Now the secrets of life will be revealed...

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

*note* lovely secrets of life from brother Elias(a former christian monk)
What he means (or he discovered) is very important.
He discovered there were no negativities,no devils,other then his OWN not-resolved soul experiences.
In other words..the devil is in you,not out there.
In truth(or absolute truth) there is no devil other then your NOT resolved(integrated sub-personalities..and remember that even those are NOT the real you..but those make up your personality,as it splits,and becomes many...your job is not to reject those,but KNOW that was necessary..for otherwise you could not become an individual)
YOU MUST accept your individuality,and the collectivity,and the ONE.(3 in one)
The ONE knows..but if you stop blaming the devil,and start looking within..the ONE will readjust your reality,and miracles will happen.
quote from Elias,,"
May I recognize whatever appears as being my own mind-forms. May I fear not the bands of the Peaceful and the Wrathful, who are my own mind-forms. ~ from The Tibetan Book of the Dead
"
Thus spokenth the mahayogi,to the bewildered grasshoppers.
-added by danny-
................
VISION. One afternoon I was taking a nap after dinner, dreams and jazz music were sluicing through my brain. Suddenly a voice spoke very loudly next to my ear: “NOW THE SECRET OF LIFE WILL BE REVEALED.”


A hole opened up under me and I fell into it. It was a square dark hole, which got progressively lighter the deeper I fell.


I fell quickly at first, then more slowly as the light thickened. Soon I was floating in the loving embrace of the Light, an intense rapture flooding my senses. The words “I need you!” echoed in me and around me.


There was progressive dissolution of form and quality as the light thickened. Images dissolved into light, dream dissolved into light, I dissolved into light, and this light was Consciousness itself.


That is the secret of life.



Such experiences would “dissolve” me, and for a few days I would walk around transported. The other brothers would notice and I would receive lots of smiles and nods.



Then my mind would resolidify, new crystalline structures would form, and new dreams of conflict would emerge.
_________________________


VISION. I am walking on a road that leads into the forest. Suddenly a circular chasm opens next to the road.


Cautiously I approach the edge of the pit and peer over. I am gazing into a fathomless dark deep, and I am thinking of all my ecstatic falling dreams.


At that moment I hear the clatter of hoofbeats coming along the road out of the forest. I raise my eyes and see a spectral being on a black horse galloping toward me. He is moving with the speed of the wind, and his aura is of stupendous and irresistible power. I know at once that nothing in the universe can impede or resist this onrushing power. As the horse thunders by, its flank brushes me lightly, and I am knocked head over heels into the abyss. I wake up quaking with fright.


What’s so different about this descensus from my other glorified tumbles? Why was there no hint of luminous supporting depths waiting to receive me? For a long time I thought this dream meant that I was going to undergo physical death at an early age. I took this horseman to be the Lord of Death himself, on his daily journey around the world.
_________________________


When you take a breath of air, are you possessed by the air? When you take a drink of water, are you possessed by the water? When you eat a meal…and so forth.


You cannot live without air, water, and food. All of these material dependencies are metaphors for your dependency on the Spirit. (Actually, they are metaphysical manifestations of your dependency on the Spirit, but that’s a discussion for another day.)


In order to consciously awaken to Spirit, you will have to fall into that aspect of consciousness we call “subtle awareness". Subtle awareness is the intuitive faculty which allows us to know things directly, without the intermediary of the verbal mind. Some of you have that already, so you know what I am talking about. Others may think I am telling a fairy tale or a myth. More’s the pity.


But the fact is you do have this subtle awareness. You already have it. You are born with it. In your case it may be sleeping in a dark cave, or atrophied or suppressed, but it is a living part of your totality. Unless you revive it, you will never walk out of your current imprisonment in the mind. No amount of money will liberate you from your half-alive state, this condition of atrophied subtle awareness.


Know though, that subtle awareness is a vast expanse of experience that, like an ocean, can be either shallow or profound. Hopefully you will make your way from the shallow shores towards the unspeakable depths.


