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SEEDS OF DESTRUCTION by Thomas Merton. 328 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95.

Thomas Merton, the compleat bohemian who became a Trappist monk at 26, has carried on an astringent "dialogue with the world" ever since. In his 24 years as a member of Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani, he has built a seven-storey mountain of poems, autobiography, reflection and translation that attests to his continuing concern for mankind at large. In this collection of essays and letters, Merton punctures the white liberal's complacent participation in the civil rights movement as a kind of self-indulgence that is of "no interest to the Negro." In his view, what the Southern segregationist realizes, and the Northern liberal fails to grasp, is that with full and meaningful integration of the Negro, "society is going to be radically changed." However, says Merton, before the Negro revolution ever nears fulfillment, the liberal will respond by "goosestepping down Massachusetts Avenue." If this vision seems extravagant, the author argues persuasively that the struggle is a preordained spiritual purgatory for the white man, a redemptive mission for the black.

THE CAT AND SHAKESPEARE by Raja Rao. 117 pages. Macmillan. $3.95.

To Westerners, the Hindu mind often seems like that frustrating garden in Through the Looking-Gloss, which Alice couldn't penetrate because even the most promising path "gave a sudden twist and shook itself" and led her right back to the door. As Alice learned, the only way in is to go blithely in the opposite direction. The reader who does the same may get some fun and a certain impalpable sense of enlightenment from Indian Author Raja Rao's charming, puzzling tale. The simple surface of the book is the story of a clerk in an Indian village near the sea who wants only to build himself a house and live with his gentle mistress--and of his neighbor, Govindan Nair, who helps him. Beneath that surface runs Govindan Nair's unscrupulous ingenuity and his innocent-seeming philosophy: "Learn the way of the kitten. Then you're saved. Allow the mother cat, sir, to carry you." And still beneath that is the Everlasting Now of the Hindu mind itself, expressed in brainteasing asides: "You only see what you want to see. But you must see what you see. Freedom is only that you see that you see what you see." Which is where Alice met herself coming out.

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