[T]he inner self is not a part of our being, like a motor in a car. It is our entire substantial reality itself, on its highest and most personal and most existential level. It is like life, and it is life: it our spiritual life when it is most alive. It is the life by which everything else in us lives and moves. It is in and through and beyond everything that we are. If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it become a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being.
(Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. William H. Shannon, editor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003): 6.)
Monday, January 12, 2009
Merton's geography of the soul…
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4 comments:
"If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself." Am pondering these lines, Mike. At first I was thinking he meant the true self, the "I" that is able to observe the mind, but perhaps he means more than this. How would you interpret this part?
I always seem to resonate with Merton's words. Thank you.
I think the clue is in the opening words, Gabrielle, or so it seems to me. The awakening Merton speaks of is more like the opening of our awareness to what we already are, rather than the awakening of some embedded thing. To use Merton's own metaphor, the awakening is when we realise the nature and purpose of car, not when we start the motor!
I'm reminded of Eckhart's istigkeit - only this is the is-ness of ourselves, not of any "external" reality. Or better, it is the realisation that we are that is-ness, that we are not other than it. In this we stand before God, persona before hypostasis, as indissolubly involved parts of "all that is made" (Julian of Norwich). If that makes sense...
Metaphysics! Who'da thunk it?
Oh goodness, I'll have to ponder your words too, Mike! "Not other than it." I think I'll start there. Thank you.
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