From The Desk Of The Absolute: Bernadette Roberts
Once beyond the self, however, holiness is no longer possible, because now, there is nothing left to give and no-one left to do the giving-Bernadette Roberts
“This journey then, is nothing more, yet nothing less than a period of acclimating to a new way of seeing, a time of transition and revelation as it gradually comes upon “that” which remains when there is no self. This is not a journey for those who expect love and bliss, rather, it is for the hardy who have been tried by fire and have come to rest in a tough, immovable trust in “that” which lies beyond the known, beyond the self, beyond union and even beyond love and trust itself.
—Bernadette Roberts
“You know there was some crazy Christian lady running around Southern California claiming that she knew God?”
”Uh…isn’t that religion like known for like not having the highest success rate in delivering the goods? You got anything more?”
“Yeah, she was a Carmelite nun and said that the problem with Christianity starts at the beginning with the misunderstanding of the Trinity and the whole Father/Son thing. But apparently, it’s greater than a trinitarian verse unitarian debate, the early Christian Father Irenaeus had the right idea. Let me see if I can pull it up.”
God
the glorious Transcendent;
the powerful, illuminating and
transforming Holy Spirit;
the divine knowing and intelligent
Wisdom of the Creator and Logos,
each revelation being the fullness of God
—Irenaeus, 125-202
Those early Christian Fathers who sought new converts were trapped between the educated Greek/Roman philosophers and the Jews. The Greeks believed in the One. That Absolute which can only be known by experiencing it. It was a journey that required re-traversing the ray of sunlight until one arrived at the One. Matter was for fools who wished to play out base desires and thus all incarcerated beings were at the furthest distance from the emanations of the One. They were enmeshed in matter. The One is like an unconcerned parent who patiently waits for his child’s temper tantrum to fade. Good thing the child is in a rubber room with nary a sharp object in sight.
For the Jews, the son of God was a failure because he did not deliver the promised land of Jerusalem. Both the Greeks and the Jews were disgusted that God (or the One) would ever don a man-suit. Jesus is either an impossibility or a blip in God’s revelation. They had no choice but to appeal to the common folk or, the Gentiles. Their sophistication varied wildly and the Fathers debated how to explain their religion.
St. Augustine remarked that the Christians adopted the “Economic Trinity” which features creation as such:
The Father
The Son
The Holy Ghost
The Child is the Father of Man
—William Wordsworth
What easier way to explain the Trinity than to use the analogy of Father and Son? Like the Old Testament God, your Father has complete control over life and death. While you are a boy, he could have ended your wretched existence. All good things flowed from the Father. All bad things flowed from the Father. He was magical like that.
Only one problem though. How the hell is one a Father before he has a son? The child gives birth to his father as well—it is his flesh that propels him into that category. So if this “Economic Trinity” is the substratum of existence how the hell is it eternally unmanifested dependent on the time-bound birth of a fleshy human?
The Carmelite nun Bernadette Roberts spent her entire life grappling with the theological questions of Christianity. Yet, she herself was fully enlightened through this vehicle. This is a wonderful paradox!
When we take the issue of the trinity, Bernadette laid it out as follows:
God
Logos
Wisdom
Or for us to better understand
Above
Within
Without
God is revealed through nature as omnipresent. He is external to the seer. This seer feels no different than anything else yet this feeling of God can never be localized anywhere, not even in man yet the feeling persists.
God is revealed as within man, as the very essence of his being. This is extremely personal because God is no longer the external world but within and as his most personal sanctum. It is immanent.
God is revealed as totally transcendent to all creation, including the seer. This is impersonal to the extreme as whoever sees this face of God dies. To understand this is to understand that the seer is dead.
Noli me tangere
Noli me legere
Noli me videre
Non enim videbit homo et vivet
—Mark Z. Danielewski; House Of Leaves
The Economic Trinity supposes that man is a miserable wretch who must cleave to God for his only chance at salvation. Jesus was Jesus Chris, the one and only holy God-man and we have nothing better to do but fear God and avoid sin. We are firmly situated outside of the party peering into a holiness.
The Trinity of Roberts and Irenaeus proclaims that Jesus was aware of his essential human nature as Christ. Christ only has meaning because it is man’s eternal oneness with the Trinity and through that—God. It is the birthright of all humans. You may think of the Trinity as three separate sides of a triangle but it is actually three sides of one shape. It’s three hypostases in one. It only looks like three triangles because of man’s limited mind which receives the revelation according to his own limited capacity.
Christians believe that they have found a way to climb the holy mountain but have yet to discover they were on the wrong mountain.
Bernadette Roberts is essential reading to the Christian seeker or the philosophically minded who just can’t help but wonder how we got started off on the wrong foot. Her own personal experience of God is laid out in three books which are as follows:
The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center
The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey
What Is Self?
These books continue to narrow in their appeal to those not steeped in the Christian contemplative method. The philosophical argument laid out in this article comes from her book The Real Christ which covers all the other juicy bits like human nature versus human essence, the Incarnation, the Eucharist and all those hearies and bible rewrites we love to bring up. Reading Roberts leaves the reader with the feeling that all those Western seekers who have deserted the religion of their fathers for the religion of the East, may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
In lieu of a text selection I have decided to go with a selection of Roberts quotes as found on Samaneri Jayasāra’s excellent YouTube channel.
I used to wholesale reject the notion of a Trinity, but lately have been grappling with it's significance and have found different descriptions helpful. From The Gateway Experience Army report:
"The description of energy totally at rest, in infinity fits the Christian metaphysical concept of the Father while the infinite self-consciousness resident in that energy providing the motive force of will to bring a portion of that energy into motion to create reality corresponds with the Son. This is so because in order to attain self-consciousness, the consciousness of the Absolute must project a hologram of itself and then perceive it. That hologram is a mirror image of the Absolute in infinity, still exists outside time and space, but is one step removed from the Absolute and is the actual agent of all creation (all reality). And, the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the Absolute as the model around which the evolution of time-space revolves to ultimately attain a reflection of and union with Him. That thought model, which perfectly reflects the essence or “spirit” of the Absolute fits the Christian metaphysical description of the Holy Spirit."