Author: Meng-hu

Polish writer I. L. Peretz wrote a little tale titled “The Hermit and The Bear.” The story is a Yiddish folk tale, a little morality tale, that begins: “Once there was a man who could not abide evil.”

The man owned a little shop and turned it over to his wife while he occupied a room of the house to study the Torah and Kaballah and to pray. But even here was evil. So he decided to become a hermit. The man left his home and went to live in a corner of the synagogue. But even here was evil. People came and went and talked, so the hermit decided to go searching for a city that had no evil but couldn’t find one. So the hermit gave up civilization and traveled to forests, hills, and valleys, searching out a good habitation far from evil. He settled by the bank of a river.

But even by the riverbank there was evil. The water rushed and ran wild, overturning trees and flooding the land. And the fish and creatures were at constant war with one another. “So hermit has no peace and cannot sleep. As for running away — there’s no place left to run.” The hermit concludes that he won’t go searching any further and that evil occurs “because the soul of the world is asleep.”

The hermit’s logic is that when people are asleep they have no order or control over themselves. Their limbs may go here and there because the soul is asleep and not awake and present to control things. (Peretz doesn’t mention dreaming; his hermit is a simple soul.) Similarly, the world thrashes about because the soul of the world is asleep.

The hermit, in short, figures out that to awaken the soul of the world he must meditate and avoid every distraction such as a crow cawing or a bird singing, and meditate especially at night. But the river-spirit learns of what he is doing and seethes and roars and floods, disrupting the hermit’s concentration. He does not want to leave his new-found place and search for a place by a quieter river. Evil is everywhere, after all. Now, the hermit has learned a few spells in his reading and thinking, and after more fasting and meditation he goes out ready to tame the river. The hermit pronounces a holy spell and now the river is in a serious rage. It hurls a mighty wave at the hermit.

The wave turns into a bear, a “hairy black bear with bloodshot eyes” and the bear runs around “roaring and snarling, interfering with the hermit’s meditations.”

The hermit decides to quiet the bear. He goes out and sees the bear raging about, and when the hermit looks at him the bear falls, seething and foaming angrily. But the hermit looks at the bear with loving-kindness.

And there’s a war between the two sets of eyes — the hermit’s brimming with love and pity, the bear’s filled with hatred and rage. But the hermit’s eyes are strong. Slowly, slowly, they begin to conquer those of the bear.

And at last, the bear comes humbly to the hermit with a look in his eyes as if to submit peacefully to his wisdom, to be his humblest servant. And the hermit looks tenderly upon the bear and lovingly caresses him.

And so the hermit is ready to return peacefully to his thoughts and meditations, to think on what more he needs in order to awaken the soul of the world.

But there is nothing left for him to think. He himself no longer possess his former soul, because in the same measure that the bear has ascended to him, he has descended to the bear.

He sense a weariness in all his limbs: his eyelids grow heavy. Falteringly, he goes to his bed, and the bear follow him and lies down beside him.

There is no end to evil. The bear has become partly human, and the human partly a bear. And a saint who lies down with a bear cannot awaken the soul of the world.

Chet Raymo’s recent book will remind the reader a little of Andre Comte-Sponville, except that Raymo’s provocative title, When God is Gone, Everything is Holy, is intended to argue for atheism as natural rationalism or rational naturalism, except that Raymo does not succeed in softening it, though that is his purpose. The two writers are similar in their Catholic backgrounds, both admitting a nostalgia for candles and rituals; Raymo was educated at Notre Dame University and spent his career teaching science at two Catholic universities.

In the title chapter, Raymo muses about Catholicism turning into “religious naturalism” — his softening of the title blow. Comte-Spoonville has no such illusions. Both are stanch supporters of modern Western society and its values, biases, and illusions. That reverse triumphalism seems to be the political style of apologists for what must be called scientism.

Religious naturalism is the term Raymo assigns to his own belief, the atheism of his career of science, which he hopes to make palatable with an agenda wherein Catholic tradition renounces its doctrines and embraces something akin to his own beliefs. For readers interested in this sort of modern quasi-religious apologia, the attraction will be to similar-minded Catholics only, for that is where it seems to occur almost exclusively. For non-Catholics, the personal agenda is less obvious. Raymo’s book ranges from active hostility gradually softened over the course of short chapters to end in Catholic name-dropping from Columbanus to Duns Scotus to Thomas Merton to Teilhard de Chardin. Seen from this perspective, the book is too confessional to provide value outside its targeted clique.

But there are larger issues.

Raymo’s chief gaff, as with most apologists of scientism, is the failure to see that reason and science operate within the same human social and cultural context as religion. Both are products of such contexts, and science does not transcend human foibles. Furthermore, science thrives on its byproduct: technology. In technology one finds a representative measure of human ingenuity, because technology represents the totality of effort behind both reason (as logic or capability) and society or politics. Technology, from the club and spear to the atomic bomb, is an inevitable brainchild of a science that has no ethical bounds. Scientists themselves bristle at such bounds, dismissing them as epistemological bounds and refusing to acknowledge that their work is culturally-based. The selective criteria scientist apply to their projects is largely motivated by the cultural values they hold and the political (in the widest sense) context of their times.

Reason cannot manufacture or analyze itself. Reason is the product of the imagination, as Wittgenstein noted. Reason as scientific method is the application of one fragment of mental capability. Apologists of scientism elevate that fragment to the status of absolute. Absolutes have a tendency to be intolerant, whether it is Yahweh or Reason. B. F. Skinner, a relentless champion of scientism, is the representative denyer of evidence outside the paradigm of science. Such was the application of an unfettered empiricism coached by the political winds of the day.

