When the encounter with God is profound, it is eminently transformative. God assumes and consumes the egocentric “I” and forces man to enter the wide spaces of love.
This is the terrible misfortune of man: when the child nears the first levels of consciousness, he begins to differentiate the image of himself from his true reality.
By the measure in which the child climbs the steps of life, this difference also amplifies and by the same measure the child, without realizing it, haloing and magnifying his image until there comes a moment in which man no longer cares for his reality as much as his image, to which he emotionally adheres. He is not interested in “how I am” but “how they see me”; rather “how I am seen” not “what I am”; rather “what I imagine myself as”; therefore, in an idolatrous symbiosis, man identifies reality with the image, the person with the character. We are therefore before an artificial and inflated “I”.
This “I”, in quotes, turns out to be a wildfire, a fiction, an illusion, a lie.
In summary, an idol. He lives among delusions of greatness. When he thinks he loves, he really loves himself.
The more he has, the more his self belief is “Lord,” when in reality he is more of a slave.
For his madness of greatness, the excessive desires of being first and being ahead of everyone, man punishes himself with envy, rivalries and fears; And all the wars ignited through out history between brothers against brothers, families against families, including nations against nations, were and are promoted, carried out by the vane illusion of an “I” (whether personal or collective) haloed and artificial.
It is a distant echo of that one “you shall be like gods” and in the bosom of this echo beats the dark and irresistible instinct of claiming all adoration and all glory.
The desire to be “adored” engenders the fear of not being adored. Half of his life man suffers and fights to conquer an image and the other half he lives terrified of losing that image.
The installation of “yo” in the center of his world raises thick walls around him that defends and separates him. Now, every separation engenders differentiation and every difference engenders opposition; what is mine on one side and yours on another. Two opposite worlds
In summary, man is a salve of himself. You need liberation and every liberation consists of setting aside the God “yo” and setting it aside for the real God, substituting the “I” for the “you.”
Salvation consists in God being my God. For this is necessary to strip the heart of all gods, of all excessive desires of greatness and of all flames that flares up around the idol “yo” empty the inner room of absolute and deified appropriations, and open free interior spaces for God to occupy.
By the path of the nothingness; Saint John of the Cross shall say, we shall climb to the top of all.
The poor who is naked, they shall dress.
and the soul that becomes naked of its appetites,
wants and don’t wants
God shall dress it with His purity, to His liking and will.
Taken from the book “Itinerary towards God” Chapter 4 “Prayer and Life” of Father Ignacio Larrañaga.
