Om. Om. Aum. Om.

[01:10]

Okay. Hallelujah! Aum. Namo tassa bhagavato arahato samasambuddhasam

[03:09]

buddham saranam gacchami dhanham saranam gacchami sangham saranam gacchami dutyampi buddham saranam gacchami dutyampi dhanham saranam gacchami dutyampi sangham saranam gacchami tātyāṁ hi buddhaṁ sarvaṇaṁ gacchāmi tātyāṁ hi daṅgaṁ sarvaṇaṁ gacchāmi tātyāṁ hi saṅgaṁ sarvaṇaṁ gacchāmi nāmo tassa bhagavato arahato samasambuddhasā The Sanskrit word yoga is, of course, the same as the Latin jungo and the English yoke, meaning union or integration, if we want to get a little bit fancier.

[04:28]

And there are many kinds of yoga suited to different temperaments and types of people. But there are three particularly distinguishing types of yoga, different ways. Jnana Yoga, the way of knowledge. Karma Yoga, the way of action. And Bhakti Yoga, the way of devotion. And I imagine that the majority of people in this gathering are bhaktis. In your contemplation, the method is centrally adoration of the Godhead. as manifested in Jesus Christ, and that is bhakti. I happen temperamentally to be a jnani. And so some of the things that I say to some of you may seem rather coldly intellectual, and as not having in it the passion

[05:38]

which you would normally expect from a discourse on contemplative meditation. However, it is possible if you go along this jnani way that you can perfectly easily join in with the bhakti devotions of those who follow that way, and with considerable enthusiasm, as I have been able to do during this week in this extraordinary and miraculous assembly. Now, we'll begin then with this Bhakti way, because it is so fundamental for most of us here. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, not just going through the motions, but with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your strength. This is the first and great commandment.

[06:39]

How can anybody possibly obey In St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, the seventh chapter, there's a long discussion of the reason why God gave the commandments, gave the law. And St. Paul explains that God gave the law through Moses, not in the expectation that it would be obeyed, but in order that man, in attempting to obey it, would find out that he couldn't. and therefore would be, what he called in his language, convicted of sin. Now, what is sin? Amatanin in Greek, which is the word we translate or mistranslate sin, means to miss the point. And to be on the point is what we call yoga, or jhana, concentration, centeredness.

[07:45]

And a bishop is in Greek an episkopos, which does not mean an overseer, but the man on the spot. The man who gets the point. So, likewise, the way of Christ is to be on the mark. Not to miss the point. Well, you say, what is the point? Oh, how can you get it? You're too big. To enter heaven, you have to go through a pearly gate. You know, that's not a gate all studded with pearls. The gate of heaven is one pearl. There are seven of them on the different sides. Seven different approaches, or maybe it's twelve. Probably twelve, I think. Yes, because the apocalypse designs heaven according to the horoscope. There are twelve gates. representing 12 different kinds of people corresponding to the 12 signs of the zodiac.

[08:51]

But the entry into the pearl is this little tiny hole through which the string goes. The string, which in Sanskrit is called the sutratman, the thread, the self-thread, which joins the pearls of all our different incarnations. But isn't any one of them? It is not us in the ordinary sense. So to go through into heaven, you have to be not you, because wither I go, you cannot come. You have to leave yourself behind in order to get in there. But how can that possibly be done? How can one give oneself up? How can one, by one's own power, completely abandon oneself to the love of God? That's the puzzle. That's what has to be tried. And all the disciplines that we undertake, all the devotions that we make, all the meditative exercises that we do, are efforts to give ourselves up.