Who can doubt that science and technology have created wonders? But what better wonders if they had an ethical basis? And who can doubt the good that religion would do if it had an ethical basis, too, even if we acknowledge the epistemological and psychological issues. Science and religion are bound to clash, but even when they do not clash they shed blood.

Science and religion — and the clash of science and religion — shed blood perhaps not because they are intrinsically extreme or because they ought to adhere to ethics — and ethics that would also have to come from society and culture. Both shed blood because both have the tendency, indeed, trajectory, to become absolute.

Religious wars, whether tribal or national, are obvious products of the worse human instincts. But these wars employ the weapons that are the obvious products of science and technology. For science to make an absolute of reason when reason does not exist outside of random and pragmatic expressions or as mechanisms of social order, consensus, consumption, and the like, is as much a folly as any religious dogmatism — or, rather, in line with them as human expressions. The argument that, well, at least science does not kill people, is not true.

Raymo accelerates his arguments slowly, starting with easy targets: popular superstitions, Romantic poets, New Age ideas, alternative medicine. With the last, for example, Raymo reveals his defense of established power in the fields of science and technology. To Raymo, modern medicine is sacrosanct; he ignores the corrupt relationship between its players, from medical to pharmaceutical to agri-business to corporate producers of toxins and pollutants, a ring of well-protected and well-concealed power bases that selectively fund whatever agenda of “science” they want to present. Or one might cite the tight economic circle binding military merchants, weapons manufacturers, politicians, scientists — all taking advantage of the latest technology, economic profits, and human suffering.

By ignoring the political and economic context of science and technology, Raymo ignores the inherent weakness of human reason and scientific objectivity: that they are not based on reason or objectivity. By ignoring the issue, he becomes an unwitting apologist for an irrationally-driven social and cultural system.

We can see this tendency, too, when Raymo marvels at the wonders of technology while writing on his laptop in an idyllic Bahamas setting. How could anybody ever live in a world “without knowledge of the galaxies and the DNA?” he says. As a matter of fact, most of the world probably does. Only the elites of power, using science and technology to craft their weapons, and well versed in such knowledge.

So by the time we get to the book’s title chapter, it is too late to find the Catholic nostalgia much of a redeeming factor. Though Raymo wants to call himself a religious naturalist or an agnostic, the title gives away what the left brain insists upon, even if the right brain wants to salvage the dregs of childhood. “When God is gone everything is holy,” says Raymo, but not by any criteria of science or reason. Raymo turns Liebnitz on his head, or, rather, turns himself upside down, claiming that we live in the best of all possible worlds after all.

In 1869, Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term “agnosticism” to label a point of view concerning knowledge — although it has wider implications. There are ambiguities and insufficiencies in his description that continue to need refinement. The following passages written by Huxley are now pretty standard reading.

When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure that they had attained a certain “gnosis” — had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. And, with Hume and Kant on my side, I could not think myself presumptuous in holding fast by that opinion …

Huxley presents agnosticism as an alternative to extremes concerning knowledge, especially knowledge of God, though Huxley assumes this of the reader: he does not actually write the word. He presents a spectrum of beliefs but doesn’t try to tease apart the strengths or weaknesses of the points of view, saying that their adherents are all “good people,” or people of good will in their respective spheres. Huxley talks like a member of a men’s club not wanting to offend any member but nevertheless obliged to choose a point of view.

Thus, on Huxley’s list, atheist, theist, and Christian are religious terms referring narrowly to a position on Christianity, at least in his day. Pantheist seems an allusion to romanticism — presumably he was not broadening the historical sense of the word. Materialist, idealist, and freethinker refer to philosophy. What is missing is deism as an alternative to theism, or the various degrees of philosophical thinking like Stoicism or Epicureanism or Cynicism, not crude like the points of view on his list, but that need not be belabored.

The continuation of the passage reveals from where Huxley is coming:

So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant; and I took the earliest opportunity of parading it at our [i.e. Metaphysical] Society, to show that I, too, had a tail, like the other foxes.

Ah, the men’s club of viewpoints, like booths at a fair, chapters in a philosophy text. Not having a favorite, do not judge even the merits or weaknesses of anyone, lest you offend.

The term “agnostic” is presented first as a bulwark against Christianity. However, Huxley’s use of the term “gnostic” is hardly an orthodox term in the “Church history” he refers to, nor can that which Christians “professed to know so much about” be said to equate with historical Gnosticism but rather Revelation or dogma. Huxley was, of course, not ignorant of what Christians said or believed but rather professed not to be convinced.

As “Darwin’s bulldog” — what some called Huxley in his day — it is not surprising that he would disbelieve the mechanics of information that could not be validated scientifically. This had been the case since Galileo. But Galileo had recanted to save himself from torture, and presumably could believe whatever else he wished in his society as long as it was not publicly controversial. Does agnosticism merely save its skin, like Galileo?

Huxley mentions Hume and Kant, and that is appropriately the source of the philosophical mechanisms for the breakdown of the certainty of knowledge. With Kant, however, this breakdown applies to reason as well. Huxley finds safety in agnosticism, which he begs off from a militancy like skepticism, being a gentleman who will need to protect his society’s ethics and politics. He chooses a diffuse “I don’t know.”

Huxley continues:

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, “Try all things, hold fast by that which is good;” it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.

Hindsight may adopt the Reformation as agnostic, but that is far-fetched. The process of devolution in Christianity was tied to intellectual reflections but as much to social and economic conditions. Socrates’ “method” and Descartes’ methodical doubt are useful historical models for philosophy but accepted as outdated by the science of Huxley’s day in the realm of knowledge.

