Author: Meng-hu

Early in his writings, Friedrich Nietzsche experimented with the idea of the origins of consciousness, which he saw as primarily a social phenomenon. (What follows is from his writings and my extrapolations.) In a postulated primieval era, both the individual act and the individual thought was filtered through the group. The group established the behavioral patterns for its members by conformity or subordination or the beginnings of a vertical or hierarchical system.

An act is an external behavior but a thought is not. Both, however, if contradicting the group, result in guilt. Guilt is the shame concerning what is “in here.” This is the beginning of morals. In the social sphere, as guilt is transformed over time and space, the sense of tragedy emerges, that is, guilt over what is happening “out there.” Tragedy becomes the basis of an historical or cultural ethos. Thus, an act of violence within the group would engender guilt. War among people “over there” eventually engenders a tragic sense of the universe. Aescylus, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky magnificently exemplify an articulation of what we come to interpret as tragedy.

The counterpart to the act is the thought or feeling on the part of the individual, since a thought or feeling does not begin as a social phenomenon. The counterpart of guilt over the act is the same, and the counterpart of tragedy is compassion, that is, compassion towards those who are “over there.”

The sense of tragedy over time and space is universalized. Socially it represents a profound discontent, which potentailly threatens the hierarchy, threatens authority. Authority will always want to limit actions on the part of the group or its members. On the thought/feeling level, compassion is universalized as well and transmutes into suffering. Suffering is the discontentment of the individual, the first noble truth identified by the Buddha.

Here is a schema of sorts:

ACT –> guilt –> tragedy –> discontent <-- consciousness
THOUGHT –> guilt –> compassion –> suffering <-- consciousness

Concludes Nietzsche, consciousness is the product not of society or groups. Consciousness developed and matured in the manner described is the product of individuals. Refined and reflected upon, consciousness grows and is further qualified by time and space and cultural circumstances — but not by society, only by individuals.

What is the relevance of these ideas for a philosophy of solitude? These ideas help form an anthropology of eremitism, if not just of individualism. They show that no one can look to society or the group for an acute sense of reality or insight into reality. Groups can preserve a certain ethos or disposition or cultural personality, but one must look within to find that grand tool of being called consciousness.

Reading The Happy Introvert by Elizabeth Wagele (2006). A cheerful book and quick to read — wish I had it when I was young. The subtitle suggests that it is addressed to teenagers and young adults (“A Wild and Crazy Guide for Celebrating Your True Self”), as do the examples dealing with relations at school or college or work, plus relevant careers for introverts versus extraverts, and parenting young children. But I profited from lots of insights and background discussion, and had a good time with cartoons, quotations, and useful questionnaires like the “In relationships, do you behave more like an introvert or an extravert?” There are useful sections on Jung, neurology, and the ubiquitous (but essential) Myers-Briggs. The book is thorough for being a popular treatment, and the appendix, “Introverts and Extraverts at Their Best and Worst” is a nice summary. Lots of useful information packed into a fun presentation. You’ll be happy, if not “wild and crazy,” reading this one.

Walking at twilight when I spot a flock of large white birds flying low against the darkening sky. It is in a perfect formation and flying directly towards me. I brace myself, struck by the contrast of slow white motion and unmoving dark sky, and by the utter silence. In a moment, the flock is winging right over me. The sound is utterly unexpected: a low quiet hush, like a subtle wave over sand. A tangible tingle passes through me. Everything lasts a second. I look back to see the birds wing away.

As a child, the Indian mystic Ramakrishna one day fell into a swoon while crossing a field and seeing a flock of white birds against a dark sky. I could understand the experience when I read his biography (by the French writer Romain Rolland), but could not appreciate it as fully as I could the other day, and do now.

We make restless efforts to achieve, improve, and strive. We always want to go somewhere, like restless hunter-gatherers, or, negatively, like wanderers doomed to scavenge the earth.

That is why the image of the flower in nature is such a calm and reflective alternative to the sense of restlessness. The flower makes us pause and wonder at its beauty and its utter simplicity but more importantly at the startling fact that it has done nothing in order to be or become the way it is. No one has intervened on its behalf to bring it about. A flower is a chance occurrence of soil and wind, of rain and sunlight.

Here is the beginning of a philosophy of nature and life that is easy to grasp yet inexhaustible in its profoundness. Can we be like the “lilies of the field”? We are scattered seed upon the earth. Can we discover the optimum conditions for a simple and fruitful life, nurtured by the elements of nature, not by contrivance, artificiality, or intervention?

The seed does not sprout in places it was not meant to. We are where we are because of some ineffable circumstance, and we may never know why. That is the source of our restlessness. Can we selflessly follow the wise pattern of the flower’s growth and beauty and decay, which occurs irregardless of what it might “try” to do? How many mystics have given up on the “why” in order to throw themselves, like scattered seed, at the deeper solution: the ineffability, the mystery, the emptiness!

