Author: Meng-hu

What is silence?

Silence (seijaku) is a principle tenet of Zen. Because of the reputation of Zen as aesthetics guiding philosophy, silence is often approached by visitors to Zen as an image or metaphor or epiphenomenon. The image is usually a garden, a temple, a quiet forest, a physical object evoking silence. But the same concreting happens in music, as when composer John Cage identifies silence as that which happens when there is no noise or sound. Such an interpretation of silence falls short of understanding, and reduces silence to a material category.

If silence is not a concrete thing but an absence, then perhaps there is no other alternative to this conventional approach. In modern culture, one is used to approaching the transcendent by a sleight-of-hand, a stealthy trick of either ignoring, obliterating, or denying the oppressive present with its technology and its artificial culture. Or, instead, we evoke something positive by analogy, as in the images of garden, temple, or forest. We exhaust grasping silence in itself and seek other ways.

But then the images themselves become transcendent objects, evoking silence as immanent, evoking not a physical reality but an imagination, a mental construct of something we demand should be essence rather than ephemera. Even in that process, however, we cannot obliterate our surroundings, only suspend them a while. We necessarily are conscious of the oppressive society around us, making silence just a welcome if temporary time-out.

One danger, particularly Western, is to make forays at silence, periods of recovery before resuming our pursuit of profit, sociability, or pleasure. Such forays are a spiritual tourism, even voyeurism. This attitude often infects meditation, yoga, or other spiritual practices. Traditional Western practices were infected by it long ago because the age of materialism came earlier to the culture.

The world and society consists primarily of raw noise, with culture being what one could call filtered noise. Raw noise is what the world sounds like if compressed in time and space: talk, noise, music, marketing, roars of pleasure, laughter, terror, fear, or hatred, news, talk shows, noisy technology, noisy events, humming workplace, urban centers, loud or faraway aircraft, low-frequency disturbances … A number of writers have pursued sounds of nature and non-human origins, but modern society and culture are best defined by sound as noise (“noise” being “undesired sound”). Take away sound and one experiences an eerie deafness, nd the acts and events and human movements become surreal and meaningless.

Silence is never absolute in nature, but can usually be defined as meaningful, of following consequence and act. The sound of volcanic eruption follows logically, as do communicative sounds of animals. Birds sing serendipitously to our layperson’s ear, but some scientists maintain that human speech may have ultimately evolved from bird song, it being so magical in its vocalization and variety. But if sound in nature always follows a purpose, its silence also follows a purpose. When nothing is happening in nature, there is silence. Can human beings achieve such self-discipline?

Short of a more thorough-going eremitic approach to the society and culture as far as eschewing non-silence, or anti-silence — not feasible for most people, even most solitaries — the engagement with silence must be deliberate and conscious. To expect silence in one’s life requires cultivating it. To cultivate silence requires practicing silence. Aesthetics is useful in understanding what we want to pursue, even when silence cannot be grasped directly. Even meditation does not grasp silence directly but always bids us forward slowly. Silence must be disclosed and cannot be manufactured. Silence is not intrinsic to the mind because our body is constantly pursuing activities that nourish the bain’s desire for engagement, alertness, and participation in the environment around us, an accretion left over from the animal world of alertness, of fight or fright, always “on.” Silence in nature is not absolute because it may mean merely an attentive fear on the part of prey.

But the human brain has the potential to be aware and conscious, not collapsing into an attentive fear or watchfulness, which is what keeps us so attuned to our artificial social and cultural environment. A natural environment has been stripped from most people, replaced by urban physical environments but also modern mental environments with telecommunications, marketing, consumerism, and an overlay of psychological dependency. This intrusiveness of the modern world reaches even remote settings, especially if people still crave connection to the world. Silence in nature, simplicity in setting, is the most revelatory of what silence consists. This pursuit can be cultivated, being secure in insecurity, or better, being comfortable eliminating the subtle instincts and false positives of the body.

The pursuit of silence may be occasional, as in a vacation in nature or a spiritual retreat, or deliberate, such as daily meditation practice. But most people will have to stop at some point in order to return to the world: to commute, work, socialize, and carry out the mundane trivialities that comprise life. A key insight of Zen philosophy is identification of silence not as a tool for manipulation and accommodation so much as an essential characteristic of the universe that eludes us if we do not actively engage it.

Only from that premise can one return to the necessities of life and yet be thoroughly engaged in them, having eliminated what is not necessary and embracing that which is left only because it is essential. Cooking rice and drinking tea were seen as such activities in classical Japan, activities not only nourishing but requiring complete attention, however simple they are. As Shunryu Suzuki used to say, when we do something, we should do it so thoroughly that we burn to an ash. By definition, this would be possible only after we had thoroughly engaged in the principles of Zen in simplifying life and freeing ourselves from worldly attachments. Then our activities would be completely appropriate. The we would appreciate the interpenetration of our lives with silence.

While meditation is a direct engagement with silence, aesthetics affords an oblique path. We stare at the object, and the object stares at us, and only contextually do we break down our ego and begin to empathize with the whole — the setting, the texture, the context, the possibility of being one in identifying with the object, with its fragility, its imperfection, its artlessness, its dependence, and, ultimately, its transience. Thus aesthetics reflects philosophy, and philosophy provides the links between disparate parts of our lives. We live in harmony with the objects that satisfy principles of aesthetics, and our lives become as compelling as the objects. We share the objects’ silence.

This is why the Zen garden impresses the most casual viewer. An immediate and negative reaction might be a demand for greenness, lushness, pleasure derived from fecundity and display. But the Zen garden startles in its though embrace of Zen principles. The silence of a kitchen garden is based on modesty, whereas the silence of the Zen garden is based on the purest philosophy. Both are otherworldly if we completely empathize with them in their silence.

