hermit's thatch

Hermits are of two types, like ponds.
One type of pond is fed from below, from deep sources of living water constantly refreshing the whole from within. This pond is stable, not changeable. It exists in harmony with its environment, welcomes visitors and vistas of all sorts, alone and in silence at the end of the day.
The second type of pond is fed almost imperceptibly by an upland stream and by rain gentle or strong. The stream and rain mingle with receptive waters that invigorate and bring life and strength. Also almost imperceptibly, a stream trickles away from the pond, downstream, beyond the vision of any pond visitor, which nourishes new ponds and rivulets and streams unseen from the forest clearing, and yet the pond is not diminished thereby. The downstream rivulet joins a brook and then a river, and the river goes on to the sea.

Art invariably falls short of conveying the true content of divinity and sagacity and instead portrays religion. Renaissance cherubs, the severe Velazquez, the romantic Dore and Blake, the naive American Hicks — all fall short of conveying a sense of mystery or other-worldliness. Modern pious art assumes foreknowledge of scripture or doctrine to convey meaning. Eastern depictions of the Buddha try to portray serenity (except the bizarre Hotei) but the deities are not always benign, as in Tibetan and Japanese traditions. Simple but endearing are Hindu portraits of blue-skinned Krishna with Radha in a forest setting (and there are Western counterparts) where the viewer feels like an intruder who has seen god and is embarrassed, like the apostle of Jesus at the Transfiguration who blurts out that it is good to be here and what do I do now.

As soon as we complain about the caprices and hardships of nature, we exchange nature for human compulsion. From tempest, drought, mudslide, flood and extremes of temperature, the complaints accelerate to the unyielding earth, the unproductive, earth, the earth ripe for exploiting. And so follows civilization’s course: mining, logging, draining, filling, dumping, runoff, chemical agriculture, pollution. Because these actions require organization, money, and motive, soon concentration of power and authority are compelling not only nature but people to change, alter, adapt, renounce, resign themselves, give up simpler lives and patterns of living. From a harmonious relationship with nature to an antagonistic one, from a relative individuality for all to a collectivity for most — this is the long-term result of our complaints against nature.
This is the economic and social history of most of the world, the core of what is called “development.” No wonder ancient peoples from Chinese to Native Americans were loath to disturb mountains or change the course of rivers or hew forests when they were believed to be occupied by supernatural beings. No such restraint hinders moderns. From nature and the solitary to domination of both nature and solitaries.
It is not a matter of living in wilderness. Early hermits could afford to; modern hermits are more often urban dwellers. But as the natural world is assaulted mercilessly by moderns, a big piece of that eremitism is assaulted, too, by the arrogance of power and the demand for renouncing values precious to the individual, values not merely symbolized by but actively represented by nature and its cycles. All of us — but especially the solitary — must monitor our relationship to the natural world in order to recover the purest sense of harmony with universe and self.

Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno extends the concept of compassion to all living beings, just as he extends consciousness to all living things. This he links to heightening our sense of imagination, not the capacity for fantasy but for empathy and solidarity with the beings of the universe.

I feel the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.

Primitive social organization based its mode of production (obviously, unconsciously) on the simplest harmony with nature. Labor was minimal, sufficient to meet needs. This is an idealization, of course, utopian in excluding human nature and its vices, but a model of hunter-gatherer-herder or agrarian culture. The point of the model is the mode of production. The simplicity of the mode is then echoed in the simplicity of needs. Harmony with nature is built into the material circumstances. This accommodation with nature points to a self-sufficiency that is best fostered by isolation, for as soon as the group in the model — which assumes “society,” but a subconscious one — makes contact with other groups, society properly speaking develops and human vices begin to erode harmony for competition.

