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

by Thomas Merton

In active contemplation, there is a deliberate and sustained effort to detect the will of God in events and to bring one’s whole self into harmony with that will. Active contemplation depends on ascesis of abandonment, a systematic relaxation of the tensions of the exterior self and a renunciation of its tyrannical claims and demands, in order to move in a dimension that escapes our understanding and overflows in all directions our capacity to plan. The element of dialectic in active contemplation is centered on the discovery of God’s will, that is to say, the identification of the real direction which events are taking, especially in our own life.