Thomas Merton

We have been for a long time stringing out Western civilization. We've been trying to do this in a very special way. We have been trying to do it by people and not by ideas. We've been doing it by human experience rather than ideas or doctrines about that experience. And we have worked our way to the United States, to our time, to our own lifetime, and we have found that the avalanche of meaning in history rests with our generation in this place at this time, that the motion of whatever meaning history has resides in our hands. Its privilege and its responsibility are here, and there's nobody to pass the buck on to. And we can think that there are other places in the world, there are other countries, there are other traditions that likewise have this destiny, but it isn't. So it's difficult because the first appraisal is that this must be egotistical or this must be chauvinistic, but we have, over the last six years, moving person to person, come to this point, not ideational, but because the movement of personal experience has arrived here. And the tragedy of our time is that we don't know it, or that we know it in some doctrinaire way, in some speculative way, which we sublimate or we repress or we amplify, but not really in just the bare situation. The last four individuals, now, to close out this series, to close out not only the year long investigation of the United States and its mystical tradition, but to close out also a whole movement of Western civilization. And next year, we're going to start from scratch, and we're going to go to the alternative civilization in China, which is the only other viable civilization on the planet.

But these last four American individuals form a group together, not by themselves. They were never a group together, but they're what Thomas Merton used to call a choir, that when there are certain deep affinities of purpose and insight among individuals, even if they don't know each other, they form a choir of harmony in the world, and that part of what human intelligence is, is to be able to recognize that these people and these people are affined to us. We belong together in some way. We don't know how or to what extent, but that we resonate together - kinship. What I used to call and probably still do, ‘spirit families.’ That there are people who belong together ties deeper than blood. And not just some modern version of a totemic clan, but the kind of sympathies of spirit that are there.

Now Merton and Black Elk and Khigh Dhiegh and A. E. van Vogt - these last four Americans are the poise of the whole movement of civilization in the West and of history in the United States, of human experience in this mode, bringing it to the edge. And if there's any kind of a choir among these four that they stand on the edge, the cutting edge of consciousness. That whatever is going to emerge, starting next year, and beginning to unfold in the 21st century, it's mysterious, nascent indications are somewhere in these four individuals, and they're all very peculiar Americans. They are not at all the kind of Americans that the stereotype would think of.

Thomas Merton is born in France. Black Elk is a Native American Indian. Khigh Dhiegh is born of Sudanese father and a Chinese mother, and van Vogt’s born in Canada. None of them are the normal, so-called normal, Americans, but they are representative of this late 20th century standing on the edge of consciousness, trying to discern what is the next step, and each of the four of them are going to present in their own way, that there is no next step, that all the steps in history have been taken, and that what is next is a leap of faith. And that's the only way we're going to get to the 21st century is by a leap of faith, because there is no more path. There's no more lighted way. The light of the hermetic candle doesn't show that there's any more steps. And it's this brinksmanship of spiritual quandary that is expressed by the Cold War, by the atomic standoff, by the nuclear so-called holocaust. It is a Hellenic expression of an interior spiritual crisis; that there is no more steps to take. There's only a leap of faith. And how are we going to make that leap of faith? And that's what these four individuals need to be scanned for. What is it? What is it? What is it?

Now, Merton was born in 1915, late in January, in the Pyrenees, and we could go through his biography and show how he had a tremendously vibrant, mischievous sort of a life and finally came to no good. Lying in the gutter, drunk and realizing that he had to do something with his life and decided to become a Trappist monk, and spent most of his life as a Trappist monk who ostensibly should have had a vow of silence. But the fact is, is that Merton, before he got into that, was an extraordinary poet. He is a great American poet. One of his works, which came out in 1947, called Figures for an Apocalypse, shows us the state of consciousness of somebody who's on the vanguard in the postwar world, when everyone else was having a good time. The poems were written in ‘46 and ‘47. The war is over. We've made the world safe for democracy again. The bad guys are vanquished. Now we can get back to having bebop dances on the weekends at the high school, and everybody can buy a New Plymouth or Chevy, and we can just go back and live life again, and it's going to be all right. It's going to be nice. But the fact is, is that the 20th century is anything but nice, and anyone who tries to live a nice life in this century is deluding themselves. This is the junkyard. This is the dregs.

Merton in Figures for an Apocalypse has a poem called A Letter to America. And it's the crunch of imagery in this poem that tells us where, in 1947, Thomas Merton was sensing something radically out of joint. Here's the poem:

America, when you were born, and when the plains
Spelled out their miles of praises in the sun
What glory and what history
The rivers seemed to prepare.
We hear them, now, in the Kentucky summer,
While all the locusts drowned our forests in their iron prayer:
And we dream of you, beloved, sleeping in your leafy bosom.

How long are we to wake
With eyes that turn to wells of blood
Seeing the hell that gets you from us
With his treacherous embrace!

The bands that raced our flesh
With smiles as raw as scars,
Can kill you, Kansas, with their high-powered thirst.
Have you not heard the vast Missouri sing
To drown them with those billion gallon silences?

But when the day is quieter
Than your primeval cradle
All our green woods fill, once again, with wishful lies:
Maybe the cities, (sing the birds, our travellers)
Maybe the cities have begun to heal,
And stanched their smoky hemorrhage:
Maybe they have begun to mend their cauteries,
Parsing the muteness of so many dead.