But as Wittgenstein — no stranger to rigorous science as well as philosophy –pointed out, reason cannot examine itself or ethics, art, or anything imagined or created. There is no method for methodical doubt, no method even for agnosticism, because it is still based on the paradigm of knowledge and reason, when their coveted throne has long since been unmasked.

Agnosticism is not a creed, as Huxley rightly notes. But neither is it a method, a parallel empiricism. In the 20th century, the progress of knowledge as a good has been revealed to be false, and creeds to be but social intuitions. Huxley’s method is a suspension of probability, a lack of trust in a teleology of meaning, a collapse of what science and technology once believed to be progress.

Agnosticism is a negative wonder, a fear of shadows, a groping for meaning instead of a plunging into experience. Experience of “gnosis” was the goal of the historical Gnostics, not an attempt to attach puny human reasons to the universe and call it or its components “knowledge.” With agnosticism Huxley thought to suspend the betting on whether science or religion would win out, confident that the latter would not. But Nietzsche rightly declared that they had plummeted one another to death.

Should solitaries have or consult masters, teachers, guides, gurus — or anybody?

The question is always relevant to religious-minded solitaries, but opinion is not at all one-sided. After reviewing a little book by Pinions several years ago — a woman who had became an anchoress and consulted closely with a spiritual adviser — a friend of Hermitary (who counted herself a religious person) wrote to dismiss this dependence on spiritual directors as a vestige of authority that misunderstands the motive of the solitary.

And yet there are solitaries who are deeply committed to spiritual masters and who find a place or community (religious or secular) that seems to approximate their needs for depth as well as autonomy. Is the solitude of the solitary ever absolute?

The solitary is already disposed to follow a certain path due to personality or experience, but often needs encouragement and insight, being the object of the negative pressures of the world and of social peers who reject the core of the solitary’s personality and values. The solitary is told to live “fully,” meaning live a life that is externally-driven and interdependent. The solitary understands that a degree of interdependence on others is a fact of life. Only the mountain or forest hermit may be able to sustain thorough-going independence, but even that is nearly non-existent, and perhaps unwise for the average solitary to even consider.

Yet many solitaries will be unwilling to give up this ideal, even if they live in a city or town. The attraction of this ideal is that it sustains, like a beacon, the necessary frame of mind to resist or properly disengage from the world and society. The ideal sustains the deeply-held conviction that the human society is flawed to the point that we need not have an active place in it, that we are “thrown” into it and must make our way alone, even if others surround us and we share their physical needs.

A master or guide is supposed to “jump-start” the process of insight for someone who comes to them seeking to confirm this deep-seated conviction or strong inclination.

But how trustworthy is such a figure, placing themselves in a position of authority? In contrast, how mature is the solitary’s subjective sense of direction and need for input? Is there no other way than a direct master-disciple relationship? What personal or psychological traits do we have that are vulnerabilities susceptible to exploitation by an authority figure? Is the solitary too cynical or simply too experienced to entrust the pearl of self to others?

Some people form a pearl from life’s vicissitudes. Others concentrate on the hard outer shell as protection and never cultivate the pearl. Solitaries differ as much as anyone in the populace, and have the hard task of addressing their own emotional issues before going out in search of an authority figure.

The best master is merely sharing an experience and pointing out a path and the expectations when on that path. In that process the master must function like a teacher or instructor who presents the consensus of the past and the critical tools for thinking and progressing on a path — nothing else. The cultural variations on how these expectations are expressed will vary widely, but they must be marked by the same psychological characteristics in looking at the presumed master — humility, self-effacement, courage, equanimity, patience, a certain ruthless honesty when confronting hypocrisy. These are just a few traits.

Ironically, these are the sorts of characteristics that lead the best masters to abandon the pretensions of being a “master.” Invariably, this is the spiritual parallel of the secular recluse. In ancient China, the best officials who could have served the state were those who, in fact, had reclused themselves, abandoned public office. Their experience would convince them that to be an official in the service of others was the equivalent of trying to be a master. Thus, to be a master required many traits that a student or disciple lacked and could profit from. The best student would be so lacking in some things that they would not chafe under the master-disciple relationship.

A familiar Zen story points to the function of the master and its self-contained goal. A certain master was presenting basic introductory methods to a group of prospective disciples. “On this path,” he concluded, “you may begin to reach understanding in ten years.” One eager student burst out: “But, master, if I increase my hours of study, and meditate twice as long, and work many hours a day, how long would it take then?” The master smiled. “Twenty years, ” he replied.

Skepticism is bound to flow when one’s experience in seeing and hearing authorities constantly falls short. They don’t know this or that, they emphasize the wrong things, or they are compromised by a wealthy patron or by the flattery of rich students, or they get lethargic and repeat formulas of convenience without enthusiasm or dedication. Anyone who has gone through formal schooling will recognize the same pattern.

Nor can masters, teachers, guides, or others who set themselves up as sharers of insight be disengaged from the society and culture in which they live, as already mentioned. Since all societies impart irrelevancies, shortcomings, biases, contrivances, false values, and contradictions, those who observe and escape them are few. As Rudolph Steiner suggested:

A healthy social life is found only when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living.

In such an ideal, there is no room for master versus disciple, only friends and colleagues on the path. Will such an ideal ever become a reality in the life of a seeker?

From the outside, the community of disciples or students may well reflect the depth of wholeness imparted by the master, but who knows? To join such a group is a wager, as much as Pascal’s, and the solitary will never know. The solitary will probably not dare to risk the “capital” already assembled by his or her own solitude.

Here is a version of an apropo Sufi story:

A man seeking truth and happiness all of his life comes to a village and encounters a man who is clearly a great master — from his bearing, his eyes, perhaps his posture. The man tells the master that he has spent his life seeking truth and may at last found it. The master says nothing but beckons him to come with him. They enter a place where many sit in quiet contemplation. One of those inside looks up and, anticipating the visitor’s question, tells him that they have sought the truth their entire lives and never found it, in the process renouncing all happiness. The master and the seeker move on to another place where people are all laughing and talking, sharing great conviviality. Again, one looks up from his cup at the visitor and anticipates his question. “We have spend our entire lives seeking happiness and have never found it, for we mistook it for truth, and now have neither one.” At this the visitor looks perplexedly at the master, who simply says, “And now you know what to seek on the path is neither truth nor happiness,” and he departs.

We must neither despair nor foster skepticism of the path. A master may point this out, and that should be all we need to get clear. We must explore within ourselves the reservation about finding that assembly of seekers who have in great honesty sought but never found.

Our path must simply be what we are capable of in this short span of life, taking from nature and great minds of the past (whose ways are captured in traditions, practices, and books) what will compliment us, will ripen us, will make us whole. Even if what we come to find we hesitate to call “truth” because we don’t want to presume more than anyone else’s knowledge. Even if what we come to find we hesitate to call “happiness” because we don’t want to presume that the path is finished. Because it isn’t finished, is it?

Stoicism arises in periods of social crisis but not revolutionary periods. An example is the era transitioning to empire in ancient Rome, which saw the leading thinkers from Cicero and Cato to first-century Epictetus and Seneca dominate the little original creative thought of the era. Marcus Aurelius represents the Stoicism of an empire conscious of its own forthcoming demise, so that his Meditations carry a stronger sense of pathos. What is dying is a known world, like ourselves.

In each case, Stoicism is an expression of a disillusioned intelligentsia, of those hemmed in by power and authority who recognize the absolute intransigence or immobility of institutions and structures. Within the realization is the paradox or folly of complicity. Epictetus was once a slave and rings more honestly than do the lines of Seneca, tutor to the murderous Nero and his dangerous family, but who writes with a stolid sense of duty, decorum, and obligation. The ultimate complicity comes from the emperor himself, Marcus Aurelius, who must reconcile his duty to his conscience, aware that to abdicate brings greater chaos to the innocent than to continue the evil that his complicity and station in life already bring.

Thus Stoicism became a vehicle for the well-born to assuage their contradiction, to be forever wedded to the world in identity and duty. Christianity inherited a good deal of this dilemma, formed by ambition mingled with fate, the inextricable dilemma of obligation to society and to others at the sacrifice of self. Boethius composed the Stoic Consolation of Philosophy in a prison cell awaiting execution.

Another era of Stoicism is post-Reformation Europe, where interminable wars of religion dragged the continent into continued miseries. It was an era of growing absolutism, and the rigidity of institutions and structures suggested to the intelligent — again, necessarily the well-born — that nothing would change for the better. They fled decision and action for the balm of necessity and reflection. Thus Montaigne, during the wars of religion in 16th-century France, rather than choose between religious sects or rivals for the throne, threw up his hands and said that it was all up to God or fate. Which was true, in a clever sort of way. The dramatists of the era — Corneille, Racine, Moliere — are entirely focused on versions of the classics of Greek and Roman theater, and present tragedies as Stoicism, daring not to identify them with the contemporary world which they are nevertheless depicting.

Pascal, too, is a Stoic, hedging his theological bets and wondering where to turn when one sees through the world and its pretensions. Pascal dabbles with fideism (faith because it is duty), as does Montaigne. Fideism is the inevitable mask of living in a harsh and absolutist world. Fideist mask are everywhere in fundamentalist countries, to be sure, and will have to do. In the end, polite acquiescence and not a new philosophical argument is all that the world demands.

In Spain, nothing tops the Stoicism of Baltasar Gracian, full of wit, irony, and solace for the intelligent and well-born who will never succeed in budging the institutions and structures of their day. In Gracian, there is too much mirth and too many inside jests to be moralistic or melancholic. Melancholy would not do in the triumphalist state of empire. Sober duty is to be presented to the sovereign monarch and the equally sovereign and humorless ecclesiastical system. Gracian is a proper Jesuit who wrote under a pseudonym when he could, narrowly escaping undue attention.

But Stoicism works: duty carried out, with a knowing glance and a stiff upper lip. Writes Gracian:

We climb the ladder of life, and the rungs — the days — disappear one after another, the moment we move our feet. There is no way to climb down, nothing to do but go forward.

Galileo, too, represents the dilemma in the early modern era. His confrontation with an intransigent institution and structure destroyed any sensible arguments he could present for science, reason, and empiricism — except the most practical argument for himself: survival. As Brecht presents the drama of the same title, a student asks the elderly Galileo why he recanted, then answers himself that ah! Galileo sacrificed himself to safeguard his students. Galileo answers no, it was that he did not like pain. A Stoic’s reply, perhaps Brecht’s own in the world of East Germany where he lived.

But revolutionary eras cannot entertain Stoicism. If Seneca or Galileo were seen as true revolutionaries, they would not have been able to opt out, so to speak. During the earliest persecution of Christians in Roman arenas, during the French Revolution, the Resistance against Nazism, Gandhi’s activism against the British Empire — there was no room for Stoicism but a forcible dichotomy between institution and individual, between power and authority versus the individual, wherein the individual perceived no duty, only a conflict between absolutes, with nothing to lose.

In 17th century England, with the upheaval of a monarch’s execution, Cromwellian dictatorship and overthrow, and a coup representing continental absolutism, most English intelligentsia were content to foster an outward fideism in the form of patriotism, a mild skepticism or Stoicism, while the true revolutionaries who were spawned by the Cromwellian era, were crushed. An unspoken compromise allowed for autonomy, as long as it did not challenge the existing institutions. Stoicism is the most opportune philosophy for such times.

