Month: May 2007

All day the wind has been in the trees. I am reading next to the window when I look up in anticipation. Another sound barely breaks through the silence: the barest note of the little chimes hanging over the front door, so obscure that the breeze seldom encounters them enough to coax out a little note. After another tentative note, the chimes fall silent.

A bird calls, more loudly than the chimes were, and then the wind in the trees returns. I decide the chimes have given up, or perhaps the breeze does not want to exhaust them; they are so modest and the wind in the trees so strong. I look out the window. The chimes are trembling ever so gently but not enough to emit another sound.

A butterfly careens from bush to tree to flower to shrub, a wild zig-zag course. Perhaps the wind has got hold of it and it cannot stop to test a flower. The butterfly disappears, then whirls back in crazy flight an instant later. The chimes want to make a sound but fall silent. In the foreground, somewhat startling, a bug slowly crosses the window pane.

As a child I grew up with a room of my own but used it only for sleeping because it seemed oppressively uncomfortable, as if it belonged to someone else. Ever since, I have not cared to have a room, and utilize a corner of the house to sit, surrounded by books, with a lamp and with a futon on the floor, my lap as my writing table.

If I am at this spot I can think, read, daydream, wonder, focus, or be empty. But then I am away from the window, missing something. And at the window, I will miss what can be done in the corner. And reading at the window I miss both. And so it is at every spot, every junction, every turn of mind and body. Perhaps that is how the butterfly feels in its zig-zag course, or the chimes when they wonder one moment to make a sound, another not to.

T. C. McLuhan quotes Stephanie Kaza’s The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees, wherein Kaza relates her travels among Pacific Northwest redwood trees. The passages will resonate with those who seek out solitary places:

I am looking for the cave tree, a tree I once encountered by accident. Underneath this large redwood there is a small dirt chamber big enough to stand in. The entrance is easy to miss; the tree looks as solid as any other from a distance. I ache to climb into this secret hollow today and hide from the world of thoughtless violence. I want to go deep into the earth and sit in the roots of a Tall One. I am hungry for the stillness and wisdom of caves.

A related Hermitary entry is “Don McLellan, Humboldt Hermit.”

This sentiment is very close to that expressed by Rilke in the ninth of his “Duino Elegies”:

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) –: why then
have to be human — and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? …

Writer Albert Camus lived in the thick of politics and ideology in World War II and post-war France and Algeria. Camus’ political point of view was thoughtful and comprehensive but beholden to no party or persuasion. He suffered for his non-conformity — friendless, surrounded by hostile colleagues, mistrusted by those whom he hoped to reconcile. His attempts to develop a unique point of view steering past ideology and refusing inevitability was rooted in his upbringing between the colonial experience, the European colonizer, and a world unreconciled to peace.

From this experience Camus evolved a point of view not so much based on but perhaps hovering around solitude.

Camus’ solitude was certainly not eremitic but social — if that is possible. Like the stranger of his novel by that title, Camus’ solitude is that of one who does not fit the class, culture, or ideas of his peers, nor of those with whom he has much in common — the European intellectuals, the pieds noir of Algeria, the militant and anti-colonial Arabs. Camus is forever alienated by his intelligence, his refusal to compromise, and his sense of history and justice.

Today, when all parties are betrayed, where politics has debased everything, the only thing left for a man is the consciousness of his solitude and his faith in human and individual values.

This sense of solitude is built in part on Nietzsche’s concept of the perspicacious observer of modern times who no longer fits into the categories of society, philosophy, and religion. This observer no longer can play along with the hypocrisy of false values. Yet where to go with this point of view other than unwittingly or unnecessarily alienating others around him or her?

Embraced voluntarily, solitude on this large scale neither shrinks from confronting the world nor does it renounce it altogether. This solitude is militant and engaged. It is a model of solitude uniquely modern, living for the issues of the present, in part because it cannot accept the moral values of the past, represented by spirituality. This is not for everyone. It is a great risk, like all modern or post-modern scenarios. Yet in the case of Camus’ politics and social views it has a firm grounding in ethical values, and has a great potential for those who are without faith but who still “believe.”

