This is the ultimate law —the seed dies /to live

[soso]

[The thing () you long for] summons you /away from the self.

Even [the desire for the thing] lives only if you abandon it.

This is the ultimate law

—the seed dies /to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, [he that loses his soul] will save it.

But the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice.

Hence it is truly said of heaven ‘in heaven there is no ownership.

If any there took upon him to call anything his own,

he would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit.’

But it is also said ‘To him that overcometh I will give a white stone,

and in the stone a new name /written, which no man knoweth /saving he that receiveth it’ [Revelation 2:17].

What can be more a man’s own than this new name //which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him?

And what shall we take this secrecy to mean?

Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty

better than any other creature can.

Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently?

And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning [the love of all blessed creatures for one another],

the communion of the saints.

If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship,

the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony;

it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.

From The Problem of Pain

Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

https://manifestpropensity.wordpress.com/2013/02/06/c-s-lewis-on-individuality-the-individual-and-ultimate-reality/

In the final chapter called ‘Heaven” in his book “The Problem of Pain,” C.S. Lewis discusses our individuality as persons in relation to the “society” of heaven and the unity of God. Following is an excerpt from his wondrous meditation.

You may think that there is another reason for our silence about heaven – namely, that we do not really desire it. But that may be an illusion. What I am now going to say is merely an opinion of my own without the slightest authority, which I submit to the judgement of better Christians and better scholars than myself. There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that.

Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported.

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side?

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.

All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound it’self – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’

We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one.

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key it’self a strange thing if you had never seen a lock.

Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you – you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s.

All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre ‘looked to every man like his first love’, because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like it’s first love because He is it’s first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it – made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

It is from this point of view that we can understand hell in it’s aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.

This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the pearl of great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have experienced only the want of it. The thing it’self has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or emotion.

Always it has summoned you out of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire it’self will evade you. ‘The door into life generally opens behind us’ and ‘the only wisdom’ for one ‘haunted with the scent of unseen roses, is work.

This secret fire goes out when you use the bellows: bank it down with what seems unlikely fuel of dogma and ethics, turn your back on it and attend to your duties, and then it will blaze. The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. But we have reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the blackout is not quite complete. There are chinks. At times the daily scene looks big with it’s secret.

Such is my opinion; and it may be erroneous. Perhaps this secret desire also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified before the end. But this opinion has a curious trick of evading denial. The desire – much more the satisfaction – has always refused to be fully present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it, turns out to be not it but something else: so that hardly any degree of crucifixion or transformation could go beyond what the desire it’self leads us to anticipate. Again, if this opinion is not true, something better is. But ‘something better’ – not this or that experience, but beyond it – is almost the definition of the thing I am trying to describe.

The thing you long for summons you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law – the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, he that loses his soul will save it. But the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice. Hence it is truly said of heaven ‘in heaven there is no ownership.

If any there took upon him to call anything his own, he would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit. But it is also said ‘To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. What can be more a man’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him?

And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.

Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St Paul that a body is a unity of different members.Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others – fresh and ever fresh news of the ‘My God’ whom each finds in Him whom all praise as ‘Our God’. For doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, attempt by each soul to communicate it’s unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created.

From the Problem of Pain, 1940, pp. 145-150