BRAVO! What you have written above is very meaningful and profound to me, not loose ramblings. I think that you have touched the heart of spirituality.
Wow! That is a beautiful and very deep understanding of the relationship between what I would call the Higher and lower self. You have been able to express in a paragraph what I have been trying, but failing adequately, to explain in a massive post. I think that you have hit the nail on the head brother Ambarsaria ji! I just love how you understood exactly what I was trying to say and distilled the essence, the gem if you like, the needle in my haystack. You are brilliant!
I consider the fragmentation between these two to be at the root of all human suffering. Human beings are out of harmony. We are at war within ourselves. The goal of the spiritual seeker should not be to destroy the lower self ("me") but rather reconcile it, harmonize it with your Higher self ("I"). The problem I have with Hinduism and Buddhism is that often it seems like they strive for self-obliteration ie no thoughts, imagings, emotions, desires which would lead to insanity and no joy in living not to mention lose of Personhood.
There was a truly wonderful Catholic mystic called Blessed Juliana of Norwich (ca. 1342 – ca. 1416) who lived in England. She is regarded as one of the most important Catholic mystics and is even quoted as an authority in the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church, and the current Pope, Benedict XVI, dedicated a whole Sunday morning sermon to talk about her just over a year ago. You can read this talk of the Pope on her here: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20101201_en.html
Through Blessed Juliana I learned about the distinction between what she calls the Substance and Sensuality within man - which corresponds roughly to what I call the Higher and lower self and what you refer to brilliantly as "I" and "me". I often associate the Substance with the human spirit, that God-breathed aspect of the soul that is directed towards and lifts itself up to God at all times; as distinct from the lower self (the Sensuality) which is our ordinary physical and psychological life, which matures as we develop and can become misdirected and obscured by ego. Our essential selfhood, our substance, our "I" is eternally united with God from whom it flows forth, though we are not always aware of it. Our sensuality is different, indeed it is very far from always being united with God. In each of us, Juliana tells us, lies the higher, inner self and the lower self. When our sensuality - the 'Me' - is not focused on God as the centre of our lives, then we are broken and fragmented because the higher self and the lower self are out of tune with each other. The task of spirituality is the reunifiction of our sensuality (our 'me') with our substance (our "I") so that we can become whole again in God. This is called sometimes The Little Way of Spiritual Childhood.
Do you know the word "salvation"? It comes from the Koine Greek word sozo which means "to make whole again". peacesign A lot of Christians don't understand this because they read the Bible in English translations and do not know the meaning of the original words.
So in brief: Our essential self is always united with God, no matter how we feel or what we are concious of or what we do, it is the essential Ground of our Being which constitutes our selfhood, flowing from Being Itself, and no matter what we do it is always still what is.
But our sensuality can be directed elsewhere, as it often is, away from God. This fragmentation must be healed. Our sensuality (Our "me") is focused away from God and fragmented from our substance ("I") and so we are divided against ourselves.
We are created with a natural, in-built orientation to God in our inmost self, and are at odds with ourselves until this orientation is made the focus of our whole life, integrating our sensuality with our substance, which is always united with God.
And I agree, it is when this wholeness between I and Me is regained, that a Saint or enlightened being is born :sippingcoffeemunda:
Two perfect exemplars of this are the great Catholic mystic Saint Francis of Assisi and Jalal'u'ddin Rumi, the greatest mystic of the Islamic world. Saint Francis had been a rich, selfish playboy knight until at the age of 25, when - imprisioned by an army attacking his home town of Assisi - he had an incredible spiritual experience which changed his life forever, and which a few days later led him to see God in a leper whose face and body had been destroyed by the disease. At first repulsed, Francis then went down and kissed the leper and renounced all claims to his father's inheritance. Thus a Saint was born. In the Islamic world, Rumi had been until the age of 37 an Islamic scholar and jurist, skilled in Hadith - Shariah Law - but lacking any spirituality whatsoever, having merely outward religion and intellect. And then he met a wandering Sufi mystic called Shams and somehow he was awakened to his Higher Self. Shams later died, some say killed, and Rumi was overpowered with grief. But in his grief he started to whirl, to dance, and through this the Islamic lawyer was transformed into a God-intoxicated devotee of the religion of Love alone.
Both Francis and Rumi were alive at the same time and although separated by geography, culture and birth-religion they essentially awakened to the same truth. In this same 13th century, Meister Eckhart was also born in Germany and he too, this Dominican scholar and Professor of Catholic theology, became a God-intoxicated mystic.
Read:
"...Very few in Western society in our time would deny that we are individually and collectively fragmented. That is obvious enough from the mess and muddle of our lives and the society around us. Juliana would say the root of all this is that we are quite literally heart-broken. Our heart, our being, is split in two by the division between our substance and our sensuality. Human wholeness can never be achieved until this brokeness is healed. Our substance is always united to God; but our sensuality all too easily focuses on other things, most obviously on ourselves. We may call this sin, or brokeness or soul-sickness, or alienation; but whatever term we use, there is a fracture at the centre of our Personhood, the deep wound which divides us from ourselves and makes us hurting and hurtful people, spreading pain like an infectious disease in which everyone contaminates everyone else...Turning from God is turning from our deepest self. Because our substance is essentially united with God whether we know it or not, and because that is constitutive of our being human at all, the denial of God in our lives actually is the denial of our deepest reality. Juliana goes so far as to say that a person who persists in this denial ultimately annihilates himself or herself..."
- Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian
