Category Archives: eremitism

Einsamkeit

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Despite my recent flirtations with religious language on this blog, I still remain unconvinced that organised religion is at all good for me. More than that, I’m honestly unsure that it is in fact a good way for people, in general, to conduct themselves.

The spiritual impulse, I am certain, is a deep and true inclination of the heart; it seems to be an essential part of what it means to be human. But, as I have often suggested here, spirituality does not necessarily imply religion – in many ways they are quite different things. Wikipedia defines religion as “a social-cultural system of designated behaviours and practices, morals, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements.” When I remember what it was like to be an active part of such a “social-cultural system of designated behaviours…” I keep coming back to AC Grayling’s remarks:

To move from the Babel of religions and their claims, and from the too often appalling effects of religious belief and practice on humankind, to the life-enhancing insights of the humanist tradition which most of the world’s educated and creative minds have embraced, is like escaping from a furnace to cool waters and green groves…

Humanism, accordingly, is the answer to the question often asked amidst the acerbic debates between proponents and opponents of religion: what alternative can the non-religious offer to religion as the focus for expression of those spiritual yearnings, that nostalgia for the absolute, the profound bass-note of emotion that underlies the best and deepest parts of ourselves? Often this question is asked rhetorically, as if there is no answer to it, the assumption being that by default religion is the only thing that speaks to these aspects of human experience, even if religion is false and merely symbolic. The symbolism, some views have it, is enough to do the work.

Humanism is the emphatic answer to the request for an alternative… [T]he most wonderful resources for good and flourishing lives lie in the intelligence, the experience, the wisdom and insight of our fellows in the human story; and it is from these resources that the humanist outlook derives.

The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism, p.7 – but q.v. my own post In defence of humanism above.

Having escaped to “cool waters and green groves”, why do I find myself sometimes tempted to at least go back and look at the furnace door again?

Sociologist Nancy Nason-Clark has researched the parallels between abusive religious environments and abuse in intimate partnerships. She has determined that individuals—women in particular—who have been in high-control religious environments are more likely to be in abusive partnerships. These individuals have internalized that their voice doesn’t matter, that someone else is allowed to control them, that they are supposed to forgive, and that it would be a sin to leave. The systems are the same whether they are in a marriage, in a church, on a team, or in a workplace. And when our sense of self is eroded or devalued, or when someone who has control over us tells us they represent the will of the creator of the universe, it makes sense that we wouldn’t recognize the dynamic happening in another context.

Hillary McBride, Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing p.80

I would simply suggest here that perhaps the dangers Dr McBride outlines aren’t restricted to what she refers to as “high-control religious environments”; perhaps it is simply in the nature of organised religion – even in such apparently benign forms as a Quaker meeting or an Anglican parish – to set up these control systems, often quite unconsciously. It is not necessary to set out to devalue a worshipper’s own intelligence and their own voice: with the best will in the world, that is just what happens in religious systems, merely by virtue of what they are.

It seems that my own instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit, for walking my own path of practice, feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, 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.

Pathless

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As time goes by, I seem to be drawn more and more to simply sitting still: choiceless awareness, as Jiddu Krishnamurti called it. For me, this necessarily implies – as it seems to have done for Krishnamurti also – growing to be increasingly at variance with institutional religion, whether Christian or Buddhist, and increasingly sceptical of its value either in the life of the spirit or in the life of society. My naturally eremitical and inward inclinations seem to have strengthened, too, and I feel increasingly at home out in the saltmarshes of the spirit, away from the familiar communities of philosophy and practice.

[One] mindfulness meditation technique is termed choiceless awareness or bare awareness. In 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. This is… awakening by engaging the whole of our experience fully, however it presents itself. In the quotation that begins this chapter, Indian spiritual teacher and philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti uses the word “freedom” to describe this awakening. 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

One of our potential pitfalls as humans is our tendency to observe events (this may be a semantic issue at root) as apparently going forward in time, and think that as a consequence their coming to be – eventuation – implies progress, whether in terms of continuous economic growth, personal development, technological advancement or whatever else. I am not saying that these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves; what strikes me here is that, misleading as they can sometimes be in the fields of economics or psychology, they inevitably lead to a disastrous misunderstanding when applied to the spiritual life – even our use of terms like “path” and “practice”. We use them in the unspoken assumption that the path leads somewhere; that we are practising for as for a musical performance, or an examination. In overtly 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 increasingly 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 divorced from contemplation are no more likely to bring peace to the human heart, or to the human community, than war. We need those who will 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 one who, their public life over, left for a hut on a mountain somewhere, “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). There are good, and necessary, things to be seen from quiet places far from known ways.

Outstaring the ghosts

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One of the perennial questions of the contemplative life is, what is it for? What possible use is it? Isn’t it merely a solipsistic, “self-actualising” activity, or some kind of relaxation technique aimed at producing a pleasant, stress-free state of mind, or even a quest for some kind of drug-free psychedelic experience?

