hermit's thatch

Jorge Luis Borges notes (in his Norton Lectures) that in literature we respond not so much to plot and setting as character, specifically to the well-crafted and resonant moment when the character perceives the workings of fate and affirms destiny.

Thus, says Borges, at the moment of kissing Jesus, Judas Iscariot suddenly realized his destiny in betrayal. One may add, as a complementary point, that the historical Jesus recognizes his destiny in that moment on the cross when he cries out that God has forsaken him.

Fate is that lot which falls upon oneself, while destiny weaves the path or sequence toward that end, visible in retrospect. Fate in Greek mythology is cut out and assigned to each of us, as in a cloth pattern. Destiny provides amplitude for action, like the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell, wherein the outcome is understood while the given steps along the way may vary.

In literature and mythology, established parameters and conventions guide the characters to express the writer’s or the culture’s point of view. The individual is struck by events as cumulative destiny, not isolated and random but as shaped by the individual himself or herself: the decisions, the ethical interpretations, the responses of environment, the dreams and meaning crafted by the deepest self. Borges notes that the character of classic literature is esteemed over the centuries not for deeds or accomplishments or adventures, all matters of luck, circumstance and contrivance, but by the insight, recognition, and wisdom that the character comes to realize. We eventually may suspend belief in the events and adventures — be it in Homer, Shakespeare, or Cervantes’ Don Quixote — to remember only the character.

Writing of his time in the death camps of Nazi Germany, witnessing the suffering of his fellow prisoners, the psychotherapist Viktor Frankl noted that a person’s realization of fate challenged the very depths of psychological and spiritual resources. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails … gives him ample opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life. He may remain brave, dignified, and unselfish, or … he may become no more than an animal. … This decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.”

While we may speak of bravery and heroic virtue in the modern death camps, high expectations parallel to our expectations of figures in literature are perilous and close to unrealistic. As much as may wish to see heroism, as depicted in a Hollywood film, we would fail to understand the depths of suffering and its implication for civilization if we look too closely for heroes and not more broadly for the propelling cause or motive for the universalizing lessons about human nature.

As a psychologist himself, Frankl noted that one factor that perpetuated the torment of imprisonment is its indefinite status. Such a tool is employed by modern authoritarian powers in numerous situations east and west, where indefinite confinement, augmented by torture, underscores the meaninglessness of the prisoner’s life. It was not the confinement of a Prometheus but the vicariousness of suffering and the interminable nature of it that would lead to despair. Despair was the chief characteristic that Frankl observed in the prisoners around him.

Can anyone truly master their fate once it is revealed? In classical drama, the character’s coping is the true attraction of the literature, the reader or audience engaged in seeing not so much how the story unravels as to witness how the character resolves life’s dilemmas. The satisfactory resolution is called comedy, while the inability to overcome fate or the products of destiny is called tragedy. In each case, the stature of the character accentuates the resolution: a poor, simple person is best for comedy, the heroic character of great potential is best for tragedy.

The modern world has reversed the sociology of classic literature: the simple and downtrodden slip deeper into tragic circumstances, while the superficial and wealthy enjoy comedic outcomes within their frivolous concerns. Modern literature often takes classic plot models but fails to produce adequate characterization. Social and psychological circumstances have more import to our discerning criticism of literature and art today, so that we have now have tools for breaking down the pretenses of modern arts as mere epiphenomena of culture rather than as genuine understanding of wisdom and spiritual depth.

Ultimately, wisdom and spiritual depth cannot be portrayed in a fictional or even artistic or creative effort. Lurking about the artistic creation is still the subjective and contrived sense that the character is being made to go in a certain direction. As much as one appreciates the sage character of Gibran’s prophet or Hesse’s Siddhartha, we know that we are looking at cardboard cut-outs that substitute for whatever the real experience is behind the presentation.

Art has a necessary and inevitable function of substitution, of universalizing presentation, and in this virtue one may delight. But we must accept the invitation to the next step, to the step that takes us closer to a path, to a destiny, to self-realization. Our creative impulses can weave fictions, images, and music, but only in stillness and emptiness, even of these creative impulses, do we discover the depths of self, meaning, and destiny.

In his classic book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1st ed. 1947, 2nd ed. 1970), Joseph Campbell described the hero’s journey in world myths as a “monomyth” insofar as the mythic process, symbols, and paths are universal to world cultures and a foundational aspect of primitive and ancient civilizations and cultures.

