Zen and the Birds of Appetite by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1968-04-07T05:00:00+00:00

TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCE

WHO IS IT THAT HAS A TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCE?

The purpose of this note is to raise an important question, in fact to cast a serious doubt upon assumptions which, casually taken for granted, make all discussion of the transcendent experience, especially “mystical” experience, completely ambiguous. This ambiguity is bound to sterilize and frustrate the disciplines or other means used to “attain” the transcendent experience.

First of all, what is meant by transcendent experience? The term is unsatisfactory, but it intends to narrow the field: transcendent experience is something more definite than “peak experience.” It is an experience of metaphysical or mystical self-transcending and also at the same time an experience of the “Transcendent” or the “Absolute” or “God” not so much as object but Subject. The Absolute Ground of Being (and beyond that the Godhead as “Urgrund” i.e. as infinite uncircumscribed freedom) is realized so to speak “from within”—realized from within “Himself” and from within “myself,” though “myself” is now lost and “found” “in Him.” These metaphorical expressions all point to the problem we have in mind: the problem of a self that is “no-self,” that is by no means an “alienated self” but on the contrary a transcendent Self which, to clarify it in Christian terms, is metaphysically distinct from the Self of God and yet perfectly identified with that Self by love and freedom, so that there appears to be but one Self. Experience of this is what we here call “transcendent experience” or the illumination of wisdom (Sapientia, Sophia, Prajna). To attain this experience is to penetrate the reality of all that is, to grasp the meaning of one’s own existence, to find one’s true place in the scheme of things, to relate perfectly to all that is in a relation of identity and love.

What this is not:

It is not a regressive immersion in nature, the cosmos or “pure being,” in narcissistic tranquillity, a happy loss of identity in a warm, regressive, dark, oceanic swoon. It is not precisely identifiable with erotic peak experiences even where these are authentically personal rather than (in Fromm’s sense) symbiotic. It is more than aesthetic transcendence, though it can combine with it and lift it to a higher point of metaphysical insight (as in Zen painting). It is also more than moral transcendence, the experience of that heroic generosity in self-giving which takes us beyond and above our own limits: but of course it can combine with or emerge from moral heroism, lifting it to the plane of a mystical self-sacrifice and self-giving.

It is finally beyond the ordinary level of religious or spiritual experience (authentic experience of course) in which the intelligence and “the heart” (a traditional and technical term in Sufism, Hesychasm and Christian mysticism generally) are illumined with insight into the meaning of revelation, or of being, or of life. All these experiences are on a level where the self-aware subject remains more or less conscious of himself as subject, and indeed his awareness of his subjectivity is heightened and purified.

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