The Hermit of Montserrat

A few years ago, I saw the Dalai Lama on a late night cable program. He was one of several people being interviewed. At somepoint during the discussion, the host turned to him and said, "Are there other living Dalai Lamas in the world?" The Dalai Lama said,
"I am certain of it. In fact, I met two such people in Europe."
Some months before this television show, I read a magazine article about the Dalai Lama's visit to Spain. He spoke of a special meeting with the hermit of Monestir de Montserrat. The Dalai Lama was touched that the hermit momentarily ceased his religious contemplation in order to meet with him. The Dalai Lama could speak no Spanish; however, he said that words were not necessary. They communicated on another level, the level of omniscient love. Buddhist philosophy considers the Dalai Lama as a reflex of
Avalokitesvara, the Buddha of Compassionate Love. According to the Dalai Lama's own statement, there are also a limited number of other people who equally have the right to be the Dalai Lama (as
incarnations of Avalokitesvara).

Who is the hermit of Montserrat? Who is this person that the Dalai Lama felt so at ease with that words were not necessary?
Obviously, the Dalai Lama regarded the hermit of Montserrat as an equal, and they communicated with the language of the heart.
When the television show was over, I decided to pursue this story. The following is a journal of my trip.

Day One

I purchased a ticket on a charter flight from Toronto, Canada, to Malaga, Spain. Since I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it was about a four hour drive to the Toronto airport. My flight was supposed to leave at 8 p.m.; however, we didn't take-off until 9:30 p.m. For some reason, I was completely exhausted and couldn't sleep a wink, although the flight was smooth all the way. There was a middle-aged man with a three year old girl sitting next to me, and she was up all night.

Since I couldn't sleep, I decided to meditate. Sometime during my meditation, I was hit with what seemed like a lightening bolt from another dimension. My exhaustion disappeared in an instant,
and I was as fresh as a daisy.

I began to think about my passion for comparative religion over the years. My philosophy professor had studied with D.T. Suzuki in Kyoto, Japan, in 1946. He was the first to point out that Suzuki had turned down Allan Watts as a student.

Watts was far too deep into the drug culture as a means to an end (that end being enlightenment). Suzuki considered such reasoning as specious because enlightenment was not a "dependent condition". He once said that even formal meditation was absolutely not necessary to realize higher truth; however, on a relative level it does seem to be a sine qua non.

Enlightenment is not an experience that the brain has created or put together. Beyond our projected framework of causality, the pure land of liberated consciousness is free and untouched by human concepts.

Enlightenment is a realization of the mind's fundamental nature. It is an insight into the formless, most subtle level of the mind, and it is often referred to as the "clear light".

Enlightened realization penetrates the veil of the dichotomizing intellect and sees beyond the filters which govern perception.

Then, the positive, constructive energies of wisdom and love can imbue all of our actions and rebuild the world with new values.

As morning dawned, our plane flew over Sintra, Portugal. It wasn't too long before we were over Spain. As Hemingway once said, Spain, with its age-old mountains, looked like a dinosaur from prehistoric times. Age gives weight to perception, and the past and present are always very much alive in Spain.

As we descended to Malaga over the mountains, I couldn't help but feel that I was twenty again, chasing some impossible dream.

It was a lively and good feeling that touched my heart and pushed me forward. The light of youth is never very far from the heart, no matter what the age.

We arrived at 4:30 a.m., which is 10:30 a.m. in Spain. Within thirty minutes or so, we were on a bus heading for our hotel (the Melia Costa del Sol) on Bajondillo beach. It was only about four miles from the airport. Upon our arrival, we attempted to check-in; however, the hotel was full and check-out time wasn't
until noon. Then, the rooms had to be cleaned. So, I decided to take a walk around the vicinity of the hotel.

There was a party store next to the hotel. I explored theofferings and noticed a few bins containing Cuban cigars. I picked-up one and squeezed it. A tobacco mite seemed to pop out and run around the circumference of the cigar. I put it back in the bin and continued my exploration. The beachfront was saturated with hotels and restaurants.

So, I decided to try some vegetarian paella, a Spanish dish filled with rice. While Valencia is one of the best places to find great paella, my dish was delicious and served with a glass of apple juice. After lunch, I went back to the hotel to see if my room was ready.

The people in my group were anxious and started complaining. I waited patiently until everyone was checked-in. Then, the desk clerk saw me standing in the back of the lobby and asked if she could help me. I said that I was part of the group that had arrived at 11 a.m. She said, "You mean that you are a part of that group and haven't complained once since you arrived! I am going to give you the best room
in the house. You are so kind."

I opened the door to my room at 2:30 p.m.. I hadn't slept in over thirty hours, but I didn't feel the less for wear. I lay on my bed daydreaming of my first encounter with a Sufi Master. It was in Philadelphia, and his name was M. R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. His first commandment was, "You must open the truth of your innermost heart." Of course, one could spend a lifetime doing such work.

The Sufis say that God is the very soul of our soul. They contend that within the heart is the light of the soul, and within the light of the soul is the light of God, and within the light of God is the light of Divine Luminous Wisdom. This is regarded as the triple flame of Divine power and knowledge.

To live within the light of Divine Luminous Wisdom is to live within the knowledge of the heart. All symbolic and non-symbolic knowledge is contained in this light. Our symbolic knowledge is a shade of this light; it is part of the spectrum, as when white light hits a prism and becomes a rainbow of different colors. This wellspring of inner harmony is the heart of all variations of knowledge and wisdom.


Day Two

I slept well and rented a car in the lobby (a Renault Megan). It was a five-speed stick shift. I had owned a VW when I was twenty-two, so the stick shift was not a problem. Before I left Malaga, I decided to visit the two Picasso museums on Plaza de la Merced. Of course, Pablo Picasso was the father of modern art. He was a revolutionary and created a new artistic language with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). He deconstructed representational realism with the invention of cubism, although currents of cubism
certainly can be found in Paul Cezanne.

I found my way to route 340 North. This area of road around Malaga was known as the "killing zone", since there were so many motor vehicle accidents. I was careful as I made my way up the coast. The scenery was wonderful along the Mediterranean. Within an hour or so, near Motril, I decided to stop for lunch, and, to my amazement, directly off the highway I saw a McDonald's restaurant. While this was not my idea of Spanish food, it served my purpose as a pit stop in the afternoon, especially since I had no clue where any other restaurants were located. For a salad, parfait, and drink, the cost was about five euros.

With mountains filled with lemon and olive trees, I drove past Lorca to Murcia. From Murcia, it was just an hour or so to Alicante, known as the "City of Light" to the Romans. It was the principal city of the Costa Blanca. I headed directly for the beach area. My hotel, the Melia Alicante, was located on El Postiguet beach. I saw a young couple getting out of their car on the beachfront, so I pulled-up and asked for directions to the Melia. They couldn't speak English but were aware of the name Melia. They pointed in a northern direction. I thanked them and, then, attempted to put my car in reverse. With my VW in the old days, you just needed to push down on the gear shift knob and go in a backward "L" motion. It didn't work. I wasn't moving. Nothing happened. Thank goodness the young man was watching me this entire time. He came to my window and said, in some sort of universal sign language, "With European cars, you must lift up."

I got the message. There was a rubber connection under the top of the gear shift knob. So, I lifted-up and made the same motion, and it worked. I laughed and said thank you, and I was off and
running once again.

I drove along the Explanada de Espana and found my hotel. I checked-in and was given a room overlooking El Postiguet beach and the Castillo de Santa Barbara, a fortress originally built by the Carthaginians. I made a dash to see the Casa de la Asegurada, which houses a collection of modern art. The Spanish artist Eusebio Sempere has assembled works by Dali, Miro, Picasso, Tapies, and Kandinsky in this wonderful museum. Next, I went to the spectacular new Museo
Arqueologico de Alicante.

Alicante had been about a five hour drive from Malaga. In the evening, I rested and thought about my first encounter with yoga. With my interest in comparative religion, yoga was never very far away.

Yoga is the essential thread running through all of the great religions of India. The word yoga means to harness, yoke, or unite. It refers to the uniting of the human soul (atman) with God (Brahman). As an ancient wisdom tradition, yoga's main purpose is self-understanding; as a spiritual path, its raison d'etre is the liberation of the human soul from the self-constructed prison of the mind and senses.

The human soul is encased in the confining sheaths of mind, energy, and matter. These correspond to the causal, astral, and physical bodies. Some adepts also speak of a knowledge and joy (ananda-maya-kosha, or super-causal) sheath. Our soul is a divine spark of consciousness from the sacred flame of truth, and it is encased in a blue pearl for its protection.

Once we realize the nature of our soul, its so-called supernatural quality becomes a natural fact of our existence. Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan said that most of us go through life with eyes half shut and with dull minds and heavy hearts, and even the few who have had those rare moments of vision and
awakening fall back quickly into somnolence. It is good to know that the ancient thinkers required us to realize the possibilities of the soul in solitude and silence and transform the flashing and fading moments of vision into a steady light which could illumine the long years of our lives.

While modern day science regards consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain (either a by-product of certain biochemical reactions between neurons or just something that appears at a certain level of biological complexity), yogic philosophy considers consciousness as a consequence of the reasoning of the Absolute Self.

There are seven psychic energy centers (chakras) located at different positions along the length of the spine. At the base of the spine, in the Muladhara chakra, the kundalini (spiritual energy) is in a static state. Once the Kundalini Shakti has been awakened, it rises through the various chakras until it merges with the Absolute in the Sahasrara (the top chakra located at the crown of the head).

This union of Shiva (God) and Shakti (Her creative energy) is the dawn of liberated awareness.
Thus, the Unmanifested Absolute became polarized into Shiva-Shakti so that creation could unfold. The kundalini is really Chit-Shakti or Pure Consciousness. She is an eternal aspect of the highest, all-inclusive reality as Sat-Chit-Ananda (Existence-Consciousness-Bliss).

The human mind is nothing other than a contracted form of Chit-Shakti. There is an ancient text in Kashmir Shaivism entitled Pratyabhijnahridayam. It says that when Universal Consciousness, Chiti, descends from its lofty status as pure consciousness and assumes the form of different objects, it becomes chitta, the individual consciousness, or mind, by contracting itself in accordance with the objects perceived.

Day Three

It was about noon when I arrived in Valencia. I wanted to see the new Science Center, with the largest aquarium in Europe. Valencia has a long history with the Romans, Visigoths, and Moors holding court until the arrival of the Aragonese in 1238. The Renaissance and baroque buildings stand as a reminder of this complicated past. On my way to Barcelona, I thought about how science and religion have been at odds for so many centuries. We have created a variety of different symbol systems (linguistic, mathematical, musical, ritualistic, and pictorial) in order to understand the universe in general and ourselves in particular.

Our best scientific theories are representations, or abstract referrals, which parallel, more or less, real processes.Of course, the goal of modern science is a self-contained, unified theory of everything, and mathematics is the new language of scientific speculation. According to modern "string theory" in quantum physics, the universe is an interwoven system of vibrating strings of energy, and it is composed of perhaps eleven dimensions. Our four dimensional universe may exist on a membrane within higher dimensions.

In fact, it may be one of many parallel universes existing within eleven dimensions. This new approach in science is an attempt to create a unified field theory uniting gravity and electromagnetism, along with the strong and weak forces within the atom. While the jury remains out on this elegant mathematical hypothesis, the Fermi Lab is in the hunt for a predicted graviton and sparkle particle in an attempt to validate this new scientific theory.

The ancient Upanishads say that the primary manifestations of the Unmanifested Absolute are light and sound, with time and space unfolding from latent potentiality. Is there some primal or sacred vibration that is the window through which all pure potential must pass before it comes into being? Are all "vibrating strings" constantly in the process of creating innumerable inner and/or outer musical harmonies and
melodies? The Chandra X-Ray Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has detected the deepest musical note ever sounded in the universe (B flat, fifty-seven octaves below middle C) emitted by a black hole.

