Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com and jstim.substack.com.

Thomas Merton is a hero of mine, about whom I have written before. I feel close to him not only in a spiritual and intellectual sense, but also personally, as we share a thicket of contradictions about what we have written and how we have conducted our lives – a mixture of cloistered retreat and sensuous adventure.

Earlier in Merton’s life, Alan Jacob writes in The New Yorker, “he was politically active, an eager participant in leftist demonstrations, and he grew increasingly interested in Eastern religions.”⁠ Whatever he wrote about was always pertinent, never stale and, remarkably, more relevant today than it was in his day.

I also like to think we have a psychic connection. In 1968, he published his book that I like best, “Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander.” That was also the year I returned home from the trauma of Vietnam and the same year Merton died grotesquely from accidental electrocution.

In this book, Merton was not trying to write a scholarly treatise. Instead, as he says in his preface, “These notes add up to a personal version of the world of the 1960s…They are an implicit dialogue with other minds, a dialogue in which questions are raised.”

Questions that have become even more applicable today.

Here’s one such nugget: “The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think.”⁠

I’m in a constant battle to purge this insidious, ever-increasing flotsam and jetsam from my brain. Staying focused helps, and physical exercise does too. However, what has aided the most has been opening up to spirituality: not the Catholicism of Thomas Merton, although I greatly respect it, but Eastern religion. In particular, meditation has allowed me to glimpse a deeper reality that is usually obscured by the overflowing clutter of my mind.

I’ve recently discovered that Complexity Theory complements my meditation, as espoused by Neil Theise.⁠ He posits, along with other scientists, that consciousness, rather than being an isolated physical component of the brain, is ubiquitous, residing within every atom in the universe, as well as in every cell of the body.

Now, whenever I’m lucky enough to enter a deep state of peace during meditation, I can name the transcendental feeling that comes over me: I’m merging with the universal consciousness of the universe.

Now, back to Merton: Connected to the rubbish that clutters our brains, Merton points out the pitfalls of overwork. Worse than just leading us to become discombobulated, overwork is a form of violence.

“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.”

Merton, in his wisdom, understood how a frenzied lifestyle destroys a person’s inner peace. “It destroys the fruitfulness of his work because it kills the root of inner wisdom that makes work fruitful.” Thanks to his guidance, I have learned to throttle down enough to savor the moment more fully.

This insidious virus I harbored, hampering my activism and peace of mind, has continued to spread until it’s now an epidemic threatening our whole way of life. No one can dispute that overwork is the tyranny of today, not only for activists but also for idealists, artists and committed, creative folks of every stripe.

In conclusion, I ask: Where are today’s prophets to guide us out of the wilderness, as Merton did for us in the 1960s?