hermit's thatch

Eremitism takes the solitude and silence within and projects them into the living milieu around the self, into the physical environment. Each tradition of eremitism crafts this environment using different terms and images. The cell is a favorite of Westerners familiar with the monastery, further circumscribed by the anchorhold. The cave and the hut are favorite images East and West of physical autonomy, closer to nature than the cenobitic. The hermit within a crowd or city has both solitary and social images as environs, still focusing on the immediate mental and physical environs into which to retreat, to cultivate, and to practice. A few brave souls live directly under the sky, under the aegis of nature.

In all cases, the physical environs become a projection of the self’s solitude and silence. Although the physical environs exist independent of our mental purposes (the cave, mountain, forest, desert, and, more contrived, the cell or hut), they are embraced and transformed by the solitary’s application of mental and physical effort.

The qualitative characteristics of the environ of cell, cave, and hut, become important not merely as an atmospheric, as a field for Feng-shui, a vibrational region, or as mere decor. The transformation of the environs physically is not based on the practitioner’s eye for interior design. Rather, the environ comes to mirror the deeper self, and reflect an order, a sense of discipline, and the greater project of mental and spiritual work. Such an environ is the apex of simplicity, yet it can become complex in its interrelations of objects and setting. Everything in the room or space takes on symbolic importance, and anything out of place or not contributing to this trajectory of solitude and silence intrudes unnecessarily.

The solitary rightly safeguards the solitude of place as much as the solitude of self. Privacy and discretion are not vanities or psychological weaknesses but tools for fostering practice. While others see this safeguarding as extended to property, the solitary maintains no proprietary relationship to objects, less one of covetousness. Rather, the attitude is one of awareness and cultivation of a seamlessness of environment based on function, namely the function of sustaining solitude.

Thus when the Abba Aresenius was visited by a certain bishop Theophilus, the latter waited for some wise words frpm Arsenius, who remained silent. Finaly, Arsenius looked up and said to the bishop, “If I give you advice, will you take it to heart?” The bishop nodded. “Then,” said Arsenius, “whatever you hear of Arsenius again, don’t come here.” And another bishop once asked of Arsenius if the old man would open his door to receive him. “Yes,” said Arsenius,” but if I open to you I must open to all, and then I will have to move from this place.”

Then, too, is the story of the Abba Moses, a large black man. He was walking in the desert when a visitor from the city stopped him and asked, “Where does Abba Moses live?” Abba Moses looked at him pointedly and replied, “Why do you want to see that old fool?” So the visitor returned to the city and told others what had happened. The others asked the traveler what the man in the desert looked like. He was large and black. “That was Abba Moses,” they replied knowingy.

A similar anecdote concerns the Chinese Zen monk Da-mei, who entered the mountains fleeing the world. A certain monk was in those mountains searching for branches suitable for staffs. He lost his way and came upon Da-mei’s hut. They exchanged a few words and the monk returned to his monastery. He told the abbot of what transpired. The abbot wondered, having remembered a certain monk gone to the mountains years before. Perhaps it was the one he was thinking of. The abbot asked the monk to return to the mountain and invite the hermit-monk to visit. But Da-mei, receiving the envoy, left him with a poem which ends:

When worldly men discover where you live
You move your thatched hut further into the hills.

Notice how this discovery of the self by others, this involuntary disclosure to others, and, therefore, to the world, is not merely physical but involves many psychological nuances, instincts, even.

To conceal self is not to flee anything that is not already present itself. It is but to put in its place those desires of weakness: curiosity, vanity, sloth, self-aggrandizement. That which is precious is not to be exposed to corrosion or pollution. The hermit is proactive in being aware of harmful influences and avoiding them. In the tragic sense, it is the world itself. That which is precious, that must be safeguarded, is a treasure, the last and only one anyone can still have, namely solitude and practice.

The world misunderstands, insisting that the hermit must participate, share his talents, live a normal social existence, perhaps because it pleases the world that everyone conform to its pattern, however, futile and without purpose, that everyone be revealed, exposed, laid bare for inspection and control. And even those in the world who have an inkling of this perception of the solitary hesitate but intuitively appreciate the heroism of solitude. And these are our allies, our only friends. This point is nicely illustrated by a tale from Kahlil Gibran titled “Finding God.”

Two men were walking in the valley, and one man pointed with his finger toward the mountain side, and said, “See you that hermitage? There lives a man who has long divorced the world. He seeks but after God, and naught else upon this earth.”

And the other man said, “He shall not find God until he leaves his hermitage, and the aloneness of his hermitage, and returns to our world, to share our joy and pain, to dance with our dancers at the wedding feast, and to weep with those who weep around the coffins of our dead.”

And the other man was convinced in his heart, though in spite of his conviction he answered, “I agree with all that you say, yet I believe the hermit is a good man. And may it not well be that one good man by his absence does better than the seeming goodness of these many men?”

The universal banes to the reputation of the solitary and the holy cross cultural and historical times. What dogged the Christian saints also pursued the holy figures of India, China, and Japan. These conflations of virtue and power also affect hermits East and West. The popular manifestations are favored by the masses of religious believers who cannot grasp the mechanics of wisdom, seeing it as a supernatural phenomenon and therefore not applicable to their lives, at least not beyond minimal ritual. So these signs and miracles become a bane to the saintly in throwing up a wall or veil to a true path.

Here one unusual example will be cited. The life of Chinese Zen master Xu-Yun, who died in 1959 and may therefore be considered modern, at least in chronology and time, unintentionally reveals these conundrums in his autobiography, titled Empty Cloud, and translated in 1988. Three characteristic “banes” may be cited.

1. Hagiography.
Biographies or Lives of the Western Christian saints and hermits are filled, sometimes painfully so, with standard devices signifying that the person is holy. Such events and signs often outweigh historical data or replace unavailable data. Nor often do biographies find mere praise sufficient, not even the modest contemporary requirement of a couple of posthumous miracles. The Lives are a literary genre, not a historical or documentary one. To the discerning, they are childlike, full of awe and wonder, rather than deliberately malicious or mischievous. The biographies often cite the very acts of nature as approbations of saintliness.

The autobiography of Xu-Yun, who lived to 120 years and died in 1959, is sprinkled with nature confirmations, of the type familiar in Western hagiography: receptivity to the dharma eliciting reform in wayward or ignorant animals (a cow, geese, a raven); brilliant lights in the sky upon the death of holy persons; sweet fragrances exuded upon the death of holy persons; successful exorcisms; weather phenomena such as rainfall when sought by prayers; and the lifting of an enormous heavy boulder with the mere hands at a dangerous moment when scaring off bandits was necessary. (The veneration of relics was also related but is universal and not necessarily hagiographic.)

2. Family.
The problem of family relations ofter dogs children who want to follow a religious path against the will of their parents. This phenomenon is common to East and West. If the saintly figure’s parents are cruel and abusive, the child’s option is naturally easier, but not always. The twin poles are regret and resentment on the parent or guardian’s part, and guilt on the child’s part. This theme fits a larger psychological paradigm, but even the simplest interpersonal factors reflect tension, often exacerbated by differences in personality.

In the example of Xu-Yun, his mother died in childbirth, and he was raised the only son of his father and a stepmother. He was educated in Taoism, but Xu-Yun preferred Buddhism, saying nothing of his preference, however. Once, at 15, he ran off with a cousin to enter a Buddhist monastery, but was retrieved. His father then put him in the charge of an uncle, and, at 17, married Xu-Yun to two girls of local families. They remained, however, “pure-minded companions,” as Xu-Yun describes it. He then made a second and successful flight to a Buddhist monastery and was never found.

Twenty years later, however, he was clearly still assailed by guilt, in part because he was still an itinerant monk (thus “unsuccessful”). “I felt very ashamed,” he writes plainly. He undertook a pilgrimage to pay his debt of gratitude to his mother for giving him birth, prostrating himself every third step, holding incense-offerings. Later, against the advice of others, he was to burn off one finger in his effort to propitiate his mother’s salvation. Once he dreamed of his mother on a dragon’s back flying westward (Ahmida’s paradise is in the west vis-a-vis China), and he was content but still wondered

He learned of his father’s death, then that of his stepmother. His stepmother and two wives had entered Buddhist nunneries. Xu Yun received a set of gathas or poems from his stepmother chiding him for his abandonment of the women, and a letter from one of his wives similarly ruing his callow treatment but commending his virtue. Naturally Xu-Yun received the documents with “mixed feelings,” as he puts it. His former wife states:

The more I think of your inability to pay back your debt of gratitude to your parents and of your casting aside all feelings towards your wives, the more I am at a loss trying to understand how you have been able to bear all this.

3. Politics.
Hermits, priests, and sages East and West have often dealt with kings, princes, and the powerful. These confrontations have often been depicted as symbolic duels of black and white, good and evil. But because such powerful people arise from within the culture, no realistic resolution is presented by hagiography, nor can one expect to find resolutions in that genre. On the other hand, reclusion and solitude have been the usual and necessary recourse, although these are considered blameworthy by authorities, and received skeptically in the West, though not so in the East. Xu-Yun was not a hermit or recluse (exception in early retreats and during his itinerant days) and did not shirk these encounters because he felt obliged to his followers.

From Xu-Yun’s narrative, it is clear that China’s hegemony over historical Tibet is assumed. This is not a popular conclusion in the West nor among China’s historical rivals or foes. The editor of the autobiography goes so far as to excise a sentence from Xu Yun as being “insensitive.” In context, however, when Xu-Yun undertook a walking pilgrimage to India that included stops in Bhutan, Nepal, and Tibet, he reveals his own disappointment if not disapproval of the Tibetan sangha, criticizing its disregard for monastic code and flagrant eating of meat. The monastic code in China forbade meat-eating, linking the Vinaya Code with the “Brahmmayala Sutra” and the “Lankavatara Sutra.” Seeing this fact and witnessing a sea of strange yellow and red hats, which he took as a proliferation of sectarianism, Xu-Yun lamented:

I thought of the days of the Jetavana Assembly [the Buddha’s original disciples in their simplicity of the dharma] and could not refrain from tears.

There is also a story, linked with hagiography but plausible, wherein a raven was brought to China by a tradesman. The raven was accustomed to eating meat, but through his instruction Xu-Yun got the raven and it gave up meat-eating. Is this a critique, suggesting that the raven it was “Tibetan”? It is only today, in fact, that the Dalai Lama recommends vegetarianism, but only as a health option, not an ethical expression.

Sectarianism has historically oscillated between rivalry for power, insistence on orthodoxy, and genuine conviction about ethics and right behavior. In the case of Chinese versus Tibetan Buddhism, the ethics of vegetarianism is acknowledged by Xu-Yun editor. He apologizes for the historical argument that Tibet could not grow adequate vegetables and greens while at the same time favorably noting the abstemiousness of the Chan monks.

Later in life, as a Buddhist elder widely respected for his efforts in rebuilding historic shrines, temples, and monasteries of China into the modern era, Xu-Yun deftly faced literal political threats. He faced hostility from secular anti-clericals of the Republic, bandits who suspected him of hoarding gold and riches, rapacious Japanese soldiers and occupiers, then destructive Communist locals. Political contentiousness from these external sources in each case threatened his years of nurturing what he realized were impermanent structures, though they meant a great deal to common people on the brink of grasping anything spiritual.

Whenever he began a project, it was said, Xu Yun arrived with only a staff in his possession, managed to raise money and volunteer labor to refurbish an ancient site, and left again with only a staff in his possession. Xu-Yun died in a cowshed, preferring it to the comfort of one of the sites he refurbished, leaving within himself the banes of holiness, which are the banes of life itself.

