From what I said before that I can see the monastic life, the monastic dimension, a basic human dimension, and not a superstructure on this religion or that religion, you really ought to first ask yourself, or one ought to ask oneself, is it really possible to be a Christian and yet a monk? You really ought to ask yourself, is it possible to be a Buddhist and to be a monk in spite of being a Buddhist almost? Is this possible? Because the two are not that closely connected. And then the answer is, yes, it is possible. And now, in the light of Buddhism, the monastic experience, basic human experience, takes on an entirely new dimension, a much more profound meaning. And in the light of the Christ event, the Christian monastic experience takes on an

[01:24]

entirely new dimension. And the two still have in common the monastic element, which is really the rock bottom. And monks will recognize one another. And when I say monks, I mean each one of us to the extent to which we have cultivated the monastic dimension. Now, in the Christ event, that search for, in the light of the Christ event, the search for meaning takes on the particular interpretation or slant or aspect of the word. That is the one key notion that goes through the whole Bible and has influenced Judaism, Christianity, Islam, that God speaks. That's the one insight expressed already in biblical terms, God speaks. Well, that isn't something that you can tell anybody on the street, because God doesn't

[02:28]

mean necessarily anything, but what you're talking about, you see? But if you take it in this larger context, you can say that the search for meaning, in the biblical tradition, focuses on the word. And wherever we are dealing with meaning in everyday reality, there is something that we could call a word. There's always something that has meaning, and we call that a word. We could call it a word. Because whatever it is that has meaning is, in Latin analysis, a word in the widest sense. It's a reality that embodies its meaning. So every situation, every person, every thing that we deal with, when it becomes meaningful to us, you could call it a word that speaks to you, it tells you something, it has a message for you. You see, we use all these expressions because we are so strongly influenced by the biblical tradition, even if we have nothing else to do with it. Now, under this aspect, Jesus is experienced as the word of God, the one in which God really

[03:35]

speaks, you see? And so the Christian monastic experience is a listening to the word, a living by the word of God in biblical terms to such an extent that you're not just doing what God tells you, you see? The idea is that you are nourished by the word, by the word in the sense of the manifestation, that which is. Now, when we pursue meaning, when anything becomes meaningful to us, there's another dimension besides the dimension of word, and that is the dimension of silence. Without silence, there wouldn't be any word. In many respects, for one thing, you would never be able to tell where one word ends and the next one begins. That's one way of looking into it. But also, we know intuitively that a real word that isn't just chit-chat, but what we really

[04:35]

mean by word, comes out of our innermost silence, embodies that innermost silence, is so to say the body of silence, and must reach somebody else's silence. Because if what I'm saying now doesn't come out of my silence, if it is just something, some noise that I make, it's not really a word. But it is a special kind of noise which we call word, hopefully, which embodies silence and reaches out for your silence. For the innermost core of you, that's silent. And only until it has come there, when it comes there, is it meaningful. So a real meaningful dialogue is not an exchange of words, but you could call it an exchange of silence with silence, by means of word, if you want. And the Buddhist experience focuses totally on that silence aspect of meaning. They're not separated, they're clearly distinguished, they're so different, as different as two

[05:40]

realities can be, the word and the silence, but they're not separated. But you can focus totally on the silence, that is, the emptiness, the nothing, behind everything. Or you can focus on the word, and it doesn't make very much difference in the long run. The decisive thing is that you want to find meaning. You can't find meaning only through the word or only through the silence, but if you have found meaning in the silence, it's the silence of the word. If you find meaning in the word, it's the word that embodies the silence, comes out of the silence. There's a third dimension to it that sort of unites the two, and that is understanding. In order to find meaning, in any respect, in any right situation where you say it's meaningful, there has to be something that has meaning, that's what we call the word. There's silence, because you can't separate the word from silence. It's the horizon on which you see the word as word. And there's understanding, but the understanding is not the word, the understanding is not

[06:43]

the silence, the understanding is an entirely different thing. What is it? It's a kind of dynamism by which you hear the word and let the word lead you into the silence. Only when you listen so deeply to the word that it takes hold of you and leads you into the silence, then you have really understood. But what happens there is not like a dead-end road and there you are stuck now in the silence, but if you really understand, the understanding leads you into the silence and then sends you to do whatever that word contains, to respond, to act. And that's a kind of dynamic circle, dynamic, a dance, a kind of dance. You see? And that dance is the thing that all monastic traditions are really, in last analysis, concerned with, not with any doctrines or anything else, but with dancing, but in this particular way.

[07:46]

I like it too. I don't mind reiterating it. Well, I reiterate it from an entirely different point of view now. It's the same thing, but I tell it to you from an entirely different side. You may have heard about what Christians call the mystery of the Trinity, triune God. Now, most of the time in Sunday school, what we learn is that don't worry you can't understand it anyway. It's a mystery. You can't understand it. It's God. It's the Trinity. So you can't understand it. And that's correct. But you must be sure that you know it, know it all. You have to be able to repeat it. So it's a pretty hopeless situation and most people give up on it, even though they are

[08:59]

Christians. They say, well, it's just sort of an appendix or a footnote or something. But rightly understood, what Christians call the mystery of the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian way of finding meaning, or you could almost say at the heart of the biblical way in its fullest development of finding meaning. And this is the way one could put it. That's now strictly in Christian terms and they intentionally do that. This may mean nothing to you at all, but you can just at least look at it from the outside and say, well, I think now I have an idea of what they're talking about. The idea is that what Christians call the Father, that is not an old man up there, of course, but the source of our meaning, the source of our reality, the source of being. Not being, because otherwise being would be God, not a being, because otherwise God would

[10:05]

be just one among other beings, but the source of being, the source of everything. What is the source of everything? Nothing. Not an empty nothing, but certainly God is no thing. It's nothing. The Father. Nothing. The Father is the only one whom the Bible calls God. There are two or three notable exceptions, but they're not enough, even the New Testament, to even at this point, this would be too fine a point to even discuss that. So what Christians call God is nothing, emptiness. But now they say this emptiness, which in one way is very beautifully described by C.S. Lewis, who is a contemporary Anglican writer. He says, we should have in our mind no likeness of the abyss of the Father, into which if a creature dropped down his thoughts forever and ever, never will he hear an echo coming

[11:11]

back. That's a beautiful picture, a far cry from the old man with the beard, you see. It still is an image, you see. It's this echo-less abyss, no matter how long you drop your thoughts, never hear an echo coming back. Silence, emptiness, void, all that. Very Buddhist. Now Christians say, and this echo-less abyss of the Father is the womb of the world. Another way of putting it is that emptiness, the Father, under the aspect of the Father, you just can't say that in any other word, or the mother for that matter, because this is one of the greatest problems in Christian ethics, that we call God only Father. The reason that such a problem in ethics is because the moment you call God only Father, you get this whole hang-up that you have to earn the love of God, you see, and that's

[12:12]

where this whole hang-up comes in. If you would call him at least now and then Mother, for which the Bible perfectly justifies us when it says, Old Testament says, if a mother could forget her children, I could not forget you. See, God is a mother as much as he's a father, obviously in the Christian tradition. If you keep that in mind, then you can't ever lose the love of God, see, no matter what you do, you can't lose a mother's love. You can do everything. You never lose a mother's love. You always have to earn a father's love, and that's why the Christians, and the Jews for that matter, are so terribly uptight about ethics and morals, because they constantly have to earn the Father's love, you see. Well, this is just an aside, but that abyss of silence, the Father knows himself and expresses himself, and it's so simple that he says everything that he is, everything he has to say, with one eternal word. That's what we call the Word, or the Logos, or the Son, see.

[13:16]

It's the total expression of the Father, so simple that it's just one. And because it's the total expression of God, it's God. Not two, but one, but the manifest. I was going to say over against the unmanifest, but over against is already, it's the term that the prologue according to St. John uses, but that's as far as one can go. And since God is love, has only one thing to say, that is that he loves, and that is so inexhaustible that it has to be spelled out by everything there is, just as lovers have only one thing to say, and that's, I love you. And it takes a lifetime to exhaust that by words and gestures and gifts and letters and flowers and whatnot, music, poetry, everything, see. And that's the universe in the Christian sense. It's a spelling out of the one eternal Word of God.

[14:20]

And the Son, being the Son of the Father, knows himself with that self, with the same self-knowledge with which the Father knows himself, and that's what Christians call the Holy Spirit. There's a very important passage which explains that in one of the letters of Paul. No one knows what is in the mind of a man except the spirit of that man. And nobody knows what is in the mind of God except the spirit of God. In other words, it's the Holy Spirit is the self-knowledge of God. And then he says, and we have received this spirit so that we may understand. And now that spirit of God's self-understanding is poured out on everything, we have received it. That means we are divine, because how much more divine do you want to be but to have received the spirit of God? But totally gratis, and that makes all the difference between this and some sort of monism.

[15:22]

Totally gratis. I know that. I didn't deserve anything. As far as I'm concerned, I'm nothing. I live in a world that I call a given reality. If you don't live in a world that is a given reality for you, then you are God. But it's a given reality. You didn't put yourself here. If it's a given reality, it's a gift. It's gratis. Every gift is gratis. And that breaks that little chink in what would otherwise be just one gigantic block. And that makes the dancing possible. Because I'm not he and I'm he. I'm divine, but I've learned it. It's all a gift. I'm on the way from being absolutely nothing to being God, out of a pure gift. And you enter into this dance by thanksgiving, because the Father is the giver, the Son is the gift, and the Spirit is the thanksgiving. And this thanksgiving is going on whether I am there or not.

[16:24]

And to enter into this thanksgiving, that's why thanksgiving makes everything meaningful. That's what the Greek fathers, fathers of the desert, call the round dance of the trinity. It's a tremendous big dance, you see, where it goes round and round and round. And spiritual life, monastic life, according to the biblical tradition, is just an entering into that. Just swing with it, and that's all. Don't reason about it. Don't put yourself out of it. Now, that was the same thing, but in a strictly biblical, or more strictly Christian, way of expressing it. First, I tried to do it in a rather agnostic way, just from the point of view of meaning, which anybody can accept. These are terms that are loaded, the ones that are used now, and I don't blame anybody if they say, gee, I have my nose full of that. I just don't want to hear anything of that anymore. But it doesn't really matter under what name you accept it. I think so too.

[17:31]

Thank you very much for your attention.

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