Author Archives: Mike Farley

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About Mike Farley

Ex-dairy herdsman, musician, writer and contemplative based in the south-west of the UK.

Presence again

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Human beings are probably the most inappropriately named species on our planet. Most of us spend very little time being. It would be more accurate to call us human doings, human thinkings, or perhaps human wantings – with being somewhere near the bottom of the list.

Most of us find it very difficult to be – to be inactive, or to do nothing – and so spend most of our time doing, filling every moment with activities and distractions. When we have nothing to focus our attention on, we usually feel uneasy and immediately reach for some means of occupying our minds…

Presence, or being, is an essential quality of wakefulness. Awakened people are centered in the present. Since they don’t experience inner discord, they don’t feel the impulse to escape the present and so spend much less time in a state of absence. Rather than finding presence a burden, they relish it. To awakened people, simply to be – to take in the reality of their surroundings and their experiences in the Now – is one of life’s greatest delights.

This is why awakened people savor solitude and inactivity, which allow them to be present and to experience the simple joy of being.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.59-61

Continual attention to presence, whether through formal practice or through moment by moment mindfulness, not only frees us from inner distraction and disharmony, it allows us to become aware of our own attitudes and assumptions, our unthought reactions and ways of seeing. This isn’t always pleasant: we find we can’t avoid seeing how we all too easily fall into characteristic patterns of relating to the world around us, and to its creatures, human and otherwise.

To observe our own predeliction for commodifying our fellow creatures, for reacting to imaginary slights and misunderstood communications, for looking away from each other’s distress, is deeply damaging to our comfortable self-conceit.

But presence is essential freedom; freedom not only from abstraction and distraction, but freedom from self-deception, and from self-absorption altogether. Practiced thoroughly. persistently, it becomes a delight and a refuge – somehow a homecoming after a long and broken time away. All that we thought were falls away. All that is left is what is.

Gratitude and presence

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Perhaps the most notable overall change [in the awakening mind], though, is a general sense of well-being. In the same way that the taking for granted syndrome inevitably leads to frustration and dissatisfaction, ongoing gratitude leads to contentment and fulfillment. You will no longer crave things you don’t have or need, since you’re now able to appreciate what you do have. You’ll be free of the constant niggling need to add more to your life or to change your life situation, like an addict who is finally free of the craving for drugs.

You will also feel an enhanced sense of presence. In chapter 1, I mentioned that many qualities of wakefulness are interdependent, and this is particularly true of presence and gratitude. Gratitude brings us into presence, and presence creates gratitude. Our blessings are always in the present, whereas the taking for granted syndrome takes us out of the present, into imaginary future scenarios.

You might wonder: Is it actually possible to live in an all-encompassing state of gratitude, continually aware of the myriad blessings in our lives? But we don’t have to extend our gratitude so widely all the time… Gratitude should be a constant, underlying trait that arises organically in relation to our experience. And when we do have free moments of contemplation, we will naturally find ourselves extending our gratitude more widely, to encompass all of life itself and the Earth.

We should also remember that, as suggested in chapter 1, it’s unrealistic – and even unnecessary – to live in a perpetual state of spiritual ecstasy. Of course, we often have to focus our attention on practical tasks, such as driving or cooking or earning a living. In those practical moments, our sense of gratitude may recede from our awareness. But it will always be in the background, naturally arising when we relax our attention. This applies to all the other qualities of wakefulness… in general.

Steve Taylor, The Adventure: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Awakening. pp.51-52

Steve Taylor’s point about presence and gratitude is an important one. In sitting still, there is nothing, apart from the continual drift of thoughts, to distract us from the fact of our sitting, the weight of our body, the scatter of sounds in the background, the blessed pattern of our breathing. What we are is here, now, in this place and instant – and that is not other than the open ground itself, present before and beneath the space and time in which we live and die.

As Eckhart Tolle frequently points out, presence is in some way analogous to waiting: to wait with full alertness is to be fully present, fully attentive to what is. “Beyond the beauty of the external forms, there is more here: something that cannot be named, something ineffable, some deep, inner, holy essence.” (The Power of Now, p.96)

To be fully present is to be finally free from the constant burden of the little self – defensive, grasping, threatened – that keeps us from our own life, from the gratitude that is our true relationship with what actually is. To sit still in the silence of our heart is to be present at last, in the “ineffable… holy essence” that is our home.

