Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton has much to say about what some zennists have termed the "recondite host" that is to be [i]realised/known[/i] beneath all our conditionings of time and place, conditionings we can end up killing and dying for. Zen seeks our "original face before we were born."

This not really to displace or erode our day to day self, but more to redeem it, to allow such self its proper place. All religion speaks of the unity of the transitory with the eternal. It can be a life adventure to discover that unity.

Merton explores such themes by contrasting the "modern" Cartesian self with other ways of seeing. Descartes famous "I think therefore I am" which has become much of a bedrock of modern thought, perhaps presumed or assumed too much. Perhaps it should just be "Thought"? Presuming an "I" that has the thoughts, therefore creating a dualism, could well be a step too far, at least as a [i]beginning[/i] to constructing a worldview.

Whatever, this cartesian self has led in part to the rampant individualism so prevalent in the West, where self enclosed units of selfhood each seeks to create a persona, a self, as a suitable case for dealing with the world, to display, to sport with.........to judge all others from. Or pass some sort of presumed "test" set by the Almighty!

Merton suggests an alternative form of "Being", but first he speaks of the consequences of cartesian thought for the concept of God:-

[i]Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later “dies,” because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will.
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Then Merton suggests an alternative:-

[i]Meanwhile, let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man. It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division. Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely nonobjective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not “consciousness of” but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such “disappears.”

Posterior to this immediate experience of a ground which transcends experience, emerges the subject with its self-awareness. But, as the Oriental religions and Christian mysticism have stressed, this self-aware subject is not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity. Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate, learns to function not as its own center but “from God” and “for others.” The Christian term “from God” implies what the nontheistic religious philosophies conceive as a hypothetical Single Center of all beings, what T. S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world,” but which Buddhism for example visualizes not as “point” but as “Void.” (And of course the Void is not visualized at all.)

In brief, this form of consciousness assumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self which is its own justification and its own center. Here the individual is aware of himself as a self-to-be-dissolved in self-giving, in love, in “letting-go,” in ecstasy, in God—there are many ways of phrasing it.

The self is not its own center and does not orbit around itself; it is centered on God, the one center of all, which is “everywhere and nowhere,” in whom all are encountered, from whom all proceed. Thus from the very start this consciousness is disposed to encounter “the other” with whom it is already united anyway “in God.”[/i]

(From an essay contained in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite")

From my Buddhist perspective the "self" that has come to be, more often than not, in our modern world, is inevitably prone to suffering (dukkha)

Our modern world seems to value "individualism", but as Merton points out, individualism should never be confused with "personalism". True, life giving personality is to be found in the “true Self”, in the unity of subject and object.

Merton again:- [i]Hence the highest good is the self’s fusion with the highest reality. Human personality is regarded as the force which effects this fusion. The hopes and desires of the external, individual self are all, in fact, opposed to this higher unity. They are centered on the affirmation of the individual. It is only at the point where the hopes and fears of the individual self are done away with and forgotten that the true human personality appears. In a word, realization of the human personality in this highest spiritual sense is for us the good toward which all life is to be oriented. It is even the absolute good, in so far as the human personality intimately and probably even essentially related to the personality of God.[/i]

Well, maybe enough. I waffle to find my own clarity. My time here in McDonalds with a white coffee is precious to me, helping me deal with my own problems and mental health issues. I'm "on call" for others in many ways, times which I also treasure, yet I value a certain solitude.

Reflecting upon the "different graces" and such, of Merton's insights into any book of meditations. There is a strong link to some words of the 13th century zen master Dogen, to be found in his "Genjokoan" (variously translated, but I like "The Actualisation of Reality")

Dogen's words:-

[i]Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization.[/i]

Living within a concrete, presumed "self" as the centre, I think we simply impose ourselves upon the world around us. We are virtually seeing a reflection. Yet "if a grain of wheat fall into the ground and dies", if we are "empty" and receptive, the grace of Reality can come to us, as it is, in and of itself. A constant advance into novelty. And although such can be thought of as passive, it is not so.

