A Teacher
Bernadette Roberts
The contemplative territory beyond union, where the self itself falls away into no-self.
The transmission
Bernadette Roberts (1931-2017) was an American Catholic contemplative who entered the Discalced Carmelites in Alhambra, California at seventeen, spent eight and a half years in the cloister, then left to study, marry, and raise four children while continuing the interior journey.
Years after settling into what the mystics call the unitive state - the abiding, permanent union of the self with God - she underwent something the classic writers do not chart: not the loss of ego into a truer self, but the falling away of the self as such.
Walking downhill one afternoon she turned her gaze inward and found, where the familiar center of herself had always been, simply nothing there. Out of that event she built a careful contemplative cartography of the path beyond union, insisting that loss-of-ego (the movement toward God) and the later loss of self (no-self) are wholly distinct passages, the second beginning exactly where John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila leave off.
Her distinctive move is to describe a no-self that meets the anatta of the East on experiential ground yet is held resolutely within a Christian frame - Trinity, Christ, and the disappearance of the personal self alongside the personal God.
She wrote as a phenomenologist of her own interior life, mapping stages, thresholds, and the terror and stillness of a state from which, once entered, there is no returning.
What they gave
The distinction between loss-of-ego (union with God) and the later, permanent loss of the self itself (no-self) - two separate contemplative passages, not one.
- A Christian phenomenology of no-self, articulated from firsthand experience and held distinct from Buddhist anatta while acknowledging the shared terrain.
- A mapping of the stages beyond the mystical marriage, resuming the journey exactly where the classic Carmelite writers end it.
- Experiential, first-person contemplative cartography - reporting thresholds, fears, and states rather than doctrine, as the Atlas of an interior journey.
In their words
Instead of the usual unlocalized center of myself, there was nothing there; it was empty.
Thus it is only where these writers leave off that I propose to begin. Here now, begins the journey beyond union, beyond self and God, a journey into the silent and still regions of the Unknown.
When there is no personal self, there is also no personal God. I saw clearly how the two go together.
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.
Once gone, the self can never return.
The line they stand in
Roberts is rooted in the Carmelite mysticism of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, whose dark nights and unitive state she takes as the accurate account of the first journey - then extends the map past their endpoint into what she calls the journey beyond union, beyond self and God.
She reads herself in dialogue with Eastern nonduality, meeting its no-self on experiential ground while insisting her account remain Christian in its terms, and finds in Meister Eckhart a rare Western voice who glimpsed the same dimension beyond union.
Essential Works
- The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey1982
- The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center1985
- What Is Self? A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness2005
- Contemplative: Autobiography of the Early Years2004
- The Christian Contemplative Journey: Essays on the Path2007
- The Real Christ2012