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

by Thomas Merton

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”!