The world curbs its appetites through moderation. Appetites are seen as inevitable and, therefore, to be invariably indulged, but with the excusing proviso that moderation is available and will retain a sense of functionality. Moderation rescues all excesses by demonstrating to the dubious that everything is permitted for everything can be tempered by power.

Moderation consists of a quantitative level of desire that is socially safe and acceptable. Thus is conserved the core of appetite or desire. An enormous superstructure of moderation exists in society and politics, whole technologies mitigating excess, smoothing it out, making it palatable, even sustainable.

A model of moderation, for example, is society’s consumption of alcohol (one could substitute as examples war, petroleum, power, pleasure or other commodity or act). From primordial times, consumption of alcohol has lured human energy and roused its fantasy. Nothing stops consumption of alcohol except what is fancifully evoked: moderation. An individual can, in this argument, be moderate, consume moderately. Here moderation refers to lack of dysfunction. Law, science, and technology conspire to define moderation and functionality. But true cost, economic, social, psychological, is never taken into account. Production, technology, transportation, marketing, enforcement, finance, medical infrastructure for death, injury, and destruction, the impact on families and individuals — all of these factors are socially tolerable costs if only, runs the argument, individuals would just be moderate — understanding that many will not.

All of these enormous cost factors are already mitigated by expressions of moderation. What, on such a scale, is excess?

Society maintains these costs because of the perceived inevitability of appetite for the given object, action, or desire. Such is the tautology of moderation, which tolerates a complex network of effort and excess because moderation can always be invoked for the postulated individual consumer. Consumption (of alcohol, war, power, pleasure), however much criticized publicly, is the core of material well-being in the modern world.

Moderation abets consumption. War, food, transportation, entertainment, education, administration, manufacturing, resource exploitation — no field of worldly endeavor is not worthy. But a tenet of modern economics is that as long as production continues, the destruction of the same product is acceptable, indeed necessary. Gross national product is measured not by positive and healthful activities and goods but by how much money and profit is to be got. More cancers, more injuries, more warfare, more vehicles, more deforestation, more chemicals, more banks, more pavement, more food outlets, more consumption — the more the better as far as producing profit and control. All are acceptable because moderation can ameliorate excess, withholding indulgence to just before the moment of self-destruction. Individuals may succumb to excess as peripheral or tolerable damage to the ethics of moderation, but, in fact, such losses are useful lessons, a warning, a propitiation like a sacrifice to ward off the true lesson that moderation fails.

Thus moderation not only fails but kills. Moderation is a barrier to reality. Moderation is the fraud of ethics, a physical, chemical, or psychological computation of limits that nevertheless destroy in order to sustain desire. If desire comes from within, then society abets desire in each individual. If desire is prompted from without by manipulating forces and people, then society induces it.

The solitary has the opportunity to look upon society and the mechanisms of consumption as a juggernaut for crushing the self. The remedy is not in opposing the vast processes of society, however. This is a physical impossibility, of course, and perhaps a psychological conceit. But no action is warranted or mandated. It is enough to retain an integrity that acknowledges the sleight of hand that is moderation, and disengage from whatever requires moderation for justification of consumption in the largest ethical sense.

Rose Macaulay’s The Pleasure of Ruins, published in 1952, is a “random excursion into the fantastic world” of ruins, that which time and circumstances have made of the external and material world of ancient cultures. This pleasure is a distinct phenomenon of the Western world, the taking of enjoyment in visiting and contemplating the ruins of ancient civilizations.

The fascination with the ruins of ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman ruins predominated from the Renaissance through the 18th century. What was the fascination? A morbid pleasure, what Henry James called a “heartless pastime,” adding, “and the pleasure, I confess, shows a note of perversity.”

During the aforementioned centuries, the pleasure carried a touch of eccentric antiquarianism, a touch of cultural superiority, as if to say, “they are gone but I am here” — and only a bit of archeological or historical research interest. Add to this the extensive and shameless looting of antiquities carted back to England and the continent and one can built the case that the pleasure of ruins is a kind of cultural violence one hand removed. The ancient civilizations fell long ago through no doing of moderns, but moderns rob the graves in order to assure themselves that it won’t happen here.

Macaulay’s first chapter (the rest of the book is a detailed if chatty catalog) clearly shows how the pleasure of ruins is enjoyed by the Western world. The first note is the Old Testament, where the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel savor the vengeance of God on the enemies of the people, namely Babylon, Edom, Nineveh, Tyre. Already there was a touch of this sense in the earlier books of the Old Testament, where Yahweh directs the ravaging of Canaanite towns, farms, forests, and populations, but there the pleasure of ruins is attributed to God. The prophets evoke God’s vengeance, depicting the desired aftermath as prophecy. The pleasure of ruins shifts from God to his prophets, which is to say the observing culture. Thus Babylon (Isaiah 13:21+):

Wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and wild goats shall dance there, and the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces. … Your pomp is brought down to the graves, and the noise of your harp strings. The worm is spread beneath you and the worms cover you. How you have fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! … I will make you a possession for the bittern, and pools of water …

Elsewhere it is the cormorant, the ravens, thorns, adders, and vultures.

Italian Renaissance writers are not vengeful but curious, reflective, flattered. The ruins are those of their intellectual and even physical ancestors, after all, and inspire them to better heights. The British at this time neatly divide into humors. Not that Shakespeare and the Elizabethans did not sprinkle their plays with bats and eyes of newt and the like, all on dark moors with strange fogs and witches and skulls buried a few inches below the soil surface. But these were literary contrivances, not real ruins to gaze upon, not yet, anyway.

Within a century or so, the ruins of classical antiquity provoke reflections of melancholy for some, but for others, the collecting of antiquities is a confirmation of empire-building, of moral superiority, and these bring back, like Elgin stealing whole Greek cities, as much as they can carry off. But the literary fashion was the discovery of ruins on one’s own soil, which inspires either genuine melancholy (always with a nobleman’s affectation) or outright pleasure. Macaulay quotes John Dyer’s poem “Grongar Hill,” describing a castle:

‘Tis now the raven’s bleak abode;
‘Tis now the apartment of the toad;
And there the fox securely feeds;
And there the pois’nous adder breeds,
Conceal’d in ruins, moss, and weeds;
While, ever and anon, there falls
Huge heap of hoary moulder’d walls.
Yet time has seen, that lifts the low,
And level lays the lofty brow,
Has seen this broken pile complete,
Big with the vanity of state;
But transient is the smile of Fate!
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter’s day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.

