Who Are You? - Thomas Merton

Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name.

Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you?
Who
Are You?
Whose Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet).  Do not
think of what you are
still less of

What you may one day be.
Rather
be what you are (but who?)
Be the unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,

and all things live around you
speaking to your own being,
speaking by the Unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

I will try, like them, 
to be my own silence:
And this is difficult.
The whole world is secretly on fire.
The stones burn, even the stones.
They burn me.

How can man be still or listen to all
things burning?  How can he dare 
to sit with them when
all their silence

is on fire?

Thomas Merton
In Silence

with thanks to  Love Is A Place

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Re-Discovery - Merton & Easwaran

At the deepest level communication
is not communication but communion.
It is wordless, it is beyond words, and
it is beyond concept.

What we have to recover [re-discover] is
our original unity [within].

What we have to be is what we are...

Thomas Merton
from a speech he gave just before he died.

with thanks to Heron Dance

~

Everything we have ever achieved we owe to the inexplicable
urge to reach beyond our grasp, [and] know the Unknown.
This urge is part of our evolutionary heritage, given to us for
the ultimate adventure: to discover who we are, what the
universe is, and what is the significance of the brief drama
of life and death we play out against the backdrop of
eternity.

Nothing can satisfy us but reunion with our real Self...

Eknath Easwaran

From the Introduction to The Unpanishads

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

"Cosmic Blanket" :)

 

The Beginning of Love - Thomas Merton

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.

Thomas Merton

with thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo from pixabay.com

 

Rain Talk - Thomas Merton

What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world.
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.

Thomas Merton

with thanks to The Beauty We Love
and photo too...

~

As I recall we haven't had rain in months - I miss the sound,
the smell, the comfort...  And we have yet to see our first
snowfall this season.  Very late...  Very dry...  No rain talk...

 

Tattered Truth - Thomas Merton

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.
Nothing strange about this.  It is natural to man, an intelligent being,
to desire the truth. But actually, what we desire is not "the truth"
so much as "to be in the right."

To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we
are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.

What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies
our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness.  This is not "the truth."
It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."
And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that
somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong?

Because we need them to be wrong.  For if they are wrong, 
and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: our selfishness
becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly
condemned.

We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as
"truth."  What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie
should be proved "right," and our iniquity be vindicated as "just."

No wonder we hate.  No wonder we are violent.  No wonder we
exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!

And in doing so, of course, we offer the "enemy" another reason 
to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready
to destroy us.

Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects
his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce
hatred, murder, disaster.

Thomas Merton

from - Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
"Tattered Truth"

 

The Silent Self - Thomas Merton

 There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing
precisely because it is so silent: it can't be spoken.
It has to remain silent.  To articulate it, to verbalize it,
is to tamper with it, and in some way to destroy it.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which
is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this
inner, silent self.  We live in a state of constant semi attention
to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise
of what goes on around us all the time.
This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words,
a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted;
we are not quite "thinking", not entirely responding, but we
are more or less there.

We are not fully present and not entirely absent,
not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available.

It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything
and we may in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and
resentment.  Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague 
sense that we are "part of something"...

Although we are not quite able to define what that something
is...  and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could.

We just float along in the general noise.
Resigned and indifferent,
we share semi-consciously in the mindless mind of Muzak
and radio commercials which pass for "reality."

Thomas Merton
from Love & Living

With thanks to The Beauty We Love

~ 

Photo - Mystic Meandering

This little tulip (maybe 6"tall") is growing
in a planter tub amongst the weeds - 
the "silent self" amongst the "noise." :)

Have no idea how the bulb got there!

Allow yourself to be used - Thomas Merton

You are fed up with words, I don't blame you.
I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also,
to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.
This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand
what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas
and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding
the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it.  And
then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to
make the meaning be there again by magic.  Going through
this kind of reaction helps you to guard against this.
Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing,
and it is right.

...The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they
suddenly happen, and we can share in them, but there is
no point in building our lives on personal satisfaction,
which may be denied us and which after all is not that
important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your
even thinking about what you are doing is crucially
important.  You are probably striving to build yourself
an identity in your work, out of your work...  You are
using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against
nothingness, annihilation.  That is not the right use of
your work.  All the good that you will do will come,
not from you but from the fact that you have allowed
yourself to be used by Love [Grace].  Think of this
more and more and gradually you will be free from
the need to prove yourself, and you can be more
open to the power that will work through you
without your knowing it.

Thomas Merton

~

"We are an instrument of Grace...
We are being played...
Keep the instrument tuned so
that Grace can play the music."

Mitch Rosacker
Self Discovery Studio

~

Photo - "The Mystery" playing :)

Remaining Empty - Thomas Merton

Art by Ann Poucher

The true "contemplative" is not one who prepares his mind
for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but
is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never
 anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. 
He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation.
He does not demand light instead of darkness.  He waits in
silence, and, when he is "answered," it is not so much by a
word that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself,
suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of
great power, full of the voice of [the Silence].

