This page lists some of the all-time best Bernadette Roberts quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Christ & God Quotes
- Religion & Spirituality Quotes
- Spiritual Journey Quotes
- Ego & Self Quotes
- Unitive State & No Self Quotes
50+ Bernadette Roberts Quotes on God, Self, Oneness, & More
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on Christ & God
“Consider the man Jesus … He never knew Christianity, he never read the New Testament, he never knew the Trinity, he never knew Christ.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Christ is utterly simple, but it has been made so difficult that I don’t think people today can really grasp the real Christ anymore.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We’ve defined ‘Christ’ as God creating a human nature totally one with itself—it is man’s oneness with God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“As St. Paul said, ‘Christ increases, we decrease.’ As we become more full of God, the more diminished the self is.” — Bernadette Roberts
“For the Christian contemplative, his whole life was just giving up of himself to God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We come into the world unknowing—we don’t really know how we got here—and we return to God knowing.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Nothing new comes into existence without God’s creative act … We can’t catch God in the act. God acts instantaneous, a divine act.” — Bernadette Roberts
“God is not absent … God can never disappear.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Reformation is what we can do. Transformation is what only God can do … When the dust settles, everything will be as it should be—not according as we made ourselves, but now as God has transformed us.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The only thing that is one with God is our own deepest center … God is the deepest center of our self, so we can say our true self is God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Where it matters in life, nobody can hurt us. Nobody can take God away from us.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In our oneness with God, we’re no longer seeking, no longer desiring, no longer looking because we now possess it.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Nothing can take God away from us, and nothing can add anything to us. What can anyone give us in this world that is greater than what we have already? … We possess God. There is nothing greater than that … Nothing is better for us than God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Nothing that the world can give us can add to God, and there’s nothing that the world can take away from us because the only thing that matters is God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The best way to give to God is to serve God not in bliss but in naked faith—that is without anything coming back to you, getting anything out of it, giving yourself unconditionally … For the first time in our lives, there’s nothing in it for us; we’re doing it all for God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We can never have more or less of God; we can only have more or less of self … The more our humanity is filled with God, the less self there is. That’s a paradox.” — Bernadette Roberts
“God creates every soul one on one.” — Bernadette Roberts
“You’ve now heard it, and now God could use that down the road possibly if it’s going to be of any use to you or prove insightful in any way.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on Religion & Spirituality
“The concern is not with an academic or intellectual understanding of our religions, rather, our focus is the experiential path of the individual as it reflects the key revelation of our enduring religions.” — Bernadette Roberts
“While revelation is first and foremost experiential, religion is usually the intellectual medium that conveys and passes it on. However, where revelation is passed on solely by way of intellectual concepts – with its endless diversity of interpretations – it soon becomes obscured and corrupted. Only through repeated experience is a revelation continuously verified and perpetuated.” — Bernadette Roberts
“On an experiential level it enables us to integrate, understand and appreciate various religions in a way not possible on a purely intellectual level. Solely from a scholarly or cultural perspective, our profound religious truths often appear incompatible or contradictory, whereas, encountered on an experiential level in the process of the journey, different religions can be understood as the progressive stages of God’s on-going revelation.” — Bernadette Roberts
“What we look for in man’s spiritual development is a religion’s key revelation. This revelation, however, must not be confused with the religion’s historical development or its extraneous accruements in the course of history. By ‘accruements’ I mean the philosophy, theology, rituals, and cultural overlays that often identify a particular religion. Although these factors are the practical and cultural outgrowth of revelation – or what develops in the living of a particular religion – our present focus is on the revelation itself minus its cultural overlays.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The reason we find a religion’s most authentic history in the individual journey is not only because the light of revelation is first hand, but because this same light, filtered through a group or social prism, becomes diffused according to each one’s level of reception. It is this diffused diversity of interpretations that has divided our religions into numerous sects and denominations, sometimes to the point where the original is no longer reflected at all.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The point is that everyone, regardless of their religion or belief system can come to know the furthest reaches of God’s revelations, know them long before they become known (accepted or rejected) by a particular group.” — Bernadette Roberts
