Another great book I had the luck to get at a very cheap price was WILDERNESS SPIRITUALITY – Finding Your Way in an Unsettled World by Rodney Romney. This also I got from a platform shop just outside the Moore Market, Chennai, the same day I got WISDOM TO LIVE BY. It is like a double jackpot.
The passage I am posting below is from the Chapter entitled, THE WILDERNESS OF SELF.
Spiritual seekers irrespective of their creed, will immensely benefit from this wonderful book. Again this passage is aimed to encourage people to go in for the full book. It is published by ELEMENT, which has offices in Boston, Massachusetts, USA; Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Now to the passage:
Scientists tell us that every apparent bottom in the physical universe is false. There simply is no such thing as a bottom, no matter how many rabbit holes you try to go down. Was this part of what theologians were try to counteract, I wonder, when they spoke of God as Ground of our Being? Might not the metaphor be more accurate if God were spoken of as Bottomless Mystery, a limitless sponge that soaks up soul and self? Or are we only making futile efforts here in trying to apply a finite vocabulary to an infinite reality?
Whether God figures into the picture or not, the self of every person is trapped in its own wilderness. Part of that wilderness is self-imposed, but much of it is a given of our creation. We live isolated, self-contained and imprisoned in a self we did not initially create and do not always understand. It is small wonder that loneliness is the hallmark of human existence. We are basically alone in this world.
We come from a dark wilderness, we end in a dark wilderness, and the luminous interval between the two we dare to name life.
Yet as soon as we are born, the quest for meaning begins. Whether we set forth or return, we are dying simultaneously as we live. Because of this, many tell us that the goal of life is self-realization. In defiance of the process of dying we take up the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life. When that proves not to be enough, many would tell us that the goal of life is self-fulfillment. We need to find ways to enjoy our existence. But as these two streams well up within us, we instinctively begin to feel that life itself is without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe, capable of great good but also prone to great evil. It is the evil that more often overwhelms than the good. At this point, many would tell us that the goal of life is self-denial, that if we would die to self, we would most truly live.
It is our work somehow to grasp the vision of these three opposing forces and harmonize them, to modulate our thinking and our action in all three ways at once: self-realization, self-fulfillment and self-denial. How can we do that?
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…deep within all of us, indestructible and intact, is the True Self. It is that essential part of us that knows truth when it is presented and can love even when the person or situation is unlovely. Some would call the True Self the God Self or the Christ Self. It is that aspect within us that is created in the image of the divine, and while it can be damaged or temporarily obliterated, it can never be destroyed completely, for it is inviolate and pure. As the Quakers put it, there is something of God in everyone. The way to salvation leads neither here nor there; it leads into your own True Self, for there alone is God, and there alone can we find peace.
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…I think the goal of prayer, the inner life, however you wish to say it, is to unify the total person – body, mind and spirit – into an integrative, functioning whole. It is to unite the many selves that dwell within us into the True Self. That also ought to be the goal of life, so that as we mature, we integrate and become whole. That is the root meaning of salvation.
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The goal of the wilderness journey is not to negate the self but to bring about its true home, its true freedom. The journey is designed to take us from self-consciousness to God-consciousness, from self-centeredness to God-centeredness, from self-imprisonment to self-freedom.
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It is my firm belief that we will forever be in a wilderness of terror until we achieve a self-sufficient inner life with a rich and heightened self-awareness. At that point, the wilderness ceases to be a place of terror and becomes our home and the way to a good and happy life.
-o-o-o-
Grateful thanks to Rev Fr Rodney Romney and the publisher, ELEMENT.
