A few moments with Merton

The following is from one of the books I am currently (re)reading, Thomas Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation:

"It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say 'no' on occasion to his natural bodily appetites. No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiousity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person. He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse. Therefore his mind and his will are not fully his own. They are under the power of his appetites. And through the medium of his appetites, they are under the cnotrol of those who gratify his appetites. Just because he can buy one brand of whisky rather than another, this man deludes himself that he is making a choice; but the fact is that he is a devout servant of a tyrannical ritual. He must reverently buy the bottle, take it home, unwrap it, pour it out for his friends, watch TV, 'feel good,' talk his silly uninhibited head off, get angry, shout, fight and go to bed in disgust with himself and the world. This become a kind of religious compulsion without which he cannot convince himself that he is really alive, really 'fulfilling his personality.' He is not 'sinning' but simply making an ass of himself, deluding himself that he is real when his compulsions have reduced him to a shadow of a genuine person." - pgs. 85-6