The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation

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HarperSanFrancisco, 2003 - 176 páginas
"Thomas Merton's final book explores the meaning and daily practice of contemplation - the heart of monastic and religious experience. This is his most comprehensive work on the subject. And now, the Merton Legacy Trust has decided to produce this expertly edited treatment, which Merton was finishing at the time of his death. The Inner Experience is a major addition to the Merton canon." "Faithfully edited by Merton scholar William H. Shannon, The Inner Experience bridges Merton's early, thoroughly Catholic works on contemplation with his later, wide-ranging writings This book signals his growing interest in Eastern, especially Buddhist, traditions of meditation and spirituality, which would significantly influence his thinking and writing in the last decade of his life."--BOOK JACKET.

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Acerca del autor (2003)

Born in France, Thomas Merton was the son of an American artist and poet and her New Zealander husband, a painter. Merton lost both parents before he had finished high school, and his younger brother was killed in World War II. Something of the ephemeral character of human endeavor marked all his works, deepening the pathos of his writings and drawing him close to Eastern, especially Buddhist, forms of monasticism. After an initial education in the United States, France, and England, he completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University. His parents, nominally friends, had given him little religious guidance, and in 1938, he converted to Roman Catholicism. The following year he received an M.A. from Columbia University and in 1941, he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where he remained until a short time before his death. His working life was spent as a Trappist monk. At Gethsemani, he wrote his famous autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" (1948); there he labored and prayed through the days and years of a constant regimen that began with daily prayer at 2:00 a.m. As his contemplative life developed, he still maintained contact with the outside world, his many books and articles increasing steadily as the years went by. Reading them, it is hard to think of him as only a "guilty bystander," to use the title of one of his many collections of essays. He was vehement in his opposition to the Vietnam War, to the nuclear arms race, to racial oppression. Having received permission to leave his monastery, he went on a journey to confer with mystics of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. He was accidentally electrocuted in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968.

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