The hero’s journey begins with the “call to adventure,” the struggle against obstacles and trials, the discovery of the treasure, and the return to share the boon. But across the globe, the myth with its different heroes, settings, thresholds, menaces, boons, and obstacles, reflects the human psyche, the deep plunge into the unconscious, the extracting of courage and fearlessness to pursue self-development, the many obstacles, puzzles, mazes, conundrums encountered, until the breakthrough of the personality into self-discovery and self-actualization.

The hermit is an important figure at the outset of the hero’s journey, represented in folklore and mythology as the wise encouraging guide, the dispenser of protection, counsel, and well-being. The hermit may be presented as the solitary wise one dwelling in a forest or cave, that is, the source of strength in the receded consciousness that represents stability and a reservoir of compassion and wisdom, stern but reassuring. Thus, as the adventure begins,

Whether dream or myth, in these adventures there is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as a guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography. …
The first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass …

The crone or fairy godmother in European fairy tales, the Virgin in Christianity, the African Mother of the Gods, the Native American Spider Woman, the Eastern Cosmic Mother, Dante’s Beatrice, Goethe’s Gretchen -— all manifest supernatural guidance, especially representative of the peace of Paradise and the cosmic womb. Masculine figures of aid and guidance are usually “some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith.” In higher mythologies, the masculine guide is the teacher, and especially the ferryman, such as Hermes or Thoth. [An accessible example, not mentioned by Campbell, is the character of the ferryman in Hesse’s novel Siddhartha.]

But things can go wrong. The individual can refuse the call, can turn away from self-development, can subordinate themselves to routines and forces around them in a stifled psychological morass. As anthropologist Ernst Becker noted (in his book The Birth and Death of Meaning, 2nd ed., 1970):

If you stay on the first or personal level for any length of time you may lead a way of life of an eccentric or a hermit, which few can do; even then it is doubtful whether they can do it without the symbols of allegiance or the solid memories of some of the higher levels [of psychological and spiritual consciousness] laid down in early years. The first level for man is unadulterated narcissism; it is pathological and it invites or is already mental illness.

Becker here clearly demarcates the recluse versus the historical hermit who has attained an ascent from personal to social to world-dwelling or secular to the sacred or spiritual level, what Becker identifies as the hierarchy of self-development, the “levels of power and meaning that an individual can choose to live by.”

Hence the common guidance by the experienced to the aspiring hermit: don’t do it if you are carrying emotional (or other) baggage. The true hermit is not one who has simply remained an a stage of infantile or child-like development or naivety, nor one who has failed at a social or secular stage and remained incapable of integrating the lessons and harm, simply one who fears or shuns the world and social contact. The true hermit must have transcended the stages and levels of self-development to confirm and assert a powerful spiritual purpose. Examples of unsuccessful, even moribund, recluses in this regard are occasionally well-documented, as in Raleigh Trevelyan’s “A Hermit Disclosed” or the contemporary Christopher Knight, the so-called “Maine hermit,” described in Michael Finkel’s biography Stranger in the Woods, who represents not a hermit but a pathological recluse. Note how popular culture erroneously, even fatally, conflates these pathological figures with “hermits.” On the contrary, these recluses represent what Campbell, echoed by Becker, points out as the refusal of the call, but, further, even lack the grace or character of the refusers found in the myths. As Campbell puts it:

The literature of psychoanalysis abounds in examples of such desperate fixations. What they represent is an impotence to put off the infantile ego, with its sphere of emotional relationships and ordeals. One is bound in by the wall of childhood; the father and mother stand as threshold guardians, and the timorous soul, fearful of some punishment, fails to make the passage through the door and come to birth in the world without.

Such is the fate of the weak refuser, creating of the self a victim to be saved. In fairy tales and myths these victims include Daphne, Brunhild, Briar-rose (Sleeping Beauty), Lot’s wife, the Wandering Jew, and Prince Kamar (of the Arabian Nights).

But, as Campbell puts it:

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required. So it is that sometimes the predicament following obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release.

And here, precisely, will be found the historical hermits, though Campbell footnotes Otto Rank’s preferred figure of the productive artist as this model. Artist or hermit-poet, hermit-meditator, etc., the figure now transcends even the run-a-day social figure and becomes a new category of hero. Campbell elaborates on the mental process.

Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images. The result, of course, may be a disintegration of consciousness more or less complete (neurosis, psychosis: the plight of the spellbound Daphne); but on the other hand, if the personality is able to absorb and integrate the new forces, there will be experienced an almost super-human degree of self-consciousness and masterful control. This is a basic principle of Indian disciplines of yoga. It has been the way, also, of many creative spirits in the West. It cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within: a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some power of transformation carries the problem to a plane of new magnitudes, where it is suddenly and finally resolved.

Thus the hermit reaches to embrace the capacity of the sage, not as mere world-denier but as aspirant to transcendence and the genius of a self-expression in accord with the hermit’s own tradition, a transcendence that is structured within a psychological balance, utilizing the gifts of art, insight, and compatibility.

In his poem “Old Age,” the poet Ou Yang Hsui (1007-1072) tells briefly of the burdens of getting sick when old: dry, dull eyes, aches, a fuzzy brain dull and forgetful.

When I was young I liked to read. Now I am too old to make the effort. Then, too, If I come across something interesting I have no one to talk to about it.

In theory, a solitary ought not to miss another’s presence but Ou Yang Hsui’s expression of loneliness is not unusual even among the worldly. Nor is a hermit immune to sentiment.

Kenneth Rexroth notes that in fact the Chinese Tang poets inclined to sentiment, especially with advancing age. The poets, male and female, thought of their forties as old age, referring to the first gray hair. By late forties, the course of their days was uncertain, and by fifty the end seemed near. Perhaps given the vagaries of life expectancy in antiquity, this sentiment was not unjustified. Studies of life expectancy in past centuries revised longevity based on survival into adulthood, so that older age was not infrequent, but the poets preferred a different criteria.

When the famous recluse Tu Fu (712-770) visited retired scholar Wei Pa, he reflected:

We sit here together in the candle light.
How much longer will our prime last?
Our temple are already grey.
I visit my old friends
Half of them ave become ghosts.
Fear and sorrow choke me and burn my bowels …

Reflections on transience are emblematic of Chinese and Japanese poetry, the genius of which is the subtle ability to address sentiment and philosophy and meld them into a poem. Tu Fu, rightly considered one of the world’s greatest poets, was more properly a recluse rather than a hermit, Confucian but revealing elements of Taoist and Buddhist thought. His revelation of sentiment is always within reflections on impermanence and melancholy, what the Japanese would later call mono no aware, the poignancy of things.

Impermanence seems a coarse philosophical term, a technical concept, but the poets appreciated the cyclical aspect of nature and came to identify it with seasons. The history of Japanese poetic technique culminates in use of images associated with seasons, illustrating the nature of things. Japanese hermit-poet Ryokan (1758-1831) mastered not only the poetic techniques but expressed them with personal sentiment. His motivation was clear: “If you don’t write of things deep inside your own heart, what’s the use of churning out so many words?”

Thus, concerning old age, Ryokan wonders: “My old friends, where have they gone?” and of old friends remarks: “Will we ever meet again? I gaze toward the sky. Tears streaming down my cheeks.”

In old age he had collected many memories, “poignant memories of these many years,” and more than a few times will admit in these reminiscences “my tears flow on and on,” or “a flood of tears soaks my sleeves,” or “I cannot staunch my flow of tears.” At other times, gazing upon the natural setting or seasonal events outside his hermit hut, he feels “limitless emotion, not one word.”

But not only do memories of old acquaintances move Ryokan. The sight of images reflective of the passing seasons also moves him to sentiment, images that became commonplace seasonal words and images in later haiku poetry. Thus Ryokan offers images and sounds such as:

rain and snow, monkey cries, river sounds ceasing at winter, the flight of crows, the chirping of crickets, “a solitary pine tree,” “lonely autumn breezes,” “wisteria completely faded,” the sound of a distant mountain stream, a cuckoo singing in a willow or the song of a nightingale, autumn breezes, the silently falling leaves or snow.

But, says Ryokan, as if in a confiding whisper: “I’ll tell you a secret: All things are impermanent!” In the end, he says, “My life is like an old rundown hermitage: poor, simple, quiet.”

Or, to switch from our Chinese and Japanese sentimentalists, we may further quote W. B. Yeats writing in Celtic Twilight, who assigns to sentimental souls “the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures, and all animals …” In the context of their sentiments and observations, Yeats might say that “Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”

Eremitism East and West has often used pithy sayings to capture the essence of spiritual motives, to provide a useful tool of focus for the practicing hermit. The sayings of desert fathers and mothers was a key source of inspiration in the Western Christian world of hermits. The Zenrin kushui and related collections of Zen sayings were the counterpart in the Taoist and Buddhist eremitical traditions of China and Japan. In neither West nor East was formal study originally dismissed or an adherence to doctrine or belief dispensed, but, rather, the emphasis on practice called for counterpart tools for practice, and sayings fulfilled that need.