Stoicism is not a measure of desperation but an exhaustion of possibility. Stoicism is a disillusionment with the world that must still continue to wear the mask of being in the world.

Nor is Stoicism a philosophy of disengagement. The Stoic responds, often in pain, to a mad world, regretting loss and ruing folly but determined to make a moral statement by remaining within society. Perhaps it is fear that motivates the Stoic from disengagement, a vacillation that is nevertheless fatal to the soul, even while the body lives. The intelligent may not be so well-born to put up with folly because they find themselves at the bottom of the rung and cannot really move forward.

Stoicism is a few paces from the insight of the solitary life. It wrestles with the world as shaped by human vice and clearly sees through it. But the Stoic stays engaged, through hypocrisy or dissembling or by keeping a low profile, never sure whether tomorrow will bring redemption after all, the chance to be happy and self-fulfilled.

There is much nobility in Stoicism, and reading Stoic writers is rewarding, but the solitary may already know the Stoics’ logic and already anticipated the shortcomings. Above all, the solitary may not maintain the patience or high expectations in the notion that we must persevere in tolerating the world.

Robert Thurman, the Columbia University scholar of Tibetan Buddhism, remarks in his introduction to Jack Kerouac’s book Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha that Kerouac’s Catholicism was a decisive factor in whether Kerouac sided with the Beat Generation’s Zen or with the orientation of Tibetan Mahayana and its closer analogies to Christianity.

Kerouac was attracted to the close parallels between the life of Jesus and of Gautama. He found the hierarchy of spiritual beings in Tibetan Buddhism compatible with his Catholic familiarity with angels, saints, and demons. He was comforted by the high status afforded to the mother of Jesus as a figure of compassion and mercy. He found the analogy between “Church” and sangha reassuring. Writes Thurman:

In spite of the insistence by Christians that their teachings are sui generis and come down only from God and have no connection with any other movement on the planet, Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity have very strong “family resemblances.” It is likely that Kerouac understood the deeper, broader dimensions of Mahayana Buddhism better than his peers, either those like myself, who were strongly motivated to break away from their Christian background, or those who were receiving their knowledge through the prism of East Asian Chinese and Japanese culture, and especially through the Chan/Zen connection, where meditation and samurai-like hardball “no-thought” are emphasized.

This weighty paragraph by Thurman refers to the ultimate complex of intellectual ferment in first-century Asia and the Middle East, which we can see evolving in gnostic Christianity especially. The possibility that interrelations between Christians and larger religious and spiritual movements in the era from Jesus through the next centuries suggests a spiritual world richer than what is left today as doctrine and style. But the sentiment of the open heart in Christian and Mahayana Buddhist thinking immediately launches both on a similar trajectory.

Personal experience can play into this identification of religious or psychological style. Kerouac was close to his mother, and that opened him to identification with other persons with whom one relates through emotions, not only to the other potential “Dharma bums” but spiritually to Jesus, Buddha, Mary, saints, Bodhisattvas, human-like and spiritual beings and hierarchies of all sorts in both religious traditions.

Indeed, the core of religious sentiment may well be in the degrees of identification with personifications. This would be so because this identification is a profound expression of the conditions of nurture. The person who has received close affection in the crucial formative years of life will more readily identify with the ying, female, and the compassionate side of a given religion. Many years of work alone can bring a person with a harsh upbringing to express affection for others — but towards spiritual beings it may be easier.

Thurman contrasts the Tibetan Buddhism that attracted Kerouac with “meditation and samurai-like hardball ‘no-thought'” characterizing Zen. Historically in Japan, many former samurai came to Zen in order to change their lives, and a discipline as strong as their former one was virtually a necessity to gain their respect and transformation.

But the evolution of Zen is foreshadowed in Taoism and in Chinese culture, which greatly contrasts with the sensual imagery of the rich culture of Indian Hinduism. The tradition of meditation is too universal in the East to apply as a difference between traditions, although one senses that meditation is a tool in the West and not integral to psychology as it is in the East.

The diverse cultural manifestations of Christianity in different parts of the West were likewise reflected in the different cultural manifestations of Buddhism in the East. Just as the pomp and pageantry of a Mediterranean Holy Week differs from the austerity of a Scandinavian Lutheran counterpart, so to does the Hindu or Tibetan Buddhist festival contrast with the austerity of the Taoist or Zen temple, regardless of doctrinal differences. Indeed, the doctrinal differences may themselves have been engendered by the climate, geography, and cultural environment.

The picture is further complicated by the intermediate expressions of both religions. Where does Theravada Buddhism or Pure Land Buddhism fall, or Orthodox or evangelical Christianity? All are eventually to be measured by their proximity to the “founder” or their authenticity in capturing the spiritual quest.

Kerouac calls Gautama “the blessed hermit.” Like Jesus, one cannot simultaneously understand the spiritual person, the human being, and extrapolate that core experience into that of a “founder.” Ultimately, the actions of the “founders” are the immediate source of spiritual inspiration, and the concentric circles rippling from them represent the various contexts wherein their message, flowing outward, is diluted.

One must return to the center, to the font, to the source, however much we enjoy the embellishments of culture, history, and creativity. For Kerouac, both Jesus and the Buddha have the same message: “Wake up!”

The perennial tension between belief and knowledge drives the cooperative but sensitive soul to the dichotomy of outward (belief) and inward (knowledge). Conformity to beliefs is conformity to the consensus of authority over the centuries. The sensitive soul is willing to understand the need for doctrine in terms of the efficacy of order and the use of symbols and rituals for the common people lost without them. But such a soul will chafe at the notion that that is all there is, that once one submits to authority or rote tradition, no more exists, neither of inquiry nor answers.

