You Are Not What You Think You Are! Part I

I would like to begin this week by expressing my gratitude to Father Chris, a Catholic priest and professed friar, and Canon Doug, a retired Anglican priest, for their words of encouragement.  Both report that they are using these newsletters in their teaching and spiritual direction, and they are commending them to others.  This affirms that I’m on the right path in sharing these understandings with you.  Thank you both so much!  I would also like to encourage all my readers to share the email addresses of those they think might benefit from these teachings.  Please email them to [email protected]

Last week, we concluded our conversation with the extraordinary formulation of the world-renowned physicist Max Planck, who said, in essence, that the universe is looking more and more like an idea in the mind of God.  The conventional understanding is directly opposite: that consciousness comes from matter.  Planck, David Bohm, and other major figures in the field of physics have stated the opposite: that the phenomenal universe we perceive around us is the result of consciousness.

In 1994, D.J. Chalmers first formulated what he called the hard problem of consciousness.  In a nutshell, the hard problem asks, How did consciousness evolve from inert matter?  Specifically, Chalmers asked, “Why and how do brain processes give rise to subjective experience?” Up to this point, physicists had ignored what is, for you and me and everybody else, our subjective experience of being aware and conscious.  This omission is quite extraordinary!

Prior to Chalmers’ radical question, scientists had assumed that consciousness is a negligible phenomenon that can be summarily discarded from any serious scientific inquiry.  Since Galileo in the early 1600s, scientists have come to understand that the world around us can be described using the language of mathematics.  In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton provided definitive proof of this notion in his groundbreaking work, Principia Mathematica.  Since then, consciousness has been described at best as an epiphenomenon – some odd quirk of the natural world, which was probably caused in some unknown way by natural forces we don’t yet understand, but it’s not really all that important.

This was the situation when I began my graduate studies in clinical psychology in 1980.  The “hard science” branch of psychology viewed consciousness as an epiphenomenon, not worth the bother of studying.  That this flies in the face of our ordinary understanding made no difference at all to those “hard scientists.”  (I suspect that at least part of this omission was due to psychologists’ corporate sense of inferiority, because at that time psychology was understood as a “soft science” and not really worthy of being labeled a science at all.)

Despite consciousness being overlooked as an appropriate field of study, there was one huge and unmistakable fact about scientific progress.  While extraordinary advances were being made in the applied sciences – witness the development of computers, space travel, lasers, artificial intelligence, and the like – there were no corresponding developments in pure science.  There were no real breakthroughs in our understanding of the world around us or our own human nature.  (Yes, I know that string theory was formulated over the last 40 years, but string theory is inherently unprovable.  As a result, we have no way of knowing if this formulation is accurate.)

So where does that leave us?  The one thing that all human beings have in common is the experience of consciousness.  We are all self-aware entities.  When you match our self-awareness with Max Planck’s understanding, that the universe is an idea in the mind of God, all of a sudden, all of our previous ideas about Reality seem to explode!

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Let’s now shift gears and look at a parallel line of inquiry, that of religion.  Religion shares with science a curiosity about the nature of Reality.  The most significant difference between these two lines of inquiry lies in the ‘assumption,’ on the part of religious adherents, that God exists.  As a result of this difference, these two lines of inquiry have reached very different conclusions.

Mystics from all the great world religions have universally found that there is no difference at the deepest level between our consciousness and God’s consciousness.  Perhaps the clearest verbal formulation of this is found in Hinduism, the oldest of the major world religions.  Hindu mystics universally say, “Thou art That.”  Unpacking this short sentence, we find that they are referring to our limited human consciousness being fundamentally identical with the Divine.  You, yourself, are identical with That for which you search.

This understanding is repeated many, many times by the mystics of all religions.  In Christianity, perhaps the clearest statement of this is found in the gospel of John.  Here Jesus said, in effect, “I am in my Father and my Father is in me.  In just the same way, I am in you and you are in me.”  In case his listeners did not understand what he was saying, Jesus said it again in different words in the next chapter, “I am the vine, you are the branches.  Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”  

Within Christendom, this message is repeated over and over again through the centuries.  Meister Eckhart stated, for example, “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”  St. Catherine of Genoa said, being quite clear about the matter, “My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my being.”  In essence, she is saying that “My me is God.”  St. Seraphim of Sarov, in the early 1800s, stated that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.  By this, he meant that our task is to realize that the Holy Spirit is already residing deeply within each of us.