Where Christian sayings emphasized the practice of virtues and self-collection, the Chan or Zen sayings capture mind and insight of mind with a simple image or statement. Both Christian and Zen sayings are invaluable insights into the mechanics of practice versus the aggregation of doctrine and theory.

Of the over a thousand sayings collected in the Eastern traditions, here are just 26 favorites of the Zen tradition. Each saying is numbered according to the collection of A Zen Forest, which is taken from the Zenrin kushui, edited by Soiku Shigematsu.

1.
Sitting quietly in a hut
White clouds rising over the mountain. (10)

2.
One moon shows in every pool;
In every pool the one moon. (37)

3.
Every voice Buddha’s;
Every form Buddha’s. (60)

4.
I’ll explain in detail why Bodhidharma came to China:
Listen to the evening bell sounds.
Watch the setting sun. (86)

5.
Rain bamboos,
wind pines:
all preach Zen. (92)
[Alan Watts used to say that the last verse was redundant and could be omitted.]

6.
Round as the great void:
Nothing to add,
Nothing to take away. (110)

7.
To display at last
Maturity of spirit. (127)

8.
My mind is a void sky. (145)

9.
Penetrate the nature of things,
making them your Self. (163)

10.
Void, void, void, void,
finally all void. (164)

11.
A crane flies over a thousand feet of snow;
A dragon breaks through the iced-over creek. (169)

12.
Eat when hungry!
Sleep when tired! (210)

13.
To feel the first rain after long drought;
To come across an old friend in a foreign land. (219)

14.
The vacant sky:
no front, no back;
The bird’s paths:
no east, no west. (233)

15.
Teaching beyond teaching:
No leaning on words and letters. (241)

16.
The hustle and bustle of the mind in karma:
Within it is Nirvana. (249)

17.
Walking, staying, sitting, lying. (250)

18.
Words,words, words:
fluttering drizzle and snow.
Silence, silence, silence:
a roaring thunderbolt. (306)

19.
Watch all sentient beings
with merciful eyes. (482)

20.
No guest throughout the year,
the gate remains closed.
No-minded all day,
feeling easy. (524)

21.
The pine is green for a thousand years:
No one nowadays understands it. (563)

22.
Magical power, marvelous action:
Carrying water, shouldering wood. (595)

23.
Cutting the human yes and no.
To live with white clouds deep in the mountain,
the brushwood door shut. (682)

24.
Ordinary mind is the Way. (1054)

25.
The whole universe:
nothing ever hidden. (1060)

26.
In Nothing, everything is contained:
limitless —
flowers, moon, pavilions … (1107)

In ancient languages, including Persian, Babylonian, Hebrew, and Greek, the root for the word “paradise” means “garden.” The enclosed garden of antiquity suggested tranquility, and in many cultures symbolized innocence of consciousness, absence of shame and guilt, like the simplicity of a child, or the fragrant flowers within paradise. The idyllic paradise of these cultures was not heaven but an earthly place of rest. The Hebrew “sheol,” abode of the dead, was a deprecated paradise, a station of rest, however gloomy. Only consciousness, called by scriptural Genesis “the knowledge of good and evil,” disrupted and lost for humanity the inheritance of paradise, intended to be its permanent abode.

The sense of paradise as resting place is obliquely referenced in the canonical New Testament parable of the beggar Lazarus, who upon death dwells in “the bosom of Abraham.” More specifically, the New Testament cites the words of Jesus in the Passion wherein the crucified thief is assured that he will soon be with Jesus in paradise. As some Gnostic sources pointed out, Jesus would go to paradise (sheol?) upon his death because the spiritual abode of God was too distant to achieve and too distinct to accommodate material beings. To some Gnostics, heaven, the pleroma, could only be achieved with practiced knowledge, “gnosis.”

So while “sheol” may have become purgatory in Christianity, the concept of paradise lingered even through the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas affirmed that paradise was originally both a corporeal and a spiritual place, intended by God as a dwelling for immortal human beings, while heaven was the dwelling place of angels, not humans.