[09:59]

Well, you know what it's like. It's like having molasses in one hand and feathers in the other, and you slap them together and then now try to pick up the feathers. And the more you do it, the more you're involved, the more you're stuck. Because you realize, you ask yourself the question, why do I want to love God? Do I really love God? What do I mean by loving God? I've never seen God. I've never even seen Jesus. I read about him in the Bible, but I don't really know what sort of a person he was. And yet I say, I get one of these manuals of devotion, you know, little black books with pink edges, and it says, Jesus, I love you, Jesus, I give my heart to you, Jesus, I adore you, and you kneel down before the blessed sacrament, and you say all this, and you know you're a complete phony, if you're honest. Why you're saying this is because you think that's what you ought to do, and you want to be on the side of the big battalions. I mean, if God the Father is the boss of the universe, you'd better get with it.

[11:08]

Otherwise, you know, you're going to go to hell. So, if the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, however perfect love casts out fear, but how are we to get perfect love? Nobody ever can give the answer. I remember Bernard Phillips, who was a great Zen student, going to a Jesuit father and saying, I'll become a Christian, but I want to be a real Christian. I don't want just to say I'm a Christian. I want you to tell me how I'm going to be a Christian with absolute devotion and no holds barred. Well, everybody's tongue-tied. When I was a little boy in school, they told me, you must do your work. And I said, sure, be most happy. I loved to have books around me. I loved the smell of books. I loved everything to do with books.

[12:10]

But everything I did was always wrong. They said, you're not working. Well, I said, how do you work? They couldn't explain. I even copied the teacher's handwriting to see if by doing that I could get their personality somehow. And I became an expert forger. So in the same way, you can be a spiritual forger. You can't have all the output forms of great spirituality. That's why I use them, so that you know I'm phony. And then they're fun anyway. But how are we to love God? Well, this puzzles St. Paul. He said, the law brought about sin in me, for I had not known covetousness except the law had said, thou shalt not covet.

[13:13]

Then he said, shall we sin in order that grace may abound? Oh, Mithikinito, heaven forbid. But the point was, he said, You are told to come up to a certain standard of selfless behavior like the Son of Justice itself to show you that you can't. And Saint Augustine and Martin Luther saw the same thing, that the reason they were trying to love God was that they were incurably selfish. And what do you do about that? There's a Chinese saying that when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. So that preaching religion, telling people that they ought to behave this way and they ought to behave that, that they should have faith, that they should love one another, produces nothing but hypocrisy. Unless we get to the end of hypocrisy and realize that we are helpless hypocrites,

[14:25]

And then we start asking the question, what am I to do? When I come to the end of my tether, I can't do anything about it. It's the same if you follow another way. It's not to say your idea is not that you should love God or love Jesus Christ, but that you should let go. Well, that's the advice of Jesus also. Be not anxious for the morrow. Consider the flowers of the field, how they grow, etc. I've never heard a sermon preached on that text, incidentally. It's completely subversive. They say, oh, it's all very well for Jesus to follow such a way because he was the boss's son anyway. And so it was no problem for him, but we practical people are responsible and have to do what is called in Sanskrit, lokasamvaha, which is upholding the going on of the world, earning livings and things like that.

[15:30]

We say, we can't be not anxious for the morrow. See, that's one of the troubles in Christianity. Jesus was the boss's son, and therefore had a unique advantage over all of the rest of us. So you can't follow his example. That's one of the most important things to understand, is that you cannot follow the example of Christ. That is the only real good reason for believing that Jesus was the unique incarnation of the Son of God. So that Christianity becomes an impossible religion. It cannot be practiced by us. Now what does that mean? It sounds awfully hopeless. I can't let go of myself because I have a selfish reason for wanting to let go of myself. It made me feel better, made me feel more protected against suffering.

[16:33]

I'd be like a cat, you know, all so relaxed and alive and very nice to be like that. Wouldn't you all love to have the mystical experience? Wouldn't you love to be in a state where you absolutely know that all is God? There's nothing to be afraid of whatsoever. You need have no attachments, no hang-ups. You'll be full of delight and joy. Wouldn't you like to be like that? Yet when we look into ourselves, we find a sensitive, quaking mess, full of pain and all that thing. There's nothing you could do. But this not being able to do anything is a concealed positive. When God, for example, is called infinite, without bounds, that could seem very wishy-washy. I mean, something without bounds isn't there. It's like meeting an infinitely tall person.

[17:37]

But it is explained, say by such a theologian as Dionysius the Areopagite, that we do not say God is infinite in order to say God has no power. This negative word is affirmative. Same way in Hindu theology, when it said of the Brahman, neti neti, Brahman is not this, not that, not anything that one can conceive. This is an affirmation. So in the same way, when you find out that there's absolutely nothing you can do to improve yourself spiritually, to be more loving of God, to be less defensive of self, there's nothing you can do, there's a message there. Very, very important message. The reason you can't do anything is that the you that you think you are doesn't exist.

[18:46]

It has a certain existence, what we call the ego, but it exists in the same way as the equator exists, or a line of longitude, or an inch. It is a social institution, a convention, But it is not an effective agent. It is not an effective energy. And that's why you can't do anything about it. Let's therefore analyze a bit the ego and see what it is. First of all, it arises from a fundamental human confusion between the world of symbols and the world of reality. The world of words and the world of real events, the process of nature. And therefore, it is typical of all civilized and even many uncivilized peoples that they confuse words with realities, just as we confuse wealth with money.

[20:04]

and status with happiness, and we are the kind of people who would eat the menu rather than the dinner. You see it going on all the time. I mean, the whole of advertising is based on this confusion. And the wealthiest people that we have are not rich. They dress like morticians, they drive around in hearses, And they don't enjoy themselves at all, like we've been enjoying ourselves. You know, a bunch of religious bums have had an absolute uproar of a week. And we got away with it because we let the world outside know that we were doing something very specially holy. Because we know how to enjoy ourselves. as poor but making many rich, as having nothing but possessing all things.

[21:12]

But the wealthy of this world, the rich in money, are miserable people. Most of my very rich friends are terribly unhappy. You think, gee, if only I could get more money. I've got all these mortgages and bills and dependents and so on. I just want a little bit more money, and then everything would be fine. All right, you get it. And you start worrying about whether you're going to get sick. And you can worry about that endlessly. Or then you can worry about whether the tax collector is going to take it away from you, or whether there's going to be a revolution, and they're going to say à la lanterne. There's always something to worry about if you're the kind of person who's inclined to worry. So then, we confuse the world as is with the world as described. That's not to be a put-down on words, on symbols, on the intellect, but only to say that you cannot use the word and the intellect properly and effectively unless you know that nothing is what you say it is.

[22:27]

Oh, the word is not the thing. The word is not the thing. Hi, ho, the derry. Oh, the word is not the thing. And you have to understand that. Incidentally, there are no things either, but we'll go into that later. But definitely, you cannot get wet in the noise water. Nor will that noise quench your thirst. So now, the confusion of ourselves with our ego is the same thing, is the result of confusing reality with a concept. The reality, we would say, of ourselves is our organism. But the organism is inseparable from a particular environment. An environment of other people, of plants, animals, air, heat, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, forever.

[23:30]

And if you fully felt your organism, if you experienced it thoroughly, you would know that it was inseparable from the entire universe, that the entire universe is simply your extended body. But the concept of the ego does not include the organism. Because we say, I have a body, we don't say, I am a body. What information is there in your ego concept about how you circulate your blood? How you work your nervous system? How you secrete important fluids from your glands? After all, you do all that. But your concept of yourself contains no information whatsoever about how it's done. How do you make a decision? You say, I've opened my hand. How do you do it? Well, a physiologist might explain something about it to you, but he can't open his hand any better than you can. Because when you do it, you know how to do it in the sense you just do it.

[24:34]

Out it comes. But how? You can't explain, because your self-image does not contain that information. So, your image of yourself is given to you by your parents, your teachers, your relatives, and your peer group. But don't blame them because you bought it. They tell you who you are. I remember when I was a little boy, I admired another boy who lived up the street, and I sometimes came home and imitated his mannerisms. And my mother would look at me in a severe way and say, Alan, that's not you, that's Peter. So she was concerned to give me an identity. And when I did terrible things, she said, it's not like you to do a thing like that. So, everybody wants you to know who you are.

[25:42]

There are a number of personalities you can choose from, you know. There are certain types, like psychological types. You can be a cerebrotonic ectomorph, or a somatotonic mesomorph, or a viscerotonic endomorph, or you can be an introverted intuitive, an extroverted feeling type, and so on, so on, so on. You know, there's all these typologies. And everybody has to have one. Is you is or is you ain't? Are you a Christian? or a Jew, Catholic or Protestant, a Republican or a Democrat, male or female. That's a very tricky one. You know, there are 12 sexes, not just two. And all kinds of things like that. Everybody's got to be in a compartment of some kind. And if you're not in a compartment, you can't be controlled. So, therefore, we identify ourselves with an image.

[26:44]

with what is called a personality. The word persona, meaning mask, that through which the sound comes, the megaphonic mask of Greco-Roman drama. It's your act. And we are increasingly convinced that we are that persona. Whereas this persona is nothing more than a caricature of what we really are. Because a caricature is something which suggests something with a few lines and leaves the rest out. But all that tremendous complex of human relationships, relationships with nature, and so on, that we really are, is completely ignored. And that is what Hindu Buddhists call avidya, which means ignorance. But we say, I still feel that... I have a feeling of I, which is more than my image of myself. I have a feeling of great reality as an ego, as me, particular me.

[27:51]

What do you suppose that is? Well, it took me a long time to find out, but I found out. You know when you're a child, they try to get you, they put you under a basic double bind, and that is to say as follows. You are required to do those things which will be acceptable only if you do them voluntarily. So mama says at night to the baby who's restless, darling, try to go to sleep. Now, dear, you mustn't be constipated. You have to have a bowel movement every day after breakfast. You, as a good child, ought to love your mother. Not because I say so, but because you really want to. Ha! And imagine what happens later in life when you get married, you get up and in front of an altar because you're itchy, and you solemnly curse and swear.

[28:52]

You'll swear anything to get hold of that girl. And you curse and swear and say that you will love that woman, and that she curses and swears and says she will love you till death do you part. Well, of all things. That is the greatest impertinence and disrespect for the God, the Almighty. Because what happens eventually is that, you know, you don't have these excited feelings. It becomes, after all, every day. There are people who have luck in this respect and to whom that doesn't happen. But most people get bored with each other. And then you say, darling, do you really love me? Well, what answer do you want? I'm trying my best to do so? It's not what you wanted at all. You wanted your beloved to say, I love you so much I could eat you. I'm your helpless slave. Isn't that funny? That love, which is supposed to be, in Christian theology, the supreme freedom, would be expressed by being your slave, your helpless devotee.

[30:01]

I can't get away from it. Whose service is perfect freedom. Whom, it says in Latin, Whom to serve is to reign. Whom to know is to live. The paradox there. But this is what the ego is. Now, the teachers and the parents all get together and say, now try. In school, the children are, you know, wandering around looking out of the window and picking their noses and flicking spitballs, pinching the behind of the girl in front of them and so on. And the teacher gets annoyed and says, pay attention! All those children frown and go tight and clench their teeth. They wrap their legs around the legs of the table and go, pay attention. Concentrate.

[31:02]

I sat next to a boy in school, in the first grade, who had great difficulty in reading. But he wanted to show that he really was trying. And so he would say... He's making an effort. The teacher wouldn't be angry with him and have him beaten. So... We learn then that concentration is something you do with the muscles in your forehead. And what do we do when somebody says to you, now take a hard look at this. Look carefully. You will immediately find that in ordinary conditioning there is tension around the eyes. Now, listen. Don't miss a note of this. Now be most attentive. You'll find muscle straining around the ears. I say, now, this needs grit.

[32:06]

You've got to get through with this. It's some painful situation, so you find you tighten your jaws, or clench your fists, or you control yourself, and you go tighten the solar plexus or in the rectal muscles. Now, all these muscle strains become chronic habits, and they're all perfectly futile. because they don't have any effect on the efficiency of the nervous system. They get in the way of it. If you stare at something, supposing there's a clock in the distance, and you can't read the time, and you start staring, it'll just become blurred. What you do is, if you want to see a clock in the distance, you close your eyes, and imagine that you're looking at a black velvet curtain on a pitch-black night. Then open your eyes and let the light come to them. And you might, by chance, see the clock. In all operations of the nervous system, you have to trust the nervous system to be intelligent.

[33:11]

The reason why neurologists don't fully understand the nervous system is that it's more intelligent than they are. So, therefore, what we call our ego is not only the image of ourselves, but it's a chronic sensation of muscular strain. which in some people is centered here between the eyes, and some people is centered here in the solar plexus, and some people in the region of the heart, what in Japanese is called kokoro. And so you feel that chronic strain there, and that is I. So what we call our ego is The combination of the self-image and this muscular strain, which is chronic, in other words, the marriage of an illusion to a futility. The true individual, I'm not saying that the individual is unreal, but the true individual is the total organism in relation to its environment.

[34:21]

That's why the half-baked science, but it is at least half-baked, of astrology, draws a picture of the soul by drawing a picture of the universe as centred on the particular individual organism. Of course, it's a very crude picture of the universe. A lot of things aren't there. And I don't think most astrologers know how to read the map. But there it is, and the idea is fundamentally sound. Okay. Now then, so we come to the point. where we have discovered that what we call ourselves is a mere symbol, plus vain straining. And what are we going to do about that? Here's the beginning of the religious life, because man's extremity is God's opportunity. But what can you do?

[35:22]

Yeah, you're stuck with this illusion. And when you say, what can I do about it? And you're asking, what can the illusion do to get rid of itself? And it is absolutely important to realize that nothing, nothing, nothing can be done about it. Well, then what? You go out and shoot yourself? Well, if I can't do anything about it, it does occur to you that still, somehow or other, something is going on. You're still breathing. Or are you breathing? Or does it breathe you? Your blood is still circulating. The vibration that we call existence is still there. What is this? Now, you may get frightened at this point. You may begin to ask, who's in charge around here? I mean, if I'm not in control, if nobody's in control, how will I know that I can speak the English language five minutes from now?

[36:39]

Here am I giving you a talk, and I don't know how this talk is happening. You know, I might lose my nerve at any moment, but somehow it talks, and I don't think ahead what I'm going to say. But it goes on. So I begin to wonder, am I simply the puppet of some God or universal process other than myself? Well, if so, where's the puppet? I can't find this puppet. Well, then, am I God? Am I in charge of everything? But that's a frightful responsibility. I'm terrified of it. There was once a young man in Los Angeles who got LSD in the wrong way and got this feeling that he was God. But he was terrified and so he wrote a note and turned himself in to the police saying, please help me, signed, Jehovah. It'd be terrible, you see, to be in charge of everything.

[37:49]

But supposing that both things are true or that both things are untrue. that there is no puppet being pushed around by the universe, and there is no boss pushing things around. Supposing there is simply a happening. What the Chinese call, the Chinese word for nature is zhiyuan, which means what is so of itself, that in Thomistic theology is called aseity. To be so of itself. Aseity is one of the attributes of God that you don't hear much about. So, there is God. Which is the great happening. Happy. Happening. It all goes together. And of course, hap is hip. It's what's onto it.

