THE FELLOWSHIP OF MEDITATION
Series 3 No 5
We have been dwelling on the possibility of newness of life. Now, we have to reckon with the fact that we do not desire this newness wholeheartedly. As the writer of the
Theologia Germanica
says,
Since the life of Christ is every way most bitter to nature and the
self
and the
me
( for in the true life of Christ, the
self
and the
me
must be forsaken and lost and die altogether), therefore in each of us, nature hath a horror of it
. Much recent psychology supports this view in its insistence that there is in each one of us a great deal that fights against
renewal
, or shrinks from change in feeling, opinion and habit. Once we recognise this to be true we can be on our guard against the tendency to idealise our selfish motives and desires, to indulge in all kinds of mental camouflage and to find all manner of excellent
reasons
for remaining as we are. If you have not detected this behaviour in yourself yet, you probably will when you read what books on meditation have to say about personality, a subject which causes more heart- burning than any other in the first years of our studentship.
Perhaps it would be useful to consider a few extracts from
Inspiration
, by
Dr. Porter Mills
a)
Our own personality and our own experience-realm stand between us and God
.
That seems a hard saying. Let us look into it more closely; and we had better begin by recalling the raw material of which personality is formed. First, there is what I share with all other human beings, emotions arising from the instincts common to us all; secondly, there is what is the outcome of my absorbing the opinions and knowledge prevalent in that part of the social fabric in which I was born and brought up; thirdly, there is what is due to the use I have made of my educational and other opportunities; and lastly, there is what arises from any choices I have exercised in my reactions to my sex, class and country. What a man makes of his special experience constitutes his personality (as far as I understand Dr. Porter Mills' meaning). This special experience is necessary to a mans development. The sentence quoted does not mean, I think, that our experience need stand between us and God, but that in point of fact it often does.
So before we dismiss it as untrue we must ask ourselves which is actually most real to us, experience and feeling drawn from the Living Christ, His Love and Peace and Wisdom, all that makes His Consciousness, or the knowledge and feeling we draw from the personality of others and the transient events of the daily life. In what order of reality are we alive and
at home
? Surely we have to admit that we are more often in anxiety, in tribulation, even in despair, than
in Christ
. Think too, how many people are saying just now that they find the assertion of Gods Love and Power quite incredible, proving thereby that they have made of their present troublous experience a barrier which blocks their entry into the Kingdom.
As regards personality, if we are ever to enter the spiritual realm in which there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, we must deliberately take measures to rid ourselves of the limitations that keep us nation-conscious, class-conscious, sex-conscious. ( I expect that some of you in meditation are aware of being intensely alive without being aware of yourselves at all as a member of a particular nation, class or sex).
We certainly shall not evolve willy-nilly from the natural order into the Divine. Hence, in the meditation we are about to use during this coming fortnight we should not press too closely the analogy of the chrysalis becoming a butterfly; as, indeed, the next quotation shows:-
b)
The son of the race is the chrysalis appearance of the Divine Man-entity destined to become divine personality in him who will
.
Christ has shown us what Man is meant to be and what in union with Him he will be.
To as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become sons of God
. It behoves us, then, to find out how to
receive
Him: we must desire to have His Consciousness, must seek It with all our strength and lay aside all else to find It
will
to have It, in fine.
c)
Man is to become personal in spiritual self-consciousness
. He is to bring out in terms of existence the Life of the Spirit latent within him. In more familiar words, he is to become aware of himself (that is the meaning of
self-conscious
) as a child of God. Instead of being an individual expression of the race-consciousness, he is to become an individual expression of Spiritual Consciousness (the
Christ-consciousness
) .
Just as much of his Divine sonship as he has recognised and lived, just so much has he attained towards the divine personality
.
Now let us turn to our meditation:-
I will enable thee to form a new personality within the chrysalis of the one that thou hast called thyself, a personality which shall have loving dominion over all the earth-consciousness
(By the way, dont forget to use first in this connection the words,
Behold, I make all things new
).
The point of the analogy of the chrysalis is that though the chrysalis is a necessary stage in the development of the butterfly, it is by those who know never mistaken for the final form of the life that it embodies. Our present personality is the necessary setting or
case
inside which the divine personality can develop. The whole point of existence on earth as far as we can tell at present is that Christ may be formed in us. Because the experiences of our present personality are necessary we must not despise them; but we must resist the temptation to feel, think and behave as though they were the one reality.
Dr. Mills was fond of reminding his listeners that the origin of the word
person
is
persona
, a mask, the mask worn by the performers in a Greek drama which hid the real man behind his appearance as an actor. And so with us: the true, spiritual being of man is concealed behind what he appears to be, a strange blend of good and evil qualities, a creature capable of rising to great heights of courage and nobility and of sinking to appalling depths of cruelty and selfishness. Such is the self of man as we know him, unstable even at his best; whereas the self he is meant to express is a God-filled personality,
having loving dominion over all the earth-consciousness
( cf.
and
Now in the light of the foregoing extracts consider again the passage with which we started. In spite of the wonderful help which we have received through friendship and love for which we can never be sufficiently grateful, must we not admit that in the experience of us all there has frequently been misinterpretation of the worth of personality and ignorant reaction to the personality of others?
Such reaction is extremely varied in character. You have only to recall the amount of emotion suggested by the three words which form the basis of so much of our personality sex, class, nationality to realise this. It might be an interesting though depressing occupation to make a list of the negative emotions that may be called out by a wrong reaction to the personality of others. Here are a few: - dislike, spite, disappointment, malice, jealousy, flattery, contempt. Yes, in the realm of personality lie very many of the causes of our unhappiness and mistakes. Apart also from the more glaring defects of much of our love- the desire to possess or be possessed, to dominate or to cling, - we are often in bondage to each others personality, letting other people decide our opinions and govern our actions because we are afraid of being thought
peculiar
or because our love has not that high quality that can be frank without jeopardising its claim to tenderness. Moreover, we tend to become absorbed in the pleasures or sorrows evoked by each other's personality. In these and many other ways we let personality come between us and God.
Admitting this, as I think we must, can we not see thankfully that in meditation lies the way out of our difficulty. The remedy is not to batter ourselves into indifference towards other people, or to seek to stultify our ability to feel emotion. It is to learn to receive the Love that is Omnipotent. As we do that, the feelings we experience towards other people will be replaced by the feelings for them that God will give us, His knowledge of them as they are in their inmost being, apart from the accidents of sex, family and nationality. As we receive this penetrative Love we shall come into a different relationship with people, not one arising from shifting likes and dislikes but one based on the knowledge of our divine unity. And we shall be able to serve others more perfectly; for Omniscient Love will enable a man to give himself wisely to others, never impairing their power of growth, never enfeebling them by foolish idealisation or ruthless censure, and above all never forgetting that the greatest service he can render them is to help them towards the formation of Divine personality. And in such self-giving a man will be caught up into the rhythm of Eternal Life.
Let me end with
Boehme's
beautiful words describing the re-made personality:-
I shall be an instrument of God's Spirit wherein He makes melody with Himself, with this voice which I myself am. I shall be His instrument, an organ of His expressed Word and Voice, and not only I , but all my fellow-members in the glorious choir, the instruments of God.
M.V. Dunlop
July 12th 1941