“‘Revelation’ is God’s disclosure of Himself to man. Thus ‘God’ is ‘That’ which is revealed – can only be revealed. This gratuitous revelation is the essence and foundation of man’s ‘religions’. Without this, I hold no authentic ‘religion’ is possible.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Where there is no revelation I hold there is also no true religion, but instead, mere philosophy, speculation and myth. Without revelation no certitude is possible, not even the certitude God exists. We might add, ‘That’ which is revealed never identifies Itself by the term ‘God’ or says anything at all. The term ‘God’ is man’s term for ‘That’ beyond which nothing exists. My use of the term ‘revelation’ is restricted to a firsthand ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’ God.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on the Spiritual Journey
“The real challenge of hearing and listening to this new paradigm of our spiritual passage and of the nature of self or consciousness is to try and put aside our preconceived ideas and notions.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We cannot help others unless we first help ourselves.” — Bernadette Roberts
“When we go in pursuit of the contemplative life, we’re not in pursuit of reaching some kind of state.” — Bernadette Roberts
“What you’re gradually learning is that you always land on your feet. Even if you’ve been knocked down, no matter what happens, everything turns out in the end to be okay.” — Bernadette Roberts
“When a contemplative says they ‘see’ something, they also mean they ‘know’ it … In many ways, our journey is like constantly being able to see in the dark … There’s a lot of things we don’t see—and really shouldn’t see, are not prepared to see—until the journey is over and done with.” — Bernadette Roberts
“One of the paradoxes of the journey is that to ultimately get out of self we have to go through self—and that means we go inward … This whole journey is an inward journey until we come to the unitive state at which time we can’t go any deeper. The inward journey is finished. But, then the whole journey turns around and goes outward—there is a thrust from the center outward.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the process of letting go, of learning to trust God, the psyche is becoming integrated around a new center—becoming whole and well-balanced.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The journey is irreversible. Once there is no ego, you never go back to a previous state … The process of transformation really begins with no ego.” — Bernadette Roberts
“There’s no repetition of any of our experiences.” — Bernadette Roberts
“If there’s any deeper aspect of yourself that you can penetrate or bump up against or anything else, then you haven’t gone far enough.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We tend to base all our concepts, and ideas, and expectations—everything—on experience. But, reality and truth really goes beyond our experiences. Experience represents as much as we can know within our human limits of the reality of what’s taking place. We don’t really know how God is joined together with ourselves, but we experience it. The reality and truth of that is beyond us … The truth is unbelievable.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on Ego, Self, & Consciousness
“Man’s real uniquenesses, his essence, is self or consciousness … Man is most uniquely, and in his own right, a conscious being … When God reveals himself to man, he’s not going to reveal himself to our senses. God is not going to be something that we see, and hear, and touch—rather God reveals himself to consciousness because that is our uniqueness.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The term ‘person’ means differences. The term ‘nature’ means sameness, universal. Common nature, different persons. No two persons are alike.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Self is first and foremost an experience; it is not an idea in our heads. Before we can have any idea of self, it must first be an experiential reality … Self is man’s most immediate experience. Everything else is mediated experience. The most unmediated experience is self; all other experiences are mediated through self … Self from beginning to end is experience. It is nothing else but experience.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Consciousness consists of a feeling dimension, which is located basically at the center of consciousness, and then it has a knowing dimension. And, between this knowing and feeling, it encompasses the totality of all our human experiences … Put these two together, the knowing self and the experiencing self, and we have the totality of the purely human experience.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Consciousness is a dynamic act. It’s the very act of the mind bending on itself … and in bending on itself, knows itself. And, here we get the term ‘self’ … The reason for saying that consciousness and self are the same thing is because we cannot say anything about self that we don’t say about consciousness.” — Bernadette Roberts
“On the unconscious level, it is constantly bending on itself which is why I call it ‘reflexive’. This is an autonomous mechanism; it’s not under our control. We did not choose to be human. This is what it means to be human—to have, or be, reflexive consciousness.” — Bernadette Roberts
“When we are aware of our own self-awareness—when we become aware of this reflexive being that we are—then we come to the conscious level or ‘reflective’ level of consciousness. And, we do have some control over this reflective level. We can choose to look inward at ourselves, kind of a self-examination.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The ‘knowing self’ has two different levels: the unconscious level and the conscious level. But, all together I just call it ‘consciousness’ and ‘self’ … The knowing self is a dual system because the way we know ourselves is an object to ourselves … The subject is the object here … The primary object of consciousness is always itself. The primary object of self is always self … This knowing self, and the fact it is dualistic, is simply our experience. Nothing is more immediate than ‘what am I’ or ‘who am I?’ Well, I’m myself.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The knowing self knows through a dualistic mechanism which is the reflexive mechanism of the brain, but the experience of the center is totally nondual … The center of consciousness and all its experience are nondual … Even though the center of consciousness is always nondual, nevertheless reflexive consciousness always sees that duality.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Many people refer to the ego as the ‘false self’, but there’s nothing false about it. It is real, and it is important. It’s our dynamic energy center. The ego is that in man which goes in pursuit of God, his highest good. The ego is the state of the freest will that we’ll ever have.” — Bernadette Roberts
