Most of us know the feeling of wanting to be less separate, even if we don’t always notice it at first. Call it the wish for unity: the wish to stop being a separate self for a while. You feel it in a favorite song that dissolves the boundaries between thought and emotion, or in a conversation with a partner or close friend where the words just flow and you can’t remember who said what. We may reach for it in smaller moments too: the drink that loosens our guard, the prayer that stops watching itself, or the long run where the noisy everyday self finally goes quiet. These are everyday ways we loosen the sense of separateness, which is what this piece explores.

Some people see this wish for unity as a weakness, a kind of escape or avoidance. Sometimes that’s true. But even avoidance can be protective and help us cope with real pain. It’s important to recognize that pain. Often, the urge to disappear comes from a deeper fear: that being separate and alone is all there is, and that real connection might not be possible. But I think there’s more to it. Deep down, we know we are connected, not just despite our differences, but because of them. In daily life, we can feel scattered, like we’re pretending or wearing a mask. Wanting to take off that mask isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a way to be more real.

In my practice, this need to move beyond the mask, beyond the role, is one of the most common things people bring to therapy. Sometimes it is what brings them in.

This is where two very different people, a Jewish philosopher and a Catholic monk, began their most important work. They didn’t start with answers, but with a strong pull toward unity.

The self that doesn’t hold

The search for unity comes from a deep need to move past the limits of our everyday selves. Our ordinary self can be confusing, always trying to please others, feeling that we never quite “meet the mark,” falling apart under stress, and changing depending on who we’re with. Merton’s name for the deepest version of this was the false self: “an illusory person,” the self that “wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love,” and one that, on his account, each of us is born with. “I was born in a mask,” he wrote.¹

When you see yourself this way, wanting unity doesn’t seem like wishful thinking; it feels like a way to be rescued. If being separate causes all this inner conflict, then it makes sense to want to move beyond it, past the divisions and noise, into something whole. That’s the pull of unity. It’s not a foolish wish; it comes from understanding the problem. The real mistake, if there is one, is in how we try to solve it.

Buber and the pull of ecstasy

As a young man, Martin Buber was drawn to mysticism: the search for a direct, personal experience of the divine or the absolute, something that goes beyond the usual limits of the self. His childhood had already taught him what separateness feels like. When Buber was three, his parents suddenly separated, and his mother left, in his biographer Paul Mendes-Flohr’s words, “without bidding him farewell.”² Buber remembered standing on a balcony with a neighbor’s daughter who told him, “No, she will never come back.” He stayed silent, but “cherished no doubt of the truth of the spoken words.” The moment “remained fixed in me,” he wrote, and years later he coined a word for that kind of failure: Vergegnung, “mismeeting,” “the failure of a real meeting between men.”³ He was raised mostly by his grandparents, in a home full of Jewish learning. In Mendes-Flohr’s account, it was Paula Winkler, the woman he would marry, “a student of Indian religions, who first evoked his interest in mysticism.”²

It’s easy to see why mysticism was so appealing. If being an individual makes us feel alone, then moments that go beyond that can feel comforting, like coming home. In a 1901 essay on Boehme, Buber put the mystic’s starting problem bleakly: “The world remains an enigma that affects one, and yet is forever distant and alien. The individual is consumed in mute, hopeless loneliness.”⁴ Early on, he longed for a unity where the hard edges of the self would soften and fade away, even if just for a while.

Mendes-Flohr argues that the questions Buber’s mature philosophy would answer were already taking shape “while still in his youth.”⁴ One clue is a line Buber quoted in that same 1901 essay, from the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach: “man with man – the unity of I and you (Ich und Du) – is God.” As Buber noted, Feuerbach wanted that unity to rest on “the reality of the difference between I and you,” which points toward where Buber would end up, though he later called Feuerbach’s sentence itself “a pseudo-mystical construction.” The young Buber welcomed the line; Feuerbach, he wrote, “confirmed and supplemented” Boehme. Then, directly after Feuerbach’s point about difference, comes the turn. “Today, however,” he wrote, “we are closer to Boehme than to the teachings of Feuerbach, to the feelings of Saint Francis of Assisi, who called trees, birds and stars his siblings, and even closer to Vedanta.”

