Contemplation Quote by Thomas Merton

“Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones…

— Thomas Merton

“Contemplation, on the contrary, is the experiential grasp of reality as subjective, not so much “mine” (which would signify “belonging to the external self”)…

— Thomas Merton

“There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify…

— Thomas Merton

Self-contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit.

— Henry Ward Beecher

The Self is self-luminous without darkness and light, and is the reality which is self-manifest. Therefore, one should not think of it as this…

— Ramana Maharshi

The denial of "self" challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind-not the ordinary sense of ourself as a…

— Stephen Batchelor

“It is quite natural to think of the self as something concrete, but it is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is…

— Neel Burton

“Although we experience the ego as the continuing centre of our existence it is, in fact, merely the Self’s executive. ‘For indeed our consciousness…

— Anthony Stevens

“The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in living creatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human…

— Aldous Huxley

The Self then functions as a union of opposites and thus constitutes the most immediate experience of the Divine which it is psychologically possible…

— Carl Jung

The self cannot be self without other selves.

— Martin Luther King, Jr

“The naturalistic hypothesis that it’s the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent…

— Thomas W. Clark