The subtle realm is nurture. It is education. It is also danger, a universe in which archetypes roam like carnivorous fish, making a meal of the weak and the naive. (These “dangerous entities” in the deep psyche include people who developed subtle awareness only to use it as a tool for possessing others and placing them in bondage.)


I am saying you don’t need to fear such intelligences as long as you keep faith with your own heart, and with the underlying truth of subtle experience:


May I recognize whatever appears as being my own mindforms. May I fear not the bands of the Peaceful and the Wrathful, who are my own mindforms. ~ from The Tibetan Book of the Dead

______________________


The important thing to remember is that the realm of subtle experience responds instantly to how it is seen. Yes, it contains everything that is unknown to you, but it is also instantaneously responsive to the act of perception itself. (Or should I say the art of perception?)


How can that be? Please remember, it is not an other that is awakening but your very “I” – the Self that is the root of your being. That’s why we say, “May I recognize whatever appears as being my own mindforms.”


This Self is looking for you, and will, if you allow it, educate and awaken you. It will test your “art of perception". When it knocks at your door, and when you open to it, it begins at once to transform your perspective – your way of seeing. It is the Liberator of your seeing – not all at once, but bit by bit.


Yes, in the realm of subtle awareness there will be moments of vision and great revelation, private glimpses of the “beyond-beyond” state of the Self. But the essence of the Self’s initiation is work – a new kind of work in which the soul collaborates with the Spirit in the real tasks of real liberation.


The work has been succinctly described as “self-inquiry". Sadly, this simple phrase has been wildly misunderstood to mean a kind of rote practice in which one asks the question, over and over, “who am I?".


Presumably this mantra-like recitation will help one to peel away the layers of illusion, false-self, and ego-persona to arrive at direct realization of the “I” of the Self. I say presumably, because no one has been shown to have achieved Self-realization using this formulaic practice.


Even Maharshi, who is supposed to have simplified his own awakening into this formula that he could hand out, like prasad, to the thousands who came to see him, did not achieve Self-realization by asking “who am I?” Rather, he allowed his i-sense to confront the inescapable reality of death. And that’s what you should do as well. When death becomes so real to you that you see the futility of the hopes and dreams of the little “i", then the great “I” will come to you and shake you awake.


And that’s important to know: the Self comes to you, and takes an active role in your education and awakening. It is another terrible mistake that seekers make, to believe they can do this “practice” in isolation from the tremendum of God. Again, as I have suggested before, they have made “non-dualism” into a ritualized form of Spirit-denial. The ego actually believes it can do the whole job of “becoming enlightened” by reciting a simple prescription handed-down by an authentic sage. And they sit for hours and hours in their “communion halls", repeating the phrase inwardly, waiting for sudden and total illumination. Good luck with that, boys.


Personally I have preferred to take the dynamic and inter-active route, of responding to the spontaneous intrusion of God into my life. I know I am not alone in this, having known others of similar disposition.


And in taking this path, I have allowed myself to be educated by that Tremendum which was Unconscious to me. I have accepted the tasks the Spirit set for me, of unraveling and inspecting the knots and complexes of the psyche.


This is true self-inquiry, you know. This is the self-inquiry that the Spirit wants you to practice: to know the personal psyche inside and out, and to explore those deep parts of the mind which Jung called “the archetypal".


Don’t worry about this legendary “God Realization” you seek. To turn around Jack Kornfield’s famous phrase, forget the ecstasy – first do the laundry.


Elias
*note* I will post his ,,monk experience,, 
-added by danny-
.............
~  posted by Elias  ~



