hermit's thatch

The Stoic philosopher Seneca displays Roman ignorance when he blithely reports (Epistle 108) that he is acetic because he abstains from mushrooms and oysters — not wine, however, because it is easier to consume it moderately than to abstain altogether. A similar misconception about ascetic practice can be found in the historical Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice deftly abused by certain medieval monks who devised exemptions for travelers arriving on their grounds on Friday, and took walks to qualify themselves as travelers exempted from the ban on meat consumption.

Perhaps these practices were mere moral shortcomings. Or perhaps these failed practices are distinctly Western failures, as Heidegger suggests in a larger context in “The Origins of the Work of Art.” They represent the Western failure to comprehend the original motivating experience behind practices. The failed practices (Heidegger begins by suggesting words and concepts) only bring a version of translation, an inorganic appropriation, to an uncomprehending culture.

This translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek words. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.

Thus, asceticism in the Christian Greek world — based on not only the language but the authentic experience of Syriac and Egyptian practices — is not a translation in the degree that Latin Roman practice, distant in time but also in spirit — not to say culture and language — inevitably remained. Western asceticism begins not in practice but in thought, in thoughtful reconstruction of what the desert experience was, now filtered through the Roman mentality of codes, hierarchies, and rituals.

Perhaps embedded in this issue, too, is what Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman refers to when he describes his personal search for authenticity in world religious tradition. Sanskrit and Tibetan alphabets are comprised of polysyllables, essentially words, but Western alphabets are comprised of contrived symbols that not only mean nothing but cannot be sounded without conjoining with other letters. What is the sound of “b” without adding “a” or “e”, for example? Hence reason and logic are applied to contrived symbols rather than to lived experience expressed. The Western form of translation, here, too, is “without a corresponding, equally authentic experience,” to return to Heidegger’s observation.

Without this lived experience, asceticism remains a set of contrived rules, an artificiality. No wonder the West must endlessly dabble in imported pieces of religion and spiritual practices that must be packaged for meaning because the pieces are not lived experience.

This phenomenon overtakes yoga, tai-chi chuan, meditation, prayer, belief, philosophizing, asceticism — any non-Western experience, any historical phenomenon that only individual practice at the heart of meaning, prior to culture and translation, can hope to address. As Heidegger says elsewhere, the East has “no thought” but the West, steeped in reason and logic, can only use thought to try to go beyond thought. And this can only be accomplished by the solitary individual.

Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-2004) defined five mental or behavioral stages of dying in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. The stages are:

1. Denial and isolation
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

The stages were later extrapolated to grief in general. Opponents argued that the stages are not necessarily ordered, depending on the subject, and not necessarily experienced at all in situations where social environment is healthy and individuals are resilient. But the objections come late compared to Kubler-Ross’ work in the fifties and sixties when death, dying, and grief were still experienced by most Americans (those are the subjects she interviewed) in a traditional fashion. Medical personnel was aloof and hospitals were themselves intended to be a last stage for dying patients. Kubler-Ross recounts her childhood in Switzerland and the forms of dying centered in family and village life, the absence of medical technology and hospitals, and the centrality of religious and cultural expression — none of which are constructive factors today, with the larger exception of the hospice movement that Kubler-Ross inspired.

Kubler-Ross notes that hope of recovery was consistently high, even to the end, not only in religious-minded patients but in firmly non-religious. Perhaps it was culture-based, personality-dependent, or simply a survival mechanism. Otherwise, psychology and personality may alone have formed the attitudes of those harboring degrees of anger and resentment. Kubler-Ross’ gentle methods of eliciting a consciousness of these feelings in her patients shows that, indeed, she was aware of variables in individual temperament and resilience.

In retrospect, depression is not as dominant a stage as one might guess. Deriving grief from depression, in turn, suggests a backward application of depression in dying. While real, depression and grief are nevertheless experienced very subjectively. Not surprisingly, they early were targets of the medical and pharmaceutical industries to which Kubler-Ross referred negatively and which preempt the dying process decisively today.

The dying process best culminates in voluntary and conscious decathexis, the withdrawal from people, objects, environments. One might apply the term philosophically in order to approximate the eremitical and sage traditions that have always suggested that life is a process of dying, and that withdrawal and simplicity best nourish this course.

Later in life, Kubler-Ross took a serious interest in near-death studies, tangential but somewhat more speculative, to be sure, versus the psychology of dying. In meditative traditions, the phenomenology of near-death experience is parallel to the pursuit of esoteric powers, to be looked upon with suspicion as a distraction from the true goal of living, and dying.

Less noticed but effective in On Death and Dying is how Kubler-Ross links poetic lines from Rabindranath Tagore to the various attitudes and mindsets typical in the emotional life and in the dying process. This poetic context enriches the somewhat clinical observations in the book, which are, after all, largely transcripts of dying people’s feelings. By developing this poetic and philosophical sense of life and nature, death and dying, the question of resilience and environment can give way to a sensibility that is whole and complete, as should be the dying process itself.

1. Denial and isolation.
   “Man barricades against himself.” (Stray Birds, 79)
2. Anger.
   “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” (Stray Birds, 75)
3. Bargaining.
   “The woodcutter’s axe begged for its handle from the tree. The tree gave it.” (Stray Birds, 71)
4. Depression.
   “The world rushes on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness.” (Stray Birds, 44)
5. Acceptance.
   “I have got my leave, Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure.
   Here I give back the keys of my door — and I give up all claims to my house, I only ask for last kind words from you.
   We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.” (Gitanjali, 93)

The “pro-introvert” advice of writings like Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking risks manufacturing a class of aberrant individuals with special needs. Cain herself compares introverts to women in a patriarchal world, calling introverts “second-class citizens.” But the intent to help introverts succeed in an insane world is inevitably paralleled by advice to authorities, managers, and bosses on how to best tap the skills and insights of introverts — for the former’s use.

But the mature introvert doesn’t want to succeed in an insane world, and powerful people only want to employ, direct, and socialize with others useful to themselves.

Introversion is a personality characteristic that exists across all cultural and social groups, and largely created by heredity, family, psychological, and social environment in children (especially to age 5 years). Introversion is not pursued consciously as a style but within the persona as integral to the psyche. Other factors in their early lives include treatment by parents, haphazard evolution of self-esteem, slower emergence of social skills, and the development of solitary self-sufficiency in routine pursuits of play and interest in environment.

Introverts understand instinctively the role of these factors in their upbringing and how it limits them in social contexts. But while many introverts may find frustrating their inability to operate smoothly in social contexts, they quickly learn from discomfort that they can survive with a minimum or no such settings. They discover that they can be reconciled to their personality, and, indeed, find strong and fruitful resources to sustain themselves.

Non-introverts sympathetic with the marginalization of introverts in corporate or institutional settings need not fret that introverts are slighted, even punished. Knowing that they cannot coach introverts into behaving like extroverts or even balanced personalities, much well-intentioned advice instead ends up counseling corporate and institutional managers on how to elicit participation from introverts. Much of the practical advice is fair and do-able, and for managers and authorities to realize techniques for eliciting introvert input on group projects and “teamwork” is not unreasonable given the boss’s job. But an important insight is being overlooked in these relationships.

Introverts are frequently excellent critics of what goes on around them. They do not usually voice their views — not only because they are socially uneasy but often because they are not going to accede to group thinking, to organizational goals and objectives to which they ultimately may not subscribe.

Introverts develop their self-image from their own insights, imaginations, and vision — not from their work-for-money efforts or social circles of insiders, intimates, or buddies. In the corporate and work world, introvert know that the efforts are put on for vague social conventions, while workplace maneuvering is often just for private gain. Introverts simply don’t identify with these social methods or private gains. Simply put, smart introverts already know (or are on the way to knowing) themselves and their vision of how things should be, at least for themselves, whether in creative, natural, psychological, or spiritual senses. In nearly every way, these senses or intimations of how things should be in the world (but are not) differ from what a collective social group of any sort can attain, or, further, is even aware.

The appearance of distraction, alienation, lack of cooperation, or just an apparent “attitude” attributed to the introvert when in a social context is not directed against anyone or anything. It is just that introverts are actively tending their gardens while others either think they are ready to harvest or haven’t even planted a seed. Introverts have a low tolerance for small talk.

Pro-introvert advice that cheer-leads the hapless introvert is self-defeating. What can be more frustrating to the introvert in the world than the intransigence of authorities running institutions and organizations is realizing that his or her fate is in the realm of their worse skill, their least interest, namely, of pretending to be other than what one is.

The Metta Sutta or Metta prayer, petition, recitation or wish-granting aspiration, is a traditional Buddhist prayer originating in Theravada practice as the Karaniya Metta Sutta but popular in Mahayana practice as well in its association with the bodhisattva. More elaborate versions exist but here is a short, specific version:

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.
May all beings be free.

The prayer has an external philosophical meaning, an epistemological premise about the nature of things. Our wish or desire is a sentiment or aspiration (“may this, may that …” ), but with an understanding that no one can change intrinsic reality. We may throw up our hands at wishful thinking.

But internally the prayer transforms the reciter towards a motivation for enlightenment. All beings ought to be at peace in this universe. They ought to be happy. They ought to be safe. So while humans might claim this desirable state for themselves because we theoretically are capable of it, we now affirm the desirability on behalf of all creatures, something that not all religions incorporate in their aspirations.

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.

And we affirm it for ourselves and all creatures not as a Kantian imperative from elsewhere — beings are not capable of it — but in the universal empathetic sense of responding to the question of why there is suffering. It ought not to be such, we say to ourselves on behalf of other creatures. And from that moment, we no longer think of ourselves but enter into communion with nature and all beings.

How is it possible to make a state of being for all beings that is peaceful, happy, and safe? Just as the bodhisattva vows to work indefinitely for this goal in an active way, the reciter of the Metta Sutta does so more modestly but positively nevertheless. It is done by changing personal actions, behaviors, and habits that promote this set of conditions in the self and indirectly promote these states for all beings. An ethical agenda emerges from an aspiration that now transforms self. How one lives, consumes, spends, eats, drinks, acts, speaks, lives — everything takes on an ethical dimension. What best promotes the well-being of plants, animals, people, even inanimate beings, promotes our own well-being.

Yet this progress of thought, which has the potential for progress towards enlightenment, is brought to one’s consciousness from outside of ourselves but emerges from deep thought about the nature of things. Thus it is not found outside the self ultimately, not coerced or compelled at this stage but grown by oneself, within oneself, often against society, social conventions and habits, and societal consciousness.

May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.

Finally comes the essential part tying in with Buddhist metaphysics. The true nature of all beings is interdependence, prescribing a necessary empathy or consciousness, confirming the previous affirmations. But also true of the awakening to true nature is the reality of impermanence, of transience, which all beings seem to harbor. This reality gives even more urgency to the delicate interdependence and the first three aspirations. To realize impermanence, to awake to this truth, is to awaken to true nature, unalterably reality.

May all beings be free.

Paradoxically, then, the Buddhist (and Hindu) notion of rebirth, springing from a more primordial, less philosophical religious tradition, seems to contradict impermanence, transience. Like rebirth, or fear of rebirth, the awareness of impermanence is a profound source of suffering. The poignancy of transience, of “mono no aware,” ought to frustrate the goal of aspiration. So in either case, we want, and all creatures want, to be free — free from suffering, free from rebirth, even free from transience. And this is nirvana.

Every search for a philosophy of solitude runs into Nietzsche, especially the clever aphoristic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The ancient argument of whether or not an author’s writing is projected autobiography immediately arises. For in Zarathustra is a prime representative of the issue, and the mask of Nietzsche rises to confuse a clear appreciation of solitude. Zarathustra celebrates solitude with a reluctant reconciliation, while at the same time disparaging not only his potential disciples but even hermits, particularly the mad desert hermits (as Nietzsche assessed them).

Zarathustra’s failures as a worldly prophet of eremitism (or, in this case, a brand of egoism under the umbrella of solitude, of the anti-societal) are absolved by his conscience. He returns, failing in his speeches in the marketplace and the byways, to his warm and friendly cave:

O solitude! O my home, solitude! Too long have I lived wildly in wild places not to return home to you in tears. … How happily and tenderly your voice speaks to me. We do not question each other, we do not complain to each other, we often walk together though open doors. … To be forsaken is one thing, to be lonely another. … You will always among others seem wild and strange.

Here Nietzsche is speaking of himself — wild and strange. The psychoanalyst will see complex feelings and emotional imbalances in Nietzsche’s personal life as the source of panegyrics like the one quoted. Similarly, too, are his praises of the “courage of hermits and eagles” and his reference to “my hermit’s heart.” But personally, Zarathustra-Nietzsche was not really reconciled to his solitude, and the contradictions, clever or contrived as may be, confirm this.

Nietzsche held a special venom towards those who successfully embraced eremitism or discovered a workable formula from their solitude:

In solitude, whatever one has brought into it grows. … Therefore solitude is inadvisable for the many. Has there been anything filthier on earth so far than desert saints? Around them not only was the devil loose but also the swine.

Here is the intellectualization, the abstraction, of lived eremitism, but not the reconciliation to it. Like the Enlightenment-era historian Edward Gibbon, very much a solitary not from philosophy but from personality, Nietzsche reacts vituperatively towards successful solitaries. Does he deduce that beliefs include and absorb solitude, or is a solitude capable that is not subordinate to belief? In short, is Nietzsche’s objection (like Gibbon’s) only to Christian hermits? What about his own atheist or secular hermits as solitaries, the latter represented by himself as Zarathustra?

Nietzsche had by this time already rejected Wagner’s romantic solitary as a reconstruction of Romanticism rather than a transcendence. And he had already rejected Schopenhauer’s admiration for Buddhism — and by extension its long tradition of eremitism — because it was not life-affirming, in his words. So perhaps the hermit or solitary in Nietzsche anticipates the Camus-like outsider or stranger, in both cases affirming not mere atheism but epicureanism or sensualism, as in Dionysus. Camus’ early works celebrate sun and sea and senses in a pagan rather than Enlightenment way; Nietzsche’s Dionysus would fit that mode of expression, the solitary (or ego) whom nothing reconciles.

Indeed, the Nieztschean solitary would evolve into the Ubermensch or Overman, leaving behind even the juxtapositions of Dionysus not Diogenes, and certainly of Zarathustra not the bikkhu or eremite. Even a secularized hermit, dwelling in wilderness or obscurity, was not good enough for Nietzsche. A Thoreau would be dismissed for his mildness and Stoicism.

