From The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton...
November 4
            Thinking about my own life and future, it is still a very open question. I am beginning to appreciate the hermitage at Gethsemani more than I did last summer when things seemed so noisy and crowded. Even here in the mountains there are few places where one does not run into someone. Roads and paths and trails are all full of people. To have real solitude one would have to get very high up and far back!
            For solitude, Alaska really seems, the very best place. But everyone I have talked to says I must also consider others and keep open to them to some extent. The rimpoches all advise against absolute solitude and stress "compassion." They seem to agree that being in solitude much of the year and coming "out" for a while would be a good solution.
            The idea of being in Alaska and then going out to Japan or the U. S. strikes me as a rather good solution. And, in some small way, helping in Alaska itself. On the way back from this trip I think I will need to go to Europe to see Trungpa Rimpoche's place in Scotland and the Tibetan monastery in Switzerland. Also to see Marco Pallis and then John Driver in Wales. I must write to "Donald" Allchin about Wales.
            The way in which I have been suddenly brought here constantly surprises me. The few days so far in Dharamsala have all been extremely fruitful in every way: the beauty and quiet of the mountains, my own reading and meditation, encounters with lamas, everything.
            In away it is wonderful to be without letters. No one now knows where to reach me. Undoubtedly there is some mail accumulating for me at the USIS office in Calcutta. But it will be ten days or more before I see any of it. And Brother Patrick is sending on only what is most essential.
            Trying to get a better perspective on the earlier part of this year, there is a lot I cannot quite understand. And perhaps do not need to understand. The last months have been demanding and fruitful. I have needed the experience of this journey. Much as the hermitage has meant, I have been needing to get away from Gethsemani and it was long overdue.
            This evening the lights in the cottage went dead for a while. I stood out in the moonlight, listening to drums down in the village and looking up at the stars. The same constellations as over the hermitage and the porch opening in about the same direction, southeast toward Aquila and the Dolphin. Aquarius out over the plain, the Swan up above. Cassiopeia over the mountains...

November 5                                                                 The metaphysician as wounded man. A wounded man is not an agnostic ˜ he just has different questions, arising out of his wound. Recognition of the wound as a substitute for real identity, when one can "think of nothing else."
            Buddha rejected the dogmatism of idealism and materialism and substituted a critical dialectic, "long before anything approximating to it was formulated in the West." "Criticism is deliverance of the human mind from all entanglements and passions. It is freedom itself. This is the true Madhyamika standpoint."
            Note that Buddha neither said "there is a self" or "there is not a self." But among many Buddhists there appears to be a kind of dogmatism that says "there is not a self" instead of taking the true middle. Also Buddha replied by silence because he considered the condition of the questioner and the effect of a dogmatic reply on him. Buddha did not say "there is no self" to prevent the bewilderment of Vacchagotta. "For he would have said: 'Formerly indeed I had a self but now I have not one any more.' "
            It was Buddha's aim not to give a "final" speculative answer but to be free from all theories and to know, by experience, "the nature of form and how form arises and how form perishes." He wanted "not a third position lying between two extremes but a no-position that supersedes them both." This is the Middle Way.

November 7     The contemplative life must provide an area, a space of liberty, of silence, in which possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices ˜ beyond routine choice ˜ become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as stopgap, stillness, but as "temps vierge" ˜ not a blank to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered and violated, but a space which can enjoy its own potentialities and hopes ˜ and its own presence to itself. One's own time. But not dominated by one's own ego and its demands. Hence open to others ˜ compassionate time, rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it.
            Merton died of accidental electrocution in Thailand on December 10, 1968. April 8 is the Buddha's birthday.