God’s very self.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 8/30/20

No one willingly does evil. Each of us has put together a construct by which we explain why what we do is necessary and good. This is the specialty of the ego, the small or false self that wants to protect its agenda and project itself onto the public stage. We need support in unmasking our false self and in distancing ourselves from our illusions. For this it is necessary to install a kind of “inner observer.” At first that sounds impossible, but with patience and practice, it can be done and even becomes quite natural.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 2/28/21

During the first half of our lives, we are building up our separate or false self. For the first months of life, human infants feel they are one with their caretaker, usually their mother. But soon the child grows into a sense of separateness, a split between my self and your self that understands “I’m here and you’re over there.”

We call this dualistic consciousness. To put it very simply, as children we learn which behaviors cause approval and disapproval from our family, teachers, and friends. If we want to have some sort of control over our lives and create pleasant outcomes, we tend to develop those things which are acceptable and repress those things which are not. Those things we repress or deny about ourselves become our shadow.

The more we have cultivated and protected a chosen persona, the more shadow work we will need to do. The more we are attached to and unaware of such a protected self-image, the more shadow self we will likely have. Our self-image is not substantial or lasting; it is simply created out of our own mind, desire, and choice—and everybody else’s preferences for us! It is not objective at all but entirely subjective (which does not mean that it does not have real influence).

The movement to second-half-of-life wisdom has much to do with necessary shadow work and the emergence of healthy self-critical thinking, which alone allows us to see beyond our own shadow and disguise and to find who we are, “hidden with Christ in God,” as Paul puts it (Colossians 3:3). The Zen s call it “the face we had before we were born.” This self cannot die, lives forever and is our True Self. Religion is always in some way about discovering our True Self, which is also to discover God, who is our deepest truth.

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 6/13/21

The ego wants to eliminate all humiliating or negative information in order to “look good” at all costs. Jesus calls this self an “actor,” a word he uses fifteen times in Matthew’s Gospel, though it is usually translated from the Greek as “hypocrite.” The ego wants to keep us tied to easy and acceptable levels of knowledge. It does not want us going down into the “personal unconscious” or, in Jung’s term, our “shadow self.”

The shadow includes all those things about ourselves that we don’t want to see, are not yet ready to see, and don’t want others to see. We try to hide or deny this shadow, most especially from ourselves. Carl Jung asks: “How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow?” He makes clear that the unconscious is not bad or evil; it is just hidden from us.

Jung describes shadow also as “the source of the highest good: not only dark, but also light; not only bestial, semi-human and demonic, but superhuman, spiritual” and, in Jung’s word, “divine.” That is why we dare not avoid the deep self. Wild beasts and angels reside in the same wilderness, and it takes the Spirit to “drive” us there (see Mark 1:12–13).

Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion, 11/24/21

People who are still living in the false self are history-stoppers. They use God and religion to protect their own status and the status quo of the world that sustains them. They are often fearful people: the nice, proper folks of every age who think like everyone else thinks and have no power to break through or, as Jesus’s opening words state, “to change” (Mk 1:15, Mt 4:17) and move beyond their small agenda. Courage is a foundational virtue. Without it, faith, love, and hope do not happen. It takes immense courage to trust our own experience and be willing to pay the price if we are wrong-and we just might be.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p.59

The awakening of the True Self in God is the essential foundational task of religion. Thus, authentic religion is more about letting go of the false self than any attempt at engineering our own True Self. We can’t create what we already have.

Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 246

The classic emotional programs for happiness as security/survival; esteem/affection; power/control, which comprise the basic building blocks of the false self system. They are called energy centers because unconsciously a huge amount of our psychic energy is bound up in identification with these programs these unconscious programs percolate in the consciousness in the form of attachments in the versions.

Attachments are things you need to feel safe and comfortable; versions of those things that push your buttons. These attachments and versions, semi conscious and mostly cloaked in self justification, virtually guarantee that we will enter situations in life with hidden values, as are called on the diagram, or, hidden agendas. There seems to be a karmic law that hidden agendas will attract their corresponding triggering of that or troubling situations.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 136-138

Thomas Keating suggest the false self as a modern equivalent for the traditional concept of the consequences of original sin. Beginning in infancy each of us, in response to perceived threats to our well-being, develops a false self: a set of protective behaviors driven at root by a sense of need and lack. The essence of the false self is driven, addictive energy, consisting of tremendous emotional investment and compensatory “emotional programs for happiness,” as Keating calls them. 