The actually loved and known

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The contemplative life is not in fact about ideas at all, really. It is far more practical, even down-to-earth, than that. In a sense, the contemplative doesn’t care about constructing a metaphysical framework. What happens is merely experience. When a person enters the stillness of “awakened” consciousness, the rigid boundaries of the self drop away. The immediate, felt reality of that state is precisely one of mutual indwelling.

In that state, we don’t look at nature; we are in nature, and nature is in us. We don’t so much sympathise with another person’s suffering as we experience our existence as continuous with theirs. Charles Williams’ coinherence becomes simply a description of what it actually feels like when the ego’s filtering mechanism relaxes – when Huxley’s doors of perception drift open of themselves.

All that we are consists in our relationship with all that is; not in an abstract sense, but in vital, lived reality. When the boundaries of the self are fully defended, this is no more apparent than the atoms that constitute the hands typing these words; but the function of the contemplative mind is to dissolve those boundaries to little more than a fitful mist across what is. Each one of us is in fact infinitely permeable, and infinitely, intricately conditioned. We reflect each other, and are reflected, like dew drops in a web of uncountable dimensions, bright with the light of the isness from which they emerge. It follows that what each of us does or thinks or feels, in the minutest degree, affects all others, human or otherwise, sentient or not. And so we are ourselves affected, from the least to the farthest.

To know this, and yet to sit still, is in some way the greatest gift. “The ‘pristine awareness’ that is the fundamental ground itself” (Stephen Batchelor) holds all that is, the “ten thousand things” of the ancient Taoists: our sitting in some way brings them into that whole and healing light, despite ourselves. We cannot know it, cannot hold an image of it as we could hold a book or a glass paperweight; and yet unknown, it is most precious; not to be held, it is maybe the gift the world needs.

[*the title is taken from David Jones: “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“]

Rebuilding the UI

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It seems to me that our practice is in a sense no more than a phenomenological user interface (UI) for the metaphysics of the contemplative life. What we are, beneath the structures of our frail and temporary selves, is no more than the open ground itself. We are appearances, wavelets that come and go, and flicker for a moment in the brief light of our human consciousness; but wavelets are water. They are the stream itself, waving for an instant here, and then there.

Our fellow creatures, human and otherwise, are likewise ripples on the same measureless stream. Whatever we each of us does disturbs the surface minutely, or substantially. Perhaps to do so intentionally and with love has more effect than we dream, even. At least it cannot fail to change things, somehow, in the direction of good. Charles Williams called it coinherence.

But it is hard to sit and take account of these things. Thought is merely about, not of. Human beings, all through recorded history – and undoubtedly before as well – have tried to engage directly with the vast space before things, and they have taken stories, images, songs from the culture in which they were born, teaching them to their children and their children’s children, until churches and ashrams and synagogues grew from the ache within the heart of each of them.

What are we to do, here on the edge of something we cannot understand? We need a user interface, a phenomenological UI of some sort. It is no good our carefully deconstructing the religion of our forefathers unless we have a way to understand – no, to stand under – the endless becoming that is the ground of all that is. One cannot interact with raw code; there must be some interface there – which was the genius of the uncountable generations before us, with their psalms and their parables, their songs and their stories.

We must, I think, learn to listen to our hearts. To sit still and listen is in many ways the hardest thing, and yet it must be the truest way. When a spirituality undergoes deconstruction, we often think we have to throw away our entire old user interface because we no longer believe in the literalist, dogmatic theology it was originally built for. Perhaps we don’t actually need to change the interface; perhaps we merely need to understand what its elements – buttons, widgets, liturgies, prayers – are actually for. In the silence, if we are patient, their names may appear. Only be still…

Perennial

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It’s significant that the major characteristics of wakefulness I’ve identified through my research are essentially the same… as the main themes of wakefulness as described in the world’s spiritual traditions. (…[T]hese included union, inner stillness or inner emptiness, self-sufficiency, compassion and altruism, relinquishing personal agency, heightened awareness, and well-being.) This synchronicity validates the insights of spiritual traditions and shows that wakefulness can exist outside spiritual traditions and is more fundamental than the traditions themselves. It suggests that wakefulness exists as a psychological or ontological state in itself. It may be interpreted in terms of spiritual traditions, but it doesn’t have to be.

