The Inner Experience: Thomas Merton's Unfinished Masterpiece on Contemplation, Bridging Catholic Monasticism and Eastern Meditation Traditions

by Thomas Merton

Man in our day, menaced on all sides with ruin, is at the same time beset with illusory promises of happiness. Both threat and promise often come from the same political source. Both hell and heaven have become, so [they say], immediate possibilities here on earth. It is true that the emotional hell and the heaven which each one of us carries about within him tend to become more and more public and common property. And as time goes on it seems evident that what we have to share seems to be not so much one another’s heaven as one another’s hell.

They want us, at all costs, to be inspired, uplifted. They fret over our distressing tendencies to see the dark side of modern life, because they are able to imagine that it has a light side somewhere. Have we not, after all, made the most remarkable progress? Is the standard of living not rising every day, and is not our lot becoming always better and better, so that soon we will have to work less and less in order to enjoy more and more? With a dash of psychological self-help and a decent minimum of religious conformity, we can adjust ourselves to the emptiness of lives that are so blissfully devoid of struggle, sacrifice, or effort. These willing counselors want to revive our confidence in all the gestures of bourgeois good feeling which will magically turn pain into pleasure and sorrow into joy because God is in His heaven and all’s right with the world.

At such time it would be singularly unfeeling as well as dishonest for me to suggest that peace, joy, and happiness are easily found along that most arid stretch of man’s spiritual pilgrimage: the life of contemplation. More often than not, the way of contemplation is not even a way, and if one follows it, what he finds is nothing.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life itself solves them for you. Usually the solution consists in a discovery that they only existed insofar as they were inseparably connected with your own illusory exterior self. The solution of most such problems comes with the dissolution of this false self. And consequently another law of the contemplative life is that if you enter it with the set purpose of seeking contemplation, or worse still, happiness, you will find neither.

the contemplative and spiritual self, the dormant, mysterious, and hidden self that is always effaced by the activity of our exterior self does not seek fulfillment. It is content to be, and in its being it is fulfilled, because its being is rooted in God.

If, then, you are intent on “becoming a contemplative” you will probably waste your time and do yourself considerable harm by reading this book. But if in some sense you are already a contemplative (whether you know it or not makes little difference), you will perhaps not only read the book with a kind of obscure awareness that it is meant for you, but you may even find yourself having to read the thing whether it fits in with your plans3 or not. In that event, just read it. Do not watch for the results, for they will already have been produced long before you will be capable of seeing them. And pray for me, because from now on we are, in some strange way, good friends.

That is to say, it does not aim at making the reader feel good about certain spiritual opportunities which it claims, at the same time, to open up to him. Nor does it pretend to remind anyone of a duty he has failed to perform or attempt to show him how to perform it better.

The worst thing that can happen to a man who is already divided up into a dozen different compartments is to seal off yet another compartment and tell him that this one is more important than all the others, and that he must henceforth exercise a special care in keeping it separate from them. That is what tends to happen when contemplation is unwisely thrust without warning upon the bewilderment and distraction of Western man. The Eastern traditions have the advantage of disposing man more naturally for contemplation.

The first thing that you have to do, before you even start thinking about such a thing as contemplation, is to try to recover your basic natural unity, to reintegrate7 your compartmentalized being into a coordinated and simple whole and learn to live as a unified human person.8 This means that you have to bring back together the fragments of your distracted existence so that when you say “I,” there is really someone present to support the pronoun you have uttered.

Reflect, sometimes, on the disquieting fact that most of your statements of opinions, tastes, deeds, desires, hopes, and fears are statements about someone who is not really present. When you say “I think,” it is often not you who think, but “they”—it is the anonymous authority of the collectivity speaking through your mask. When you say “I want,” you are sometimes simply making an automatic gesture of accepting, paying for, what has been forced upon you. That is to say, you reach out for what you have been made to want.

