Sidewalk Shadows
It is the Not-I that is most of all the I in each one of us. But we are completely enslaved by the illusory I that is not I, and never can be I, except in a purely fictional and social sense. And of course there is yet one more convolution in this strange dialectic: there remains to suppress the apparent division between empirical self and real or inner self. There is no such division. There is only the Void which is I, covered over by an apparent I. And when the apparent I is seen to be void it no longer needs to be rejected, for it is I. How wonderful it is to be alive in such a world of craziness and simplicity . . . (1.31.65 HGL 627)
-The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns
Sidewalk Shadows
It is the Not-I that is most of all the I in each one of us. But we are completely enslaved by the illusory I that is not I, and never can be I, except in a purely fictional and social sense. And of course there is yet one more convolution in this strange dialectic: there remains to suppress the apparent division between empirical self and real or inner self. There is no such division. There is only the Void which is I, covered over by an apparent I. And when the apparent I is seen to be void it no longer needs to be rejected, for it is I. How wonderful it is to be alive in such a world of craziness and simplicity . . . (1.31.65 HGL 627)
-The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns