Background Image

...

When Society Is Made Up Of Men Who Know No Interior Solitude It Can No Longer Be Held Together By Love: And Consequently It Is Held Together By A Violent And Abusive Authority. But When Men Are Violently Deprived Of The Solitude And Freedom Which Are Their Due, Then Society In Which They Live Becomes Putrid, It Festers With Servility, Resentment And Hate.

-Thomas Merton

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

When Society Is Made

Thomas Merton

...

When Society Is Made Up Of Men Who Know No Interior Solitude It Can No Longer Be Held Together By Love: And Consequently It Is Held Together By A Violent And Abusive Authority. But When Men Are Violently Deprived Of The Solitude And Freedom Which Are Their Due, Then Society In Which They Live Becomes Putrid, It Festers With Servility, Resentment And Hate.

Views: 96658

Topic

More From Thomas Merton

When We Are Strong, We Are Always Much Greater Than The Things That Happen To Us.

We Live In A Society Whose Whole Policy Is To Excite Every Nerve In The Human Body And Keep It At The Highest Pitch Of Artificial Tension, To Strain Every Human Desire To The Limit And To Create As Many New Desires And Synthetic Passions As Possible, In Order To Cater To Them With The Products Of Our Factories And Printing Presses And Movie Studios And All The Rest.

Some Of Us Need To Discover That We Will Not Begin To Live More Fully Until We Have The Courage To Do And See And Taste And Experience Much Less Than Usual... And For A Man Who Has Let Himself Be Drawn Completely Out Of Himself By His Activity, Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Sit Still And Rest, Doing Nothing At All. The Very Act Of Resting Is The Hardest And Most Courageous Act He Can Perform.

We Are Not At Peace With Others Because We Are Not At Peace With Ourselves, And We Are Not At Peace With Ourselves Because We Are Not At Peace With God

Things That Are Good Are Good, And If One Is Responding To That Goodness One Is In Contact With A Truth From Which One Is Getting Something. The Truth Is Doing Us Good. The Truth Of The Sunshine, The Truth Of The Rain, The Truth Of The Fresh Air, The Truth Of The Wind In The Trees, These Are Truths. And They Are Always Accessible!

... Nothing Resembles Reality Less Than The Photograph. Nothing Resembles Substance Less Than Its Shadow. To Convey The Meaning Of Something Substantial You Have To Use Not A Shadow But A Sign, Not The Limitation But The Image. The Image Is A New And Different Reality, And Of Course It Does Not Convey An Impression Of Some Object, But The Mind Of The Subject; And That Is Something Else Again.

The Fruitfulness Of Our Lives Depends In Large Measure In Our Ability To Doubt Our Own Words And To Question The Value Of Our Own Work. The Man Who Completely Trusts His Own Estimate Of Himself Is Doomed To Sterility.

The Christian Life, And Especially The Contemplative Life, Is A Continual Discovery Of Christ In New And Unexpected Places.

Contemplative Life

There Is In All Visible Things An Invisible Fecundity, A Dimmed Light, A Meek Namelessness, A Hidden Wholeness. This Mysterious Unity And Integrity Is Wisdom, The Mother Of Us All, "natura Naturans." There Is In All Things An Inexhaustible Sweetness And Purity, A Silence That Is A Fountain Of Action And Joy. It Rises Up In Wordless Gentleness, And Flows Out To Me From The Unseen Roots Of All Created Being.

To Be Grateful Is To Recognize The Love Of God In Everything.

Contemplation In The Age Of Auschwitz And Dachau, Solovky And Karaganda Is Something Darker And More Fearsome Than Contemplation In The Age Of The Church Fathers. For That Very Reason, The Urge To Seek A Path Of Spiritual Light Can Be A Subtle Temptation To Sin. It Certainly Is Sin If It Means A Frank Rejection Of The Burden Of Our Age, An Escape Into Unreality And Spiritual Illusion, So As Not To Share The Misery Of Other Men.

In An Age Where There Is Much Talk About "being Yourself," I Reserve To Myself The Right To Forget About Being Myself, Since In Any Case There Is Very Little Chance Of My Being Anybody Else.

Duty Does Not Have To Be Dull. Love Can Make It Beautiful And Fill It With Life.

The Deepest Level Of Communication Is Not Communication, But Communion. It Is Wordless. It Is Beyond Words, And It Is Beyond Speech, And It Is Beyond Concept. Not That We Discover A New Unity. We Discover An Older Unity. My Dear Brothers [and Sisters], We Are Already One. But We Imagine That We Are Not. And What We Have To Recover Is Our Original Unity. What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

The Spiritual Life Is First Of All A Life. It Is Not Merely Something To Be Known And Studied, It Is To Be Lived.

Happiness That Is Sought For Ourselves Alone Can Never Be Found.

Anxiety Is The Mark Of Spiritual Insecurity.

I Am Against War, Against Violence, Against Violent Revolution, For Peaceful Settlement Of Differences, For Nonviolent But Nevertheless Radical Changes. Change Is Needed, And Violence Will Not Really Change Anything: At Most It Will Only Transfer Power From One Set Of Bull-headed Authorities To Another.

The Degradation Of The Sense Of Symbol In Modern Society Is One Of Its Many Signs Of Spiritual Decay.

...love Triumphs, At Least In This Life, Not By Eliminating Evil Once For All, But By Resisting And Overcoming It Anew Every Day.