Similarly, to enter ambient music is startling because the immediate and negative reaction is to demand flourishes, melodies, happy engagement. Instead there is the conscious presentation of silence as a theme, a complementary evocation of simplicity and profundity that is close to silence while still being a soundscape that can be ignored as background or actively listened to as aesthetics. In such music, the sound is, in effect, that which we would hear if we wanted to hear silence. Of course, there are versions of ambient music, whereas there is only one version of the Japanese garden, but seeking out the better examples is similar to seeking out the craft objects inspired by Zen principles of wabi and sabi.

Silence is a fundamental structure of existence, avoided by many and actively opposed by institutions and social structures because silence takes down the artificiality of society and daily life, and naturally allows the mind to deconstruct its facade, to identify with the larger whole. Silence bypasses the contrivances of human effort and society. Silence restores the notion of creativity to that aesthetic plane from which humans occasionally draw but seldom seem to comprehend as more than a source of amusement and time-wasting indulgence. Silence becomes a part of our lives when we see in it a commonality that all beings share.

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, reflects the paradox of power and narrow thinking endemic to the contemporary world. His criticism of China is inevitably taken as supportive of the West and its history, values, and policies, which historically have targeted China as an object of imperialism. The criticism serves the West as much as it may affect China.

Liu himself understood the dilemma early, describing himself as a frog at the bottom of a well, staring up at a patch of blue sky, lacking the context for his criticisms. He recognized the sordid history of the West in dealing with Asia, Africa, and the Americas, but owned that he lacked the intellectual capacity and breadth of knowledge that he admired in Western cultural critics. In a trenchant epilogue to his book, Chinese Politics and China’s Modern Intellectuals, Liu wrote:

One of humanity’s greatest mistakes in the twentieth century, in my view, has been its attempt to escape its predicaments using the civilizations that it has already created. … Humanity so far has been unable to conceive a completely new civilization that might solve such problems as the population explosion, the energy crisis, environmental imbalance, nuclear disarmament and addiction to pleasure and to commercialization. Nor is there any culture that can help humanity once and for all eliminate spiritual suffering or transcend personal limits. … [Nuclear annihilation] has become part of the backdrop of every person’s life. The specter of death can render all human effort futile. The best that anyone can do is to face cruel realities squarely and stride bravely toward the abyss.

These remarks do reflect a common sensibility understood world-wide for a long time. They could have been written in the 1950s. But more candidly, Liu reveals a more profound self-doubt:

After I finished this book, whose guiding principle was to use Western civilization as a tool for critical reflection on China, I suddenly found myself at a loss, trapped in an awkward position, and shaken. It struck me like a bolt from the blue that I had been attacking an obsolete culture with a weapon that itself was only a bit less obsolete. I was like a paraplegic laughing at a quadriplegic.

This was a candid admission. But Liu’s wife was more precise, telling Liu that his engaged dissidence wedded him more firmly into identifying with the system (here quoted in collected essays by Liu Xiaobo titled No Enemies, No Hatred):

The system treats you as an opponent, and in so doing it accommodates you, tolerates you, even flatters and encourages you. In a sense you are an oppositional ornament of the system. But me? I am an invisible person, I disdain even to demand anything of this society, and don’t lose sleep over how I am going to denounce it. It is I, not you, who am fundamentally incompatible with it. …

These words hit the nail on the head, admitted Liu, but he only elaborates on his own ideas in the same flawed vein. He misses the true import of his wife’s words. To engage in the world is to give it tacit approbation. To be invisible is the true incompatibility.

Liu’s problem is more complex. Despite being a university professor of Chinese literature, with some years spent in the West, Liu does not invoke the rich tradition of China’s intellectual history in understanding the present. He is embarrassed to do so, perhaps, if not ignorant of it. While he recognizes the Confucian convention of the imperial mandate from heaven as a continuing theme in Chinese political thinking, and rightly notes the ossified Confucian social system as abetting the existing cultural order, Liu does not mention the long tradition outside of this system, the Taoist and Buddhist political theories that always swirled around Chinese intellectual circles, balancing Confucian excesses and rigidities. The legacy of China’s last two centuries’ encounter with the West destroyed this balance. Western powers fostered the ossified system in order to weaken Chinese society and state. Opium and technology finished it off, but nationalism revived its ambitions, fatally flawed, however, as modern thought.

The Taoist philosophical tradition proposed a complete social system based on decentralization and agricultural economy, protecting individuals, families, and nature. With Buddhism, Taoist thought vigorously pursued an eremitic tradition that promoted a system of values centered around individual and social responsibility, preservation of environment, and a philosophy of life. This harmonious presentation of values is neither ossified nor obscure, and has seen a modest revival in contemporary China, where materialism, mass consumption, and ideology — all crafted and imported from the West — is ruining environment, economy, society, and individual autonomy.

What is obsolete is the present, East and West — not in its preponderant ills but in its destructiveness and mindless lack of direction. Critics from both East and West miss the rest of the sky when they continue to see science, technology, materialism, and engagement as reforms leading to a new civilization rather than as paths to the abyss.

The terms “sociopathy” and “psychopathy” mean the same thing, but the latter is nowadays deprecated in popular use because it suggests a psychological or mental illness. Sociopaths are not mentally ill. They are too mainstreamed for obvious notice.

M. E. Thomas is a lawyer, law school professor, blogger — and sociopath. She writes of herself in Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight (2013). Thomas belongs to a profession that attracts sociopaths, as does finance, banking, politics, the military, law enforcement, surgery — and now, perhaps, authors of books like these. As a sociopath, and by her own account, she is a liar, manipulator, opportunist, envious, covetous, hedonistic, promiscuous, extremely intelligent, easily bored, shameless, narcissistic, unreliable, ruthless, and completely lacking in empathy.