This, however, is not the “I” who can stand in the presence of God and be aware of Him as a “Thou.” For this “I” there is perhaps no clear “Thou” at all. Perhaps even other people are merely extensions of the “I,” reflections of it, modifications of it, aspects of it. Perhaps for this “I” there is no clear distinction between itself and other objects: it may find itself immersed in the world of objects and to have lost its own subjectivity, even though it may be very conscious and even aggressively definite in saying “I.” If such an “I” one day hears about “contemplation,” he will perhaps set himself to “become a contemplative.” That is, he will wish to admire, in himself, something called contemplation. And in order to see it, he will reflect on his alienated self. He will make contemplative faces at himself like a child in front of a mirror. He will cultivate the contemplative look that seems appropriate to him and that he likes to see in himself. And the fact that his busy narcissism is turned within and feeds upon itself in stillness and secret love will make him believe that his experience of himself is an experience of God.

But the exterior “I,” the “I” of projects, of temporal finalities, the “I” that manipulates objects in order to take possession of them, is alien from the hidden, interior “I” who has no projects and seeks to accomplish nothing, even contemplation. He seeks only to be, and to move (for he is dynamic) according to the secret laws of Being itself and according to the promptings of a Superior Freedom (that is, of God), rather than to plan and to achieve according to his own desires. It will be ironical, indeed, if the exterior self seizes upon something within himself and slyly manipulates it as if to take possession of some inner contemplative secret, imagining that this manipulation can somehow lead to the emergence of an inner self. The inner self is precisely that self which cannot be tricked or manipulated by anyone, even by the devil. He is like a very shy wild animal that never appears at all whenever an alien presence is at hand, and comes out only when all is perfectly peaceful,12 in silence, when he is untroubled and alone. He cannot be lured by anyone or anything, because he responds to no lure except that of the divine freedom. Sad is the case of that exterior self that imagines himself contemplative, and seeks to achieve contemplation as the fruit of planned effort and of spiritual ambition. He will assume varied attitudes, meditate on the inner significance of his own postures, and try to fabricate for himself a contemplative identity: and all the while there is...

The inner self is not a part of our being, like a motor in a car. It is our entire substantial reality itself, on its highest and most personal and most existential level. It is like life, and it is life: it is our spiritual life when it is most alive. It is the life by which everything else in us lives and moves. It is in and through and beyond everything that we are.

The inner self is as secret as God and, like Him, it evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held and studied as object, because it is not “a thing.” It is not reached and coaxed forth from hiding by any process under the sun, including meditation. All that we can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart, and the indifference which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable manifestation of his2 presence.

The inner self is not an ideal self, especially not an imaginary, perfect creature fabricated to measure up to our compulsive need for greatness, heroism, and infallibility. On the contrary, the real “I” is just simply ourself and nothing more. Nothing more, nothing less. Our self as we are in the eyes of God, to use Christian terms. Our self in all our uniqueness, dignity, littleness, and ineffable greatness: the greatness we have received from God our Father and that we share with Him because He is our Father and “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

In Christianity the inner self is simply a stepping stone to an awareness of God. Man is the image of God, and his inner self is a kind of mirror in which God not only sees Himself, but reveals Himself to the “mirror” in which He is reflected. Thus, through the dark, transparent mystery of our own inner being we can, as it were, see God “through a glass.”

For us, there is an infinite metaphysical gulf between the being of God and the being of the soul, between the “I” of the Almighty and our own inner “I.” Yet paradoxically our inmost “I” exists in God and God dwells in it. But it is nevertheless necessary to distinguish between the experience of one’s own inmost being and the awareness that God has revealed Himself to us in and through our inner self. We must know that the mirror is distinct from the image reflected in it. The difference rests on theological faith.

Our awareness of our inner self can at least theoretically be the fruit of a purely natural and psychological purification. Our awareness of God is a supernatural participation in the light by which He reveals Himself interiorly as dwelling in our inmost self. Hence the Christian mystical experience is not only an awareness of the inner self, but also, by a supernatural intensification of faith, it is an experiential grasp of God as present within our inner self.

let us proceed without further explanation to a few classical texts, fir...

