Punctum Saliens

I think things. I write things. I take too long to write good and put it aside. Then I find that someone else has said what I want to say. And said it more eloquently than I am capable of (hopefully that will change). So, why not let those who have already spoken speak for me?

So, here’s another quote from Thomas Merton’s letter to Amiya Chakravarty in The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns:

It is not easy to try to say what I now I cannot say. I do really have the feeling that you have all understood and shared quite perfectly. That you have seen something that I see to be most precious — and most available too. The reality that is present to us and in us: call it Being, call it Atman, call it Pneuma … or Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen which cannot be learned any more than breathing), we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.

I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happiness, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it …

Aside from Merton’s appreciation for religious and spiritual thought other than his own, what strikes me about this passage is the last sentence. How many of us truly recognize each other? We meet someone and immediately we judge them based on name, appearance, the way they stand, how they talk, what their “affiliations” are. We never are just with them in the “metaphysical space of silence and happiness.” We don’t truly recognize them; we think we see them or know them but all we see are the exterior things. We don’t see how “full of paradise” they are. Hell, we don’t even see how “full of paradise” we are. We just don’t know. And the rate some of us are going — we never will.