We are far beyond cursing an enemy’s proud towers or adding baneful props to a play or even the later cultural arrogance of antiquarian collectors. Dyer strikes the note of melancholy mixed with what Macaulay calls

cheerful enjoyment of the dismal scene, a brisk, approving gaiety, expressed in firm octosyllabic or decasyllabic lines, with satisfied enumerations of the gloomy objects perceived, and a good moral at the end.

Here Macaulay provides a valuable service in revealing an eerie side to our cultural psyche. Although the emphasis is especially British, the pleasures of melancholy are subtly expressed by all of the Western world. But — and here Macaulay only offers a few paragraphs — not the rest of the world. Not, she notes, the Arab, Indian, or Chinese. She notes the ancient Chinese reaction to ruins, ruins of war: the melancholy is genuine, the identification with the people in their last desperate hours is heartfelt and true. In particular, and not unexpected, is the identification of this suffering witnessed of a place familiar to the observer. Here Macaulay quotes a famous Chinese poem by Tsao Chih, written about the great city of the Warring States period:

In Loyang how still it is.
Palaces and houses all burnt to ashes,
Walls and fences broken and gaping,
Thorns and brambles shouting up to the sky. …
I turn aside, for the straight road is lost:
The fields are overgrown, and will never be plowed again.
I have been away such a long time
That I do not know which street is which.
How sad and desolate the empty moors are!
A thousand miles without the smoke of a chimney.
I think of the house in which I lived all those years:
I am heart-stricken and cannot speak.

Macaulay goes no further with non-Western opinion of ruins. But the sentiment of the Middle Ages is closer to the Eastern, as in the famous Old English Wanderer poem, reflection on the aftermath of war and human destructiveness. Our contemporary pleasure in ruins is videoed, televised, streamed, and made into movies for mass anesthetizing.

Almost an aside because Macaulay does not mention it but in passing is the fact that from the British view, the eccentric antiquarian view, can be seen the evolution of the idea of ornamental hermits to grace the ruinous appearance of a noble’s wide estate. The hermit is made another ornament, a column, a decaying wall, the remnants of an ancient abbey. The hermit by this era is but a ruin in the cultural sense, and so scarce that an ornamental one must be hired, instructed, and placed like an artificial flower in a sterile garden.

What was called melancholia up to the last centuries is today called depression. The term itself suggests the definition: a depressed patch of land is low, not as a hillside valley or low and moist meadow brightened by flowers but more qualitatively as a ditch that fills with dank water, filled with jagged rocks, a hollow or lowland that projects darkness and wariness.

A customary definition of depression is sadness that exceeds objective conditions, that is not justified by anything specific. From this general definition can be derived a distinction between a tragic sense of life and clinical depression that does not originate in philosophy. But there is much in the world and human condition that can give rise to depression, after all. One need not point to specific circumstances. The social norm for responding to doleful and cruel circumstances is anger, determination, and increasingly pitched aggression at apparent injustice or wrong. The norm is not resignation or a patterned inaction. The reactions are not born of sadness but are moral characterizations. Anger, cynicism, and violence projected outwardly against a perceived evil is not melancholia. Indeed, there is a latent optimism in such a person’s responses that reflects a will to power and a confidence in the ego.

Similarly, personalities oriented toward extroversion may experience restlessness and the desire for sociability when alone for a long time or without interpersonal exchanges. Their apparent sadness is desire, which cannot be described as depression because it deflects introspection and is focused on others. This focus does not simply preempt depression. Rather, the individual is not self-aware enough to be depressed. As with the angry and aggressive, the extrovert is less likely to be characterized as depressed because there is a confidence in self, in ego, as a potentially successful social tool that gives rise to optimism. There is an expectation of revived or restored conviviality to which solitude or even loneliness is viewed as an interruption.

When such a personality does collapse emotionally, then the facade of self-confidence is lost nd symptoms of true depression ensue. The state was probably always there, but society is quick to categorize and medicate. Biographies of melancholics of the past show this oscillation between sun and darkness, and were somehow able to ride out the darkness in an age when there were no pills. Today many psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies recommend preventive drugs, seeing in the social collapse around us the logically resulting despondency of many people. This neither addresses the causes of social collapse nor the necessity to find an understanding of how to cope.

Whole catalogs of depressed poets and artists have been assembled, such as this one at Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_major_depressive_disorder). The obvious fact is that many of the names on such lists are creative people: writers, painters, composers, poets. Did depression drive them to such avocations, or did the avocations, once pursued, drive them to depression? The indubitable fact seems to be that the insightful and sensitive nature of such individuals, and their depiction of what they see or experience of life, makes their art excruciatingly personal and intense. What the brain does with the depth of this experience is a medical and not an artistic issue. But the process even today is haphazardly addressed with pharmaceuticals and electroshock, the latter historically failing many by exacerbating their condition.

***

American novelist David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) once said in an interview:

Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room. I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get not just bored — there’s an almost dread that comes up I think, here [in the US], about having to be alone and in having to be quiet. You see that when you walk into most public spaces in America.It isn’t quiet anymore, they pipe music through. … It seems significant that we don’t want things to be quiet, ever, any more.

Contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen remembered David Foster Wallace when Franzen visited an obscure and solitary island off the coast of Chile. Franzen and Wallace, as fellow-novelists of similar age, were fast friends. On one of their last visits, Franzen busily admired the hummingbirds everywhere around the back patio of Wallace’s house, adding to his ornithological knowledge before an upcoming study trip to Ecuador. But Wallace could not appreciate the birds, or much else about nature or anything else at this point. Wallace suffered from depression. When he found his pharmaceutical no longer worked, he dropped it, didn’t follow up with a replacement, and committed suicide. Franzen visited Wallace’s widow before leaving for the Chile, and she unexpectedly gave him some of her husband’s cremation ashes to deposit on that lonely deserted island, thinking he would have liked that.

The island was named by the Chilean government Alejandro Selkirk, after the marooned sailor taken as the model of Robinson Crusoe in Daniel Defoe’s famous novel. But the locals still called the island by its original name, Masafuera, meaning “Farther Away.” The New Yorker essay of Franzen titled “Farther Away: Robinson Crusoe, David Foster Wallace, and the Island of Solitude,” makes for reflective reading about solitude, wilderness, friendship, and the origins of the novel.

None should disparage sufferers of depression. Melancholy reaches back to the most ancient of literary records. The tragic sense of life is often bottled up in single souls and leaks out like a poison until it consumes. Pharmaceuticals help many people today but research fails to serve them and conventional palliatives for depression are clearly still elusive when, for example, seasonal affective disorder can largely be addressed with full-spectrum lighting and vitamin D. If conditions and circumstances are the triggers of depression, then humanity would always be melancholy, yet clearly that is not the case. (Nor, necessarily, is heredity.) More immediate conditions and circumstances are clearly the case in the depression suffered by writers like Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound, due not to nature’s aberration but to horrific electroshock treatments administered by arrogant technocrats. The fullness of solitude eludes the electrical and chemical mechanisms of brain and nervous system. The fullness of solitude eludes depression.

One of the great paradoxes is summarized in the Buddhist saying that, on the one hand, to be born as a human being is a great and rare event, and that one should use this precious happening wisely, and on the other hand, there is nothing special about anything, or, as Morihei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido would say, we spend our whole life working diligently on the Path only to discover that there is No Path.

This paradox has it counterpart in our breath. On the one hand we inhale, and our whole body is animated, waiting, as it were, for the unique gift of air to nourish our being, to refresh every vitality. And then, on the other hand, we exhale, we dispose of what is now spent and useless, without a thought. There are other parallels: for example, we eagerly eat food prepared for many hours and presented in fine conviviality and fanfare, and then we digest and expel its remnant without much thought. But breath captures our attention because breath is celebrated and keenly appreciated by every physical art such as yoga and every meditation tradition, East and West.

Inhalation represents beginning, hope, expectation. The child in the womb is silent, reposed, and does not need breath because it does not (yet) partake of frail human necessities, blissfully unaware that it is growing, developing, and undergoing an irreversible trajectory. When the child is born, the shock of reality evokes a sharp cry. An old Arabic tradition says that a baby cries on birth because it sees the devil, lurking nearby. Or it sees death itself lurking in the shadows. Perhaps the baby cries because it must be born, because it is now thrown inexorably into existence, that existence so celebrated as unique by others but greeted by a cry of sorrow by the innocent.

Inhalation signals the beginning. What we take in, as breath or as experience, all that is environment, pain, pleasure, thought or words, all these events come to represent beginnings. Each inhalation is a sunrise, the beginning of a new episode, a commonality with what already exists. The body is a microcosm, each organ awaiting inhalation, awaiting its renewal, just as every creature on the earth awaits the sunrise to begin anew, to begin again. And the sun finds some youthful and new, others waning and dying, but all must acknowledge the newness that the sunrise represents, just as each organ sees each inhalation as a sign that life goes on, however youthful and healthy are the organs, or how weakened and failing they may be.

Exhalation, on the other hand, represents this terminus to all, like sunset and the coming of night, of silence, quiescence, diminishing, dissolution. Perhaps you have stood by the bedside of a dying person. In today’s modern circumstances, pain management makes the transition quiet and unobtrusive, but in the past, the dying person, unconscious in mind but not in organs or lungs, did not die quietly. Each breath was a loud and scraping, a gasping effort, the inhalation struggling to suck in air, the exhalation labored and spent. And then the pause, the horribly long pause between the last exhalation and another inhalation that will signify life, that trembling flame of a candle, that sadness of the whole body and organs remembering the obverse of this dying, remembering when that body emerged from the still, oceanic womb, into a new world, and its earliest struggle to conform to breathing after so long dormant. And upon dying, the reverse, the long path traversed only to end in No Path, only to end ignominiously, in a wretched noisy dying that only frightens those who watch or listen or remember a birth long ago and wonder.

In meditation, there is nothing but this inhalation and exhalation. We have cut through the intermediate, which is to say life. Thoughts, sounds, drifting dregs of a consciousness between sunrise and sunset, float up and float about like stale air to be expelled, or better, to be ignored until passing. Among thoughts there is no inhalation or exhalation — only living beings do this, unless the whole planet, the whole universe, breathes in and out. In meditation, we are bidden concentrate on breathing, perhaps counting or following the breath, until there is nothing else, no thoughts, no feelings, no awareness of anything else, even the coolness of the room, the degree of light, the hum of an appliance. Sometimes a bird’s cry startles, so without awareness of environment is the meditative state. Only inhalation and exhalation, as if to maintain the reality that we are a composite of body and mind. The breathing is autonomous and frees us to realize not thoughts and feelings but to reveal to us our nothingness, our absolute identity with everything else, everything else that exists. Inhale, exhale — we traverse the whole path from birth to death in that in-breath and out-breath.

The masters say that at a certain point we will find that sitting is what we like to do best, that we will look forward to it with an unexpected eagerness. Perhaps that is because we refresh our minds before another day or we relax a while from the stress of what lies ahead or what was behind us during the day. Or, perhaps it is because we get to know our breath, and therefore our selves, if we are willing to do so. If we have no thoughts, no distractions, and do not chase the clouds with our mind’s eye but sit quietly, then breath teaches us. Breath teaches us beginnings and ends, the cycle of life, the fullness of being and the mystery of coming to be and passing away.