Thomas Merton
from: The Climate of Monastic Prayer

(one of the last books he prepared for publication)

~

Personal Note: Although I do not consider myself a
"contemplative", as a "Mystic", I have had similar
experience with silence/Silence.  The labels don't
really matter.  It is the "remaining empty" in silence,
listening without agenda, that allows for the "direct
experience" of the Ineffable - aka - the Voice of
The Silence...

Solitude - Thomas Merton

If you seek a heavenly light
I, Solitude, am your professor!

I go before you into emptiness,
Raise strange suns for your new mornings,
Opening the windows
Of your innermost apartment.

When I, loneliness, give my special signal
Follow my Silence, follow where I beckon!
Fear not, little beast, little spirit...
I, Solitude, am angel
And have prayed in your name.

Look at the empty, wealthy night
The pilgrim moon,
I am the appointed hour,
The "now" that cuts
Time like a blade.

I am the unexpected flash
Beyond "yes," beyond "no,"
The forerunner of the Word of God.

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers.

For I, Solitude, am thine own Self.
I, Nothingness, am thy All.
I, Silence, am thy Amen!

Thomas Merton

via - The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

When I am not present to myself - Thomas Merton

When I am not present to myself,
then I am only aware of that half of me,
that mode of my being which turns outward
to created things.

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them.
Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull
of the gravitation of love which draws my inward self
toward "God." [The Unmanifest]]

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the
other faculties.
My senses, my imagination, my emotions,
scatter to pursue their various quarries all over the face
of the earth.

Recollection brings them home.
It brings the outward self into line with the inward spirit,
and makes my whole being answer the deep pull of love
that reaches down into the Mystery...

Thomas Merton

from - No Man is an Island

via - The Beauty We Love

~

Photo - by Jacqueline Riman Photographer/Artist

via - No Mind's Land

Contemplative Experience - Thomas Merton

Contemplation is not trance or ecstasy, or a tendency to find
peace and satisfaction in liturgical rites; nor is it the hearing
of sudden unutterable words, nor the imagination of lights;
not the emotional fire and sweetness that come with religious
exaltation  It is not enthusiasm, not the sense of being "seized"
by an elemental force and swept into liberation by mystical
frenzy...

Contemplation is no pain-killer.

It is life itself - fully awake, fully 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 a vivid realization that life and being
proceed from an invisible, transcendent
and infinitely abundant Source.

Contemplation is, above all, awareness of
 the reality of Source.

And in that realization, the contemplative suffers the
 anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what "God" is.
This is great gain, because "God" is not a what",
not a "thing."
That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of
contemplative experience...realizing that there is no
such "thing" as "God", because "God" is neither a
"what" or a "thing", but pure Who [Pure Being],
the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs
into awareness [being].

Thomas Merton
Christian Monk

From: New Seed of Contemplation

~

Personal Note - His description is somewhat
different from the "mystical experience".  Still -
I relate to some of his description.  In the end, "It" is
 all Pure Beingness/Pure Awareness/Pure Consciousness.

A Plague of Intolerance - Thomas Merton

A mass movement readily exploits the discontent and frustration
of large segments of the population which for some reason or
other cannot face the responsibility of standing on their own
feet.  But give them a movement to join, a cause to defend, and
they will go to any extreme, stop at no crime, intoxicated as they
are by the slogans that give them a pseudo-religious sense of
transcending their own limitations.  The member of a mass
movement, afraid of his own isolation, and his own weakness as
an individual, cannot face the task of discovering within himself
the spiritual power and integrity which can be called forth only
by love.  Instead of this, he seeks a movement that will protect
his weakness with a wall of anonymity and justify his acts by
the sanction of collective glory and power.  All the better if this
is done out of hatred, for hatred is always easier and less subtle
than love.  It does not have to respect reality as love does.  It
does not have to take account of individual cases.  Its solutions
are simple and easy.  It makes its decisions by a simple glance
at a face, a colored skin, a uniform.  It identifies an enemy by
an accent, an unfamiliar turn of speech, an appeal to concepts
that are difficult to understand...  This is not "ours", he says.
This must be brought into line - or destroyed.

[Because of] this universal infection of fanaticism, the plague of
intolerance, prejudice and hate, which flows from the crippled
nature of mankind... [we] must labor with inexhaustible
patience and love, in silence, perhaps in repeated failure,
seeking tirelessly, wherever we can, to restore the capacity of
 love...

Thomas Merton
from - Disputed Questions
(written in the 1960's)

Thomas Merton was a Christian Trappist Monk
and social activist in the 1960's.  He was a strong
supporter of non-violence and civil rights.  In his
later years he became interested in Zen Buddhism
and promoted an East-West dialogue.  

