INTERIORITY

A UNIVERSAL SEARCH FOR CONTEMPLATIVE EXPERIENCE

Abstract

A universal yearning for contemplative experience is discernible in the contemporary search for divine depth or interiority in the human person. Religionists and psychologists speak about it in order to combat the growing human stress, alienation and superficiality. Though this inner depth is man's innermost reality, what Ira Progoff said is right and significant. "In Freud's victorian age, the aweful secret that nobody wanted to talk about was sex. Today the aweful secret is spirituality. People today will discuss anything but that inner self. "l The lack of intimacy with one's self and consequently with others, is what created the loneliest and most alienated people in the world. Hence they do not want to talk about their inner life, but they are actually very much involved in a search for meaning, intimacy and inner peace. This search and process of growth, however, is one from within the human person, essentially an inward process. Any inward looking tendency with a goal of personal growth and inner peace has a contempoative dimension, we maintain. It is this dimension that we want to develop and promote in this article as the new contemplative trend in the religious and secutar world of today.