An earlier entry suggested that part of the modern philosophical and belief dilemma in the West is the discovery of a plethora of philosophical and religious traditions existing in history and other cultures, coupled with the exhaustion of traditional systems in the West.

This exhaustion is not simply out of boredom or chasing after novelty. It has been coming rapidly, since the 19th century especially. The crucial human questions have remained unanswered; solace has not provided by the traditional institutions. The disintegration of the West throughout the 20th century confirmed the lack of an exit. Yet, few have wanted to go back to the sages of antiquity through the world, instead either rejecting the existing historic structures without a replacement, or propping up the existing modern structures because they still serve the powerful and give a little comfort to the lowly.

Existentialism confirmed isolation, the alienation, without distinguishing from where it arose. While isolation is an alienation from institutions and culture, it is false to distinguish institutions and culture from actual human beings. This painful realization is, however, one that the solitary understands, and makes. It is the first step to liberation.

The solitary returns to the original strength of self. The solitary looks at those other selves or individuals in history who have faced similar cultural crises, and attempts to learn from them. One cannot look to structures, schools, and ossified traditions. Where were they when the sages began their quest? Their contemporary culture was in crisis, their contemporary institutions were crumbling, or were rigid structures without solace or advice. The sages, too, were solitaries.

Gautama Shakyamuni was not teaching “Buddhism” but sharing personal insights that he considered useful and commendable to others. Similarly, Jesus of Nazareth was not teaching “Christianity” but identifying where his contemporaries needed to go in order to rescue themselves from an ossified and exhausted culture. In the same sense, the sages of Advaita did not teach “Hinduism,” and Lao-tzu did not teach Taoism. A spiritual experience, an insight, an “enlightenment” took place in their lives, and their narratives shared the experience, that’s all.

The experience of the sages, it can be seen reflecting on a past tradition, moves us to a new place, to a new perspective, from which everything subsequent must begin, in effect leaving the past, however dutifully acknowledged the influence of its cultural milieu. We do not escape the past or try to; we merely begin from where we are. It is in this sense that Jesus says that anyone who follows the new path (new to us, at any rate) cannot look back.

Historically, new structures of religious and philosophical schools rose quickly to fill the vacuum that society and authority insists must be filled. The social and collective context of each new thought, each new insight, demands a rationalization, demands a justification. Sagacity must not float about, available to aspirants — such notions must be disciplined, brought under control, codified. So would authority argue. No sooner do sages pass away than their words, thoughts, examples, are sealed into an approved package that justifies a social and group entity.

Within such a stricture, the spirit of the sage suffocates and dies, so that what is transmitted is only what can be traded in the marketplace and subordinated to the ends of authority. However sincere, the practitioners then follow a regime that is second-hand, and without the impetus to listen to their own hearts, the sage’s teaching is absent. What to do? Quit the marketplace, go back to one’s room, practice and experiment, confirm that the spirit of the sage is still alive and vibrant and lives within us because it has bypassed the suffocating structures and speaks directly to us, heart to heart. This is very much a solitary process.

A solitary process does not mean self-assurance, less arrogance. The very nature of the search is a solitary process because consciousness resides in one person at a time. Of course there are pitfalls, as Shunryu Suzuki notes, referring to Buddhism. There is the danger of ignoring the totality of a sage’s teaching because, as Suzuki puts it, “if we take pride in our own understanding, we will lose the original characteristics of Buddha’s teaching, which includes all the various teachings.”

It is not the wariness of successors and structures but the realization that an attitude of pride will prevent us from understanding even the original teaching, let alone all of the nuances of a sage’s teachings that do reverberate through succeeding generations. We are obliged to acknowledge the human effort at retaining and imitating and explicating both the original teaching and the successors’ teachings, while at the same time understanding how the successors fall short, how they may distort and misconstrue those teachings, sometimes intentionally but also simply as local and subjective adaptations.

Historical circumstances arise organically from the specifics of time, space, events, and environments. The schools and heresies over centuries are engagements with the original thought that manifest human society and culture in their many turns of fate. One school arises because of the need to address a physical requirement in a specific location, a psychological characteristic in a given era, or a change in material conditions giving rise to a specific view of the original. It is a fascinating scholarly project, however frustrating it is to the search, however diverting, confusing, exasperating to clarity.

Over the centuries, and on a global scale, the cacophony of versions and sects leads to skepticism and despair. But this reaction is itself a way of responding and engaging the sages’ original thought. The obvious analogy is to plants arising and thriving chaotically as they will, in a given habitat or niche, and other plants adapting only slowly and cautiously to the same circumstances of soil and water and air and sunlight. While just a bit further over, a slightly different or even radically different environment may exist, a micro-climate of different circumstances, and therefore different responses by the plants that arise there.

Given this inevitability of circumstance, the unfruitful tangle of scholarship not merely in identifying the mind and heart of the sage but in making their insights resonate within a given observer. We necessarily become our own teacher and our own student or disciple. We learn by experimenting, by heeding the experiences and practices we undertake, by constantly testing, always with the sages at our side. Truly this is a solitary task. But integrity comes from one conscience at a time, not secondhand from a group wherein the minds of each individual are subordinated to a contrived presentation of what is neither here nor there, neither living nor dead, neither self nor other selves, a mere shell or husk, without fruit within. The safest path, the wisest one, is to place ourselves, our questions, our aspirations, before the archetype of original teachings, to go back to the sages.

In the heyday of the simplicity movement (the 1990’s), the tone of many books on the topic was aesthetic, pragmatic, and psychological. The trend continues with most simplicity books, and magazines such as Real Simple, for example.

This approach avoided the ethical dimension, skirted economics, and ignored nature and the environment. Although it may have been all that a public slowly burning out from consumption, competitiveness, and middle-class ethos could accept, the lulling sense that one could be “simple” by making aesthetic adjustments to one’s household or persona led to a false ethic of simplicity.

