Revolving Around A Lie

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.

- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

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The lie is not the truth. It is not our identity. It is not who we are. It is a not our true self.

By simply retaining our ability to choose is itself a selfishness. It does not matter whether our justifications for doing so grow out of a well-established tradition or of post-modernist independence. Without the ultimate and final act of fully emptying ourselves we will always be basing our understanding and acceptance of ourselves on creativities, which in the end are always only veiled, contextual, and by necessity incomplete moralisms.

It is this capacity to creatively develop and further these external standards out of one’s sense of belonging, or of mimicry, or in order to please, that isolates and alienates one from life itself. In doing so we seek to become our own infallible authorities, crawling into small dark crevices in the rocks where we can defend this pale, false, masked self.

Anyone who is honest and intelligent well knows that this strict internal control of one’s conscience is equally as present in traditional cultures as in the present day’s post-modern delusions of the self as well.

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We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, to appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it!

- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation