hermit's thatch

Philosophies of nature, most pointedly Taoism, describe large universal cycles as the “Great Transformation.”

The multiple transformations we describe, observe,and experience are grand planetary cycles but also the small circumscribed cycles of earth, water, elements, and living beings. Our identification of and with these cycles represent tzu-jan or “self-so,” meaning that which transpires naturally, of itself, without arrogant imposition or call for subjective interpretation. Adopting a philosophy of life that accords with tzu-jan is to embrace tranquility, simplicity, and wisdom.

Embracing tzu-jan in every sphere of life — especially in the heart of the mundane, in occupation, dwelling-place, routines, or the writing of poetry and submersion in spiritual mindset — minimizes mental struggle. We adopt a body of wisdom from a high source of wisdom without ever suppressing our own caution or sense of observation. We do not need to understand, interpret, or justify what is given by nature. We do not need to justify a contrived philosophy of life based on a human-made authority or projection.

Indeed, we do not even need to understand the fullness of tzu-jan as simplicity or its life-style as “idleness,” as the ancient Chinese poet Tao Chien’s modern editor David Hinton notes. This idleness, he notes, is “profound serenity and quietness,” not the artificial busyness embraced as productive and vital by the world.

The Chinese pictographs representing hsien or “idleness” are two: a tree standing alone in a courtyard or moonlight through an open door. Tzu-jan is the revelling in nature, the meditative view that became what Hinton calls “the essence of spiritual practice” adopted by Zen.

Tzu-jan was not popular among the system-builders in the East, and in the West would only influence a few figures, romantic and nature-oriented. Tzu-jan in the Taoit and Zen traditions is worth comparing is Yoshida Kenko’s 14th-century Essays in Idleness, where, however, the Great Transformation takes a great subjective turn.

In the Western world is found Henry David Thoreau’s limited adventures in solitude beside Walden Pond, the latter viewed as nature’s crystallization of the subtle transformation. Thoreau is a novice introducing Eastern works like the Bhagavad-Gita, and a mature notion of tzu-jan is not to be expected here. But his recommendations about solitude, nature, and the pace of life are nevertheless instructive. In contrast, misunderstanding the notion of “idleness,” is the Western world’s inevitable bungling of the concept in the exhausted decadence of Marcel Proust.

Aldous Huxley’s 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy is an anthology of world thinkers from over thousands of years who have affirmed “the metaphysics that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.” Further than metaphysics, Huxley attempted to include psychology and ethics, including

the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, Divine Reality, [and] the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being — the thin is immemorial and universal.

Huxley’s book emerged from the wrenching history of Western violence and chaos in the 1930s and 1940s with an implicit appeal for the restoration of peace and civilization embedded in the fine discourse of the many authors he selects. In that regards, the work is a n expression of hope, or at least of optimism. Huxley had skillfully weaned his list of sources to exclude scholars, theologians, commentators, interpreters, and ecclesiastical or institutional figures, instead giving full voice to the most original people in history: saints, sages, mystics, and spiritual figures. Not unexpectedly, however, the selection of sources is decidely Western, familiar and prominent names, not always pure in their spirituality, some devotional, some scholastic. But the effort largely succeeds

This concentration on figures who lived their perceptions versus those who commented on the letter of the ideology or religion rescues the work not only for posterity’s readers but also for Huxley’s contemporaries, who may well have come to see the institutional and scholarly apparatus as the core of the problem, the source of the culmination of the 20th-century chaos. Huxley deliberately did not include a critique to that tradition because he was interested in the positive and hopeful message that a transcendence was possible.

This view was popular in Europe in the late 1940s but encounters two obstacles. In the first place, the sages, saints, mystics, and spiritual thinkers he cites were not consciously presenting a political or social agenda for a failing contemporary civilization. Indeed, the great spiritual figures, while living their virtue and insight, offer material applicable to everyday ethics, but not for advancing the infrastructure of a moribund culture.

A pointed example of a 20th century spiritual figure, of India, is Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). Aurobindo aptly fulfills Huxley’s criteria for a sage and spiritual thinker. (He is only mentioned once by Huxley, however.)

Sri Aurobindo, educated in British universities, returned to his native India determined to participate in political and social activism promoting Indian independence. He did so, leading meetings and editing a radical pro-independence periodical. He was arrested and imprisoned for a year (in the 1920s) for his seditious activity. During that solitary year, Aurobindo rediscovered the classics of his Hindu tradition, and decided to pursue a spiritual rather than activist path, concluding that the masses he sought to influence would not understand their social situation and its needs until they had raised their spiritual consciousness. Aurobindo went on to write prolifically on spiritual and mystical themes, never returning to worldly affairs. (Aurobindo eventually founded an ashram; a French widow and patron extended his ashram to a larger community. The institutionalizing of his thought tarnishes the singularity of his writing.)

A second factor challenging Huxley’s (and others’) hopes was the reality brought to the forefront by the existential tradition that succinctly expressed the pain and suffering of that era. As already mentioned, Huxley unwittingly bolsters the established Western historical traditions in the metaphysics, psychology and ethic represented in their own cultural contexts and eras. These historial contexts could not be reproduced in the 20th century, however well intentioned the reparative effort. The challenge for Huxley and his followers was how to maintain the spiritual fruits without continuing the ossification of Western culture.

Huxley may have striven for hope, that deep value that holds a faith regardless of circumstances. But once popularized, hope easily becomes optimism, a shallow version of hope but also a more palatable one for the mass reader. And as Miguel de Unamuno notes in his classic 1912 Tragic Sense of Life:

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.

Furthermore,

If there exists in a man faith in God joined to a life of purify and moral elevation, it is not so much the believing in God that makes him good, as the being good … that makes him believe in God. Goodness is the best source of spiritual clear-sightedness.

While these critiques are pointed, they also conjure the gentle pessimism of Kierkegaard, the tragic sense of Marcus Aurelius and Unamuno himself, the cautionary insight of the more mystical spiritual writers recruited by Huxley. This is not the cynicism of Schopenhauer or the egoism Nietzsche. The 20th-century’s civil and world wars, genocides, nuclear weapons, and global tensions confirmed the pessimist’s view. The 20th century had already outrun the optimism of Huxley in the proliferation of technology and the institutionalization of the very sources that had engendered the pessimism.

But Huxley’s service was for all that invaluable. It refocused on the source of enlightenment and action, which is the individual, focused on a rich tradition that would outlast the diverse happenings that have snaked through the river of subsequent history. Huxley’s saints, sages, spiritual beings, and mystics, constitute a refuge for the individual thrown into a world where not merely people and structures tighten their grips on the organs of power, but even overthrow collective efforts of spiritual awareness. Huxley’s book echoes an old and happy optimism, perhaps, but is a valuable sourcebook that can still invite us to enter a great spiritual path.

Ars moriendi or the “art of dying” was originally a specific religious essay composed as a comfort during the Black Plague of the late middle ages. Today, the term may be applied to a religious or philosophical essay on the subject. Because life is overshadowed by the “letting go” of inevitable death, the genre is not only addressing conscious last days of life but may today be aplied to the entire art of living, of living well, wisely, and consciously, in the face of inevitability.

Ars moriendi is universal. From stoics in the West to Japanese death poets in the East, classics on dying with the understanding that living correctly is always an urgency do share important insights without divisive metaphysics or speculation.

The genre may today, by analogy, be authored by wise physicians, even if the weight of how to livee well is only offered as an opportunity to the wise reader. How We Die, the influencial 1994 book by surgeon Sherwin B. Nuland, described the process of aging and death as a natural phenomenon versus the catalog of diseases gleefully assigned to each symptom of decline by the medical and pharmaceutical establishments. Not that dying has even been the happily painless ideal of going to sleep without awakening, as Nuland notes. The impulse to arrest and frustrate a natural course even when the prospects of reversal are nil commonly delineates medical discourse, even now when palliative philosophies and practical methods of palliative care have emerged. Death “with dignity” is an older negative mindset, but even palliative care still requires insight about time, space, quality of life, consciousness, and suffering — no easier to understand as science. But any death carries the urgency to embrace the expression of ars moriendi.

Ars moriendi cannot be an art taken up too late for comprehending what happens in the long or short course of time. This urgency is illustrated by the fate of the brilliant young neuro-surgeon Paul Kalanithi, who was also thoroughly familiar with literature and the ars moriendi genre. He died very young, barely finishing his medical residency, but managed to wrie an autobiographical manuscript When Breath Becomes Air (2016), describing his days from lung cancer diagnosis through reacting, coping, then eking out life to the end.

This memoir can be readily added to the repertoire of arts moriendi, made special because the author is a physician. Like Being Mortal by Atul Gawande — which, however, addresses as third-person research the life and death of patients, plus the life and death of his father — Kalanithi’s book fits this new expression of the ars moriendi genre. In Kalanithi’s book the modern jugernaut of technological and pharmaceutical progress is contrasted with tenuous quality of life prospects. No better person for composing such a book is Kalanithi because the author is both a terminal cancer patient and an informed physician and scientist who can both recount his careful medical decisions as a practicing neuro-surgeon while assessing the signs of impending death more professionally and philosophically than other people in this life stage, and, perhaps, better than other writers of ars moriendi.

The value of the art of dying, considered when in health and vitality, is to practice a clear mindset long before consciousness is swayed by fear and suffering. Kalanithi was originally a formal student of literature because of its clear psychological insights, but eventually he pursued the study of medicine and neuroscience for their physical and descriptive insights, for knowledge about the mechanical and biological aspects of the unitary body/mind that constitutes our identity. Science is the priveleged knowledge afforded by modern times, but as Kalanithi wrote in his final year, literature uplifts the burdens of the self. Poetic passages classical and modern sprinkle the author’s pages, and one sees a divergent contrast of art versus science gradually unified in fact and elevated in spirit.

In the end, said Joseph Conrad, we live as we die — alone. Or, rather, we die as we live. To each personality is alotted an art of dying, an extension of the art of living, providing a perfect continuity if we learn the art well.

The Dalai Lama’s book A Profound Mind (2012) is a non-polemical summary pf Buddhist thought, specifically Mahayana and Tibetan. These include teachings on dependent origination and emptiness derived from Nagajuna, and the creating of a mental disposition toward individual enlightenment, Bodhicitta, and compassion, derived from Shantideva.

The Mahayana trajectory of saving others while saving oneself, however, has always been a later development — or accretion — that has never settled well with the Theravada and Zen traditions. A social agenda to inner tranquility, even of the society in mind, is inevitably horizontal re enlightenment, and suggests a busyness and disippation of resources uncomfortable with or incompatible with the goal of an otherwise worldly aspiration such as saving others. The argument against Jesus, that he would save others but could not save himself, is taken as a literal admonition by the Mahayana tradition (by analogy, of course,since the saying never reached this far East).

Granted that, as the Dalia Lama puts it:

If we have not developed the required inner peace, then even if we are living the life of a hermit, our minds will be overwhelmed with anger and hatred, and we will have no peace.

This comment about hermits is understood in every eremitic tradition, but revises the burden for pursuing inner peace, which must be fulfilled before the pursuit of eremitism. Eremitism is not a concomitant position. But there is no allusion here to the physical and natural setting that fosters inner peace in the first place, or to the fact that the most successful setting has historically not been a social setting, at least not a complex or busy social setting. Otherwise the process of pursuing inner peace may become incompatible with saving others whether by teaching, preaching, engaging others, or even wish-intention.

The notion of the saving of self and others is derived from the solitary enlightenment experience of the historical Buddha followed by his preaching activity to “save” others. But the teaching was of how to achieve inner enlightenemtn, not how to save others, which is the external or extroverted act of preaching, not the act of achieving enlightenment. Without the latter, there likely is no saving of others, for who, even among the disciples of Buddha, is “enlightened”? We don’t know or ever will, especially in the context of thousands of years later among contemporaries.

The relevance of meditative practice to society is thus conflated with two different goals. The Dalai Lama discourages what he calls asceticism, which he considers extreme. But the asceticism criticized by the historical Buddha is nowhere practiced. It is, perhaps, a straw man. The issue today is the extreme of indulgence, not the extreme of asceticism.

The Dalia Lama writes:

It is best, I believe, for a lay practitioner to remain involved in society, while leading a spiritual life. Though some exceptional individuals may be capable of dedicating themselves totally to pursuing meditative practices, I myself try to follow a middle path, balancing spiritual and worldly responsibility.

This sentiment is safe and acceptable, but dilutes the traditions that constructed practice in the first place, leaving spiritual expression largely to clerics, monks, and scholars, a bifurcation familiar in the West, undertaken perhaps to make making Buddhism more adaptable to Western tastes and lifestyles.

A recent post touched upon benign examples of blindness in literature and art: naive innocence, virtue following the notion that “justice is blind,” that blindness does not take into account appearance or superficiality in judging or interpreting. In literature, an example was the character DeLacey in Shelley’s Frankenstein. Blind characters abound in popular film. To Sir With Love, to cite an example, features a blind female student enamored of her male teacher – she does not realize that he is black and therefore she can afford to ignore the conventions of society because she does not judge by appearance. In art, blind hermits are depicted accompanied by angelic figures, as if confirming the hermit’s enhanced powers of the perception of virtue.

