“The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. 36 of the Shambala edition, emphasis added) A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. (p. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside of life.

And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. He writes:Įvery one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. There Merton talks about the false-self and the true-self. Twelve years later, that was revised as New Seeds of Contemplation. Tonight I’m thinking about the idea of the false-self and true-self.Ī year or so after Seven Storey Mountain, Merton wrote Seeds of Contemplation. So, in an effort to process through some of the questions it raised for me, I’m going to write a few posts about Merton and Seven Storey Mountain.

It made me hungry for liturgy, tradition, the sacraments and prayer. Parts of his story resonated with my own life and other parts left me utterly fascinated. If I had a free minute, I couldn’t put the book down. But reading it did more than that: I was sucked-in. His autobiography gave me a deep appreciation for the man behind the writings. I had read New Seeds of Contemplation before, and thus appreciated his writings. The second reason is that I’ve been spending all of my free time for the past three weeks reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. First, much of my life recently has been consumed by thinking about this. Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain & The “True Self”

The 7 storey mountain