The three he named are not alike, but in 1901 Buber heard them together. The German mystic Jakob Boehme taught, in Mendes-Flohr’s summary, that each person makes a path to “a unity with the upper world”; as as the Buber scholar Laurence Silberstein reads Buber’s essay, Boehme “denied any sharp distinction between human beings and the rest of the universe.”⁵ Vedanta, as Mendes-Flohr glosses it, is the Hindu teaching that the separate, individual world is only “a veil of maya,” an illusion “fraught with pain.” Francis’s kinship with creation fit that picture: Buber placed him beside Boehme. I read Francis differently. His Canticle of the Creatures names no trees or birds, so it may not be the Francis Buber had in mind, but in it each creature is named in its own character as God is praised through it: Brother Sun is “beautiful and radiant,” Sister Water “humble and precious,” Brother Fire “playful and robust and strong.”⁶ Siblings are distinct beings who belong to one another, which sounds closer to Feuerbach’s “reality of the difference” than to Vedanta. In 1901, though, Buber still preferred, in Silberstein’s words, “Boehme’s concept of the underlying unity of creation.”⁵ He would keep that kinship with the natural world. What changed, Silberstein argues, is that in relation “the integrity and concreteness of the individual is preserved.”⁵ In Mendes-Flohr’s account, Feuerbach’s influence “remained dormant” through a “mystical gestation of some fifteen years.”⁷ Looking back in the foreword to Pointing the Way, Buber called that period “a stage that I had to pass through before I could enter into an independent relationship with being.”⁸

On Mendes-Flohr's reading, the unity he sought back then remained a private experience: a self turning inward, not really meeting anything outside itself. Grete Schaeder reads it differently: his ecstasy, she argues, came not from "absorption in God" but from "an intensified elementary relation-phenomenon." He built this early thinking on the German word Erlebnis, meaning “lived experience.” Of the several influences on his mysticism, Mendes-Flohr calls his teacher Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of Erlebnis “the most seminal,” though Buber used it in his own way.⁷ But he later realized that Erlebnis kept the self at the center, even when it claimed to dissolve it. In the same foreword, he described the mystic’s ecstasy as “the experience of an exclusive and all-absorbing unity of his own self.” In those “higher hours,” he wrote, “the great dialogue between I and Thou is silent; nothing else exists than his self.” And his verdict: "That is certainly an exalted form of being untrue, but it is still being untrue." His conclusion: "Being true to the being in which and before which I am placed is the one thing that is needful."⁸ His idea of meeting, as he put it, arose “out of the criticism of the concept of Erlebnis, to which I adhered in my youth, hence, out of a radical self-correction.”⁹ Meeting is where this series will go next.

Merton and the pull of withdrawal

Thomas Merton arrived at the lure from a different door. His was renunciation. His mother, Ruth, died of cancer in October 1921, when he was six. His father, Owen, an artist, died of a brain tumor in January 1931, less than two weeks before Merton turned sixteen.¹⁰ Years of drift followed: a visit to Italy in 1933, a year at Cambridge that he left in 1934, and then Columbia University in New York. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1938.¹¹

By the time the restless young man arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, on December 10, 1941, at twenty-six,¹¹ he had made what Carr calls “an experience of dramatic conversion from the self to God, from the ‘world’ to the monastery.”¹² If the everyday self is mostly costume, the monastery promised a place to finally take it off.

In the monastery, Merton described the spiritual journey as leaving things behind. Carr finds the pattern in both Seeds of Contemplation and its 1961 revision: preparation for contemplation “demands intense prayer and withdrawal from the ordinary desires, conflicts, and the relationships of everyday life in a single-minded focus on God.”¹² At this point, contemplation seemed like a process of taking things away: removing the noise and distractions around the false self, trusting that something true would remain.