Theologians and transpersonal psychologists have long debated the existence of a “perennial philosophy,” a common core to the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. According to the perennial view, the same basic truths lie behind all spiritual teachings but they’re expressed in slightly different ways. They’re simply different paths leading toward the peak of the same mountain, though there are some superficial differences between them, of course.

On the other hand, some people dispute the existence of a perennial philosophy, believing instead that spiritual and mystical traditions are independent. There isn’t a common mountain — all the paths are heading in different directions toward different peaks. Any similarities between different traditions are the result of contact or influence…

This seems highly implausible to me. For one thing, even if there was a chain of influence in the way this argument suggests, surely the original teachings would have been altered beyond recognition over centuries of dissipation (similar to a game of telephone), rather than remaining essentially the same. But the best way of verifying perennialism is to look outside spiritual traditions, as we’ve done in this book. Most of the participants of my research had no familiarity with spiritual traditions or practices at the time of their awakenings, but still described them in similar terms to the mystics of many different traditions. (Some of them became familiar with traditions later — in some cases, many years later; in other cases, only to a limited degree.) This strongly suggests that there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.233-234

[T]he physical world is not ultimately separate from its transcendental foundation, and so the perennial philosophy is a non-dualistic view of reality. There is no barrier between the so-called physical and metaphysical dimensions of reality (i.e., between the universe and its transcendent source); the two are a Oneness rather than a duality, and this is in contrast to systems of philosophy or religion that place a firewall between the transcendent realm and the physical world. For Perennialists, the universe arises from the Ground of Being, or, put the other way round, the Ground of Being takes form as the world around us. The One becomes the many, just as one ocean can rise up into multiple waves. Furthermore, and because we too are “waves” on the surface of a cosmic sea, our physical selves also arise from the Ground of Being. The Ground, therefore, is not only the Ground of Being but, consequently, the ground of our being as well.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, pp.33-34

Ever since I first read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy in my early twenties, I have been drawn to the clean simplicity of the idea. In the passage I’ve quoted above, Steve Taylor provides one of the briefest and most credible responses to the most common criticism from both humanist and religious points of view: that the contemplative traditions, rooted in such radically different religious soils, cannot have anything in common. As Dana Sawyer points out, a few lines on from the passage above, “…human beings have the latent ability to grasp the content of the two previous postulates experientially. That is, we have a capacity, whether we cultivate it or not, to go beyond intellectual descriptions of the Ground of Being (transcendent) and the Oneness of Being (immanent) to the direct experience of these realities, as did the mystics of the past—and as do some mystics today.”

It doesn’t matter, either immediately or ultimately, whether the experience in question occurs within the taught practice of any one religion or philosophy; as Taylor explains above, “there exists some form of underlying or perennial landscape of experience that precedes interpretation by spiritual traditions.” I can testify to this myself: my earliest unitive experiences of inner stillness, emptiness and heightened awareness came around the age of five, long before I knew anything of religious or contemplative teachings in any form.

The simple phenomenology of contemplation – inner experience itself (by which I don’t mean experiences, altered states or spectacular changes in perception, but plain awareness) – will teach the foundational fact of oneness with the ground. Merely to sit still is usually quite enough…

Be still

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“Be still and know that I am God.”

–Psalm 46

Be still and feel what is most subtle, most intimate.

Be still, empty yourself, and discover the ungraspable openness that you are.

In silence and stillness, we may come in touch with an energetic reality that feels spacious, open, boundless, limitless, vast, uncontained, shapeless, empty, ineffable and immensely alive. It has been called formless presence, pure consciousness, primordial awareness, groundlessness, no-thing-ness, but no words can capture it.

Out of this germinal no-thing-ness, the apparently formed world appears, a gift from the formless, a perfume of formless energy or spirit, a waving of the great formless ocean. Go deep into any form—a sound, something seen, a tactile or somatic sensation, a taste, a fragrance—and you find this aliveness, this radiant no-thing-ness. If you see deeply enough, you may find the whole universe in each breath, each sound, each sensation, each momentary appearance, just as if you go deep into any wave, you find the entire ocean and nothing you can grasp…

God, as I mean it, is not some gendered deity up in the sky directing the show, punishing and rewarding us. God is not a thing at all. God is this presence that is infinitely subtle, closer than close, and yet also infinite and boundless—that sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God is the light of awareness, beholding everything with unconditional love…

God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from wholeness rather than fragmentation. To awaken is to dissolve into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is no body in any sense, there is only this ungraspable openness, in which there is no inside or outside.

