hermit's thatch

A model microcosm of society is a group of people arguing. We may recommend a certain openness, tolerance, or mindfulness to them, but it is likely that most people will not want to accept that because it suggests a dilution of their moral principles or suggests the wrongness not of their behavior in arguing but of their point of view, especially if the argument involves specific actions defended, advocated, or planned.
If we extrapolate this scenario to society itself, as a macrocosm, we see that the issue is not the bringing of tolerance or mindfulness to one set of people or the other (or to multiple sets) but rather the issue is power and authority. Everyone accepts some source of authority — be it mere convention and ignorant conformity –in that everyone claims a guiding principle to their outlook and actions. But different people accept different authorities, and these authorities or sources of authority conflict and oppose one another, contradict and make war on one another, regardless of whether the authority has been empowered by material means or not. Nonviolent resolutions are proposed to a group of people arguing because the resolutions reduce the negativity of certain points of view or actions, but as long as certain points of view or advocated actions exist and are empowered with authority, is it possible to say that mindfulness will defuse them? Are we trying to defuse the behavior or the idea behind the behavior? Are they intrinsically linked? And what about the equivalent conflicts on the scale of macrocosm?
These reflections have great importance to the solitary and the hermit who, regardless of education or awareness, has instinctively grasped the fact that society deals not with relationships in the neutral sense but with power and authority relationships. To accommodate others, it is necessary for all to renounce authority and power. But with this renunciation, we renounce moral authority and the power or energy of good as we may see it. To go beyond good (and evil) is essentially mystical and will not work universally, with all peoples or in every circumstance. Society — which is power and authority that contradicts the higher instincts of human enlightenment — cannot coexist with renunciation of power and rejection of contrived rather than natural authority.
This is why the solitary and hermit will not get involved with society. This is why the hermit or solitary is often the better candidate for a life empowered by mysticism or its particular spiritual or insightful equivalent.

The utopia that conforms to the way of the hermit and solitary can be found in the short tale of Tao Chien called “Cherry Blossom Spring.” In this story, a traveler lost in a forest comes to a cave entrance and follows it, emerging on the other side into an ideal place where people work, rest, and coexist without violence, power, or rank, a place where food is plentiful, disease unknown, and wants reduced to the patterns of nature. The traveler is delighted and tells the people of this hidden valley that he must return at once to announce his wonderful discovery to the world. No, protest the people, don’t tell anyone, for unworthy people with unworthy motives will come and their society and values will corrupt and ruin them. But the traveler will not listen. In a moment he has retreated through the cave and back to the forest, eventually finding his way to the city and his compatriots. A troop of the curious quickly forms and they go straight to the forest. But after a long and futile search, the cave cannot be found. They give up, wondering if they have been duped by the traveler.
Such a society is Tao Chien’s own mountain village, an ancient Chinese hamlet that welcomed hermits and recluses without prejudice. Tao Chien, in reclusion from government service, a farmer with his family, imagined his village — and, perhaps, his eremitic life — in a perpetual cherry blossom springtime, the most beautiful season of the year.

The flower I call morning glory (probably Mexican heather run wild) only blooms overnight, and this morning there are over a dozen of the gentle lavender flowers perched in quiet greeting on their slender green stalks. Nearby a frog croaks lazily, and birds are already busy looking for seeds. The sky is an enormous and cloudless blue.
But many miles away I discover that someone has felled every pine tree in the front yard of a house that must have recently exchanged hands. One day those magnificent trees loom tall and the next are felled and lying strewn like beached whales. Fifty or sixty or ninety years to grow and only a moment to be cut down. The trees lie silent and uncomplaining as they die, their rich green needles turning like an unaccustomed autumn to red then yellow. It is a glimpse of our own deaths: so many years to grow and achieve a sense of who we are and then to fade away, perhaps not as violently, or perhaps for many in the world more violently and in not so many years.

Utopias are portrayed as lost and inaccessible worlds (Thomas More, Tao Chien, many science fiction settings) or as ideal states of the past. Hence the Golden Age of the ancient Greeks contrasted with the present Iron Age of Hesiod. The Garden of Eden contrasted with history in the era of fallen humanity. Rousseau’s state of nature projects utopia before society and its artificial constraints had altered the innocence of the individual. Perhaps Freud’s oceanic feeling in the womb is the origins of the notion that the ideal resides in the past, not in the present or in the future, and that all of our longing is for this mystic state. Utopias provoke our imaginations to wonder what we should be.
For the solitary-minded, however, nostalgia can be haunting, crippling, especially for individuals whose past has not been idyllic. Yet the accretions of the past comprise the person of the present. If the solitary is not prepared to extirpate the past, no progress can be made. The process need not be violent, nor an idealization like a utopia. It is a forgetting, an irrelevance. The present emerges as the only reality, the only time when we are breathing in and out, when we can do something good and natural, when we can begin the journey on a path that heretofore had frightened us. By not ascribing ideals to the past we become fully conscious of the present, of what the passage of time and the priorities of our lives should be.