In the end, Nietzsche’s solitude is an interim step to egoism, a skin to be shed, a mask to be abandoned.

Creation stories around the world have presented the same structure, the same basic narrative: a male and a female human being are created (or engendered or fashioned, produced) — after or before everything else that exists — by a deity or natural force or primordial process. Then the male and the female reproduce and their offspring disseminate throughout the world, with the fate of the original humans soon overshadowed, though their character has indelibly marked the nature of human beings ever after.

Science has employed the same motif — not with a primordial couple, of course — describing generation, reproduction, and distribution across the planet, reflecting adaptation to various habitats, and accounting for the “nature” of human beings genetically and environmentally. The engendering force is not described but assumed. The notion of chaos or a succession of chaotic events as evolution parallels the attempted logic tenuously explaining all outcomes.

The concurrence of myth and science on fundamentals of human origins reinforces the notion that all human beings are related to one another in some essential way, even if that way is crudely material. All human beings are familial. Such a notion is not odd or irrational projection, not idealism, but a matter of biology and logic, observable today through countless observations. The separation of human beings into many cultures, languages, customs, beliefs, and habits is a matter of climate, geography, and circumstances. It, too, is the subject of many folk and mythological tales and scenarios, for primitive peoples universally sought to describe the phenomena around them, however colorfully. Indeed, do we not vainly try to describe the phenomena around us as avidly, if not with much more insight or success?

The history of animal populations from aquatic to reptile, insect, bird, and mammal, all evidence simple and basic patterns of behavior that are merely amplified in humans, extended by a diversity of common factors of social behavior. Perhaps the unwelcome (to some) notion of kindredship among all human beings is only less welcome (to others) than the auxiliary notion that animals and all sentient beings are intrinsically related to us.

Ironically, the very tool exercised by human beings in their evolution from other species (or from the moment of their creation, it does not matter which) is consciousness. Consciousness is what separates human beings from the sense of unity among all beings. This separation is not simply the separation of natural units but a profound alienation that is the cause of our misery, restlessness, and destructiveness.

Consciousness is not alienation; reflection on separation is alienation. Anxiety arising from separation is the root of the sense of obligation to transform the totality of environment from physical to mental in order to assuage the wound, the source of misery that consciousness unattended lays heavily upon human beings.

This urge to transform becomes an urge to deform: to deform landscape, space, time, relations between humans (society) and relations with all living and non-sentient things. Ultimately, this condition or sense of separation from nature and creation is woven into the narratives of myth and explanation, rule and value, law and order, society and person.

The narrative affirms the separation and indeed celebrates it, for it can then project the possibility, the necessity, of transcending it and transforming society into an all-encompassing super- or over-humanity (to use the Nietzschean notion more loosely). However, where Nietzsche sees the ubermensch as a necessity of the modern era to safeguard the individual, society as a whole (and its elites) extended this notion to itself and spreads it over selected parts of itself, such that Nietzsche’s dreaded State was not only not transcended but actually strengthened through various transformations reaching to an over- or super- status, chiefly through technology and consolidation of social infrastructure.

The co-opting by society of the notion of a transcendence intended for the individual was inevitable. What are the virtues of the individual? Whatever they are, they can be isolated into concepts and blocks of behavior and applied to society, or, rather, by society for the control of society. The ruthless severing from tradition, values, cultural mores, the whole package of a “genealogy of morals” boldly proclaimed against the dominant elites and their docile classes was one more device to be turned against the critic and the aspirant.

The inversion of life is death, of Eros is Thanatos (as Freud said). The same inversion was applied to the alienation of human beings from nature, and rather than resolve or reconcile consciousness and nature, society removes individual consciousness from autonomy and subordinates or amalgamates the individual into society at large. The individual’s tenuous link to originating culture is severed for dependence on artificial culture manufactured by modern elites and modern factors of environment, habit, and socialization. This is characteristic of modern times, achieved with meticulous design by war, economic change, psychology, and technology. The sense of individual triumph and freedom expressed by a Nietzsche (however theoretical) is today an illusion of autonomy and a sublimation of fears that are now addressed through social devices like technology and propaganda.

Yet, since primordial history, different cultures learned to address consciousness in different ways. The torment of consciousness and its consequential rending into Eastern and Western cultural spheres reflects, in part, a different cultural anthropology East and West. Historically, this divergence was sealed by rejection of a deeper comprehension of consciousness by the Western world. The West has, over millennia, devolved into cultivating the misery of consciousness through its own violence, aggression, internecine conflict, authority and control — and spread this eastward and world-wide. For the Western world, the resolution of consciousness was not to be left to the philosophers and sages, for it is useful to the generals and the elites.