Correspondances can be found throughout our world of Faiths. The Christian mystic Meister Eckhart speaks of true obedience in his "Talks of Instructions".

Here is Eckhart:-

[i]In true obedience there should be no ‘I want this or that to happen’ or ‘I want this or that thing’ but only a pure going out of what is our own. And therefore in the very best kind of prayer that we can pray there should be no ‘give me this particular virtue or way of devotion’ or ‘yes, Lord, give me yourself or eternal life’, but rather ‘Lord, give me only what you will and do, Lord, only what you will and in the way that you will’. This kind of prayer is as far above the former as heaven is above earth. And when we have prayed in this way, then we have prayed well, having gone out of ourselves and entered God in true obedience. But just as true obedience should have no ‘I want this’, neither should it ever hear ‘I don’t want’, for ‘I don’t want’ is pure poison for all true obedience.[/i]

Seeking to distinguish between theism and non-theism seems often a pointless pursuit, at least within the mind/heart of experience.

The Great Way of the Hsin Hsin Ming:-

[i]The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When like and dislike are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail.[/i]

Anyway, as said elsewhere, I tend to waffle.

Getting back to the "different graces" found in Thomas Merton's words, for me Grace is fundamental. Understood on a wide spectrum - as a gift from "Him up there", to the insight that we do not attain emptiness but are empty from the very beginning (an insight drawn from a dialogue between Merton and D T Suzuki) Such a spectrum takes in all, from the most literally minded to the most "mystical", from those who live in an "I-Thou" relationship with the divine to those who can say "Not I, but Christ lives in me"

So grace is one, yet differentiated in how it manifests.

It also relates to the true prayer spoken of by Eckhart, which is more a giving up of ourselves, rather than making requests. More seeking to allow God/Reality to play in us, rather than playing God ourselves.

So we can plan and anticipate, have our techniques for "gaining" salvation/enlightenment, look for our own justifications, seek to make our "self" a suitable case for the receipt of any gift from the divine. Or actually seek to be receptive to what is given, when given. Not recognised or known until given. So always new, and not what we may have expected. Never ours, only ever to be reflected back into the world, as gift and grace to others. Shared but never divided.

May true Dharma continue.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.

A lovely little backwater here, far from the madding crowd. I was thinking of the great friendship between Thomas Merton and D. T. Suzuki, which flowered through the "spirit of all truth" in our world of division and conflict.

Merton, a Christian whose fidelity to Christ is unquestionable, once wrote this to Suzuki and said that the missionaries of our Western World should have approached the East truly in the spirit of Christ. Not to convert, but to learn, with the recognition that God is ever present in each and every heart.

[i]The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
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Merton went on to say:-

[i]I want to speak for this Western world.................which has in past centuries broken in upon you and brought you our own confusion, our own alienation, our own decrepitude, our lack of culture, our lack of faith...........If I wept until the end of the world, I could not signify enough of what this tragedy means. If only we had thought of coming to you to learn something..............If only we had thought of coming to you and loving you for what you are in yourselves, instead of trying to make you over into our own image and likeness. For me it is clearly evident that you and I have in common and share most intimately precisely that which, in the eyes of conventional Westerners, would seem to separate us. The fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk, far from separating us, makes us most like one another. How many centuries is it going to take for people to discover this fact?......
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(Possibly quoted before, but bears repetition)

Once when Merton escaped from under the monastery wall (😀) he met up with Suzuki in New York. Near the end of their conversation Merton quoted the words of a South American theologian:- "Praise be to God that I am not good!". Suzuki responded:- "That is so important".

Theistic language, yet Suzuki, a non-theist, saw through the "word as text" and had drunk from the Living Words of the spirit of all truth that [i]blows where it will[/i] - and not according to human understanding or reasoning.

