In the past few weeks I've been reading Thomas Merton's 'last' book, The Inner Experience. It's his last because it was published in 2003, thirty-five years after his death. Evidently the full manuscript - a re-write really, of an earlier book - was among Merton's papers, but for a number of reasons, it was awhile before it could be published.
Well, anyhow, I got it because I read somewhere that it was the most extensive and personal thing that Merton ever wrote about his own spiritual experience and his understanding of the processes of prayer and meditation.
It's very much old-style Merton - not entirely a good thing. His best writing, in my opinion, is in the autobiographical material - that always has a freshness about it, even when the ideas and feelings he's describing are rather dated. They're his feeling, his thoughts - and that is very real. The Inner Experience, though based on his own prayer life, is more theoretical - and it is marked by Merton's usual disdain for 20th century American culture and worldly attitudes. However, not too many people write on this topic at all - so it's valuable and interesting for that.
For me it has the added interest that it helps me to add a few pieces to an old (to me) puzzle. I've wondered for many years about the so-called "dark night of the soul" that one reads a great deal about in Christian writings, but of which there is almost nothing in the equivalent Buddhist material. Why not? Don't Buddhists experience anything like this? Are the meditative practices and processes of development so different in the two forms of spirituality that what is a major and perhaps essential phase in one is entirely absent in the other? It seems so at times. In mulling over The Inner Experience I am finding some clues.
[to be continued]