It is our false self that we bring to the spiritual journey; our “true self” lies buried beneath accretions and defenses. In all of us there is a huge amount of healing that has to take place before a deep and authentic quest for union with God-which requires tremendous courage and inner presence to sustain-establish the pull of my psychological woundedness. This, in essence, constitutes a spiritual journey.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 94-95

Cynthia Bourgeault, in her commentary on Bruteau’s work below, says, “our locus of identity is constantly fluctuating back and forth along a continuum from constructed to unboundaried.”

Success, progress, and all similar goals are examples of the world’s expression of the false self. Prayer is a death to every identity that does not come from God. The most I can do for the world is to transcend it so as to serve it as a person instead of a slave. The only genuine way to serve it is to follow God’s will. And, an important expression of God’s will is fidelity to some degree of prayer in which I discover and actualize a transcendent self grounded in love. Fame and success are the myth of the ego taken root like an acorn in the soil of the world.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. 23, 24

The true self is our whole self before God. It is the self the Father created us to become. It is the self in Christ.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. xxiii

The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a shadow, that it is nothing, it begins to convince itself that it is what it does. Merton says, “I use up my life in the desires for pleasures and the thirst for power, honor, knowledge, and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. I wind experiences around myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.”

Merton, The New Man, p. 34-35, James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. 11–12

The core of our being is drawn like a stone to the quiet depths of each moment where God waits for us with eternal longing. But to those depths the false self will not let us travel. Like stones skipped across the surface of the water we are kept skimming along the peripheral, one dimensional fringes of life.

To sink is to vanish. To sink into the unknown depths of God's call to union with himself is to lose all the false self knows and cherishes. Thus, the false self does not face or even acknowledge the darkness within. On the contrary, the darkness is proclaimed to be the brightest of lights.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. 4

After one glance of God’s love, our false self, in spite of all its apparent embeddedness, dissolves away like a bad dream. That’s all it is anyway, a bad dream that passage with the dawning of God's love.

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, p. 59

Our true self is a self in communion. It is a self that subsists in God’s eternal love. Likewise, the false self is the self that stands outside this created subsisting communion with God that forms our very identity. In our zeal to become the landlords of our own being, we cling to each achievement as a kind of verification of our self-proclaimed reality. We become the center and God somehow recedes to an invisible fringe. Others become real to the extent they become significant others to the designs of our own ego. And in this process the ALL of God dies in us and the sterile nothingness of our desires becomes our God. . . .

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the true self, p. 32–33.

Our mission is to live into the shape of our true self, not the shape of someone else’s life.

Parker Palmer

I can’t think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graced way to die than with the knowledge that I showed up here as my true self as best I knew how, able to engage life free and lovingly because I had become fierce with reality.

Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything

The Voice of Truth

I often hear two voices—The voice in my head and the voice in my heart.  The voice in my headfills me with shame and doubt. Tells me I’m flawed. I don’t measure up. It reminds me ofall the times I’ve failed. “You’ll never win,” it scoffs. The voice in my heart tells me something different. I’m God’s Beloved. I’m perfectly human. I’m good enough. I’m love and loved. The voice in my head is loud and brash. I can’t trust it to tell me the truth. The voice in my heart is patient and kind. It listens first and whispers later. To which voice do I listen? I desire to follow the voice of my heart but the voice in my head is relentless, an untamed beast that hounds me. I stop, quiet myself, placing hands to chest. In the stillness, in the bridal chamber of my heart I hear the Voice of Truth whisper, “Do not be afraid, I am with you. You’re okay. You can do this.” A chorus of birds sing Psalms outside my den window together we praise the Voice of Truth.

Brian J. Plachta

The true self is rooted in the Ground of Being from which flows an awareness of being loved, safe, and having no need to fear. The false self is a slave to fear. The true self is free and unafraid.

Phileena Heuertz, Mindful Silence, p. 48

We all have lifetime wounds: False Self: ego driven-feeds ego, True Self: soul inspired-feeds soul. Only when we feel truly safe can we live into True Self.

