He was a trappist monk in America who eventually died in an accident in Thailand in 1968 on a journey of discovery in the Far East as he began to realise the profundity of Taoism & Buddhism and was beginning to edge towards those religions, and he was also very much a left wing thinker and wrote some damning critiques of western capitalism and its effects on ordinary people. My favourite idea of his was that it is abnormal for one man to want power over another, it meant that person must be mentally sick in order to need to excercise such power. Therefore by extension the more powerful the person the more mentally ill he is, and the most powerful men in the world - eg the US Presidents - must be the sickest. THat may all sound very esoteric then, but he was a major influence on 60s singers like Bob Dylan. For me as lapsed Catholic with connections with Asia he has always made a great deal of sense
