I am currently reading Thomas Merton's book, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Early in the book, the following passage caught my attention:
The first thing that you have to do, before you even start thinking about such a thing as contemplation, is to try to recover your basic natural unity, to reintegrate your compartmentalized being into a coordinated and simple whole and learn to live as a unified human person. This means that you have to bring back together the fragments of your distracted existence so that when you say "I," there is really someone present to support the pronoun you have uttered.Of course, as I am a psychosynthesist, this is a wonderful and exciting statement! And, to think that he originally wrote this in 1959; the manuscript was only slightly revised in 1968. Roberto Assagioli wrote Psychosynthesis in 1965. The centerpiece of Assagioli's book is his emphasis on discovery/recovery of the "I," which is the "center of consciousness and will" and the person's conscious connection with the "higher self" (the soul).
Psychosynthesis is a wonderful prelude or accompaniment to a life oriented to contemplation. If you are interested, see my psychosynthesis blog at http://soulmakingjoyfarm.blogspot.com/ or see the Association for the Advancement of Psychosynthesis web site at www.aap-psychosynthesis.org
Photo: NASA, "the Eye of God" from the Hubble telescope
