Meditation and prayer are dangerous. The more I try to empty myself, the more corpses I to find in what I considered to be my Self. My Self is in fact not alive at all, but is a pile of rotting corpses. Certainly, it moves – it has maggots – and it is strong – rigor mortis – but it is certainly dead. My “I” is the demons who cried out to Christ, “I am Legion.”  We have no need for Satan himself: it is our self that is Satan!

As I have been thinking in terms of peace, non-violence, self-abnegation, and God, I have uncovered a visceral lust for power (libido dominandi) which is inexplicable and coolly impersonal. This could be explained in simple psychological terms, honestly: as I consciously explore the unknown depths of my mind, my unconscious desires burst forth forcefully from below the surface. Or, as I suppress certain elements, they emerge all the more viciously. These unholy impulses manifest themselves in violent bouts of rage without an object, lust for demonic power without purpose, and a poison I didn’t know existed.

I’d been reading St. Benedict and Thomas Merton about the struggles of self-emptying and thought of them as somewhat overblown, but they are not. The more I seek to empty my Self, the more I find needs to be cremated. Every so often, the stench is overwhelming. Other times, the horror is so poignant that I almost declare, “It is me! It is me!” to the corpse I unearth.

None of these corpses are me, but my false-ego. In fact, my true Self is not what I consider to be me. My true identity is in God. Yet the faces I recognize disturb me. It is not just the anger or the egoism that rushes at me that is disturbing, but the dreadful familiarity of it all – and the recognition of my reflection in every grim face. Kenosis is a dangerous activity, for it is like digging out a graveyard: as the shovel sinks into the soil of one’s Self, one finds that it is not a plot of good earth to be turned effortlessly, but a black quagmire filled with corpses and will-o’-the-wisps. It is no singular being but a graveyard of entities, each dead. My “I” is, in fact, no one at all.

The process of emptying myself is not one of ignoring myself, but encountering myself head-on: to turn my mind inward against itself in order to be open to God. The faces I see are horrific because they are mine. Each of the contradictory wishes, hatreds, and lusts for dominion are revealed if I manage to dispose of any bodies at all.  We are each a villain with a thousand faces.

In Jungian terms, I uncover unconscious elements always alive under the surface. This is not psychosis, where the border between conscious and unconscious is obliterated; nor is this neurosis, where the border between the two is lowered.  Kenosis is the Self turning against its whole being, so that one looks past consciousness and unconsciousness to the universal ground which supports all things. One faces one’s Self and declares, “This is not me.” It is the task of Christ to send one’s myriad demons out into swine. Facing oneself is facing the maw of hell itself, for what burns in hell is the false self opposed to God – the chaff we should have burned off in life.

Only when our last mask is torn away do we find our true faces, which are so strange and wonderful that they will not seem like ours at all, and yet that novelty and wonder will be permanent.  This is constant progress (epektasis, “stretching forth”) an infinite process of drawing nearer to the Source; this is Union with God (theosis) which is something ever to be perfected.

There is a great danger in emptying – not of seeing the face of God, but the face of the Devil himself: You. As morbid as that encounter may be, what is worse is that we often choose to put on the old man once again like finding a favorite sports coat: “Oh, but doesn’t this fit wonderfully?” And as the Kingdom of God is within us, so too are the Powers and Principalities: we wage war against Legion within our souls. We stray terribly when we think it is our duty to force the righteous to be more righteous. It is our task to care for the sick and to see that we have been cured before we infect others!

There is no such thing as arriving when it comes to emptiness. Only a perpetual (almost monastic) effort can place us where we should be. But all of this is asceticism (askesis, “exercise, training”), a practice which has been much slandered, partially due to the extreme nature asceticism took historically. But asceticism is nothing more than training towards righteousness. Moderation is itself training against extremes – something asceticism forgot at one point! Any moral structure is ascetic: it involves training to follow certain regulations. Self-abnegation is only accomplished by saints, and even they would likely say they are too selfish.

The final peril of self-emptying is seeing your face and loving it. This is why some of the greatest monsters can come out of a false determination. If my wish is only to have greater selfish knowledge, then I will find a death mask and wear it proudly as if it were the face of God Himself! The danger is not that we will reach perfect emptiness, but that we will believe we have arrived. By thinking we have arrived, all possibility of progress withers.  In order to find the face we had before we were born, we must lose the face we know and seek one that is radically new.

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