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

by Thomas Merton

The man whose view of life is purely secular hates himself interiorly, while seeming to love himself. He hates himself in the sense that he cannot stand to be “with” or “by” himself. And because he hates himself, he also tends to hate God, because he cannot abide the inner loneliness which must be suffered and accepted before God can be found. His rebellion against his own inner loneliness and poverty turns into pride. Pride is the fixation of the exterior self upon itself and the rejection of all other elements in the self for which it is incapable of assuming responsibility. This includes the rejection of the inmost self, with its apparent emptiness, its indefiniteness, and its general character as that which is dark and unknown. Pride is, then, a false and evasive self-realization which is in actual fact no realization at all, but only the fabrication of an illusory image. The effort which must then be put into the protection and substantiation of this illusion gives an appearance of strength. But in reality, this fixation upon what does not exist merely exhausts and ruins our being.

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