Down where the movies grit
Their white electric teeth,
Maybe the glorious children have rebelled
And rinsed their mental slums
In the clean drench of an incalculable grief.

Maybe their penitence has torn the phony sunset
To view their devil dressed in laudanum,
And scotched his crazy spectre,
And learned the liberty of the unfathomable stars,
Within the doors of their confessionals,
Their new, more lasting Lexingtons!

But oh! the flowering cancers of that love
That eats your earth with roots of steel!
No few fast hours can drain your flesh
Of all those seeds of candied poison,

Until our long Gregorian cry
Bows down the stars’ Samaritan
To rue the pity of so cruel a murder.

This is A Letter to America, 1946-47. So we have a lot of wire. We have someone who can't sleep at night, who can't sleep in the daytime, who's walking around constantly filled with weird anxieties that he can't quite place. It isn't just himself, personally. Yes, we make mistakes. Yes, we have regrets. Yes, we can get over them. But what's this that we can't get over? What's this that's there after we've gotten over everything else and it's still there? Merton was bothered to the extent that he had to find his way into a monastery. For a long time he started going there in the early 40s, 1941 I believe. And he buried himself. He took his rigidness. He took his anger. He took his need for solitude, for work, and just put himself in there. And for about ten years, Merton did that, and from time to time got permission underneath the table to publish a few things. And by the early 1950s it seemed to Merton that he was settling down, he was maturing as a monk. “All right I'm a monk. I'll be a monk if I can live as a monk. God, just let me live as a monk, I'll take that.”

But something strange was happening in the early 50s in this country. What was strange was that the monasteries were filling up. There hadn't been so many new people in monasteries for six hundred years. Merton became not only a senior monk, he became an instructor, a teacher, and they were all pressed into service in one day. He realized that there were over two hundred and fifty novices in a monastery that should have had twenty people. Something in the back of his mind said, what is going on? Something is happening; something is in the wind. “Maybe what scared me is still loose. Maybe I just caught it first and maybe other people are catching it.” What are we catching? What is this? He writes at this time,

“Imagine that we now have one hundred and fifty novices at Gethsemani” - that was the name of the monastery - Gethsemani. Gethsemani was the largest monastic order, place, in the whole Cistercian Order anywhere in the world - Pennsylvania, Kentucky in that area. It had branches around. “Many of them are sleeping in [tents in the yard]. The nucleus of seniors is a small, bewildered group of men who remember the old iron rule of Dom Edmond Obrecht and have given up trying to comprehend what has happened [here at] Gethsemani. The house has a very vital and enthusiastic (in the good sense) and youthful air like the camp of an army preparing for [a gay,] easy and victorious war.”

The first sign, almost unnoticed in Merton's consciousness at the time, that the physical wars are over and this is the beginning of a spiritual war. That the debacles of the First World War and the Second World War are just like little trumpet blasts saying, this is for appetizers, we're going to see what you're made of, we're going to put you through it now. He writes,

“Those of us who have been sobered by a few years of the life find ourselves in turns comforted and depressed,” both, “comforted and depressed by the [multitudes] of our young companions of only two or three months’ standing: comforted by their fervor and [their] joy and simplicity, and depressed by the sheer weight of numbers. The cloister is as crowded as a Paris street.” On this, the house, “when… completely full of men who are happy because they have not yet had a chance to suffer anything.” They're still having the elation of the transference. Mother Church and Father God are going to take care of me, everything is all right, they're going to feed me, and I'm going to get a chance to work and be quiet. And that's it. And like any transference, it has a nice euphoric easiness for a while. But like any habituation or any drug, when it wears off, it wears off permanently.

“They have not yet had a chance to suffer anything (although they believe themselves willing), the effect is a little disquieting. One feels more solidly rooted in God in a community of veterans, even though many of [the veterans become] morose.” Because when the euphoria wears off, when you realize that you are in a struggle with yourself, there's nothing to be particularly joyed about. The spiritual life matures into delight, but it never again shows carefree happiness. That's just too naive.

All through the 50s, and all through the early 60s, Merton progressed. He became almost a household word for millions of people around the world, because here's a Trappist monk who's supposed to have a vow of silence, who is given all kinds of opportunities to write, and sometimes to leave the monastery and go occasionally to speak at places. And he writes book after book, dozens of books, and pretty soon Merton is writing on everything. And by the early 60s, Merton begins to sense that he has matured to a point to where he is ready to take the next step. And the next step for him - he begins to become curious about other monks. What other monks? Well, he knows all about Western monks, he means about Asian monks. And first, he's curious about Chinese monks - Taoists.

And so Merton does a little selection. A book which came out in 1965, The Way of Chuang Tzu, selected by Thomas Merton. And he says in his introduction that his Chinese friend John C. H. Wu says that, he must have, he must have, Merton must have, in a previous life, been a Chinese monk. He says, “I do not know about that, and of course, I hasten to assure everyone that I do not believe in reincarnation (and neither does he). But I have been a Christian monk for nearly twenty-five years, and inevitably one comes in time to see life from a viewpoint that has been common to solitaries and recluses in all ages and in all cultures.”

What is that? What is that commonality? That commonality is seeing that the only thing there is to do in the next step is to come face to face with oneself. There is no other step to take after a certain amount of maturity, that that is the next step. And that's just where the path ends. Because there's no way to objectify and concretize yourself and put it out there so that you can dispassionately walk on yourself and continue. You can't. You come to the edge. It's been called ‘the edge of objectivity’. And what happens is that the memory and the imagination try to choreograph certain ways that one can do this, and it's only after they begin playing out and flatting out that you realize that you're hemming and hawing, that it hasn't occurred to you yet that you've got yourself on the edge.

And from 1965 until his death in late ‘68, Merton increasingly became conscious, almost more than any other individual in our time, of the fact that he was on the edge of everything, that it had all run out. He says, “I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is.” Notice he's still being nice to himself. He's still not realizing that he's telling himself something very serious. Oh yeah, I like him because “he is what he is.” Well, that tautology is the last stage when one can get down to that. That's the last stage that the mind can be of any solace. And after that, only the spirit can move, because the mind gets frozen, incapacitated when it gets down to that nib, because it doesn't have any way to to go anymore. He says that there's something in the Tao and that his friend John Wu, when he translated Genesis into Chinese, said in the beginning was the Tao. And he said it sounded natural to me somehow. One of the selections from Chuang Tzu - The Breath of Nature. Merton puts this title on it. Just a few lines. Here's what Merton is sensitive to in Chuang Tzu:

When great Nature sighs, we hear the winds
Which, noiseless in themselves,
Awaken voices from other beings,
Blowing on them.
From every opening
Loud voices sound. Have you not heard
This rush of tones?

Well you can out of courtesy call it mysticism, but if you have been there, you know that this is really mysterious - there's something happening. Merton's deepest self conjured up a choreographed skit for him to live out so that he would not have to face this. This is what we do. When we get to the edge like that our deepest self throws up the last fantasy. It's usually called a death dream, and sometimes it comes out in very mysterious forms. And Merton's death dream, because he was a monk – he had been a monk for almost 30 years by this time – was that he fell in love with a woman and was tempted to leave the order and marry her. Oh, it happened so smoothly he didn't even understand. We never understand how smooth the deepest self is. What a master craftsman it is. And it plays all these beautiful forms and beautiful complications. And here it is.

He had trouble with his back down at the base of his spine, and he had to go into Louisville for an operation. And when he was in there, he was kind of concerned that he was going to be out from the anesthetic. And so it set up his sensitivity. He didn't want to be out from the anesthetic. And after he had the operation and he woke up, he was surprised that it had taken such a short time and that he didn't feel the pain anymore. And the relief from that set him up and he saw the nurse that was there, and he could see that her black hair under the cap and her kind of gray eyes and her cute Irish face and everything. And Merton didn't see it right away. He saw it with his eyes, but he didn't recognize what he had seen, what his disposition had set him up for. What his whole deep inner self to keep him from understanding that you have got to the edge of objectivity started to unwind this whole thing. And it took about four or five months. It went on and on and on. He started to think about her. What am I thinking about? Well, she read my books, I'll send her a letter. He sent her a letter, she sent him a letter. You're not supposed to phone if you're a monk in a monastery, especially a senior monk. He'd find himself finding excuses to hitch a ride someplace and while they'd be doing things, he'd go over to the phone booth and call her. And she is glad to get that call. It even got to the point to where he was almost hoping that he would be caught, hoping that his superior would come and clamp down and say, no, you can't do this. You can't do this. Yes, that's what a man does. You have given that up for thirty years, man. You are – You are not a child. You have gone on all this way. This is temptation. It's no longer love. But for Merton, because his deepest self was involved, it was love. He even snuck her into the monastery. He forgot all about the fact that he's a world famous figure - this is 1966. They would go and they. He would have to go and see the doctor, right, to get checked up. Oh, good. I've got to go and see the doctor. Well, she's a nurse in the hospital, let's go for coffee.

He didn't understand. And you're a world famous figure, in a little Kentucky city like Louisville. Everybody sees you. People began talking. And of course, all of this came out because what finally wasn't supposed to see her, he kept writing. The whole situation kept getting more and more complex. It just wouldn't quit. It just wouldn't stop. He talked about getting married over the phone. He knew he was being overheard leaving the monastery. Finally, there is something deep, deep down in us, darling - he's writing to her - that tells us to let go completely. He's telling her what he's supposed to be telling himself. There's something deep, deep down that says let go completely. That word is big: Completely. “Not just the letting go when the dress drops to the floor and bodies pressing together with nothing between, but the far more thrilling surrender” – notice the word surrender - “when our very being” - that's it now, see - “our very being surrenders itself to the nakedness of love, and to a union where there is no veil of illusion between us.”

He's not talking to her now. He's talking to himself. But he doesn't know it yet. He doesn't know that he has already stepped over the line. He is already transcendentally ready to do it, to open himself up to the ineffable. He thinks he's still writing to her. “Darling, I long for it madly.” Notice the word, madly. Do you see? Do you need me as well? He wrote a little midsummer diary and he presented it to her as all his thoughts, the most personal thoughts of this whole travail, this whole period. The last entry in it is, “We are two half-people wandering in two lost worlds.” And that was it.

So the fall of 1966 came, and everybody here can remember the fall of 1966 and remembers the sense of how 1966 began with such a fantastic élan. In San Francisco it was like Florence all over again. And in the summer of ‘66, it was still just beautiful, but matured. Everything was in motion. But by the fall, by the fall, when the autumn winds came, there came some kind of long, sonorous melancholy, or as Verlaine used to say, “which wounds my heart with a wondrous languor.” Something has changed. There's been a change of key in nature. Not just the season this time. Something really basic has changed its key. The whole pitch of life somehow is in a different mode. And as 1967 came around, that change became horrific. And it expressed itself in the Vietnam War as far as the United States was concerned.

It was the fairy tale of the tar baby. You're going to make it respond. And if it doesn't, you'll just hit it one more time. And every time you hit it with that desperate need to make the universe respond, dammit, you will respond to me. Ahab says in Moby Dick, “I would strike the face of the sun if it insulted me.” Well, the Vietnam experience was like that, and the United States kept trying to make Asia respond to it and getting stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, and realizing they'd been stuck before. They'd been stuck ever since the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. They couldn't get loose. They couldn't get loose in Korea. They couldn't get loose in Vietnam. And they're not going to get loose anywhere until this madness, this compulsion of trying to force the other half, the receptive half of the planet, to respond to aggression, because it just won't, cannot, because it's an acceptance and not a respondent. There's no yin-yang in the world as long as there's that pushiness.

But for Merton, coming out of that love relationship and realizing that it was over, not being able to forget her, he kept calling her right up to a couple of months before he died. But he became mature like a man finally does, that there is something else here which is really basic and can't be evaded anymore. And for him, he realized it had something to do with Asia. Oh, yes. No, it's not medieval; it's not Western history; It's not even United States anymore than the fact that the US is somehow stuck in Asia spiritually and has to understand. What does this mean?

So Merton did a book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite - fantastic, insightful book. Zen and the Birds of Appetite. And he says in here, the author's note, he's talking about how when something dies, the birds begin circling. This hovering, this circling. What are those birds? Those are not the Orioles of spring. They're the buzzards. Buzzards. “Buzzards hovering around a corpse.” What an image. What an image to be talking about. An American Trappist monk doing a selection of statements about Zen Buddhism. He says, “This hovering, this circling, this descending, this celebration of victory, are not not what is meant by the Study of Zen - even though they may be a highly useful exercise in other contexts. And they enrich the birds of appetite. [But] Zen enriches no one. There is no body [there's no corpse] to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be.” See what he's saying? “But they soon go elsewhere.” The birds of appetite soon go elsewhere. “When they are gone, the ‘nothing,’ the ‘no-body’ that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.”

Merton’s starting to perk up. He's starting to hear the receptance of Asia in its wisdom. It's not what's there, it's what's not there that's also important. Don't you forget it. Later on, he's talking about how one of the early Christian monks, John Cassian, who lived in the four hundreds, early four hundreds, went around to all the desert Christian communities in Egypt and Syria. And he collected stories and anecdotes about how they came to be there. Little life vignettes and he collected all these things together, and he called them the conferences. There's translation of them now in paperback, oddly enough - what an age, what an age. So he's talking about how there's a statement in John Cassian that there's a two fold stage in spirituality, that there's an intermediate stage, a skopos, where one has to perfect oneself into purity of heart, that perfection, purification, gaining purity of heart. And this is what emptiness corresponds to in Buddhism. And then he says later on, there's a fullness. Well, in the reply to this, D. T. Suzuki, aged 95, powerful Zen master, writes, “When Father Merton uses emptiness in this way, when he uses this term does not go far and deep enough, I am afraid.” Because he's still talking about something. He's still talking about stages. He's still talking about steps. He still thinks that there are more steps. There isn't even one more step. He's got to the edge. And so Suzuki says, “Well, not far and deep enough, I am afraid. I do not know who first made the distinction between the Godhead and God as creator. This distinction is strikingly illustrative of Father Merton's emptiness is still on the level of God as Creator and does not go up to Godhead.”

So when this book came out in late ‘66, when he digested his dialog, his interchange with D. T. Suzuki, all through 1967, Merton stood, all of these things had happened to him. Nothing was happening at Gethsemani. He would go into solitary retreats. Nothing was happening. He would do all the classic things that monks do that he knew how to do. He'd been a monk by this time, almost thirty-five years. Nothing was happening. And he knew that something is wrong. Because you can't do that. You can't put yourself through these disciplines and have nothing happen. The only way that that can obtain is that one's deepest self massively is keeping everything in a limbo. And the spiritual masters say, “you have got your finger on the trigger.” There's no more looking for the targets. There's no more setting up shop. There's no more thinking about. Your finger is on the trigger and the gun is right here. This is like a final surprise. One way or the other. This is the watershed. This is it.

When the beginning of 1968 came around, almost if it were choreographed, there was rumored there was going to be a fantastic international religious conference in Bangkok, Thailand. And as soon as Merton heard that, his ears, his heart, his spirit, everything perked up. Bangkok. A world religious conference held in the last peaceful international center in Asia. He had to go. He had to go. But they had been having so much trouble with him. So many problems. Are they going to let me go? Then a couple of synchronistic things happened. The international head of the Cistercian Order died, and some new person came in who was more sympathetic to an ecumenical world. The head, the Dom of Gethsemani, died and was replaced by somebody who was a little more lenient. As long as doors kept opening, Merton kept blossoming, and finally he made a deal. He said, why don't you test me? Test me out. Why don't you let me go to two of our branch retreats, one in California and one in Alaska, and see how I do. And if it's all right with you, then I'll go to Asia. And so that's what they did. He went to Whitethorn, California, which is just up in Humboldt County, just over the Mendocino County line. And if you look at the continental map of the United States, that's the farthest western point in the United States. That's the edge before you have to step off over the Pacific into Asia. It is geographically the very thing called Whitethorn, the pure suffering. There's no other way you get there. That's it. You can't lie anymore.

