‘How mistaken I was to make contemplation only a part of…life. For a contemplative his whole life is contemplation.’ Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience is the first complete, authorized edition of Thomas Merton’s final work. It was a manuscript he always intended to revise, but did not until 1968 when he incorporated brief but important ‘corrections and additions’ to the text. Drawing on his own Christian experience, as well as the Eastern writings and traditions that so significantly influenced him in the last decade of his life, Merton shows the expansive nature of contemplation; that contemplation is not simply a part of life, but the entirely of it. This, his last major work to be published, is vintage and vital Merton.