The book is predominantly anecdotal, with a few references to research, starting with pioneer Robert Hare, whose original observations of sociopathy involved prisoners, one of Thomas’s complaints about the bad image of sociopaths. There are no footnotes in the book, however. The author’s childhood anecdotes confirm a violence-ridden household and an abusive childhood that has left her cold and cynical. She admits that she lacks the discipline to have used her power to revenge herself to a maximum against the world, in contrast to most sociopaths. Many of her adulthood adventures are not so much thrills as sad confessional.

Thomas rightly stresses that sociopaths are not necessarily criminals. In fact, in modern society they are the engines of what she herself calls “corporate capitalism.” Studies point to different brain characteristics: sociopaths have more white matter (versus gray), enabling faster, too fast, deduction versus judgment, hence sociopaths use emotional criteria far less than those with slower and therefore more reflective judgments. Sociopaths have extremely high pain thresholds, physical as well as emotional, hence they pursue riskier behaviors and are oblivious or hardened to the collateral results of their actions (think Wall Street). Moral decision-making probably evolved from emotions, notes Thomas, “gut feelings,” and sociopaths lack these, instead relying on practiced observation of the weaknesses and contradictions of others. High intelligence and premeditation added to the absence of empathy makes the sociopath the ideal personality for executing the whims of power and exploitation.

As with most psychology-oriented popularizing books, the most plausible sections deal with childhood upbringing. That is where the reader will probably identify the author’s personality quickly. But the question of plausibility conveys minimal confidence, and many questions of motive. Why would a thorough-going sociopath make a public confession? Even the pseudonym is permeable, as on the last page of the book Thomas invites curious readers to contact her via her website but swears them to secrecy. Is Thomas the proverbial “criminal” wanting to get caught? The aging fatale wanting attention? Not that the anecdotes are not salacious enough or don’t fulfill the intent to shock “empaths,” as she calls other people. Rather, the probability of mendacity keeps rearing its head. Is Thomas the sociopath as much a liar in writing as she tells us and shows us in her real life?

In the end, the old Liar’s Paradox haunts this book as soon as the objective references to research evaporate and the anecdotes begin: If a liar says “I’m telling the truth,” is she telling the truth or lying? If a liar says, “I’m lying,” is she lying, or telling the truth? Substitute “sociopath” for “liar.”

If the book argues that sociopaths deserve our understanding, if not empathy, that is itself an odd sign of weakness, a mellowed sociopath trying to pump meaning into fading memories. But given the machinations that sociopaths wreak on society and as their victims multiply, one may take the author’s claims as either disingenuous or delusional, depending on how the reader assesses the purpose of this confession.

Fictional, but based on an actual conversation, with the interlocutor here speaking.

I’ve been homeless for ten years. I made some mistakes and I paid for them, but I lost all my friends, and my family refused to ever see me again. Jobs are scarce; I have no skills of value to anyone. But like Siddhartha in the Hesse novel, I can think, I can wait, I can fast. Many days I go hungry. But I have infinite patience. And I can think, but usually think myself into a self-righteous and ethical stalemate.

I decided to give up trying to make it, you know, to give up trying to be a square peg — or is it round? It was just too hard: trying to pay rent or a mortgage, trying to pay insurance and debts, trying to guess what pleases people.

I imagine average people would say that it is my fault, that I am dysfunctional. But wasn’t it Freud who said, “Who wants to be functional in a dysfunctional society?” Not just dysfunctional — modern society is basically sick. All the values are upside down. What is celebrated is greed, exploitation, violence. What is scorned is simplicity, nature, the slow, and the quiet.

Being homeless, I know this firsthand. Homelessness is being criminalized. Simplicity is being criminalized. The Native people of this continent didn’t have property deeds and legal documents, so everything was stolen from them, and when they insisted that this was their home and that everybody had free access to the water, the land, the forest — well, they were pushed out of the way, or were killed outright.

Today it’s average people, the poor people. The simple people. And many just don’t see how they are being abused by society. Homeless people are society’s front line, the soldiers that were put on the front line to die first. The average people, the wage slaves that carry on, they don’t realize what society has done to them. They don’t resent or understand, they just admire those who abuse them. They want to be rich, and they think the next lotto ticket is their pass to that stairway to heaven. John Steinbeck, the writer, called them “embarrassed millionaires.” That’s what they are, still groveling for a chance to sit at the boardroom table.

Of course, homeless people have a bad reputation. It’s true that many are alcoholics, addicts, mentally ill. They smell bad, wear ragged clothes, talk loudly to themselves. They scare me plenty of times when I’m out there. But that’s the difference: I don’t drink, smoke, do drugs. I have no behavior problems, travel with a clean kit, bathe and groom, and get clean thrift shop clothes when I need to. I stay in shelters and missions when I need to eat and rest, but I prefer being outdoors and on the road. I dumpster-dive for most food and sleep under the stars when I can, which is why I tend to stay in climates where there are beaches and woodlands. I don’t like to panhandle because then you immediately lose respect, and self-respect. I have money for small things because I will do odd jobs, though most people are suspicious of me. Many towns have centers where men gather waiting for a job. Once in a while I will get something, enough to keep me going, but I avoid groups. They can be dangerous to a peaceable person like me.

My health has been good. Maybe that’s because I eat very little, walk a lot, get fresh air. If I was religious I could be a wandering preacher. Jesus was a wandering preacher. Doesn’t the Gospel say that birds have their nests and foxes their dens but that he was homeless? Don’t people realize what that means, about God taking care of the flowers and birds? I think Jesus was homeless in every sense: no property, no relations, no friends or kin, no career. And that’s how he figured out everything, how he became wise. There isn’t any other path for a solitary.