The Devil Is No Fool. He Can Get People Feeling About Heaven The Way They Ought To Feel About Hell. He Can Make Them Fear The Means Of Grace The Way They Do Not Fear Sin. And He Does So, Not By Light But By Obscurity, Not By Realities But By Shadows; Not By Clarity And Substance, But By Dreams And The Creatures Of Psychosis. And Men Are So Poor In Intellect That A Few Cold Chills Down Their Spine Will Be Enough To Keep Them From Ever Finding Out The Truth About Anything.

Perhaps I Am Stronger Than I Think.

Thinking About Monastic Ideals Is Not The Same As Living Up To Them, But At Any Rate Such Thinking Has An Important Place In A Monk's Life, Because You Cannot Begin To Do Anything Unless You Have Some Idea What You Are Trying To Do.

The Simplicity That All This Presupposes Is Not Easy To Attain. I Find That My Life Constantly Threatens To Become Complex And Divisive. A Life Of Prayer Is Basically A Very Simple Life. This Simplicity, However, Is The Result Of Asceticism And Effort: It Is Not A Spontaneous Simplicity.

Violence Is Essentially Wordless. And It Can Begin Only Where Thought And Rational Communication Have Broken Down.

I Would Call The Attention Of The Reader To The Difference Between "reason" And "reasoning." Reason Is A Light, Reasoning A Process. Reason Is A Faculty, Reasoning An Exercise Of That Faculty. Reasoning Proceeds From One Truth To Another By Means Of Argumentation. This Generally Involves The Whole Mind In Labor And Complexity. But Reason Does Not Exist Merely In Order To Engage In Reasoning. The Process Is A Means To An End. The True Fulfillment Of Reason As A Faculty Is Found When It Can Embrace The Truth Simply And Without Labor In The Light Of Single Intuition.

We Are Already One. We Just Think We Are Separate.

True Encounter With Christ Liberates Something In Us, A Power We Did Not Know We Had, A Hope, A Capacity For Life, A Resilience, An Ability To Bounce Back When We Thought We Were Completely Defeated, A Capacity To Grow And Change, A Power Of Creative Transformation.

The God Of Peace Is Never Glorified By Human Violence.

Every Man Has A Vocation To Be Someone: But He Must Understand Clearly That In Order To Fulfill This Vocation He Can Only Be One Person: Himself.

I Will No Longer Wound Myself With The Thoughts And Questions That Have Surrounded Me Like Thorns: That Is A Penance You Do Not Ask Of Me.

It Is When We Love The Other, The Enemy, That We Obtain From God The Key To An Understanding Of Who He Is, And Who We Are.

The Man Who Fears To Be Alone Will Never Be Anything But Lonely, No Matter How Much He May Surround Himself With People. But The Man Who Learns, In Solitude And Recollection, To Be At Peace With His Own Loneliness, And To Prefer Its Reality To The Illusion Of Merely Natural Companionship, Comes To Know The Invisible Companionship Of God. Such A One Is Alone With God In All Places, And He Alone Truly Enjoys The Companionship Of Other Men, Because He Loves Them In God In Whom Their Presence Is Not Tiresome, And Because Of Whom His Own Love For Them Can Never Know Satiety.

To Be A Saint Is To Be Yourself.

We Must Be True Inside, True To Ourselves, Before We Can Know A Truth That Is Outside Us. But We Make Ourselves True Inside By Manifesting The Truth As We See It.

Very Well, Then: Why Are You Attached To Any One Book, Or To The Words And Ways Of One Saint When He Himself Tells You To Let Them Go And Walk In Simplicity? To Hang On To Him As If To Make A Method Of Him Is To Contradict Him And To Go In The Opposite Direction To The One In Which He Would Have You Travel.

Sincerity Must Be Bought At A Price: The Humility To Recognize Our Innumerable Errors, And Fidelity In Tirelessly Setting Them Right.

We Stumble And Fall Constantly, Even When We Are Most Enlightened.

A Humble Man Is Not Afraid Of Failure. In Fact, He Is Not Afraid Of Anything, Even Himself, Since Perfect Humility Implies Perfect Confidence In The Power Of God.

We Are Obliged To Love One Another. We Are Not Strictly Bound To 'like' One Another. Love Governs The Will: 'liking' Is A Matter Of Sense And Sensibility. Nevertheless, If We Really Love Others It Will Not Be Too Hard To Like Them Also.

Love One Another

One Of The Most Important-and Most Neglected-elements In The Beginning Of The Interior Life Is The Ability To Respond To Reality, To See The Value And The Beauty In Ordinary Things, To Come Alive To The Splendour That Is All Around Us.

For Each One Of Us, There Is Only One Thing Necessary: To Fulfill Our Own Destiny, According To God's Will, To Be What God Wants Us To Be.

Do Not Depend On The Hope Of Results. You May Have To Face The Fact That Your Work Will Be Apparently Worthless And Even Achieve No Result At All, If Not Perhaps Results Opposite To What You Expect. As You Get Used To This Idea, You Start More And More To Concentrate Not On The Results, But On The Value, The Rightness, The Truth Of The Work Itself. You Gradually Struggle Less And Less For An Idea And More And More For Specific People. In The End, It Is The Reality Of Personal Relationship That Saves Everything.

Love Is A Special Way Of Being Alive.