In this version of simplicity, a too-feminine touch recurs in the search for nurturing reassurance, in the emphasis on home, family, and comfort, consciously avoiding the too-masculine attitudes of self-assertion, concreteness, and ego-boosting. In this era, men typically eschewed topics like simplicity and sustainability anyway.

A striking example of the domesticity of simplicity was the 1990’s series of books by Sarah Ban Breathnach titled Simple Abundance, which appeared as Daybook, Companion, and Journal. The author defined the wistful and increasingly self-satisfied mood of the mid-nineties: nostalgia for a simple past, for the good old days when the nation was great, life was slower, and people knew their station. This theme mingled with a New Age sense that as long as your thoughts were positive, very little mattered with regard to material conditions or the fate of the world.

The series offered many reassuring quotations from otherwise reliable sources, but gave the classics a bourgeois twist: Happiness is the most important thing in life, and the search for happiness means simplifying (at least a little), therefore a little attention to aesthetic detail will help make for happiness. Perhaps this summary is not quite fair in that some order and priorities are indeed necessary to anyone’s life. But the whole premise is an acceptance of the high status of one’s given culture and material conditions. We are otherwise lulled into ignoring that happiness in this context is merely a projection of our favorable material conditions enjoyed. Add to this the author’s soothing reassurance about simplicity’s ease and one concurs with a critic who described the author as “Martha Stewart on Prozac.”

The other maven of 1990’s simplicity was Elaine St. James, who produced several simplicity books (Simplify Your Life, and Kids, and Job, etc.) and made the celebrity circuits briefly. Her less pompous books are more practical and useful perhaps because she was in the real estate business. One critic described her books as “a pinch of Heloise and a dash of Buddha.”

The pragmatic approaches continued through the 1990s with Ish Oxenreider’s Organized Simplicity, Mindy Caliguire’s Simplicity, Linda Breen Pierce’s Simplicity Lessons, and Janet Luhr’s The Simple Living Guide. Notice that all of the authors are women. The only significant simplicity book by a male author is Duane Elgin’s classic Voluntary Simplicity, first published in 1981 and still the most insightful overview of the urgency for simplicity on a universal scale.

At least one conclusion from these forays into simplicity can be made. Ignoring ethical premises for what we buy, eat, think, say, or listen to leads to ignorant contentment and smug self-satisfaction. And when the favorable conditions that nurtured our false sense of well-being start to unravel, simplicity may help in practical terms. But the optimism of the 1990s that has been collapsing at the peak of 20 years of materialism in the Western world is closing off even the opportunity for practical simplicity to make a difference for many.

Simplicity can be approached with too many false pretexts and preconditions. Winnowing away at superfluities in what is in one’s closet or kitchen or garage is undoubtedly useful. But disengagement from pleasures and habits and objects grown comfortable is the best way to begin building an ethical framework to what one does every day. What the Chinese sages called “cultivating your virtue” is all that we need to do, and the rest of what is right will grow within us.

A recent entry here proposed that the modern Western malaise that culminated in existentialism was caused not by science and rationalism or a loss of religious faith — although these had their places — but by the challenge of a plethora of cultural ideas and beliefs impacting the Western point of view, overthrowing certainty in its monolithic self-confidence, even arrogance, the extensions of Western personality and culture. This encounter with cultures and ideas was not acquired benignly but through the waves of imperialism that have engulfed the West for a thousand years. But the cumulative force of this history is now highlighted by the technocratic state and the apex of modern societal and psychological fragmentation. Thus the Western world has been in a state of search for a system of beliefs or values in which it can believe, adhere to, find truth in.

Such an era is not completely unique to Western history. The apex and decline of the Roman Empire reflects a similar array of encounters with many cultures and belief systems, and finding the dissemination of information about them reaching all points of the dominant Roman society impossible to stop. For despite its civic creed of tolerance and open mindedness, the Western world has always been loathe to accommodate what it considered foreign influence, as in the coming of Arabic philosophy, or Renaissance humanist dilettantism, or the simmering wars of the Protestant reform when they engaged the Eastern European front, or the suppression of peasants for concentrated wealth in aristocracy, or the promotion of rapine technology.

The Roman era conveniently predates Christianity, as the latter is often viewed as the sole ethical wellspring in the West. In Rome, the argument of church and state is not relevant. The material and social conditions of Rome served both to extend Roman influence around the known world but also to introduce those elements of culture into the body of its culture and society that would be inimical and ultimately fatal.

The empire found that its original trajectory was to expand with the intention of conquest, not assimilation or cultural taint. But this was futile, for as expansion reached its limits of energy, exhaustion would — as in Spengler’s biological or morphological model — weaken it, make it susceptible to illness, ultimately sicken and kill the body. Similarly, modern Western powers, formally “post-imperial” today but only in name, have failed to maintain their self-claimed pristine motives, and now find their hubris haunting them with the specter of their crimes returning in the form of immigration, multiculturalism, financial crisis, environmental destruction, simmering social discontent, and the dissolution of optimism, culture, and faith.

The confidence of early Roman conquest was paralleled by the confidence of the European crusades and the era of discovery and occupation — and by the same built-in ethical contradictions. These contradictions eventually led to moral decadence in the home culture — and continue to do so. The ethical contradiction and inevitable abuses of imperial policy infected Western imperial cultures, demonstrating how the cultures could not sustain their historical faiths and their cultural self-confidence. A variety of tricks, deceptions, and economic and military ruses, of vast spectacles of sports, film, fashion, jingoism, Internet — bread and circuses — will continue to try to postpone the inevitable, will continue to give spurts of energy to the ancien regimes. But the course of transformation and mortality will continue, the resulting future being unpredictable.

In the era of ancient Rome, Gnosticism emerged as a syncretic philosophy, the intellectuals’ reconciliation of religion, philosophy, and cultural mood. Unlike the religions of the era that held tenaciously to a system of hope and optimism, usually in a redemption from the political and exploitative systems of the day, Gnosticism held no illusions about the inevitability of such structures. Gnosticism instead pointed the individual inward, to the heart, the soul, the mind. It urged a disengagement from a preoccupation with worldliness to a inner development of self. The external was not to be a deliverance; disengagement was the only route to wisdom.

