Thomas Merton: Contemplation and the Contemplative Life

The aspiration for enlightenment - "direct awareness," as Trappist monk, Thomas Merton describes it, below - is, if anything, far stronger today, than it was in the early 1960s when Merton wrote his classic work of comparative contemplative traditions,"Mystics and Zen Masters." Merton's observations about the difficulty of attaining what Christianity would generally describe as "mystic union," and Zen Buddhists would describe as ""satori," points out the helpfulness of grounding one's practice on, if not in, one or another of the many varied religious or contemplative traditions. It also requires, Merton posits, a deep understanding of the world's anguish, a state that has manifestly increased in the past fifty years.

"(D)irect awareness," writes  Merton, "is a gift, but it also presupposes the knowledge and practice of certain traditional disciples. Thus, we can say that contemplation is both a "gift" (a "grace") and an "art." Unfortunately, we must also admit that it can almost be said to be a "lost art." And for this lost art there is certainly in the world today a definite nostalgia, not unmixed with vague hopes for the recovery of this awareness. But the nostalgia and the desire do not of themselves suffice to make the nostalgic one a contemplative."

"Needless to say, the contemplative" Merton points out, "is not simply a person who, by vocation, is juridically isolated and cloistered. The mere fact of breaking off communication with the world and of losing interest in it certainly does not make one ipso facto a "contemplative." On the contrary, it would seem that today a certain openness to the world and a genuine participation in its anguish would normally help to safeguard the sincerity of a commitment to contemplation."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 203-204.]

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In the attached video, highlighting Merton's writings, this most contemplative of writers has the following to say about contemplation, its source, and its importance to man's psyche:

"Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is the vivid realization that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond both reason and beyond simple faith.  For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete."

"Yet contemplation is not vision, because it sees without seeing, and knows without knowing. It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images and words, or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows, the contemplative mind takes back what it has said and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by unknowing, or, better, we know beyond all knowing or unknowing."

The Quality of Faith: Relgious Belief versus Religious Experience

There is a marked difference in the quality of faith dependent upon whether it is based on religious belief or if it is grounded in religious experience. The difference in this quality of faith is "the one great partition" that William James describes as dividing institutional from personal religion. ("The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 28.)

"In the true mystic," writes Evelyn Underhill, "we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs."

"The mystic," she notes, "speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was "in union with God." The certitude then gained - a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not usually diffused - governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away."

[Underhill, "The Essentials of Mysticism," pp. 25-26.]

Faith based on religious belief is thus, of necessity, only second-hand, while faith based on personal experience of a higher, religious consciousness is primary. The former is susceptible to wavering in tough times, while in the latter, or so it seems, there is "no variableness, nor shadow of turning."

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," James asserts, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

"This enchantment," James observes, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 47-48.]

James goes on to describe the many different varieties of inner religious experience, each demonstrating that there is a higher state of religious consciousness above our ordinary, egoic self-consciousness; and he differentiates such experiences from intellectual or learned faith. Those who experience such inner relgious conversion are possessed thereafter with faith which is of a much different and enduring quality than a faith based solely on subjective, self-conscious belief.

"All the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy," philosopher and spiritual seeker, Aldous Huxley observes, "make, in one form or another, the affirmation that man is a kind of trinity composed of body, psyche and spirit. Selfness or personality is a product of the first two elements. The third element . . . is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being."

"Man's final end," he observes, "the purpose of his existence is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. And this identification of self with spiritual not-self can be achieved only by "dying to" selfness and living to spirit."

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 38.]

While such religious experience - such "dying to self" and awakening to spirit - is available to all of us, it is only the rare individual who experiences the "immanent and transcendent Godhead" in reality. The rest of us, holding to a religious faith based only on our subjective and intellectual belief, may merely aspire to the experience of that higher consciousness which leads to the deepest, and most abiding faith possible.

"Sell all your cleverness," Rumi urges us, "and purchase bewilderment."