Having therefore sought to find my God in visible and corporeal things, and found Him not; having sought to find His substance in myself and found Him not, I perceive my God to be something higher than my soul. Therefore that I might attain to Him I thought on these things and poured out my soul above myself. When would my soul attain to that object of its search, which is “above my soul,” if my soul were not to pour itself out above itself? For were it to rest in itself, it would not see anything else beyond itself, would not, for all that, see God. . . . I have poured forth my soul above myself and there remains no longer any being for me to attain to save my God. . . . His dwelling place is above my soul; from thence He beholds me, from thence He governs me and provides for me; from thence He appeals to me, calls me and directs me; leads me in the way and to the end of my way. (Enarratio in Psalm 41)

There is always a possibility that what an Eastern mystic describes as Self is what the Western mystic will describe as God, because we shall see presently that the mystical union between the soul and God renders them in some sense “undivided” (though metaphysically distinct) in spiritual experience. And the fact that the Eastern mystic, not conditioned by centuries of theological debate, may not be inclined to reflect on the fine points of metaphysical distinction does not necessarily mean that he has not experienced the presence of God when he speaks of knowing the Inmost Self.

Let us turn to some texts of the Rhenish Dominican mystic John Tauler.

Now man with all his faculties and also with his soul recollects himself and enters into the temple (his inner self) in which, in all truth, he finds God dwelling and at work. Man then comes to experience God not after the fashion of the senses and of reason, or like something that one understands or reads . . . but he tastes Him, and enjoys Him like something that springs up from the “ground” of the soul as from its own source, or from a fountain, without having been brought there, for a fountain is better than a cistern, the water of cisterns gets stale and evaporates, but the spring flows, bursts out, swells: it is true, not borrowed. It is sweet. (Sermon for the Thursday before Palm Sunday)

While in the previous quotation there was a resemblance to the fountain in the Chinese text, here is a clap of “mystical thunder”: After this, one should open the ground of the soul and the deep will to the sublimity of the glorious Godhead, and look upon Him with great and humble fear and denial of oneself. He who in this fashion casts down before God his shadowy and unhappy ignorance then begins to understand the words of Job, who said: The spirit passed before me. From this passage of the Spirit is born a great tumult in the soul. And the more this passage has been clear, true, unmixed with natural impressions, all the more rapid, strong, prompt, true and pure will be the work which takes place in the soul, the thrust which overturns it; clearer also will be the knowledge that man has stopped on the path to perfection. The Lord then comes like a flash of lightning; he fills the ground of the soul with light and wills to establish Himself there as the Master Workman. As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him. (Second Sermon for the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, #5)

According to the Christian mystical tradition, one cannot find one’s inner center and know God there as long as one is involved in the preoccupations and desires of the outward self.

Penetration into the depths of our being is, then, a matter of liberation from the ordinary flow of conscious and half-conscious sense impressions, but also and more definitely from the unconscious drives and the clamoring of inordinate passion. Freedom to enter the inner sanctuary of our being is denied to those who are held back by dependence on self-gratification and sense satisfaction, whether it be a matter of pleasure seeking, love of comfort, or proneness to anger, self-assertion, pride, vanity, greed, and all the rest.

Faith in this sense is more than the assent to dogmatic truths proposed for belief by “the authority of God revealing.” It is a personal and direct acceptance of God Himself, a “receiving” of the Light of Christ in the soul, and a consequent beginning or renewal of spiritual life. But an essential element in this reception of the “light” of Christ is the rejection of every other “light” that can appeal to sense, passion, imagination, or intellect.

Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its vision of other realities: but in the end, when we become used to the new light, we gain a new vision of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself.

The contemplative does not cease to know external objects. But he ceases to be guided by them. He ceases to depend on them. He ceases to treat them as ultimate. He evaluates them in a new way, in which they are no longer objects of desire or fear, but remain neutral and, as it were, empty until such time as they too become filled with the light of God.

During the “dark night” of faith, one must let himself be guided to reality not by visible and tangible things, not by the evidence of sense or the understanding of reason, not by concepts charged with natural hope, or joy, or fear, or desire, or grief, but by “dark faith” that transcends all desire and seeks no human and earthly satisfaction, except what is willed by God or connected with His will. Short of this essential detachment, no one can hope to enter into his inmost depths and experience the awakening of that inner self that is the dwelling of God, His hiding place, His temple, His stronghold, and His image.