The contention of the many faiths, from Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Jewish, Christian, etc., only demonstrated to Gnostics that all these adherents were futilely seeking answers within their own given cultures. But each culture was already under attack from the flow of knowledge about other cultures. None could rest when they learned about the views and practices of others. Their reaction was a blind backlash or, in a few, a reflective syncretism. Not ostrich-like do we hide from the existence of other cultures, but we realize that they are the experience of different environments, different habitats, different social structures evolved to handle a specific niche. Hence the natural world can teach us as much as any culture can, the nature is is supra-cultural and contains within itself a larger epistemology.

But the niches of culture, like the niches of the natural world, are becoming extinct. The societal habitats are spoiled, broken, collapsing. This is not evolution so much as devolution. Cultures and beliefs, even historical ones, have exhausted themselves attacking and being transformed, transformed even beyond the recognition of its adherents just a few decades before, let alone centuries. As with the material and natural world, so the human world of societies, cultures, technologies.

What is left in modern times is analogous to the Roman era, for not only has the dominant power lost its moral justification but it has destroyed the rest of the world as much as possible, wittingly or otherwise, and in the process mortally undermined its own values and culture. The imperial West enriched itself by consuming its own material resources and those of the cultures it encountered. It proselytized its religion of faith and ideology, supplanting the traditions of those it encountered with the fast materialism of its modern technological civilization. Now there is little difference between states, cultures, traditions, habits, or patterns of behavior around the world. All are imitative of what the West has become.

A syncretism of classics and the thought of sages alone can be a model of personal behavior. There is no way forward, only back, in this limited sense. Nor can there be any more progress, only devolution. And for the solitary, who observes the whirlwind of disillusion and change that is the modern world, there is no way towards ethical engagement, only disengagement.

TRANSCENDENCE

The problem with Norman Rosenthal’s book Transcendence (2011) is that at its heart the book is not about transcendence but about Transcendental Meditation — (TM) or ™ — which term is officially presented with a trademark sign as the copyrighted product of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917-2008). Confusion between a common term for what has existed for thousands of years and what has been copyrighted was probably deliberate.

Not only does Rosenthal only discuss the health benefits of TM — much of the research coming from faculty at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa — but in keeping with the copyright, he refuses to talk about actual techniques. These cost money and will not be revealed. The only real concession is in reprinting a chart of comparative meditation traditions and their effects on EEG frequency bands of the brain’s pre-frontal lobe. The chart proposes that there are basically three meditation methods: focused attention, open monitoring, and automatic self-transcending. The chart is from an article in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. Rosenthal doesn’t mention that it, too, is a journal of Maharishi University.

Brief treatment in the text and this chart, then, are the extent of discussion on comparative methods. Focused attention means focus on an object or mantra, and open monitoring is the absence of a specific object of attention, the latter essentially including all Eastern methods. But, contends Rosenthal, only TM (TM) is constructed so that the meditator immediately sees gains in physical and mental health, sometimes almost immediately. Furthermore, use of the secret mantra given to the meditator once enrolled in the TM program, is not considered focused attention because by its very meaning-free nature and use, the techniques lead to automatically falling away at the right time and yielding transcendence. The term used is “automatic self-transcending.” No other technique can do this, Rosenthal (and the entire copyrighted organization) content.

Rosenthal does not discuss transcendence outside of the usual description of feeling good, and the more technical-sounding brain wave coherence. Anywhere on TM websites, focus, creativity, health, equanimity, and happiness are the guaranteed results. But such a technique, if it gives such results to virtually anyone who takes them up, ought to be freely available, shared, based on a few books, self-taught, and practiced in the privacy of one’s room. At little or no cost, the secular and health-minded person, persuaded by an MD, can go back to Herbert Benson’s classic The Relaxation Response (1975) and its successors. For anyone else remotely philosophically, religiously or spiritually-minded, their tradition already has numerous classics. And at little or no cost.

WISDOM

Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe, authors of the book Practical Wisdom, which is subtitled “The Right Way to Do the Right Thing,” are said by the author to consult widely and make presentations at business conferences. Such news immediately sets a pragmatic and even conformist tone to the effort to present practical wisdom as anything more than finding a distilled consensus on how to soldier on with the existing order of institutions, social conventions, and ethics.

Early on, the book presents the idea of practical wisdom as originating in Aristotle’s realism, that humans must manage that into which they have been thrown, and devise a situational ethics to cope. One may speculate whether this had to do with Aristotle’s worldly responsibility of teaching an emperor (Marcus Aurelius is experienced from the other side of responsibility). Practical wisdom can be interpreted as how to deal with the devil, or as how to get out of worldliness, as one sees fit from a higher plane of philosophical thinking. One of the perennial weaknesses of trying to apply situation ethics to broader ontology is represented by talking about wisdom and ignoring the vast tradition of wisdom literature.

Granted that wisdom means a perspective, a self-understanding, a basic functionalism. But no worldly example will ever demonstrate how the asymptote of wisdom will be achieved in any given situation that is not defined as black and white, like a court decision or a military victory — and even then.

Early chapters in the book present the dilemmas of the teacher and the doctor. The teacher is frustrated because she wants only to teach; the doctor is frustrated because he only wants to heal. But nowhere are the more essential questions raised — do we need doctors in order to heal? Do we need teachers in order to learn? Perhaps the allopathic system and the educational system, perhaps the entire economic and social paradigm, the way we eat, buy, believe, create, communicate, love, hate — are all to be questioned first, before we have a set of solutions ready-made. Practical wisdom is not an accommodation but a transcendence. Perhaps the right way to do the right thing is to not discard the way but the things, to let the things organically find the Way (whatever that means to our better self) again, out of the complexity and bureaucracy and atrophied assumptions of the modern technological world.