Tiresias, the ancient Greek mythological prophet, provides a transition in judging the “powers” of blindness, for he has been blinded by the gods but has acquired the gift of divination, which, however, is a weighty and dubious gift when consulted by Oedipus.

Blindness is a physical condition and usually attributed to the absence of insight, sometimes ominously. Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, makes blindness a horrible miasma that overcomes an entire city, unleashing the true character of people with evil results. Saramago himself is blind.

Rudyard Kipling’s first novel, The Light That Failed, features an ambitious protagonist who is a military artist, sketching warfare in what was called Anglo-Sudan in the 19th century. He is wounded in a blow to the head. On his return to England, he seeks out a childhood friend to share his artistic gifts, but she rejects him. Disillusioned, he undertakes the portrait of a perfect woman, but then realizes that he is losing his sight, and does so before his masterpiece can be completed. He then convinces a military friend to take him back to the scene of his original work, and he is killed in a firefight, as he wanted to be.

Granted that there are no blind characters in Joseph Conrad’s last novel, Victory, but the elements of physical and spiritual isolation are intense, and suspense is made a blindness intrinsic to characters battling fate. The novel deals explicitly with a solitary man’s fate. Employed by an export company in distant Pacific Islands, the protagonist finds himself adrift when the company folds. He sets up household on a deserted island, and alludes to his father’s grand philosophy of life in quotations from Schopenhauer. In the Dutch supply town, the protagonist rescues a young woman from hostile circumstances and brings her to the island, while a pair of sharp frauds pursue him for his imagined buried treasure. The climax of the novel is not only the resolution of the conflict but the destruction of the cast of characters, which in retrospect the author sees as a victory for the integrity of both self and solitude.

Every spiritual tradition uses the vocabulary of sight, insight, coming to realize, enlightenment, and so forth. The analogy with physical sight is well established, but the notion of enhanced versus deteriorated physical sight is often made culture’s touchstone analogy. Culture itself, however, represents multiple assumptions about what it can “see,” understand, and convey as norms and values. Just as true meditative practice is a falling away of assumptions about environs and worldliness, so too must physical sight be not an assumption of insight but a report of context, a literal report to our true organs of discernment, which cannot reside in blindness or non-blindness alone.

Naming American generations and characterizing them is a fanciful exervise but can yield some points for thought. Here are a few with likely themes.

Great Generation (WW2) – “The world is a mess and it’s everybody else’s fault.”
Boomer Generation (50s & 60s) – “The world is a mess and we could have/should have/would have/almost/ fixed it.”
Generation X, “Me” generation (70s-90s) – “The world is a mess and I’m hunkering down with what’s mine.”
Generation Y, “Millennial” generation (2000s) – “The world is a mess but there are so many cool things going on.”

Today’s millennials (Y generation) often describe themselves as minimalist, though not as art or aesthetics but as an entire lifestyle. The degrees of minimalism vary in kind and consistency, but is largely based on the economic and technological backdrop of 21st century life in developed countries.

Previous generations to that of the last two decades were accustomed to locally-based manufacturing, production, communication, and travel. Millenials no longer see any of this with the dominance of outsourcing, outdated technologies, disappearance of labor replaced by service jobs, and a world as tense and violent as ever.

The dominance of the Internet and social media has dominated and displaced communication technologies. The millennials’ argument for fewer possessions is as much based on increased capacities of modern technologies that at the same time are physically smaller than ever. The multiple functions of a smart phone or tablet displace many previous technologies. The application of new technologies to everything from automobiles to banking to shopping to learning foster the illusion of simplicity even while increasing dependence on larger infrastructure, corporate control, and easier surveillance. But the marketing of consumption continues and grows even while touting a new simplicity in getting rid of objects — or rather miniaturizing them.

Thus millennial limiting of possessions such as books, clothing, and furniture can be lauded when based on values of simplicity, but less so when motivation is ease of replacement via web-based vendors, two-day delivery, easy credit and downloadable access. In this case, minimalism is resistance to the temptation to buy too much because of minimal living space rather than the virtue of abstinence.

In this millennium, many professional jobs have been outsourced in developing coutries, leaving an information and economic gap between professional-level jobs and service jobs that basically “service” the professional classes. The college graduate serving at the coffee shop is a typical example. Such an economy is then bolstered, complemented, or designed to limit labor and benefits of job stability, and stability of residence. Such mobility in jobs and residence used to be the provenance of upwardly-mobile professionals, but in this century it characterizes the millenial with less money and fewer prospects for better work. Hence debt and the hustle to work become full-time concerns, and the aspiration to minimalism a motive that is primarily economic.

Simplicity in the stable (middle) class was and remains an effort to declutter life, closets, and garages from too many attachments, possessions, and gratuitous clingings. The millenial has necessarily passed this stage from sheer economic pressure and technological capacities. The millennial does not have mutiple shoes, multiple coats, and multiple CDs and DVDs because technology and apartment rental (they are either mobile or cannot afford a house — or both) doesn’t make it practical or economical. At least this is a millenial aspiration though doubtless not all share it.

Today’s generation may find its way nimbly while an older generation simply adds the new technology to its clutter. The angst of the boomer is surpassed by the gluttony of the “me” middle-agers, and now succeeded by the cautious millennials. May their minimalism resemble neither a Beckett stage nor a Potemkin impoverished village but a reconciliation to the future, which is certainly dim and foreboding, as the millennial knows well — or ought to. The assault on nature and the destruction of sustainability makes simplicity not only a necessity but a strategy, which, hopefully can be reconciled to the deeper and sustaining values that every generation of sages has practiced.

Blindness is both a condition and, in popular speech, a metaphor. The blind person cannot see, while the metaphor makes blindness both a virtue and a a stigma. Justice is blind, it will be said, and a just person does not weigh appearance or visual details when making a moral judgment. At the same time, to be blind can be a metaphor for stubborn ignorance, as in the saying that there is none so blind as one who cannot see, or does not want to see, or when someone rants at another about missing something obvious in a task or an argument: “How could you be so blind!” or “Are you blind?”

Clearly, common speech and metaphor has not yet sorted out the difference between physical condition and mental ones, as words like lame and dumb are still widely used for multiple meanings.

A classic literary presentation of blindness is in the Mary Shelley character of De Lacey in her novel Frankenstein. The plot revolves around the “monster” that scientist Dr. Frankenstein has created but now rues with a compelling desire to destroy it. The “monster” represents the outsider, the persecuted, the ugly and repulsive to all he encounters, with evil intent ascribed to his mere appearance though he is originally without “sin” or harmful desire. One night the monster enters the DeLacey house. The family is away except the blind DeLacey, who sits alone in the parlor.

The monster apologizes for the intrusion and tells him:

I am an unfortunate and deserted creature. I look around and I have no relation or friend upon earth. … I am an outcast in the world forever.

After more conversation on the subject wherein the monster seeks the kindness of none other than De Lacey’s family, described obliquely, the old gentleman replies:

I am blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but thesre is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere.

Reassured, the monster thanks DeLacey for his kindness and aid, hoping thereby that “I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow creatures.” DeLacey responds that even if this visitor was hunted as a criminal, it would not abrogate his humanity and virtue as a person.

Two ironies emerge: first, that DeLacey himself is a political exile and deemed a criminal because of his revolutionary politics, and, second, that the monster is unreflectively placed by DeLacey in the company of human beings identified with entitlement to beneficence, when the source of his origin as a creature is at issue: his humanity or lack of it, his acursed existence and animosity toward his creator who made him so flawed. Thus the monster’s plight and DeLacey’s blindness are aspects of the same flawed humanity.

Shelley’s views are romantic but morally charged. English poet John Milton, writing centuries earlier, went blind in adulthood but bargained in his own manner for his Lord’s grace against the unassuming fictional DeLacey, even less Frankenstein’s monster. Milton in his poem “On His Blindness” credits his patience with affliction a source of redeeming virtue for him. At the same time one senses in Milton’s verbal demurring from resentment the suggestion that God’s blindness itself is the true moral issue at hand.

A curious case of a blind hermit depicted in art is a painting by the British painter Thomas Stothard (1755-1834). The painting, held by the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts (U.S.), is conventionally labeled “Blind Hermit” by most sources. But in fact the painting is “Belisarius the Blind,” depicting an event in Byzantine history — dubious in having been written five centuries after the supposed event. Belisarius was the outstanding conqueror-general of Emperor Justinian, whose suspicions were aroused by his general’s successes and presumed ambitions. Upon returnng to the capital, Justinian had Belisarius blinded and cast out as a beggar. Undoubtedly, however, the portrait easily evokes a hermit, and his young helper an angelic presence.

Stothard’s painting, too, may evoke Tobit of the Old Testament and his son, though his son was older by the time of his father’s blindness, and the old man Tobit is not a hermit but a doublet of Job, even to his complaints against God, who has done this to him.

The American engraver William French (1815-1898) also created a blind hermit with young guide, sentimental and stylized, closly parallel to Stothard, enough to sugget imitation. His blind hermit has no classical robe, however, and is less ambigously a medieval monk, complete with beads. French’s work is also held by the Perkins School.

The suggestive incapacity of blindness coupled with the near-outcast status of the hermit makes an image of pathos, especially when assigned a story of past success, as in the depiction by Stothard. In the imaginative novel The Bee-loud Glade of American writer Steve Himmer, the protagonist drops out of the rat race to become a decorative hermit but grows nearly blind as he ages, now become a true hermit living in concealment and solitude. Incapacity pursues everyone who ages, but for the hermit the challenge is greater. This writer knows because double vision and glaucoma slow his pace, especially for reading, writing, and research.

The popular conception of blindness as a physical reversal of sight but also a possible and mysterious alternative yielding true insight remains a literary and artistic convention. Add the historical perception of the hermit as self-sufficient in both simplicity and wisdom and the archtype is relatively complete.

The structures and morals presented by traditional religions, especially the three scriptural religions of the West, have a clear historical and cultural basis. By the time the historical religions address many of the essential issues, it is too late — human beings have developed particular instincts, behaviors and values that are already set long before the religions conceive of values and abstractions that can affect social existence. Neurology and anthropology now contribute research that only further demonstrates what has always been anticipated by sage individuals who did not bind themselves to the tribal and cultural circumscriptions of the historical religions of their day. That they could borrow from them, reform them, or transform them, even as firm and long-lived institutions, was at most an adventitious sally.

The human brain developed primordial behaviors that predate formal history. The first such stage is amply demonstrated by the paleolithic, characterized by sheer survival interests: food, shelter, hunting, territoriality, and reproduction, a set of behaviors dominated by the amygdala, a stage appropriately called reptilian in its instictiveness. The era of the instinctive brain saw the expansion of human beings over Africa and Europe and beyond. The era brought the whosesale extermination by humans of entire species such as the wooly mammath and saber-toothed tiger, destroyed by rapacious hunting. This behavior also created the rudiments of society, for as humans sought larger and more numerous prey they came to realize that cooperation in numbers led to more effective hunting. Thus was nurtured familiar social behaviors, hierarchies, power displays, and tribalisms.

The second stage of brain development is the limbic or emotional, which provided sensations, responses, and feelings to human experience. The more primitive responses were within the realm of fear as human gauged situations and became capable of responding to them, chiefly as fight or flight. Thus the experience of the paleolithic (fight not flight) is transmuted into the reflectiveness of, for example, what is witnessed in the Lausaux cave paintings, where we see humans clearly engaged in the activities of the Paleolithic but now becoming aware of the patterns in animal life, movement, and migration, and suggesting that these patterns evoke emotions. From the limbic stage, memory rituals evolve to capture the emotional experiences, engendered by a desire to give greater meaning to the animal hunt, to put the animal and the human into a larger context evoking feeling. Second stage sensibility tempers the later Indo-European and Semitic animal sacrifice rituals into religious expressions.

The third stage of brain development is the most decisive: the neo-mammalian complex, which in turn developed four distinct areas (and functions), these functions further enabling existing evolutionary potentials to finally find a conscious channel of control and use. The five senses, for example, could now be consciously applied and used, as opposed to being merely passive and receptive functions without self-consciousness, without even the tentative self-consciousness of the second stage hunter. The developed neocortex included four brain lobes and their attendant functions: the occipital (visual), the perietal (spatial), the temporal (sound, speech, voice), and the frontal (integrative and coordinating the other three). This development provided human beings the ability to assign context and continuity to all human experience and memory.

With the fourth stage we are led to the holistic being identified today as a person.