Everything In Modern City Life Is Calculated To Keep Man From Entering Into Himself And Thinking About Spiritual Things. Even With The Best Of Intentions A Spiritual Man Finds Himself Exhausted And Deadened And Debased By The Constant Noise Of Machines And Loudspeakers, The Dead Air And The Glaring Lights Of Offices And Shops, The Everlasting Suggestion Of Advertising And Propaganda. The Whole Mechanism Of Modern Life Is Geared For A Flight From God And From The Spirit Into The Wilderness Of Neurosis.

The Sky Is My Prayer, The Birds Are My Prayer, The Wind In The Trees Is My Prayer, For God Is All In All.

The Only Right Way: To Love And Serve The Man Of The Modern World, But Not Simply To Succumb, With Him, To All His Illusions About The World.

The Rush And Pressure Of Modern Life Are A Form, Perhaps The Most Common Form, Of Contemporary Violence. To Allow Oneself To Be Carried Away By A Multitude Of Conflicting Concerns, To Surrender To Too Many Demands, To Commit Oneself To Too Many Projects, To Want To Help Everyone In Everything, Is To Succumb To Violence. The Frenzy Of Our Activity Neutralizes Our Work For Peace. It Destroys Our Own Inner Capacity For Peace. It Destroys The Fruitfulness Of Our Own Work, Because It Kills The Root Of Inner Wisdom Which Makes Work Fruitful.

Death Is Someone You See Very Clearly With Eyes In The Center Of Your Heart: Eyes That See Not By Reacting To Light, But By Reacting To A Kind Of A Chill From Within The Marrow Of Your Own Life.

Love Is The Door To Eternity.

Lovely Morning! How Lovely Life Can Be!

But Precisely This Illusion That Everything Is "clear" Is What Is Blinding Us All. It Is A Serious Temptation, And It Is A Subtle Form Of Pride And Worldly Love Of Power And Revenge.

The Purpose Of Our Lives Is To Find The Purpose Of Our Lives.

My Own Personal Task Is Not Simply That Of Poet And Writer (still Less Commentator, Pseudo-prophet); It Is Basically To Praise God Out Of An Inner Center Of Silence, Gratitude, And 'awareness.' This Can Be Realized In A Life That Apparently Accomplishes Nothing. Without Centering On Accomplishment Or Nonaccomplishment, My Task Is Simply The Breathing Of This Gratitude From Day To Day, In Simplicity, And For The Rest Turning My Hand To Whatever Comes, Work Being Part Of Praise, Whether Splitting Logs Or Writing Poems, Or Best Of All Simple Notes.

The World Of Men Has Forgotten The Joys Of Silence, The Peace Of Solitude, Which Is Necessary, To Some Extent, For The Fullness Of Human Living. Man Cannot Be Happy For Long Unless He Is In Contact With The Springs Of Spiritual Life Which Are Hidden In The Depths Of His Own Soul. If Man Is Exiled Constantly From His Own Home, Locked Out Of His Spiritual Solitude, He Ceases To Be A True Person.

God Has Brought Me To Kentucky...the Precise Place He Has Chosen For My Sanctification.

Here Is An Unspeakable Secret: Paradise Is All Around Us And We Do Not Understand.

We Must Suffer. Our Five Sense Are Dulled By Inordinate Pleasure. Penance Makes Them Keen, Gives Them Back Their Natural Vitality, And More. Penance Clears The Eye Of Conscience And Of Reason. It Helps Think Clearly, Judge Sanely. It Strengthens The Action Of Our Will.

Humility Sets Us Free To Do What Is Really Good, By Showing Us Our Illusions And Withdrawing Our Will From What Was Only An Apparent Good.

We Are Obliged To Love One Another. We Are Not Strictly Bound To "like" One Another.

Love One Another

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself. Therefore The Problem Of Sanctity And Salvation Is In Fact The Problem Of Finding Out Who I Am And Of Discovering My True Self.

If You Have Love You Will Do All Things Well.

Silence Has Many Dimensions. It Can Be A Regression And An Escape, A Loss Of Self, Or It Can Be Presence, Awareness, Unification, Self-discovery. Negative Silence Blurs And Confuses Our Identity, And We Lapse Into Daydreams Or Diffuse Anxieties. Positive Silence Pulls Us Together And Makes Us Realize Who We Are, Who We Might Be, And The Distance Between These Two.

If You Want To Have A Spiritual Life You Must Unify Your Life. A Life Is Either All Spiritual Or Not Spiritual At All.

The Truth That Many People Never Understand Until It Is Too Late Is That The More You Try To Avoid Suffering, The More You Suffer.

World Suffering

Christ Is Born To Us Today, In Order That He May Appear To The Whole World Through Us.

If We Examine Ourselves Carefully We Shall See Most Of Us Have An Enormous Amount Of Unfinished Business...we Have To Be Free So That We Can Just Step Across The Line And That's It. That Is What Real Freedom Is.

Unfinished Business

The Soul Of Man, Left To Its Own Natural Level, Is A Potentially Lucid Crystal Left In Darkness. It Is Perfect In Its Own Nature, But It Lacks Something That It Can Only Receive From Outside And Above Itself. But When The Light Shines In It, It Becomes In A Manner Transformed Into Light And Seems To Lose Its Nature In The Splendor Of A Higher Nature, The Nature Of The Light That Is In It.

