Thomas Merton

@BozieFozie Said

I'm going to have to dig out my Merton books. I went through a "heavy" phase a few years back and would read Merton at sunset on the beach every night.....it's heavy alright!!!

@tariki Said

Bozie,

Here's a Merton quote that is a little lighter, and always makes me smile.....

A few years ago a man who was compiling a book entitled "Success" wrote and asked me to contribute a statement on how I got to be a success. I replied indignantly that I was not able to consider myself a success in any terms that had a meaning to me. I swore I had spent my life strenuously avoiding success. If it so happened that I had once written a best seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. I heard no more from him, and I am not aware that my reply was published with the other testimonials. (From "Love and Living" )

@tariki Said

Obviously there is a place for trying to be as rational as possible yet as Merton has said....If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man.

For me this is linked to the Buddhist thought that there is, according to its central philosophy, a "total and interminable conflict in reason" and therefore a call to go beyond reason in some sense. Again, this linked to the thought that any word is not the thing itself, that words point beyond themselves, and that - therefore - the implication that life can be experienced/lived, but NOT thought (or be explained by thought)

Perhaps, when we think we've got it taped, we can congeal as people at the point we are at. I think we have to remain vulnerable - vulnerable to change, to self judgement - and this in itself can imply we need to stop stereotyping others, stop seeing "atheist", "theist", "Muslim", "Christian" rather than the concrete living person in front of us. We can end up just seeing our own labels, our own understanding of the words.......in the end we are just looking in a mirror and not living in the real world, however "rational" we think we are.

A concrete example is how I first read Merton. It was his autobiographical book "The Seven Storey Mountain", about his early life and conversion to Catholicism. I gave up less than halfway through; the book seemed so pious and world condemning. It was only a few years later when I picked up a book of letters by Merton "The Hidden Ground of Love" that I gained another perspective on the man. Why I bothered at that time with this book of letters I don't really know, I'm just glad I did. (Merton himself eventually cringed at the tone of his early book)

Anyway, I could waffle on, but its sunday and the garden needs attention........

@NikiNiki Said

So God so loved Thomas Merton that God punished Thomas for his sin of hiding his light under the bushel, his sin of burying his talent in Kentucky, and his sin of avoiding success by making Thomas a success.

I would say whodatukit; except that God, according to my mother, did the same to my mother and me.

God did something similar to Einstein. For the sin of challenging authority, God made Einstein an authority.

Or not, maybe Einstein?s sinned by spelling his name wrong. (?I? before ?E,? etc.)

@JaneDevin Said

Instead of irrational, I might have said uncertain. The universe might be rational, but some parts might be unknowable.

And I know that something about categories disturbs the Asian mind. It insists on seeing the uncut entity rather than the Christian or the Buddhist. One must wonder how that Asian housewife manages to buy carrots on her way home from the temple where the master has insisted the she see only vegetables.

@tariki Said

Have you got your categories and carrots mixed up? Anyway, according to the Tao of Pooh, the Uncarved Block is all about maintaining the simplicity of singular things...

When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few, other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun. Along with that comes the ability to do things spontaneously and have them work, odd as that may appear to others at times. As Piglet put it in 'Winnie-the-Pooh', "Pooh hasn't much Brain, but he never comes to any harm. He does silly things and they turn out right.

Bozie knows about life being fun.......

@tariki Said

Have you got your categories and carrots mixed up?

@JaneDevin Said

Could be. I suppose a thing is not a category. A category would contain at least two things.

I had a high school teacher, who insisted that things don't make reality. Only differenc makes reality. I think that means that the sensation we call a carrot would be at least two differences, one when the carrot begins and another where the carrot ends. Then, of course, if I sense two carrots, is that one thing or two things? Do I have two carrots, or a bunch of carrotness?

And it, or they, might not be carrotness. It might be potatoness or peanutness. Darwin had this problem when he collected the famous Galapagos Finches. He thought they represented more than a dozen unrecorded species. When he returned to England, John Gould told him that the birds were all finches.

But that's all for the birds.

I had meant to ask you on the other thread if you see any incompatibility between the notion that God created everything and the notion that the environment selects changes which become species. Seems to me, that if God created everything, she must have created natural selection.

@tariki Said

Well, Merton did say that he was born under the sign of contradiction, and was not blind to the paradox's (paradoxi?) of life... As far as his words on success, maybe we have to be very aware of his many writings on the false self, and its felt need to wrap itself in glory, to see exactly what he was speaking of. Keeping that in mind, I think it possible to be a "success" - at elast in worldly terms - without sucumbing to the vanities of it.

Oh yes, never saw that before......."i" before "e" except after "c"......that little ditty has helped my spelling no end.

Anyway, whatever, Einstein was a great Scientist!!

@JaneDevin Said

God created everything

@NikiNiki Said

You don't really believe that, right?