During the summer months of 1965 I wrestled with my "religious problem" while hiking in the mountains of Pennsylvania and spending long days holed up in a cabin I'd been permitted to use. I saw almost no one.
It was obvious to me I had to make a clean break with the world. My visions were pulling me toward greater intimacy with God. For some reason I saw my artistic career as being opposed to that movement. I decided my writing was "egotistical" and "non-sacrificial" -- in spite of everything I'd learned about how the power of Grace opens creativity.
So one August afternoon I burned all my manuscripts -- a three-foot pile of material I had accumulated since 1961. The same day I made the decision to return to Vermont and enter a monastery.
My parents were happy to see me -- it had been almost two years since I'd been home -- and they were suitably impressed when I told them my decision to return to the Catholic Church and enter a religious order. There were at least three monasteries in our vicinity -- Carthusian, Benedictine, and Camaldolese. I planned to approach them all, one by one, and offer my life into the service of God.
After a few weeks of hanging around the house, helping my father catch up on repairs and yardwork, I steeled my nerves for a visit to the Carthusian hermits of Mt. Equinox, in Manchester, Vermont. I didn't write or call ahead, I simply showed up at the gatehouse.
The two old monks who saw me were the most spiritual men I'd met up to that time. They radiated an immense peace and great depth of intuition. I thought they'd probably see at once that I was favored with holy visions --something about my face would tell them. Then they would joyfully welcome me into the sacred precinct, and that would be the end of it -- goodbye cruel world. Instead they gave me the once-over, asked a few skillful questions, and sent me away. "You ought to get married and open a grocery store," one of them told me, munching a carrot, like Bugs Bunny in his cosmic trickster mode.
I fared better with the Benedictines. Their youthful prior listened attentively to my tale of re-conversion (I instinctively left out the visionary part). He agreed that I might be admitted to postulancy in their order after a suitable period of testing --probably about a year. A year! I didn't want to wait a year! I wanted to put on those holy robes right now! Well, it might take less than a year, but in any case I'd have to get a job and work off some debts I owed. That in itself would take about six months.
As it turned out it only took three months. I found work on a rock-drilling crew, as a bit changer. This was the most physically demanding work I'd ever done. Day after day, as the air compressors roared in my head, I thought how fortunate I was to find such uncomfortable work. Surely my sins were vanishing like dirty snow on an April afternoon!
While waiting to be admitted to the Benedictines, I went through the formalities of rejoining the Church. I began attending mass as often as possible, and I made my first confession in about six years. One happy Sunday I took the Lord on my tongue and felt again that meditative satisfaction that most Catholics feel when they realize that God Himself has entered their body as spiritual food.
I had several auspicious dreams at this time. In one, old St. Benedict himself placed the cowl of profession over my shoulders, while thousands of monks looked on. On Christmas Eve, 1965, I dreamt I was sleeping in the palm of a giant hand. As the hand lifted me slowly and dreamily into the sky, power flowed into my body, and I dissolved in bliss and exaltation. As I awoke, a Biblical phrase passed through my mind: "No harm can come to those you protect with your hand."
Was this the same hand that crushed me mercilessly a few months before? Undoubtedly!
In early January, 1966, taking the name "Brother Robert," I was admitted to the company of the holy monks of St. Benedict. The monastery was a small farm in the hills of Vermont, with a chapel and dormitory and about fifteen men in residence. They were a cloistered, meditational group, with vows of silence -- a return to the ways of earlier centuries. Our chief physical occupations were farming and craft work. Our only exposure to the public was on Sunday, when large numbers of people would come for mass and afterwards mingle briefly with "the brothers."

