......................................................................................................................................................... In the collection of Thomas Merton's journals that includes his visit with D.T. Suzuki, I had hoped to find the story of the Trappist monk informing the Zen scholar that in his meditations he had reached Christ's kenosis, his emptiness. And of Suzuki replying, "This, too, is an illusion. You must go deeper." Is this an antidotal myth? Did I read it somewhere else? Did I dream it? In a secular context, to be awake means that instead of enveloping our consciousness dreams are running in the background, like an endless strip of film played out in the light of day. Thus, the surreal suffuses the real. "Reality is no longer a given, a natural, familiar environment. The self, cut loose from its attachments, must deliver meaning where it may---a predicament, evoked at its most nihilistic, that underlies both surrealism and modern ethnology." [J. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA, 1988.] Late one wintery afternoon in Northern New Mexico, near Tesuque Pueblo, I stood on the lip of a pit that was a kiva, a ceremonial place dug out of the earth. Nothing was left but cedar beams of the caved in roof, spilt and digested by the desert's hungry arachnid critters. This is evidence that gods don't dwell, but continue their eternal journey, so that a wake is waking up. Then I read: "(Suzuki) then writes that Merton's use of the term 'emptiness' does not go 'far and deep enough' because it is still on the level of God as Creator, which Suzuki understands to be dualistic, because of the distinction made between creator and creation, or creature." [J.Q. Rabb, "Openness and Fidelity: Thomas Merton's Dialogue with D.T. Suzuki, and Self-Transcendence." Ph.D. thesis, St. Michael's College. Toronto, 2000.] ......................................................................................................................................................... In the collection: T. Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Vol. 5. San Francisco, 1997.