You make no demands on life, if only because you aren’t around long enough to see the conclusion. Yet sometimes there is something that bubbles up inside of me, that you want to tell people, even shout to people, something like: “Don’t you know that you can be free? That if you could open up to everyone, you won’t need all this fear, this terror, insecurity. That all this control is a grand charade, a phantasmagoria to fool you into never going your own way, never daring to, never learning what life is all about. Isn’t that what Jesus might have said, and Buddha, and probably everybody else you would call wise?

So, you know, the town to where I am heading next is poor but has water and lots of trees. I’ve been there years ago. But every day is new. I feel like a deer or a bear or a turtle. Every day I have to find food, get some sleep, wash myself, protect myself. At least I don’t have anyone. It’s an odd blessing, though, or a curse of sorts: sometimes I get very lonely and wonder if it’s all wrong. Successful people don’t think that way, they just assume it’s all just right, just the way it should be, themselves, the world, the universe, it’s just dandy because they do what they want and nobody stops them, so therefore the universe favors the arrogant and the sociopath and the fittest. That’s the thinking of the mind serving the body and calling it success. But I don’t think like that. I think like the deer, and the bear, and the turtle. Life is tough but they are free.

It’s probably better not to think. Everything I know is from my intuition, my wits, my gut feeling. Not from thinking. Better not to think, really, because then what you know comes naturally, you come into knowing that is more natural instead of just assuming things because someone told you or because everybody else thinks that way, or because your life is ordered just so. In that way, my mind becomes very settled, very peaceful. It’s like finishing a journey that went well: you might remember and regret losing the good of it, but you are ready to finish and rest, satisfied weariness. That’s how I want to go, really, when that day catches up.

But no rest yet, no end yet. Say, I’d best be going on. Thanks for listening to me.

EAST AND WEST

New Age Thought attempts to recover the remnants of Western spirituality and revitalize them with Eastern thinking. The birth of New Age thought has been attributed to a number of figures, all of whom contributed a mystery element to attract adherents and the curious, such as Swedenborg, Blavatsky, and Gurdjieff. The most direct influence in the United States, which is the grand receptor and disseminator of modern ideas, may have been the appearance of Vivekananda at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893. Quoting the Shiva mahimna stotram, he announced:

As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take, through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee! … Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths that in the end lead to Me.

Vivekananda bridged East and West in an articulate way not seen in the West, retaining the element of mystery lost by the West in the Enlightenment and in the turn to pragmatism in Christianity, while at the same time providing a simple but universal structure for the cross-over from West to East. This structure is basically perennial philosophy, which can, however, deviate quickly into relativism and the dismissal of those core beliefs of many religions. The result can be a skepticism, a syncretism, or an entirely new but tenuous ideology of life. Yet this is the inevitable status of what is called today called New Age, somewhere between respecting, borrowing, co-opting, and relativizing. Those of good heart willingly receive the best of all cultures without distorting or imposing. On the one hand, the process can be seen as fruitful and enlightening, the only course for a complex modern world, but at the same time it can be seen as the chaotic result of Western imperial legacy in East Asia, wresting away ancient traditions for its own use while corrupting those whom it encountered with its Western wiles.

HERMIT ETHICS

The idea of a hermit who steals for a living confirms the worse stereotype of the “eremite as parasite” in the minds of those who believe that disengaging from society is anathema. No historical hermit, especially those motivated by a spiritual sense but also wilderness hermits, has ever had the slightest motive to encroach upon anybody’s belongings — be that body, mind, time, space, or goods. Indeed, the hallmark of eremitism is disengagement from that which is Other, whether it be a person or a person’s extensions into society. How many Western and Eastern hermits voluntarily renounced the world for the forests and mountains and deserts in order to be alone with God, Nature, the Tao, or whatever equivalent?

The recluse, on the other hand, is a different subject. The recluse actively avoids people, as do hermits (though many in religious traditions such as Orthodoxy are active counselors). The motive of the recluse differs from that of the hermit, springing from misanthropy — springing not from social criticism like Diogenes but from the ego. Such a person, whether reclusive or not, is less motivated to craft a life of self-sufficiency. To them God, Nature, the Tao, or whatever equivalent, revolves around themselves. To steal is universally condemned because it lies at the heart of the undisciplined self, of the absence of empathy, and is a menace to society as much as to self.

WHITHER?

The search for metaphysical meaning has always a charged pursuit in Western thinking. Meaning must be intrinsic to a context and, if not forthcoming, must be assigned to it. That mode of thought has dominated Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to the modern era. Science, on the other hand, and logical positivism as its philosophical adjunct, has, on the surface, attempted to demolish meaning, reducing it to a figment of the mind or culture. In neither case, however, is the idea of meaning allowed to express itself through nature and the universe. In neither case is the possibility of human observation outside the subjective allowed.

This failure to see meaning not teleologically but simply as a phenomenon based on universal patterns is a signal feature of modern technological civilization. Twentieth-century thought,, especially existentialism, recognized the unconscious motives behind the dismissal of meaning and what the absence of meaning could create in society and institutions. The absence of meaning coupled with an exclusivist use of logic, science, and technology, plus an acceleration of material control in circles of wealth and power, has created an artificial system of culture that is self-destructive, while yielding satisfaction to those in positions of wealth and power. Such a phenomenon is both familiar (in that history offers many examples of societies collapsing into these conditions) while at the same time unique (in that science and technology has accelerated events and environmental conditions to an irretrievable pitch).

Science and technology serve powerful circles in attacking cultural meanings once rooted in natural environments and patterns of life. These patterns were the last vestiges of social cohesion for average people. The masses of people, disillusioned and rootless, now skip on to new meanings assigned from the manufacturers of popular culture, losing touch with the earth, with living beings, and with the patterns of the universe. They have nowhere to go but back into the dependent arms of a ruthless, if collapsing, system devoid of meaning.