LIFE IN THE CLOISTER
A bell wakened us every morning at 4 A.M. A few minutes later we congregated in the chapel (which was breezy and cold in winter) and began chanting the psalms of matins. This was the longest "office" of the day, sometimes lasting an hour or more. When I first arrived it was sung in Latin, with the ancient Gregorian melodies. Later we changed to English, and our choir-master improvised new melodies from the old forms. The effect was less beautiful -- Gregorian chant is amongst the most inspired music on earth --but at least we could understand what we were singing!
After another hour or so of meditation and lectio -- meditative reading --we returned to the chapel for more chanting, and then went to breakfast. Breakfast consisted of coffee, last week's donuts (compliments of a local bakery), toast with peanut butter, and fruit. During cold weather there would be hot cereal and sometimes eggs or french toast -- which we would bathe in syrup from our own maple trees.
Breakfast was followed by more lectio and personal duties such as shaving, making beds, and so forth. A few of us used this time to catch up on our sleep, although this was strictly forbidden. During my entire two years as a Benedictine I never adapted to the official seven hour nights. Many people would consider seven hours a generous vacation from the toils of day. A few of the brothers never slept more than four. But I had always been a nine-hour man. In a pinch I could get by on eight, but seven was impossible. I seemed to need a lot of time for dreaming.
The mornings consisted of an hour or two of instruction -- mostly theology -- followed by an hour or two of work. Then came daily mass, at around 11:30. This was definitely the high point of the day for everybody. All a monk's suppressed libido is channeled into his participation in "the sacrifice of the mass." With heartfelt attention he relives the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and when he turns to embrace his brother during "the kiss of peace," the room is humming with charitable feeling. The cup is passed around, and large chunks of consecrated bread. (We used loaves of homemade bread, a practice which at that time was frowned upon by Rome, which still preferred "wafers".) God is imbibed and chewed and swallowed, and in the ensuing silence the affirmation of divine love is very strong, and almost childlike.
In spite of this ritual of love, some of the brothers still managed to dislike each other. Petty differences can loom very large in a human incubator. Unconscious complexes and neuroses -- even latent psychoses --take on an eerie intensity that is like physical sickness. If one or two men are going through a crisis, everybody goes through it with them.
By the same token, if one man makes a breakthrough in consciousness, it sends waves through the entire group. Everyone picks up on it, and even the animals seem to feel it. Fortunately, this positive "participation mystique" (a Jungian term, derived from anthropology, for collective identification) tends to predominate over the negative kind. Except in a few "difficult" cases, the neurotic complexes seemed to burn off as "heat."
After lunch there was a short "siesta." This was my favorite time of day, but not for the reason you might think. The fact was I tended to have some of my strongest visionary experiences during these midday naps. Just below the edge of sleep, when the ears could still hear the sounds in the room, the flux of images would often burst into that dimension of pure healing which is always present alongside the shape of our thoughts. Night dreams tended to be more informational, more structured. Nap dreams were like swimming in the blue Caribbean.
Siesta was followed by another interlude of chant, and then the major work period of the day began -- about five hours of uninterrupted physical labor. This could encompass a great variety of tasks, anything from baling hay and weeding vegetables to fixing the roof or going into town for supplies. Some of the older brothers worked at pottery and woodworking, but most of us did "chores." Since I was an experienced mechanic, I spent a good part of the time nursing the large number of machines that shared our reclusive existence. That and carpentry, at which I became fairly proficient.
During these silent work periods I became aware of a most extraordinary kind of cause and effect. Every time that I entertained a vindictive or angry thought, without exception, I would bang my head against something! On a few occasions it was as if an invisible hand grabbed me by the hair and pulled me off balance, so that my head struck an object as much as two feet away!
At 5:30 P.M. we showered, dressed, and gathered in the chapel for another lengthy session of chanting the songs of David. Then came dinner, dishwashing, and a half hour of "recreation" which consisted of sitting around talking and laughing in very boisterous fashion. After a few more psalms and a hymn to Mary, we were ready for bed.
And that's the way it went, with very little variation, every day for two years of my life. That was my gift to the Blessed Virgin for giving me a glimpse of her ecstatic majesty.