Dante’s adoption of the title “Paradiso” to describe the third book of his Divine Comedy adopts a misnomer based on his complicated version of cosmology. Dante’s heaven includes multiple heavens trasversed physically through the solar system, from purgatory through paradise, and on past moon, sun, planets and stars, to Empyrean. Earthly paradise is barely mentioned (only in Canto 1) as Dante and Beatrice quickly ascend like astronauts through the heavens, literally. Paradise is merely a sighting along the way, “that place, made for mankind as its true home.”

But humanity had lost that “true home” and fallen back to earth to live in fallen nature due to being conscious of good and evil. Again, some Gnostics, disbelieving that God was the creator of a universe of suffering, argued that Adam had to learn the truth about Ialdabaoth, the half-maker, the demiurge, the one responsible for creating this vale of tears. Eve, they argued, having informed Adam from what she learned from Ialdabaoth’s mother, was punished by the vindictive demiurge and, with Adam, cast out of the only safe place.

Paradise dramatically reappears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is wholly constructed on the traditional Genesis account of the fall, highlighting the expulsion of Adam and Eve. At the epic poem’s finale, the archangel Michael offers compensation to the couple, telling them that they will “possess / A Paradise within thee, happier far.” And so

They hand in hand with wandering step and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

The image of paradise effectively animated apocalyptic movements of the past, such as the Zealots in the Jewish-Roman wars, on to medieval and early modern millennarian and peasant revolts in Christian Europe, to the emergence of Mahdis in the Islamic world and periphery, and messianic cults in the West.

Apocalypticism characterizes messianic and utopian uprisings intended to overthrow exploitative occupiers in order to establish a just state or conditions. Historical Jesus scholars carefully parse the perceptions of Jesus in this apocalyptic tradition, from traditional Messiah fulfilling Old Testament prophesy to what John Dominic Crossan calls “Mediterranean peasant cynic” pronoucing a decidedly different apocalype of the heart and the community. In this latter view, the on-going inspiration of Paradise is not distant and imaginary but recoverable in the utopian and intentional community movement, not simply Hesiod’s lost Golden Age but as a future and forthcoming realm, aspiring to a religious or secular kingdom of God or kingdom of heaven on earth. Historical apocalypticism has not always required the presence of God on earth, only a messianic personality, a guiding ideology, or communal effort.

Today apocalypticism only engenders wariness, as in the case of cults like Jonestown or evangelical dispensationalism, where apocalypse is Armageddon. These notions oppose the core apocalypticism of the historical Jesus and the notion of a kingdom of God within individual and the community, of a paradise here and now.

The term “disease” is today used exclusively to refer to a medical condition, specifically an absence of correct or healthy function. The root word “dis” originally connoted absence or lack, with a further meaning connoting bad, ill, or unfortunate, perhaps in a more metaphorical sense. Thus, for example, “disaster” was not a missing star, literally, but a bad star, an ill omen, a foreboding and prophetic moment.

In the broadest sense, collective thought has historically always feared, or awaited, disaster, always suspected the presence of a bad star. A strong sense of dis-ease has always haunted human efforts, especially social, cultural, and organizational ones. Perhaps this sense is evolutionary, as when primitive men (specifically men, versus women) pursued the hunt, courting the danger of injury or death, while restlessly passing night in woodland copses or hovels, fearful of the night sky, a turn in weather, the sudden appearance of one of the large creatures it hunted during the day. Add to this evolving stories or reports of spirits and malevolent natural phenomena and “dis-ease” was endemic. The dis-ease may have originated in guilt over their work or how they might have treated one of their clan, or in quiet moments a consciousness of frailty before a complex universe, as the experience of injury, sickness, and death became familiar. One may speculate that dis-ease has always been a component of human existence.

Even without a study of primitive anthropology, Freud came to call this “dis-ease” malaise, and to see it rooted in the tenuous status of human beings in their relationships to one another, and to nature and nature’s inevitabilities. While he saw religion as a displacement for psychological conditions, a history of religious thought does demonstrate the perennial attempt to unravel “dis-ease.”

Thinking in terms of culture one might assume “dis-ease” to be a strictly modern affliction, the doubt, restlessness, and anxiety characterizing contemporary life and philosophy. Contrast the Stoicism of antiquity, which Frank MacLynn (biographer of Marcus Aurelius) describes as entirely based on the classical assumption of Platonic and Aristotelian thought of an ordered and meaningful universe governed by God and ethics. Even the other philosophies of antiquity were not dissimilar. Epicureanism, with its emphasis on aesthetics, and the gentle materialism of Lucretius, were also built on pantheism and saw ethics as the only universal to which to cling. These philosophies understood the need to assuage the heart and spirit against dis-ease. In that sense, they shared the temperament of the contemporary East.