In an essay contained in "Zen and the Birds of Appetite" Merton writes this of Suzuki:-

[i]Speaking for myself, I can venture to say that in Dr. Suzuki, Buddhism finally became for me completely comprehensible, whereas before it had been a very mysterious and confusing jumble of words, images, doctrines, legends, rituals, buildings, and so forth. It seemed to me that the great and baffling cultural luxuriance which has clothed the various forms of Buddhism in different parts of Asia is the beautiful garment thrown over something quite simple.[/i]

And further:-

[i]But I did feel that I was speaking to someone who, in a tradition completely different from my own, had matured, had become complete and found his way. One cannot understand Buddhism until one meets it in this existential manner, in a person in whom it is alive. Then there is no longer a problem of understanding doctrines which cannot help being a bit exotic for a Westerner, but only a question of appreciating a value which is self-evident.[/i]

Yes. A value that is self-evident. Self-evident at least to those whose mind/hearts truly share the [i]Living Word [/i]and have not been corrupted by the "word as text" and their own time conditioned understandings.

May true Dharma continue.
No blame. Be kind. Love everything.

Just time for another quote from Thomas Merton, this on "True Religion" drawn from his book "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander":-

(True religion is) ......[i]freedom from domination, freedom to live one's own spiritual life, freedom to seek the highest truth, unabashed by any human pressure or any collective demand, the ability to say one's own "yes" and one's own "no" and not merely to echo the "yes" and the "no" of state, party, corporation, army or system. This is inseparable from authentic religion. It is one of the deepest and most fundamental needs of the human person, perhaps the deepest and most crucial need of the human person as such.[/i]

To pad out this post, a while back I read a a book on Merton "The Monk's Record Player", sub-titled "Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966" written by Robert Hudson. I wrote a review of the book for Amazon:-

[i]For those who only know of Thomas Merton from random quotes on the so called "spiritual life", this book could come as something of a revelation. Hey, the "spiritual life" can be fun! Ethereal quotes can create in our minds a cloistered Merton, perhaps a Merton floating a few good inches off the ground as he drifts rather piously down silent monastery corridors. Here we have him in dalliance with a young nurse, a visitor of Jazz Clubs, even getting slightly pie-eyed on Jack Daniels before heading off late at night with Joan Baez to meet up with his loved one. They eventually abandoned the escapade half way there but it gives an element of Keystone Cops to Merton's monastic life.

Strange as it might sound, the whole story here is told without sensationalism, and with Bob Dylan thrown in for good measure, it makes for very entertaining reading.

Robert Hudson knows Merton well from his Journals and uses some of the entries here to set the scene and does so in a way that manages, in spite of all else, to give great depth to the story - even spiritual depth. And why not? All of us are contradictory and multi-layered, even if "all is transparent" or, as the zen master Dogen said:- "In all of the universe there is nothing that is hidden."

Dylan and Merton never actually met in person, but did meet in words and music. Merton would have loved some of his own poetic words set to music by Dylan, thinking that then they would actually have been sung with a modern prophetic spirit and not just forgotten and lost in the context of a hymn that "nobody would ever sing". Sad in very many ways.

As Bob Dylan wrote much later in "Every Grain of Sand":- "Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear". But who truly can distinguish the weeds from the flowers, or the indulgence from the true flowering of the spirit? As Thomas Merton once said, in one of his ethereal quotes, met with in pious books of "spiritual" homilies:- "Our real journey in life is interior: it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts." Yes, it is, and often it can all happen beyond our calculations.

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Well, that's it. Nobody actually reading this, but no matter.

Away from the Dinosaurs, back to another Reality.

Mentioning the relationship between Merton and Suzuki, I must mention also the very fine essay contained as Part Two of Merton's "Zen and the Birds of Appetite", the essay in fact a dialogue between the two called "Wisdom in Emptiness".

In this dialogue, for once Merton and Suzuki part company. In a very friendly way. The dialogue relates to the "Fall" and the recovery of paradise. For Suzuki this comes with the "homely self" and what can be called an eschatology of the present moment. In the "present", discarding linear time, we find eternity. It is enough.

