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

by Thomas Merton

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.