Month: November 2004

We bid ourselves to temper our ego, by which we really mean two things: first, to eliminate self-harming actions and thoughts such as pride, covetousness, laziness; second, having eliminated or diminished self-harming, to cultivate a different self-perception based on humility and non-desiring.
But are all these actions and thoughts merely dependent on circumstances, such that pride or assertiveness can sometimes be virtues? Can humility be a bad thing? Here is where we mistake personality for ego. We cannot make progress until we have that minimum of ego we call personality. This is a life-long refinement, but at the same time clearly established in childhood. We cannot undo ego without having one, a mature one, in the first place. From personality we can proceed to work on ego, or begin to undo ego and thereby enhance the virtues (and reduce the vices) of our personality. Our conscious goal is to move our virtues into that non-social realm that psychoanalysis calls the superego.
The leader, administrator, and the social organizer cannot help but project personality on a group. But in this capacity is leadership also a projection of ego? What the person interested in wielding power also ends up doing is projecting not only vices but the superego, their own values and conscience. The values may be benign, but in this power capacity, these values may now be reduced to content for psychological manipulation. The use of power and authority becomes the vehicle for values and beliefs. This is why the abuse of sound principles by institutions and authorities or their representatives is more painful to us than the vices of any given individual whom we do not know.
The true solitary, having worked on the ego, will be able to detect the imposition of authority and the arbitrariness of power in others. Ultimately, this will be recognized in social relations and society itself. Rarely does anyone achieve a position of power without thereby exercising authority. Authority is contrivance. Authority exercised by another is authority removed from oneself.

Can a solitary develop compassion, or what the Buddhists call “bodhichitta”? For it seems that the highest compassion requires intense socializing, being with others in a large and public way. But compassion is not just pity in the sense of sorrowful identification with another. Such an attitude is easily codified by society into a paternalism, a condecension, a pharisaic morality.

True compassion begins by extending consciousness, by extending it into that collective consciousness where identity with others is the very sharing of a consciousness that is “built-in” to all of us and is not just an “add-on” of charity or philanthropy. The cry of pain in another human being — it can be half way around the world — can evoke the depth of our compassion because it emerges from (is) our (collective) consciousness. This compassion requires no “social” dimension because it exists at a level of awareness that is universal.

Consciousness is the realization of being, and may be identical with being. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno generously extends consciousness to animate and inanimate beings by positing the action of consciousness through the universe of all beings:

We attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus quotes this Persian saying: “The bitterest sorrow that anyone can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing.” Said differently, our knowledge and desire can embrace and extend to almost any length, but our will and the concrete circumstances (happenstances) of our lives can frustrate nearly any ambition.
Resolving this “bitterest sorrow” means looking at desire and will as the pivot of the two sides of this human equation. Let knowledge — as awareness, as sensitivity, as consciousness — extend as far as our talents persuade us. But let desire, will — projections of ego — shrink to nothing. No projects, no schemes, no insistence or demands on reality. This can be difficult when a moral imperative moves us to anger or frustration. For to be aware means not only to have knowledge but to shape our lives and hearts to what is true. This does not automatically translate into action, except the imperative to change ourselves. This is the only necessary action: changing ourselves. All else will follow, if circumstances (happenstance, “karma”) allow. Only thusly will our best wishes be fulfilled, modestly guided by what is larger than our own little thoughts and feelings. Only thusly can we balance our aspirations and our achievements.

Concepts of God and God’s functionality in the universe are as often derived from experience and feeling as any formal philosophizing or theologizing. Darwin, for example, was as much influenced in his agnosticism by the evangelists’ images of hellfire and the tragic death of his daughter as by anything to do with evolution and natural selection. Our reflections on nature can dwell on “tooth and claw” as much as on the butterfly and the sunset. Likewise our reflections on humanity may dwell as much on love and mutual aid as on the cruel destruction of innocent life. The theories spun by thinkers never resolve the dichotomies, nor does society ever seem to progress in addressing them. But the solitary can pursue the necessary path: slowing the cultural influences in one’s life, reducing the ego’s affinities for easy social solutions, and awaiting a pattern of silence from which will emerge at least a modest personal equanimity. This is a life-time’s work, to be sure, but it is the only work we need pursue.