Here are a few entries unrelated to the subject matter of “Hermit’s Thatch” but having to do with the structure and design of the journal, for anyone who is interested.

I have never considered “Hermit’s Thatch” to be a “blog” in the same sense that people nowadays write blogs with the expectation of getting feedback. That is not the expectation of a solitary. After all, historically no one wrote diaries and journals with the expectation of getting public feedback and comments on each entry the way blogs are presented today.

So I turn off comments, for though I appreciate anyone who writes to say something about an entry here and there, I don’t want to post their comments on entries and dilute the purpose of the journal as — after all — my reflections. I would think anyone who reads “thatch” will understand that reflections of this sort don’t beg for examination.

These entries are thatch, so much straw, really. They are intended to be no more than reflections in the literal sense that a pond reflects moonlight. The reflections point to the moon, and are of no use after we have discovered the source of the light.

“Hermit’s Thatch” first appeared in late 2002 using MovableType 2.63. I never upgraded, and only tinkered modestly with the design. I know a few things but I am not a technical person.

MovableType served well for some five years nearly, but had recently shown signs of faltering. It was an old, free, cgi-based program with three modest templates (index, archive, and stylesheet), and I wasn’t sure if I could ever get another copy. Recently the postings would not build. I had to rebuild the index to get the recent posting to show, and that was a little scary. It worked, but what next? What if a file corrupted? I am not a programmer. There was no place to get another copy of the program, and upgrading to the new version was seeming more and more problematic with all of the alternatives out there. I did not want to spend money on the at-cost MovableType.

So here is “Hermit’s Thatch” in the WordPress incarnation. I lost some minor things, like italics on book titles, and perhaps other minor details I have not pursued. Graphics ended up in the same folder rather than a new one, which is alright. I appreciate the fine administrative capabilities of the program. And I appreciate the theme, which is compatible with the simplicity that the web site and this journal (blog) want to project.

One must smile when Seneca, the ancient Roman and Stoic essayist, describes frugality. He does not want his chef to prepare too fancy a meal, he tells us, nor does he insist that his servants wear lavish clothing. No, says Seneca, he wants frugality.

The different between frugality and simplicity is the difference between quantity and quality. Our foods may be simple by culinary standards but they may represent ecological extravagance, waste, and destructiveness. Our clothing may not look ostentatious, but what havoc to land, air, water, resources, and other sentient beings does it represent? With a little reflection and information, perhaps even Seneca would understand the economic context of our lives.

A plastic trinket from a box-like retail warehouse may seem an exercise in frugality versus buying something else, but it is not. To produce that trinket, a global socio-economic exploitation and the same incalculable environmental damage is inevitable. Frugality is where quantity and short-term cost is the only criteria.

Simplicity accepts the limited intention of frugality but makes it holistic and qualitative. Where frugality is based on mass appeal and thoughtlessness, simplicity is based on individual values and conscious or mindful attention. As with any exercise in values, simplicity means knowing the true nature of a thing before we appropriate it. We want to know how it came into being, its history, who was involved in its crafting, and in what manner it came to us. This genealogy gives the object an opportunity to unfold itself into our consciousness, and we can accommodate ourselves to it as an enhancement to our lives.

Such a reflectiveness is not a fetish or a ritual, as is often the case with frugality. Rather, simplicity invites a mental check that puts a thing into perspective, just as we ourselves try to put ourselves into perspective regarding society, the world, and the universe.

Simplicity is the unfolding of the objects all around us, and our right thinking and being with them. With frugality we think we are beating the system and saving a few pennies as a reward, but at the foolish expense of the rest of the world, human and natural. With simplicity we drop the mask of acquisitiveness and make a relationship to the world of objects around us. Simplicity is a participation in values and an exchange of being.

St. Mark the Ascetic wrote 265 aphorisms under the title: On Those Who Think That They are Made Righteous by Works, or, No Righteousness By Works. Today this essay is part of the Orthodox Christian Philokalia. Mark is not anticipating a Reformation debate, but addressing a fundamental paradox of everyday life assumptions.

