Entersection

What is alienation, and what is an alienated person, and what are the results of alienation? Alienation is the psychological condition of somebody who is never allowed to be fully himself. For example, in the social order a slave is an alienated person because he does not belong to himself. His work is not his own. There is no real personal meaning to his life, because everything he does belongs to somebody else. Anything can be taken away at any moment.

Transfer that obvious example to a person who is never able to be himself because he is always dominated by somebody else’s ideas or somebody else’s tastes or somebody else’s saying that this is the way to act and this is the way to see things. We live in a society in which many people are alienated in that sense without realizing it. Their choices are made for them, they don’t really have ideas and desires of their own; they simply repeat what has been told them. And yet they think that they are making free choices, and to some extent maybe they are.

What happens to a person in this condition is that, without realizing it, he does not have any real respect for himself. He thinks that he has ideas and he thinks he is doing what he freely wants to do, but actually he is being pushed around, and this results in a sort of resentment, which in turn leads to hatred and violence under a cover of respectability. This is the problem of our world, psychologists tell us. People feel inner tensions and violence and hatred, and they are ready to explode at any moment because they don’t really belong to themselves.
— Thomas Merton in Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters, (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1989), p. 74.

God knows us from within ourselves, not as objects, not as strangers, not as intimates, but as our own selves. His knowledge of us is the pure light of which our own self-knowledge is only a dim reflection. He knows us in Himself, not merely as images of something outside Him, but as “selves” in which His own self is expressed. He finds Himself more perfectly in us than we find ourselves.

He alone holds the secret of a charity by which we can love others not only as we love ourselves, but as He loves them. The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Can this be charity?
— Thomas Merton in No Man Is an Island, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003), p. 168. Originally published (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).

In dealing with symbolism one enters an area where reflection, synthesis, and contemplation are more important than investigation, analysis, and science. One cannot comprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one’s own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as “sacrament” and “presence.”… The true symbol does not merely point to some hidden object. It contains in itself a structure which in some way makes us aware of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. A true symbol takes us to the center of the circle, not to another point on the circumference. A true symbol points to the very heart of all being, not to an incident in the flow of becoming.
— Thomas Merton, in his essay “Symbolism: Communication or Communion?” in the posthumously published collection Love and Living, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, 2002 edition, p. 54. Cited by Dr. Charles T. Davis of Appalachian State University in “How Others Read the Bible” (not currently available online).

Descartes made a fetish out of the mirror in which the self finds itself. Zen shatters it.
— Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander