I HAVE LOST MYSELF. . .WELL, NOT REALLY!

One finds in all religious, spiritual and mystical traditions the idea that one must lose oneself in order to find oneself.  How does one lose oneself?  My experience is that I always seem to fail when I TRY to lose something.  Yup.  The harder I try the harder it gets; stuff just won’t get lost.  On the other hand, I frequently lose things when I am not trying to lose them.  I lose things when I am not aware.  Then there is the similar idea of dying to oneself.  How does one die to oneself?  Well, I’m not talking about death — suicide if you will.  The mystics don’t tell me to kill myself; they tell me to die.  For the mystics causing pain to myself, causing suffering to myself would be self-defeating and self-violent.  It would also be counterproductive.  A spiritual guide once told me that I would never fulfill myself when I am in pain.  I have never been more focused on myself than when I was depressed.  On the other hand, when I am ‘happy’ (content, at peace, in balance, living in the now, etc) I am not aware of myself.

Think about it.  We are quite conscious of ourselves when we have a toothache and when we don’t have a toothache we are, for the most part, not even aware that we have teeth.  The same holds for headaches.  When we have a headache we are really, truly, very much aware of our heads.  When we don’t have a headache we seldom think about our head.

So?  Consider, gentle reader, that it is quite false, quite erroneous, to think that the way to deny self is to cause pain to self, to go in for mortification.  The mystics tell us that to deny self, to die to self, is to understand our nature, to be aware of our ‘true’ self.  When we are able to do this then we will disappear — like the healthy tooth or non-headache, we won’t be aware of the self.

The great mystic Catherine of Siena told us that in one of her conversations with God, she was told by God ‘I am He who is; you are she who is not.’  The Eastern mystics liken this to the dancer and the dance.  God is the dancer and God’s creation is the dance.  It isn’t as if God is the big Dancer and we are the little dancers; we are, in this analogy, not the dancer at all.  We are ‘being danced.’  To tell you the truth, gentle reader, I don’t really understand this completely, but at times I do have a sense of it.

I once had another spiritual guide say to me that to lose self is to suddenly realize that you are something other than what you thought you were.  I used to think I was my depression; now I know that I am feeling depressed; I am not my depression.  Most healthy four-year olds believe they are the center and then they learn (hopefully) that they are not the center, they are more like a satellite.  I have to caution myself.  These are simply analogies; they are images.  They are not to be taken literally.  They give me a clue, a hint, a glimpse — they help point me in a certain direction.

Those mystics.  They certainly give me a lot to contemplate.  I suppose if this were really easy stuff then we would all be doing it — losing self and dying to self, that is.  But I-You-We are more likely to think we are our depression or our fear or our pride or even our humility.  We want to be the one dancing, not the one danced.  I know that I can easily, at times, forgot who the creator of the dance really is and that I am the dance that was created.