Thomas Merton - A Teaching on Realisation and Awakening - Christian Mystics

31.705 - 81.757 Thomas Merton

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.

85.435 - 114.41 Thomas Merton

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.

123.303 - 184.002 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,

185.15 - 244.634 Thomas Merton

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.

252.987 - 298.668 Thomas Merton

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.

329.178 - 358.304 Thomas Merton

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

359.35 - 420.961 Thomas Merton

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

422.075 - 505.538 Thomas Merton

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.

507.749 - 563.808 Thomas Merton

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

646.934 - 704.798 Thomas Merton

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.

706.503 - 767.557 Thomas Merton

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. And here all adjectives fall to pieces. Words become stupid.

770.712 - 827.446 Thomas Merton

Everything you say is misleading. Unless you list every possible experience and say, That is not what it is. That is not what I am talking about. Metaphor has now become hopeless altogether. Talk about darkness if you must, but the thought of darkness is already too dense and too coarse. Anyway, it is no longer darkness. You can speak of emptiness,

966.968 - 1046.821 Thomas Merton

It is love loving in love. It is the purity of God rejoicing in its own liberty. And here, where contemplation becomes what it is really meant to be, it is no longer something infused by God into a created subject, so much as God living in God and identifying a created life with their own life, so that there is nothing left of any significance but God living in God.

1050.128 - 1109.613 Thomas Merton

If a person who has thus been vindicated and delivered and fulfilled and destroyed could think and speak at all. It would certainly never be to think and speak of themself as someone separate or as a subject of a grandiose experience. And that is why it does not really make much sense to speak of all this

1110.305 - 1162.617 Thomas Merton

as the high point of a series of degrees, and as something great by comparison with other experiences which are less great. It is outside the limit within which comparisons have meaning. It is beyond the level of ways that correspond to any of our notions of travel. Beyond the degrees that correspond to our ideas of a progression.

1251.127 - 1301.87 Thomas Merton

in which the soul vanishes out of itself by the perfect renunciation of all desires and of all things, is that it can have nothing to do with our ideas of greatness and exaltation. and is not therefore something which is subject to the sin of pride. In fact, this perfect contemplation implies by its very essence the perfection of all humility,

1306.527 - 1363.092 Thomas Merton

Pride is incompatible with it in every possible way. It is only something that a person could be proud of or desire inordinately or in some other way make material for sin. When it is completely misunderstood and taken for something which it is not and cannot be. For pride

1364.527 - 1392.978 Thomas Merton

which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent and exterior self, cannot exist where one is incapable of reflecting on a separate self, living apart from God.