Thomas Merton Quotes

There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.

We are the universe pretending to be individuals.

I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

I do not conceive of any reality at all as without genuine unity.

I think the answer of course is that space and time are not these hard external objects. Again we're, scientists have been building from one side of nature (physics) without considering the other side (life in consciousness). Neither side exists without the other. They cannot be divorced from one another or else there is no reality.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.

You are the universe, you aren't in the universe.

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

If you're trained in metaphysics, you don't see the world as distinct from yourself. You are one with the world.

I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.

I think one has to understand, not as a theory, not as a speculative, entertaining concept, but rather as an actual fact - that we are the world and the world is us. The world is each one of us; to feel that, to be really committed to it and to nothing else, brings about a feeling of great responsibility and an action that must not be fragmentary, but whole.

And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.

In so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

In death, as in sleep, I am all things.

There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only/ eyes in all heads,/ to be looked out of.

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

We are the gods of the atoms that make up ourselves but we are also the atoms of the gods that make up the universe.

You think of yourself as an "individual person", with a unique and separate mind. You think you are born and you think you die. All your life you feel separate and alone. Sometimes desperately so. You fear death because you fear the loss of individuality. All this is an illusion. You, he, she, those things around you living or not, the stars and galaxies, the empty space in between- these are not distinct, separate objects. All is fundamentally entangled.

The world is not divided into two types of being, one superior and the other merely surrounding it. Being, nature, the universe - they are all one infinitely complex and mysterious metaorganism of which we are but a part, though a unique one.

It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all.