Gentle reader, ‘we humans’ are imperfect beings. We are endowed with wonder-full potential and great gifts. We are virtue and vice. We are pride-full. When our pride moves from virtue to vice we become hubris-full (think ‘arrogant’). We move from being ‘God-Like’ to being ‘Like-God.’ We become confused as to which is our ‘true self’ and which is our ‘false self.’ This ‘identity confusion’ has been explored by theologians and by psychologists for eons.
One of the theologians who address the theme of the true and false self is Thomas Merton. In his book, The Silent Life, Merton sought to help us understand this tension. Today I have decided to quote Merton at length – he states it more eloquently and powerfully than I am able to. Merton writes:
…God made us free…God did not make us omnipotent. We are capable of becoming perfectly godlike, in all truth, by freely receiving from God the gift of his Light, and his love, and his freedom… But in so far as we are implicitly convinced that we ought to be omnipotent of ourselves we usurp to ourselves a godlikeness that is not ours… In our desire to be ‘as gods’ we seek what one might call a relative omnipotence: the power to have everything we want, to enjoy everything we desire, to demand that all our wishes be satisfied and that our will should never be frustrated or opposed. It is the need to have everyone else bow to our judgment and accept our declaration as law. It is the insatiable thirst for recognition of the excellence we so desperately need to find in ourselves to avoid despair. This claim to omnipotence is in fact the source of all our sorrows, all our unhappiness, all our dissatisfactions, all our mistakes and deceptions. It is a radical falsity…
Merton continues:
There are many acceptable and ‘sane’ ways of indulging one’s illusory claim to divine power. One can be, for example, a proud and tyrannical parent –or a tearful and demanding martyr-parent. One can be a sadistic and overwhelming boss, or a nagging perfectionist. One can be a clown, or a dare-devil, or a libertine. One can be a hermit or a demagogue. Some satisfy their desire for divinity by knowing everybody else’s business: others by judging their neighbor, or telling him what to do.
There is a way we can shift to living into and out of more virtue than vice, to living more into the light more than the darkness. The great wisdom figures have for thousands of years provided us the way: to consciously strive to be who we really are – our ‘true self,’ the image of God, who is Love.
Searcher-Seeker 
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