Our Natural Center
by Patrick Drysdale
We have to realize that we have our original center in God
and that without Him, we couldn't exist. Somewhere along the
way, though, we made a terrible mistake and displaced this
divine center with a sense of a separate me and acted from that
standpoint instead of our original one, thereby obscuring God as
our natural center.
The purpose of our life is to
undermine this unnatural center and reestablish contact with the
divine. We don't really live until we understand that Truth is
the missing piece from our humanity and everyone on earth is
seeking it but doesn't know it. Spirituality has been so
suppressed that its negative side has surfaced as the most
outrageous addictions and preoccupations: making money, love
affairs, the job, drugs, alcoholism, gambling, racing, anything
that produces an intense sensation is accepted as a substitute
but they'll never satisfy. The spirit wants union with Truth,
not shallow amusements.
It's important to remember that
recovering this natural center doesn't obliterate our humanity.
It completes it. The path to it, though, is not an additive
process, as most people believe, but rather a shedding one. It's
a progressive death to everything that makes up the personal
self. I think it's imperative to view this unified center in the
context of man's overall development and see it as the normal
state in which God intended us to live. Further development in
humans is entirely spiritual and achieving our full potential
means returning to our original unity with God, our natural
center. This should be our first goal in life.
Living
with a sense of a separate self is the adolescent stage is the
spiritual life but the majority of human beings don't get any
further than this level of development because neither organized
religion nor society provides the environment for going beyond
it. Most people get stuck here and never have the opportunity to
break out of themselves. Those who have are seen as misfits and
ridiculed if they talk about life with a personal sense of self.
Nobody seems to consider that not being able to outgrow the
sense of a separate self is just as pathetic as not being able
to outgrow children's clothes. A forty year old who still wears
juvenile clothes is deplorable but exactly corresponds to an
adult living with an egotistical self. A person who fails to
trade in his adolescent clothes for spiritually mature ones has
made a decision to stand apart from the call to inwardly develop
and will mechanically repeat his egotistical lifestyle to the
very last.
It's as if something in us wishes to stay a
child, resist the call to spiritual maturity, and remain
unconscious of our natural center but I've found that being at
an immature level isn't the real problem. The major obstacle is
that everyone at this level believes that he's already reached
his highest level of development. Conventional psychology can't
come to the rescue because it hasn't evolved to the point where
it considers the psychology of the whole person and can see the
ego as the juvenile phase of the total human experience. Living
with a sense of a separate self is a phase we have to pass
through but the problem is that most people get stuck in it and
never leave. The real issue is not that people have an ego but
that they're not outgrowing it.
It's my experience that,
at a certain point, the personal self stops expanding and an
inexorable inner process enforces its contraction. This is God
calling us home and His way of inviting us to devote serious
attention to the inner life. I've observed that people who
should have let their sense of a separate self die long ago but
insisted on keeping them alive become hypochondriacs, rigid
dogmatists, and either applauders of the past or eternal
juveniles. In my opinion, these traits are all pathetic
substitutes for the spiritually mature personality but
inevitable consequences of resisting God's urge to become whole
and inwardly develop.
Living with a sense of a separate
self is not our natural state but the problem is that it's the
only self we know while living with it, so if someone tries to
tell us of a life without a personal me in it, they're labeled
as escapists and considered psychologically unsound. I'm firmly
convinced, however, that the really dangerous people aren't the
nonbelievers in the egoless life but the swarm of petty thinkers
who have already decided that union with the divine is just an
emotional fantasy.
Experience shows that the reality of
this attainment is more within our reach than we realize but
since we can't conceive of a life without a separate self while
living with it, we insist that such a state without a sense of a
personal me in it doesn't exist. It does.
I've always
felt that if learning about something couldn't bring about any
inner change or didn't give me any insight into myself, then it
was a waste of time. I saw that knowing the validity of
spiritual truths can only be accomplished by living them, not
just reading or talking about them, and that with practice they
reach down from the mind to become an experiential reality. For
this reason, anyone who hasn't had any inner experiences finds
statements like that of living without a feeling of a separate
self unverifiable and hard to accept but inner knowing is the
very heart of this issue. Real spirituality consists of
experiencing these truths instead of just believing in them.
People hold on to this unnatural sense of a personal me only
because it's the only self they presently know. After all, if
you stopped being yourself, who would you be? Try it and find
out.
Drop all identifications and self-images you have
of who you think you are and then see what's left. I think if
people stopped running and faced their own imaginary mental
existence, they would see the absurdity of their so-called
personal concern and 99.9% of all their worries would fall away
right there. The problem is that they're terrified of living
without themselves. I think that everyone should know that
living without himself is not only possible in this life but
that it's the normal state in which Truth intended us to live.
Disidentifying with everything you think is you plays a
crucial role in undermining the unnatural personal center.
Breaking your identification from thoughts and false self-images
is like learning a new behavior, a new way of living without a
sense of separateness in your life. There's an inner emptiness
you'll have to learn to adjust to, one that's both a quietness
and conscious awareness of your existence, a stillness that's
Truth itself. This is your natural center.
About The Author
Patrick is an author and lecturer of transpersonal psychology
and inner development. His books include "Journey Into
Wholeness", "Diamonds Along The Path", and "Path To No Ego".