RETREAT

Off on retreat for several weeks …

A poem of Wendell Berry begins:

Beyond this final house
I’ll make no journeys …

Berry is a farmer (and poet, teacher, essayist) — this sentiment is close to the heart of the farmer, for it affirms the permanence (to the degree that anything has) of land, of soil that returns labor with harvest, that preserves health and bounty, that stretches the spirit into nature itself. (Here land has the “permanence” that the ancient Chinese ascribed to “heaven and earth.”)

Like the farmer, too, a house well-made, overlooking fine land, nourishing to creatures, blessed with clean water, vistas to the surrounding mountains and forest, sky and stars, complements the farmer’s sense of perpetuity and identification with nature and the grand cycles of existence. In this regard one can conjure the images of villages and farms depicted in Lao-tzu (Tao te ching, 80) when he describes the inhabitants of an ideal society in conformity with the Tao:

They truly love their homes,
so they have no interest in travel.
There may be some carts or boats,
but these don’t go anywhere.

Everything is ordered and predictable, and that is what the farmer in Berry would seek in his final house. But as the poem continues, the “house” is more complex.

Beyond this final house
I’ll make no journeys, that is
the nature of this place,
I came here old; the house contains
the shade of its walls,
a fire in winter; I know
from what direction to expect the wind;
still
I move in the descent
of days from what was dreamed
to what remains.
In the stillness of this single place
where I’m resigned to die
I’m not free of journeys:
one eye watches while the other sleeps
— every day is a day’s remove
from what I know.

The house is the container of poet’s mind and spirit. The poet is now old and realizes that this will be his last house, that his journeying will end here, though one ultimate journey remains, and every day brings him closer to it, one step removed from the familiar.

Yet as a farmer, as one close to nature in all its vicissitudes, the poet knows that he can be reconciled to the journeying, having recognized the patterns of nature. In that house which is the temple of his spirit, in that body and mind that gives life yet, will he come to the last journey in peace because he is already reconciled, because he already lives in conformity to that grand cycle that Lao-tzu would have called the Tao. The poet is old, “came here old,” perhaps because it has taken a lifetime to recognize the principles which can now give him peace of mind, that give him a “fire in winter,” and a strength that he had not when younger, and a discernment he lacked but now has, sufficient to “know from what direction to expect the wind.”

Now, Berry may not have been thinking about Lao-tzu in any line of this poem, but he affirms the instinct for conformity to nature as approximating that which defines and gives value to life, that which harmonizes human experience and reconciles the self to the cycles of life. In this is the universality of poetry — that is, when it addresses vital questions from a deep and strong place, not from a fleeting emotion or from a misapprehension of modern whim, but from a place rooted in nature, where observations are bound to have richness and resonance.

***

Houses or dwelling places will capture the aspect of location within nature in writings on the simple life, for dwellings come to reflect or project the mentality of their resident. Compare four different personalities in the little compilation by Bruce Watson titled Four Huts. The four disparate writers are Po Chu-i, Yasutane, Kamo no-Chomei, and Basho. In brief one may say that they represent an esthete, an idler, a pessimist, and a wanderer, each nevertheless enduring, each retaining the strength of articulate writing and the pursuit of solitude. To one degree or another they each understand the dwelling as reflection of self. Thus, Po Chu-i thinks of retiring to his wonderful thatched hall on which he has been working for years, not without an admitted boastfulness and pride at his accomplishment. Is he speaking only of his dwelling, or of his own persona?

Yasutane was still writing in Chinese and under China’s cultural influence. His pond pavilion, as he calls it, his final dwelling, embarrassingly not modest, is the object of much attention over years of dreaming. He repeats the ominous old saying that the builder does not live long enough to live in what he builds. This discourages him, being along in years. This place will have to do, he says. It is, however, a little gaudy and graced with excess, no less than himself; even the attention expended on it cannot but contrast with Yasutane’s own assessment of himself:

I’m like a traveler who’s found an inn along the road, an old silkworm who’s made himself a solitary cocoon. How long will I be able to live here?

Kamo knows better than his Chinese counterparts, reflecting on life and circumstances more forcefully and intelligently than the previous two authors. Kamo has seen Japan suffer great upheavals, natural disasters, and knows the fragility of life and circumstances beyond the vicissitudes of his own personal preferences. The opening lines of his celebrated Hojoki are full of vigor:

The river flows on unceasingly, but the water is never the same water as before. Bubbles that bob on the surface of the still places disappear one moment, to reappear again the next, but they seldom endure for long. And so it is with the people of this world, and of the houses they live in.

Kamo is a genuine hermit in crafting his dwelling to conform to his philosophy and mind, his sense of impermanence — even to noting that in a pinch he can disassemble his hut and transport it with him. Kamo lives (to paraphrase Berry) in the shadow of the walls of his dwelling and knows from where to expect the wind. Yet his simplicity, while not rooted in the soil, is firmly a part of it as part of the earth of “heaven and earth,” presented as an offering to the whims of time and change. This paring of thought and possessions allows Kamo to be a trenchant philosopher as well as a successful hermit.

The disposition of Kamo also suits Basho, who was a traveler and wanderer, yet dearly loved the tiny dwellings in which he resided, however long or short. His very name derives from the banana tree, for a tree he carefully tended against winter winds, not always successfully (but bananas always grow back). When he left his first hut he hoped friends would save the banana tree, thus providing him a continuity with the past.