All wars are internecine wars, civil wars, because all human beings are part of the same origins, the same family, despite their long-term yet anecdotal differences. Each group defends circumstantial habitat and fiercely clings to mythologies of origins and distinctiveness. The early Nietzsche himself, in Human, All Too Human, noted that the State will always argue the necessity of its arsenal as defensive, implying that its neighbors are untrustworthy and harboring malicious thoughts and designs against it. This thought is a self-fulfillment of an already festering instinct to aggression. No peace can arise gradually, Nietzsche continues. A State must rid itself of all its weapons in order to demonstrate its best motives, and this will be unilateral, and unlikely, but provides the only way out for humanity.

Given the nature of groups, society, and geopolitics, only individuals can solve societal ills, by addressing them within themselves. Thus, by analogy, we disarm our self, we rid ourselves of all vices and impurities and all torment of consciousness and unaddressed instincts. The larger group evolved from the solitary individuals, according to every culture’s creation stories. These primordial expressions lie at the heart of all of us as models of being. Every culture carries a primordial design in its core, but never looks deeply at the inkling or insight it reveals, namely, the basic understanding that we are all, for better or worse, related.

In his recent book The Homing Instinct: Meaning & Mystery in Animal Migration, biologist Bernd Heinrich explores the capacity of animals to define “home,” either in the fascinating treks of birds, butterflies, moths, turtles, whales, and salmon that may travel thousands of miles from their birthplace homes to live out a season or a lifetime, then to return to the exact place of birth, whether by magnetic or solar navigation or other still mysterious to science mechanism.

As compellingly interesting is Heinrich’s discussion of animal homes themselves. While the descriptions are entertaining and informative, an important and notable fact is that homes are typical of social animals, while solitary animals typically seek makeshift shelter. Thus, eusocial animals, those with the most complex stratification of labor such as termites, bees, and naked mole rats, construct the most complex of homes. The chief characteristic of these homes is not merely shelter for rearing progeny safely. Indeed, in such complex society, reproduction is restricted to one female (“queen” among the insects). Eusociality = gregariousness, although the degree of voluntarism is not knowable. However social, such as birds, which diligently build nests and defend homes or home grounds entire lifetimes, the eusocial species construct large communal multi-dwelling structures to accommodate colonies, not just families. Heinrich sees a suggestive if imperfect analogy with (human) monastic orders.

But humans were lower then even birds in the hierarchy of home-construction and the evolution of this function. Where birds and lower mammals (rabbits, beavers, rodents) construct nests, warrens, and burrows, later mammals opportunistically used makeshift or found structures. Thus, the larger mammals like lions, hyenas, bears and the like, and simian evolutionary ancestors of humans, did not construct homes at all — nor did the earliest humans.

However, human newborns are decidedly altricial. They are born helpless and remain effectively dependent for years, unlike other species, including most mammals. The need for male humans to seek out food, leaving females alone and physically vulnerable, demanded the requirement of shelter, and earliest human groupings presumably used caves before constructing makeshift structures equivalent to huts and evolving into multiple occupancy structures. In all this home construction, however, humans had been forced by sheer necessity to innovate shelter, and not necessarily skillfully. They had advanced from cave-dwelling to inverted nests to group structures not unlike those of weaver birds.

Once safely ensconced in a safe home, humans could specialize and multitask. With the exception of the occasional natural disaster like plague or famine, or societal disasters like war, humans launched the course of infinite growth and acquisitiveness that is the chief characteristic of the species in society.

Curiously complementing this discussion is Kazi K. Ashraf’s book The Hermit’s Hut: Architecture and Asceticism in Ancient India, which shows that the concept of home as the primordial bastion of reproduction and survival evolved into the bastion of family life and safeguarding of material well-being. However, this foundational structure of society was challenged in ancient India by the late Vedic era ascetic movements rejecting the primacy of the role of the home. With this rejection — to parallel Heinrich’s discussion — is rejection of reproduction and subordination to the group survival instinct. In short, the hermit, or hermit-ascetic, represents the rejection of the concept of home, a radical metaphysical and psychological mindset but not novel in the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.

The hermit’s reversion to primitiveness and makeshift shelter is akin to solitary animals, for as Heinrich demonstrates, nest-building and home-creation is the product of reproductive behavior, in turn the expression of the survival instinct. The hermit of this era reverts to dwelling in caves, in huts, under trees — not unlike solitary (versus gregarious, let alone eusocial) animals.

Divergent disciplines — biology, architecture, sociology — suggest the depths that an anthropology of solitude and eremitism needs. Ancient India provides an excellent model because the IndoEuropeans who swept eastward from Europe, to be known as Aryans in India, established a religion of sky gods and animal sacrifice not unlike other nomadic peoples, such as the Hebrews. Fire was at the heart of the Aryan ritual, deriving in part from the necessity of sacrifice, but ultimately expressive of a deity form. Scripture (in this case the Rig Veda) became the intellectual expression of that peoples’ religion and the source of social codes and stratification. Here, too, are analogies with the founding religion of the Western world, with scriptures, social codes, and a priesthood equivalent of Brahmins.