A Unitive, Inclusive View of God and Man

God, Allah, Ahura Mazda - the Ground of Being, whatever its name - knows no differences. It is only those who profess their singular and exclusive view of religion that separate themselves off from the eternal. Those who are consciously possessed of this Divine Ground within and without themselves make no such distinctions and place no restrictions on their vision of God, as they know it is distinction itself that separates them from Wholeness.

Thus, "the Shakespeare of Mystics," Rumi can say:

"Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the oceans or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Ever or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

"The biographies of the saints," writes Aldous Huxley, "testify unequivocally to the fact that spiritual training leads to a transcendence of personality, not merely in the special circumstances of battle, but in all circumstances and in relation to all creatures, so that the saint "loves his enemies' or, if he is a Buddhist, does not even recognized the existence of enemies, but treats all sentient beings, sub-human as well as human, with the same compassion and disinterested good."

"Those who win through to the unitive knowledge of God set out upon their course from the most diverse starting points," Huxley notes. "One is a man, another a woman; one a born active, another a born comtemplative. No two of them inherit the same temperament and physical constitution, and their lives are passed in material, moral and intellectual environments that are profoundly dissimilar."

"Nevertheless," he observes, "as far as they are saints, insofar as they possess the unitive knowledge that makes them "perfect as their Father which is in heaven is perfect," they are all astonishingly alike. Their actions are uniformly selfless and they are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is their true relation to the universe and its spiritual ground."

Saints, mystics and sages, it seems, regardless of their formal path (or lack of a path), have an acceptive, unitive and inclusive view of God and man, for they have realized in the very essence of their Being that they are inseparably a part of the Ground of Being that encompasses all. It is the unsaintly, non-mystical, unsagacious common man who makes distinctions based on his or her God. And, in doing so, he or she falls short of realizing the essence of their Being.

Thomas Merton: Searching the Soul

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Thomas Merton was a man of solitude, as the attached videos demonstrate. He was also a man in an ever deeper search of the soul.

A prolific writer throughout his adult life, his autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" is perhaps his most famous work. In the transition from Part One to Part Two, from civilian life as a student at Columbia University to a Trappist novice at the Abbey of Gesthemani in rural Kentucky, Merton shares his deepening search for solitude and an understanding of his inner being.

"If my nature had been more stubborn in clinging to the pleasures that disgusted me," he observes, "if I had refused to admit that I was beaten by this futile search for satisfaction where it could not be found, and if my moral and nervous constitution had not caved under the weight of my own emptiness, who can tell what would eventually have happened to me?  Who could tell where I would have ended?"

"I had come very far, to find myself in this blind alley: but the very anguish and helplessness of my position was something to which I rapidly succumbed. And," he concludes, "it was my defeat that was to be the occasion of my rescue."

Opening Part Two of his autobiography, which details his renunciation of outer life to the cloistered quietude of his beloved Gesthemani, Merton directly addresses the nature of man, and his ultimate affinity for a deeper understanding of his own being.

"There is a paradox that lies in the very heart of human existence," he writes. "It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: man's nature by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problem.. If we follow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will end up in hell."

"This would be a depressing thought," he observes, "if it were not purely abstract. Because in the concrete order of things God gave man a nture that was ordered to supernatural life. He created man with a soul that was made not to bring itself to perfection in its own order, but to be perfected by Him in an order infinitely beyond the reach of human powers. We were never destined to lead purely natural lives, and therefore we were never destined in God's plan for a purely natural beatitude. Our nature which is a free gift from God, was given to us to be perfected by another free gift that is not due it."

"This free gift is "sanctifying grace." It perfects our nature with the gift of a life, of an intellection, a love, a mode of existence infinitely above its own level. If a man were to arrive even at the abstract pinnacle of natural perfection, God's work would not even be half done: it would be only about to begin, for the real work is the work of grace and the infused gifts of the Holy Ghost."

