hermit's thatch

Philip Koch, author of Solitude: A Philosophical Encounter, defines solitude simply as “a time in which experience is disengaged from other people.” This is an exact but accommodating definition because one cannot constrict solitude to a method that pertains only to one’s own beliefs or ends. Where for some solitude is a time for spiritual work, to another it may simply be creative work, or to another an emotional time-out, even a prescribed respite for a type-A personality. At a minimum, however, solitude is for all a physical sense of space and time and a sense of freedom or relief from interaction with others.

But perhaps the core of Koch’s definition is disengagement, for disengagement brings a new flexibiity to the experience of solitude. Disengagement not only allows for solitude in the midst of the crowd but even within the daily life-style and vocation, thus being available as a specific experience or resource that can be pursued when needed, as needed, or even at will. Furthermore, disengagement allows solitude to range from physical isolation to psychological self-perception, wherein the mind can recognize and act upon its own perceptions, intuitions, and insights.

The metaphor of engaging with the world is rightly turned on its head as disengaging from unreality and falsehood, of turning inward to what is our true source of being.

Ninth-century Chan master Tung-shan once said: “I preach what I cannot meditate and I meditate what I cannot preach.” This is a straight-forward summary of the great dichotomy of inward and outward, extrapolated to active and contemplative.

We cultivate ourselves inwardly, through meditation and introspection, according to our tradition. But the fruits of our effort are inevitably limited. Who can boast of the perfection of inner cultivation? Society and others may wonder what we are doing, what we think of ourselves.

So we must “preach” what we lack, what inner fruit we cannot express outwardly. We must articulate to ourselves — but especially to others — what we believe, our experiences, our hopes, and desires, our compassion. And do so with the example of our lives, every moment of our lives. And when these efforts are judged by others to be inadequate, ineffective, idealistic, or false, then we must return again to our meditation to “meditate what we cannot preach.”

And so the cycle goes on, the cycle that consumes our very being, the cycle of “perfection.” We enter into it fully, but we cannot dwell on it long or it becomes an object, not a process. It is a cycle that conforms to our very purpose and our purpose conforms to the cycle. It cannot be a contrived purpose or a purpose defined for us by society, but a purpose that grows in our attentive minds the way a flower grows.

The famous tree-sitting of Julia Butterfly Hill has a parallel in the column-sitting of Simon Stylites. Both were motivated not so much by a cultural or group concern but by a strong personal conviction — a moral imperative to make a statement, not a social or cultural motive. A journalist who ascended to the makeshift platform that Julia Hill had in the top of the tree noted how cold and windy it was and remarked how she could possibly stand it. Julia replied that it was very difficult at first but that now the cold was a sensation, not a hardship. Simon would have had the parallel experience. He would have endured the heat without hardship, just as a sensation.

How did others react or respond to them? It was not the message that was deficient but the people — not the message that lacked persuasion but the moral turpitude of the hearers and witnesses. The tree or the column were props, accessories, devices. They worked because they symbolized the gist of their message — Julia Hill about the deforestation, Simon about moral corruption.

As with others embarked on a solitary work, the inner psychological resources were the mainstay of the individual — with a little help from friends (food and supplies). And the time to come down was determined by a deep-rooted conviction that one had done enough to deliver the message, to strike the best moral deal given the culture and the people. This is the point at which Jesus would say it was time to kick the dust from one’s feet and move on to other projects, other audiences. Or to none at all, perhaps, to just recluse oneself.

Despite the public attention and the inherent danger of their respective exploits, both Simon Stylites and Julia Butterfly Hill knew in their hearts what it meant to be a solitary.

Visualization is the projection of positive images throughout the mind in order to settle the mind, to struggle with disease or psychological shortcomings and stress, or to assist meditation.

But visualization is not meditation. Both visualization and meditation represent effort, but the former is effort that must be consciously, deliberately, even meticulously learned and applied. Of course, meditation must be learned and applied with effort, too. But meditation is an emptying of images, ideas, and thoughts, whereas visualization is a conscious contrivance of thoughts and images for a therapeutic end. In Buddhist tradition, a mental image is the equivalent of a sensory object, as much as is a contrived or entertained thought.

Meditation traditions hold a variety of mantras, but these, too, can be considered visualizations, or auditory visualizations. Zen Buddhism argues against mantras because mantras require a process of mind akin to visualization. Even a “good” mantra is an effort, and potentially a distracting effort. As commentator Nyogen Senzaki explains:

If you drop a coin into a calm pool, the ripples increase one after another. It makes no difference whether the coin is gold or copper. The moment the sea of our mind raises a ripple, the calmness is disturbed and the peace broken.

Often one comes across lines of poetry and thought that express self-effacement. Self-effacement is simply the process of making oneself less conspicuous to the world. It is a difficult concept in the West and among people with no spiritual interest. Self-effacement is identified as the opposite of assertiveness and akin to shyness or insecurity. And perhaps the uncultivated soul may be expressing no more than what appears to be a psychological problem or a characteristic of personality. This only means that the person has to start reflecting and meditating on his or her life course.

Self-effacement rightly understood is the virtue of humility fine-tuned to a philosophy of life or a psychology of being. Self-effacement follows a continuum from humility to integrity, from passivity to consciousness, from psychological trait to mindful motive. No wonder it is a chief characteristic of every classic hermit.

The Zen master Soyan Shaku (mentioned a few entries ago), recommended ten practices applicable to everyone.