We Do Not Pray For The Sake Of Praying, But For The Sake Of Being Heard. We Do Not Pray In Order To Listen To Ourselves Praying But In Order That God May Hear Us And Answer Us. Also, We Do Not Pray In Order To Receive Just Any Answer: It Must Be God's Answer.

Let Me Rest In Your Will And Be Silent. Then The Light Of Your Joy Will Warm My Life. Its Fire Will Burn In My Heart And Shine For Your Glory. This Is What I Live For. Amen, Amen.

For Pride, Which Is The Inordinate Attribution Of Goods And Values And Glories To One's Own Contingent Self, Cannot Exist Where There Is No Contingent Self To Which Anything Can Be Attributed.

... But Any Fool Knows That You Don't Need Money To Get Enjoyment Out Of Life.

When You Reread Your Journal You Find Out That Your Newest Discovery Is Something You Already Found Out Five Years Ago.

I Stand Among You As One Who Offers A Small Message Of Hope. . . There Are Always People Who Dare To Seek On The Margin Of Society, Who Are Not Dependent On Social Acceptance, Not Dependent On Social Routine, And Prefer A Kind Of Free-floating Existence Under A State Of Risk.

Let Us Come Alive To The Splendor That Is All Around Us And See The Beauty In Ordinary Things.

Ordinary Things

If We Wait For Some People To Become Agreeable Or Attractive Before We Begin To Love Them, We Will Never Begin. If We Are Content To Give Them A Cold Impersonal 'charity' That Is Merely A Matter Of Obligation, We Will Not Trouble To Understand Them Or To Sympathize With Them At All. And In That Case We Will Not Really Love Them, Because Love Implies An Efficacious Will Not Only To Do Good To Others Exteriorly But Also To Find Some Good In Them To Which We Can Respond."

A Life That Is Without Problems May Literally Be More Hopeless, Than One That Always Verges On Despair.

Why Do We Have To Spend Our Lives Striving To Be Something That We Would Never Want To Be, If We Only Knew What We Wanted? Why Do We Waste Our Time Doing Things Which... Are Just The Opposite Of What We Were Made For?

Do Not Be One Of Those Who, Rather Than Risk Failure, Never Attempts Anything.

Our Whole Life Is A Meditation Of Our Last Decision - The Only Decision That Matters.

Contemplation Is The Loving Sense Of This Life, This Presence And This Eternity.

Those Who Think They 'know' From The Beginning Will Never In Fact Come To Know Anything.

Love Is Not A Matter Of Getting What You Want. Quite The Contrary. The Insistence On Always Having What You Want, On Always Being Satisfied, On Always Being Fulfilled, Makes Love Impossible.

Getting What You Want

Contemplation Is Life Itself, Fully Awake, Fully Active, And Fully Aware That It Is Alive. It Is Spiritual Wonder. It Is Spontaneous Awe At The Sacredness Of Life, Of Being. It Is Gratitude For Life, For Awareness, And For Being. It Is A Vivid Realization Of The Fact That Life And Being In Us Proceed From An Invisible, Transcendent, And Infinitely Abundant Source.

By Reading The Scriptures I Am So Renewed That All Nature Seems Renewed Around Me And With Me. The Sky Seems To Be A Pure, A Cooler Blue, The Trees A Deeper Green. The Whole World Is Charged With The Glory Of God And I Feel Fire And Music Under My Feet.

I See No Contradiction Between Buddhism And Christianity ... I Intend To Become As Good A Buddhist As I Can.

It Is Not Merely Our Own Desire But The Desire Of Christ In His Spirit That Drives Us To Grow In Love. Those Who Seldom Or Never Feel In Their Hearts The Desire For The Love Of God And Other Men, And Who Do Not Thirst For The Pure Waters Of Desire Which Are Poured Out In Us By The Strong, Living God, Are Usually Those Who Have Drunk From Other Rivers Or Have Dug For Themselves Broken Cisterns.

Nothing Has Ever Been Said About God That Hasn't Already Been Said Better By The Wind In The Pine Trees.

I Myself Am Part Of The Weather And Part Of The Climate And Part Of The Place … It Is Certainly Part Of My Life Of Prayer.

The Importance Of Detachment From Things, The Importance Of Poverty, Is That We Are Supposed To Be Free From Things That We Might Prefer To People. Wherever Things Have Become More Important Than People, We Are In Trouble. That Is The Crux Of The Whole Matter.

The Only True Liberty Is In The Service Of That Which Is Beyond All Limits, Beyond All Definitions, Beyond All Human Appreciation: That Which Is All, And Which Therefore Is No Limited Or Individual Thing: The All Is No-thing, For If It Were To Be A Single Thing Separated From All Other Things, It Would Not Be All.

Prayer Is An Expression Of Who We Are...we Are A Living Incompleteness. We Are A Gap, An Emptiness That Calls For Fulfillment.

The Logic Of The Poet - That Is, The Logic Of Language Or The Experience Itself - Develops The Way A Living Organism Grows: It Spreads Out Towards What It Loves, And Is Heliotropic, Like A Plant.

Faith Is A Light Of Such Supreme Brilliance That It Dazzles The Mind And Darkens All Its Visions Of Other Realities, But In The End When We Become Used To The New Light, We Gain A New View Of All Reality Transfigured And Elevated In The Light Itself.

We Have What We Seek, It Is There All The Time, And If We Give It Time, It Will Make Itself Known To Us.