BIG DREAMS IN THE MONASTERY
The first dream that I can recall from my monastic period seemed to be a comment on religion. I include it here in full:
I am at home with my family. It is night. Suddenly the sky lights up. We run up to the roof to see a glowing cross stretching from horizon to horizon, and the words THE END OF THE WORLD written in blazing letters across the stars. The image of the crucified Christ appears on the cross, and the cross comes zooming down toward the earth. The stars begin to wink out, meteors flame across the heavens, and an amazing display of celestial phenomena sends the populations of earth into hysteria. My father goes back into the house to save his possessions. I recall the words of the gospel: "When that time comes the man on his housetop must not go down into his house to fetch anything." (Matt. 24:17)
Then mobs of people are roaming the streets, lost and afraid. "Where's Jesus?" they cry. "Has he come to take us with him? We saw him in the sky!" "He's in here!" others answer. "He's holding a meeting in town!" So my mother and brothers and I go to the meeting hall where Jesus and his apostles are speaking to the crowds. Jesus walks in and begins shaking hands. But something is amiss --when my turn comes to shake his hand I look directly into his eyes and realize at once that this is an imposter! I shout, "Hey, you're not Jesus!" Hissing and obscenities erupt from the mouths of Jesus and the apostles, their masks fall off, and they are revealed as Satan and his fallen angels! I wake up realizing the whole "end of the world" display was a satanic trick. Everyone was fooled because they knew only the religious cliches and literary images, but not the spirit.
("If anyone tells you at the time, 'Look, here is Christ,' or 'Look, there he is,' don't believe it! For false Christs and false prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders, to deceive, if possible, even God's chosen men!" -- Matthew 24:23)
For me, the message of the dream was this: The historical symbols and the written record of what was made manifest -- even the ceremonies and sacraments handed down by tradition -- all lend themselves to fraudulent use. None of the images are Christ, (who is only truly known in the Spirit). Nor can you be excused from real work in consciousness by performing the religious ceremonies and daily obeisances of a holy monk. That's a nice movie, and it can serve your transformation, but it's still a movie.
Looking back from today, I see that this dream which came at the beginning of my monastic career was already pointing to that time when I would again sever my relationship with formal religion. But on another level the dream was a scenario generated by a central dichotomy in my psyche -- the archetypal opposition between Christ and Satan, Light and Shadow. In 1966 the traditional Christian soul epic was still moving powerfully in me:
DREAM.  A stairway winds up to heaven. The stone steps are worn as if by a great many feet. On either side is an abyss from which smoke and sulphurous fumes issue. The cries of the damned can be heard below us, as we climb the long stair. "Many have slipped who tried to pass this way," says a voice. In the dream I know that I too might easily slip into the abyss and never reach the Eternal Kingdom. What a dream -- many have ascended to heaven, but many more have descended into the sulphurous darkness! Christianity divides the human race into the "saved" and the "damned," and this mythology is imprinted in us right down to the place where dreams emerge. Why this eternal opposition? Why this cosmic conflict between good and evil? Why this roaring black fire of hell that snuffs out the light of God's infinite love?
It was going to take me many years to realize that the answer to these questions lay in myself, for these dreams were a dramatic reflection of a war that existed entirely within my body and my psyche...but not in my innermost Spirit. However, to find (and become) that inmost Self, one had to pass directly through the mythology of the opposites:
DREAM.  I am standing in the choir singing with the other monks. There is a flash of light to my right. I turn and see a huge cross planted in the floor of the chapel. Jesus himself is nailed to this cross, bleeding and suffering incredibly, looking at me with eyes of greatest sorrow. My mind says, in the dream: do you see how it is, even now the Lord of Eternity suffers at the hands of man. The crucifixion is a reality which will continue to the end of time! The crucifixion is a symbol whose meaning is not exhausted by the shame that Christians feel for the murder of the Godman. Psychologically, crucifixion means coming to wholeness by taking the war of opposites (the four directions of the cross) upon oneself. As a symbol of conscious transformation through conscious death (sacrifice), crucifixion is surely a reality that must continue to the end of time.
But each of us resists our own crucifixion...and our real awakening beyond the opposites. A few nights later I had a dream that God was pushing into my heart, and I was resisting. I heard myself say, over and over, "I hate you! I hate you!"
By being made aware I still harbored deep reluctance, I began to surrender:
VISION.  A surge of light and music above me and to the left. I am dragged up out of my body into the divine effulgence so familiar from previous visions. Then the vision arcs in intensity until it bursts out of "vision" into unearthly reality. I am lying in a pool of light, and all around me invisible presences are laughing and talking to me -- "Elias! Hi, Elias! We're with you, Elias! See you soon, Elias!" Then another voice: "Have you ever seen an angel, Elias?!" An angel starts to appear, I feel greater energy and light surging into my body, too much for me to contain without dying, I snap completely awake, unable to breathe. About this time I read a book about Padre Pio, the Italian stigmatic. Padre Pio used to see the devil as a red-eyed dog who would snarl at him from outside his window! The good Padre was part of a venerable tradition of saints and martyrs who have lived the mythology of good vs. evil through concrete projections. The book provoked a dream:
DREAM.  My little female cat is being attacked by an enormous red-eyed wolf. As I approach, the cat leaps safely into my arms, and the wolf backs off snarling. I wake up with a feeling of power. The dark aspects of the psyche need to be handled carefully. As long as we identify with the unconscious mythology of light and darkness, there is real danger. It wasn't until years later, after exhaustively sifting the mindforms that surfaced in dreams, that I could truly know this vision of a red-eyed wolf as an "unconscious complex"...a psychic structure that with proper distillation would release its energy to consciousness.
As the Hindus say, "the snake becomes a rope...was it ever anything but a rope?" Over time powerful scenarios of light and darkness must inevitably transmute into direct cognition of a spiritual wholeness beyond the opposites.
"Was it ever anything but a rope?" Even then, while immersed in religious mythology, the great underlying Truth would, from time to time present itself -- (usually during the mid-day "siesta"):
VISION.  One afternoon I was taking a nap after dinner, dreams and jazz music were sluicing through my brain.  Suddenly a voice spoke very loudly next to my ear: "NOW THE SECRET OF LIFE WILL BE REVEALED." A hole opened up under me and I fell into it. It was a square dark hole, which got progressively lighter the deeper I fell. I fell quickly at first, then more slowly as the light thickened. Soon I was floating in the loving embrace of the Light, an intense rapture flooding my senses. The words "I need you!" echoed in me and around me.
There was progressive dissolution of form and quality as the light thickened. Images dissolved into light, dream dissolved into light, I dissolved into light, and this light was Consciousness itself. That is the secret of life.
We dwell in sketchy modulations of form and color. We live in the rind of being. And all of this is permeable to the Light, because it is solidified out of the Light, and all of this is fated to be dissolved in the Light. In the beginning and in the end we are nothing but Light, and that Light is Consciousness, the Light of Life Itself. That Light is being and life, and the fullness of Life Itself. That Light is our eternal samadhi (a Hindu word for divine absorption, or ecstatic communion with God).
All images and all dramas of the opposites, both in dreams and daily living, express a single unconditional "substance" which is consciousness itself. Thus Consciousness, as Light, transcends the mind of "light and darkness".
Such experiences would "dissolve" me, and for a few days I would walk around transported. The other brothers would notice and I would receive lots of smiles and nods.
Then my mind would resolidify, and new crystalline structures would form, new dreams of conflict would emerge:
DREAM.  New York is destroyed by atomic bombs. Standing on our hilltop we can see the mushroom cloud rising above the southern horizon. The light becomes very intense. The other monks and I hide behind pillars, and the pink light blasts by us, vaporizing everything it touches (except the pillars, fortunately).
VISION.  I am walking on a road that leads into the forest. Suddenly a circular chasm opens next to the road. Cautiously I approach the edge of the pit and peer over. I am gazing into a fathomless dark deep, and I am thinking of all my ecstatic falling dreams. I recall Rilke's words: "to love is not to rise but to fall!" At that moment I hear the clatter of hoofbeats coming along the road out of the forest. I raise my eyes and see a spectral being on a black horse galloping toward me. He is moving with the speed of the wind, and his aura is of stupendous and irresistible power. I know at once that nothing in the universe can impede or resist this onrushing power. As the horse thunders by, its flank brushes me lightly, and I fall head over heels into the abyss.  I wake up quaking with fright. What's so different about this descensus from all my other glorified tumbles? Why was there no hint of luminous supporting depths waiting to receive me? For a long time I thought this dream meant that I was going to undergo physical death at a young age. I took this horseman to be the Lord of Death himself, on his daily journey around the world.