The mystery religions of antiquity contrasted to the temperament of the philosophers, but nevertheless did not contradict the desire to understand nature and find a resolution to dis-ease. They did, however, not assume that the God of logic was the true God or a single source of divinity. Their emphasis on bypassing reason and logic in favor of a subjective method of appropriating knowledge offered an alternative to the non-philosopher masses. A similar historical parallel is to be found in the Western scriptural religions of the era: Judaism and Christianity.

What limited the impact of Judaism outside of its immediate adherents was its sense of exclusivity and the peculiar nature of its notion of God, which relied heavily on a myth-making narrative and a narrow set of commandments and rituals. Judaism offered no individual path like the mystery religions, and no philosophical paths until later contact with Greek sources. Christianity suffered the immediate conflict of internal dissension, between the Eastern-style teachings of Jesus, and the institutional and ritualizing forces of Judaism. The victory went to the latter, and the sayings tradition was deliberately mingled with diluting and mythologizing elements of use to the institutionalists. Thus, no rigorous philosophical school emerged — unless the theologians count — and the insights of a mystery religion took on ritualized formulas more heavily Judaic than Greek.

Of special note in this era, therefore, is Gnosticism, which challenges both the institutional Judaic element in Christianity as well as the exclusivity of Christianity’s dependence on scriptural authority complementing the institutional. The Gnostics return to the fundamental dis-ease that should be addressed: the universality of pain and suffering. Some Gnostics went so far as to overthrow the biblical creation narrative and argue that the true God is entirely spiritual and did not create the world, that the world was created by an evil archon/pretender who contrived a flawed creation full of death and suffering.

Modern sholars, effectively maintaining the vital questions of the historical Gnostics, were concerned to rescue the original sayings and parables of Jesus against the interpolations of the orthodox Christians tussling for power as priests, bishops, and authorities, with useful narratives of the passion and resurrection suiting their succession narrative. The impact of the original sayings (as the Q Gospel) and especially of the Gnostic and other sectarian documents discovered at Nag Hammadi is specific to twentieth century spirituality, and complements the grand intellectual effort of the era to address dis-ease. For it is not the dis-ease only of contemporary life but even of the foundations of the civilization, for better or worse.

But gnosis as a method is common to all spiritual traditions. Judaism eventually developed a school of mysticism to transcend the aridness of Scripture anthropomorphism. The Christian mystics of Western Europe, especially Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross, exemplify the notion of discerning the divine outside of the canon of authorized documents, dry and lifeless.

In Islam, Sufism was essentially a gnostic methodology, entirely original within the Muslim tradition but paralleling the mysticism of its predecessor religions in the West. In modern times, theosophists have been instrumental in popularizing elements of Western gnostic traditions and melding them with Eastern thought, and while frequently vague and naive, their historical efforts to explore Eastern documents and traditions has represented an effort to address modern “dis-ease.” The popularity of Eastern thought, then brought to the West as New Thought and New Age, plus keen Western interest in depth psychology and Hindu and Buddhist traditions have all highlighted the gnostic search for meaning that is not dependent on authority, reason, or cultural exclusivity but on the efforts of spiritually-minded individuals.

In his essay “The Stages of Life,” C. G. Jung describes consciousness as the source of our “problem,” contrasted with nature and instinct. For modern times, the “problem” disrupts the psychological progression of the life stages but also challenges the function of culture, which is self-individuation and self-development. The cultivation of self that ought to logically be the provenance of maturity, experience, and wisdom, is undermined and overthrown by the artificiality of consciousness, not only the continued adolescent behavior of older people as an example but more deeply the modern failure to cultivate value.

Thought, like desire and achievement, does not address the problem of consciousness but exacerbates it. The tendency of our thinking is rigidly linear, but there is an alternative. As Jung puts it:

We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But besides that there is a thinking in principle images, in symbols which are older than historical man, which are inborn in him from the earliest times, and eternally living, outlasting all generations, which make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.

Jung argues that we must be attentive to these “primordial images of consciousness” because that process can supersede rational thought in making an order to our lives. He laments how few people are aware of the character of the stages of life, how many enter them successively neglecting their significance and failing to make the necessary and healthy transformations.

