Thomas Merton 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 and most personal and most existential level. It is like life, and it is life: it our spiritual life when it is most alive. I t 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 become 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.

The inner self is, first of all, a spontaneity that is nothing if not free.

Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Ed. William H. Shannon (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 6.

Image: Stephen Rue, One Big Self, oil on panel, 36" x 36"