A field of flowers is impressive, and a bouquet of flowers has its charm, but it is the one solitary flower in the forest or the meadow or the trashheap that teaches best.

Four films of interest to anticipate:

1. Into Great Silence is a documentary film of the Grande Chartreuse and daily life of the silent monks there. Because no one in the film speaks and there is no voice-over narration, Into Great Silence is a visual and aural experience of great depth. URL: http://www.diegrossestille.de.

2. Milarepa tells the story of the 8th-century Tibetan Buddhist hermit Milarepa. The Bhutan-born producer Neten Chokling filmed with monks as his non-professional cast on location in the Indo-Tibetan frontier. Shown at film festivals, the latest being Vancouver, B.C. URL:
http://www.milarepafilm.com.

3. The Fort Fisher Hermit: The Life and Death of Robert E. Harrill is a documentary film. The web site blurb explains that Harrill “spent 17 years under the stars and scrub oaks of Fort Fisher, North Carolina. Surviving off the land and the contributions from thousands of visitors, he became one of the areas largest tourist attractions.” A DVD is available. URL:
http://www.thefortfisherhermit.com.

4. The Island tells the story of a modern-day guilt-ridden man who sacrifices life by entering a rigorous and isolated monastery and pursuing a life of atonement there, where he challenges the monks and attracts pilgrims who seek him out for advice and healing. Not knowing the ending, however, I will not recommend but merely not the appearance of this one. URL:
http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2006/films_schedules/films_description.asp?id=161.

Thanks to friends of Hermitary for bringing these films to our attention.

Another version of consciousness is the notion that amalgamates matter and energy. On the one hand, the New Age version of this view appropriates quantum physics as a kind of scientific proof of non-scientific ideas. On the other hand, this view extrapolates the principles about subatomic activity into everyday life, as does the film and book titled What the Bleep Do We Know?

Our thoughts determine reality, says this view of consciousness. See how a thought can make us sad or angry or aroused? Our brains are bathed in chemicals, and our depression or elation (or cancer or financial wealth) results from a flood of neuro-peptides. If we can harness this process, we can make our own reality. Or at least we can get a handle on our lives. So say the presenters (largely unnamed) of the film.

The premise is a kind of spiritual materialism. Matter is all that we are, neurons firing and chemicals mingling, basic science and better known than in the past. But thought and language and expression then become sparks and ashes of this chemical process, hence the materialism.

The ends of changing reality are noble but the means are not likely. How consciousness is to get to a point of equilibrium that equates or approximates enlightenment is hard enough for masters. To literally change reality (as in “miracles”) is not for the rest of us. We can see the premises of What the Bleep? in its chief inspirer John Hagelin of Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa, or in the channeler of “Ramtha.” If we can create an institution or organization or a thought and make it reality, then other realities can be affected by it. At a personal level, for example, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (not in the film) advertises classes wherein you can “became a remarkable life.” Hence changing reality sounds at first like improving your health or attitude or seriously addressing addictions, diseases, or mental problems, but in What the Bleep? reality is in fact the world of the paranormal, psychic, and spiritualist. At most, kind masters of the past would have called these “optional.” It is what I call “old” New Age, like theosophy.

What we do know is that human beings are afflicted with too much culture and organizations and blessed with too little tranquility and solitude for collecting themselves and pursuing sustainable lives. While some may desire to take on paranormal powers, we should not distract anyone from the banality of organizing their lives, thoughts, and desires. We should strive to not be remarkable people and not have remarkable powers.

When a rival master visited a certain Chan master, the visitor boasted of being able to walk on water and perform other great feats. The host shrugged and replied. “I, too, have great powers. I chop wood, I haul water.”

Consciousness is both the bane and glory of human beings.

Popular Buddhism tells us that to be born a human being is a great privelege, by which is meant that the having of consciusness is good because it enables the person to attain nirvana. Similarly, the Western notion that having a soul enables the is good because it enables the person to attain heaven. At the same time, the secular point of view presents the same glory of consciousness: the ability to reason, decide, create, to pursue knowledge, science and technology.

What underminds the glory of consciousness is the bane. Nirvana missed for the endless turning of the wheel, heaven lost eternally, the vanity of knowledge and the horrors of modern science and technology and the cultural premises behind them. Consciousness has been a tool justifying differentiation and supperioririty over the universe of myriad creatures, an extrapolation of every foible of the mind. The level of consciousness in human beings, ranging from the earliest childhood to the presumed elite of enlightenment has been taken to be complete. Self-sufficient and inevitable, what we see, to drastically paraphrase Hegel, is what we get, as “consciousness.”