[38:52]

What is, in other words, on the mark. Because you see now, if you do that, you realize that you cannot understand the world through concepts. The word is not the thing. And you become silent. There's nothing you can do. You become passive. And you watch. But there's nobody watching. Because the idea that there has to be an experiencer of experience is merely a concept. What you call the experiencer is just one of your thoughts. Whose thoughts? You know, those things, so there's the happening. So, you are watching. And you realize there's nobody watching, but the universe is sort of watching itself through your eyes. You're an aperture through which the universe is aware of itself. And you realize nobody ever was in charge. Things have gone along reasonably or unreasonably, but most of the time reasonably.

[39:57]

I can prove from Hindu doctrines that one... that seven parts of life in ten are good, three parts in ten are bad. Anyway, we won't go into that now. But it goes along reasonably well. and so you watch. And you hear yourself thinking to yourself, all this chatter going on inside your skull. And you try to stop it and there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop that chatter. You want peace, you want silence. You want to stop thinking about what you ought to be doing tomorrow, what you did wrong yesterday, and all that stuff. And say, couldn't we have peace for a while, but it's going on. Yes, you see, you're trying to get peace because you want to escape reality. So eventually you see that you just can't help thinking that it goes on like the birds outside.

[40:58]

or the sound of the air conditioning, or whatever. And so you treat your thinking as that. Just nonsense and hubbub going on inside your head. Say, I have to pay the rent, I have to pay the rent. Let this go with that, you see. You have to pay the rent, you have to pay the rent, you have to pay the rent, you have to pay the rent, and it becomes a mantra. But eventually, you see the futility of all that, and your mind of itself becomes still, like water when left alone, clears itself of the mud, and the waves cease, and you get clarity. Now clarity is very important. This is what is the meaning of blessed are the pure in heart, or they shall see God. It doesn't mean pure in heart. It doesn't mean at all. Katharos doesn't mean that you don't tell dirty jokes and that. It means clear, transparent, like a crystal.

[42:03]

And realize, you see, the word clarity suggests two things to us. Complete emptiness. Empty space. The sky with no clouds. But the same word clarity means absolutely articulate form. You've made it clear. That's why in Buddhism it is said the void is the same as the form and the form is the same as the void. Because what happens, you see, when you realize that you're not your ego, your idea of yourself, you finally and unaccountably disappear. And you become what is absolutely obvious to you from the beginning. What does your head look like to your eyes? Do I experience my head as a black spot in the middle of everything? Or as a fuzzy place? No. It is just sitting there. I'm completely headless.

[43:06]

All you have heads. But I apparently don't. But nevertheless, out of this absolute blank spot, I see. So in the same way, the stars shine out of space. We think space is nothing. Space is not important. But until you stop to realize that you can't have stars without space. How could you have a universe without space? How could there be a solid without space? So the truth of the matter is that every something comes out of nothing. Listen with your ears. Take that sense for a change. And as we were listening yesterday morning, you hear all sounds coming now out of silence. They arise spontaneously, self-so, out of silence, because in this moment you are witnessing the creation of the universe.

[44:07]

And when you stop thinking, yoga is the cessation of vritti in the mind, that is, chatter. You stop thinking, stop concepts. And you suddenly find that not only has your ego disappeared, but there is no past and there is no future. There is an eternal now, but you don't know what that means, because now has meaning only in relation to then. When there is no then, there's no now. It's just that. So you really don't know what to say about it. There's nothing to be said. It says in one of the Zen texts that you're like a dumb man who's had a marvellous dream. Everybody wants to tell everybody what a marvellous dream, but when he opens his mouth he can't say anything. And if I try to tell you what it is, what the state is, all I do is weave a mess of words, which I'm clever at, because the art of the poet and the philosopher is to say what cannot be said, to describe the indescribable, to F the ineffable, and to unscrew the inscrutable.

[45:19]

So long as you talk, you never get there. So that is why I want to emphasize the value of the contemplative life, of that mental silence, silence of the mind. But the moment I say it's valuable, that really you ought to pursue it. I've said the wrong thing. Meditation is supposed to be fun. There is no other reason than doing it, no reason whatsoever than to participate in that super-essential joy which is called God. It's not your duty. It won't be good for you. Because the minute you think, I'm doing this for a reason, because it will be good for me, you've stopped meditating.

