Photo by Thomas Merton from louie, louie.
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton (Thank you, libraryland)
Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Thomas Merton Playing Bongos, 1968. Thank you, uncertaintimes & catherinewillis.
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts, we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 204 (via parabola-magazine)
Yesterday as I came down the path from the mountain I heard a strange humming behind me. A Tibetan came by quietly droning a monotonous sound, a prolonged “om”. It was something that harmonized with the mountain — an ancient syllable he had found long ago in the rocks — or perhaps it had been born with him.
Thomas Merton, from a journal entry written in Dharamsala on November 2, 1968. (Thank you touba)
By technique?
All truly contemplatives souls have this in common:
not that they gather exclusively in the desert,
or that they shut themselves up in reclusion,
but that where He is, there they are.
And how do they find Him? By technique?
There is no technique for finding Him.
They find Him by His will. And His will,
bringing them grace within and arranging their lives exteriorly,
carries them infallibly to the precise place in which they can find Him.
Even there they do not know how they have got there,
or what they are really doing.
—Thomas Merton from Thoughts in Solitude. Thank you, The Beauty We Love.
When humility delivers a man
from attachment to his own words
and his own reputation,
he discovers that true joy is only possible
when we have completely forgotten ourselves,
and it is only when we pay no more attention to our life
and our own reputation and our own excellence
that we are at last completely free to serve God for His sake alone.
Thomas Merton. Thank you, The Beauty We Love.
the courage to be simple
“It takes more courage than we imagine to be perfectly simple with other men. Our frankness is often spoiled by a hidden barbarity, born of fear.
False sincerity has much to say, because it is afraid. True candor can afford to be silent. It does not need to face an anticipated attack. Anything it may have to defend can be defended with perfect simplicity.”
—Thomas Merton. No Man is an Island (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955) pages 194-5
also in A Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas P. McDonnell, (New York: Image Books, 1989) page 123.
Thank you, louie, louie.
Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they 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.
Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Another excellent quote from The River.
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stay right there with it
“Merton’s life and writing remain enormously instructive. He started out as a very zealous, very spiritual monk but over the years, because he learned the nature of true practice, he gradually lost all that spirituality and sense of his own specialness and became a rather ordinary human being.
One very practical idea that can be found throughout his writing is that meditation (or what he usually called contemplation) is a practice of self-emptying. And one simple technique we can practice in this regard is attention to silence. Usually we sit with an awareness of all the sounds of the world going on around us - we open ourselves to them and allow ourselves to be transparent to them - we let them simply flow through us as we sit, either without comment or judgement, or labeling the comments and judgements that arise as we just sit and listen. But today I want to suggest a somewhat different practice for you that you can try if you like - or rather what I’m going to describe is a way of sitting that you may find yourself having settled into already at different times without thinking about it. It’s very simple. At the end of each breath, we pause for an infinitesimal moment and notice the space before the next breathe begins. Just that split second before we exhale and just that split second before we draw in the next inhalation. In that little gap, we may experience a moment of pure silence. And for that moment we drop everything. There is just that empty gap between breaths.
If we do that for a awhile, we may find that all sorts of reactions will begin to come up. Some of the time that silence will feel deeply peaceful, and we find that we can release all our bodily tensions for that moment of letting go. But I think most of us will also find that are those moments when our bodily tensions stand out most starkly and we will suddenly be acutely aware of a tightness that we’re holding onto somewhere.
It’s as if we’ve created this momentary blank screen of silence and then suddenly see projected onto it all the physical tensions we normally carry around unconsciously. And when that happens we need to just stay right there with it, being, feeling that tension in our bodies. The fact is, that as we progressively let ourselves go into silence, we also feel more acutely our resistance to letting go, our fear of loss of control, of vulnerability, of not knowing. Facing these fears is the real work of practice.”
Thank you, dhammanovice & to ordinaryind.com.
(Source: stillcuriosity)