Albert Camus was one of the more acute and responsive thinkers of the past century. When he speaks of “the unreasonable silence of the world” (The Myth of Sisyphus), we quickly appreciate his reflections on the bleak history of humanity, violence, injustice, and the absurdity of collective efforts to reform society or to cheat death, which is to say, reality. Collective responses to perennial concerns have failed historically. What curbs people’s cold hearts but exhaustion! Sisyphus is condemned by gods or fate to roll a great boulder up a mountain only to watch it slip past down and have to roll it up again, indefinitely. But Camus thinks that his archetype must yet be happy. Sisyphus must study and ponder and take meager delight in “every atom of the stone,” every “mineral flake of that night-filled mountain.” And Sisyphus is, in the final analysis, a solitary, condemned by the gods to solitude, but making the best of it, the very best.

One of the paradoxes of traditional religions and sects is that when they are pursued exclusively in their ritual and formulaic modes as institutions of power and privilege, they are invariably attacked as belief systems. However, when religions and sects take on a humanitarian and social function of helping the lowly and oppressed, for example, their belief system is suddenly tolerated and alliances from otherwise antithetical quarters emerges. This is a curious sociological phenomenon of mutual aid and toleration, but a tenuous argument for the truth of a given sect’s beliefs. Which religion with a benign face do we accept for its social face, and does this toleration exempt it from a critique of its beliefs and actions? What method separates the two?
The solitary can best negotiate this underexamined paradox in religion and society by teasing out the valid expressions of the new social face of the religion while constantly pressing the abstract belief system for it spiritual fruit. Because the solitary has no particular public function as do institutions and sects, what can emerge is an insightful and sustainable model of spirituality that does not depend on either one pole or another of this dichotomy.

The first major atheist of the modern West, Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Hollbach (1723-89), described the atheist as “one who destroys human chimeras in order to summon people back to nature, experience and reason.” The atheist, says d’Hollbach, “has no need to imagine ideal forces, imaginary intelligences or rational beings in order to explain the phenomena of the universe or the operations of nature.” We know today that science and reason do not explain these phenomena either, except in the grossest sense of error and description, or in the pragmatic sense of technology. We know, too, that nature and experience are richer in the spiritual sense than the chimerical forces, intelligences, or beings of which d’Hollbach writes. It has taken the exhaustion of science, technology — and classical atheism — to recognize this. But the “ideal” (or otherwise) “forces” that do explain the universe and the operations of nature continue to elude humanity.

Archaic thinking proposes the existence of a soul or spirit within living things like birds and insects and trees, and even within inanimate things like stars and rocks. So Jainism and Shinto, both influential in the course of world thought. This is distinct from the magic of animism, with its anthrocentric point of view, its preoccupation with power and control.
Our philosophy of life and nature inevitably suggests this primitive or archaic notion of universally indwelling spirit or Spirit percolating from the past. This is true no matter what the technicalities of animation or sustainability or creation in our thinking. And this is good and right, and can be tested with simple logic. Because if we reserve the worthiest form of life only to ourselves as humans, what should even higher beings (whether you accept it as fact, possibility, or myth) think of our claim? Would they crush us in fear or repulsion? Destroy our habitat and well-being for their own selfish ends? Eat us? Presumably they would not because they are “higher.” Yet archaic religions have always expressed the fear that higher beings would and do exactly what we fear. They believed this because these higher beings were projections of the culture’s own malevolence. Even now, however, we humans inflict that suffering on “lower” forms of being. We still project these cultural accretions. Only the positive view of animating all of nature in some universal and benign way will move us to a higher philosophy of life.

One of the great malevolencies of modern (if not Western) culture is the treatment of the habitat of hermits and solitaries, which is to say the habitat of all animate and other beings, but especially of those beings that appreciate the solitude, the silence, and the benignity of simple nature. The heart of the West is rooted in the false premises of Hebrew antiquity, the narrow experience of a hunter-herder culture of the semi-desert. This is succinctly expressed by Aldo Leopold in his classic A Sand County Almanac, published in 1948:

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. … That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.