And the other place was Alaska. And when he got there, he was nothing but illusion for him. He wrote back. He said, this is a beautiful place. And we should have a big monastery here. He got there on a sunny day and everybody else said, you know, it's foggy all the time. But he was wrapped up in his mythos. He didn't realize that the one day that he was there was sunshine, but that almost all the other times it's fog bound. That's why there was nothing there. And his superior understood this, saw this, and saw because he was a mature man. That this man has got a destiny. We're going to have to let him go. Something in Asia is there for him that he has to experience some way or another. It wasn't that woman. It isn't anything to do with the monastery. It's something to do with God's Word. So let's let him go.

And if we take a break while, we'll see what happens.

I guess I should mention that I'm doing the Sunday lecture here at PRS, and the title is Christ in Alexandria. So I'll be preaching on Sunday at eleven and I'll do my darndest, which can get considerable.

One of the mysteries of Los Angeles, and it's a mystery of San Francisco, too, and to some extent Seattle and Portland. But the mystery that’s come home to Los Angeles, is that the next step is China. There's only the Pacific. Merton, in his Asian diary, starts off very innocently, very poignantly. “The Pacific is very blue.” That's right. It's like the sky. It's like when you step off, you've got to step into that sky, to be wrapped in sky. That's the old shamanic code for ecstasy. What does he write? “The moment of takeoff was ecstatic.” Sure as shooting. “The dewy wing was suddenly covered with rivers of cold sweat running backwards.” Wow, it's like Dante. It's like the imagery is incredible, but he's still not understanding what he's telling himself. Still not understanding. Because that kind of maturity is incredibly difficult to have. You still think you're writing for someone else. You still think that it's just poetic imagery, metaphor, or that it's descriptive. It hasn't come home yet, but it's getting close. “The window wept jagged, shining courses of tears. Jagged shining. The tears were lightning.” That's what kind of imagery is coming out of him automatically. Wow, where is the man? The man is all bound up in this dynamo. And finally he writes, “We left the ground. I, with Christian mantras and a sense, a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way, after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around.” Thirty years as a monk and just fooling around. “May I not come back without having settled the great affair.” That's true. When you can say that, then you're ready. “May I not come back until I have settled a great affair.”

I have to skip over everything. I outlined everything for you. But we just, we don't have time. He gets to Asia and it's teeming. It's late 20th century Asia. The jets swoop into Tokyo. You stay there for a while. The jets sweep you to Hong Kong. You stay there for a while. They sweep you to Bangkok. A little while, they sweep you to Calcutta. Take a flight into New Delhi and take a train to Dharamsala. And you come back and so forth. It's not digestible. You can't do that. You can't do that unless you're priming yourself for some ultimate realization. You can't stuff Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Calcutta, New Delhi, Dharamsala. You can't stuff all of Asia into a week's itinerary when you're this sensitive, unless you do it on purpose. You're trying to make yourself vomit up what is it. And so you put your jet-age agenda down your throat, hoping that it'll bring it out. And it did. It all came out.

A line in his Asian journal: “Air conditioned mantra, Tibetan base of the machines.” You see, it's getting down to bedrock now. “For the Tibetans, every conceivable sound is both music and mantra. Great brasses. trumpets snoring into the earth.” These great long trumpets. “They wake the mountain spirits.” I don't know if you've ever heard them, they are a deep blat, two octaves below what I could sound. “They wake the mountain spirits.” It's like when the Hopis say that the kachinas don't, they're not there in the costumes. They're not here in our imaginations. The spirits of the Kachinas come out of the Francisco, San Francisco Peaks, and they energize those costumes and we wake up to that. That's what is real. These are gods dancing. Watch out! Watch out! It's not so simple anymore. “They wake the mountain spirits, inviting canyon populations to a solemn rite of life and death… The ‘sonorous icon’ with its unending trance of atonal sound repels evil.” Om. “But a huge Mask of evil is pressing down close.”

Why? Because the closer you get to the purely realization, the more the purely non realization is also right there. And if you think the world is nice, you're rudely surprised that the more you get closer to the one, the more the other is right there too. Not so nice, not so comfortable. “But a huge mask of evil mask is pressing down close. The deep sounds renew life, repel the death-grin (i.e., ignorance). The sound is the sound of emptiness. It is profound and clean. We are washed in the millennial silent roar of a rock-eating glacier.” He’s a great American poet; great 20th century consciousness; coming very close to understanding.

“Dance is essential for initiates. The dance of the Supremely Wrathful One, with his long-sleeved retinue and his bride of wrath.” An excerpt from a book he was reading, Giuseppe Tucci’s Theory and Practice of the Mandala. A sentence out of it. “The guru [is he] who must produce the revulsion of the adept.” Why the revulsion? Because the nice, pleasant personality will not do - it's flattened out. It has to see that its other side and the other side is the revulsion. It has to see its own demonic potential, exactly equal with its own nice personality - balance.