There are those who, despising the less zealous because of the rigor of their own ascetic practice, think they are made superior by physical works. But how much more foolish if we rely on theoretical knowledge and disparage the innocent.

With this passage, Mark criticizes both ends of behavior: practice and theory. Both are the dwelling places and refuges of the solitary, so we would be wise to heed Mark’s admonishing.

Our tendency as solitaries is to escape into ascetic practices to justify our separation from others — either in physical isolation or psychological distance. Our pleasure is in not being with others because we are not “like” them. Our practice then becomes a posteriori or after-the-fact proof of this difference. Or so is our temptation. We can argue that at least the practice is better than not practicing. Well, that’s a start.

Mark sees the fallacy of intellect and knowledge (worldly or scholarly) as a worse folly in that it can justify us without practice. The mind can conspire with conscience to assign to ourselves not only a righteousness but a superiority. The escape to theory is a worse menace to the solitary because the mind can operate without suffering the repercussions that our bodies suffer from asceticism.

And yet the mind is the core of the self, the core even of the body. To avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of false practice and false mindset, we must recognize the overarching operation of the ego. For Mark, the ego must be subordinate to Christ. Mark uses the vocabulary of his age in saying that the ego or self must be a slave in expecting nothing, servicing all, and receiving freedom as a gift. Today we may look askance at this imagery, but there is a core of wisdom here because the psychological processes are universal.

“Expecting nothing” but that-which-is means extinguishing desire, so that the flames of the world are successively quenched. “Serving all” is serving both practice and knowledge, both the body and the mind, for in that we become clear and humane and personable. That is how we service all, how the solitary is genuinely solitary yet servicing all. Emptied of self, connected to no one thing, not even desire, the solitary is free to pursue life without assuming an air of superiority, an assumed righteousness.

Finally, too, continuing Mark’s notion of the slave — we receive our freedom as a “gift.” As all traditions emphasize, life is a gift, and we often find ourselves reluctant to express or offer gratitude because life seems to be such a given, a necessity. Like Sartre, we may be tempted to say that we are “condemned” to live, after all. But the moment we say this we are theorizing, we are mentally contriving. That theorizing is what Mark considers such a great folly. This theorizing is the opposite of freedom, of the liberation from desire, for theorizing contrives a purpose that is only supported by theory itself and not by the fruits of practice.

And so we are back to the importance of practice in strengthening the mind and will. What a paradox that Mark considers the ability to abstract and theorize to be so bad for the solitary, but he wants us to check the excess of contrivance and desire before sanctioning what we have concluded and think to act upon. Mark reminds the solitary to monitor motives, to pursue ascetic practice and to think based on the virtuous fruits of practice. To do so is the core of being solitary and the solitary does so not to impose the ego on our beleaguered selves or upon others.

As much as I enjoy the writings of Matthieu Ricard, in part because of his combination of a science background and his vocation as a Buddhist monk, I wish his 2006 book was titled other than Happiness. Perhaps his English-language publisher insisted on the title. The original French, published in 2003, is Plaidoyer pour le bonheur, literally, Plea for Happiness, which is more palatable. Instead of his jolly portrait on the French cover, one could almost cringe at the prospect of a yellow smiley on the English. But it is safely plain.

The word happiness has been much abused, as Heidegger prophetically noted in his Discourse on Thinking in 1959, referring to modern science and technology:

Through this atomic business a new era of happiness is envisioned. Nuclear science, too, does not stand idly by. It publicly proclaims this era of happiness. Thus in July of this year at Lake Constance, eighteen Nobel Prize winners stated in a proclamation: “Science [and that is modern natural science] is a road to a happier human life.”

But Ricard knows these nuances. He is careful to distinguish well-being and euphoria, pleasure and happiness, and, especially, the experience of suffering versus objective suffering.

It bears emphasizing, and Ricard mentions this though not emphatically, that modern Westerners bring upon themselves degrees, scenarios, and experiences of suffering that are contrived by their perceptions and do not amount to physical and socio-economic suffering that is objective.

As with many books informed by Tibetan Buddhism, Ricard follows neurology and psychology closely, especially experiments on meditators. He decides that optimism and pessimism, the use of time, perceptions of self, others, and the universe, are all factors in deciding what happiness is.