In his book "The Inner Experience" Thomas Merton draws from "eastern" examples of the "inner experience" that does indeed find us once again "at home". The finding of our "homely self" , that which we have always been. Alas, once again for Merton this is not enough! "Theological faith" must step in and in some sense we must leave home once more and get beyond the inner self to an "awareness of God", apparently a "darkness". Really, I am lost once more!

Thomas Merton seeks in a sense to reach beyond "suchness" and the eschatology of the present moment (Suzuki) to speak of something more where our present moment is to be handed over to God to create something totally new. "It is to be the great, mysterious, theandric work of the Mystical Christ, the New Adam".

So homeliness and being in the present moment - coming back to where we started from "and knowing it for the first time" - is not enough. Something called "theological faith" must step in. Which seems, at least to me, to be superfluous, virtually bringing us back to the old and outer self of anticipations and epitaphs!

Much like some versions of a deep incarnational Christianity where after the dying to self and becoming "as Christ" some still insist upon the unique uniqueness of Jesus which sets Christianity apart from all the other (acknowledged) unique Religions/Faiths of our world. It all seems totally unnecessary. Each moment, each human being, is forever unique. Particular. Why stick a uniquely unique person on top as some "item of faith"? Why look to them?

Simply to mention my own Pure Land path, Faith (simple, homely, such as it is) is salvation itself. Of infinite potential. It has no conclusions, no [i]belief[/i] as such, and thus is open, receptive to the movements of Grace, Reality-as-is. A constant advance into novelty.

Back to Thomas Merton. In his book "New Seeds of Contemplation" he speaks of the purpose of any book of meditations:-

[i]The purpose of a book of meditations is not to teach you how to think and not to do your thinking for you. Consequently if you pick up such a book and simply read it through, you are wasting your time. As soon as any thought stimulates your mind or your heart you can put the book down because your meditation has begun. To think that you are somehow obliged to follow the author of the book to his own particular conclusion would be a great mistake. It may happen that his conclusion does not apply to you. God may want you to end up somewhere else. He may have planned to give you quite a different grace than the one the author suggests you might be needing[/i]

From my own Pure Land perspective, this advice can be applied not only to reading but to all life, as each moment unfolds in each and every day, this to get beyond a life only of "confirmation bias" and reactivity. Rather the way of [i]hakarai [/i] where things are [i]made to become so of themselves beyond our calculation[/i]. Which can be another way of seeing the NT verse from one of St Mark's Parables of the Kingdom:- "For the earth brings forth fruits of herself." Obviously it can also apply to reading any "holy" text, including the Bible. Not to read to have our specific doctrines confirmed or justified (a form of self-justification) but to remain open to new lessons.

In Pure Land the "dojo" (training ground) is not the meditation hall, but all life.

As said, I tend to favour the letters and Journals of Merton rather than the many published books. His books had to pass the censorship of his Church and so one never really knows what was perhaps his true approach to certain things.

When he first entered the monastery he was quite prepared to follow the "silence" of his chosen Order, the Trappists. But the powers that be decided to allow him to continue writing. Who knows their reasons? Possibly recognising the deep need Merton had to continue [i]finding himself[/i] in his words? Or maybe their eyes glinting at the possibility of a cash cow for the Church.......😀

Enough for now.

He was in Thailand when he died, living as a Buddhist monk. He was being taught a meditation technique that involved how to die, I forget what it's called but I think it's about how to leave your body through the top of your head. The monk who was teaching him was asked why that was the only thing he taught him. The monk said that was all there was time for. He could tell Thimas Merton was soon to be electrocuted (or possibly murdered).

So different from the dysangelists on here who think that by quoting Bible verses and threatening people, they will win converts. I'm pretty sure that their goal is just the opposite - to push people away from their religion out of a desire to feel superior.

Although virtually speaking to myself and seeking my own clarity of mind/heart, I do feel gratitude that others have taken the trouble to read some of this thread and respond.

Thank you.