Preloading
Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr

What to Do When You Can't Find Your True Self

Read an excerpt from Father Richard Rohr's Immortal Diamond. In this section, he engages the age-old question, "Who am I?"
Who of us has not asked, "Who am I?" "Who am I really?" "What am I all about?" "Is there any essential 'me' here?" It is as if we are all a big secret to ourselves and must search for clues, however obscure they may be. Yet the search never stops fascinating us, even as we grow older. (If it does, we have almost certainly stopped growing.) Any lecture or class on understanding yourself always draws great interest, even from otherwise jaded or superficial people. One sees this fascination in little children as their eyes widen if you tell them about the day they were born, or what they were like "as a kid," or what they might "be" when they grow up. Try it, and notice how children quiet and listen with intense interest at almost anything about themselves. They gaze at you with wonder and excitement and invariably want to hear more. These messages must feel like oracles from another world to them and doorways into still-hidden secrets.

This curiosity about ourselves grows more intense in the teen and young adult years as we try on a dozen costumes and roles, and we surely covet any recognition or praise of our most recent incarnation. We quickly grab it and try it on for size, as if to say, "This might be me!" Some never take their costume off. A too early or too successful self becomes a total life agenda, occasionally for good but more often for ill. Think of the many young athletes, musicians, and poets who become obsessed with their identity but never make it to the big time. Even if they do succeed, there are too many stories of unhappiness, being lost, and self-destruction. Our ongoing curiosity about our True Self seems to lessen if we settle into any "successful" role. We have then allowed others to define us from the outside, although we do not realize it. Or perhaps we dress ourselves up on the outside and never get back inside. When I explore the True Self in this book, I am talking about a second dressing up, which will actually feel much more like a dressing down.

This confusion about our True Self and False Self is much of the illusion of the first half of life, although most of us do not experience the problem then. Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success... If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted." Success is hardly ever your True Self, only your earl window dressing. It gives you some momentum for the journey, but it is never the real goal. You do not know that, however. In the moment, it just feels right and good and necessary—and it is. For a short while.

I remember hearing a story, reportedly true, about a young couple putting their newborn in the nursery for the night. Their four-year-old son said to them, "I want to talk to the baby!" They said, "Yes, you can talk to him from now on." But he pressed further, saying, "I want to talk to him now and by myself." Surprised and curious, they let the young boy into the nursery and cupped their ears to the door, wondering what he might be saying. This is what they reportedly heard their boy say to his baby brother: "Quick, tell me where you came from. Quick, tell me who made you? I am beginning to forget!" Could that be true? Have most of us forgotten? Is this what Jesus was referring to when he would often teach that we have to become like little children to "get it"?

Most spirituality has said, in one way or another, that we have all indeed begun to forget, if not fully forgotten, who we are. Universal amnesia seems to be the problem. Religion's job is purely and simply one thing: to tell us, and keep reminding us of who we objectively are. Thus, Catholics keep eating "the Body of Christ" until they know that they are what they eat—a human body that is still the eternal Christ. What else would the message be? Avoiding this objective and wonderful message, many clergy have made the Eucharist into a reward for good behavior and missed the core Gospel for the sake of a small contest where they just happen to give out the merit badges. Religion's job is to keep "re-minding" us of what we only know "in part" (1 Corinthians 13:12). This book hopes to remind you of what you know and who you are at your core—and in a way that you can't forget. Then whatever you say or do will come from a good, deep, and spacious place. The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.

What to Do When You Can't Find Your True Self

Read an excerpt from Father Richard Rohr's Immortal Diamond. In this section, he engages the age-old question, "Who am I?"
Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr
Who of us has not asked, "Who am I?" "Who am I really?" "What am I all about?" "Is there any essential 'me' here?" It is as if we are all a big secret to ourselves and must search for clues, however obscure they may be. Yet the search never stops fascinating us, even as we grow older. (If it does, we have almost certainly stopped growing.) Any lecture or class on understanding yourself always draws great interest, even from otherwise jaded or superficial people. One sees this fascination in little children as their eyes widen if you tell them about the day they were born, or what they were like "as a kid," or what they might "be" when they grow up. Try it, and notice how children quiet and listen with intense interest at almost anything about themselves. They gaze at you with wonder and excitement and invariably want to hear more. These messages must feel like oracles from another world to them and doorways into still-hidden secrets.

This curiosity about ourselves grows more intense in the teen and young adult years as we try on a dozen costumes and roles, and we surely covet any recognition or praise of our most recent incarnation. We quickly grab it and try it on for size, as if to say, "This might be me!" Some never take their costume off. A too early or too successful self becomes a total life agenda, occasionally for good but more often for ill. Think of the many young athletes, musicians, and poets who become obsessed with their identity but never make it to the big time. Even if they do succeed, there are too many stories of unhappiness, being lost, and self-destruction. Our ongoing curiosity about our True Self seems to lessen if we settle into any "successful" role. We have then allowed others to define us from the outside, although we do not realize it. Or perhaps we dress ourselves up on the outside and never get back inside. When I explore the True Self in this book, I am talking about a second dressing up, which will actually feel much more like a dressing down.

