A friend in my meditation group recommended this interesting spiritual autobiography by the one time Carmelite nun Bernadette Roberts. While obviously written from a Christian perspective, it's clearly a member of the 'dharma autobiography' book club (cf. Henry Shukman, Adyashanti). Interestingly, despite the differing religious background, it has the same fundamental structure -- an initial awakening turns out in retrospect to be a stage in a longer journey to what feels like a final (non)-destination. And perhaps even more interesting is all these authors' agreement on what is fast becoming a profound truism for me -- progress on the path is not measured by what you get but by what you lose.
Since there's little point in detailing the itinerary of a journey that already borders on indescribable, I will simply observe that the trip Roberts documents delivers on the title -- she loses her self. While it seems to me that this makes it a pretty standard voyage in Buddhist terms, it apparently makes it a total outlier for Christians.
Her spiritual trajectory had two stages. The first was a loss of the small egoic self through immersion in the greater divine self. Roberts has already written about this stage of union with the divine, which in her case lasted 20 years, and she considers her experience of it to be very similar to what other mystics like St. John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila have described. So here she begins her story with stage 2, which is the loss of union with this 'true' divine self and the beginning of a path to having no self at all. From a Christian perspective, this ends up sounding like a heresy that Torquemada would have had himself a little bonfire over. As Nietzsche could have told you, losing all sense of personal self actually entails losing all sense of personal God as well.
Presumably, this context explains why Roberts makes such a big deal about how she thinks the second part of this journey has been totally undocumented by any other spiritual practitioner, ever. The feeling that she's had a unique (or almost unique, as we'll discuss momentarily) experience is of course what motivates her to write the book. Because while she finds no similar account in 3,000 years of spiritual literature, she feels oddly sure that others after her may follow in her footsteps. Other Christian mystics either did not experience, or perhaps were understandably loath to describe, this second stage. She claims her only point of reference are some of Meister Eckhardt's writings. She really feels she's describing uncharted territory.
While assessing whether Roberts' experience of stage 2 is unique among Christian mystical accounts remains above my pay grade, it seems rather bizarre to me to insist that no one in any tradition has experienced or described this falling away of self. I mean, you can almost pick up any of the Buddha's discourses and find him talking about anatta. Despite her claim to have searched spiritual literature "East and West" for a similar account to help her understand her journey, it seems more likely that she was put off by the failed communication she recounts with a single Zen monk and left her exploration of non-Christian traditions before they began. Because what she describes is so similar to so many of the descriptions of seeing the non-dual unity of subject and object or form and emptiness that we find in Zen or Dzogchen or even Kashmiri Shaivist accounts. In short, what she calls stage 2 seems to be exactly what every Buddhist simply calls Awakening. And while she writes a fine description of her personal journey to Nirvana, it didn't seem to me to contribute that much to the many other accounts of the process and 'destination' that I've read in the past few years. I enjoyed the book, but unless something changes dramatically, it's not where I'd return for guidance on how to walk this path.
Of course, if you're Christian, your mileage may vary. Maybe the idea that there could be no self at all, not even a soul or divine true self will seem phenomenally new and liberating. I certainly agree it's a pretty profound idea. In this case, you may appreciate Roberts' reframing of what seems a very Buddhist experience in very Christian theological terms. Because her idea is that Christ's life is a parable for the pathway to no-self. That is, Christ was the only other mystic who not only had but described her experience. The journey to no-self gives meaning to his doubt (Psalms 22:1) as well as to his death, resurrection, and identity with God. Roberts includes a long chapter towards the end of the book that reinterprets her experience several years after the process of awakening she describes. This recasts her fresh and direct account in the first part of the book (which makes little mention of God and none of Christ) in terms more compatible with Christian theology. While this is an interesting exercise that might help us reappraise the story of Christ's life, it felt rather like an act of intellectual contortionism given how Buddhism provides such a parsimonious paradigm for explaining her experience.
