hermit's thatch

Kamalashila identifies five characteristics for a “conducive environment,” such an environment being a prerequisite to meditation but also to daily life and the ideal physical setting for solitaries. (The list is easily updated by identifying evil beings in 2. as bad company and neighbors.)

1. provides easy access to food and clothes,
2. is free of evil beings and enemies,
3. is free from disease,
4. contains good people who maintain moral ethics and who share similar views, and
5. is visited by few people in the daytime and with little noise at night.

The 8th century Mahayana Buddhist writer Kamalashila identified several prerequisites to meditation that can easily be applied to daily life in general. While they might be considered “ascetic,” most solitaries would find that these prerequisites reflect their ideal lifestyle. (From his Guide to Meditation, with commentary by the Dalai Lama.)

1. to live in a conducive environment;
2. to limit desires and practice contentment;
3. to not be involved in too many activities;
4. to maintain pure moral ethics, and
5. to fully eliminate attachment and all other kinds of conceptual thoughts.

Four frogs are lined up on the same upper window sill outside, slumbering in the narrow shade of a large myrtle tree. They are a ghastly ashen gray color due to their automatically cutting back their metabolism as they sleep, safe from predators, weather, and humans. “Etherized upon a table” they look. I wonder what a frog dreams, let alone four of them. Not a twitch despite my obvious hovering; their eyes are unmoved, even no rapid eye movements to hint at dreams. “To sleep, perchance to dream” may not be part of a frog’s angst — at least not until nightfall and hunger awakes them again.

In a 1999 teaching session on transforming the mind, the Dalai Lama was asked which was better: a city life style or a remote and peaceful setting? The Dalai Lama replied that while it depended on the individual, the very advanced practitioner might “seek a life of solitude and abandon the world, as it were. That is said to be the highest form of spiritual practice.” For most, however, “it is far more important to be an effective member of society, someone who makes a positive social contribution and integrates spiritual practice as much as possible into daily life.” This is the path for most to pursue, said the Dalai Lama, because solitude is too hard for most and they would discover this too late, only to “slowly and quietly, and with some embarrassment … try to sneak back into society!”
–from Transforming the Mind (2000)
Of course, those who make “a positive social contribution,” etc. are few, and those who pursue the “highest form of spiritual practice” are fewer. The overwhelming majority of people, sadly, do neither, and these are the ones who are not reached either through appeals to social contribution or otherwise.

Here is a half-amusing quote from a standard medieval history text (Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages; 1968):

Some zealots, for whom the communal life of the monks was insufficiently austere, became hermits or anchorites, obeying the impulse that always bids some to hide from the world. They might build huts in the wilds, dressed in sheepskins, exist on the produce of their own garden and the gifts of poor peasants; or they might continue to serve humanity by settling at a ford or marsh or forest way to guide travelers. Some few, particularly women, had themselves walled in a cell with a window opening on a church.

If silence was a palpable force, an enormous reservoir of energy, what could we envision? A huge labyrinth of an industrial factory, the whir of gigantic machines grinding, clanging, mashing, louder and faster, then suddenly: silence. Or a large room full of voices, a rising hum of anger, a single voice rousing the crowd to fever pitch, and then, suddenly: silence. Or fearful faces staring up at an ominous sky as the roar of bomber aircraft grows louder, closer, visible, screams of fear, and then, suddenly: silence.
Silence is not merely the counterpart of noise when noise is human contrivance. Silence is void and empty of noise, it absorbs and neutralizes noise, it stills and sweetens and renews. If silence were palpable, it would stop noise and the human source of noise.
The emptiness of silence is the fullness of the universe, the fullness of becoming resting in being. And, if our minds are very still, very quiet, we can sense in a palpable way the scent and taste of silence as it descends like a mantle, like a gentle rain shower, over the face of the earth.

Which comes first: widespread depression in modern society, or cultural and financial contrivances creating and servicing a lucrative market? The ominous collusion of culture, business, medicine, education, and popular media tries to overwhelm the average person into believing that, yes, depression is inevitable, virtually innate, a basic part of human nature. The cultural use of pharmaceuticals is a renunciation of will and mocks those in the world who live in conditions that really have brought about disease, illness, and mental problems. Culture creates many diseases that disengagement from culture begins to cure. Silence and simplicity not only cure but prevent, reverting us to a natural state where our degree of dependence on contrivance is minimized, allowing a process of healing (not to say awakening) to begin.

Apocalypticism, the belief if not outright desire for the end of the world in a dramatic and violent way, has existed in every culture because suffering and the desire to end suffering is universal. Apocalypticism as a tumultuous cleansing of perceived evil is, however, a violent projection of the self and the group, and wishes vengeance and havoc on a world already suffering.
Apocalypticism is a special temptation to the would-be hermit and solitary because it justifies the life style of aloneness and aloofness, presenting itself as a cure for alienation and despondency. But it slips quickly into a misanthropy and despair. The individual assumes that he or she alone suffers. Isn’t this a popular explanation for why someone becomes a hermit or recluse: the death of a beloved, unrequited love, disappointments, abuses, worldly failure?
But apocalypticism goes a step further in wanting to punish others for one’s own suffering, by making others suffer too. Suffering is universal. Our suffering is always less than that of so many others. The path of solitude is a path of knowledge, awareness, and compassion, not resentment.

Dystopia is the word often used for literary depictions of utopias gone wrong. It is no coincidence that these depictions are classed as science fiction, though they are essentially political novels: for example, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 or even Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. For what has gone wrong in these fictional scenarios is not only the authoritarian powers but technology (hence the “science”). Indeed, technology is what enables authority to consolidate and extend its power to a precise and scientific level of cultural control. Technology has long failed the sense of culture that nourishes individual potential. Technology reduces economics to materialism, consumption to greed, and labor to dependence. The ancient Chinese recluses and the desert fathers of the Roman Empire successfully escaped authoritarian power but, as importantly, they escaped technology itself, and that is what allowed them to function freely. They functioned freely not because technology did not yet exist to a sophisticated degree but rather because technology was not so sophisticated as to abet the extension of political power. The silence and simplicity of their era and their natural settings fostered their successful life of solitude and autonomy. The destruction of nature and of the values of the spirit today remind us that the benefits of modern technology are the irrelevant byproducts of dystopia.

Reluctant mid-morning chore: weeding among mosquitoes. But outside the door is a cloud of hovering dragonflies, maybe thirty or more, hovering delicately about five or six feet off the ground. The yellow-brown dragonflies are small and therefore recent hatchlings. I had never seen so many little ones like this assembly, and they are a delight to behold. The weeding goes on perfunctorily, perhaps unaffected by the presence of the dragonflies. But I like to imagine that the mosquitoes were just a little more cautious all morning.