The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation

Thomas Merton

SPCK, 2003 - Contemplation - 176 pages

This is the first complete publication of Merton's last book, revised by the author shortly before he died, in which Merton draws on both Eastern and Western traditions to explore the subject of contemplation/meditation in depth, and to show how true contemplation can be practised in everyday life.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - allenkeith - LibraryThing

This is a book not so much on the how of contemplative prayer but on what is contemplation. It is a thorough work on the topic from a person who made this very thing his life's vocation. Merton looks ...

The inner experience: notes on contemplation

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

A Trappist monk and prolific author, Merton (1915-68) was a pivotal figure in bringing Eastern mysticism to a wider audience in the West. He wrote the core of this book in 1948 (published as What Is ...

About the author

Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism. After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death. His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression. Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
• Author: Thomas Merton
• Editor: William Henry Shannon
• Publisher: SPCK, 2003
• ISBN: 0281056161, 9780281056163
• Length: 176 pages