The Point Vierge — Louisville Vision
The Teaching
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world.
There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes.
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, from which God disposes of our lives. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.
Commentary
Merton's Louisville vision is one of the most important mystical accounts of the 20th century. Standing in an ordinary shopping district, the ego-boundary dissolved and he experienced the unity of all beings, not as theory but as direct perception.
He went on to engage deeply with Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, writing that he found 'a different language for saying the same thing.' He was on his way to meet the Dalai Lama when he died in 1968.
'The little point of nothingness' is Eckhart's Seelengrund, is Turiya in the Mandukya Upanishad, is what the Tao Te Ching calls the valley spirit. The divine center is accessed not through more thought but through the stillness beneath all thought.