Finally, the lateVedic era, of the Upanishads and the rise of eremitism and asceticism culminating in multiple contemporary ascetic groups (especially Hindu sadhus, Jains, and Buddhists), represents what Gavin Flood has called the “internalization of tradition.” The fire of the external ritual became the spiritual fire within, what the historical Jesus intended in teaching that the kingdom of God is within the self. In this train of thought, the kingdom of God is not with the temple-worshipers. It is not unlike the view of the Indian hermit-ascetics who argued that the kingdom of God was not in the Brahmin’s temples.

All the implications for what we consider home and society, versus solitude, dwellings, simplicity, and disengagement, are resting at the core of a deep anthropology of eremitism.

Blindness is the absence of sight, due to genetics, circumstance, or accident. But for centuries blindness has been used more widely as a metaphor for a stubborn person whose ideas and ethics are not in accord with one’s own. For example, the Gospel of Matthew speaks of “blind guides” and “blind fools,” a disparaging use of the notion of blindness that employs the isolated physical handicap of those who are innocent. (At the same time, the gospels show Jesus healing a number of blind people, with the notion of their being restored to wholeness, both physical and spiritual).

More complexly, the ancient Greek tradition conjured a different experience of blindness and its meaning, in part a deeper metaphor but a literal one as well. The universal figure was Tiresias, a prophet who was blinded by the gods according to various traditions, essentially punished for his frankness. Not merely frankness but clairvoyance characterizes Tiresias, though it is presented as simple depth, observation, and vigilance in wiser versions. In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the blind Tiresias continues his prophetic role. Oedipus demands of Tiresias to know who has murdered the previous king Laius. Tiresias knows but demurs, for his knowledge is a terrible truth and worse future. He thus angers the temperamental Oedipus. When Tiresias finally tells him that it was he, Oedipus, who unwittingly committed the evil deed, Oedipus blinds himself in self-punishment.

Here, the blind prophet Tiresias is the only person in a world of sighted people who can perceive the truth and proclaim it unflinchingly. From this presentation — not quite an archetype — evolved the counter-notion concerning blindness that the blind can achieve a deeper insight, a deeper sense of meaning than the sighted, who are forever consumed (visually) in the worldly.

The notion of blindness has a social ambiguity that wavers between a debased notion of physical handicap or a refined notion of intelligence, creativity and insight. Many major authors have been blind, or as in the case of Homer, were deemed blind as a way of accentuating their keenness of mind, character portrayal, and insight. The English poet John Milton (1608-74), who became blind in mid-life, composed a short poem reflecting on his condition:

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

[Shortly after posting this item, a long-time friend of Hermitary pointed out a relevant piece of literature illustrating the theme of blindness and wisdom, “The Astronomer” by Kahlil Gibran, which with much thanks is reproduced here:

In the shadow of the temple my friend and I saw a blind man sitting alone. And my friend said, “Behold the
wisest man of our land.”

Then I left my friend and approached the blind man and greeted him. And we conversed.

After a while I said, “Forgive my question, but since when hast thou been blind?”

“From my birth,” he answered.

Said I, “And what path of wisdom followest thou?”

Said he, “I am an astronomer.”

Then he placed his hand upon his breast, saying, “I watch all these suns and moons and stars.”

]

Of the many writers who have been blind or nearly so — James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Jose Saramago, the classical composer Joaquin Rodrigo — a favorite (but not because of his blindness) is Jorge Luis Borges, who has said of his condition in a 1971 New York Times interview:

I knew I would go blind, because my father, my paternal grandmother, my great-grandfather, they had all gone blind. … When I lost my sight I was rather worried over it, and in my dreams I was always reading. Then somehow I never could read because a word became twice or thrice as long as it was, or rather instead of one line there would be other lines springing like branches out of it. Now I no longer dream of reading, because I know that’s beyond me. …

Sometimes I see a closed book and then I say, “I could read this particular book,” but at the same time even inside my dream I know I can’t, so I take good care not to open that particular book.

But these are modest words, for after blindness in his mid-fifties, Borges was obliged to dictate his stories and poems and essays, hence his amused acknowledgement that he had to copy and restyle what he had written long before. Yet everything he had written to that point he had written with the dark foreknowledge that he would lose his eyesight. Was this a factor in his insightful writing, his creativity, his stories that read like a prophetic or mystical voice announcing of things that others had not seen?

Blindness is a kind of solitude, involuntary to be sure, separating the self from people in a sense-dependent way, missing cues and emotional revelations in others that signify so much of relationships. But this can as much be imposed by others who persist in not comprehending that one sense-perception is not the universe of knowledge, creativity, or insight. As the philosopher Diderot wrote, “A blind man values himself as much as, and perhaps more than, we who see.” He was referring to a blind man he had encountered, a busy husband, father, and chemist, who surprised Diderot with his assertiveness and self-esteem.

