The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation [Paperback]

Thomas Merton (Author), William H. Shannon (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2004

Now in paperback, revised and redesigned: This is Thomas Merton's last book, in which he draws on both Eastern and Western traditions to explore the hot topic of contemplation/meditation in depth and to show how we can practice true contemplation in everyday life.

Never before published except as a series of articles (one per chapter) in an academic journal, this book on contemplation was revised by Merton shortly before his untimely death. The material bridges Merton's early work on Catholic monasticism, mysticism, and contemplation with his later writing on Eastern, especially Buddhist, traditions of meditation and spirituality. This book thus provides a comprehensive understanding of contemplation that draws on the best of Western and Eastern traditions.

Merton was still tinkering with this book when he died; it was the book he struggled with most during his career as a writer. But now the Merton Legacy Trust and experts have determined that the book makes such a valuable contribution as his major comprehensive presentation of contemplation that they have allowed its publication.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Merton speaks to us even now -- and freshly -- with these perceptive insights into the contemplative life.” (Paul Wilkes, author of Beyond the Walls: Monastic Wisdom for Everyday Life )

About the Author

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk, writer, and peace and civil rights activist. Merton's works have had a profound impact on contemporary religious and philosophical thought. He is best known for his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain and New Seeds of Contemplation.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060593628
• ISBN-13: 978-0060593629
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,863 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. His autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, has millions of copies and has been translated into over fifteen languages. He wrote over sixty other books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.

After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism and entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), the most ascetic Roman Catholic monastic order.

The twenty-seven years he spent in Gethsemani brought about profound changes in his self-understanding. This ongoing conversion impelled him into the political arena, where he became, according to Daniel Berrigan, the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960's. Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he called "certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States." For his social activism Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as unbecoming of a monk.

During his last years, he became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism, and in promoting East-West dialogue. After several meetings with Merton during the American monk's trip to the Far East in 1968, the Dali Lama praised him as having a more profound understanding of Buddhism than any other Christian he had known. It was during this trip to a conference on East-West monastic dialogue that Merton died, in Bangkok on December 10, 1968, the victim of an accidental electrocution. The date marked the twenty-seventh anniversary of his entrance to Gethsemani.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Inner Experience, February 21, 2010

By 

Derek (True-Small-Caps.Blogspot.Com) (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (Paperback)

Thomas Merton seems to have published more books since he died than he did while he was alive. The Inner Experience is a set of notes on contemplation he effectively began in 1948, revised and expanded in 1959, but was never happy enough with to allow publication during his lifetime. After excerpts had been serialized over the years, the Merton Legacy Trust finally allowed complete publication in a single volume.

This is not, Merton warns at the outset, a self-help book. Contemplation, he says, is not a program whereby the false "I" can manipulate the true "I." On the contrary, so long as the false self is busy with its projects, the inner self will remain hidden. And even when the inner self emerges, the final goal has not been attained. While some Eastern religions stop with the awakening of the true self, Christians continue on to know God. Solitude and seclusion may be necessary for long stretches of this journey, but the contemplative vocation finds its ultimate fulfillment in a love that reaches out to others.

Merton has an interesting perspective on active contemplation. He sees it as a progressive letting go of the agendas and plans of the false self in favor of an approach to life where we simply discern the way events are flowing. This flow he sees as God's will. Self-seeking motivations have been abandoned to the point that the contemplative is not even aware that he is contemplating.

Infused contemplation is, of course, beyond the control of the individual. While Merton sketches a few characteristics of infused contemplation -- a passive, intuitive, non-conceptual, and above all loving knowledge of God -- he avoids the fruitless question of exactly where active contemplation ends and infused contemplation begins. Instead he cite passages from five authors that may be helpful in recognizing the beginnings of infused contemplation. These writers are St. John of the Cross, John Ruysbroeck, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. To emphasize the need to abandon the programs and desires of the false self and to replace them with pure love, Merton devotes a further chapter to St. John of the Cross on this point.

Among the dangers for the contemplative to avoid, Merton mentions blanking out, seeking some kind of self-annihilation, a withdrawal from reality, and straining after mystical experiences. Monasteries, with their one-size-fits-all regulation of life, paradoxically present special difficulties. But life outside the monasteries presents other problems. Silence has become an expensive luxury. Most people need group support, and for these Merton proposes something along the lines of contemplative third orders, but without stifling organizational structures. Merton sees these relatively informal lay or priestly-lay groups as offering promise for the future. In particular he admires the Little Brothers of Jesus and the simple Christian ashram of Fr. Jules Monchanin (a co-worker of Fr. Henri Le Saux in India).

The cover photo is by Merton himself, and the introduction is by the book's editor, William H. Shannon.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars the trappist speaks, January 17, 2007

By 

Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (Paperback)

Next to CS Lewis, the monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) might have been the most influential Christian in the West during his lifetime. Best known for his powerful autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton was a Trappist monk, writer, social activist, and contemplative Christian. Here he contrasts two ways of living Christianly. The exterior or external self is a life of self-impersonation, superficiality, alienation, conformity, indulgence, and narcissism: "Reflect, sometimes, on the disquieting fact that most of your statements of opinions, tastes, deeds, desires, hopes and fears are statements about someone who is not really present. When you say `I think,' it is often not you who think, but they--it is the anonymous authority of the collectivity speaking through your mask. When you say `I want,' you are sometimes simply making an automatic gesture of accepting, paying for, what has been forced upon you. That is to say, you reach out for what you have been made to want." In contrast, and this is the positive theme of the entire book, is the life of what the Apostle Paul called the "inner man," and other Christians throughout the last two millennia the way of illumination, the way of the heart, or contemplation.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Merton at Midstream, January 14, 2006

By 

Patrick Doherty (Birmingham, Alabama, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (Paperback)

THE INNER EXPERIENCE is a recently edited and published work which reflects Merton's thinking on the subject of contemplation about 1959 - eleven years after the publication of both THE SEVEN STOREY MOUNTAIN and WHAT IS CONTEMPLATION? The most interesting chapters in the book, in my opinion, are Chapter 5 which attempts to describe the various kinds of contemplation as well as Chapter 7 dealing with the texts on contemplative prayer written by St. John of the Cross, Blessed John Ruysbroeck, Meister Eckhart and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. THE INNER EXPERIENCE preceeds NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION which was written in 1961.