Buber and Merton used different words, but both felt the same deep longing: to escape the isolated self, even before they knew what they would find on the other side. The parallel is more than a shared feeling, though. It is a shared shape. Each came to see his first answer as something to move beyond, not a destination. Buber, as we saw, called his mystical years “a stage that I had to pass through.” For Merton, the early focus on leaving things behind was at its starkest in Seeds of Contemplation (1949), and his own view of that book was mixed. When it appeared, he wrote that it lacked “warmth and human affection,” though, Carr adds, he “was glad that it had been written”; in 1961 he said it had been written “in a kind of isolation.” The 1961 revision, New Seeds of Contemplation, is in Anne E. Carr’s words “less absolute, elitist, severe,” and it “removes all suggestion that other people represent a danger to contemplative union with God.”¹²

Carr calls Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander “the real textual turning point.”¹² One of its most often remarked passages records a day in Louisville, March 18, 1958, when Merton stood on a street corner and was “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs.” It was, he wrote, “like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.”¹³ She also calls the Louisville vision “central” to the turn, but she adds a caution. She quotes Merton’s biographer Michael Mott, for whom it was “not any moment of vision in the streets of Louisville that changed Merton’s orientation entirely, but the gradual working out of the deep and disturbing themes in Hagia Sophia,” a prose poem Merton wrote in the same period, and she notes that the new realization did not end Merton’s solitude but “intensifies it”: his solitude came to belong to others.¹²

An earlier experience was inward in a different way. In 1933, on his second visit to Rome, Merton felt one night that his dead father “was there with me,” a presence “as vivid and as real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.” What followed was “a sudden and profound insight into the misery and corruption of my own soul,” and, he wrote, “I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray.” By his own account he did not hold on to it: “If I had only followed it through, my life might have been very different.”¹⁴

Buber moved from mystical absorption to meeting; Merton, on Carr’s reading, moved from “the self of pious withdrawal” toward a solitude that belonged to others.¹² The parallel is mine, not Carr’s, and it has limits, which later parts of this series will take up.

The problem hiding in the solution

There’s a catch, though, and it’s why this piece is only part one of five. Buber named it outright. Merton, in 1949, described the same ground from the other side: for him the trouble was not that the self might vanish but that it had not yet. One remains far from God, Carr summarizes, because, in Merton’s words, “there are always two of you.”¹⁵ Buber called his own early mistake a kind of absorption: the self swallowing the world rather than meeting it. Merton’s early frame was subtraction: strip enough away, and what’s left will be true. These are two failures of meeting, coming from opposite directions. Buber’s mystic swells until “nothing else exists than his self,” and loses the knowledge, “This is my self, distinguished and separate from every other self.”⁸ The 1949 Merton, taken at his word, lets the self disappear into God until there is “nothing left of any significance but God living in God.”¹⁵ Either way, there is no longer a separate self.

If you take either approach too far, it stops fixing the problem of feeling fragmented. If the goal is to dissolve the separate self entirely (to merge, to vanish into the whole), then the very thing that could have entered a genuine relationship is lost. You can’t meet anyone if there’s no you left to do the meeting. Taken to its end, the cure for a fragmented self quietly erases the self it was meant to help.

But Buber and Merton didn’t stay stuck there. They spent their lives learning to seek unity differently. For Buber, that meant meeting: a unity that brings you and another together while keeping your differences real. Merton’s path is less tidy. He kept the language of losing the self in God, and in New Seeds he still writes that way: "I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself."¹ And he came to insist that a self must first be its own: “The lover is able to give himself completely to another precisely because he is his own to give.”¹⁶ As I read them, both got there by taking the desire for unity seriously rather than dismissing it. We’ll explore what each did with it next.

My Take

Wanting to merge or disappear is rarely the real problem. It’s a sign, a way of saying that the self someone lives in feels fake, empty, or even unbearable. Ignoring or shaming this longing misses the deeper need for connection and unity through our differences, which is central to being human.