Basho wrote his poems while traveling, and his self-imposed exile from a happy dwelling must have shadowed his writing. Within his hut or “phantom dwelling,” Basho conceives of a perfection that awaits his ripening within it, deliberately simple a hut and deliberately simple his own mind and heart. But the poet’s transparency is fragile. He wonders if he is cut out for solitude, or is it just that “weary of dealing with people, I’ve come to dislike society.” He wonders if his devotion to poetry is excessive, as it was with Po Chu-i and Tu Fu, whom he cannot match for intelligence or quality of writing. And he scruples about the purity of his practice. But though his hut is his mind and spirit, Basho concludes philosophically, “Do we not, in the end, all live in a phantom dwelling?”

Mikau Usui (1865-1926), the founder of Reiki, espoused five principles that came to be called the five Reiki principles, which he transcribed succinctly as:

Just for today, do not anger. Do not worry and be filled with gratitude. Devote yourself to your work. Be kind to people.

But successors expanded the form of expression in English, so that a favorite version is:

Just for today, I will not hold anger.
Just for today, I will not cling to worry.
Just for today, I will be grateful for my many blessings.
Just for today, I will do my work diligently.
Just for today, I will be kind to all sentient beings.

Restoring the Zen context of these expressions affirms the notion of the present moment. This is not the now or present moment so favored by New Age thought and so often reduced to psychological justification for doing whatever feels good at the moment. The deeper Zen concept pinpoints the necessity of practicing all the time, of perpetual awareness of that which exists all the time, one moment following the previous one, the next moment superseded by the next one. The chain of future anticipation is quietly released by a practice that begins now, regardless of the past, not because it justifies the past but in order to stop the past from becoming the present and the future, in order to allow the past to collapse of its own accord. After all, we are the consummate product of the past at this moment, and consist of the past whether the past consists of anger and worries, or whether it is a lifetime of entanglements, vices, debts, guilt, and responsibility.

But few can recreate themselves altogether and so facilely. Usui’s formula thus calls for a measured, tentative, but psychologically sound approach, reminding us not to expect too much but to expect something small and to be content with incremental steps. Hence, “just for today” is all we need to do, and if it works, if it is feasible, we can go on to renew the sentiment tomorrow. If we cannot make it last a whole day, then part of it, even a small part of it, even just for this moment — that is sufficient. We can return later, tomorrow, or another day — if we are being honest with ourselves and really intend to change that which plagues us, haunts us, frustrates us. We have no where to go if we cannot make this work today, so let us begin.

Anger and worry are probably the most important tempers that harm a person’s sense of balance. Anger and worry completely invert the ordered balance of the self, turn it inside out, making the self completely vulnerable and dependent on the vicissitudes of circumstances, putting us in the control of emotions and of others. Expressions of anger and worry signify a renunciation not of self but of self-control, self-discipline. Anger and worry are consuming of every spiritual resource, undermining and overthrowing years of positive work in a flash, especially if the anger and worry undermine health and relationships.

At the same time, we can recognize that anger and worry are difficult to control. They are vestiges of animal instinct, unconsciously so for animals and unconsciously so for people, too, until we human beings assert self-discipline in ourselves. How to assert self-discipline is based not on existing psychological states curbed, like biting the tongue or suppressed, like bad memories forgotten, but on a slow and incremental practice that begins with the moment, begins “just for today.”

Cynical modernity argues that there are no blessings to be grateful for because everything has to be wrested from life: money, power, pleasure, things. Here again is an animal instinct enshrined, a Darwinism projected on human capacities. Those so-called blessings that modernity treasures, having wrested from others, are exactly what are not blessings but curses, millstones, burdens, and sorrows. The true blessings are taken for granted, but they are those deeper than superficial items or acquaintances or situations. The blessings can indeed be material things and social control, but wealth and control are relative in world society. Those well off complain about not enough material control, and those in poverty unconsciously envy and covet wealth as a projection of guilt. Hidden within each person is the potential to break through the relative and to discover what are true blessings for themselves. Some blessings are circumstantial, but the most important is self-awareness and the possibility of identifying the self with the universe. This potential is a blessing because it must be nurtured and cultivated in order to emerge and bring itself to fruition, at least just for today.

What is our work on this earth? Is it a career, profession, busyness pursued for gain, idleness pursued for leisure? Is anyone obliged to pursue anything more than the work of the soul in discovering itself, in harmonizing itself (to God, to Nature, to the universe, to the planet)? Whatever form of work one has, that work must always be the work of enlightenment, or, to use a more modern diction, that of consciousness. What we do to buy food and pay rent is not work but social necessity. That which we do to enrich the soul is our work. Let us pursue it diligently.

Usui’s original formulation speaks of being kind to people. That is a functional necessity, but it also raises our temperament to an ordering of emotions and sentiments that will at least not interfere with our higher work and salutes the principle that is within each person.

But to be all-sustaining, our kindness must extend to the whole of living beings, and to the nonliving in the form of the objects around us and with which we extend our personalities. Sentient beings (humans, animals, trees) point us to an interconnectedness that obliges us to recognize a vast context to our existence. Non-sentient beings (rivers, mountains, seas, clouds) oblige us to recognize an order of existence beyond ourselves, and are therefore humbling.

The historical response to non-sentient beings has been destruction and dominance, exploitation for resources. Such social activities become the basis of culture and the values a culture projects. The results serve a few but ultimately undermine all. Without a new psychological disposition, we cannot achieve any sense of enlightenment. Without disengaging from these activities and their deleterious outcomes, we cannot achieve any sense of enlightenment. Without a new form of kindness that involves a reciprocity between our spiritual goals and the well-being of the sentient and non-sentient world around us, we can go no further than our present state, which is one of chaos and lack of self-discipline, a state likely to slip farther and farther into a moral abyss and a material collapse.

The effort of self-change — let alone enlightenment or consciousness — has to start somewhere. We only need for it to work incrementally, just for today. At least that much. Only that much and we begin to see that it can work tomorrow as well, and indefinitely thereafter, at least for ourselves. Reciting Usui’s little formula at the beginning of the day can set our daily course.