“The aim of all the Tantras is to teach the ways whereby we may set free the divine light which is mysteriously present and shining in each one of us, although it is enveloped in an insidious web of psyche’s weaving.”

The cobwebs, the cobwebs are in the way. But Merton is tremendous. Merton is a courageous human being. He's exemplary of late 20th century Americans who, when they really understand what there is to do, they do it. It's a kind of a courage which happens in this country, because Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson set it up to happen that way, that the American person doesn't lean on doctrine but trusts to personal growth, even if it means growing out of yourself. If that's what it means, then we'll do it. Why not? Because we're not pilgrims so much, the pilgrims came from Europe, the pilgrims came from other countries, from Asia, from Africa, but when the pilgrims got here they were transformed into pioneers. That's the esoteric meaning of Thanksgiving. Thank you to the Indians for transforming starving pilgrims into pioneers who now not only can eat, but can take care of themselves, who are no longer afraid of the wilderness, but at home in it, as if it were a nature for them, and the transformation of all the nations of mankind from pilgrims into pioneers is a transformation of bringing spiritual courage back into all the races of man, because that's the only way that you can get free is to be a pioneer. A pilgrim always is addicted to the way, always needs to have the steps, and when the steps run out, only a pioneer can make that leap.

What do you yell when you make the leap out? Geronimo! It's not colloquial, it's not just a pun, it's recognizing the transformation of the spirit of Indian America has penetrated through. That's right. The only wilderness there is, is that which you are afraid to live in. That's what that wilderness is. And if you are a pioneer, you can live in the unknown. What's wrong with that? Emptiness, you say. Bring it on. Spiritual courage. It's different. It's not psychological. It's not mental. Not cultural. Leastways not cultural as long as one is bound up in an ethnocentric pathfulness. But you've got to be in that special juxtaposition which Americans, almost by nature by now, are - let's see what goes on, let's do it.

He runs across a lot of characters. He runs across a lot of situations. He finds himself increasingly exposed to Tibetans. He finds himself hearing words like bodhichitta, bodhichitta, the seed of enlightenment, bodhichitta. And he writes, “The Khempo” - khempo is like a teacher, he is like a serious teacher, somebody who would challenge you, a khempo is that way. “The Khempo of Namgyal deflected a question of mine about metaphysics - he returned to it later - by saying that the real ground of his… study and practice was the knowledge of suffering.” The real ground. “...and that only when a person was fully convinced of the immensity of suffering and its complete universality and saw the need of deliverance from it, and sought deliverance for all beings, [instead of just yourself, then you] begin to understand.” Then you begin to get the tone of what Asia accepts, and in its integrity will never be any other than that open acceptance of that. And this is what the West, what the United States, what Thomas Merton has to understand.

You can't force that acceptance in its deep, profound emptiness wisdom to respond to aggression or blows. It is not the way. It is worse than childish. It is absurd. It is misunderstanding completely, totally, what is real. It is indicative of massive paranoiac psychosis of civilization cannot understand what is real in that. It's a brink. It's an edge. There's no more steps.

Quotation from Milarepa in his diary, “It is the tradition of the fortunate seekers never to be content with partial practice.” Merton was appalled by Calcutta. Tokyo was bustling. Hong Kong was wealthy. Bangkok was kind of interesting, but Calcutta was just horrible. Eight or nine million people, ninety nine percent of them beggars and starving and crushed by it all. He's riding in a cab. Here's an image. He's riding in a cab and a beautiful young child - girl child - smiles beautifully at the window and holds her hand out for money. And when she realizes he's not going to get any, just melts on her face and she disappears back into the swirl of the beggars and he wonders, “what can I do?” The whole place was like that. Revulsion, revulsion. Same revulsion. You think you've had a hard life. You think you know what suffering is? Look at it. The ocean. It's all that way. It's always been that way. So he found himself going to Delhi and taking a train up to Dharamsala to have an interview with the Dalai Lama, because there are real happenings in the spiritual life - real happening.

“I had my audience with the Dalai Lama,” November 4th, 1968, afternoon. He writes, “I had my audience with the Dalai Lama this morning in his new quarters. It was a bright, sunny day - blue sky, the mountains absolutely clear. Tenzin Geshe sent a jeep down. We went up the long way round through the army post… past the old deserted Anglican Church of Saint John in the Wilderness. Everything at McLeod Ganj is admirably situated, high over the valley, with snow-covered mountains behind, all pine trees, with apes in them, and a vast view over the plains to the south.”

“The Dalai Lama is most impressive as a person. He is strong and alert, bigger than I expected (or some reason I thought he would be [very] small). A very solid, energetic, generous, and warm person, very capable [of] trying to handle enormous problems - none of which he mentioned directly. There was not a word of politics. The whole conversation was about religion and philosophy and especially ways of meditation.”

And he's going to learn something about meditation. He's going to learn something that he didn't learn as a Christian monk in all those decades, in all those centuries, in all those millenniums, that he didn't learn that meditation is extraordinarily powerful. The image in the Gospel of Philip, the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, is that Jesus showed the disciples how to put an axe to the root of evil. And the Vajrayana says the same thing, that meditation is like an axe, that you have to be careful now, don't cut yourself and don't waste your time clipping off twigs. Go for the root. So don't dissipate it by fooling around, making clippings. Let it grow and save it. And when the time is right, hit the root, cut it off.