I Am Earth, Earth My Heart's Love Bursts With Hay And Flowers. I Am A Lake Of Blue Air In Which My Own Appointed Place Field And Valley Stand Reflected

The Things We Really Need Come To Us Only As Gifts, And In Order To Receive Them As Gifts We Have To Be Open. In Order To Be Open We Have To Renounce Ourselves, In A Sense We Have To Die To Our Image Of Ourselves, Our Autonomy, Our Fixation Upon Our Self-willed Identity.

And Of Course Most Non-catholics Imagine That The Church Is Immensely Rich, And That All Catholic Institutions Make Money Hand Over Fist, And That All The Money Is Stored Away Somewhere To Buy Gold And Silver Dishes For The Pope And Cigars For The College Of Cardinals.

God Utters Me Like A Word Containing A Partial Thought Of Him. A Word Will Never Be Able To Comprehend The Voice That Utters It. But If I Am True To The Concept That God Utters In Me, If I Am True To The Thought Of Him That I Was Meant To Embody, I Shall Be Full Of His Actuality And Find Him Everywhere In Myself, And Find Myself Nowhere.

On Pride: This Sickness Is Most Dangerous When It Succeeds In Looking Like Humility. When A Proud Man Thinks He Is Humble His Case Is Hopeless.

What A Thing It Is To Sit Absolutely Alone, In The Forest, At Night, Cherished By This Wonderful, Unintelligible, Perfectly Innocent Speech, The Most Comforting Speech In The World, The Talk That Rain Makes By Itself All Over The Ridges, And The Talk Of The Watercourses Everywhere In The Hollows! Nobody Started It, Nobody Is Going To Stop It. It Will Talk As Long As It Wants This Rain. As Long As It Talks I Am Going To Listen.

Each Individual Christian And Each New Age Of The Church Has To Make This Rediscovery, This Return To The Source Of Christian Life.

Self-conquest Is Really Self-surrender. Yet Before We Can Surrender Ourselves We Must Become Ourselves. For No One Can Give Up What He Does Not Possess.

We Are Not Perfectly Free Until We Live In Pure Hope. For When Our Hope Is Pure, It No Longer Trusts Exclusively In Human And Visible Means, Nor Rests In Any Visible End. He Who Hopes In God Trusts God, Whom He Never Sees, To Bring Him To The Possession Of Things That Are Beyond Imagination.

I Believe That The Desire To Please You Does In Fact Please You.

Love Seeks One Thing Only: The Good Of The One Loved. It Leaves All The Other Secondary Effects To Take Care Of Themselves. Love, Therefore, Is Its Own Reward.

What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

Faith Is The Door To The Full Inner Life Of The Church, A Life Which Includes Not Only Access To An Authoritative Teaching But Above All To A Deep Personal Experience Which Is At Once Unique And Yet Shared By The Whole Body Of Christ, In The Spirit Of Christ.

That Is God's Call To Us - Simply To Be People Who Are Content To Live Close To Him And To Renew The Kind Of Life In Which The Closeness Is Felt And Experienced.

It Is True To Say That For Me Sanctity Consists In Being Myself And For You Sanctity Consists Of Being Yourself And That, In The Last Analysis, Your Sanctity Will Never Be Mine And Mine Will Never Be Yours, Except In The Communism Of Charity And Grace. For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself. Therefore The Problem Of Sanctity And Salvation Is In Fact The Problem Of Finding Out Who I Am And Of Discovering My True Self.

There Is No Greater Disaster In The Spiritual Life Than To Be Immersed In Unreality, For Life Is Maintained And Nourished In Us By Our Vital Relation With Realities Outside And Above Us.

If There Is No Silence Beyond And Within The Many Words Of Doctrine, There Is No Religion, Only A Religious Ideology. For Religion Goes Beyond Words And Actions, And Attains To The Ultimate Truth Only In Silence And Love.

The Imagination Should Be Allowed A Certain Amount Of Time To Browse Around.

A Christian Is Committed To The Belief That Love And Mercy Are The Most Powerful Forces On Earth.

To Be Ordinary Is Not A Choice: It Is The Usual Freedom Of Men Without Visions.

I Suppose What Makes Me Most Glad Is That We All Recognize Each Other In This Metaphysical Space Of Silence And Happening, And Get Some Sense, For A Moment, That We Are Full Of Paradise Without Knowing It.

I Am Willing To Admit That Some People Might Live There For Years, Or Even A Lifetime, So Protected That They Never Sense The Sweet Stench Of Corruption That Is All Around Them - The Keen, Thin Scent Of Decay That Pervades Everything And Accuses With A Terrible Accusation The Superficial Youthfulness, The Abounding Undergraduate Noise, That Fills Those Ancient Buildings.

It's A Risky Thing To Pray And The Danger Is That Our Very Prayers Get Between God And Us. The Great Thing In Prayer Is Not To Pray, But To Go Directly To God. . . . The Fact Is, Though, That If You Descend Into The Depths Of Your Own Spirit And Arrive Somewhere Near The Center Of What You Are, You Are Confronted With The Inescapable Truth That, At The Very Root Of Your Existence, You Are In Constant And Immediate Contact With The Infinite Power Of God.

Who Is Willing To Be Satisfied With A Job That Expresses All His Limitations? He Will Accept Such Work Only As A 'means Of Livelihood' While He Waits To Discover His 'true Vocation'. The World Is Full Of Unsuccessful Businessmen Who Still Secretly Believe They Were Meant To Be Artists Or Writers Or Actors In The Movies.

