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

by Thomas Merton

The secular and sacred reflect two kinds of dependence. The secular world depends upon the things it needs to divert itself and escape from its own nothingness. It depends on the creation and multiplication of artificial needs, which it then pretends to “satisfy.” Hence the secular world is a world that pretends to exalt man’s liberty, but in which man is in fact enslaved by the things on which he depends. In secular society man himself is alienated and becomes a “thing” rather than a person, because he is subject to the rule of what is lower than himself and outside himself. He is subject to his ever increasing needs, to his restlessness, his dissatisfaction, his anxiety, and his fear, but above all to the guilt which reproaches him for infidelity to his own inner truth. To escape this guilt, he plunges further into falsity.

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