Einzelgänger (f. Einzelgängerin) is one of my favourite German compound nouns. It’s usually translated as “loner”, though Google Translate also offers “maverick, rogue, nonconformist”. Literally of course it means “single walker” – and that comes closer to the way I always think of it. There’s almost an eremitical flavour to it…

By nature I seem to be an Einzelgänger myself, though it has taken me a while to develop the courage of my convictions on the matter. In spiritual matters, of course, there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and of some tradition within that religion. Worse, one may become – especially in most Buddhist traditions – someone’s disciple. I’m not at all certain the guru/disciple (teacher/follower, etc.) relationship is always a healthy one, hallowed though it is by long use. Sam Harris writes:

One of the first obstacles encountered along any contemplative path is the basic uncertainty about the nature of spiritual authority. If there are important truths to be discovered through introspection, there must be better and worse ways to do this—and one should expect to meet a range of experts, novices, fools, and frauds along the way. Of course, charlatans haunt every walk of life. But on spiritual matters, foolishness and fraudulence can be especially difficult to detect. Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of the subject matter. When learning to play a sport like golf, you can immediately establish the abilities of the teacher, and the teacher can, in turn, evaluate your progress without leaving anything to the imagination. All the relevant facts are in plain view. If you can’t consistently hit the little white ball where you want it to go, you have something to learn from anybody who can. The difference between an expert and a novice is no less stark when it comes to recognizing the illusion of the self. But the qualifications of a teacher and the progress of a student are more difficult to assess.

It may well be that for some people there are those, further along their own chosen path, who can wisely and compassionately provide the most helpful and literally enlightening instruction. Perhaps it depends to some extent on how closely that path happens to conform to one already mapped out – Vajrayana, perhaps, or traditional Advaita Vedanta. But more to the point, I honestly think, is simple temperament.

We are used by now to the way people may be broadly divided into introverts and extroverts, more precisely perhaps into the 16 personalities of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. We may even have stumbled across Elaine Aron and her concept of the highly sensitive person. I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves. I don’t mean by this a literal loner, nor a hermit in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but a contemplative who finds that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship.

I truly believe that I have discovered more, about myself and about the way things are, in the last few years outside of any formal commitment than I had in decades inside. Of course I am getting old, and some might say – with at least a grain of truth perhaps – that this is all a function of age. But it doesn’t feel as though it is just that. It actually feels as though I have finally found the path I should have been treading all along. I only wish – in a manner of speaking, outside the constraints of cause and effect! – that I had had someone to explain this to me long ago: which may be the whole point of writing a blog like this.