MY SECOND GREAT TEACHER
A monastery is a utopian community that works because it is founded on the law of sacrifice, selflessness, and surrender to God. Furthermore, all hope is invested in an elsewhere, a dream of another world, a heaven beyond the wall of death where Christ is king and where beatitude and exaltation are the soul's eternal state.
Repelled by the Shadow of man -- his lust, greed, murderousness and lying --the monk joins a social agreement which makes a great nothingness of the world and focuses all attention on prayerful and meditative communion the perfection of Christ.
Unfortunately this act of abnegation doesn't really free the monk from sharing in the darkness of humanity. His blood and flesh are still woven into the psycho-physical being of the whole human race. He may dissociate his mind from the complexes and compulsions that rule the world, but all of these shadowy and regressive forces are still at play in him.
I know -- for two years I lived in the company of saints, and in those two years I saw a group of basically ordinary men behave much as ordinary men do everywhere. There was ego, there was jealousy, there was deception, at times there was even hatred. There was power-tripping, arrogance, and once in a great while there was violence. In short, all of the benign qualities which monks put on like a uniform were fully complemented in their behavior by devilish opposites.
The worst of it was that no one knew quite how to deal with this situation. One could suppress a moment of rage or repress a lustful thought, but sure as hell it would rear its head again later with renewed strength. One could confess one's sins to a father-priest and then, heart filled with forgiveness, take the body and blood of the Lord into one's entrails. These symbolic activities seemed to keep everything under control, but by no means did they resolve the war between Christ and the devil. If anything, they accentuated it.
The whole monastic enterprise, as I now see it, was based on a misconception, a faulty view of reality. For one thing, the Church and her ministers have never had a handle on consciousness itself as the primary reality. Churchmen have, over the centuries, taken the various dramatic manifestations of psychic energy as real in themselves -- and therefore opposable, destructible, and subject to legislation.
Christians have, for instance, never fully understood that Christ and the devil are two aspects of a unified field, "two sons of one Father," the right hand and left hand of God. Christian saints, therefore, have seldom acknowledged the fact that the devil is an unconscious aspect of themselves, a free body of psychic energy whose autonomy is granted and perpetuated by our false idea of what we are. Empirically, we remain victims of the mythology of opposites because our narrowly circumscribed ego puts 98% of reality into the "unconscious."
The situation in the Christian churches and monasteries is aggravated at present by an undercurrent of suspicion of all things mystical. It is more or less explicitly denied that the spirit of God can, in these days, fill man with revelation and Divine Light. The prophets and saints are legendary (therefore unreal). Our communication with the Spirit must be indirect, mediated by the body politic, the sacraments, and the priesthood.
When men who try to describe holy dreams and visions are dismissed as deluded, one can only suppose that the institutional church has a deep doubt about its own relationship to God, and a profound absence of the knowledge available for millennia in the East. In spite of all the fashionable talk about "Pentecostal Catholicism," the embarrassed laugh and the impolite dismissal were the only acknowledgements I ever received when I dared to tell my superiors of my visions.
Early on in my monastic career I ventured to tell a spiritual dream I had had the night before to the prior of the monastery (who was also my confessor). He laughed and said straight out, "What do you think, that you have a direct pipeline to God?" After that, I kept my experiences to myself.
Fortunately there was one other monk who shared my encounters with "private revelation." He was Hugh McKiernan, an older man, a former Trappist Abbot who had learned, even as a Trappist, to keep his mouth shut about his inner life.
I am not sure how we discovered our mutuality, but soon after he arrived as the monastery, Hugh and I opened our hearts to each other. He was a powerful influence on me, reinforcing my faith in spiritual intuition, and reinforcing my disrespect for ecclesiastical authority. After Jung, this man was my second true teacher. He taught me that mystical knowledge is free and sufficient unto itself. It has no need to prove itself to the ignorant. It has no need to seek rapprochement with its mockers or presumed "authorities".
My friendship with Hugh transformed the dullness of monastic life into an experience of a very high order. If circumstances had not conspired to draw both of us back into the world, we would probably still be there today, sharing our secret love and knowledge of God. I remember many occasions when we would walk together to lonely places in the forest, and sit on rocks or fallen logs and share our most recent visions.
At these times Hugh would be overcome with waves of Divine Love as he recounted his most precious secrets to me...and then we would sit in silence, enveloped by a peace that was like the descent of Heaven.
Hugh seemed to look forward to death...even long for it. He was fifty-seven when I first met him, in 1965. After we both left monastic life we stayed in touch for a number of years. I haven't seen him since 1976, although from time to time we still meet in dreams. Surely he rests with God today, for if he were still alive he would be over ninety-years-old.
[Hugh McKiernan did pass away, in the 1990s. There used to be a tribute site to him on the internet, but now the only references I find are to his correspondence with his fellow Trappist Thomas Merton, whom he knew as a friend.]

