Union and Division
Adapted from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation

In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die.

The reason for this is that I am born in selfishness and therefore my natural efforts to make myself more real and more myself, make me less real and less myself, because they revolve around a lie.

People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world.  They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the others who have less than they, or nothing at all.

They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and others.  They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are “members of one another.”

The one who lives in division is not a person but only an “individual.”

The one who lives in division is living in death.  They cannot find themselves because they are lost, they have ceased to be a reality.  The one they believe themselves to be is a bad dream.  And when they die, they will discover that they long ago ceased to exist because God, Who is infinite reality, will say, “I know you not.”

The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.  In God’s love we possess all things and enjoy fruition of them, finding God in them all.  And thus as we go about the world, everything we meet and everything we see and hear and touch, far from defiling, purifies us and plants in us something more of heaven.

True Self	False Self