I've spent more time in meditation lately. I don't know if anyone has had this experience, but the more time I spend in meditation, the harder it gets. What I mean is that it seems to take longer to achieve the point I'm trying to achieve.
In meditation, I've been focusing on pulling away from my self. And I've been learning about what that self really is. In short, my self is everything I identify my self with. Where I was born, what I have studied, what my fears are, what my hopes are, even what my habits are at the grocery store. For example, I identify my self by the fact that I study Greek. I identify myself by the fact that I am a bit necrophobic. I identify my self by the fact that whenever I go to the store, I usually pick up a candy bar and/or a drink. I identify my self by the fact that I'm a priest, a daddy, a husband, and I identify myself by my fear of failure. All of these things are facts, and I have locked on to them for who I believe my self to be.
In the Christian life, we are to let all these things go and identify our selves with only one thing, the cross of Jesus Christ, and consequently, His death. I am finding that my own psyche rebels against this. When I first began to meditate and let go of these other things that I identify my self with, I had a very physical panic reaction. As I push for this, and attempt to incorporate it into my daily life and thought of just letting these things go, I find myself psychologically and physiologically stressed. My psyche doesn't want to let go of what it perceives as itself.
The Buddha taught that self was an illusion, that it was nothing more than the aggregation of our minds, bodies, and experiences (more or less, I'm simplifying it here), and that it was the realization of this which led to enlightenment. I'm more and more coming to the opinion that freedom in Christ truly comes only when we fully let go of this illusion of our self, this clinging to certain facts about "this person" for a self-identification. The facts don't change, but we stop allowing them to define who "this person" is. True freedom in Christ comes when we identify with one fact only, His death on the cross.
I say that this is the only fact we may identify with. What about the resurrection? We cannot identify with the resurrection, until we have identified with the cross. One cannot resurrect when he hasn't died. To attempt to identify with the resurrection without the cross, without the struggle to let one's self go, is a self-delusion. It's the psyche trying to parade itself as renewed and transformed when it is no such thing. The cross means death, and the psyche panics and runs from it in sheer self-preservation when it realizes what the cross really means, and it is an act of Grace, and can only be an act of Grace, God's uncreated energy, which enables "this person" to continue on this path of the cross.
It is a true statement that I have died with Christ by being joined to Him through Baptism. The struggle of the Christian life, and our "enlightenment" is the full realization of this fact within our own psyches.
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Maybe it's solely a product of my Western, American worldview, but I tend to think that this is where Buddhism throws the baby out with the bathwater. Lots of studies have shown meditation to be a great thing, but the idea of divorce from the material world, and by extension selfhood, worries me. I feel like the Lord has spent way too much resource creating a beautiful world, and creative, gifted individuals to populate it, to accept the notion that we are to deny the physical reality, or our individual selves. When you have no hope of a better world to come, it makes sense to divorce oneself from this one as a way of overcoming its inherent sufferings. But we do have that hope of heaven, and as such are called to embrace suffering (rather than escaping it along with the rest of physical reality), to create in our selves characteristics that draw us closer in the now to the promised perfection of the next world to come. Identifying with the death of Christ is to identify with the triumph over the power of sin and death which was achieved on that day - and this is a means, but never an end in itself. If I forget about the existence of my self, I forget about the fact that I as an individual am valuable enough to deserve Christ's sacrifice. I forget about the pains the Lord takes to order my steps, and to give me the honor of playing a role in His Kingdom plans. Experientially, if my psyche cannot actively move toward that perfect state, I cease to grow in Christ and become stagnant... and the very fact that the Lord created within me the capacity to reflect upon my own psyche, says to me that the idea of self was of value to Him. Not to mention, it is an ability that he chose to grant only to we humans, the pinnacle of his creation - the ones in His image. Buddhist ideals give us much to learn from and many useful life strategies, but we must carefully separate the areas in which their devices are those of the hopeless, and instead relish the abundant hope we have for fully redeemed selves, to be found in Christ alone.
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