I think the real task is to notice this wish and stay open to it, instead of trying to talk someone out of it. When we do this and understand its purpose, we find it’s not really about disappearing. It’s about connection: about being fully yourself with someone else, which is very different from merging or vanishing. But that’s a topic for later. For now, if you’ve ever wanted to stop feeling like a separate self, you’re in very good company, and your wish is wiser than it seems.

Go Deeper

  • The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton: the early, withdrawal-shaped Merton in his own voice; you can watch the lure of unity operating on a brilliant, restless young man.
  • I and Thou by Martin Buber: not where he starts but where he lands; worth meeting now so you can feel, later, how far he traveled from ecstasy.
  • Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent by Paul Mendes-Flohr: the definitive biography, and the best guide to how the young mystic became the philosopher of dialogue.

References

  1. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1972 printing, New Directions Paperbook 337; first published 1961), 33–34, 37.
  2. Paul Mendes-Flohr, Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent (New Haven: Yale University Press, Jewish Lives series), ch. 1, “A Motherless Child,” 1 (his mother’s departure), 4–5 (his grandparents), 12 (Paula and mysticism).
  3. Martin Buber, “Autobiographical Fragments,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967), 3–4.
  4. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “The Sanctification of the Everyday,” Filozofia 78, no. 7 (2023): 511–32, at 511, 514 (quoting Buber, “Über Jakob Boehme,” first published in Wiener Rundschau 5, no. 12 [15 June 1901]; Mendes-Flohr cites Martin Buber Werkausgabe, vol. 2.1, ed. D. Groiser [Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017], 70–74). On the 1901 passage as Buber’s account of Boehme’s “fundamental problem,” see Silberstein (note 5), 40.: On Buber's later judgment of Feuerbach's sentence, see Grete Schaeder, The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber, trans. Noah J. Jacobs (Wayne State University Press, 1973), 61.
  5. Laurence J. Silberstein, Martin Buber’s Social and Religious Thought: Alienation and the Quest for Meaning (New York: New York University Press, 1989), ch. 1, 40, and 275 n. 69; ch. 4, 134.
  6. Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of the Creatures,” English text as published by Via di Francesco Firenze–La Verna (translator not named), viadifrancescofirenzelaverna.it, accessed October 14, 2026.
  7. Mendes-Flohr, "The Sanctification of the Everyday," 514–15; for a different reading, Schaeder (note 4), 93.
  8. Martin Buber, foreword to Pointing the Way: Collected Essays, trans. and ed. Maurice Friedman (New Jersey/London: Humanities Press International), ix–x. The foreword is dated Jerusalem, June 1957. Buber’s own verdict on Erlebnis is in “Replies to My Critics” (note 9).
  9. Martin Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” in Schilpp and Friedman, The Philosophy of Martin Buber, 711–12.
  10. Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 20 (Ruth Merton’s death, October 3, 1921), 55–56 (Owen Merton’s death and burial); causes of death from “Chronology,” Thomas Merton Center, merton.org/chrono.aspx (accessed October 13, 2026).
  11. “Chronology,” Thomas Merton Center, merton.org/chrono.aspx (accessed October 13, 2026).
  12. Anne E. Carr, A Search for Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton’s Theology of the Self (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), ch. 1, “Seeds of the Self,” 26, 27, 33; ch. 3, “Conjectures at a Turning Point,” 57, 58 (quoting Michael Mott, Author’s Response in “Review Symposium,” Horizons 12, no. 1 [Spring 1985]: 158), 59; and ch. 6, “The Story of the Self,” 134.
  13. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Image Books, 1968), 156–57. The date is from Merton’s journal entry of March 18, 1958, in A Search for Solitude.
  14. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948; Harvest/HBJ paperback, 1978), 107, 111–12.
  15. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1949), as quoted in Carr, A Search for Wisdom and Spirit, 25.
  16. Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, as quoted in Carr, A Search for Wisdom and Spirit, 101.

This is the first part of a five-part series about Buber and Merton, two thinkers who began with the same longing and spent their lives turning it into something deeper. This topic is also central to the book I’m working on. Next time, I’ll explore why Buber eventually turned away from the very fusion he once sought.

Revised October 2026: sources rechecked against the texts.