Many of the great religions have an ear tuned to the Music of the Spheres as a means of salvation. This
symphonic stream of bliss is a radiant sound current, and it is called Kalma by the Mohammedan saints, Sarosha by Zoroaster, Shruti, Udogeet, Nad, or Akash-Bani in the Hindu scriptures. In Christianity, this song of God is called the Holy Word. This pearl of great wisdom is also referred to as the Divine Melody, the Voice of God, the Audible Life Stream, the Holy Ghost, the Logos, the Nam, and the Kun.

Over a century ago, Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan said that the normal limits of human vision are not the limits of the universe. There are other worlds than that which our senses reveal to us, other senses than those which we share with other animals, other forces than those of material nature. I arrived at the Melia hotel in Barcelona in the evening. It had been a long day, so I decided to call it a night.

Day Four

It was about 4 a.m. when I awoke, as a result of a tap on my shoulder. I looked around and saw an angel. She was blond with short hair and approximately five feet tall. While nothing was said, I received some sort of transmission from her mind to mine. It was the following:

Love is the universal language of the heart, with its own grammar and syntax. The angels communicate with God through the celestial light and sound of this divine symbol system, and they understand all of the worldly languages created by human beings with their sweetness, which is the essence of compassionate love. This angelic language of the Spirit is the speech of enlightenment, and, on this level of creation, thought, word, and deed are one movement.

I fell to sleep, once again, and awoke at 9 a.m.. I didn't spend a great deal of time thinking about my insight. It happened and now it was over, and now I have a better understanding of how things work on a higher level. Was this a prelude to seeing the hermit of Montserrat?

Before I left Barcelona, I walked through the Picasso Museum and went to see the Four Cats Restaurant.
Picasso had his first art show as an adult in this restaurant. It played an important role in his life during his teenage years. Many of the intellectuals and great artists of his day used this cafe as a salon.
I had a friend from my student days who was living in Barcelona. His name was Juan Camelo, and he was a student of Jiddhu Krishnamurti and a Taoist philosopher. Juan met me at the Picasso museum and insisted on driving me to Montserrat. This sent a chill up my spine, because he suffered from some sort of sleeping disorder. Every once in awhile, his head would drop forward, and this would scare the liver out of me. So, I would usually shout some word, as if it were a mantra, in order to awaken Juan from his slumber.

Just about thirty minutes from Barcelona, Juan's head dropped forward, and I shouted, "Krishnamurti". Juan immediately responded as if a shock had gone through his body. He said, "Krishnamurti, yes, Jiddhu Krishnamurti."

For Krishnamurti, the truth is a pathless land. It is not the consequence of any ideology, nor is it a gift bestowed by any authority. True insight is an epiphany within the field of attentive awareness. When the act of attention becomes a flame of complete and total awareness, it has the power to free us from our negative social conditioning, and as an act of penetrating intelligence, it is the key to a liberated sensibility.

The truth is not something static that is the end result of any methodology. Rather, it is a living movement. There is great truth to be discovered in every movement of thought and feeling. Krishnamurti is a poet of awareness, and he believes that meditation is the flowering of love. It is through love, compassion, and intelligence that we eliminate the suffering engendered by egocentricity. Violence is the result of fragmentation and conditioned understanding, while love blossoms in the freedom and panoramic awareness of a silent mind.
After this lecture, Juan said that I must write him a prose piece on Taoism. So, I wrote the following:

the Tao is not the word Tao
nor is it an idea
when everything has been washed away
the Tao will remain standing

open your mind's eye and behold
the Tao of light
it is within the heart of wisdom
and the wu wei is the path of freedom

We needed gasoline, so Juan Camelo pulled into an old station that looked like a relic from the Spanish Civil War. Juan told a boy to fill it up, and I walked to the dilapidated station
to find a bathroom. As I was about to open the door, I looked back and saw the boy spraying gas all over the back of my car.