Seek Him in faith and love, without desiring to find satisfaction in aught, or to taste and understand more than that which it is well for thee to know, for these two are the guides of the blind which will lead thee, by a way that thou knowest not, to the hidden place of God.

Remain thou not therefore either partly or wholly in that which thy faculties can comprehend; I mean be thou never willingly satisfied with that which thou understandest of God, but rather with that which thou understandest not of Him; and do thou never rest in loving and having delight in that which thou understandest or feelest concerning God, but do thou love and have delight in that which thou canst not understand or feel concerning Him; for this, as we have said, is to seek Him in faith.

which brings us into the depths of our own being and releases us that we may voyage beyond ourselves to God, the mystical life culminates in an experience of the presence of God that is beyond all description, and which is only possible because the soul has been completely “transformed in God” so as to become, so to speak, “one spirit” with Him.

And since it is moving all things by its power, there appears together with it that which it is doing, and it appears to move in them, and they in it, with continual movement; and for this reason the soul believes that God has moved and awakened, whereas that which has moved and awakened is in reality itself. (Living Flame of Love, IV, 7)

Since our inmost “I” is the perfect image of God, then when that “I” awakens, he finds within himself the Presence of Him Whose image he is. And, by a paradox beyond all human expression, God and the soul seem to have but one single “I.” They are (by divine grace) as though one single person. They breathe and live and act as one. “Neither” of the “two” is seen as object.

Yet it is nothing else but the message of Christ calling us to awake from sleep, to return from exile, and find our true selves within ourselves, in that inner sanctuary which is His temple and His heaven, and (at the end of the prodigal’s homecoming journey) the “Father’s House.”

The inner self is not merely what remains when we turn away from exterior reality. It is not mere emptiness, or unconsciousness. On the contrary, if we imagine that our inmost self is purely and simply something in us that is completely out of contact with the world of exterior objects, we would condemn ourselves in advance to complete frustration in our quest for spiritual awareness.

Instead of seeing the external world in its bewildering complexity, separateness, and multiplicity; instead of seeing objects as things to be manipulated for pleasure or profit; instead of placing ourselves over against objects in a posture of desire, defiance, suspicion, greed, or fear, the inner self sees the world from a deeper and more spiritual viewpoint. In the language of Zen, it sees things “without affirmation or denial,” that is to say, from a higher vantage point which is intuitive and concrete and which has no need to manipulate or distort reality by means of slanted concepts and judgments. It simply “sees” what it sees and does not take refuge behind a screen of conceptual prejudices and verbalistic distortions.

One of the Fathers of the oriental Church, Philoxenus of Mabbugh,3 has an original and rather subtle view of original sin as a perversion of faith in which a false belief was superadded to the “simple” and unspoiled view of truth, so that direct knowledge became distorted by a false affirmation and negation.

It is curious to realize that those who most deride religious faith are precisely the ones who interpose between themselves and reality a screen of beliefs based on an illusion of self-interest and of passionate attachment. The fact that these beliefs seem, pragmatically, to “work” is all the more fatal a deception. What, in fact, is the fruit of their working? Largely a perversion of the objects manipulated by the exterior man, and the even greater perversion of man himself. Such belief springs from, and increases, man’s inner alienation.

#Sermon Illustrations

It is at once apparent that the exterior man tends to look at things from an economic or technical or hedonistic viewpoint which, in spite of all its pragmatic advantages, certainly removes the seer from direct contact with the reality which he sees. And this exaggeration of 4 the subject-object relationship by material interest or technical speculation is one of the main obstacles to contemplation, except of course in such notably exceptional cases as the intuitive and synthetic view which crowns and sums up the researches of an Einstein or of a Heisenberg. Einstein’s view of the universe is one of the most notable “contemplative” achievements of our century, though in a special and limited sense of the word “contemplation.” And here of course the vision was chiefly speculative rather than technological. And yet the atomic bomb owes its origin, in part, to such “contemplatives”!

