There is a beautiful short video on the monastery of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto. It is one of the very few flourishing Rinzai Zen centers in Japan. Here is the link to the video:
https://dharma-documentaries.net/daitoku-ji-temple
If you have but just one contemplative bone in your body, you will find this video enchanting and maybe inspiring. However, there is a problem: what you find at Daitoku-ji and what you see in this video is but a remnant of something that once was dominant and pervasive in Japan. If I were doing this video, I would have interspersed scenes from downtown Tokyo….as a contrast to where we really are as modern humans. The situation is akin to what has transpired in Catholic contemplative life, monastic or otherwise, with some obvious differences.
I am not going to go into the numbers game: how many monks and nuns there were at some point in the past, how many there are now…. I am not going to waste my time on various studies from think tanks and academics citing the demise of formal religiosity say in the U.S. and its supposed growth in the 3rd world….and other studies claiming to find unexpected growth of “spirituality.” All of this kind of stuff, if any of it has any validity, misses the essential problem; and in place of that we get various diagnoses and various programs and various versions of a story we tell ourselves. There is a so-called “liberal” version, and there is a so-called “conservative” version. All useless, unless we see these studies, these reports, these headcounts themselves as a symptom of the problem.
And I don’t mean to reduce or restrict that which we call “contemplative life” to monastic life or any kind of formal religious life. The reality of which I speak can come in any “color or shape” and be lived in any circumstances. Two very interesting examples coming from two very different traditions are Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist, and Benedict Joseph Labre, a Catholic. The former never became formally a monk but is now the paramount exemplar of realization in Tibetan Buddhism (and actually his teacher, Marpa, was also strictly a layman and married). The latter tried to enter the Trappists and the Carthusians and was rejected by both and became a vagabond on the streets of Rome going from church to church and continually praying. So what is at issue is a certain state of mind and heart which can be called “contemplative,” can be called a possibility for a transformation of awareness, can be called a living within an Absolute Holy Mystery, and so on…. It can be put in many different ways. In St. Benedict’s Rule for monks the newcomer is faced with a question: what do you seek? In the Rule it says: “The concern must be whether the novice truly seeks God…..” This will involve a profound interior change. (Echoing the Gospel of John 1:38—“Jesus turned and saw them following, and said to them, ‘What do you seek?’ And they said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’”) As Merton argued, the essence of monastic life is not “embedded in buildings… or even a rule” but in “total inner transformation.”
It is with this kind of “seeking” that we begin to get a sense of what is really at stake and why we are in deep trouble. “The Problem” is not that we are living in “bad times.” This has been the case since we were expelled from the Garden: wars, chaos, human cruelty, delusion, etc. The age of the Desert Fathers, the age of Lady Julian of Norwich, the age of the ancient Chinese Taoist and Chan hermits were all “bad times.” The difference is that modernity practically obliterates the social and cultural and intellectual conditions for the possibility of such a “seeking,” such a transformation. Modernity has no room, no time, no reason to support a cultural environment in which such a seeking is “normal.” Mostly this negation is accomplished in a “benign” way, and there is a conservative version and a liberal version of this subtle marginalization of a profound human need. In both cases you usually end up with a narcissistic parody of the real journey or nothing at all. Of course most of modern American culture simply ignores any such “seeking.”
“The Problem” resists naming. When we do try to name it, we miss its real depth, its unimaginable scope, its bewildering faces with their innumerable masks. Best just to use a simple label like “modernity” and maybe reflect just a bit on its most egregious and most toxic manifestation: the evisceration of the contemplative heart “seeking” in the depths of human life.
[eviscerate: to take away the vital or essential parts of something, making it severely weak or meaningless]
Consider the following quotes:
“The direct experience of being is a ‘non-experience.’ It is a ‘no-knowledge.’ It is a ‘void.’ It is not an object. It is a ‘poverty.'”
— The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton
“The void which I then entered was so total that I could not even say I was entering it… It was the end of all ‘I,’ the end of all ‘God.’ Only the ‘IS’ remained.”
— Abhishiktananda’s Diary (Ascent to the Depth of the Heart)
“The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self, and yet infinitely transcends ourselves. . .. Christ Himself is in us as unknown and unseen. We follow Him, we find Him … and then He must vanish and we must go along without Him at our side. Why? Because He is even closer than that. He is ourself.”
From a Merton letter to D. T. Suzuki
From T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece “Four Quartets”
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
Human beings totally committed to the self-understanding of modernity, to its structures and maps of human existence, will find this kind of language incomprehensible and irrelevant. It may be allowed a certain kind of marginal existence (even in a religious community) but it is definitely not the “real world” as they say. We as a people, as a culture, are aggressively noncontemplative. Mostly we are lost in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making, self-affirmation, power, sex, etc. That there is more to human life than just “getting somewhere” is a quaint notion allowed only on the margins of society. And of course people who still seek to realize some sort of religious/spiritual path through the ruins of modern civilization will nevertheless also be seriously affected by this toxic vision of human existence. No one’s “religious life” is left unscathed. What is left is to recognize one’s “wounds” amid the psychological and spiritual devastation.
The serpent lurking in this modern paradise has tainted all the fruits of modernity with various poisons….like meaninglessness, angst, loneliness….a fragile emptiness that needs to be filled as quickly as possible with distractions, entertainment, consumerism…. Thoreau, almost two centuries ago, already diagnosed some of the symptoms of “The Problem.” He already observed the repercussions: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country,…. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things”
Yet you might want to say to me, “What about all this new interest in spirituality and religion springing up here and there? And more books on spirituality are being published than ever before!” And you would be right about the numbers. And yes some of this phenomenon has some real positive value. But the deep contemplative life does not manifest itself and does not flourish where the self is promoted, “improved,” taught psychological maneuvers, etc., which is what most of this stuff is all about. The real thing is something quite different. But in a culture that’s obsessed with self-improvement, self-observation, self-imaging, there’s a strong tendency to see spirituality as a means of creating a better, faster, stronger, more productive version of ourselves. Spiritual practices, concepts, or achievements are used to reinforce and build up the ego rather than transcend it. Instead of letting go of self-importance, the ego treats spirituality like a capitalist shopping spree. It treats wisdom, rituals, and traditional practices as shiny new possessions to collect, control, and show off. But the deeper life is not about another “version” of who we are; rather it is a matter of total transformation, a matter of “life and death.” A contemporary Tibetan Lama described his authentic path like this: open heart surgery with no anesthesia!
When I was a small boy, I saw an old(1933) cheap sci-fi movie called “The Invisible Man,” in which a mad scientist somehow makes himself invisible. In order to let people close to him know that he is “there” and exactly where he is in a room, he wraps himself in bandages. Amazingly enough Merton uses this image in New Seeds of Contemplation:
“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self… I wind my whole life around this false self like bandages. I give it my name, my academic degrees, my deeds, my office, my business, my triumphs… I treat it as if it were a solid reality, whereas it is nothing but a phantom made visible by my bandages.”
Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there.
—DEUTERONOMY 5:15