When fears are triggered, old behaviors emerge. We flee situations by distracting ourselves. Ultimate love requires ultimate freedom.

Mark Ritchie, Spiritual Director

Shame is a tool of the evil one to drive a wedge between me and God to make me feel unworthy of love.

Mark Ritchie, Spiritual Director

When we are totally safe, our true self emerges. Ego doesn’t go away. It moves more and more into serving True Self. Ego’s job is to keep us safe. It acts out of fear. When we can inform the ego by letting go, it can learn to be safe. That is transformation.

Mark Ritchie, Spiritual Director

Idea: Made in the image of God, not good enough,

Ideal: Standard I need to live up to,

Idol: Prove myself worthy,

False Identity: Idea that I can prove myself. Shoals that shipwreck faith. We work for renewal, but mostly suffer.

Harvey Cheatham, Esoteric Spirituality

Veneer: a thin coating atop an inferior product. We all have a veneer to increase perceived value. We consume and purchase things which support our veneer. Our true self becomes hidden, overcome by the bright shiny veneer. The pursuit is endless.

Jason Lacy & Tim Willard, Veneer

Don't be fooled by me. Don't be fooled by the face I wear, for I wear a mask, a thousand masks,  masks that I'm afraid to take off, and none of them is me. Pretending is an art that's second nature with me, but don't be fooled, for God's sake don't be fooled. I give you the impression that I'm secure, that all is sunny and unruffled with me, within as well as without, that confidence is my name and coolness my game, that the water's calm and I'm in command and that I need no one, but don't believe me.

My surface may seem smooth but my surface is my mask, ever-varying and ever-concealing. Beneath lies no complacence. Beneath lies confusion, and fear, and aloneness. But I hide this.  I don't want anybody to know it. I panic at the thought of my weakness exposed. That's why I frantically create a mask to hide behind, a nonchalant sophisticated facade, to help me pretend, to shield me from the glance that knows. 

But such a glance is precisely my salvation, my only hope, and I know it. That is, if it's followed by acceptance, if it's followed by love. It's the only thing that can liberate me from myself,  from my own self-built prison walls, from the barriers I so painstakingly erect. It's the only thing that will assure me of what I can't assure myself, that I'm really worth something.

But I don't tell you this.  I don't dare to, I'm afraid to. I'm afraid your glance will not be followed by acceptance, will not be followed by love. I'm afraid you'll think less of me, that you'll laugh, and your laugh would kill me. I'm afraid that deep-down I'm nothing and that you will see this and reject me.

So I play my game, my desperate pretending game, with a facade of assurance without and a trembling child within. So begins the glittering but empty parade of masks, and my life becomes a front. I idly chatter to you in the suave tones of surface talk. I tell you everything that's really nothing,  and nothing of what's everything, of what's crying within me.

So when I'm going through my routine do not be fooled by what I'm saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I'm not saying, what I'd like to be able to say, what for survival I need to say, but what I can't say.

I don't like hiding. I don't like playing superficial phony games.  I want to stop playing them. I want to be genuine and spontaneous and me but you've got to help me. You've got to hold out your hand even when that's the last thing I seem to want. Only you can wipe away from my eyes the blank stare of the breathing dead. Only you can call me into aliveness.

Each time you're kind, and gentle, and encouraging, each time you try to understand because you really care, my heart begins to grow wings– very small wings, very feeble wings, but wings!

With your power to touch me into feeling you can breathe life into me. I want you to know that. I want you to know how important you are to me, how you can be a creator--an honest-to-God creator--of the person that is me if you choose to. You alone can break down the wall behind which I tremble, you alone can remove my mask, you alone can release me from my shadow-world of panic, from my lonely prison, if you choose to.

Please choose to. Do not pass me by. It will not be easy for you. A long conviction of worthlessness builds strong walls. The nearer you approach to me  the blinder I may strike back. It's irrational, but despite what the books say about man often I am irrational. I fight against the very thing I cry out for. But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls and in this lies my hope. Please try to beat down those walls  with firm hands but with gentle hands for a child is very sensitive.

Who am I, you may wonder? I am someone you know very well. For I am every man you meet and I am every woman you meet.

Charles C. Finn