{"id":27521,"date":"2026-08-27T10:21:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T14:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27521"},"modified":"2026-08-27T10:21:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T14:21:12","slug":"true-self-and-false-self-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=27521","title":{"rendered":"True Self and False Self"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p> <iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Crosby, Still &amp; Nash - Woodstock Lyrics\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/g25DlXOWmMo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Glory of God in Us<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>Thursday, August 27, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard first encountered the concept of the true self and false self from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915\u20131968), who had a mystical experience on the corners of Fourth and Walnut (now Fourth and Muhammed Ali Boulevard) in Louisville, Kentucky. Merton wrote:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.<\/strong> This little point of nothingness and of\u00a0<em>absolute poverty<\/em>\u00a0is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God\u2019s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our [birthright]. <strong>It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.<\/strong> It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely\u2026. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But <strong>the gate of heaven is everywhere<\/strong>. [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Father Richard reflects:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Most people spend their entire lives living up to the mental self-images of who they think they are, instead of living in the primal \u201cI\u201d that is already good in God\u2019s eyes. But all we can \u201cpay back\u201d to God or others or ourselves is who we really are. This is what Merton is describing above. It\u2019s <strong>a place of utter simplicity<\/strong>. Perhaps we don\u2019t want to go there because it is too simple and almost too natural. It feels utterly unadorned. <strong>There\u2019s nothing to congratulate myself for. I can\u2019t prove any worth, much less superiority. There I am naked and poor.<\/strong> After years of posturing and projecting, it will at first feel like nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>But when we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God.<\/strong> As Merton says, our point of nothingness is \u201cthe pure glory of God in us.\u201d If we look at the great religious traditions, we see they all use similar words to point in the same direction. The <strong>Franciscan<\/strong> word is <strong>\u201cpoverty.\u201d<\/strong> The <strong>Carmelite<\/strong> word is\u00a0<em>nada<\/em>\u00a0or <strong>\u201cnothingness.\u201d<\/strong> The Buddhists speak of <strong>\u201cemptiness.\u201d<\/strong> Jesus speaks of being <strong>\u201cpoor in spirit\u201d<\/strong> in his very first beatitude (Matthew 5:3).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A Zen master would call <strong>the true self<\/strong> \u201cthe face we had before we were born.\u201d <strong>Paul would call it who we are \u201cin Christ, hidden in God\u201d (Colossians 3:3). <\/strong>It is who we are before we\u2019ve done anything right or anything wrong, before we even have a conscious thought about who we are. <strong>Thinking creates the separate self, the ego self, the insecure self. The God-given contemplative mind, on the other hand, recognizes the God self, the Christ self, the true self of abundance and deep inner security.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>References:<\/strong><br>[1] Thomas Merton,&nbsp;<em>Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander<\/em>&nbsp;(Doubleday &amp; Company, 1965, 1966), 142.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Adapted from Richard Rohr,&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/store.cac.org\/products\/everything-belongs-the-gift-of-contemplative-prayer\"><strong>Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer<\/strong><\/a>&nbsp;<\/em>(Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 76\u201278.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Image Credit and inspiration:\u00a0<\/strong>Mick Haupt,\u00a0<em>untitled (detail)<\/em>, 2022, photograph.\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/photos\/a-group-of-water-droplets-cuZllRxZrr8\" target=\"_blank\">Unsplash<\/a>.\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/cac.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/True-Self-and-False-Self-08-23-08-29-2026-Week-34-scaled.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">Click here to enlarge image<\/a>.\u00a0<em>A shattered mirror reveals the light within each broken piece. Letting go of the false self is not a loss, but a breaking through that allows more light in.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>=============================================================================<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Unseen Existences &#8211; Brian Zahnd<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Brief Q&amp;A<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>NOV 06, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><a href=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!PWDB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25755fa3-930d-40ca-aac0-a4ba85bfa9d3_2400x2400.jpeg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!PWDB!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F25755fa3-930d-40ca-aac0-a4ba85bfa9d3_2400x2400.jpeg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Q. What prompted you to write&nbsp;<\/strong><em><strong>Unseen Existences<\/strong><\/em><strong>? Was there a particular moment or experience that made you realize the need for this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I began to notice that with a desire for a \u201cthis world\u201d faith (a desire with which I fully concur) many theological circles had overcorrected to the point that heaven had gone missing from any serious consideration. But without heaven as the spiritual world of unseen existences Christian theology is rendered incoherent. Without metaphysics Christianity is reduced to mere ethics. Or to put it more severely, Christianity without transcendence degenerates into politics. We need to recover heaven\u2014not the escapism of&nbsp;<em>The Late Great Planet Earth<\/em>&nbsp;and its successors; not the sensationalism of \u201cmy thirty minutes in heaven;\u201d not the sentimentalism of kitschy social media memes\u2014but heaven as the awareness of the spiritual world enfolded into the material world all around us. This was my motivation for writing&nbsp;<em>Unseen Existences<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Q. Many people today struggle with belief in anything beyond the material. How would you invite skeptics or disenchanted Christians to rediscover the \u201cunseen\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To quote Nick Cave, \u201cWe must take our subtle spiritual intuitions seriously and view them as the quintessence that underlies the ordinary world. The rejection of the sacred is the fundamental reason for our existential discontent.\u201d Our modern existential discontent will not be healed unless we remember what our ancestors knew: A spiritual world underlies what we think of as the ordinary world. Furthermore, philosophical materialism has the embarrassing problem of being unable to account for matter itself! With just a modicum of thought most people recognize that meaning must be derived from something that transcends the material world. If all there is is matter, not much really matters. I want to encourage people to lean into what they already intuit in the deepest part of their being. In a world where existential discontent is a genuine phenomenon I want to offer something constructive. Not a trite solution but a gesture in the direction of where I believe hope can be found. What is needed is a&nbsp;<em>pilgrimage<\/em>\u2014a pilgrimage of the soul toward the homeland where we\u2019ve never been. If our pilgrimage is true, it is a journey inspired by wonder, waymarked by beauty, and ultimately a quest for a forgotten realm called heaven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Q. How do you see this book fitting into your broader body of work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In many ways&nbsp;<em>Unseen Existences&nbsp;<\/em>is the natural successor to&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/a.co\/d\/brQL9gR\">When Everything\u2019s on Fire<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\">\n<p><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Q. If readers only take away one thing from&nbsp;<\/strong><em><strong>Unseen Existences<\/strong><\/em><strong>, what do you hope that one thing is?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I\u2019m going to be ambitious and hope that readers can take away&nbsp;<em>two<\/em>&nbsp;things from&nbsp;<em>Unseen Existences<\/em>: Our true home is in the unseen world of heaven, and life is a pilgrimage of the soul toward our true home of union with God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>BZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Glory of God in Us Thursday, August 27, 2026 Father Richard first encountered the concept of the true self and false self from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915\u20131968), who had a mystical experience on the corners of Fourth and Walnut (now Fourth and Muhammed Ali Boulevard) in Louisville, Kentucky. Merton wrote: At the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27521"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27521"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27522,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27521\/revisions\/27522"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}