"Our Silent Selves"

"There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalise it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it. Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self.

We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalised noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available"- Thomas Merton.