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

by Thomas Merton

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.