A Great Question

Must the contemplative leave the world?

The desert or the marketplace: whether the life of contemplation requires withdrawal, or is to be lived in the midst of ordinary life.

Framing

Contemplatives have often left the world: the desert fathers, the hermits of India and China, the monks and nuns of every tradition. Withdrawal gives silence, discipline and freedom from distraction, and many teachers have said that the inner life cannot grow without it. Yet the same traditions also teach that the goal is not to escape the world but to see it truly, and that the fruit of contemplation is a return, in compassion and service.

The question has become sharper in modern times, when few can or will enter a monastery, and when some of the most influential contemplatives have lived and written in the midst of ordinary life, work and politics. Is withdrawal a stage, a calling for some, or a mistake? Can attention and prayer be practised in a factory, a school or a marketplace?

The perspectives below range from the monastery to the street.

Perspectives

Voices from several traditions, each in its own terms. They are set side by side to be compared, not ranked.

Christian Mysticism, Thomas Merton
Scholarship
Merton entered a monastery to leave the world, and found there that the contemplative is bound to it more deeply: solitude reveals the true self, which is one with others, and calls the monk to speak against violence and injustice.
Sources: New Seeds of Contemplation
Christian Mysticism, Simone Weil
Scholarship
Weil stayed outside the cloister and the Church, among workers and the afflicted; attention, the substance of prayer, can be practised in school studies and factory work, and the love of one’s neighbour is an implicit love of God.
Sources: Waiting on God; Gravity and Grace
Sufism, Junayd of Baghdad
Scholarship
The mystic passes away in God and then returns, sober, to live in the world through God; the highest state is not ecstasy apart but this remaining, outwardly ordinary, inwardly with God.
Sources: The Life, Personality and Writings of al-Junayd; The Kashf al-Maḥjúb
Zen
Scholarship
In the ten ox-herding pictures, the seeker tames the ox of the mind, forgets both ox and self in emptiness, and in the last picture returns to the marketplace with open hands, indistinguishable from ordinary people.
Comparative mysticism, J. Krishnamurti
Scholarship
No retreat, method or authority is needed: awareness of what is, in the midst of daily relationships, is the whole of meditation, and escape from life is only another movement of the self.
Sources: The First and Last Freedom

Reflect

Where in your ordinary day could contemplation already take place?

Cite this entry

Chicago (bibliography): “Must the contemplative leave the world?” Question. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/questions/must-the-contemplative-leave-the-world.
Chicago (note): “Must the contemplative leave the world?” question, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/questions/must-the-contemplative-leave-the-world.
MLA: “Must the contemplative leave the world?” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/questions/must-the-contemplative-leave-the-world.
BibTeX: @misc{questions-must-the-contemplative-leave-the-world, title = {{Must the contemplative leave the world?}}, howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society}, note = {Question. Last modified November 7, 2026}, year = {2026}, url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/questions/must-the-contemplative-leave-the-world} }

Must the contemplative leave the world?

Framing

Perspectives

Christian Mysticism, Thomas Merton

Christian Mysticism, Simone Weil

Sufism, Junayd of Baghdad

Zen

Comparative mysticism, J. Krishnamurti

Reflect

Concepts involved

Traditions

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Authors