# Meditations II



## Homeskooled (Aug 10, 2004)

What Contemplation is Not

By Thomas Merton

The only way to get rid of misconceptions about contemplation is to experience it. One who does not actually know, in his own life, the nature of this breakthrough and this awakening to a new level of reality cannot help being misled by most of the things that are said about it. For contemplation cannot be taught. It cannot even be clearly explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, symbolized. The more objectively and scientifically one tries to to analyze it, the more he empties it of its real content, for this expreience is beyond the reach of verbaliztion and of rationalization. Nothing is more repellant than a pseudo-scientific definition of the contmeplative experience. One reason for this is that he who attemps such a definition is tempted to procede psychologicallly, and there is no adequatate psychology of contemplation. To describe "reactions" and "feelings" is to situate contemplation where it is not to be found, in the superficial consciousness where it can be observed by reflection. But this reflection and this consciousness are precisely part of that external self which "dies"....

Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superfuicial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. We must remember that this superficial "I" is not our real self. It is our "individuality" and our "empirical self" but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The "I" that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true "I" that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and knuknown "self" whom most of us never discover until we are dead.

Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. " I think, therefore, I am." This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he "thinks". If his thought is a necessary medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. At the same time, by also reducing God to a concept, he me makes it impossible for himself to have any intuition of the divine reality which is inexpressible.

Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuituive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God.

For the contemplative there is no "I think, therefore" but only SUM, or I AM. Not in the sense of futile assertion of our individuality as utlimately real, but in the humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.

Contemplation is not prayerfulness, or a tendency to find peace and satisfaction in liturgical rites. These, too, are a great good, and they are almost necessary preparations for contemplative experience. But they are not contemplation.

Contemplation is not ecstasy, or emotion, or the imagination of lights. It is not the emotional fire and sweetness that comes with religious exaltation. These things may seem to be in some way like a contemplative awakening...But they are not the work of the deep self, only of the emotions, of the somatic unconscious. They are a flooding up of the dionysian forces of the "id".

It is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us. No idea of him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Peace 
Homeskooled


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## Homeskooled (Aug 10, 2004)

Pure Love

By Thomas Merton

The beginnings of the contemplative life.

1. The best of these kinds of beginnings is a sudden emptying of the soul in which images vanish, concepts and words are silent, and freedom and clairty suddenly open out within you until your whole being embraces the wonder, the depth, the obviousness and yet the emptiness and unfathombable incomprehensibility of God.

2. The most usual entrance to contemplation is through a desert of aridity in which, although you see nothing and feel nothing and apprehend nothing and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety, yet you are drawn and held in this darkness and dryness because it is the only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace. As you progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude, and the assurance of a comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on you more and more, until you gradually realize that it is God revealing Himself to you in a light that is painful to your nature and to all its faculties, because it si infinitely above them and because its purity is at war with your own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.

3. Then there is a quietud sabrosa, a tranquillity full of savor and rest and unction in which, although there is nothing to feed and satisfy either the senses or the imagination of the intellect, the will rests in a deep, luminous and absorbing experience of love. And from the depths of this cloud come touches of reassurance, the voice of God speaking without words, uttering His own Word. For you recognize, at least in some obscure fashion, that this beautiful, deep, meaningful tranquillity that floods your whole being with its truth and its substantial peace has something to do with the Mission of the Second Person (Christ) in your soul, is an accompaniment and sign of that mission.

Thus to many, the cloud of their contemplation becomes identified in a secret way with the Divinity of Christ and also with His Heart's love for us, so that their contemplation itself becomes the presence of Christ, and they are absorbed in suave and pure communion with Him. And this tranquillity is learned most of all in Eucharistic Communion.

He becomes to them a sensible presence Who follows them and envelops them wherever they go and in all that they do, a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire in the night, and when they have to be absorbed in some distracting work, they nevertheless easily find God again by a quick glance into their own souls. And sometimes when they do not think to return to the depths and rest in Him, He nevertheless draws them unexpectedly into His obscurity and peace, or invades them from within themselves with a tide of quiet, unutterable joy.

Sometimes these tides of joy are concentrated into strong touches, contacts of God that wake the soul with a bound of wonder and delight, a flash of flame that blazes like an exclamation of inexpressible happiness and somtimes burns with a wound that is delectable although it gives pain. God cannot touch many with this flame, or touch even these heavily. But nevertheless it seems that these deep movements of the Spirit of His Love keep striving, at least lightly, to impress themselves on every one that God draws into this happy and tranquil light.

It is in this ecstasy of pure love that we arrive at a true fulfillment of the First Commandment, loving God with our whole heart and our whole mind and all our strength. Therefore it is something that all men who desire to please God ought to desire. It is in these souls that peace is established in the world. They are the strength of the world, because they are the tabernacles of God in the world. They are the ones who keep it all from flying apart. They are the little ones.

They are the only ones who will ever be able to enjoy life altogether. They have renounced the whole world and it has been give into their possession.

What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what He Himself takes most seriously. At any rate the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call....We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts, or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness and the purity of vision that makes themselves evident, provide a glimpse into the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the dance....

Peace
Homeskooled


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## Homeskooled (Aug 10, 2004)

Come on. More than 42 and 55, respectively, need to read these quotes. Get reading, thinking, praying, and most of all, hoping, my dear fellow board members! I wish you all

Peace
Homeskooled


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