The fourth stage of brain development was the sophistication of the prefrontal cortex, which allows for the immediate processing and assigning of meaning for retention of all the experiences initially processed in the third stage. Development of the prefrontal cortex provides the essential regulation of fear as an emotion, to the entire “fight or flight” syndrome. The prefrontal cortex does this by providing context to events, by providing emotional feedback and reason (or at least sensibility) to address events and context, and, importantly, to compare experiences, judge them, and make plans for addressing them in the here and now and into the future. In terms of brain development, stages one and two form the clearest distinctions of behavior, while three and four emerge logically and are available for social application.

Historically, brain development provides tools and functions, and only hints at socially functional and ultimately culturally and morally viable behaviors. Use of the brain to optimially develop beahviors and ethics is an elusive pursuit, and has never been of predominance in the institutional and cultural history of the major civilizations, where stage one behaviors around power, hierarchy, and control, enhanced by late stages for incorporating reason and persuasion, make the stage one behavior more formidable and lethal. War, aggression, and violence have been the hallmark of society.

The brain’s development has ben frustrated at every cultural turn by the rejection of late stage behavior in favor of stage one behavior orcestrated by elites utilizing late stage behavior manipulatively. One need only glance at the scriptures of ancients, from Hebrews to Greeks to Etruscans to Persians, from Indo-Europeans to later Semites, to witness the hunter stage extended into civilization and urban life and institutions, often with the clever use of late stage behavior. (And the same can be said of modern society.)

Thhe input of religious thought — itself a product of the same given cultures — is therefore always too late chronologically in mitigating this process of social and political behvior. Either the religion ends up collaborating with stage one behavior or underestimating the entrenchment of society in stage one behavior. One looks to more authentic later stage behaviors prompting the human ability to specialize, plan, appreciate, create, and aspire only to find these behaviors compromised and corrupted by the institutions that suppressed these behaviors and thoughts in favor of the powerful.

Inevitably the exceptional sages and the eremitic personalities of antiquity and not the mainstream religious or philosophical thinkers were to provide intellectual breakthroughs and social models alternative to their contemporaries and their cultural circumstances — in India, China, Japan, and tangentially in East Asia and Europe.

Salvation is an integral concept in the mature world religions East and West. Christianity and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, contain salvific mechanisms, although their methods differ. In early religions, salvation is ambiguous because afterlife is ambiguous. The ancient Greek Hades presented a murky underworld, and the Jewish sheol was a vague state of unclear lingering below, which evolved into hell in Christian thought. Vedic Hinduism, too, did not evolved a notion of salvation because it had no clear views on afterlife but, like Judaism, concentrated on correct ritualism. Corrupted overworlds like the Norse Valhalla, or the literalist pleasures of Christian heaven or Muslim Jannah full of gold, foods, and triumphalism are of little persuasion to the wise.

Salvation itself is a tenuous element even in religious vocabularies because there can be no definite description, only desire. In Western thought, salvation is the product of divine intercession because of this tenuous status of will and grace, wherein salvation cannot be achieved by personal effort. The figure of Jesus as divine intercessor parallels the prophetic intervention of Muhammed. In the East, salvation is mediated in part by the Buddha, but the entire salvific mechanism in Mahayana Buddhism especially is made more tenuous by the absense of true divinity or theism as regulatory intercession.

What is the need for salvation if not afterlife and perpetuation of integral being? — a proposal about which mechanism so little can be said even by religionists? In the East, the mechanism of karma absorbs the moral justification for perpetuation, but cannot retain individual identity because there is no self in Eastern thinking. Instead, the karmic element transmigrates to another person, and while this mechanism preserves some of the moral persuasion of the religion, it is comparable to the shade of the Greek underworld in its viability.

Salvation in the East consists of retaining moral elements to pass on to strangers, which is for the individual an ineluctable process with no particular individual reward. The Mahayana tradition of Buddhism in particular presents the work of bodhicitta as exemplary, the work of saving all sentient beings even if the effort means postponing all reincarnation or nirvana, the latter being dissolution of the cycle of life and death. The Boddhisatva, therefore, like the Muslim martyr or Christian saint, dedicates a life to salvific work, perpetuating religious viability through the lives of witnesses and the people they influence — a very social undertaking. Hinduism, more traditional in its karmic cycle, has no such role except, perhaps, within the person’s defined caste. Karma cycles serendipitously, like the later Christian election based on good works but not on priesthoods or castes or the prayers of others, where grace falls like rain where it may.