SAN FRANCISCO
In the summer of 1967 one of my uncles who lived in New York fell ill. My father was planning to visit him, and in an extraordinary gesture from my superiors, I was allowed to go along.
This uncle was a World War II veteran who had lived on a disability pension ever since the war. Life for him consisted of sitting in front of a television eating junk food and drinking endless bottles of Coca Cola. After twenty years of this he collapsed and began to die.
We stayed in New York for a week, speaking sadly with the other relatives. And I managed to do a turn around the Lower East Side, dropping in on my friends who were still madly tapping their typewriters and storming the walls of success.
I met my old girlfriend there too, the one who had lived with the guitar maker who had killed somebody in a bar fight. By chance she was in town for a few days, visiting from San Francisco, where she was now going to school. A meeting between us in Tompkins Square Park was a deciding factor in my decision to abandon the Rule of Saint Benedict.
I remember the incident clearly, we were sitting on a bench on the east side of the park, facing west. I kept looking in her eyes and wondering how they could be so lifeless, so dull and pinched. She told me she had been taking a lot of LSD, and it had left her feeling confused, although she had enjoyed the "trips." That seemed to explain the dark eyes. There was nothing at all of the communion we had shared two years before.
I felt terribly sorry for her, wondering if there was any way I could help her. She behaved as if I was a priest-confessor, and told me some of her experiences with men since last we'd met. They sounded mindless and degrading. I thought to myself, well, it's good enough that I left all this behind, the world is going straight to hell. LSD and sexual promiscuity are not the way to God.
We stood up and walked through the park. It was time for her to catch a bus to the airport and the flight back to San Francisco. As we were about to part, we turned and embraced and then kissed. I looked into her eyes one last time. At that moment the top of my head dissolved and I was the whole spiritual realm peering down through the body and eyes of Elias into the soul of this lost young woman. Every ounce of samadhi I'd ever felt was right there, I was it, I was boundless consciousness stretching out in all directions and focused through the body of a twenty-six year old man.
She must have felt it too, in her own way, for when I returned to the monastery, we began corresponding, and they were the kind of letters that draw two people into a love relationship. My mind had returned to "normal," but now the promise of the dream I'd had years before, in which our marriage had released an influx of divine power, dangled before me as a very real possibility. That among numerous other signs and portents (including strongly directive dreams) made me quickly opt for a return to the world.
One very interesting experience I recall: It was our custom to have one of the brothers read aloud to the others during meals. On this day it was my turn, and as I recall, I was reading from a book of stories and sayings of the "Desert Fathers", the early Christian hermits. As I read I raised my eyes, and off to the side I got a momentary glimpse of an old man standing watching me. He was dark skinned, long-haired, and wore the white garments of an Indian holy man. I looked back at the book and read the next sentence of the story: "You must leave this place, my son, for I have other work for you to do."
If I had any remaining doubts about whether to leave the monastery, in that moment my destiny was sealed.
So at the end of 1967, like a lonely migratory bird, I left my holy brothers in the wilds of Vermont and returned to my poet brothers in the jungles of New York City. There I found work in a restaurant and began to accumulate money for my journey to San Francisco. There I unpacked my typewriter and laid the foundations of a new three-foot pile of manuscripts.
During my two years of silence and reflection, the world had become a giddy place. LSD and marijuana were now the staple recreation of youth, and a wild new culture had burst into bloom. I let my hair grow, bought a 1958 Dodge, overhauled its transmission, and headed West.

"To us all towns are one, all men our kin. Life's good comes not from others' gift, nor ill. Man's pains and pains' relief are from within. Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !." - Tamil Poem-