Month: September 2004

In his book Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience(1990), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes that good interpersonal relationships bring “flow experiences,” a high quality of life and happiness, but relationships involving conflict are probably the most depressing and dispiriting events anyone experiences. Yet, he notes, most people never explore solitude.

Why is solitude such a negative experience? The bottom-line answer is that keeping order in the mind from within is very difficult. We need external goals, external stimulation, external feedback to keep attention directed. And when external input is lacking, attention begins to wander, and thoughts become chaotic — resulting in the state we have called “psychic entropy.”

Hence the modern cycle of television, drugs, videos, games, shopping, overeating, sex, gambling — what become desperate methods for imposing external order on a chaotic mind. A positive solitude, however, is too difficult in Csikszentmihalyi’s scheme; he has only the goal of “flow” to offer, having written his book before the positive breakthrough of Anthony Storr’s Solitude and other books in rehabilitating the positive role of solitude.

One of the more insightful features of hatha yoga and qigong/tai chi chuan are the postures that visualize the body’s identity with the earth. The corpse asana or posture of yoga is a supine resting posture during which one imagines one’s weight sinking into the ground. Similarly, the standing meditation of qigong visualizes the same rootedness into the soil. The image is not a morbid one. On the contrary, while the body “sinks” into relaxation the mind is lifted from the whir of events, feelings and mental chatter characterizing the energy points assailed throughout the day. It does not take a yogin or martial artist to appreciate these simple bodily postures and to utilize the sense of well-being that flows from them.

In his list of prerequisites for meditation, which is easily applicable to daily life, Kamalashila includes limiting one’s desires. He offers this brief explanation of what that entails: “limiting your desires refers to not being excessively attached to many or good clothes and so forth. The practice of contentment means always being satisfied with any little thing.”

With regards to his third prerequisite, “not being involved in many activities,” Kamalashila states: “Not being involved in many activities refers to giving up ordinary activities like commerce, avoiding too close association with householders and monks, and totally abandoning the practice of medicine and astrology.” Of course, who else would one associate with other than monks and households? Hence, one could read this as meaning people in general. And commerce, medicine and astrology were, in 8th century India, often unscrupulous and fraudulent.

Kamalashila identifies five characteristics for a “conducive environment,” such an environment being a prerequisite to meditation but also to daily life and the ideal physical setting for solitaries. (The list is easily updated by identifying evil beings in 2. as bad company and neighbors.)

1. provides easy access to food and clothes,
2. is free of evil beings and enemies,
3. is free from disease,
4. contains good people who maintain moral ethics and who share similar views, and
5. is visited by few people in the daytime and with little noise at night.

The 8th century Mahayana Buddhist writer Kamalashila identified several prerequisites to meditation that can easily be applied to daily life in general. While they might be considered “ascetic,” most solitaries would find that these prerequisites reflect their ideal lifestyle. (From his Guide to Meditation, with commentary by the Dalai Lama.)

1. to live in a conducive environment;
2. to limit desires and practice contentment;
3. to not be involved in too many activities;
4. to maintain pure moral ethics, and
5. to fully eliminate attachment and all other kinds of conceptual thoughts.

Four frogs are lined up on the same upper window sill outside, slumbering in the narrow shade of a large myrtle tree. They are a ghastly ashen gray color due to their automatically cutting back their metabolism as they sleep, safe from predators, weather, and humans. “Etherized upon a table” they look. I wonder what a frog dreams, let alone four of them. Not a twitch despite my obvious hovering; their eyes are unmoved, even no rapid eye movements to hint at dreams. “To sleep, perchance to dream” may not be part of a frog’s angst — at least not until nightfall and hunger awakes them again.

In a 1999 teaching session on transforming the mind, the Dalai Lama was asked which was better: a city life style or a remote and peaceful setting? The Dalai Lama replied that while it depended on the individual, the very advanced practitioner might “seek a life of solitude and abandon the world, as it were. That is said to be the highest form of spiritual practice.” For most, however, “it is far more important to be an effective member of society, someone who makes a positive social contribution and integrates spiritual practice as much as possible into daily life.” This is the path for most to pursue, said the Dalai Lama, because solitude is too hard for most and they would discover this too late, only to “slowly and quietly, and with some embarrassment … try to sneak back into society!”
–from Transforming the Mind (2000)
Of course, those who make “a positive social contribution,” etc. are few, and those who pursue the “highest form of spiritual practice” are fewer. The overwhelming majority of people, sadly, do neither, and these are the ones who are not reached either through appeals to social contribution or otherwise.

Here is a half-amusing quote from a standard medieval history text (Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages; 1968):

Some zealots, for whom the communal life of the monks was insufficiently austere, became hermits or anchorites, obeying the impulse that always bids some to hide from the world. They might build huts in the wilds, dressed in sheepskins, exist on the produce of their own garden and the gifts of poor peasants; or they might continue to serve humanity by settling at a ford or marsh or forest way to guide travelers. Some few, particularly women, had themselves walled in a cell with a window opening on a church.

If silence was a palpable force, an enormous reservoir of energy, what could we envision? A huge labyrinth of an industrial factory, the whir of gigantic machines grinding, clanging, mashing, louder and faster, then suddenly: silence. Or a large room full of voices, a rising hum of anger, a single voice rousing the crowd to fever pitch, and then, suddenly: silence. Or fearful faces staring up at an ominous sky as the roar of bomber aircraft grows louder, closer, visible, screams of fear, and then, suddenly: silence.
Silence is not merely the counterpart of noise when noise is human contrivance. Silence is void and empty of noise, it absorbs and neutralizes noise, it stills and sweetens and renews. If silence were palpable, it would stop noise and the human source of noise.
The emptiness of silence is the fullness of the universe, the fullness of becoming resting in being. And, if our minds are very still, very quiet, we can sense in a palpable way the scent and taste of silence as it descends like a mantle, like a gentle rain shower, over the face of the earth.

Which comes first: widespread depression in modern society, or cultural and financial contrivances creating and servicing a lucrative market? The ominous collusion of culture, business, medicine, education, and popular media tries to overwhelm the average person into believing that, yes, depression is inevitable, virtually innate, a basic part of human nature. The cultural use of pharmaceuticals is a renunciation of will and mocks those in the world who live in conditions that really have brought about disease, illness, and mental problems. Culture creates many diseases that disengagement from culture begins to cure. Silence and simplicity not only cure but prevent, reverting us to a natural state where our degree of dependence on contrivance is minimized, allowing a process of healing (not to say awakening) to begin.