“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ~Thomas Merton

And we do it with every self-centered breath…

“I cannot perceive my own true identity, or my union with spirit, because my awareness is clouded and obstructed by a certain activity that I am now engaged in. And that activity, although known by many different names, is simply the activity of contracting and focusing awareness on my individual self or personal ego. My awareness is not open, relaxed, and God-centered, it is closed, contracted, and self-centered.” ~The Simple Feeling Of Being by Ken Wilber

“We must remember that this superficial ‘I’ is not our real self. It is our ‘individuality’and our ’empirical self’ but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God… It is at best the venture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown ‘self’ whom most of us never discover until we are dead…

Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this ‘I’ is really ‘not I’ and the awakening of the unknown ‘I’ that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapable of commenting upon itself…

Hell can be described as a perpetual alienation from our true being, our true self, which is in God.” ~from New Seeds Of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Fr. Thomas Keating on transcending the ego through the practice of Christian Contemplation.

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