Bernadette Roberts – A Passage Through Self

Bernadette Roberts – A Passage Through Self

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Bernadette Roberts – A Passage Through Self

BERNADETTE ROBERTS – A PASSAGE THROUGH SELF

This is a review of a two-DVD set I ordered from Bernadette Roberts’ website. The DVDs are a recording of a three-hour talk based on “the circles course” that Bernadette gave annually for some thirty years. The course is nicknamed “the circles course” because BR illustrated her points with a set of paper circles with their centers punched out to various extents. This series of circles, with their increasingly large centers, represent the spiritual journey.

The DVDs are quite expensive if you have them shipped to Canada and have to pay Canadian shipping, import taxes, and customs fees. They are much more affordable if you live in the U.S., where the price includes shipping.

The videos were originally recorded back in 1994 on VCR tape. Unfortunately there is a lot of hiss on the audio.

The main subject of the talk is the mystical journey. BR says that her description is wholly based on her own experience and not on anyone’s theory. At the same time, she asserts that the stages as she presents them are universal. The main stages to be discussed on the DVDs are the falling away of the ego, the dark night of the spirit, the unitive state, the marketplace stage, and the final falling away of self.

Before discussing these states and stages, BR defines what she means by consciousness. This is important because, for BR, “self” and “consciousness” are synonyms. By “consciousness” she means those parts of the psyche that humans possess but animals do not. She equates this with anything other than the senses. Now, my experience is that pet dogs and other animals do in fact have a rudimentary sense of self. But we will let that point go, since it’s not really critical to her description of the journey.

The key characteristic of consciousness, says BR, is that it “bends” in on itself. Consciousness is aware of consciousness. This reflexive mechanism (“reflexive” being another of her terms for the bending) is why she equates “consciousness” with “self.” Consciousness being aware of consciousness is precisely what constitutes self.

Self happens primarily at what BR calls the “knowing” level. But there is also a “feeling” level of consciousness. It is at this level that the reflexive mechanism actually operates, giving rise to the sense of self at the knowing level. However, it is not possible to verify this for yourself while consciousness is still happening. This is because it is only when the reflexive mechanism comes to an end that it can be full recognized, when you become aware of the absence of its previously familiar action.

At the very beginning of the journey, the self (or the circle of paper that represents it) has a tiny dot in the middle. The is the very center of consciousness, which she thinks might be akin to the Japanese notion of hara, as documented by Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.

On closer inspection, the tiny dot is seen to be actually a small pinprick. Consciousness has an opening in it.

The area of the self (or paper circle) immediately surrounding the central pinhole is the ego. Our consciousness at the initial stage is thus, literally, self-centered.

The journey begins when God touches us, perhaps through some crisis or other revelation. This provokes the active night of the senses as we seek to reform our lives, removing all sensory distractions to the pursuit of God. This is not such a bad night, though, as God may at this time reward us with what BR calls spiritual “sugar cubes.”

The passive night of the senses happens when God withdraws the “sugar cubes” and we reach periods of increasing dryness. God is now in charge of the process, and not ourselves. Thus begins the diminishment of the ego.

At a certain point, the entire ego drops out of the middle of the paper circle (i.e. out of the self). For BR, this happened at the age of 17 when she was reading a book in the monastery garden.

The initial gap left by the falling away of the ego is not smooth, but has jagged edges. This represents the painful period of adjusting to no-ego. This period is the dark night of the spirit, and for BR it lasted two difficult years. God seems to have disappeared because prior to this point, all experiences of God were actually egoic experiences. Without an ego, they cannot possibly continue.

The correct course of action, as BR discovered, is actually to look into this darkness. As she says of the dark night of the spirit in What Is Self?:

“I did not collapse, but was determined to hold still and not flinch come hell or high water. The task is to get to the bottom of this dark hole, to see it is God and to surrender our whole being to It.”

Quite apart from the disappearance of what we previously thought was God, we must also grow accustomed to a new way of life. In the egoless state, we have no will. We feel helpless. The only thing we can possibly do is let go of any remaining opposition to the will of God, which must now be our will.

It is no longer possible to go back to the old way of experiencing God. We must experience God in a new and more profound way.

It make take several years to get acclimatized to this egoless state. (BR emphasizes a couple of times that this is the no-ego stage and not the no-self stage, which happens much further along.)

The dark night of the spirit forms the passageway between the initial falling away of the ego and the final and permanent establishment of the unitive state.

At the end of the dark night of the spirit comes the unitive revelation. Here we see properly what the unitive state is really all about. All our wrong ideas about this state have now fallen away. Where once we thought that our mundane self might be transformed into something very holy, we now realize that what it is really all about is discovering God to be our deepest center. Trying to reform or change the self turns out to have been irrelevant.

We also discover, unexpectedly, that the inward movement of the journey is now over. Once you’ve arrived at the deepest center, there is nowhere else to go. The journey turns around and goes outward. This is what BR calls the “marketplace” stage of the journey.

We discover that we can now be fully human. We know that nothing can affect what we really are, and therefore we live fearlessly. In the egoic state, emotional provocation would go round and round inside us. We were stuck without a way out of it. In the unitive state, while there is still a larger self that is hurt and doesn’t like it, there is no ego for hurt to cling to. It disappears into the hole where once there was an ego. God, to which this deepest center is our gateway, changes the hurt into peace, joy, and compassion. In fact, she says, some saints go out and deliberately seek suffering at this stage, in order to let God heal the pain of the world.

Life in the marketplace erodes the remaining self from within. In terms of the paper circles, the hole in the center is now getting broader and broader in diameter. As we diminish, Christ increases. Essentially, God is consuming the self.

Although we are living for God and for others in this marketplace stage, this is not motivated by altruism. The whole point is to get to the stage where the entire self disappears for good.

This is presaged by moments when the mind stops. BR uses the word “ecstasy” for these moments, though I do not think she necessarily means they are blissful. Ecstasy just means being without self.

Finally, the reflexive mechanism that creates the self runs out of fuel. The center is gone. There is no more within-ness and without-ness. All that remains is Christ.

Unless you’re familiar with the BR books, I think you’ll need to view this three-hour set of DVDs multiple times to get the most out of them. They are very rich with ideas. And if you have already read the books, then they make a useful supplement. Watching and listening to Bernadette Roberts present her material brings the books to life.

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