Paradoxically, I Have Found Peace Because I Have Always Been Dissatisfied. My Moments Of Depression And Despair Turn Out To Be Renewals, New Beginnings. If I Were Once To Settle Down And Be Satisfied With The Surface Of Life, With Its Divisions And Its Cliches, It Would Be Time To Call In The Undertaker... So, Then, This Dissatisfaction Which Sometimes Used To Worry Me And Has Certainly, I Know, Worried Others, Has Helped Me In Fact To Move Freely And Even Gaily With The Stream Of Life.

The Whole Aim Of Zen Is Not To Make Foolproof Statements About Experience, But To Come To Direct Grips With Reality Without The Mediation Of Logical Verbalizing.

The Artistic Experience, At Its Highest, Was Actually A Natural Analogue Of Mystical Experience. It Produced A Kind Of Intuitive Of Perception.

Mystical Experiences

Our God...is A Consuming Fire. And If We, By Love, Become Transformed Into Him And Burn As He Burns, His Fire Will Be Our Everlasting Joy. But If We Refuse His Love And Remain In The Coldness Of Sin And Opposition To Him And To Other Men Then Will His Fire (by Our Own Choice Rather Than His) Become Our Everlasting Enemy, And Love, Instead Of Being Our Joy, Will Become Our Torment And Our Destruction.

How Deluded We Sometimes Are By The Clear Notions We Get Out Of Books. They Make Us Think That We Really Understand Things Of Which We Have No Practical Knowledge At All.

God, Have Mercy On Me In The Blindness In Which I Hope I Am Seeking You!

Since No Man Ever Can, Or Could, Live By Himself And For Himself Alone, The Destinies Of Thousands Of Other People Were Bound To Be Affected, Some Remotely, But Some Very Directly And Near-at-hand, By My Own Choices And Decisions And Desires, As My Own Life Would Also Be Formed And Modified According To Theirs.

We Become Contemplatives When God Discovers Himself In Us.

There Are Crimes Which No One Would Commit As An Individual Which He Willingly And Bravely Commits When Acting In The Name Of His Society, Because He Has Been (too Easily) Convinced That Evil Is Entirely Different When It Is Done 'for The Common Good.'...one Might Point To The Way In Which Racial Hatreds And Even Persecution Are Admitted By People Who Consider Themselves, And Perhaps In Some Sense Are, Kind, Tolerant, Civilized And Even Humane.

This Is The Crucifixion Of Christ: In Which He Dies Again And Again In The Individuals Who Were Made To Share The Joy And Freedom Of His Grace, And Who Deny Him.

Crucifixion Of Christ

O Love-why Can't You Leave Me Alone? Which Is A Rhetorical Question Meaning: For Heaven's Sake, Don't.

Surrender Your Own Poverty And Acknowledge Your Nothingness To The Lord. Whether You Understand It Or Not, God Loves You, Is Present In You, Lives In You, Dwells In You, Calls You, Saves You And Offers You An Understanding And Compassion Which Are Like Nothing You Have Ever Found In A Book Or Heard In A Sermon.

Love Not Only Prefers The Good Of Another To My Own, But It Does Not Even Compare The Two.

Compassion Is The Keen Awareness Of The Interdependence Of All Things.

Loving Kindness

Whose Silence Are You?

Our Destiny Is To Live Out What We Think, Because Unless We Live What We Know, We Do Not Even Know It.

The Sacred Attitude Is, Then, One Of Deep And Fundamental Respect For The Real In Whatever New Form It May Present Itself.

The Only Unhappiness Is Not To Love God.

For Every Gain In Deep Certitude There Is A Corresponding Growth Of Superficial "doubt." This Doubt Is By No Means Opposed To Genuine Faith, But It Mercilessly Examines And Questions The Spurious "faith" Of Everyday Life, The Human Faith Which Is Nothing But The Passive Acceptance Of Conventional Opinion.

The Light Of Truth Burns Without A Flicker In The Depths Of A House That Is Shaken With Storms Of Passion And Fear.

To Worship Our False Selves Is To Worship Nothing. And The Worship Of Nothing Is Hell.

We Do Not Want To Be Beginners. But Let Us Be Convinced Of The Fact That We Will Never Be Anything Else But Beginners, All Our Life!

Love In Fact Is The Spiritual Life, And Without It All The Other Exercises Of The Spirit, However Lofty, Are Emptied Of Content And Become Mere Illusions.

Life Consists In Learning To Live On One's Own, Spontaneous, Freewheeling: To Do This One Must Recognize What Is One's Own-be Familiar And At Home With Oneself. This Means Basically Learning Who One Is, And Learning What One Has To Offer To The Contemporary World, And Then Learning How To Make That Offering Valid.

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself.

We Love The Things We Pretend To Laugh At.

The Most Awful Tyranny Is That Of The Proximate Utopia Where The Last Sins Are Currently Being Eliminated And Where, Tomorrow, There Will Be No More Sins Because All The Sinners Will Have Been Wiped Out.

Our Christian Destiny Is, In Fact, A Great One: But We Cannot Achieve Greatness Unless We Lose All Interest In Being Great. For Our Own Idea Of Greatness Is Illusory, And If We Pay Too Much Attention To It We Will Be Lured Out Of The Peace And Stability Of The Being God Gave Us, And Seek To Live In A Myth We Have Created For Ourselves. And When We Are Truly Ourselves We Lose Most Of The Futile Self-consciousness That Keeps Us Constantly Comparing Ourselves With Others In Order To See How Big We Are.

