Center for Action and Contemplation - Father Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation "The Disconnected Self" for Sunday, 9 March 2014

Center for Action and Contemplation - Father Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation "The Disconnected Self" for Sunday, 9 March 2014

Your False Self is your necessary warm-up act, the ego part of you that establishes your separate identity, especially in the first half of life. 

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

"The False Self"

"The Disconnected Self"

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Your False Self is your necessary warm-up act, the ego part of you that establishes your separate identity, especially in the first half of life. In other words, it lives entirely on the “manifest” level, to the point of being disconnected with the “unmanifest,” or pure Being—with God. 

Basically the False Self is your incomplete self, trying to pass for your whole self. We fall in love with the part so much that we deny the Whole. God surely understands this and is undoubtedly glad that we are at least in love with something. Such initial love gets us started until we eventually realize that “love lasts forever” (1 Corinthians 13:13) and is the one thing we can forever count on and forever are.

Your False Self is not your bad self, your inherently deceitful self, the self that God does not like or that you should not like. Actually your False Self is quite good and necessary as far as it goes. It just does not go far enough, and it often poses and thus substitutes for the real thing. That is its only problem, and that is why we call it “false.” Maybe small self would actually be a better term.

The False Self is bogus more than bad, and bogus only when it pretends to be more than it is. Various false selves (temporary costumes) are necessary to form early identities, and they only show their limitations when they stay around too long. If a person keeps growing, his or her various false selves usually die, and need to die, in exposure to greater light.

Adapted from Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, pages 27, 64-65

and True Self/False Self (CD)

Gateway to Silence:

I am who I am in the eyes of God— nothing more and nothing less. 

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