The garden is the apex of human creativity as a microcosm of the universe. The garden is multidimensional, tactile, visual, artful, aesthetic, life-giving. It is embedded into the very life forces that the mind seeks to understand.

Yet the successful transference of this intimation is up to the designer of the garden, the conception of philosophical and artistic meaning projected into this filled space. The Garden of Eden is attributed to God, and the great gardens of Persia, India, China, Moorish Spain — all are projected images of heaven. And the special gardens of Japan, the meditation gardens, are abstractions of Big Mind. So the garden has great potential, and our small, circumscribed backyard gardens reflect the simplicity of our skills and the smallness of our worldly desires. (The spacious barren lawns of English nobility, on the other hand, reflected the barrenness of a civilization valuing the utilitarian and ostentatious.)

For a long time, the backyard gardener has been persuaded to imitate industrial agriculture and the dreaded plantation with their endless rows of production. Permaculture introduced not only principles compatible with a natural philosophy but also garden designs compatible with the mind’s mingling of ideas and thoughts, reflecting nature as it is when not obstructed or overthrown by human design. Plants intermingle as naturally as in a forest, meadow, or shady grove, and yet productivity rewarding the human need for food is grown in abundance. The garden should be small enough to reflect the personality of the gardener, large enough to be practical, circumscribed enough to allow for individuality and circumstances. We must depend on the wisdom of nature before usurping its designs with ours.

The manner in which the garden is tended reveals to the gardener the deeper patterns of existence. Is it not more satisfying to grow a plant from seed than to transplant a potted sample grown and nurtured by another’s hand? Is not the taking of fruit, vegetables or leaves, however necessary for food, a kind of violation, a stealing of offspring? (The Jains only ate from what had already fallen, voluntarily delivered by the plant or tree, or they ate food culled by a hireling! The Japanese poets were repelled by the notion of cutting flowers for a vase rather than leaving them where they grow.) Is not the flowering at season’s end not a poignant reminder of when the course of our lives, too, is done, even in the last expression of beauty? Letting a few plants go to seed, however, and carefully collecting the fecund seeds for the next planting, is like receiving an inheritance of the past delivered to precious safeguarding, with the promise of a future, even if we will not witness it.

Like life itself, the garden starts in hope and anticipation, for Spring is in all cultures esteemed as a time for growth, beginnings, fresh possibilities. Like life, hope abets our efforts for success, and small adversities are overcome, beginning with dreaded culling of crowded sprouts, a heartless task not necessarily pursued with diligence or thoroughness by all gardeners. A natural universe does not not spare everything, either, but in paradise (or permaculture), nature takes care of these concerns to our blissful ignorance. As months pass, and vicissitudes are overcome, and the garden yields its work to eye and palette, one may count nature as blessed, and our modest role as coordinator or facilitator breaks humility. We are mere the observer. All of the processes have gone on without our understanding, without our sight, indeed, at the biological level, the microbiological level, mysterious to the eye. At most we have abetted the process, though blindly. Is the whole process just for our hunger, or are we simply a species who drops in to watch?

And then, when everything seems exhausted, we cut down the remnants or let them quietly sleep — but that is later, much later! For now it is Spring and our plans and hopes and expectations are of beginnings, and new growth, richer and more fecund than before. And we will look on best if we are quiet, attentive, easily awed, if let nature take its course, and sit beside the garden in its quiet, as when we meditate and say nothing, expecting nothing, but living in the garden — or the garden in us — in a quiet way. Approached in this way, as a daily ritual, the garden becomes our private universe, if not paradise.

Hermann Hesse wrote in Notes at Easter, in 1954:

My gardening in the course of the years has become nothing but a hermit’s pastime without any practical meaning — that is to say, it has a meaning for me alone.

Renunciation complements solitude, and is a nuanced expression of solitude, disengaging the self from aspects of its environment that do not complement the life of solitude. Thus renunciation has a psychological component as well as a spiritual one, the former addressing the self in the world and the latter intended to further assist the solitary in more integrative endeavors.

Renunciation is not mere abstinence but a conscious decision about one worldly practice at a time, culminating in a holistic self-discipline. Each object addressed is seen as negative, life-stealing, an “unnecessary.” Each renunciation strengthens the self for the next level, the next encounter with the world. The conventional sense of abstinence is not to pursue or partake of something for a given time, for example, religious abstinence from flesh on certain days or seasons. The conventional sense pales in efficacy when one understands that the whole business of eating flesh can be renounced for many good reasons, not all spiritual. In this example, then, the self breaks the limits of society and institutions and proves to itself that renunciation is an intrinsic good. Such anthropological versions of abstinence are useful among the common people for whom even these are sacrifices; they keep good order in their lives. But the solitary does not need such devices after recognizing not only the efficacy but the strengthening that renunciation provides.

Renunciation is entirely up to the individual in defining bounds, objects, and uses. Because renunciation is both horizontal (in terms of objects and cultural contexts) and vertical (in terms of spiritual and psychological efficacy), each individual must choose. Nor can one practice be disparaged and another elevated. The cultural abstinence of religions, for example, is the collective soul’s remembrance, and every tradition incorporates it. To the degree that it is weakened, so, too, is that tradition weakened. But for individuals, renunciation is not intended as sacrifice or self-punishment but as self-discipline, strength, enlightenment, and equanimity.

Renunciation rises to an ethical imperative for the conscious practitioner. Renunciation is not temporal in the sense of being indefinite because then it would hold out the possibility of reversal in the subconscious mind. Hence, while renunciation rises to the level of personal ethics, in part to confirm and convince the subconscious, it is an entirely self-sufficient act, not depending any more on logical or traditional practice or guilt.

