'The Awakening of the Inner Self'

Musings from Monks (Vol. 1)

Nov 30, 2024

📿 Musings from Monks

The ‘Musings from Monks’ series explores insights from the writings of monks, mystics, and martyrs. These are short contemplations designed to provide meditations, prompts, and practices to help you (and me) reflect on what it means to live a contemplative life.

‘The Awakening of the Inner Self’

In this Musings from Monks meditation, we reflect on the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s thoughts on the inner self:

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, 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. 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 becomes 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. …
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, humility, detachment, purity of heart, and indifference 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, moral, or even artistic, tends to have something of the presence of the interior self. […]

+Adapted from The Inner Experience