Towards dusk, after a heavy rainfall, I am walking past a woodlot burned over a year ago by a brushfire. A sudden cracking noise and I see a large cluster of blackened branches crash to the earth. “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, is there a sound?” Suddenly (a little sheepishly) I realize the import of this old philosophical question. If “I” am not here, does the universe go on? The sound in the forest — any sound — is a frequency wave of energy that depends on the creature for aural interpretation. Otherwise, there is a profound silence. And this silence is the silence of the universe, palpable and real, as real as any “sound,” real regardless of whether the little wave on the sea called “I” is present to heard its sound and fury.

Utopias are literary and creative brainstorms, imaginative sketches of how the world and society ought to be. Reading early works such as More, Campanella, or Bacon, we smile in recognition of our own society’s obsession with contrivances and the preservation of wealth and production through power and authority. These authors had found literary devices to criticize contemporary values under the guise of presenting amusing speculative fiction. Putting the description of Utopia in the mouth of a Portuguese sailor, for example, gives More the freedom to say what he wants without the necessity of advocating his own ideal scenarios to be forced upon unenlightened society. This was the mistake of Plato, whose utopian Republic would depend upon power and authority to establish virtue, whereas the later utopias would not.

The night is still and dark but for the circle of light on the page of the open book. A moth hovers while I read under the small lamp. For a moment, it perches on my hand, a delicate tawny yellow, like burnished gold. In another moment it is gone. Next morning, just at dawn, the first rays of sunlight dance along the edge of the window curtain. The flickering light crosses the spot where I was reading last night, and for a moment the light touches my hand. The light is a delicate tawny yellow, like burnished gold.

Utopias are conceived as alternatives to the overwhelming control of power and authority. The premise of every utopia is the innate decency of each person given freedom from the socialization of a society controlled by power and authority. This control is seldom understood or even acknowledged by the average person, taken as a necessary given to maintain civilization, to keep people from being “nasty, brutish, and short,” to quote Hobbes. These average people are, as Seneca said, bound by golden chains, just as firmly as if the chains were coarse iron, but the gold gives them the illusion of being autonomous and content. Power and authority feeds the illusion of contentment through the marketplace of material goods and pleasures. As the goods and pleasures become “necessities,” so too does the power and authority that perpetuates them and perpetuates their captivity.
What utopias — or those who conceive them — try to sketch for us are challenges to the premises of society. The premises that humans are innately evil and that superfluous material goods and power structures to maintain them are essential are serious delusions. To shake off these delusions is the first step of the solitary. The solitary, just by following his or her own disposition, is prepared to understand these issues. The solitary is disposed to understand that what is vital need not be and cannot succeed as mere contrivance, however vast. The solitary lives in a kind of utopia, which literally means “no place.” Where better to begin?

Poverty is deprivation of material necessities (food, clothing, shelter), but a cultural or spiritual poverty also exists: deprivation of self-expression, autonomy, self-development. Historical hermits from Asia to the European forests have always been willing to cope with material poverty, setting themselves physically outside the zones of power and authority centered in cities. The corollary poverty of soul and person has been the more urgent concern. The poor in the world suffer deprivation of self the more keenly because of abuse, manipulation, and control by authority and power. But the better off suffer spiritual poverty from the same sources of authoirty and power. In urban settings or in today’s modern nation-state, the surveillance by authority makes escape to deserts and mountains less plausible to solitaries, so that fleeing into material simplicity is still not an issue. But the control of the minds and hearts of people through consumerism and various addictions of soul and mind (as well as body) is ubiquitous. This form of poverty is often not material deprivation at all. It is a poverty that leaves the individual destitute of purpose, regardless of material circumstances. The hermits of the past knew that it was essential to flee spiritual deprivation even at the price of material poverty.

Like the other two major Western religions, Islam takes a pragmatic view of solitude and eremitism as temporary spiritual practices but ultimately having no spiritual value or authority, being a disruption of the unity of society and religion. While “recluses” appear here and there in Sufi stories, they are generally scholars entrenched in study for a short time or poor mendicants. The basic assumption is that hermits do nothing, a strong condemnation, as in the verse attributed by Idries Shah to an otherwise unnamed Sahl’s Commenting on a Recluse:

He has established himself upon a mountain
So he has no Work to do.
A man should be in the market-place
While still working with true Reality.

Saadi of Shiraz (13th cent.) affirms the contrasting identification with the way of the scholar:

Give money to the scholars so that they can study more.
Give nothing to the recluses, that they may remain recluses.