To assume that my superficial ego — this cramp of the imagination — is my real self is to begin by dishonoring myself and reality. Then I am left with a choice between a servile adjustment that submits to facts and manipulates my ego-concept to defend it against subversion by the facts, or else a rebellious attitude which denies the facts and tries to flout them, again in the interests of the ego-Image.
“Adjustment” becomes a constant play of ‘”yes” and “no,” an organized system of ambivalences, circling around one central ambivalence — a relative and contingent ego-image trying to constitute itself as an absolute. Here what we first intend as an absolute “yes” becomes inexorably an absolute “no.” But our life continues as a more and more desperate struggle to keep ourselves in focus as an affirmation not as a negation.
Such a project is simply and utterly futile.
We must go back to the beginning. What beginning? The beginning of our thought? Or the real beginning which we cannot reach, which is too close to ourselves to be seen? How can we ever “go back” to it? Back where? The beginning is now.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 267-268
