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Reading Thomas Merton’s Asian Journals on the train. I think: why do I not become a hermit in a cave? Cut myself off from the world. I could. But even Merton couldn’t — not really: he kept a foot in the world of people and things; or more than a foot.
My religious life — or more specifically: the series of religious questions that haunt my life — is held back by the skeptical question of what it would accomplish to meditate; to humble oneself. It just seems to me that my life would disappear without a noise or commotion. And maybe that scares me. Maybe — certainly — I’m still attached to the ideal of the heroic individual. My intellectual lineage is rooted in Homer and not the Vedas.
I find it fascinating, however, reading the journal of Trappist monk from the 1960’s, that meditation is only now becoming a mass phenomenon. I suppose in the 1960’s, people really believed that new forms of worship and consciousness were on the horizon. In 2018 we know that an authentic spiritual revolution — any revolution — is impossible, but we plow ahead with silly corporatized meditation and yoga anyway, as if it were the real thing.
It’s hard to imagine that the Headspace App is anything more than cognitive white-noise; non-chemical Ambien. It’s hard to imagine that your evening yoga class is about anything more than looking beautiful.
Which makes sense: we all want to be beautiful and empty. That’s what the spiritual tradition of the East now amounts to in the West.
When religion is torn from ritual and repetition, it becomes a lifestyle.
And when a lifestyle becomes religion… then…
