Joel Goldsmith, Ken Wilber, Dharmakaya, Brahman, God, Goddess, Maat, and godliness

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“There is no mystery about the inner life

except the mystery of godliness.”

Joel Goldsmith

             But what then does it ‘mean’ to be God? What does it mean to be God’s ‘I’, God’s self, the  great mystery, immanent within us? Well, perhaps it does not mean anything at all, at least not to our limited forms of understanding. Perhaps the God which is unknowable within us, which we are, should never be given any characteristics, any limitations, any definitions, or preconditions. For that is the only way in which God is not limited, and therefore the only way in which our true selves are not limited.

             To accept this is to accept a powerful and troubling truth- that we must release every idea and supposition about what the self is, about what our ‘I’ is, and become naught but a vast and imponderable mystery to ourselves. We must cease creating definitions and descriptions for ourselves, and allow that we are so implausibly enigmatic that we are far beyond our ability to understand ourselves.

             Ken Wilber relates how this possibility- of accepting our impossibility- comes about. He states: “All those things that you know about yourself are precisely not the real Self. Those are not the Seer; those are simply things that can be seen. All of those objects that you describe when you ‘describe yourself’ are actually not your real Self at all… The deeply inward Self is witnessing the world out there, and it is witnessing all your interior thoughts as well. This Seer sees the ego, and sees the body, and sees the natural world. All of those parade by ‘in front’ of this Seer. But the Seer itself cannot be seen. …It is utterly timeless, spaceless, objectless. And therefore it is radically and infinitely free of the limitations and constrictions of space and time and objects- and radically free of the torture inherent in those fragments. …Some would call it God, or Goddess, or Tao, of Brahman, or Keter, or Rigpa, or Dharmakaya, or Maat, or Li. …Amazing! Miraculous by any other name.”

            It is apparent that every definition, aspect, or characteristic which we had to renounce from our idea of God, as in the last chapter, must now be applied to our own most inward self, our ‘I’, for they are the same thing, and therefore we cannot claim to know one while not knowing the other.

            If we are God, then we are limitless mystery- limitless enough to contain an infinity of limited ones.

           This is an old truth which we have been offered from day one; Christ admonished us two-thousand years ago, “Is it not written- Ye are Gods?” And yet we believed it not.

 excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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