So the attitude of others is as much a key to what is blindness as whatever the blind person can pursue. In unwitting social circles, the blind can revert (or be reverted) to a kind of numbness if not themselves cautious and philosophical. For example, many blind people are in poorer countries today where tolerance of their condition will revert to the attitude of antiquity, and only ten percent of blind people today can read Braille, fostering a dependence on audio technology that is both a blessing and a threat.

Even so, solitude need not separate anyone from nature or from that deepest part of self that is the link to universal things. Solitude always challenges the self to be a better steward of the mind and soul, to pursue paths that provide greater insight into self. What an irony that blindness understood as a potential rather than merely a handicap could serve at least metaphorically as a parallel gift of insight.

Gratitude is an ambiguous term. Does it mean thankfulness for what we have? But as opposed to if we did not have what we have? And what do we have for which to feel thankful? Health, possessions, friends, esteem, position? If we are grateful for these, is it not at the expense of others, or is any effort of our own not the result of serendipity or the work of others bringing us to this point?

To be grateful for something in our lives can appear an arrogance when others lack: lack possessions, lack self-esteem, lack position, social circle, health. Gratitude can be an itemization of blessings, counting ourselves blessed, which suggests we are lucky, deserving, special, or exceptional. Every religious tradition has faced this narrow paradox. The Brahmin is blessed by the gods, or deserving from a previous life of virtue, while the mere day-worker must have been evil in a previous existence. The Western scripturalist is to itemize God’s favors and, like the Pharisee, tells himself that he has been chosen out of the many and is thankfully not like the others, sinful and impure. Even in a non-theological psychology we are expected to be grateful for what we have, to be pleased, satisfied, proud of achievement that is mere circumstance. Society shapes expectation, and our lack of this possessions or of this or that circumstance is cause for regret and antidepressants. Power further exploits the relationship, taking credit for the possessions and possessiveness of its subjects, and alternatively stripping them of possessions and hope when gratitude for mere survival is in order.

The only way out of gratitude as self-congratulations is twofold: to view all as necessary or to view all as accidental — or both.

The former sees all events as rigidly preconceived and unfolding like a mathematical formula. We ought no more to celebrate good health as to curse bad fortune. Stoics and Taoists took the actions of nature as given but random, inspecting their core ramifications dispassionately, not to be taken personally. The conspiracy of power was as ordered against the autonomous self as much as the conspiracy of weather brings heat stroke or snow showers bring wetness. Circumstances are defined by their attributes of randomness and inevitability. We must prepare for them, and they come to us regardless of our attitude or preparation. Indeed, morality is based on a livelihood and behavior that brings mental preparation and tranquility capable of anticipating any vicissitudes.

This sentiment is expressed more basically in chapter 5 of Chuang-tzu, which quotes Confucius as authority, though the sentiment is Taoist. The passage refers to a man born with one foot:

Confucius said, “Life and death are great affairs, and yet they are no change to him. Though heaven and earth flop over and fall down, it is no loss to him. He sees clearly into what has no falsehood and does not shift with things. He takes it as fate that things should change, and he holds fast to the source.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Ch’ang Chi.

Confucius said, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh. But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one. A man like this doesn’t know what his ears or eyes should approve — he lets his mind play in the harmony of virtue. As for things, he sees them as one and does not see their loss.”

Confucius then concludes that this man “regards the loss of a foot as a lump of earth thrown away.” In short, he is neither grateful that he still has one foot, nor resentful that he does not have two. But the analogy, though strained here, is more largely contextualized by Chuang-tzu’s image of pine trees that are stolid in winter snows as in summer heat, or to water that does not permit self-reflection unless it is still and not turbulent. So, too, with mind.

We can think, then, that everything must be accidental. You are rich and I am poor, but it is entirely an accident of nature that I am not the wealthy one and you are not the poor one. And if it is an accident, then what is the difference between us, any of us, except the temporary losses we sustain or the privileges society assigns to stratify and control us, each in our spheres? You are a Brahmin and I am a day laborer. You are a lord and I am a tenant. You are grateful for your status and expect me to be wretched, resentful, and doomed. Your ideology is contrived to make your accidental fortunes a necessity of virtues you never practiced in the womb, and to make my solitude a scornful sign of sloth and rootlessness attached to an ideology built on hatred of your circumstances.

The key to justice is not to level the inevitable but to stop defining justice as vertical, as enabling all to be Brahmins, lords, and mongers of power. The key is not to behead the lords and crown the impoverished. The key is to stop being grateful.

Gratitude implies hierarchy of desire, a material definition of values. If we succumb to what others have defined as gratitude, we perpetuate injustice and privilege. What is required is to redefine gratitude and dematerialize our responses to circumstances. We dematerialize by leaving gratitude neither in the realm of worldly society nor in the realm of abstract belief.

Instead, we must live and work opportunistically, like the butterfly discovering a flower, or a flower enjoying a refreshing rainfall. We must emulate the stolidness of the pine tree and pursue the trajectory toward stillness of water in seeking the center within us and not within the world. We can anthropomorphize the accidental and make it part of a moment’s joy, part of a day’s serendipity, make it such that we really can speak of that moment, that encounter, as a blessing — and nothing more. We become like the Japanese haiku poet walking the hedgerow at dawn and unexpectedly coming across a peony that leaves him speechless except to say “Ah!”