Such is the indirect origin of mysticism. Mysticism in the traditions from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism consists of the exhaustion of belief and the desire and the aspiration to attain knowledge that is not second-hand, not a body of laws or signs or formulas without spirit, without life. Mystic impulses are inevitable phenomena because the confines of the empirical, let alone the nostrums of culture, are too rigid to permit of speculation, contemplation, or identification with mystery.

Yet mysticism is often viewed as aberrant, as defiance of belief. Put in terms of individual responsibility for knowledge rather than mass expectation of conformity to tenets, “mystic” tendencies are present at the beginning, with the very “founders” of religious movements, of what become sweeping vehicles of individual attainment to knowledge of mystery.

Thus Moses is presented as holding mystical converse with God. The earliest Christian thinking was not the Judaic Paul but the mystic Paul, was not the authority of bishops and councils but the insights of gnostics perceiving a deeper resonance to the meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus. And the Sufi tradition in Islam predates the fundamentalism that eliminated the individual attainment of God for the structure and hierarchy of clerical authority.

In Hinduism, too, the revolution of the 5th century BC presents the spiritual insights of the Bhagavad Gita triumphing over the rigid caste system — a projection of belief — of the Brahmins. And the saying of Gautama Buddha in the Kalama Sutra rings out across the network of world-wide spiritual sentiment:

Do not believe in something because it is reported. Do not believe in something because it has been practiced by generations or becomes a tradition or part of a culture. Do not believe in something because a scripture says it is so. Do not believe in something believing a god has inspired it. Do not believe in something a teacher tells you to. Do not believe in something because the authorities say it is so. Do not believe in hearsay, rumor, speculative opinion, public opinion, or mere acceptance to logic and inference alone. Help yourself, accept as completely true only that which you test for yourself and know to be good for yourself and others.

The test is, as Kierkegaard shows, ultimately subjective, in the sense that the self must be satisfied with the content of knowledge, that the self must be able to conform to the goal that the momentum of thought presents. This is belief that is not believed in but is experienced as authentic and not secondary. Even when an adherent will argue that authority or tradition or revelation accepted is good enough to provide a trajectory in life, that is still not knowledge but a sentiment based on conforming to an outside presentation.

Ultimate subjectivity makes the ideas and words knowledge by transforming the self, not in the direction of closeness to other adherents but in distance from them and identity with a greater universal identity, an identity with every particle of creation, not merely the convenient creation of one’s culture or tradition. And yet we remain such creatures that we need our culture’s symbols, language, social routines. The paradox is only broken by silence, stillness, the adjustment of the self to a reality that must inevitably transcend all of this culture, this social transmission of ideas, this world and its evanescence.

The Christian gnostics, among others in this way of thought, recognized that everyone should think for themselves, much as the Buddha said. This meant a separation from worldliness, from society wherein everyone conforms thoughtlessly, to a concentration on the well-being of the self. The Gospel of Thomas has Jesus say: “Blessed are the solitary and the chosen, for you will find the Kingdom.”

Scholar Elaine Pagels puts it:

This solitude derives from the gnostics’ insistence on the primacy of immediate experience. No one else can tell another which way to go, what to do, how to act. The gnostic could not accept on faith what others said, except as a provisional measure, until one found one’s own path. …

Those attracted to solitude [orthodox or gnostic] would note that even the New Testament gospel of Luke includes Jesus’ saying that whoever “does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

Of course, Jesus also praised loyalty and compassion, but within a firm sense of knowledge and the necessity of coming freely to awareness, not mere belief or conformity to authority. Like the “founders” of all religions, the complex and unique personalities present themselves as ultimate solitary, ultimately able to attain a plane of experience that eludes disciples and adherents, let alone authorities intent on constructing a self-justified edifice of power. Without striving for that level of knowledge, that level of gnosis, no one does justice to the true heart of spirituality.

G. I. Gurdjieff proposed a new way he called the “fourth way,” which requires examining the three assumed ways and the question of whether there are not still more ways.

The three ways are the way of the fakir, of the monk, and of the yogi. The way of the fakir corresponds to control of the body and senses; that of the monk to the emotions or feelings, the heart; that of the yogi to the mind. Gurdjieff proposes the image of concentric circles or squares, with the way of the fakir as the outermost. The problem is that no way intersects or allows the individual to work on integrating all three. Someone at the periphery, who must start with the body, will not have time or strength to attain to control of the heart, let alone the mind. This is the situation for all of us.

Gurdjieff’s alternative is the fourth way, but as with all of his writings and narratives, no firm details are ever revealed. Gurdjieff preferred to work with people directly rather than have them read something. This is a characteristic of modern gurus, as Anthony Storr points out. So we are left with the summaries of P. D. Ouspensky to try to fathom what the “fourth way” could possibly be, though we have an inkling.

First off, Gurdjieff insists, the fourth way differs from the other three in that

it is never a permanent way. It has no definite form and there are no institutions connected with it. It appears and disappears governed by some particular laws of its own.

Schools to follow the fourth way appear, says Gurdjieff cagily, and people do work within them. But when the work is done, the school closes, for it is not a school for instruction or information. However, those who learn of the schools may attempt to follow its content. Such people then create new schools, which, however, are only imitations, and take on a “pseudo-esoteric” character, purporting to carry out work but are themselves “a lie” in respect to the truth of the real work. Such is the history of thousands of years, where ossified institutions and structures still extant carry on with only a grain of truth, representing only their perpetuation of power and control.

