Vigils Reading

THE INNER SELF

From the writing of Thomas Merton

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The 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 is our spiritual life when it is most

alive. It is the life by which everything else in us lives and moves.. 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: and this awareness is not so much

something that we ourselves have as something that we are…

The inner self is as secret as God, and like Him, it evades every concept

that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held

and studied as an object, because it is not a “thing.” It is not reached and coaxed

forth from hiding by any process under the sun, including meditation. All we

can do with any spiritual discipline is produce within ourselves something of the

silence, the humility, the detachment, the purity of heart, and the indifference

which are required if the inner self is to make some shy, unpredictable

manifestation of his presence.

At the same time, however, every deeply spiritual experience, whether

religious or moral, or even artistic, tends to have in it something of the presence

of the interior self. Only from the inner self does any spiritual experience gain

depth, reality, and a certain in communicability. But the depth of ordinary

experience only gives us a derivative sense of the inner self. It reminds us of the

forgotten levels of interiority in our spiritual nature, and of our helplessness to

explore them.

From THE INNER EXPERIENCE quoted by William Shannon in his book: Thomas Merton’s Dark Path, Farrar-

Straus-Giroux N.Y., 1987, pp. 116-117.