The final quotation for the Merton series comes from his Zen and the Birds of Appetite. A longer term project I have is to write a tract/book on comparative apophatic spiritual practice. This quotation seems to fit perfectly for that project.
“...let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man. It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division. Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely nonobjective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not ‘consciousness of’ but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such disappears.
Posterior to this immediate experience of a ground which transcends experience, emerges the subject with its self-awareness. But, as the Oriental religions and Christian mysticism have stressed, this self-aware subject is not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity. Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate, learns to function not as its own center but ‘from God’ and ‘for others.’ The Christian term ‘from God’ implies what the nontheistic religious philosophies conceive as a hypothetical Single Center of all beings, what T.S. Elliot called ‘the still point of the turning world,’ but which Buddhism for example visualizes not as ‘point’ but as ‘Void.’ (And of course the Void is not visualized at all.)
In brief, this form of consciousness assumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self which is its own justification and its own center. Here the individual is aware of himself as a self-to-be-dissolved, in self-giving, in love, in ‘letting-go,’ in ecstasy, in God – there are many ways of phrasing it.
The self is not its own center and does not orbit around itself; it is centered on God, the one center of all, which is ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ in whose all are encountered, from whom all proceed. Thus from the very start this consciousness is disposed to encounter ‘the other’ with whom it is already united anyway ‘in God.’”