Thomas Merton

Whatever is added to it is fortuitous, transient and inconsequential.

Hence, both body and soul belong to, or better, subsist in our real self, that which we are.

The ego, on the other hand, is a self-constructed illusion that has our body and part of our soul at its disposal because it has taken over the functions of the inner self as a result of what we call man's fall.

That is precisely one of the main effects of the fall, that humans have become alienated from their inner self, which is the image of God.

Humans have been turned spiritually inside out,

so that their ego plays the part of the true self.

A role which is actually has no right to assume.

In returning to God and to ourselves, we have to begin with what we actually are.

We have to start from our alienated condition.

We are prodigals in a distant country, the region of unlikeness.

And we must seem to travel far in that region before we seem to reach our own land.

And yet secretly,

We are in our own land all the time.

The ego, the outer self, is respected by God and allowed to carry out the function which our inner self cannot yet assume on its own.

We have to act in our everyday life as if we were what our outer self indicates us to be.

But at the same time, we must remember that we are not entirely what we seem to be.

And that what appears to be our self is soon going to disappear

One of the most widespread errors of our time is a superficial personalism which identifies the person with the external self, the empirical ego, and devotes itself solemnly to the cultivation of this ego.

But this is the cult of a pure illusion. The illusion of what is popularly imagined to be personality, or worse still, dynamic and successful personality.

When this era is taken over into religion, it leads to the worst kind of nonsense, a cult of psychologism and self-expression. Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness and void.