So meditation. So the Dalai Lama is talking to him. First off, about meditation. Let's talk about meditation, brother. “He said he was glad to see me, had heard a lot about me. I talked mostly about my own personal concerns, my interest in Tibetan mysticism. Some of what he replied was confidential and frank… He advised me to get a good base in Madhyamika philosophy.”

Madhyamika, the middle way, the middle way. Why the middle way? Because if you really get into the middle way, it's not any particular way. The real middle way is not any particular way at all, as a mystery. When you understand that it's not any particular way at all, that that's the middle way. You find yourself floating free without any kind of a compulsion, any kind of a predilection, any kind of an ambition at all because any way that you begin to adopt, that's not the middle way, any way that you don't begin to adopt, that's not the middle way. It's very, very precise. It grinds like a great glacier grinds boulders. The middle way finally brings you there because there's no other place to be. Nothing else is the middle. So the Dalai Lama says to him, “Why don't you come back, why don't you come back in a couple of days and see me again? Do a little thinking, walk around and so forth.” Why? Because he’s a great teacher. His name means ‘great ocean’. Three times he goes through this. Three times Merton goes every other day. He was supposed to have just an interview. Then he comes back in two days and the Dalai Lama brings him closer. And then he tells him, well, come, come back in a couple of more days. And after the third time, Merton begins to sense something. What does he sense?

“Last night I dreamed I was, temporarily, back at Gethsemani. I was dressed in a Buddhist monk's habit, but with more black and red and gold, a ‘Zen habit,’ in color more Tibetan than Zen. I was going to tell Brother Donald Kane, the cook in the diet kitchen, that I would be there for supper. I met some women in the corridor, visitors and students of Asian religion, to whom I was explaining I was a kind of a Zen monk and Gelugpa together” - which is the Dalai Lama's tradition - “when I woke up. It was 6 AM. Time to get up. Other recent dreams, dimly remembered. Strange towns. Towns in the south of France.”

You see, he's going back to his origins because when you're in the Madhyamika, when you really get into that, you go back to the origin. All origins, they all line up. It's like a bulls-eye that goes straight through the core of reality. It's easy, easy to step off the path when you see that. What? How could you ever not be there? That's what happens in freedom but Merton is still working. He says the Tibetans often talk about “whether,” we must, “in order to know something, one must know the word for it,” or whether we apprehend it without the word. Well, that's right, because that's what they're telling him. They want that response out of him.

He's talking to the Dalai Lama. “We got back to the subject of meditation and samadhi.” Now he's adding samadhi to it. “I said it was important for monks in the world to be living examples of the freedom and transformation of consciousness.” He's still talking, see, he's still using the words. Dalai Lama saying “Yeah, but let's not talk about it. Let's do it.” It’s different. “The Dalai Lama then talked about samadhi in the sense of controlled concentration” - controlled concentration. Well, concentration, single-pointedness if you want, collected together - Madhyamika, the middle path, the absolute middle path, which is not absolute. And that control; how do you control that? There's nothing to control. Well, but just going on, just going on with it. That's the only way. That's the only control. So, Dalai Lama is talking to him this way. He's saying, let's let's do this. So he keeps reading about the Madhyamika, and he starts to notice in the background from his place that he's becoming conscious of the Himalayas. He's becoming conscious of the mountains.

Later on, when he'll be in Darjeeling and these lessons come up because a spiritual teacher never teaches you on that day. Those lessons come up a year or two later, five years later, and when they come up they come up in nature. And later on, Merton in Darjeeling will start to notice that one of the mountains is calling to him Kangchenjunga (K2), the second highest mountain in the world. And he'll get into a situation where he'll look at it and it'll be blue gray, and he'll look away and look, and it'll be covered with clouds - it's not there. What happened to it? He'll be walking around and he'll be passing a window, and all of a sudden he'll look up and there's Kanchenjunga. He'll go out at night and go and just be under the stars and thinking about nothing and then the eyes come down - there's the mountain glistening in the moonlight - standing out phosphorescent. Pretty soon there will be a revulsion about it. He can't stand the fact that the damn mountain is there. It's always there. It's boring. You're right. It's boring. Too much of a good thing. And after a couple of days, he'll say it was really good to see that mountain again today. There it was. It was like that. He's learning that it isn't just inside that. It's all real. All of it is real. It's only the mind, the psyche that says it's different, that it's this way or it's that way. It's not. His first affinity.

“My third interview with the Dalai Lama,” and this is before the Kangchenjunga phenomenon began to happen. “My third interview with the Dalai Lama was in some ways the best. He asked a lot of questions about Western monastic life, particularly the vows, the rule of silence, the ascetic way, etc. But what concerned him most was: 1) Did the ‘vows’ have any connection with a spiritual transmission or initiation?” Why? Because if you're making a vow with words, with your mind, with a concept, it's nothing. They’re only valuable as triggers for spiritual transmission. And they have to have that kind of intensity. They have to have the amperage of everything. This is why vows should be made and kept. Not for the words. Not because there are doctrine satisfying thing, not because you do it, but because they work. And when they work, they really work. So he's asking him. And “... 2) Having made vows, did the monks continue to progress along a spiritual way.” Does it work? He's saying. Is it happening? “And some incidental questions: What were the motives for the monks not eating meat? Did they drink alcoholic beverages? Did they have movies? And so on.”