Joan Tollifson, the ungraspable openness of being

Sometimes, Joan has a way of nailing precisely what I would wish to say. Like me, she occasionally finds herself unable to refuse the necessities of language; a thing poets encounter all the time. TS Eliot seems sometimes unable to help himself:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting…

(East Coker)

It is so simple really – all there is is sitting still, and the beautiful isness opens of itself in the stillness. And the heart opens, and cries out in silence, without words. But not to tell of this would be more than bearable. And sometimes only ancient words carry sufficient weight, sufficient links to the old, old mind we all share, back for generations to the days of Julian of Norwich (whom Joan quotes later in this essay), the days of Meister Eckhart and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing – back to Scripture itself, which after all was only written by people trying to find words for what is beyond words.

Sometimes I think being human consists as much in the ancient community of words as it does in our genome. Used rightly, words can draw us in, bring us closer on what is after all a path walked alone. They can, at their best, open our eyes to what we had been missing, startle us and heal us – bring us home too what actually is, and is beyond all words, being here, now, always –

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well…

(TS Eliot, Little Gidding)

You do not have to go anywhere

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It seems to me that the most insidious difficulty facing our practice is complexity. Ritual, elaboration of any kind, stages and visualisations, devotions and liturgies are at best distractions from what is at root a most perfectly simple thing: returning to what we essentially are.

Andrew Harvey:

The Direct Path is the Path to God without dogma or priests or gurus, the Path of direct self-empowerment and self-awakening in and under God in the heart of life. You do not have to go anywhere or take a new name or sign up for expensive intensives to begin it; whether you yet know it or not, you have been on this path since the day you were born.

When you discover for yourself how real the Direct Path is and how it can transform you faster, and more completely and integratedly than any other, your whole life will change and you will discover with wonder and delight why you are here and what you are here for. You will start to become free from all the political, social, and religious systems that constrain you, with the freedom that is yours by right of being a child of God, the freedom of your divine nature and your divine truth, and this freedom and this truth will make you increasingly an empowered agent of change in every arena in the world.

The Direct Path, p.12

Caryll Houselander saw this too:

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr’s The Universal Christ)

We do not need continually to be seeking things: all that we are, all that is, is right here in this present moment, as itself. Meister Eckhart’s Istigkeit, the open ground itself, is here, within each breath, within each phrase of birdsong from the open window. All we need is to be entirely present to what is here, now, always. “…[F]or only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitatis“ (David Jones)

Peter Russell:

In asking the question “Who am I?” we tacitly assume an individual self does indeed exist. As such, the question can mislead us, setting us up to look in the wrong direction — looking for ways to define ourselves. It can be more insightful to drop the “Who” from the question, and ask simply, “Am I?” The answer nearly always comes as a simple “Yes, I am.” Not “I am this or that.” Just pure “I am.” “I am” is the first-person form of the verb “to be.” It is our direct personal knowing of being. Not to be anything or anyone; simply to be, to exist — that sense of presence at the heart of every experience.

How to Meditate Without Even Trying, pp.95-96

Just noticing (edited and republished)

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I had intended to write a post here this evening when it occurred to me that I had already written, very nearly two years ago, almost the exact article I’d been planning. So here it is (somewhat edited):

Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity…

You know, unless you hesitate, you can’t inquire. Inquiry means hesitating, finding out for yourself, discovering step by step; and when you do that, then you need not follow anybody, you need not ask for correction or for confirmation of your discovery.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Sitting quietly – just noticing whatever appears in the field of consciousness, without having to label it or evaluate it, without having to either focus one’s attention on it or wrench one’s attention away from it – is perhaps the freshest, most peaceful thing one can do. There is no technique to adhere to, no doctrine to conform to: what is, is, and there’s nothing that needs to be done about it.

