Bernadette Roberts Describes her Ascension | Steve Beckow

Bernadette Roberts

By Steve Beckow, August 12, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

Bernadette Roberts Describes Her Ascension – Part 1/2

Bibliography

ENS: Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self. A Contemplative Journey. Boston and London: Shamballa, 1985.

PNS: Bernadette Roberts, Path to No-Self. Boston and London: Shamballa, 1985.

PNS2: Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991.

What Bernadette Roberts calls her journey to No-Self, we call Ascension. Like the Buddha before her, she continued her story past the peak 3rd-Dimensional experience, Brahmajnana or God-Realization, seventh-chakra enlightenment. She sensed that she was not finished. She now went beyond any conception of a self, higher self, etc.

She pushed through stillpoint or the dark night of the soul to the experience of the No-Self that we call Ascension. In Buddhist language, she went from arahantship to buddhahood. This is her story.

The Journey

Within the traditional framework, the Christian notion of loss-of-self is generally regarded as a transformation of the ego or lower self into the true or higher self as it approaches union with God; throughout this journey, however, the self retains its individual uniqueness and never loses its ontological sense of personal selfhood. …

[During my] two-year journey [into the No-Self] … I experienced the falling away of everything I can call a self. It was a journey through an unknown passageway that led to a life so new and different that, despite forty years of varied contemplative experiences, I never suspected its existence. … I came upon a permanent state in which there was no self, not even a higher self, a true self, or anything that could be called a self. Clearly, I had fallen outside my own, as well as the traditional, frame of reference when I came upon a path that seemed to begin where the writers on the contemplative life had left off. (ENS, 9-10.)

Since I knew that this experience was not articulated in our contemplative literature, I went to the library to see if it could be found in the Eastern religions. … [In Hinduism] the final state is equivalent to the Christian experience of oneness or transforming union.

If a Hindu had what I call the no-self experience, it would be the sudden, unexpected disappearance of Atman-Brahman, the divine Self in the “cave of the heart,” and the disappearance of the cave as well. It would be the ending of God-consciousness, or transcendental consciousness — that seemingly bottomless experience of “being,” “consciousness,” and “bliss” that articulates the state of oneness. To regard this ending as the falling away of the ego is a grave error; ego must fall away before the state of oneness can be realized. The no-self experience is the falling away of this previously realized transcendent state.

Initially, when I looked into Buddhism, I did not find the experience of no-self there either; yet I intuited that it had to be there. The falling away of the ego is common to both Hinduism and Buddhism. Therefore, it would not account for the fact that Buddhism became a separate religion, nor would it account for the Buddhists’ insistence on no eternal Self – be it divine, individual, or the two in one. I felt that the key difference between these two religions was the no-self experience, the falling away of the true Self, Atman-Brahman.

Unfortunately what most Buddhist authors define as the no-self experience is actually the no-ego experience. The cessation of clinging, desire, the passions, etc., and the ensuing state of imperturbable peace and joy articulates the egoless state of oneness; it does not, however, articulate the no-self experience or the dimension beyond. (PNS2, 136-7.)

Four years later, however, I came across two lines attributed to Buddha describing his enlightenment experience. Referring to self as a house, he said, “All the rafters are broken now, the ridgepole is destroyed.” And there it was — the disappearance of the center, the ridgepole; without it, there can be no house, no self. When I read these lines, it was as if an arrow launched at the beginning of time had suddenly hit a bull’s-eye. It was a remarkable find. These lines are not a piece of philosophy, but an experiential account, and without the experiential account we really have nothing to go on. In the same verse he says, “Again a house thou shalt not build,” clearly distinguishing this experience from the falling away of the ego-center, after which a new, transformed self is built around a “true center,” a sturdy, balanced ridgepole. (PNS2, 137.)

At a certain point, when we have done all we can [to bring about an abiding union with the divine], the divine steps in and takes over. (PNS2, 131.)

Tomorrow we’ll look at what sense Berrnadette made of all this.



By Steve Beckow, August 13, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

Bernadette Roberts Describes Her Ascension – Part 2/2

Bernadette today

(Concluded from Part 1, yesterday.)

Bibliography

ENS: Berandette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self. A Contemplative Journey. Boston and London: Shamballa, 1985.

PNS: Bernadette Roberts, Path to No-Self. Boston and London: Shamballa, 1985.

PNS2: Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991.

Two Movements

I don’t think we should get locked in to any stage theory [of enlightenment]; it is always someone else’s retrospective view of his or her own journey, which may not include our experiences or insights. Our obligation is to be true to our own insights, our own inner light. (PNS2, 131.)

I am convinced that the contemplative life is composed of two distinct and separate movements, well marked and defined by the nature of their experiences alone. The first movement is toward self’s union with God which runs parallel with the psychological process of integration, wherein the emphasis is on interior trials and dark nights by which the self is established in a permanent union with God — the still-point and axis of its being. In this process we discover that the self is not lost; rather a new self has been found that now functions as an undivided unit from its deepest, innermost center.

Following this first movement is an interval (twenty years in my case) during which this union is tested. … It seems that at the end of this [intervening] period a point is reached where the self is so completely aligned with the still-point it can no longer be moved, even in its first movements, from this center. It can no longer be tested by any force or trial, nor moved by the winds of change, and at this point the self has obviously outgrown its function; it is no longer needed or useful and life can go on without it. We are ready to move on, to go beyond the self, beyond even its most intimate union with God, and this is where we enter yet another new life — a life best categorized, perhaps, as a life without a self. (ENS, 11-2.)

The onset of this second movement is characterized by the falling away of the self and a coming upon of “that” which remains when it is gone. But this going-out is an upheaval, a complete turnabout of such proportions it cannot possibly be missed, under-emphasized, or sufficiently stressed as a landmark in the contemplative life. It is far more than the discovery of life without a self. The immediate, inevitable result is a change of consciousness, an emergence into a new way of knowing that entails a tremendous readjustment when the self can no longer be an object of awareness. The reflexive mechanism of the mind — or whatever it is that allows us to be self-conscious — is cut off or permanently suspended so the mind is ever after in a fixed now-moment, out of which it cannot move in its uninterrupted gaze upon the Unknown.

This journey, then, is nothing more, yet nothing less, that a period of acclimating to a new way of seeing; a time of transition and revelation as it gradually comes upon “that” which remains when there is no self. This is not a journey for those who expect love and bliss; rather, it is for the hardy who have been tried in fire and have come to rest in the tough, immoveable trust in “that” which lies beyond the known, beyond the self, beyond union, and even beyond love and trust itself. (ENS, 12-3.)