Yet concealed within such traditional organizations are surely those who know. Gurdjieff places them in Tibetan monasteries and Indian temples, where visitors or aspirants only pass through the circles corresponding to their adeptness. Most will not penetrate the inner sanctum of their selves, nor of the monasteries or temples — or equivalent institutions.

The fakir will know something about the body and its energies; the monk will know something, too, about fasting, deprivation, sacrifice, and bodily control, plus the feelings of his spiritual tradition; the yogi will know still more, of the body, of the stirrings of the spirit, but also mental exercises and control of thoughts. “In this way a yogi spends on the same thing only one day compared with a month spent by the fakir and a week spent by the monk.”

Gurdjieff insists that the fourth way offers the aspirant a manner of integrating all of the strengths of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.

When a man attains will on the fourth way, he can make use of it because he has acquired control of all his bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions. And besides, he has saved a great deal of time by working on the three sides of his being in parallel and simultaneously.

The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The “sly man” knows some secret which the fakir, monk, and yogi do not know. How the “sly man” learned this secret — it is not known. Perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone. It makes no difference. The “sly man” knows the secret and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.

There are “proper and legitimate ways” to attain the fourth way, but, Gurdjieff notes, there are also “artificial ways which give temporary results only.” And there are wrong ways that give permanent but wrong results. And there may be a skeleton key to the fourth room, but with it the user may discover the room to be empty.

These threads, made unnecessarily exotic and abstruse by the sly man Gurdjieff himself, are perfectly legitimate perceptions of the inadequacy of historically dominant thinking and controlling. Gurdjieff was horrified by the limitless capacity for evil in the modern world (in this case, thinking of World War I, when Ouspensky interviewed him), and the need to disengage from it. What his model fakir, monk, and yogi have in common is that they all do find methods of disengaging from the world, but they are incomplete.

While a fourth way would seem to promise a breakthrough, Gurdjieff never develops this “way” and leaves it to his work with individuals, outside the realm of verification and publicity. As to the bulk of Gurdjieff’s known thinking on physics, astronomy, biology, psychology and the like all of it is too far afield from the goal of a fourth way, too irrelevant to a cogent philosophy of self-realization and disengagement.

A philosophy of solitude would include the work of the fakir, the monk, and the yogi, and would — as with Gurdjieff’s “work” — offer those in the world some understanding while they necessarily had to continue to work in the world — those less fortunate than the hermits and solitaries who would not have to continue to work in the world.

A true fourth way might be the way of the hermit, at least in the symbolic or archetypal sense. But that would require a new search for the mechanics of how it would be presented. It would seem to be cheating to take the route of the “sly man” and steal it from some other thinker or philosopher or poet or hermit. After all, as Gurdjieff owns, “He who wants knowledge must himself make the initial efforts to find the source of knowledge. … Knowledge cannot come to people without effort on their part.” Much less a way.

Systems and schools can indicate methods and ways, but no system or school whatever can do for a man the work that he must do himself. Inner growth, a change of being, depend entirely upon the work which a man must do on himself.

The symbolism of the path can be studied in order to understand why it is the fundamental image for life’s progress. Yet the path overlaps our other cultural images: way, road, journey. Each is different, as a stage or in themselves, and we need to consider where we are at any given point.

A path is a natural part of a natural landscape. We are so familiar with artificial landscapes that a natural path in them seems to be visually disruptive, violating some injunction against trespassing. But in a natural landscape (or in our symbol mind’s-eye) the setting and path must be natural.

A path is distinct as figure to ground. A path is visible and distinct but it arises from the occasional traversing by someone else. Who that someone else is we do not know, nor can we assume some motive or purpose too readily. The path is not marked, not controlled by anybody. We come to such a passage with similar intention, however. The path seems just wide enough for one, or, rather, just narrow enough. We step forward of our own volition, hoping the path will lead us somewhere but also let us be on our own. The experience will be our own, regardless of the outcome. Perhaps the experience will come to override our original purpose – we don’t know.

But the path is not a way. A way is established by a predecessor and the landmarks are already pointed out, the highlights emphasized, even if the destination is not clear. For a way is not a matter of destination but an experience. On a way, we cross various landscapes, not all of them visible yet, and some changing behind us. At least we set out on a way with a guide, even if only a literary or historical one. A way remains objective; sometimes we don’t understand the guide and have to look for ourselves, and sometimes we look ahead or behind without clarity. But we have the confidence that others have trusted our guide, however much our guide leaves things to our own potential.

If we travel on a road, we are no long on a path or way, for we have left the subjective experience for someone else’s. A road is intentional, but not our intention — somebody else’s. A road is organized y others, maintained by them, available to others as long as they obey the rules of those whose road this is. We pass over a road with necessary intent, with a preordained goal, measured out and specified as to where and when. We see rapidity, efficiency, and inevitability with a road. You must know where you are going in order to take exit. Or, if you do not know, you will be told so. On a road, one must keep pace with all the other travelers, or you will be singled out and perhaps thrown off the road.

A journey is a grand project. A journey is an abstraction, a desire, a hoped for outcome that remains in a shrouded distance. A journey will take up all of our resources, all our strength, our focus. We will have no choice but to give ourselves wholly to the proposed journey if we are to make a success of it. At least the journey is the product of our own mind: the success or failure of reaching our imagined goal is up to our own fortitude and skills. But the journey may take far longer than we expected. The hazards on the way may divert us for a long time, and the pleasures on the way may divert us indefinitely. We cannot resume a journey as on a road, for the goal may shift, the possible manners of completing the journey may expire or change. The journey may overwhelm us, due to circumstance but more likely to our own shortcomings. All journeys are perilous, involving risk. There is the possibility that we may end up not in the place we thought but in the place from which we began.