Merton was headed for the Abbey of Gerthemani, where he would pass 26 years in a quest for an ever increasing quietist solitude, before leaving Gesthemani temporarily (or perhaps permanently), for Asia to pursue his study of Buddhist and Indian contemplative methods. He would die at age 53, electrocuted as a result of a poorly wired household fan in a Bangkok hotel room on the 27th anniversary of his entry into Gesthemani in 1941, leaving behind a treasure trove of some 70 books on the contemplative life.

Idries Shah: The Way of the Sufi Gardener

Agriculture, a practice that underlies and accounts for all of civilization, is a relatively recent acquirement in mankind's evolutionary journey, having only been acquired less than 10,000 years ago. Yet, how central it is to the stories we tell about ourselves. A person of high accomplishment is said to be 'cultivated,' while the raucous rebel who does what he or she pleases is said to be 'wild.' And where else but the 'Garden of Eden' are we famously said to be from?

In Sufi teachings - Sufism being the esoteric or mystical branch of Islam - the garden is often used as a symbol of the state of our collective and individual spiritual being, just as wine (the product of the most highly cultivated and intoxicating first fruit of the garden) is used as a symbol for true religious, spiritual and ecstatic experience.

Thus, in his masterful book of insight into the life and thoughts of the Sufi masters and the different Sufic schools or orders, "The Way of the Sufi," the late Idries Shah (himself a Sufi master) tells the following cryptic, multi-layered and not-so-fanciful story - as all Sufi stories are - of a master-gardener and his efforts to sow many gardens and teach others would-be gardeners the secret of his craft.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"Once upon a time when the science and art of gardening was not yet well established among men, there was a master-gardener. In addition to knowing all the qualities of plants, their nutritious, medicinal and aesthetic values, he had been granted a knowledge of the Herb of Longevity, and he lived for many hundreds of years.

In successive generations, he visited gardens and cultivated places throughout the world. In one place he planted a wonderful garden and instructed the people in its upkeep and even in the theory of gardening. But becoming accustomed to seeing some of the plants come up and flower every year, they soon forgot that others had to have their seeds collected, that some were propagated from cuttings, that some needed extra watering, and so on. The result was that the garden eventually became wild, and people started to regard that as the best garden there could be.

After giving these people many chances to learn, the gardener expelled them and recruited another whole band of workers. He warned them if they did not keep the garden in order, and study his methods, they would suffer for it. They, in turn, forgot - and since they were lazy tended only those fruits and flowers which were easily reared, and allowed the others to die. Some of the first trainees came back to them from time to time, saying: 'You should do this and do that,' but they drove them away, shouting: 'You are the ones who are departing from truth in this matter.'

But the master-gardener persisted. He made other gardens, wherever he could, and yet none was ever perfect except the one he tended with his chief assistants. As it became known that there were many gardens and even many methods of gardening, people from one garden would visit those of another, to approve, to criticize or to argue. Books were written, assemblies of gardeners were held, gardeners arranged themselves in grades according to what they thought to be the right order of precedence.

As is the way of men, the difficulty of the gardeners remains that they are too easily attracted by the superficial. They say: 'I like this flower,' and they want everyone else to like it as well. It may, in spite of its attraction or abundance, be a weed which is choking other plants which could provide medicines or food which the people and the garden need for their sustenance and permanency.

Among these gardeners are those who prefer plants of one single colour. These they may describe as 'good'. There are others who will only tend the plants, while refusing to care about the paths or the gates or even the fences.

When, at length, the ancient gardener died, he left as his endowment the whole knowledge of gardening, distributing it among the people who would understand in accordance with their capacities. So the science as well as the art of gardening remained as a scattered heritage in many gardens and also in some records of them.

People who are brought up in one garden or another generally have been so powerfully instructed as to the merits or demerits of how the inhabitants see things that they are almost incapable - though they make the effort - of realizing that they have to return to the concept of 'garden'. At the best, they generally only accept, reject, suspend judgment or look for what they imagine are the common factors.

