People who know know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world.
They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.
They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men.
They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division but in unity, for we are "members one of another."
The man who lives in division is not a person but only an "individual."
—Thomas Merton,
New Seeds of Contemplation
(Boston, MA: Shambala Publications, Inc, 2003, 1961, pp.49-50)
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