These thoughts are inspired by Wald and Ruth Amberstone and their book The Secret Language of the Tarot. The title is popularized; the book is better than its title. The authors’ intent is simply to draw out symbols and to reflect on their meaning. In the symbolism of the path and its counterparts, they see spiritual paths:

All point to some version of escape from the dilemma of the suffering small self in the great world, and they all lead, at the very least, to magnificent self-improvement and refinement.

Thus the great traditions propose only paths, and the rest is up to us: the Buddhist Eightfold Path derived from the Four Noble Truths; the Great Path of Return in Hindu tradition; the Path of Ascent in Gnostic tradition, among others. To pursue any other equivalent to the simplicity of the path is undertaken at our own risk. Meditating on the symbol of the path allows us to set ourselves in a great context and to work our way forward according to a clearer insight of will, meaning, and purpose.

Simplicity is a qualitative application of principles, whether aesthetic or ascetic. Simplicity represents a conscious attempt to reduce the complexity of objects and appearance in some function of life. Nature is the model of simplicity because it represents functionality, efficiency, effectiveness, and a discrete harmony. Nature is as simple and as complex as anything we can conjure. That very wide-ranging activity challenges us in trying to make nature a model, but functionality and not functions is the focus of simplicity.

On the other hand, poverty is a material condition or setting which evolves with the individual into a physical and mental condition. Poverty is deprivation of functionality, absence of harmony, and the breakdown of the natural relations of one object to another.

For individuals, simplicity is a goal and opportunity to take on as a project involving self or just an external like art, design, or environment. Thus simplicity can apply to diet, exercise, dwelling, thought, or spirit. Simplicity can be principles for self-expression in literary forms.

Simplicity is optional, embraced voluntarily, pursued freely. It is hard to imagine society insisting on simplicity, except where the individual happens to be aware of other cultural styles — which, just because they are foreign to a culture will be seen as threatening, decadent, unethical, or complex. The Amish will insist on simplicity — when aware of society outside itself. And there are many other anthropological examples.

Simplicity usually begins with the level of material and emotional culture and is taken by the individual to a deeper level of purification. As the world shrinks and globalization exposes every small or private culture to the ways and vices of other societies, the individual is increasingly overwhelmed. To become simple and retain simplicity in daily life and thought becomes virtually radical and anti-social. Yet there are always opportunities to implement simplicity.

Simplicity movements in the West begin with a given level of material and cultural premises. Art, style, public thought, and technology are already given, are already forced upon the awareness. There is nowhere to go confronting the world (or society) with simplicity except to deconstruction. Deconstruction is always perceived by social authority as threatening. Yet for the individual, the elimination of superfluities and dysfunctions that harm life and spirit — the dysfunctional complexities that all advanced societies inevitably create — simplicity is healthy and refreshing.

Here simplicity is not contrarianism or a kind of agnosticism. Simplicity is not a lack of faith or hope, but it is a reduction that will be perceived as either naive, soulless, or threatening.

Simplicity is not minimalism, which is almost quantitative but projects a qualitative value after the fact. Often, minimalism is a crude eviceration rather than a simplification, the removal of interrelations by cutting rather than unraveling. Simplification is not a rescue from complexity but a dropping-away or disengagement from dysfunction. Complexity is not the “enemy” but rather dysfunction. By identifying what does not work, what can be shown to be a superfluity that does not work, the complexity can be understood and even accepted. The complexity of the human body, for example, or of microbes, soil science, hydrology, meteorology, cosmology, etc., is not offensive, and does not affect simplicity as a model of philosophy and ethics.

This is the wonderful irony of, for example, modern diet. By removing the imagined gist of, say, a fruit rich in vitamins, a pill is manufactured and presented as superior to the original food. Only after the fact is it discovered, many years later and after illnesses, that the original food contained countless complex products that make it more rich and healthy than the pill, product of expensive labs, research, and profit.

Poverty is a human condition but can be understood as a condition of nature, too — nature that is deliberately harmed by conscious intent, human intent. Human intent is not necessarily individual culpability. Why some peoples are poor is not the direct action of a given individual, but the result of generations of social conditions. However, if recognized as a deprivation or dysfunction, then poverty is the moral equivalent of malevolent cells in a physical body, a body which also supports the far-off individual. (The pill that replaced the fruit is poverty, deliberate or not.)

Poverty is a deprivation even of what is salutary. But what is salutary for the person embarked on implementing simplicity? Where do the two paths intersect? Is the path to simplicity pursued by the ignorant or immature in fact a dangerous direction towards poverty? The ignorant or immature person actually embarks on a path to poverty when not understanding the qualitative character of simplicity, when psychologically coerced to believe that simplicity is deprivation. (This is why ascetic traditions have a feedback loop to a sage or elder who can counsel the ways of fasting, etc.) Deprivation is poverty because deprivation means lacking in the salutary, which the individual must define and comprehend before even the first step of the journey.

How many people in search for themselves have failed to carry this careful distinction? Solitude is a grand field of nuance, and many who enter it are fleeing introspection in fear, are involuntarily whirled or thrown into a psychological abyss. Hermits who disappear, or starve themselves, may be equivalent to the many people who suffer involuntary solitude, those described by Sue Halpern in her book Migrations To Solitude: imprisoned, addicted, depressed, lonely, ill, etc. Eremitism must be informed and conscious, scrupulously honest to self in motive and method. Simplicity is an excellent tool for provisioning daily life.

Only the totality of a person’s life will reveal the nature of their solitude and decisions. Only the totality of their lives will reveal the nature of simplicity, and whether they lived or died simply or “poorly.”