[46:25]

Meditation is the one thing in which you are completely here and now. With no reason for it. With nothing in mind as a result or a consequence. Because all that is chatter. And you must treat all that chatter. Here I am meditating, I ought to be doing this and that. You must regard that as... See? That's what it is. And then you're centered. In the only place there is, you're on the mark. You're not sinning. So now... I feel this is how all has to be said as a corrective to the excessive verbosity of our religiousness and is therefore contemplation means what we do together in the temple contemplum and when we gather in the temple

[47:31]

This is primarily for silence of the mind. Now that doesn't mean there's no noise going on. It doesn't mean that we can't have chickens and babies and dogs and cats and all sorts of comings and goings like they do in any temple in India. Because you cannot meditate at all unless you can do it in a boiler factory. Because all sound is this Shabda. the manifestation of the energy of the universe. Just listen to it, as you would listen to classical music. When you listen to Ravi Shankar play, or Ali Akbar Khan, or you listen to the New York Symphony, Philharmonic, playing Beethoven, you don't ask, what does this mean? Because music means music. Music is, as St. Thomas pointed out, an end in itself, and therefore he likened the divine wisdom to games, because games are played, not for anything beyond them, but for their own sake.

[48:39]

And so he quoted the book of Proverbs, where wisdom speaks and said that her delight was to play in the sight of the Almighty, playing among the sons of men. The divine wisdom, incidentally, is a lady. Sophia, and she's the other aspect of Logos. So, fundamentally then, you make the discovery that life is not serious. It may be sincere, but not serious. God is not serious. Wouldn't it be awful if God was serious? I often love to quote G.K. Chesterton saying that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if so, how much more the Lord of the angels? There's no reason whatsoever for God to take himself seriously.

[49:40]

You know, instead of this attitude. God doesn't preach. God woos. God speaks in the language of the Song of Songs. That's the language that convinces. It's not going to be the language of you so-and-so. But people love being scolded, especially in church. So that is mental silence. But as I say, it does not involve the absence of physical sound. And that's why music, chanting, mantra, and all sorts of sublimely nonsensical activities are supports for contemplation. But remember, I made the distinction between nonsense and claptrap. Nonsense is something of a very high order. It is that which is transcendent of the senses, of what is sensible. And so we make holy nonsense and a joyful noise to the Lord, like we've been doing in our marvelous devotions these past days.

[50:52]

Now, in conclusion, I want to talk about something very briefly that's just a slight shade off the point. I want to offer my thanks to the Order of Saint Benedict here present and say something that I think this place is an island of sanity in a mad world. I am not called to be a monk. I like women too much. But those of you who are so-called are doing the rest of us an unbelievable service in establishing these islands of constant prayer, scholarship, and manual work. It's a very balanced rule And you Benedictines, being the most ancient order in the church, are like aristocrats. You don't have to blow your own trumpet.

[51:56]

Please keep this going. Do not lose the courage of your sense of vocation. It is such a great service to the rest of us that you wouldn't even know. naturally there are members here of many other orders but I speak particularly to our hosts but the maintenance of the monastic life even if you are hermits and the world knows not of you at all it is essential that there be people in the world who are, as it were, sitting on the mountain peaks. Because if there isn't someone around who is contemplating God, the life of the rest of us is absurd. Someone must be there to give the rest of us, as it were, a center.

[53:08]

Thank you, and God bless you. Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, I'll give it to you. Most High, to Thee we give glory in Thee alone, our God, the One and Sister.

[54:19]

They'll never meet each other again. Swing fast, yeah, [...] yeah StSq3 3.30 (-0.99") Alleluia.

[55:43]

I love you. O Lord, have mercy on us, for we have sinned. With hope in our hearts and in our minds, May forever we follow the path of the Spirit.

[56:58]

Alleluia. you.

[57:31]

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