Where the point of view of observers today lies in reviewing these cultural interpretations of salvation is squarely within personality and culture. Someone raised within a religion and not given to social change will likely remain within their traditional beliefs, nor can it be argued that intelligent religious believers are few. But anyone with a critical faculty and a modicum of curiosity will review these world responses to life, death, and afterlife, and consider where the notion of salvation falls. Does a person need to be saved? Late post-Christian sects such as Unitarians proposed universal salvation, which begs the question of any efficacy to having a moral criteria and designing the nature of afterlife. The premisses of afterlife govern many people’s moral compass, and salvation is for them a necessity of authority and behavior.

The hermit of every world tradition, including religious hermits, do not view the issue of salvation in terms of a personal goal or mandate. The hermit recluses from the world specifically to avoid the mundane debates about what it takes to be better or worse and to merit salvation or not. Similarly the hermit avoids the social functions of salvation, and the presumed necessities of pursuing social activities that justify salvation.

The hermit, including the religious hermit, has insight into the human condition and the folly of deriving a philosophy of life based on the mass sentiment for ameliorating sin and evil, the inevitability of fall and grace, the vicious cycle of act and regret. The hermit has dropped all of this and does not act, does not impose, interpret, seize, desire, or persuade. The hermit’s solidarity is with the permanence of whatever cycle he or she has identified and detailed, however consciously, and it is in the eremitic life that the hermit finds salvation.

Love is romantic, emotional, even spiritual, according to the various points of perception: literary, psychological, or religious. The dictionary is mundane: love is compulsion, desire, even obsession. This is the understanding of most people, who see love originating with physical and aesthetic attraction, then personality, then hormones. After this phase, love continues in a subtle, quiet allegiance, loyalty, or identification based on longevity, companionship, and shared values. The origins of love is as a survival instinct, and when young people begin to express this interest, one can be sure that the expression is instinctual, filtered by cultural factors. The duration of love is a testimony of successful complementarity and affection.

These are not new facts. The acceleration of the expression of love through vertical stages of presumed sophistication, from physical to aesthetic, to psychological, to abstract cultural to relgious or spiritual, culminating in love of God or the grand analogy of “God is love,” at least in those with a particular religious interest is perhaps new to the dictionary. The mundane train of thought suspends the consideration of a durability, a horizontal character, to love, inevitably biased towards the emotional and romantic, to the vertical. So in the mundane view, love is identified with the vertical, not the horizontal.

But how does the lofty acceleration from instinct to absolute, entirely vertical, change the mundane definition of compulsion and desire? Or, rather, is it not an extension of such thinking?

Many attempts to spiritualize the trajectory of love as purified of the carnal can be found among spiritual writers. Rumi distinguishes the “temple of love” (the physical) from love itself (the spiritual), and Teresa of Avila portrayed her ecstasies by analogy with physical raptures but sanitized spiritual experiences, though in contrast to some mystics like Eckhart, her pursuits appear to be invoked and intentional. But even for the intentional spiritual interest, love cannot escape the instinctual element; love must be other than a vertical ascent but cannot escape this experience because it seeks to reproduce the analogous path or way, which is physical and psychological. Love with an object, however absolute the object, cannot but fit the mundane definition.

In Eastern thought, love is a difusion of identification with the universe, with all sentient beings. Not that lay people and householders are assuming this in their personal relations. Rather, spiritual practitioners do not imitate or transcend the instinctual vertical instead bypassing it for a completely different application of the affective faculty. Because God is within all reality, the expression of love cannot be analogous to the instinctual expression. This love does not take on a function of adding pleasure in order to promote survival. In Eastern thought, love is compassion for its innumerable objects, not desire for one object, even if that object is God. For Eastern thought, all reality is in the same existential plane, and worthy of compassion, worthy of love. The Western aberrations of love — lust, greed, ego, obsession — are made not impossible by Eastern though but irrelevant to the process of love or compassion. They are on a different plane. The plane of compassion is almost horizontal, and not, like Western love, constantly piqued to a vertical height that overshadows any other emotion, sentiment, or desire.

The hermit can see this distinction and retains it in daily life. The peaks of vertical ascent are to be avoided; enlightenment is naturally horizontal, it is not going up or down but within, while retaining a grand vision of identifying with nature. The excesses of Western love are in the same bucket as temptations, and are not sanitized to justify a spiritual expression of desire, greed, or obsession. The hermit, whether Eastern or Western, is in the fortunate situation of being able to express love as compassion, serving all and serving none, by the faculty of understanding and empathy, lacking the tribulations of what is commonly called love.