When he realized that they were still following steps, they were still following the choreography of the mind and of tradition that they weren't in a spiritual transformation where the steps peter out. The steps in just right at the time when you stop making them for yourself. If you continue to make them, then they continue to appear. But just at the stage where you stop making those steps that's when they run out. That's when there's the leap of faith is the only thing that's left.

Merton goes back to Calcutta, and when he comes back to Calcutta, after talking three times to the Dalai Lama, he writes, “Returning to Calcutta, I have a completely new impression: greater respect for this vast, crumby city. There is a kind of nobility in its sordidness.” He's starting to acclimate himself to cosmic revulsion. That you can't throw it away. There's no way that completeness can throw it away. You can't say, I don't want to have it. It's there. It's childish to say, I only want to have the pie. You can't. There's no way. All of it is real in the same way. And Merton begins to slowly come into feel. He writes of Calcutta,

“...the elemental city with no room left for masks. Only the naked truth of overpopulation, underemployment, hunger, disease, a mixture of great vitality and permanent exhaustion - but an exhaustion in which the vitality renews itself. How does it happen that the skinny men in bare feet trotting with rickshaws don't all drop dead? And maybe many do. [But] when I was here first, I was too shocked; the trauma made me see the city as a big blur. Now I see detail, contrast, the infinite variety of light and shade. All the colors - though they are drab and obscure, they are colors. This is one of the greatest cities in the world, [and] with a character completely its own, full of contrasts and yet beyond contrast. The vast noise of Calcutta seems somehow to [also be] a silence. There was a spectacular robbery on Sudder Street three weeks ago and it is a city of crime; somehow the crime gets lost in the sheer massive poverty and exhaustion - the innocence of despair. The place gives no impression of wickedness. For the masses of Calcutta, you dimly begin to think there is no judgment. Only their misery. And instead of being judged, they are a judgment on the rest of the world. Yet curiously, non-prophetic … nonaccusatory. Passive. Not exactly resentful. Not yet… How long before it explodes? What will the explosion mean? One imagines an enormous, elemental, thoughtless, confused violence like that of a sweeping storm of rain after a sultry summer day. Will it cleanse anything? Clear the air? Will the city simply go on stifling in its own steam? It breathes, sprawls, broods, sweats, moves, lies down, and gets up again.”

You see he's starting to see the real. It's there. The delusions are going. He finds a Tibetan fellow, Chatral Rimpoche, and they get to talking about enlightenment. And the old man says that he's been meditating for thirty years and he still hasn't perfected himself. And Merton says, I am working on this for thirty years, and I haven't either. And, the Rimpoche says, “can you imagine a Buddhist monk like me and a Christian monk like you talking like this?” And they both laugh.

“The door of emptiness. Of no-where. Of no place for a self, which cannot be entered by a self. And therefore is of no use to someone who is going somewhere. Is it a door at all? The door of no-door.”

“The door without sign, without indicator, without information. Not particularized. Hence no one can say of it, ‘This is it. This is the door.’ It is not recognizable as a door. It is not led up to by other things pointing to it: ‘We are not it, but that is it - the door.’ No signs saying ‘Exit.’ [No sign saying this.] No use looking for indications. Any door with a sign on it, any door that proclaims itself to be a door, is not the door.”

The name that can be named is not the eternal name. Anybody who says they're a guru, turn around and walk away. Anybody who says that they're your master bye, baby. Because it can't be, double negative, it can't not not be. But do not look for a sign saying not door or even no exit. Like the existentialist.

“The door without wish. The undesired. The unplanned door. The door never expected. Never wanted. Not desirable as door. Not a joke, not a trap door. Not select. Not exclusive. Not for a few. Not for many. Not for. Door without aim. Door without end. Does not respond to a key - so do not imagine you have a key. Do not have your hopes on possession of the key.”

“There is no use asking for it. Yet you must ask. Who? For what? When you have asked for a list of all the doors, this one is not on that list. When you have asked the numbers of all the doors, this one is without a number. Do not be deceived into thinking this door is merely hard to find and difficult to open. When sought it fades. Recedes. Diminishes. Is nothing… there is no threshold. No footing. It is not empty space. It is neither this world nor another. It is not based on anything. Because it has no foundation, it is the end of sorrow. Nothing remains to be done. Therefore there is no threshold, no step, no advance, no recession, no entry, no nonentry. Such is the door that ends all doors; the unbuilt, the impossible, the undestroyed through which all the fires go when they have ‘gone out.’”

A few weeks later, Thomas Merton was found dead in his hotel room. He had stepped out of a bath and had pulled a fan a little bit closer and the fan had defective wiring. It was a big, huge fan and it fell on him and electrocuted him and they found him two hours later, the fan was still going. The spiritual adventures of the modern world are unbelievable because we live in great times.

Next week we'll see Black Elk and we're going to emphasize his, the latest publication that came out, The Sixth Grandfather, because it's on the fulcrum of the American Indian that the American spiritual consciousness matures. It's on that basis. It's our real link with. It's our real link with Asia. So I hope some of you can make it.