This confusion about our True Self and False Self is much of the illusion of the first half of life, although most of us do not experience the problem then. Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success... If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted." Success is hardly ever your True Self, only your earl window dressing. It gives you some momentum for the journey, but it is never the real goal. You do not know that, however. In the moment, it just feels right and good and necessary—and it is. For a short while.

I remember hearing a story, reportedly true, about a young couple putting their newborn in the nursery for the night. Their four-year-old son said to them, "I want to talk to the baby!" They said, "Yes, you can talk to him from now on." But he pressed further, saying, "I want to talk to him now and by myself." Surprised and curious, they let the young boy into the nursery and cupped their ears to the door, wondering what he might be saying. This is what they reportedly heard their boy say to his baby brother: "Quick, tell me where you came from. Quick, tell me who made you? I am beginning to forget!" Could that be true? Have most of us forgotten? Is this what Jesus was referring to when he would often teach that we have to become like little children to "get it"?

Most spirituality has said, in one way or another, that we have all indeed begun to forget, if not fully forgotten, who we are. Universal amnesia seems to be the problem. Religion's job is purely and simply one thing: to tell us, and keep reminding us of who we objectively are. Thus, Catholics keep eating "the Body of Christ" until they know that they are what they eat—a human body that is still the eternal Christ. What else would the message be? Avoiding this objective and wonderful message, many clergy have made the Eucharist into a reward for good behavior and missed the core Gospel for the sake of a small contest where they just happen to give out the merit badges. Religion's job is to keep "re-minding" us of what we only know "in part" (1 Corinthians 13:12). This book hopes to remind you of what you know and who you are at your core—and in a way that you can't forget. Then whatever you say or do will come from a good, deep, and spacious place. The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.
Is it possible that we do know our True Self at some level? Could we all know from the beginning? Does some part of us know—with a kind of certitude—who we really are? Is the truth hidden within us? Could human life's central task be a matter of consciously discovering and becoming who we already are and what we somehow unconsciously know? I believe so. Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had. Most Native cultures look for inherent symbols at a child's birth—and that became the child's sacred name. Maybe this is what lovers are doing for one another with their sweet nicknames.

Our True Self is surely the "treasure hidden in the field" that Jesus speaks of. It is your own chunk of the immortal diamond. He says that we should "happily be willing to sell everything to buy that field" (Matthew 13:44)—or that diamond mine! Could any one thing be that valuable that we would sell everything for it? In all the Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying, "What will it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your own soul?" (Matthew 16:26), and the context invariably implies he is talking about something happening in this world. If you find the treasure hidden in your own field, then everything else comes along with it. It is indeed the "pearl of great price" (Matthew 13:46) to continue our precious gem metaphor.

The early Christian writers tell us that this discovery of our True Self is also at the same time a discovery of God. I have far too often seen the immature and destructive results of people who claim to have found God and do not have even a minimum of self-knowledge. They try to "have" God and hold onto their false and concocted little self too. It does not work (1 John 4:20). I have also met many who appear to know themselves and do at some good levels, but not at the largest and divine level; they have to keep scrambling for private and public significance by themselves and in their mental ego. They still live in a separate and very fragile self.

Some who use the language of integral theory or "spiral dynamics" call it the "mean green" level: these are people who are just smart enough to dismiss everybody below them as stupid and everybody above them as falsely spiritual. A little bit of enlightenment is a very dangerous thing. I have seen it in myself, in many clergy, and especially in the arrogance of many academics, early feminists, and loners who can never trustfully belong to any group and seem to believe they have the only correct ideas. Their "smartness" makes them also mean or arrogant, and we intuitively know this should not be true.

The two encounters with a True God and a True Self are largely experienced simultaneously and grow in parallel fashion. If I can do nothing more in this book than demonstrate why and how this is the case, I will have achieved the best purpose here.
One of Jesus' most revealing one-liners is, "Rejoice only that your name is written in heaven!" (Luke 10:20). If we could fully trust this, it would change our whole life agenda. This discovery will not create overstated or presumptuous individualists, as religion usually fears, but instead makes all posturing and pretending largely unnecessary. Our core anxiety that we are not good enough is resolved from the beginning, and we can stop all our climbing, contending, criticizing, and competing. All "accessorizing" of any small, fragile self henceforth shows itself to be a massive waste of time and energy. Costume jewelry is just that, a small part of an already unnecessary costume.

Most of Christian history has largely put the cart of requirements before the "horsepower" itself, thinking that loads of carts, or "I have the best cart," will eventually produce the horse. It never does. The horsepower is precisely our experience of primal union with God. Find God, the primary source, and the spring water will forever keep flowing (Ezekiel 47:1–12; John 7:38) naturally. Once you know that, the problem of inferiority, unworthiness, or low self-esteem is resolved from the beginning and at the core. You can then spend your time much more positively, marching in the "triumphal parade" (2 Corinthians 2:14), as Paul so playfully calls it.

You see, the horse does all the work. Your work is of another kind: to stay calmly and happily on the road and not get back into the harness. St. Teresa of Avila used a similar metaphor when she described how you can either keep digging the channel or find the actual spring and let it just flow toward you, in you, and from you. Her entire mystical theology is about finding that Inner Flow and not wasting time digging trenches.

Excerpted from Immortal Diamond by Richard Rohr, copyright © 2013, used by permission of Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint.

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