Yet, despite all of the affirmations that come from those who actually know God intimately and personally – that we are fundamentally identical with the Divine Consciousness – this is not our experience.  We have to ask, why not?

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What are we?  What is this self-awareness that makes us what we are?  And how are we connected with the rest of the universe?

In prior weeks, we have explored the nature of the self – that fundamental sense of self-identity.  That part of us that says, “I am myself and not someone or something else.”  We have seen that this self is composed of at least two elements.  There is the ego, that sense of being a separate self, and there is something deeper, which I will get to in a moment.

We have seen that our ego begins by taking in the values of our parents.  They teach us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that certain behaviors are good, other behaviors are acceptable, and still others are not good at all.  This serves as the initial scaffolding for our sense of self, which each of us builds, moment by moment.  Essentially, our ego is an instruction manual for getting along in the world.

This means that our ego is fundamentally a survival mechanism.  It is that part of us that helps us survive from birth through early adulthood.  As such, our egos are essential to human development.  We cannot do without them.  That being said, our egos come with significant limitations.  While they function to keep destructive events away from us, they also keep us from accurately understanding both the world around us and within us.  In addition, our egos tend to keep our negative thoughts and feelings inside of us, where they often wreak destruction.  How many times, for example, have you found your mind repeatedly going over a negative situation or conversation, until you’re just sick of it?

So you can think of your ego as constructing a wall.  While that wall keeps negative things outside of itself, when negative things do get in, it holds on to them.  We can see here that the ego is a two-edged sword: it confers benefits and, at the same time, burdens us with negative consequences.

The most profoundly debilitating consequence of an adult ego is that it keeps us from realizing our essential nature.  We tend to identify with our bodies or with our minds but our actual identity is that we participate in the fullness of the Divine.  The Christian mystics and indeed, the mystics of all religions, clearly state that we are one with God.  They clearly state that God dwells within our hearts.  Yet, because we identify with our bodies or our minds, we are unable to perceive the great treasure within each of us.  Jesus himself says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Due to the ego's limiting effect, we fail to perceive this profound truth. 

As a result, our primary spiritual task is to let go of our ego’s constraints so that we can experience our true self.  Our true self is not limited to this body.  It is not limited to the ever-changing play of emotions we experience.  It is not limited to our thoughts or our ideas.  Our true self participates fully in the Divine and has no limits.  Indeed, one way to understand the salvation that Christ brings to us is to recognize that he is freeing us from the too-narrow constraints of our ego so that we can participate fully in the love of God.

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Let us circle back now to that amazing notion, that we are best understood as ideas in the mind of God.  Let us also remember one of the most hideous stories in the Bible, that of Jacob and Esau.  In this story, Esau, who was famished, came upon Jacob, who was cooking a meal, variously described as a mess of pottage or gruel.  In order to obtain immediate relief from his hunger, Esau foolishly sold his birthright to Jacob for a meal.  This appears to me to be a metaphor for what each and every one of us has done.  We have sold our birthright as children of the Most High in exchange for next to nothing.

We have mistaken our egos – which are nothing more than a set of tools for survival in this world – for our ultimate reality.  As such, we have limited ourselves to an extraordinary degree.  Most of us have come to believe that we are nothing more than our thoughts, our emotions, and our physical bodies.  We have mistaken who we are for what amounts to a set of fantasies or delusions about ourselves.  

The Divine – however you conceive or perceive that – dwells inside of you, in your innermost being.  Not only that, but paraphrasing the words of St. Paul slightly, “you live and move and have your being with in Christ.”  As a result, there is no way that you can ever be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

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I think I will end our conversation here for today.  I expect that I have afflicted you enough for a while!  Next week I want to go more deeply into our human experience and explore how we have used our egos to erect protective barriers. 

Once again, I want to encourage you to meditate daily.  Meditation may be the most significant tool that we have to loosen the chains that our ego has wrapped around us.  How will we step into the love which God has created for us?  We will only be able to do that as we step out of the too narrow constraints that keep us bound and in chains.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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