Our Vocation Is Not Simply To Be, But To Work Together With God In The Creation Of Our Own Life, Our Own Identity, Our Own Destiny....to Work Out Our Identity In God.

Zen Is Consciousness Unstructured By Particular Form Or Particular System, A Trans-cultural, Trans-religious, Transformed Consciousness.

Today Will Never Come Again.

May God Prevent Us From Becoming "right-thinking Men"-that Is To Say Men Who Agree Perfectly With Their Own Police.

Jesus Lived And Died In Vain If He Did Not Teach Us To Regulate The Whole Of Life By The Eternal Law Of Love. Gandhi, Quoted In Merton, P. 38

Ash Wednesday Is Full Of Joy...the Source Of All Sorrow Is The Illusion That Of Ourselves We Are Anything But Dust.

Conscience Is The Light By Which We Interpret The Will Of God In Our Own Lives.

There Is In Us An Instinct For Newness, For Renewal, For A Liberation Of Creative Power. We Seek To Awaken In Ourselves A Force Which Really Changes Our Lives From Within. And Yet The Same Instinct Tells Us That This Change Is A Recovery Of That Which Is Deepest, Most Original, Most Personal In Ourselves. To Be Born Again Is Not To Become Somebody Else, But To Become Ourselves.

I Just Remember Their Kindness And Goodness To Me, And Their Peacefulness And Their Utter Simplicity. They Inspired Real Reverence, And I Think, In A Way, They Were Certainly Saints. And They Were Saints In That Most Effective And Telling Way: Sanctified By Leading Ordinary Lives In A Completely Supernatural Manner, Sanctified By Obscurity, By Usual Skills, By Common Tasks, By Routine, But Skills, Tasks, Routine Which Received A Supernatural Form From Grace Within.

Happiness Is Not A Matter Of Intensity But Of Balance And Order And Rhythm And Harmony.

There Is A Subtle But Inescapable Connection Between The "sacred" Attitude And The Acceptance Of One's In Most Self.

In Humility Is The Greatest Freedom. As Long As You Have To Defend The Imaginary Self That You Think Is Important, You Lose Your Piece Of Heart. As Soon As You Compare That Shadow With The Shadows Of Other People, You Lose All Joy, Because You Have Begun To Trade In Unrealities And There Is No Joy In Things That Do Not Exist.

If Zen Has Any Preference It Is For Glass That Is Plain, Has No Color, And Is "just Glass."

You Do Not Need To Know Precisely What Is Happening, Or Exactly Where It Is All Going. What You Need Is To Recognize The Possibilities And Challenges Offered By The Present Moment, And To Embrace Them With Courage, Faith And Hope.

One Might Say I Have Decided To Marry The Silence Of The Forest. The Sweet Dark Warmth Of The Whole World Will Have To Be My Wife.

I Cannot Make The Universe Obey Me. I Cannot Make Other People Conform To My Own Whims And Fancies. I Cannot Make Even My Own Body Obey Me.

Be Good, Keep Your Feet Dry, Your Eyes Open, Your Heart At Peace And Your Soul In The Joy Of Christ.

The Closer We Are To God, The Closer We Are To Those Who Are Close To Him.

The Man Of Faith Who Has Never Experienced Doubt Is Not A Man Of Faith.

It Is A Glorious Destiny To Be A Member Of The Human Race, Though It Is A Race Dedicated To Many Absurdities And One Which Makes Many Terrible Mistakes.

My Lord God, I Have No Idea Where I Am Going. I Do Not See The Road Ahead Of Me. I Cannot Know For Certain Where It Will End. Nor Do I Really Know Myself, And The Fact That I Think That I Am Following Your Will Does Not Mean That I Am Actually Doing So. But I Believe That The Desire To Please You Does In Fact Please You. And I Hope I Have That Desire In All That I Am Doing.

Grace Is Not A Strange, Magic Substance Which Is Subtly Filtered Into Our Souls To Act As A Kind Of Spiritual Penicillin. Grace Is Unity, Oneness Within Ourselves, Oneness With God.

When I Pray For Peace, I Pray Not Only That The Enemies Of My Own Country May Cease To Want War, But Above All That My Country Will Cease To Do The Things That Make War Inevitable.

If You Have Never Had Any Distractions You Don't Know How To Pray.

The Modern Child May Early In His Or Her Existence Have Natural Inclinations Toward Spirituality. The Child May Have Imagination, Originality, A Simple And Individual Response To Reality, And Even A Tendency To Moments Of Thoughtful Silence And Absorption. All These Tendencies, However, Are Soon Destroyed By The Dominant Culture. The Child Becomes A Yelling, Brash, False Little Monster, Brandishing A Toy Gun Or Dressed Up Like Some Character He Has Seen On Television.

The Solution Of The Problem Of Life Is Life Itself. Life Is Not Attained By Reason And Analysis But First Of All By Living.

How Can I Be Sincere If I Am Constantly Changing My Mind To Conform With The Shadow Of What I Think Others Expect Of Me?