Despite Debussy and Chirico (or perhaps in part because of them — search “moonlight” in the archives), I have always been wary of the moon, or more precisely, the “man in the moon.” One night, I looked up into the night sky to gaze at the bright moon but instead it seemed to be looking intently at me. “What are you staring at?” it demanded. “First you stared at the finger pointing to the moon, until at last you learned to look instead to what the finger pointed. Now you are staring at the moon, instead of looking at what the moon is illuminating.” I looked away, reproved. About me were the trees, the contour of the landscape against the night sky, the stars in cold silent heavens. I looked down at the ground before me, the flowers, rocks, my hands and fingers. I could see all these things, pale and incandescent, in the moonlight.

We bid ourselves to temper our ego, by which we really mean two things: first, to eliminate self-harming actions and thoughts such as pride, covetousness, laziness; second, having eliminated or diminished self-harming, to cultivate a different self-perception based on humility and non-desiring.
But are all these actions and thoughts merely dependent on circumstances, such that pride or assertiveness can sometimes be virtues? Can humility be a bad thing? Here is where we mistake personality for ego. We cannot make progress until we have that minimum of ego we call personality. This is a life-long refinement, but at the same time clearly established in childhood. We cannot undo ego without having one, a mature one, in the first place. From personality we can proceed to work on ego, or begin to undo ego and thereby enhance the virtues (and reduce the vices) of our personality. Our conscious goal is to move our virtues into that non-social realm that psychoanalysis calls the superego.
The leader, administrator, and the social organizer cannot help but project personality on a group. But in this capacity is leadership also a projection of ego? What the person interested in wielding power also ends up doing is projecting not only vices but the superego, their own values and conscience. The values may be benign, but in this power capacity, these values may now be reduced to content for psychological manipulation. The use of power and authority becomes the vehicle for values and beliefs. This is why the abuse of sound principles by institutions and authorities or their representatives is more painful to us than the vices of any given individual whom we do not know.
The true solitary, having worked on the ego, will be able to detect the imposition of authority and the arbitrariness of power in others. Ultimately, this will be recognized in social relations and society itself. Rarely does anyone achieve a position of power without thereby exercising authority. Authority is contrivance. Authority exercised by another is authority removed from oneself.

Can a solitary develop compassion, or what the Buddhists call “bodhichitta”? For it seems that the highest compassion requires intense socializing, being with others in a large and public way. But compassion is not just pity in the sense of sorrowful identification with another. Such an attitude is easily codified by society into a paternalism, a condecension, a pharisaic morality.

True compassion begins by extending consciousness, by extending it into that collective consciousness where identity with others is the very sharing of a consciousness that is “built-in” to all of us and is not just an “add-on” of charity or philanthropy. The cry of pain in another human being — it can be half way around the world — can evoke the depth of our compassion because it emerges from (is) our (collective) consciousness. This compassion requires no “social” dimension because it exists at a level of awareness that is universal.

Consciousness is the realization of being, and may be identical with being. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno generously extends consciousness to animate and inanimate beings by positing the action of consciousness through the universe of all beings:

We attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus quotes this Persian saying: “The bitterest sorrow that anyone can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing.” Said differently, our knowledge and desire can embrace and extend to almost any length, but our will and the concrete circumstances (happenstances) of our lives can frustrate nearly any ambition.
Resolving this “bitterest sorrow” means looking at desire and will as the pivot of the two sides of this human equation. Let knowledge — as awareness, as sensitivity, as consciousness — extend as far as our talents persuade us. But let desire, will — projections of ego — shrink to nothing. No projects, no schemes, no insistence or demands on reality. This can be difficult when a moral imperative moves us to anger or frustration. For to be aware means not only to have knowledge but to shape our lives and hearts to what is true. This does not automatically translate into action, except the imperative to change ourselves. This is the only necessary action: changing ourselves. All else will follow, if circumstances (happenstance, “karma”) allow. Only thusly will our best wishes be fulfilled, modestly guided by what is larger than our own little thoughts and feelings. Only thusly can we balance our aspirations and our achievements.