1. Upon awakening, quit your bed at once, like discarding a useless pair of shoes.
2. In the morning, before dressing, light incense and meditate.
3. Eat at regular intervals and only to the point of satisfying hunger.
4. Retire at a regular hour.
5. Receive a guest as when you are alone. Be alone as if you had received a guest.
6. Be aware of what you say. Say only what you would do.
7. Do not forego opportunity, nevertheless, think twice.
8. Do not regret the past but look instead to the future.
9. Have the fearless heart of a hero and the loving heart of a child.
10. When you retire to sleep do so as if it is your last night.

The conflict between religion and science does not arise when each pursues its own field of interest. But it is not a mere academic divergence, as with, say, organic chemistry versus Victorian poetry. The conflict is implicit in that both science and religion are tempted to describe the totality of the universe, and by different and ostensibly irreconcilable criteria.

As mentioned in an earlier entry, the conflict tends to resolve itself as a clash between not science but technology and not religion but ethics. Both science and religion have the internal means to refute outlandish hypotheses in their spheres of interest. But manifested as technology — such as medicine, engineering, or manufacturing — science has been greatly abused. Conversely, the history of religion easily demonstrates ethical abuses, corruption, and scandals regardless of theological fine points.

In his book, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, the Dalai Lama rightly recovers the proper spheres and relations of science and religion, though intellectually and not by grounding both in culture. The concept of paradigm shift has shown that science and by extention religion are not realms of absolute knowledge. It can be pointed out that both depend upon cultural ambience, their cultural milieu, their material and intellectual environment, and the cues provided by culture. Hence the abuses to their practical applications of technology and ethics are essentially cultural, and the ontological status of either science or religion is distinct from real world applications. A proper view of what can or cannot be understood — and a focus on areas of mutual interest such as consciousness — will greatly benefit a humanity beleaguered by wars of religion and science, wars of ethics and technology.

The universality of religion is not in the various theologies but in the archetypes. To cling to a theology and not go beyond the human dogmas and representations to the heart of the archetypes is to favor the epiphenomenal, the historical, the particular, and the cultural. We must look beyond, to the universal, the abiding, the true. To ascend to the archetype is to see the face of the transcendent without the transience of time and our limited experience.

Here is a quick illustration. The Gospel shows Jesus in a brief conversation with “the woman by the well.” Jesus tells her that the water of the well will not satisfy but that there is a living water that alone will. She asks him to give her this water. And he speaks of himself as the source of this transcendent water.

The archetype, of course, is the water, not Jesus per se, although the writers wanted to make the story prove something about his status. Jesus is not the source but the conduit of the living water, for ultimately water has no single source but the few conduits must be ourselves.

Here is a quick Zen parallel. A monk asked Hseuh-feng, “When the old creek of Zen dries and there is not a drop of water left, what can I see there?” Hsueh-feng answers, “There is the bottomless water, which you cannot see.” The monk asks further: “How can one drink that water?” Hseuh-feng replies, “He should not use his mouth to do it.” The monk persists. “But what happens to someone who drinks that water?” Hseuh-feng replies: “He will lose his life.”

The modern saying, “Be in the moment,” is true and wise, but very difficult. How easy to be “in the moment” watching a butterfly’s flight or a striking sunset, or the season’s first snowfall. But how difficult to be in the moment when we suffer wracking physical pain or learn of sad news or are in the throes of grief. We are told to bear pain and sorrow stoicly and impassively, that it will pass. Jesus on the cross, we are led to believe, suffered in silence and presumably remained “in the moment.”

It begs the question: If being in some moments is better than being in other moments, should we aspire to be in the moment at all? Or is it that we have nothing but the moment? No past will redeem this moment, and no future will reprieve us from it. Such a realization is not comforting to the sorrowful but neither is it comforting to be condemned to the moment only. Or, as Sartre puts it, to be “condemned to live.”

The injunction to live in the moment has been wrongly taken to be based on the pleasure principle, a sensual ground. Accordingly, it signals us to live to enjoy pleasure (however sanitized) because of duty or time or pleasure, whether sensual or aesthetic. This is a misinterpretation of the animal’s apparent lack of self-consciousness. So we subvert our own self-consciousness, fooling it with pleasure.

We must renounce the self as center for all moments, even the tragic and sad ones, especially these. For the real tragedy, echoing Unamuno, is the sense of immortality betrayed, unproven, elusive, undermined by the notion that immortaility is the moment. As the Japanese Zen master Takuan put it:

This day will not come again
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.

Soyen Shaku (1859-1919) was an influencial Zen teacher who ended his career supporting Japanese imperialism as an extention of his unfortunate nationalist beliefs. But his intellectual contributions were great and cannot be denied. One of his best insights was packaged in a maxim intended to characterize himself, a maxim that certainly applies beyond his own experience: “My heart burns like fire but my eyes are as cold as dead ashes.”

Whatever the degree of solitude or disengagement from society we may experience, we must extinguish not our feelings and emotions (“heart”) but rather our senses (“eyes”). The “heart” propels our progress on a spiritual path, while our senses tend to see life and objects as temporary sources of diversions from the spiritual path.

Working on what feelings and emotions really ought to consist of is a great challenge for anyone, but especially for the solitary, who naturally can lapse into misanthropy and cynicism towards fellow human beings. The concept of love, much trivialized, much misunderstood, transcends the senses and approaches the very harmony of the universe, the very core of being — and does so without attachment, without diversion, without corruption. Perhaps the spiritual path is nothing but this pursuit of harmony and being after all. In which case the true concept of love will resonate within us because we can perceive progress on our path as no mere intellectual or emotional stage but a uniform momentum.