O God, Teach Me To Be Satisfied With My Own Helplessness In The Spiritual Life. Teach Me To Be Content With Your Grace That Comes To Me In Darkness And That Works Things I Cannot See. Teach Me To Be Happy That I Can Depend On You. To Depend On You Should Be Enough For An Eternity Of Joy. To Depend On You By Itself Ought To Be Infinitely Greater Than Any Joy Which My Own Intellectual Appetite Could Desire.

The Psychological Impotence Of Our Enraged Generation Must Be Traced To The Overwhelming Accusation Of Insincerity Which Every Man And Woman Has To Confront, In The Depths Of His Own Soul, When He Seeks To Love Merely For His Own Pleasure.and Yet The Men Of Our Time Do Not Love With Enough Courage To Risk Even Discomfort Or Inconvenience.

The Goal Of Fasting Is Inner Unity.

The Gate Of Heaven Is Everywhere.

Gates Of Heaven

To Be Unknown To God Is Altogether Too Much Privacy.

Every Moment And Every Event Of Every Man's Life On Earth Plants Something In His Soul.

What Is The Use Of Praying If At The Very Moment Of Prayer, We Have So Little Confidence In God That We Are Busy Planning Our Own Kind Of Answer To Our Prayer?

This Act Of Total Surrender Is Not Merely A Fantastic Intellectual And Mystical Gamble; It Is Something Much More Serious. It Is An Act Of Love For This Unseen Person, Who, In The Very Gift Of Love By Which We Surrender Ourselves To His Reality Also Makes His Presence Known To Us.

It Might Be Good To Open Our Eyes And See.

What Do I Mean By Loving Ourselves Properly? I Mean First Of All, Desiring To Live, Accepting Life As A Very Great Gift And A Great Good, Not Because Of What It Gives Us, But Because Of What It Enables Us To Give To Others.

The Humble Person Receives Praise The Way A Clean Window Takes The Light Of The Sun. The Truer And More Intense The Light Is, The Less You See Of The Glass.

You Must Realize That It Is The Ordinary Way Of God's Dealings With Us That Our Ideas Do Not Work Out Speedily And Efficiently As We Would Like Them To. The Reason For This Is Not Only The Loving Wisdom Of God, But Also The Fact That Our Acts Have To Fit Into A Great Complex Pattern That We Cannot Possibly Understand. I Have Learned Over The Years That Providence Is Always A Whole Lot Wiser Than Any Of Us, And That There Are Always Not Only Good Reasons, But The Very Best Reasons For The Delays And Blocks That Often Seem To Us So Frustrating And Absurd.

The Beginning Of Love Is To Let Those We Love Be Perfectly Themselves, And Not To Twist Them To Fit Our Own Image. Otherwise We Love Only The Reflection Of Ourselves We Find In Them.

Inspirational Love

Solitude And Silence Teach Me To Love My Brothers For What They Are, Not For What They Say.

The Things I Thought Were So Important -- Because Of The Effort I Put Into Them -- Have Turned Out To Be Of Small Value. And The Things I Never Thought About, The Things I Was Never Able To Either To Measure Or To Expect, Were The Things That Mattered.

Living Is Not Thinking. Thought Is Formed And Guided By Objective Reality Outside Us. Living Is The Constant Adjustment Of Thought To Life And Life To Thought In Such A Way That We Are Always Growing, Always Experiencing New Things In The Old And Old Things In The New. Thus Life Is Always New.

When Your Tongue Is Silent, You Can Rest In The Silence Of The Forest. When Your Imagination Is Silent, The Forest Speaks To You. It Tells You Of Its Unreality And Of The Reality Of God. But When Your Mind Is Silent, Then The Forest Suddenly Becomes Magnificently Real And Blazes Transparently With The Reality Of God.

Teach Me To Go To The Country Beyond Words And Beyond Names.

I Will Not Fear, For You Are Ever With Me And You Will Never Leave Me To Face My Perils Alone.

Prayer And Love Are Really Learned In The Hour When Prayer Becomes Impossible And Your Heart Turns To Stone.

To Be Risen With Christ Means Not Only That One Has A Choice And That One May Live By A Higher Law - The Law Of Grace And Love - But That One Must Do So. The First Obligation Of The Christian Is To Maintain Their Freedom From All Superstitions, All Blind Taboos And Religious Formalities, Indeed From All Empty Forms Of Legalism.

The Secret Of My Full Identity Is Hidden In Him. He Alone Can Make Me Who I Am, Or Rather Who I Will Be When At Last I Fully Begin To Be. But Unless I Desire This Identity And Work To Find It With Him And In Him, The Work Will Never Be Done

The Reality That Is Present To Us And In Us: Call It Being...silence. And The Simple Fact That By Being Attentive, By Learning To Listen (or Recovering The Natural Capacity To Listen) We Can Find Ourself Engulfed In Such Happiness That It Cannot Be Explained: The Happiness Of Being At One With Everything In That Hidden Ground Of Love For Which There Can Be No Explanations.... May We All Grow In Grace And Peace, And Not Neglect The Silence That Is Printed In The Center Of Our Being. It Will Not Fail Us.

When You See God In Everyone, Then They See God In You.

The Hindus Are Not Looking For Us To Send Them Men Who Will Build Schools And Hospitals, Although Those Things Are Good And Useful In Themselves--and Perhaps Very Badly Needed In India: They Want To Know If We Have Any Saints To Send Them.

People Are In A Hurry To Magnify Themselves By Imitating What Is Popular- And Too Lazy To Think Of Anything Better.

Trending Author

Alfred Korzybski

Category