I ran back and asked him what he was doing. The young man said that when he started to pump nothing came out (Nada!!). He noticed that there was a knot in the hose, so he took out the pump and shook the hose. Unfortunately, he forgot to release the pressure on the pump. So, when the knot came out, the gas squirted in all directions.

The boy took a bucket of water and tossed it over the back of the car. He said there would be no problem, but I was afraid the car was going to explode when we started the engine. Juan was laughing all this time and said not to worry, but I chose to meet him at the end of the driveway, just in case. Nothing happened when he started the car, so we were off and running once again.

Mont Serrat means "serrated mountain". It is Catalonia's holiest place, with its highest peak rising to 4,055 feet. It is home to a group of Benedictine monks. We arrived late in the afternoon and stayed to hear the Escolania sing the Salve Regina y Virolai (the Montserrat hymn) at 7:10 p.m.

The complex includes cafes and a hotel, but it was booked during the few days that I was there. Juan asked a monk about the meaning of life, and he said, "We discover the meaning of life in the act of glorifying God, and we glorify God by living the beauty of a life of love."

He said that we must use the key of love in order to unlock the door to the mysteries of the heart. As a path of selfless action, love reveals the translucent ground of the Divine essence as freedom and grace. God is Love, and the only road leading to the Divine Kingdom is the path of Love.

When Juan wondered why there was so much suffering in the world , the monk said that suffering can be considered as a means of purification. He said that we must always ask ourselves, who is this "I" who is suffering?
During my first day there, I was able to walk the Way of the Cross. This path passes fourteen statues representing the stations of the Cross. It begins near the Placa de l'Abat Oliba.

Also, I saw the La Moreneta, the Virgin of Montserrat. This small wooden statue is the soul of Montserrat, and it is said to have been made by St. Luke.
In 1881, Montserrat's Black Virgin became patroness of Catalonia.
While I was unable to meet the hermit of Montserrat, I was told that he always took a walk at noon. Also, Father Louis said that I could submit three questions, and he would give them to the hermit to answer, if I wanted to return the next day.

Day Five

I returned to the monastery with the hope of seeing the the hermit of Montserrat. I felt very lucky to catch a glimpse of him on his daily walk. All that I can say is that it was as if a full measure of happiness had been poured into my heart.
Regarding my three questions, I was given a handwritten page with the following responses.

Is searching for the truth actually necessary?

No! Searching is only "window shopping". The most important thing is to manifest compassion in the world in order to alleviate suffering. Worry a little less about yourself; worry a little more about the suffering of the world. Being the truth is"doing" the truth.

What is love?

Love comes in many forms. The world seems most concerned with love as friendship, or affection, or romance. Unfortunately, all of these forms of love involve attachment, which will only lead to further suffering.
The most important form of love is "agape", which is unconditioned, selfless love. Once we are free of our
projections, fears, and desires, we can walk with a new life in the world. We can be reborn in the light of freedom.

Why are there so many problems in the world?

Problems are the result of a "wrong view" of the world and of our relationship with other beings. From psychology, we know that we suffer from various distortions. There is cerebration, which means that we "think" our experience, transference or parataxic distortion, which means that we project our ideas and thoughts onto the world and experience those ideas and thoughts rather than the world as it is, and the false consciousness caused by the social filter of language, logic, and taboos. Thus, our challenge is to liberate our awarness from these self-imposed qualifications which limit our
possibilities. Relationship is only possible when life is seen through the "eyes of unconditional love". Then, there is awareness without limits.

I went on to vist the Montserrat museum with its collection of 19th and 20th century Catalan paintings and many Italian and French works. It also has a display of liturgical items from the Holy Land.
Back in my room that evening, I thought of a prose poem for the hermit.

"through a glass darkly" we try to see what is real in life's mazes we try to share a word, or two, or three
but can't express the feeling that amazes we glance at each other, hoping that our love is not a prisoner of time we look into the emptiness of space, groping for a sign of tomorrow's rhyme.

Beyond the pale of fear and security issues, true religion is based on love as a transformative power that radiates the light of higher meaning. The aphorism for our age should be "I love, therefore I exist." It is the alpha and omega of genuine insight.