There is always a risk, of course, in talking like this. People who like things cut and dried are often suspicious of what appears to them to be an impractical vagueness; those from a background of religious orthodoxy will wonder if there’s a heresy lurking in there somewhere. Words, when it comes to spiritual things, are signs only in the sense we mean when we speak of hints and premonitions as “signs”, not in the sense of street signs, or signs on office doors in a hospital. They are not, by their very nature, precise and prescriptive; it is their very vagueness that allows them to be used at all, for they can do no more than offer us a glimpse into someone else’s experience – a window, if you like, into that which it is to be them.

Robert C Solomon writes:

Spirituality is a human phenomenon. It is part and parcel of human existence, perhaps even of human nature. This is not to deny that some animals might have something like spiritual experiences. But spirituality requires not only feeling but thought, and thought requires concepts. Thus spirituality and intelligence go hand in hand. This is not to say that intelligent people are more spiritual, but neither is it to buy into a long tradition of equating spirituality with innocence misconstrued as ignorance or even as stupidity.

Spirituality for the Skeptic: the Thoughtful Love of Life

The practice of choiceless awareness (in Krishnamurti’s phrase) that I have been describing is not a kind of daydream, or an unusual state of consciousness even: it is a quiet but exceptionally alert quality of mind, without straining after attention either. Toni Bernhard suggests that,

[i]n this technique, we begin by paying attention to the sensation of the breath (this settles the mind and body), but then the instruction is to let our attention rest on whatever is most prominent in our field of awareness… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself…  As a meditation practice, choiceless awareness is similar to the Zen meditation technique known as shikantaza, which roughly translates as just sitting. I love the idea of just sitting, although for me, just lying down will do—which takes me to my number one rule regarding meditation: be flexible.

Toni Bernhard, How to Wake Up

This quality of stillness, of just noticing, is such a simple thing that it would be easy to dismiss it as inconsequential. It is not. It seems important, somehow – and here I hesitate, as Krishnamurti suggested – that someone is prepared to do this.

We are brought up, certainly here in the West, to see life as intrinsically bound up in progress, or at least development, and that isn’t necessarily so in the spiritual life, despite our continual use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere, that we are practising for a performance, or an examination. Even in religious contexts it is often seen as wasteful self-indulgence to sit still when we could be up and out feeding the poor or preaching the good news, or making some other kind of progress in our “walk of faith”. But maybe the point is being missed somewhere.

Contentment has become something of a dirty word, yet a life without it is too often at risk of shallowness and politicisation. Febrile activism and polemical discourse without contemplative roots are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need to sit still. We need those whose path has petered out under the quiet trees, whose practice is no more than an open and wondering heart. There was good sense in the Taoist tradition of the sage who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere. There are good things to be seen sometimes from a mountain hut.

Strange days

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Today, however, we’re in the midst of a spiritual renaissance that differs markedly from those of the past. No longer confined to the faiths of our own cultures, we have access to many traditions, from the dawn of recorded history to the present day. Moreover, the insights of contemporary teachers are readily available in books, recordings, videos, and online, none of which was possible before.

Whereas past spiritual revivals were often led by a single teacher, today many are contributing to this growing rediscovery of the timeless wisdom. Instead of the truth becoming increasingly diluted as it is passed on, our discoveries are reinforcing one another. As the cultural overlays are stripped away, the core message not only becomes increasingly clear but gets simpler and simpler. And the path becomes easier and easier…

None of this would have been possible were I not alive in this epochal time — a time of ever-increasing change and opportunity, a time of proliferating crises and potential catastrophes, and a time of unprecedented spiritual renaissance. Two hundred years ago, my only counsel in this area might have been from a local priest, who, most likely, would have known little of the topics I’ve been exploring here. Or perhaps, should I have been so fortunate, from a local sage. Today, I’ve been privileged to travel the world, sit at the feet of various masters, study teachings from across the ages, listen to and watch numerous recordings, and learn from many companions on their own journeys of awakening. To all these various teachers, I give thanks.

Peter Russell, How to Meditate Without Even Trying, pp.109,114

Caught between solastalgia and the BBC news, we can be forgiven for thinking, as so many have throughout recorded history, that we live in times of quite unprecedented strife and difficulty. But it’s more complicated than that.