Cultural exemplars exist but they remain lofty and unfathomable to the average aspirant — intentionally so because renunciation ought not to be thought of as easily attained. Too easy and the exercise becomes merely a group identifier. Too lofty and the exercise is unattainable. Too strange and renunciation is violently rejected, labelled as abnormal. Each objection is a plaudit of the world, even of conventional religious authorities, who want to scare off extremes and maintain a comfortable indifference and numb acquiescence among their followers. Such arguers show the lack of spiritual practice in their own lives.

Austerities, as they are called in the East, are not Western-style self-flagellation or wearing of hair-shirts. Austerities address the carnal appetites, quietly changed by force of habit and by a deep understanding of the moral truths behind the aspects of health and utility. The moral scandals of presumed practitioners of celibacy in religious institutions today have nothing to do with excessive austerities overwhelming the self, but everything to do with a fundamental indifference to spiritual practice in the institutions, and by social cultivation of narcissism, which feeds mental vanities of pride as well as bodily instincts unaddressed due to the absence of psychological and spiritual exercises.

How far does renunciation go? Everyone thinks of food, drink, sex — the favorites pleasures, the universal pleasures. But renunciation in these spheres is the easiest part. Some people combine their renouncing: spouse and house, property, worldly career or profession, money — all integral aspects of a daily life that constitutes the social norm. Renunciation is negative: not this, not that. Eventually, renunciation is not anything: not becoming, not being, a folding into emptiness. But it must begin with small practices, always in solidarity with a responsibility that is both moral and practical. What good to give up that which helps the spiritual path? Perhaps not everything is to be renounced? The individual must decide. Whatever does not help is where renunciation must first begin.

As we cannot renounce the self that we never sufficiently developed, so, too, we cannot renounce that which we do not understand. That is the nature of social and institutional instruction, in effect leaving the individual at the mercy of guilt and punishment. The solitary must first understand the object of use, the apparent need and utility, and having grasped this can begin to understand the benefit of renunciation. For example, why not renunciation of time as the first step: 15 or 20 minutes of sitting, renouncing noise, distraction, schedules, busyness? That emptiness is the most valuable part of the form which is our self. “Form is emptiness,” is the Zen saying, pointing to the space within the clay pot as the value of the form, for the space holds all the potential. Beginning in this way, renunciation is a natural process.

Renunciation complements solitude in maintaining the emptiness of form, the deepening emptiness sought in confidence and happy reassurance. Renunciation is the solitary ability to relate to the world and simultaneously to shift between the world’s forms and the world’s ultimate emptiness.

To youth is often ascribed ambition, adventurousness, and restless energy. Myth assigns to youth not merely the desire for travel but compulsion for the archetypal journey of fulfillment and discovery described by Joseph Campbell as the Hero’s journey. But the old established generation intervenes sufficiently — indeed, fundamentally — by expecting adherence of the journeyer to the moral obligation to return with the boon, the treasure that will enrich the entire community. Of course, unspoken is the understanding that the youth’s desire is not to return at all, and that the boon is to empower the old.

Grimm’s fairy tales expect no such moral conscience, where the old obstinately hold hostage the youth’s desired princess, therefore obliging him to come back not with an expected boon (except news, perhaps, that he has usefully slain a dragon) but in order to wed the princess. Freud would relate all this to war and violence, a theme that bears pursuing.

The older generation projects into the youthful journey its own selfish control. The mistake of mythographers like Campbell versus the more autochthonous and realistic fairy tales collected by Grimm is to assume the veritable autonomy of youth on the one hand, factoring out mere biology, but to also overlook the authoritarian societal devices of the elders in expecting the treasure to be returned to them. Hence a narcissism that is doubled upon itself occurs in the elders. The doubling upon itself creates a new myth, cleverly presented by Oscar Wilde in his prose poem. “The Disciple,” here briefly paraphrased:

When Narcissus died, the flowers wept. They even pleaded drops of water of the river to supplement their tears. “We loved him so,” they lamented to the river. “I loved him, too,” said the river. “He was so beautiful,” added the flowers, sighing. “Was he?” asked the river. “Of course,” replied the flowers in surprise. “Surely you saw that he was, whenever he bent down to gaze into your waters.” “Oh,” said the river. “When Narcissus gazed into my waters, I only looked at my beautiful reflection in his eyes.”

As in this new myth, injecting a fresh realism, old age admires youth because it does the service of flattering and rewarding age, by which we may see institutions, corporations, power, progress, and all that previous generations of the powerful have given us. Youth does its service, fighting its wars, spending its money, consuming its products, enthralling itself.

Old age is the triumph of foolishness for many, not only clinging to the appearance of youth but manipulating youth with societal values, the very ambition and adventurism, and heroism ascribed as innate to being young. Everywhere, under the guise of institutional venerability and the fruits of hard labor are but the bastions of power, privilege, and manipulation still held in the iron grip of the old. What the old value is intact, repackaged for youth, with rewards when aped or inherited. Hero’s journey or fool’s errand?

At the same time, not all of the old are powerful, but the old do reflect the values of their youth. A dissipated, ignorant, and narcissistic youth will only lead to a similar old age.

The error of dichotomizing a person into youth versus age is to not see the fundamental process reflected in each stage, a trajectory of biology and genetics, of personality and intelligence or aptitudinal preferences, of environment and circumstance. Underlying each person is a stable and a volatile, and many degrees in between, a fiery meteor soaring for a brief moment or longer, and an immobile black hole weighing the self down into deep obscurity. Temperaments are circumstantial, as is everything else that comprises what we call the self, and what Eastern thought calls no-self. Whether manifested as youth or age, we are inexorable stages of the same elements, whether journeying in blissful ignorance or rooted in a hidden garden. What matters is to be conscious of the manipulations of society and the world.