The root of personality is to be sought in the “true Self” which is manifested in the basic unification of consciousness in which subject and object are one. Hence the highest good is “the self’s fusion with the highest reality.” Human personality is regarded as the force which effects this fusion. The hopes and desires of the external, individual self are all, in fact, opposed to this higher unity. They are centered on the affirmation of the individual. It is only at the point where the hopes and fears of the individual self are done away with and forgotten “that the true human personality appears.” In a word, realization of the human personality in this highest spiritual sense is for us the good toward which all life is to be oriented.
Thomas Merton
Zen and the Birds of Appetite, p. 69
