In May and October of 1968, Trappist monk and acclaimed spiritual author, Thomas Merton, offered two extended conferences at Our Lady of the Redwoods Abbey, a Cistercian women’s community in Northern California. Comprising over twenty-six hours of previously unpublished material, Merton’s California conferences cover a variety of topics from ecology and consciousness, to yoga and Sufi spirituality. Throughout these engaged and enlivening informal talks, Merton challenges his listeners to ask their own questions about the nature of the self and offers penetrating insights into the complexities of contemporary human being from a monastic and contemplative perspective.
One of the key themes that Merton “treats” is the rampant anxiety, alienation, and depression that he diagnoses at the root of “modern consciousness.” Merton then contrasts the modern, alienated self to medieval and mystical forms of consciousness, rooted in a spiritual or contemplative “Ground of Being” – serving as “alternatives” to contemporary forms of consumer consciousness, or what he calls the “computer karma” of modern-day Americans. As does Merton, parallels will be drawn to the work of C.G. Jung, particularly to Jung’s notion of individuation, and the modern “search for soul,” or as Merton frames it, the recovery of one’s “true self” and the restoration of the “image and likeness” of God – Jung’s archetypal Self.