The Edge Foundation sponsors academics discussing their specialties and interests in a popularized context of talks and videos. The effort is not unlike the early 20th-century American Chautauqua aimed at non-academics, itself derived from traveling evangelizing ministries originating in the Great Awakening revivalist religious movements of a century earlier. The origins reach even further back to the rarefied intellectual circles of Enlightenment salons hosting the philosophes, who, however, lacked an audience except themselves and wealthy patrons. Today’s popular TED talks represent a similar phenomenon, further broadcast in bundles by public radio.

Still clinging to this effort of popularizing science and knowledge (or some parts of knowledge) is the symbiotic relationship of institutionalized thinkers and wealthy patrons, the latter transformed into governments and corporations.

This effort is characterized as democratic in the sense that it attempts to present decision making, scientific policy, and thoughtful reflection on current issues as the input of the many, especially of the enlightened many across the world. But the so-called democracies are oligarchies, if not plutocracies. Perhaps the revivalism of the popular media blunts this sharp-edged reality.

A current Edge book assembles scores of academics, chiefly in the sciences, to opine on “What Should We Be Worried About?” The short but numerous essays can be reduced to something like the familiar dialectic ascribed to Hegel:

• Technology can be good (… wonderful, progressive, liberating, efficient, compelling, inevitable, salvific …)
• But, technology can be bad ( … destructive, disruptive, abused, misapplied, misunderstood, unchecked …)
• Therefore, we should worry about it.

No conclusion is ever reached by these many voices because no fundamental premises are ever touched upon. None of these philosophes actually says that technology is intrinsically an expression of human society pursued by the powerful for the purposes of maintaining power, as Rousseau said centuries ago.

Technology’s presumed uses for good (thesis) or for evil (antithesis) is a false dilemma, especially in the modern world among modern scientists, for oligarchies always utilize sources of power such as technology for their own aggrandizing purposes.

Much of the remorse of scientists about the abuse of technology is what may be called the Einstein effect, not as scientist think of it but as a commonplace observer might. In this case the new Einstein effect refers to science’s most eloquently remorseful representative, who championed through his work the knowledge and technology of atomic fission leading to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, Fukushima, nuclear weapons (bombs, missiles, depleted uranium), and countless nuclear power plants around the world that must be maintained for centuries to come regardless of the state of economic resources in the future.

Einstein came to regret all this (synthesis). But should Einstein — or any scientist or technologist — not have understood the fundamental nature of power and its utilitarian nature? Should it not be understood that what we should worry about (going back to the book title) is the inimical human drive to aggression and what to do about that? But the very first essay in the book, intended to blunt all others, is composed by the ubiquitous Steven Pinker, who reassures us that violence and war is at an all-time ebb, and nothing to worry about.

None of this debate should suggest that the original scientific method of observation, with increasingly sophisticated tools, is inaccurate or produces false data. For example, climate change need not be disputed, not just because scientific observations confirm it, but because climate change is the inevitable product of technological society’s insatiability and its absolute dichotimization of nature and human society. Nor can it be disputed that much technology saves lives, but, ironically, it saves the lives of especially those damaged by the very applications of technology, namely war, environmental pollution, changes to natural habitat and food, and acute reactions to diseases of civilization and to pharmaceuticals.

The redemptive, salvific role of technology advocated by oligarchies overlooks the reality that the same technologies cause many of the intractable and inimical circumstances of life and society in the first place.

The Dalai Lama has acquired a worldwide reputation for popularizing Tibetan Buddhism and spiritual themes, but his rapprochement with science, especially neuroscience, will yield minimal interest among the world’s scientists. His effort does not take into account the nature of science and technology, which is grounded on an intrinsically non-ethical methodology (“observation”) with unregulated experimentation and the contriving of acts.

Even acknowledging the moral scruples of some scientists, their work is always co-opted by technological applications that service inimical ends, even while some of the byproducts are benign or helpful. The same producers of technology are familiar with marketing, after all, whether to oligarchies or to the public. One can expect technology to be spun for its positive effects. Marketing focuses on individual testimonies. Marketing’s role is not to address the larger evolutionary patterns at work in frustrating nature and ethics. For example, medicine’s grand efforts today, such as cures for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and autism, quietly overlook the fact that these modern diseases are caused by modern technology itself in the form of chemicals, pesticides, adulterated foods, and pharmaceuticals.

But to point out this obvious fact is to undo everything societal. Only individuals with insight can address their own situation. Only individuals can reinsert ethics and constructive habits into their daily lives.

If the scientists of Edge can stir up a cacophony of worries about which they have no control (but whose research and that of their predecessors abets), then even a newly-redefined Einstein effect will be muted and the technologists will shrug off the necessity of ethical thinking.