He died in Bangkok in 1968.

~

Thanks to The Beauty We Love

The Secrecy of My Own Being - Thomas Merton

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me
by my own estimate of what I am.  My idea of what I am is
falsified by my admiration of what I do.  And my illusions
about myself are bred by another's imagined greatness.

If I do not know who I am, it's because I think I am the sort
of person everyone around me wants to be.  Perhaps I have
never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what
everybody else seems to want to become.  Perhaps if I only
realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire,
I would really begin to live after all.  I would be liberated from
the painful duty of saying what I really do not think.  [or feel :)]

Thomas Merton

~

Photo - a recent Spring snowfall
1:30am

The Colors of Change...

I took myself and my head cold out for a photo excursion today
and discovered the brilliant colors of change.

"Life is this simple:

We are living in a world that is transparent
and the Divine is shining through it
all the time."

Thomas Merton

"Through our eyes the universe is perceiving itself.
Through our ears the universe is listening to its harmonies.
We are the witness through which the universe becomes
conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."

Alan Watts

 "Reflections don't affect the mirror.
There is only Existence that is unaffected
by our experience."

Bentinho Massaro 

"When I  run after what I *think* I want,
my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety;
if I sit in my own place of patience,
what I need flows to me
without pain...

From this I understand that what I want
also wants me, is looking for me
and attracting me.

There is a great secret here..."

Rumi

~

Unfortunately the sky was not its brilliant blue

(the top photo was taken last year).

We had cloud cover today because a storm is coming in tonight

with wind and rain,
 which means the leaves will be gone tomorrow.
And normally we don't get the brilliant reds and oranges!
An unusual year...

Learning about Love...

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves,
and not to twist them to fit our image.
Otherwise we love only the reflection of
ourselves we find in them…”

Thomas Merton

“You have to learn to get up from the table
when love is no longer being served…”

Nina Simone

“Love arises when you die into
the Unknown Mystery of Being -
when you realize that Love
has no intention to change you,
it has no agenda…”

Adyashanti

Whose Path Are You On...?

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the results of other people’s thinking.
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice.
And most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
They somehow already know what you truly want…”

Steve Jobs

~

At this inner crossroads that I am experiencing I have been pondering “the path.”  The question that keeps coming up is “What is the true path of liberation?”  I can honestly say I don’t know!  I used to think I did… I used to think I was searching for “enlightenment”/God/Truth – and the bells and whistles of realizing my True Nature, and turning into Light…  Now I don’t know…  But this question of true liberation keeps coming up lately.  And what *is* true liberation?  I don’t know…  My gut feeling is it is liberation from the mind and its mental veils of separation that still linger even though I have been aware of my True Nature – Beingness – for a long time…  

I have been on many paths.   And I discovered that each one was only a facet of the Truth.  Some teachings say we need a continual practice and many lifetimes to be able to truly be “enlightened.”  Other paths say all we need is awareness of our True Beingness, and others give mental ascent to who we truly are, but never get to the Heart of Being – getting lost in intellectualism and a pseudo non-duality.  None providing real “liberation.”  At least that is my experience…

I’ve been at this threshold before…  See The Pathless Path and Into The Forest for more articulate versions.

Although I chose to follow certain paths for a time, I’ve had to go beyond the illusory path of religious beliefs, of ideas of “enlightenment”, conceptual “non-dualism” , and experience the Truth of Being directly, in my own way – carving out a “path” of my own.  I still am – discovering, exploring, experiencing, deepening – still a wayfarer on an ever unfolding path…  The paths I have followed have been other people’s paths who speak *about* the Truth, *about* “enlightenment” and the tendency has been to reiterate what has been heard – as the Truth - not what is necessarily True from my own experience, in my Heart of Hearts.

It seems in order for “liberation” to occur one needs to *experience* and be absorbed by an inner Presence; the inner Guru/Teacher/Self – which is not to say that we don’t need an external “teacher” or “teaching” at times.  But we each must essentially find our own way – which is why we choose the paths we do.   True spiritual pathways and teachers will always turn us back to the inner Heart of True Beingness.  A true teaching actually helps us trust the Truth of our Heart – the “spiritual” Heart – not our personal truth – as in “my truth” - but the universal Truth of our Beingness.  I’m still working on that one – trusting the Truth of the Universal Heart and not the mental concepts of what Truth is supposed to look like - according to others. :)

Here are a few quotes from various “teachers” from various traditions that speak to the essence of what I’m trying to say here…  As you can see, I am still using other people’s words, other voices…  J

“King Arthur’s Knights went on the quest for the Holy Grail -
the Truth…

Each entered the forest of adventure
 at the point they had each chosen for themselves,
where it was darkest and where there was no path…

If there is a path,
it is someone else’s path,
and you are not on the adventure.

