How Little We Really Know About Our Inner Life
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| (Found here) |
The soul on awakening to God wakens to the sense of its ignorance of itself and the impossibility of making any decided advance without self-knowledge. . . .
Verily, it is possible to imagine anything when we find ourselves the victim of effects traceable to no known cause, on first awakening to the fact that we are practically a stranger to ourselves — a stranger, that is to say, to a whole inner world of motive, of complex aims and wily thoughts that slip off into the darkness as we try to turn upon them the light of conscience, leaving us with a deepening sense of alarm and restlessness. We are surprised and shocked when, as sometimes happens, we find some strong motive or passion or ambition standing like a draped form whose expression we cannot catch, in the very council chamber of the soul, arguing with the reason or threatening the conscience or stimulating the imagination to take its side and plead its cause. It stands there with the ease and bearing of an honored counselor whose words are wont to have weight, and its voice is as of one in authority. But when we strive to grasp and unveil it, so that we may detect its origin, the voice is suddenly hushed into silence and is gone.
We are awakened to the knowledge that motives sway us that we cannot analyze, yet which seem to have gained position and power long ago, even though we have only now become conscious of their existence.
It is only in moments of retirement or of prayer, when the soul is hushed in silence and we pass in spirit through its various chambers and corridors, that, if we suddenly find ourselves face-to-face with such a presence, we are able to recognize its nature, and at once trace many of our gravest failures to its agency. ‘Where did it come from?’ we ask ourselves. ‘How long has it been there? How did it gain admittance?’ That pride that somehow found entrance into the heart and set itself to watch and manipulate our thoughts at their very source: we have seen it now for the first time face-to-face, and it has been like a revelation. It has explained a vast deal that was hitherto incomprehensible: the reason for those hours of despondency; for that bitterness toward people that we were quite conscious of, but never knew the cause of before; for that spiritual lassitude; yes, for the victory of that temptation that we hated and fought, yet could not overcome.
We see it all now. We are like a man who discovers a thief in his house — a discovery that explains many losses that he could not understand before. We have found that unbeknown to us, an enemy has entered the soul, taken up his abode there, and used its God-given powers to injure the soul and to dishonor God.
Such moments of insight reveal to us in a startling way how little we really know about our own inner life — how we have grown and developed and formed unconsciously to ourselves.”
~Basil Maturin
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