Inner Landscape

After dinner, Sue and I randomly talked as usual. A familiar topic about transition in life emerged. She initiated it and talked about her own. The topic was mainly about life, vision, and role. We can live without exploring our inner worlds. We can move on with our titles—external titles. Because of a sense of lostness, we explore. I think it’s our basic instinct. We can live without asking, seeking, and exploring. If this is the case, we merely exist. We stop living. If we don’t pause and explore, one day human lostness will decompose our lives in terms of vocation, direction, and meaning. We are forever lost if we don’t explore and listen attentively. If we don’t listen, we live with our bodies without souls. “So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air” (1 Cor. 9:26).

Recently, we both realize that we explore our inner landscapes a lot more frequent than before. Perhaps, it’s true that we “settle”, and we don’t have to deal with the externals (e.g. relationship, work, etc…). When we are not fully preoccupied by the externals, we explore the internals.

After our dinner talk, I went back to my room and read the following by Thomas Merton. He wrote this letter to John Hunt on December 18, 1966.

“Thanks for your letter of the 13^th. All right, I am still open to all kinds of suggestions and even have one of my own…Let’s see how I can put it in a few words.

Say an article ‘Speaking Out for the Inside.’ An attempt to make people realize that life can have an interior dimension of depth and awareness which is systematically blocked by our habitual way of life, all concentrated on externals. The poverty of a life fragmented and dispersed in ‘things’ and built on a superficial idea of the self and its relation to what is outside and around it. Importance of freedom from the routines and illusions which keep us subject to things, dependent on what is outside us. The need to open up an inner freedom and vision, which is found in relatedness to something in us which we don’t really know. This is not just the psychological unconscious. It is much more than that. Tillich called it the ground of our being. Traditionally it is called “God,” but images and ideas of the deity do not comprehend it. What is it?

The real inner life and freedom of man begin when this inner dimension opens up and man lives in communion with the unknown within him. On the basis of this he can also be in communion with the same unknown in others. How to describe it? Impossible to describe it. Is it real? People like William James ‘scientifically’ verified its reality at least as a fact of experience in many lives. The appetite for Zen, etc., reflects a need for this. What is Zen? What about LSD? What can one do? And with some observations on the tragic effects of neglect on this: possibly our society will be wrecked because it is completely taken up with externals and has no grasp on this inner dimension of life.

That is rather tough, and it will demand a lot of your readers. My suggestion is: frankly admit the toughness and unpalatableness of the subject and treat it as it is. Some may be hit hard, most will remain indifferent” [Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters. Edited by William H. Shannon and Christine M. Bochen (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2008), pp. 189-190.].

“Some may be hit hard, most will remain indifferent.”