You have to work it out
for yourself,
taking the clues from
here and there…”

Joseph Campbell
Mythologist

Photo: Shadow from front window

“The spiritual search is usually undertaken
as a result of the failure to secure
happiness, peace and love
in the conventional realms of experience.

Now we seek a permanent state
of enlightenment.

This search takes us to new realms of experience,
teaching us to focus on the acquisition of
states of mind…

So these newly acquired states of mind
bring the spiritual search to a temporary end -
which we call awakening or enlightenment;
and we now confuse these new states of mind
for enlightenment.

Faced with the failure of our search,
there are no more possible realms
in which to search.

For some this failure is experienced
as a time of despair.
There are no further directions
in which to turn…
There is nowhere left to seek,
and yet we cannot stop seeking.

What we truly long for
cannot be found in any state
of the body, mind or world.

A new doorway may open up -
the only one that has yet to be explored.

It is the profound exploration
of the nature of our Self -
The Nature of Being…”

Rupert Spira
Contemporary Non-Duality Teacher
From:
Presence: The Art of Peace and Happiness

“Contemplation is 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 a vivid realization
of the fact 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 reason
and beyond simple faith.

It is a more profound depth,
a knowledge too deep to
be grasped
in images,
in words,
or even
in clear concepts.”

Thomas Merton
Christian Contemplative
From:
Choosing to Love the World

“Spiritual awakening may seem like
an extraordinary occurrence -
but is a built-in human capacity
able to realize inner freedom…

Contact the sacred Presence within you,
call on this Presence.
Direct your attention inward to that…

Contacting the facets of the sacred Presence
within, you deepen your trust in your own
essential being…

Trust that you can find a way to
the true refuge of your own loving
awareness – your own Buddha Nature.”

Tara Brach

Buddhist Teacher
From her Blog

“You are the Beloved.

…though the experience of being the Beloved
has never been completely absent from my life,
I never claimed it as my core truth.

I kept running around it in large or small circles,
always looking for someone or something
able to convince me of my Belovedness.
It was as if I kept refusing to hear the voice
that speaks from the depths of my being…

That voice has always been there,
but it seems that I was much more eager
to listen to other louder voices…
Meanwhile, the soft gentle voice
that speaks in the silence and solitude
of my heart
remained unheard…"

Henri Nouwen
Catholic Theologian
From: Life of the Beloved

 Photo: Rainbow light from crystal in window
forming a symbol for a musical note

“…even the idea of the path is an illusion:
there is nowhere to go,
nothing to realize,
because everything is ‘God’ [Infinite Consciousness].

And if everything is ‘The Beloved’,
who is this “I” who has made the journey
from separation back to union?

The simple knowing that it is all One,
and that the “I” is just an illusion,
a veil of separation,
has made me question
the nature of the very human drama
that is played out
with our longing…

Is the very idea of our own journey, our story,
just a figment of our imagination…

And does it matter?

So who makes the journey?

There is a journey…
even though I know there is really no journey… 

They are just continuing footsteps…

The path is ‘not about me’ -
but a larger story -
an ocean in which my own experiences
are just a small ripple…

It’s the story of the ocean,
rather than the drop……”

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Sufi Mystic

From: Fragments of a Love Story

Note: when Vaughan-Lee speaks of ‘God”/The Beloved, etc.
it is the all-pervasive Presence of
Love that he refers to,
not a separate entity…

Photo: Light through stained glass
reflected on window sill

Winter's Whimsies...

“Regard everything as transparent.
See through everything.

See that everything is in transition.

Liberate your concepts and beliefs.

Let go of the need for an “answer”,
a solution, a resolution…

Rest in the nature of Essence ~
The Primordial State of everything.

Be a child of fantasy.
Be curious instead of afraid…”


Quotes from Pema Chodron

When you can let yourself
really be
who and how
you are…
No one else
will have much
problem with it…

Practice letting yourself just BE!



Robyn Posin
For The Little Ones Inside

All life moves in cycles…

What has been
must often come apart
before what is to be
can come together…

Remember to honor
your courage
in the midst
of the
coming apart times.


Robyn Posin
For The Little Ones Inside

“What if we could really see the world
without a sense of separateness?

We must see what lies beyond
the perception of polarities…

Individuals are indivisible...
We are all “connected” through
our spacious Awareness…

Awareness is not about labeling different
”takes” on reality.
Awareness allows all ways of seeing to exist...
If you are rooted quietly in Awareness
you are fully aware of
the whole picture…”

Ram Dass
Be Love Now

“…..the deepest level of communication
is not communication, but communion.

It is wordless…

It is beyond words,
and it is beyond speech,
and it is beyond concept.

We discover we are already one.
But we imagine that we are not.

What we have to be
is what we already are…”


Thomas Merton