Sublime

IF YOU have read my book Affirmations, you will recall that I described journeys I have taken up the tunnel of light into the spirit world.

I took a medium-sized bottle of Jim Beam and drank from it under the covers while reading No Man Is an Island by Thomas Merton. Without God, we are no longer persons. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much confusion.

Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments.

29 Now the rest of the acts of Rehoboam, and all that he did, are they not written in the Book of the Annals of the Kings of Judah? 30There was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam continually.

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyrical strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality