Thomas Merton

What we are not seems to be real, while what we are seems to be unreal. We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden identity. And that is why the way to reality is the way of humility.

which brings us to reject the illusory self and accept the empty self that is nothing in our own eyes and in the eyes of people, but is our true reality in the eyes of God. For this reality is in God,

and with God and belongs entirely to that. Yet of course it is ontologically distinct from that and in no sense part of the divine nature or absorbed in that nature.

This inmost self is beyond the kind of experience which says, I want, I love, I know, I feel. It has its own way of knowing, loving and experiencing, which is a divine way and not a human one.

A way of identity, of union, of espousal, in which there is no longer a separate psychological individuality.

drawing all good and all truth towards itself, and thus loving and knowing for itself. Lover and beloved are one spirit.

Therefore, as long as we experience ourselves in prayer as an eye, standing on the threshold of the abyss of purity and emptiness that is God, waiting to receive something from that, we are still far from the most intimate and secret unity of knowledge

that is pure contemplation. From outside of the threshold, this darkness, this emptiness, looks deep and vast and exciting. There is nothing we can do about entering in.

We cannot force our way over the edge although there is no barrier. But the reason is perhaps that there is also no abyss. There you remain somehow feeling

that the next step will be a plunge and you will find yourself flying in interstellar space.

When the next step comes You do not take the step You do not know the transition You do not fall into anything You do not go anywhere

And so you do not know the way by which you got there, or the way by which you come back afterward. You are certainly not lost. You do not fly. There is no space.

Or there is all space. It makes no difference. The next step is not a step.

You are not transported from one degree to another. What happens is that the separate entity that is you apparently disappears and nothing seems to be left but a pure freedom

indistinguishable from infinite freedom. Love, identified with love. Not two loves, one waiting for the other, striving for the other, seeking for the other, but love, loving,

in freedom. Would you call this experience

I think you might say that this only becomes an experience in a person's memory. Otherwise it seems wrong even to speak of it as something that happens. Because things that happen have to happen to some subject.

and experiences have to be experienced by someone. But here, the subject of any divided or limited or creature experience seems to have vanished. You are not you.

You are fruition. If you like, you do not have an experience, you become experience. But that is entirely different, because you no longer exist in such a way that you can reflect on yourself.

or see yourself having an experience or judge what is going on. If it can be said that something is going on that is not eternal and unchanging and an activity so tremendous that it is infinitely still.