Our "True Self" is Not Separate from God

Thomas Merton wrote:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. … My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God's will and God's love — outside of reality and outside of life. And such a life cannot help but be an illusion. We are not good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves….For most of the people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist….All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real….The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. … Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in [God] Ultimately, the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with [God] in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence. Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find [God], I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find [God].” (New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 34-36).

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“There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of [God] become an obstacle to our union with [God]. The obstacle is in our ‘self,’ that is to say, in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will. It is when we refer all things to this outward and false ‘self’ that we alienate ourselves from reality and from God. It is then the false self that is our god, and we love everything for the sake of this self. We use all things, so to speak, for the worship of this self” (Id. at p. 21).

Therefore, according to Merton, “Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts.” (The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p. 296).

God manifests the Godself through the particularities of all of creation. This does not mean, however, that we accept the proposition that God is limited to God’s creation (pantheism). Rather, an image for our relationship to the underlying reality of God is like the story of the fish who is swimming in the ocean, asking another larger fish where she can find the ocean, only to be told that she is already swimming in the ocean. Or, it is being like a drop of water in the ocean. The essence of the ocean (e.g. H₂O) is contained in every drop of water, but every drop of water does not comprise the entirety of the ocean.

Like the fish in the ocean, we fail to realize that we already exist in the reality of God’s all-pervasive loving presence. We cannot begin to find God, or allow God to find us, until we are able to discover that our “true self” is not separate from God. To begin to do this, we must first release our attachment to our “false self.” Once we begin to realize that our “true self” is one with God, through consciously living in the awareness of God’s presence in each moment, then perhaps we can begin to finally realize that we are also one with all of God’s creation.