“This can take on a false self by trying to be what other people think they should be by allowing other people to mold you according to their image of you. They have an image of you, and you’re trying to live up to it—and in doing that, you try to please others and you’re not being true to yourself. So, this is what we mean by the ‘false self’—taking on other people’s images of you.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The ego is wanting our own will, it’s pursuing our own good, it’s our own self-enhancement, and obviously it’s the totality of consciousness. It isn’t just some little ego … The ego is deep in the center of our self. This isn’t some peripheral little false image of our self. This is our true self.” — Bernadette Roberts
“If there’s any problem with ego it’s that it can go either way. It has free will. It can either go in pursuit of the highest good, or it can go in pursuit of what is less than good … The ego is the powerhouse for goodness. The problem is it can also go the other way; it can become a powerhouse for downright evil … The ego is responsible for both the greatest good in the world and for the greatest evil in the world. The problem with the ego is that it’s not stable because it can go either way.” — Bernadette Roberts
“It is an energy center, and it is that energy that’s going to run or propel the reflexive mechanism of the mind. And, it is an energy that is specific to consciousness … We experience that center as life, as being, as existence … the experience of being a soul, the experience of being a bodily entity. Up one from there is the experience of willpower—will, volition. Up from will, we get into the whole affective system.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Having your own image of yourself means, in a way, having no image of yourself because we are just our self. The ego in itself is strong, and it is that which says, ‘Hey, I am myself.’” — Bernadette Roberts
“If we’re going to transcend the ego, it isn’t because it is bad but because it is not stable in goodness.” — Bernadette Roberts
“One day out of the blue, the whole ego center simply falls away and now we have an egoless condition … Even though it’s a clean breakthrough and it’s gone in an instant, we have been painfully shattered … The ego is only known when it’s gone. It’s known in retrospect.” — Bernadette Roberts
“True perfection and true transformation is only in the center … The deepest point of our being is the center of consciousness … There is definitely something very mysterious about the center of consciousness.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The empty center is two things at once: it is no ego self, and it is the positive presence of God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Consciousness is three things at once: the experiencer, the experience, and the experienced.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Consciousness is open-ended, it has an openness in itself.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on the Unitive State & No Self
“We’re not really concerned about reaching some kind of unitive state … We may never know if we’re really there. We leave it to God—if we’re there, fine, if we’re not, fine.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Nobody outside ourselves can ever verify that we are in that unitive state or we are not.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The reason that the egoic state is unstable and fickle is because it still has that free will, that choice, to go contrary to God. But, in the unitive state, there is no such choice. Man starts out with free will whereby he is free to do good or evil. In the unitive state, he is only free to do good; he’s no longer free to do evil. And, if there were no self at all, man has no freedom at all. He’s neither free to do evil, and he’s no longer free to do good. He’s simply out of a will completely. But, the marvel of this state is we’re no longer free to go contrary to God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the unitive state, our affective life (feelings, emotions) has been totally altered, and we now have a balanced psyche.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the unitive state, we are enjoying our oneness with God—very profound joy.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the unitive state, it’s a union of wills.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Self cannot be known so long as we are living it or are it. The totality of self is only known once it is gone, in its absence. We know it by what is not there anymore—what is not functioning, what is absent … You know by its absence what self was, and consequently you know what it is.” — Bernadette Roberts
“There is no cessation of life. What there is, however, with the falling away of self is a cessation of the experience of life.” — Bernadette Roberts
“When we come to the fine line (of self), we are living without all that movement of will, without all that affective system, without all those desires.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The sense of our own being is replaced by a sense of God’s being. It’s as if we now recognize that at the center of our being is God’s being.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We can only talk about a center if we have a circumference. We can only talk about God in ourselves, or God imminent, because it is relative. It’s relative to something outside: God is inside because we are outside you might say. So, consciousness is responsible for our whole sense of interiority—of an inside, of an imminent—and also of an outside, or a transcendent.” — Bernadette Roberts
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