Bernadette Roberts: What is Self?

The Christian Discovery of Truth: Bernadette Roberts

Many discount Christianity as constricted within dogma and ritual with little, if any, perfume left to it.
 
Nothing coud be further from the Truth, as Christain mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Saint John od the Cross, Bede Griggiths, Abhishiktananda, Thomas Keating and Thomas Merton are all well known.
 
The Christian Contmeplative path is extraordinary as it leads one to the absolute discovery of Self as Consciousness. Bernadette Roberts began as a Carmelite nun. Her discoveries paralelled John of The Cross, and she emphasizes the “path of naked Truth.” Her journey took her beyond union of God into where both the experience of the separate sense of self and the experience of God fall away. It is the journey that follows Christ’s own path of self discovery to the end.
 
According to Roberts, all spiritual inquiry results in a “unitive state”, in which the breakthrough to God occurs and an abiding union completes the seeker. What happens next is the beauty of her discourse:
 
Roberts writes about herself as “no self”. It is the experience that she refers to as “the end of consciousness” and the revelation of what remains beyond self. Lest readers become confused, consciousness here refers to a “containerized” versoion of awareness, as distinct from that which exists beyond our view of limitiation. Being consumed by what is, eventually leads to a primary event where the self ceases altogether, and with it all human experience. This may be familiar to some as ajativada, or nirvikalpa samadhi, the first hand experience of consciousness without an object. It is the complete dissolution of the “ego”, the separate sense of sense and belied in objective reality into the source. It is a “falling away” of the unitive center.
 
What occurs thereafter, Bernadette refers to as “the ressurection”.

Read a chapter of her extraoridinary journey, What is Self” by clicking here.

Enjoy her whole book by clicking here to obtain your own copy.