From time to time true gardeners do arise. Such is the abundance of semi-gardens that when they hear of real ones people say: 'Oh, yes. You are talking about a garden such as we already have, or we imagine.' What they have and what they imagine are both defective.

The real experts, who cannot reason with the quasi-gardeners, associate for the most part among themselves, putting into this or that garden something from the total stock which will enable it to maintain its vitality to some extent.

They are often forced to masquerade, because the people who want to learn from them seldom know about the fact of gardening as an art or science underlying everything that they have heard before. So they ask questions like: 'How can I get a more beautiful flower on these onions?'

The real gardeners may work with them because true gardens can sometimes be brought into being, for the benefit of all mankind. They do not last long, but it is only through them that the knowledge can be truly learnt and people can come to see what a real garden is.

["The Way of the Sufi," pages 117-119.]

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Shah's story of the master-gardener leaves many questions hanging, as it is supposed to do. Who was the master-gardener? Who was the first group he trained, and who was the second? What is the "Herb of Longevity"? Who were the master-gardener's "chief assistants," where are the "real experts" and where do they associate? Etc., Etc., Etc.

Some of these questions can be answered, but not all of them, perhaps. While, for other questions, there are multiple answers, and those answers will vary by degree according to the reader. And even those answers will be temporary, changing with conditions as a real garden does.

"Sufism," like gardening, perhaps, Shah notes, "must be studied with a certain attitude, under certain conditions, in a certain manner." Or, as the great Sufi teacher, Ibn Arabi said: "The Sufi must act and speak in a manner which takes into consideration the understanding, limitations and dominant concealed prejudices of his audience."

["The Way of the Sufi," page 33.]

I leave to the reader, then, how to interpret Shah's story; but I leave it with the observation that the story must be understood, perhaps, within Shah's larger works, of which "The Way of the Sufi" is but an integral part.

Thomas Merton: "Shining Like the Sun"

"I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

-- Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O. --

The quotation, above, is but part of a description of an "epiphany" experienced by the famed Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton, as described in his book, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander."

Thomas Merton (1915 -1968)

While Merton wrote in excess of seventy books (and has been the subject of many score more since his death by accidental electrocution in 1968), it is Merton's 'epiphany' moment, and his famous "shining like the sun" passage, that stand out from, and helps define, his larger body of work - much like Krishnamurti's famous "the Truth is a pathless land" quote.

(His "waking from a dream of separateness" and comments on "illusion" in the first paragraph of the "shining like the sun" passage are not uncoincidentally also reminiscent of Einstein's comments about our suffering from a "cosmic illusion of consciousness," which creates the seeming separation of the ego.)

Merton, in his "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander," writes:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you."

"Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous."

"This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking."

"It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake."

"I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun."

"This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!"

"Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift."

(Emphasis added.)

Merton was a staunch advocate for, and enthusiast of, interfaith conversation and understanding. A 'giant' himself, he pioneered dialogues with many Eastern spiritual 'giants', including the Dalai Lama, D.T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen master and writer who was so influential in introducing the Zen Buddhist tradition to the United States, and the Vietnamese monk and anti-war activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, whom Martin Luther King Jr. nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.

Fittingly, the recent unveiling of an historical plaque, and the designation of Fourth Avenue and Walnut Street in Louisville as "Thomas Merton Square," was accompanied by an inter-faith reading of Merton's famous "Shining Like the Sun" quote at the site of his personal epiphany.

Mystic Experience and The Environment

I found this gem of insight by Alan Watts, undeniably one of the brightest lights of the twentieth century - a pioneering psychonaut, a Zen master, and lecturer on Indian and Chinese philosophy - on one of my favourite Internet repositories: www.scribd.com.

It is Watt's opening line from a collection of "Lectures and Essays" available here:

"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit---to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." (Alan Watts, from Psychedelics and Religious Experiences.) 

Watts held a Master's Degree in Theology, and Doctorate of Divinity.  He never practiced as the Church of England minister he had trained for, delving instead into the practice of Zen Buddhism and the study of Eastern Wisdom Traditions.