Jung uses the sun to illustrate the stages of life. Visualize a circle, then place a cross within it to create four quadrants, which, from the lower left clockwise to the lower right, represent the sun’s progress across the sky, and our human stages of life from infancy to old age. The first quadrant is childhood, when our consciousness emerges from nowhere to begin its progress. Youth should not be impeded but allowed to grow, experience, and learn. In the long midday and afternoon span the adult years of career, profession, social obligation, and self-image, conforming to the many responsibilities of the ego and the instincts of the species. Then the sun begins to set, and new lessons by the aging must be observed and taken to heart in order to appropriately derive the lessons of this last stage. Jung draws out these lessons:

Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and expanding, but that an inexorable inner process enforces the contraction of life. … For the aging person it is a duty and necessity to devote serious attention to himself. After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illuminate itself. Instead of doing likewise, many older people prefer to be hypochondriacs, misers, pedants, applauders of the past or else eternal adolescents — all lamentable substitutes for the illumination of the self, but inevitable consequences of the delusion that the second half must be governed by the principles of the first. … Money-making, social achievement, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature, not culture. Culture lies outside the purpose of nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?

Jung speculates that life after death offered by religion is a concession to those who cannot tolerate the transition from middle years to old age, and especially cannot discern the significance of what old age offers the psyche: the opportunity to pursue the primordial symbols left behind in the rise of consciousness and “problems.” Would that we could perceive these possibilities early in life, nurturing them so that our entire lives would fall not so much into delineated stages but into a continuity of inner self-development.

In 1940, writer C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) published a little book titled The Problem of Pain. Written as a Christian apology, the work addresses its topic in an entirely popular and literal way, assuming the theological arguments of a medieval scholastic, uninformed of any other intellectual movements, even within Christianity, let alone contemporary issues such as anthropology, philosophy, hermeneutics, or psychology. The reader is relegated to a list of arguments constructed on original sin, free will, hell, angels, the Devil, the nature of God, the divinity of Christ, etc., all from the point of view of a traditionalism and scriptural literalism that is sweepingly insufficient from an intellectual source.

Lewis is most animated when he acknowledges the existence of the Numinous (citing Rudolph Otto) as the universal source of religion in all its forms but quickly qualifies the sense of the Numinous by interjecting a criterion: that only in Judaism is the sense of the Numinous identified not only as Yahweh but that it is identified with a moral standard (the commandments) which defines the behavior of those who acknowledge this absolute manifestation of the Numinous. Thus, Lewis is able to argue that because no other sense of the Numinous clearly identifies a moral standard to complement its divinity, only the Judeo-Christian religion breaks through to the complete nature of the Numinous — and therefore constitutes the true religion. But contrary to Lewis’s ahistorical sense is the equal universality of the perennial philosophy, which Lewis seems to anticipate in alluding to Aldous Huxley (whose book The Perennial Philosophy argues that the Numinous is universally present and not merely in one culture but simply expressed variantly) was published in 1945.

Ironically, Lewis very clearly sets out the “opposing” view on pain and suffering early in the book, saying that this view is what he would have argued before his conversion to Christianity. These arguments are never really addressed in the course of Lewis’s book but are subsumed under the author’s necessity to have the reader accept Christianity and its theology. In any case, the straw argument is from an “atheist” point of view and does not acknowledge a perennial philosophy, so that Lewis has constructed a theist/atheist frame around what is in fact a larger view of religion in Otto, Huxley, and contemporary studies.

Look at the universe we live in. By far the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold. The bodies which move in this space are so few and so small in comparison with the space itself that even if everyone of them were known to be crowded as full as it could hold with perfectly happy creatures, it would still be difficult to believe that life and happiness were more than a bye-product to the power that made the universe. As it is, however, the scientists think it likely that very few of the suns of space – perhaps none of them except our own — have any planets; and in our own system it is improbable that any planet except the Earth sustains life. And Earth herself existed without life for millions of years and may exist for millions more when life has left her. And what is it like while it lasts? It is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another. In the lower forms this process entails only death, but inthe higher there appears a new quality called consciousness which enables it to be attended with pain. The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die.

In the most complex of all the creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence. It also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures. This power they have exploited to the full. Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonised apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering. Every now and then they improve their condition a little and what we call a civilisation appears. But all civilisations pass away and, even whilethey remain, inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably
sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may have brought to the normal pains of man. That our own civilisation has done so, no one will dispute; that it will pass away like all its predecessors is surely probable. Even if it should not, what then? The race is doomed. Every race that comes into being in any part of the universe is doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down, and will sometime be a uniform infinity of homogeneous matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.

Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in its various editions, first appearing in 1848, has often been identified for its Epicurean aesthetic and worldly philosophy, fitting the mood of British intellectual life and art in the late nineteenth century, with its interest in antiquity, romantic exoticism, and fatalism. The pessimism of the era reflected that of ancient Rome at a comparable stage, the nearest counterpart to the British Empire, with Omar Khayyam a similar-minded thinker in a fossilized imperial society.

Historical Epicureanism represented a skepticism of the gods extrapolated to the state, to society, and to institutions so revered by both the powerful and the foolish. The alternative to duty, service and belief was an aesthetic point of view, a seeking out of what was not transient — art, poetry, music, modes of expression both genuine, enduring, and universal. In Omar Khayyam, however, the aesthetic life actively enjoys sensual pleasures, especially wine:

How long, how long, in infinite pursuit
of this and that endveavour and dispute?
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
than sadden after none, or bitter fruit. (1st., 39)

To the catalog of sensual pleasures are added those pursuits which wine embodies.

While Khayyam may have been shunned by contemporaries as blasphemous, the poetry of the Sufis often used sensual imagery presented as mysticism — and a French priest and translator of Khayyam, contemporary of Fitzgerald, pleaded likewise for this view. [Interestingly, this view has also been applied to Chinese poets such as Tao Chien and Li Po who also celebrate wine.]

But while Fitzgerald does not accept the mysticism argument, neither does Fitzgerald believe that the astronomer Khayyam was an adherent of science and reason as an alternative to intellectual skepticism. Rather, he imagines Khayyam’s sensualism to be an exaggerated poetic device, for he is too smart to not further apply philosophy to the presumed Epicurean solution, let alone a hedonist one. Fitzgerald instead identifies Khayyam with Lucretius, seeing Khayyam less patient of an entirely Stoic view of the universe. Notes Fitzgerald:

Omar, more desperate, or more careless of any so complicated system as resulted in nothing but hopeless necessity, flung his own genius and learning with a bitter or humourous jest into the general Ruin which their insufficient glimpses only served to reveal; and pretending sensual pleasure as the serious purpose of life, only diverted himself with speculative problems of Deity, Destiny, Matter and Spirit, Good and Evil, and other such questions, easier to start than to run down and the pursuit of which becomes a very weary sport at last!

In rehabilitating Khayyam, Fitzgerald sought to rescue the skeptic Persian poet from those who would embrace his apparent hedonism and disperse with any moral sensibility. Such is the hazard of publishing an overtly Epicurean work, shrouded in mysterious antiquity, embraced by readers of this or that quote celebrating pleasure but missing any irony about pleasure’s futility.

The occasional complaint of letter-writers to editors of religious and spiritual magazines is that the course of articles is usually insufficient summary, while the real gist of insight is promised at an expensive conference or workshop in a pricey venue for an excessive number of days beyond the average person’s reach, as if the best insights are only available from celebrity figures at swank locations.

The point is reminiscent of John McQuarrie’s remark in his 1967 book God-Talk, wherein he discusses the expressability of religious experience, specifically the paradox of talking about the ineffable:

It has to be acknowledged that adherents of religious faiths are almost notorious for their habit of talking and writing at great length. Perhaps the urge to verbalize is more characteristic of the West than of the East. W. P. Paterson wittily remarked that the Indian sage’s career culminates when he retires to the forest to meditate in silence, while his Western counterpart is more likely to be invited to give a course of lectures embodying his mature reflections on life!

[The Patterson book referred to is The Nature of Religion, published in 1925.]

And if this phenomenon was true decades ago it is especially true today. What articles and books need to do is to point out the essentials, the building-blocks, and past insights, then bid readers to go and do likewise.

In this respect, the traditions that emphasize silence and meditation understand that technical elaborations and group exercises are of little value if the aspirant has not time or space to pursue the recommendations.

But, further to help the individual, they should best recommend a strong relationship to nature.

A relationship to nature can supersede the desire for social or group work that supposedly reveals self or elucidates principles. Being in nature directly, within silence, trees, forests and fields, mountains and water reveals to the self the profound integration of all being into silence. When silence is disrupted in nature, it is to adjust balance, the “Great Transformation” with its many micro (and occasional macro) changes, and restore silence. As human beings, we both understand and are part of this greater process, and must learn how to conform, reconcile, and present ourselves to this process. No matter what intellectual path we study, the complement of silence and nature always allows the meditative process to reveal the ineffable, wherein the body, mind, and soul, already charged with its origin and direction, can make more explicit its truths.