The contemplative way requires a renunciation of the will to power.

"We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation and contemplation are of utmost importance in America today. The contemplative way requires first of all and above all the renunciation of an obsession with the triumph of the individual or collective will to power. For this aggressive and self-assertive drive to possess and to exert power implies a totally different view of reality than that which is seen when one travels the contemplative way. We have an instinctive need for harmony and peace, for tranquility, order and meaning. None of these seem to be the most salient characteristics of modern society. We would like to be quiet, but our restlessness will not allow it. Hence we believe that for us there can be no peace except in a life filled with movement and activity, with speech, news, communication, distraction. We seek the meaning of our life in activity for its own sake, the service of the machine as an end in itself. The reason for this inner confusion and conflict is that our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very Ground of Being."

Thomas Merton

Photos: Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 28-30, 2015

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