In other words, the inner self sees the other not as a limitation upon itself, but as its complement, its “other self,” and is even in a certain sense identified with that other, so that the two “are one.” This unity in love is one of the most characteristic works of the inner self, so that paradoxically the inner “I” is not only isolated but at the same time united with others on a higher plane, which is in fact the plane of spiritual solitude. Here again, the level of “affirmation and negation” is transcended by spiritual awareness which is the work of love. And this is one of the most characteristic features of Christian contemplative awareness. The Christian is not merely “alone with the Alone” in the Neoplatonic sense, but he is One with all his “brothers in Christ.” His inner self is, in fact, inseparable from Christ and hence it is in a mysterious and unique way inseparable from all the other “I’s” who live in Christ, so that they all form one “Mystical Person,” which is “Christ.”

For this reason it is clear that Christian self-realization can never be a merely individualistic affirmation of one’s isolated personality. The inner “I” is certainly the sanctuary of our most personal and individual solitude, and yet paradoxically it is precisely that which is most solitary and personal in ourselves which is united with the “Thou” who confronts us. We are not capable of union with one another on the deepest level until the inner self in each one of us is sufficiently awakened to confront the inmost spirit of the other.

Here it is quite clear that charity, which is the life and the awakening of the inner self, is in fact to a great extent awakened by the presence and the spiritual influence of other selves that are “in Christ.”

St. Augustine speaks of recognizing the inner self of other Christians through the virtuous actions which give evidence of the “Spirit” dwelling in them. It can be said that Christian “edification” is this mutual recognition of the inner spirit in one another, a recognition which is a manifestation of the Mystery of Christ.

In a word, the awakening of the inner self is purely the work of love, and there can be no love where there is not “another” to love. Furthermore, one does not awaken his inmost “I” me...

Solitude is necessary for spiritual freedom. But once that freedom is acquired, it demands to be put to work in the service of a love in which there is no longer subjection or slavery.

#Sermon Illustrations

But I mean to make clear the fact that those recesses of the unconscious in which neurotic and psychotic derangement have their center belong in reality to man’s exterior self: because the exterior self is not limited to consciousness. Freud’s concept of the superego as an infantile and introjected substitute for conscience fits very well my idea of the exterior and alienated self. It is at once completely exterior and yet at the same time buried in unconsciousness. So too with the Freudian concept of the “id,” insofar as it represents an automatic complex of drives toward pleasure or destruction in response to external stimuli.

I think this can go far to explain false mysticism and pseudo-religiosity. These are manifestations of a fake interiorization by which, instead of plunging into the depths of one’s true freedom and spirituality, one simply withdraws into the darker subterranean levels of the exterior self, which remains alienated and subject to powers from the outside. The relation between this false inner self and external reality is entirely colored and perverted by a heavy and quasi-magical compulsivity. Instead of the freedom and spontaneity of an inner self that is entirely unpreoccupied with itself and goes forth to meet the other lightly and trustfully, without afterthought of self-concern, we have here the ponderous and obsessive delusion of the paranoid who lays claim to “magical” insight into others, and interprets the portentous “signs” he sees in external reality in favor of his own distended fears, lusts, and appetites for power. True Christian charity is stifled in such an atmosphere, and contemplation has no place in it. All is heavy, thick, biased, and dark with obsession, even though it lays claim to blinding and supernatural lights. It is a realm of dangerous appetites for command, of false visions and apocalyptic threats, of spiritual sensuality, and of a mysticism charged with undertones of sexual perversion.

The highest form of religious worship finds its issue and fulfillment in contemplative awakening and in transcendent spiritual peace—in the quasi-experiential union of its members with God, beyond sense and beyond ecstasy. The lowest form is fulfilled in a numinous and magic sense of power which has been “produced” by rites and which gives one momentarily the chance to wring a magical effect from the placated deity. In between these two extremes are various levels of ecstasy, exaltation, ethical self-fulfillment, juridical righteousness, and aesthetic intuition. In all these various ways, religion primitive and sophisticated, crude and pure, active and contemplative, seeks to attain to the inner awakening, or at least to produce an apparently satisfactory substitute for it.