The glories, if rhey are ever manifested, are reserved to the few in this world. We risk the sinister social division of elites and masses even in this lofty pursuit, the recreation of our cultural and material environment in this realm of mind and consciousness. If the glories are postponed for another work, another realm, it is because humankind cannot bear too much sorrow (as T.S. Eliot says). Who in this world has the time or space to pursue the perfection of consciousness, the glory of this elite exercise of will?

Reading Philosophers Behaving Badly by Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson (2005). The book is a popular treatment of the philosophical ideas of Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Russell, Witttgenstein, Heidegger, Sartre and Foucault, intermingled with biographical anecdotes. The assembly of personalities is well-chosen, both for ideas, influence and personal behavior. Thus we have miscreant Rousseau, misanthropic Schopenhauer, philandering Russell, Nazi Heidegger, autocratic Wittgenstein, faithless Sartre, sado-masochist Foucault, etc. Informative, even entertaining, if not disheartening in a way.

The fundamental question is whether philosophical ideas can be disengaged from the philosophers who propose them. The authors show how complex the issue can be, and how even the personalities involved never completely uderstood the ramifications of their ideas — or of their behavior, for that matter. We are left a little overwhelmed by the contradictions of their behavior and start to wonder if their ideas are just the epiphenomena of their overheated brains (and libidos).

But if we read the philosophical texts without knowing the phiosophers, we would probably just concentrate on the ideas. Rousseau’s naturalism, the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, the soaring logic of Wittgenstein and the early Russell, the explorations of self and society in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the historiography of culture and ideas in Foucault — it’s all intriguing and compelling in the original, abstracted from the thinker. We ought to resist the temptation to dismiss ideas with an ad hominem flippancy. After all, might we all be dismissed for our personality quirks, too?

But the quirks in these philosophers are, well, very bad. To be charitable we could conclude that it all seems more of an issue of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. What constitutes a brilliant mind but an human aberration? Schoolchildren were once advised to imitate the virtues of the saints — but not their habits! Or, as Nietzsche says paradoxically somewhere (not quoted in this book): “If you are praised by others you can be sure that you are not following your own path but somebody else’s.”

Someone wrote to object to the presence of “New Age” on a site devoted to hermits, a contradiction in the eyes of the correspondent. Hermitary simply chronicles hermits throughout history, of whatever tradition or persuasion. This is how one can come to understand such a universal phenomenon as eremitism — universal yet elusive.

As to “New Age,” I assumed the correspondent meant the Hermit of the Tarot, if not anything else that was not Chrisitan or Western. Besides the fact that eremitism is not the exclusive provenance of Christian or Western history by any means, I pointed out the following interesting fact:

In 1994, the best-selling music CD in the New Age category was Chant, the album of Gregorian chant performed by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain. The recordings had been made decades earlier, the tapes rediscovered and digitized, and a disc released to a public eager to hear something “New Age.” Many subsequent discs were released as well.

The cliche that people are looking for a form of spirituality or just tranquility in seeking out “New Age” music is amply confirmed by this example. It is one of those historical ironies that the Catholic Church pretty much abandoned Gregorian chant at a time when secular and other people were discovering it. But this demonstrates that music (at least some of it) can transcend cultures and even “marketing” categories.

The correspondent never wrote back.

A writer once said (I don’t remember whom or where) that he no longer listened to the music of Rachmaninoff because he no longer identified with such feelings. The context was the subject of enlightenment.

Rachmaninoff’s music is late romantic, full of emotion and melancholy, not angst so much as personal sadness, what would be called depression today. It has a specific context and became a creative reservoir for him.

To dismiss this music (it is just an example) as immature or narcissistic runs close to the dismisser’s own attitude. Everyone reflects in their “art” or speech or feelings nothing less than the present, and as much as we might summon other people to perfect balance, enough horror transpires in the world that there is plenty of room for melancholy. Creative people may be more prone to taking the full measure of feeling when confronting existence. And creative works appeal to different people in different ways. I don’t want to set up a philosophy of aesthetics so much as a psychology of creativity. Our paths in life are objects of creativity.

I am reminded of Lao-tzu’s saying: “Those who know do not speak. Those who do not know, speak.” The ineffable mystery of anguish and joy is a product of the interplay of yin and yang. To still that process in the self may be the goal, but we are unrealistic — even arrogant — to ignore the place of life, growth, maturity and decay in gripping our minds and hearts.

This experience of anguish and joy is creativity itself, which nudges us along the road of life. Learning to be empty is a great labor, and music can help us understanding things within outselves that we did not know. And having come to know them, we may be able to forget them, but we should never be so flippant as to boast of our having forgotten.