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

by Thomas Merton

The common level of inferior religion is situated somewhere in the collective subconscious of the worshipers, and perhaps more often than not in a collective exterior self. This is certainly a verifiable fact in modern totalitarian pseudo-religions of state and class. And this is one of the most dangerous features of our modern barbarism: the invasion of the world by a barbarity from within society and within man himself. Or rather, the reduction of man, in technological society, to a level of almost pure alienation in which he can be brought at will, any time, to a kind of political ecstasy, carried away by the hate, the fear, and the crude aspirations centered about a leader, a propaganda slogan, or a political symbol. That this sort of ecstasy is to some extent “satisfactory” and produces a kind of pseudo-spiritual catharsis, or at least a release of tension, is unfortunately all too often verified. And it is what modern man is coming more and more to accept as an ersatz for genuine religious fulfillment, for moral activity, and for contemplation itself.