Ricard mentions that 15 per cent of Americans experience loneliness.

Anyone who cuts himself off from others and the universe, trapped in the bubble of his own ego, feels alone in the middle of a crowd. But those who understand the interdependence of all phenomena are not lonely; the hermit, for example, feels in harmony with the entire universe.

Ricard identifies ethics as a key to happiness, not the modern view of ethics as in what to do that is right or wrong, good or evil, but ethics in terms of what to be as a person, a human being. This trajectory takes us directly to the question of what is death, and how we can approach death not as the cessation of things we do but the completion of what we are. The author quotes “the Tibetan hermit and wandering bard Shabkar” and concludes with a testimony of his own life.

Some premises are not fully explored, but the book is a popularization, after all. There are existential and what Ricard would consider “pessimistic” sentiments that need expression in this debate. Religious faith can curtail human situations and simply present a given palette of “beyond happiness and suffering” (to cite a subheading in the book). Happiness and suffering are not absolutes of human good and evil, and the enormous task of life is to reconcile them with “mere” contentment or equanimity.

In an essay “Total Action Without Regret,” J. Krishnamurti argues that everything around us, every aspect of culture and environment in which we are born and socialized — “the world of politics, the world of economics, the world of business, of social morality and all the religious structures” — are ultimately products of thought. We might substitute “products of human contrivance.” Likewise our relationship to all this is the product of our own thinking and feeling.

This is not entirely true — at a certain level. We cannot propose the radical ontology of Bishop Berkeley and dismiss everything around us as unreal, or even propose the more widespread tenet of New Age thought that since everything is identical in essence, we should just get over our negative thoughts and feelings and make progress, whatever that means.

A fine line between subjectivity and objective suffering and misery ought to compel us to probe into this dichotomy of mind and everything else. The philosophical question as to why there is something rather than nothing resolves itself existentially into “Why this something rather than that something.” We aren’t going to hide in the notion that it’s all in the mind. As the Zen tale goes, a student was talking at length about how everything is the product of thought, everything is empty and without reality, etc. Suddenly, the master slapped the student’s shoulder loudly with a bamboo stick. “And I suppose that pain you are feeling is not real either?” he asked the student.

Suffering is surely the touchstone for the discussion of what is objective and subjective. Popular religion understands this existential dilemma but masks it by providing doctrine that “pre-absorbs” suffering, stifling the experience and dismissing it as a necessity of the human condition. If we suffer starvation or are dying of disease, we can still see the comfort of others contrasted to our plight and feel anguish at that contrast. How much more so if we perceive that our plight is in part due to conditions created by human contrivance. The first response is subjective. We sense the temporality of self. We sense the turning of the karmic wheel. But the second sense is objective, and in this sense we will have to work hard to realize what is the true cause.

If we have consciousness such that we can alter behavior, expectation, reflection, and action (versus animal consciousness), then we give lie to the notion that, after all, suffering has always existed and will always be with us.

When physical suffering becomes individualized in our minds, we see that it does no good to console the sufferer with nostrums of psychology or spiritual liberation. Put mildly, being in intense physical or psychological pain has the tendency to obliterate thought and reasoning, let alone equanimity.

Equanimity is a more realistic term for happiness. To achieve equanimity means foregoing action. We cannot act with forethought, and we cannot think with equanimity. We cannot have equanimity if we have desire, especially the desire to change external things, to change the things around us. This does not equate to amorality or apathy but rather points to the idea that we must first and foremost undertake the rigorous task of understanding the mind, of identifying where our assumptions, opinions and perceptions come from. Then we will be able to place suffering in perspective, let alone place the external world around us in perspective. For perspective, not thought, is what orders things around us, or, rather, what orders our minds so that the things around us take their places.

To understanding mind requires suspending thought, abiding in silence, long and deep silence from which will come the shuffling, the remix, the that-which-is-necessary-and-no-other.

That is how we can take up Krishnamurti’s challenge to understand how society and culture and the world around us is very real in the sense of pain and suffering, yet is contrivance and construed thought. Only then can we achieve equanimity and justify action.