In the almost 34 years since the world wide web went live, access to information, and, with AI, the ability to process it, has grown beyond anyone’s imagining – and, of course, since we are human, so has access to misinformation – a fact that underlies much of the grief that feeds the dystopian embroideries of the news media. But there is another side to all this, as Peter Russell points out.

It may perhaps be, if we manage to hang on as a viable species long enough, that these years at the beginning of the 21st century will not be remembered for their paranoia, misogyny and bone-headed despotism so much as for their glorious renaissance of the spiritual life. Blogs like this one are not merely lone voices squeaking in the midst of chaos; we are part of something much bigger and more hopeful than any of us. And yet, as Caryll Houselander once wrote, it is only the silence of each individual contemplative that shows us the open ground of being beneath us all.

Go your own way

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One of the most interesting sections of Krishna’s exposition in the Gita comes at the very end, in chapter 18, verse 63, and I mention it here because it has relevance regarding methods of awakening in the perennial philosophy. After Krishna has outlined the three yogas, Arjuna is curious to know which method works best and which he should choose; however, Krishna ends with a very telling comment: “Thus to you has been expounded the knowledge that is more secret than the secret; after considering it fully, you should act as you think best.” At the end of the discourse, Krishna’s answer is basically, “That’s for you to decide.” And here Krishna is recognizing that different pathways appeal to different personality types. Karma yoga, the yoga of “action,” is not best suited for those who enjoy contemplation, and quiet meditation is unappealing to those who like to keep busy. Growth toward spiritual maturity is intensely personal, given that no matter how many mystics have woken up throughout history, this will be the first time you have woken up; consequently, personal choice, based on one’s own nature, is deeply important when it comes to choosing a path.

Dana Sawyer, The Perennial Philosophy Reloaded: A Guide for the Mystically Inclined, p.74

I am coming to see that this is another of those places where organised religion regularly fails the contemplative in finding their path. Rarely if ever do religions – even avowedly contemplative religions like Buddhism – offer the freedom of growth and practice Sawyer outlines here. (The individual’s path is generally seen in terms of obedience and conformity to a known pattern of practice and intent: for instance, in a Christian monastic setting one’s obedience is to one’s superior; in a Zen context to the practice leaders, or to the community’s Master himself.)

The freedom to follow the heart is another matter entirely. As I have often remarked on this blog, a contemplative without a religious framework is called to a kind of solitude,  The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t have necessarily to involve physical isolation or any experiment in extreme living: it is a solitude of the heart, a calling to a necessary quiet.

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 it is time we recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct personality type in themselves: contemplatives who find that they are temperamentally unsuited either for formal membership of some church or meeting, or for the particular relationship of personal discipleship.

It would be too easy, perhaps, to dismiss the path of the “independent contemplative” as an easy way, a variety of the cafeteria religion so enthusiastically despised by some of the more orthodox followers of one religion or another. But it is far from being a soft option, followed seriously.

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul Fredette write, in Consider the Ravens: On Contemporary Hermit Life (p.213):

Anyone taking the eremitic vocation seriously is bound to feel helpless, quite impotent, in fact. Hermits are determined to help, to make a positive difference, but how? What can one person do, hidden and alone? Sometimes, solitaries may feel blameworthy because they live lives which shelter them from much of the suffering that so harshly mars the existence of their brothers and sisters. Love and compassion well up in them … but is it enough? What should one do and how? This is where passionate intercessory prayer and supplication spontaneously arises.

The challenge is to live a life given over to praying for others while accepting that one will seldom, if ever, see any results. No one will be able to ascertain how, or even if, their devoted prayers are efficacious for others. It is a terrible kind of poverty—to live dedicated to helping others, yet never know what good one may be doing. All that hermits can hope is that they are doing no harm. Believers leave all results to the mercy of their God. Others rely on their convictions about the interconnection of all humanity, trusting that what affects one, touches all. This is a form of intercession expressed less by words than by a way of life. A Camaldolese monk once wrote: “Prayer is not only speaking to God on behalf of humanity, it is also ‘paying’ for humanity.” Suffering is part of the hermit’s vocation. One of the most acute forms is to never know whether one’s chosen lifestyle is worthwhile or has any value for others. Hermits enter into the darkness, the dusky cloud of unknowing, and walk without any light beyond that which is in their own hearts. Often, unbeknownst even to themselves, they have become beacons for others.