Benignus O’Rourke writes:

The psalmist says, ‘You hide those who trust in you in the shelter of your presence.’ For ‘hide’ we might read ‘heal’. To sit with with our buried hurts and pains in the presence of the Lord is to allow ourselves to be healed by him. We no longer become involved in trying to sort them out, nor do we recoil from them. We sit quietly. We are beginning to have the confidence to outstare our ghosts.

Sometimes when people meditate or pray without words they are accused of trying to anaesthetise themselves to deaden their pain. But what we really do in our quiet prayer is to face the pain, engage with it, and transform it into energy for loving.

Benignus O’Rourke, Finding Your Hidden Treasure: The Way of Silent Prayer

and Cynthia Bourgeault tackles the problem head on from a more academic perspective:

What tends to go missing when spiritual practice is secularized… is precisely that rich and multidimensional context in which mindfulness as “present moment awareness” flows seamlessly into mindfulness as authentic spiritual remembrance. In a secular container, mindfulness tends to become privatized, appearing as a set of personal coping skills or personal wellness benefits. But in its original spiritual setting mindfulness is irreducibly relational and ethical. Its fruits are not wellness, personal longevity, or neuroplasticity. They are compassion, equanimity, and love. In contrast to the various secular and scientific models (extensively documented in this article), the spiritual model gives central place to mindfulness as “the awareness of and familiarity with an ethically oriented ultimate reality that makes human wholeness possible.” It is only against this backdrop that notions such as “remembrance” and “unity” make any sense whatsoever…

While reestablishing this wider spiritual context is certainly helpful to a fuller understanding of mindfulness practice, with Centering Prayer I believe it is essential, for apart from its kenotic grounding, the practice remains basically unintelligible. In secular mindfulness there is at least a motivational initial entry gate through which some benefit is to be accrued thereby, be it stress reduction, better attentional skills, or lower blood pressure. But kenosis and self-surrender really have no cultural starting points; apart from a direct apprehension of the great mystical traditions of imitatio and remembrance in which the practice is embedded, Centering Prayer remains stubbornly counterintuitive.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer

The contemplative life in its inner solitude and hiddenness – for it is hidden from our own discursive intellect within as well as it is hidden outwardly – is in some ways actually lived for others. Our inward life brings us, not always willingly, to confront aspects of being human that many would rather avoid.

Karen Karper Fredette and Paul A. Fredette once wrote,

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.

The ghosts we outstare are not our own merely; somehow in the silence of our practice we find ourselves confronting the ghosts of those we live amongst, touching the shadows that our present age of fear and division casts across all our lives; touching, as for instance did the monks of Mount Athos during the years of the Stalin’s purges and Hitler’s atrocities, the dark skirts of chaos and cruelty that brush continually against our civilisation. Yet our inwardness does tend always to stillness, to wholeness of mind and spirit and to peace.  It is really that peace we seek for those with whom our lives are inextricably caught up, just by our being the frail, temporary human things we are.

[Parts of this piece have been rewritten from a post of the same title  on a previous blog in 2018]

Weltschmerz (ii)

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Conflict, turbulence, uncertainty, violence, deprivation and upset are nothing new. During the time when Chan (early Zen) Buddhism was developing in China, when Linji was alive, during one decade, two-thirds of the population died from war, famine or plague. During the lifetime of the great nineteenth and twentieth century Advaita sage Ramana Maharshi, who spent most of his life in silence, doing nothing and simply being present, there were two world wars, the rise of Hitler, the holocaust, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Spanish Civil War, a global pandemic (the Spanish flu), the creation of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, the independence of India and the partition of that country into India and Pakistan, a division that also involved violence, conflict, mass displacement and death. The human world has always been filled with disagreements, power struggles, violence, persecution, plagues, famines, injustices and wars. Empires have come and gone, millions have died.

People have responded to this in many different ways. Nondual traditions such as Zen and Advaita are two of those responses. Social service work and political organizing are another. I think of Zen and Advaita as being akin to those musicians on the Titanic, and I see political and social service work as being more like those trying to save the ship or ready the lifeboats. All these actions have their place…

Joan Tollifson, Stormy Weather

It’s odd, perhaps, but after all these years I still sometimes worry whether I am doing the right thing as a slightly eremitical contemplative, or whether I should be out there on the streets as some kind of activist, or volunteering in some local social enterprise. You would think that by now I would be at peace with my own choice, if choice it is. (Actually I don’t think it ever was a choice; temperament and circumstance have given me the place I find myself in. I have merely to get on with it.)

Joan Tollifson goes on to quote from her own earlier book, Bare Bones Meditation,

As I see it, meditation is not merely a quest for personal peace of mind or self-improvement. In involves an exploration of the roots of our present global suffering and the discovery of an alternative way of living. Meditation is seeing the nature of thought, how thought constantly creates images about ourselves and others, how we impose a conceptual grid on reality and then mistake the map for the territory itself…

Meditation is listening. Listening to everything. To the world, to nature, to the body, the mind, the heart, the rain, the traffic, the wind, the thoughts, the silence before sound. It is about questioning our frantic efforts to do something and become somebody, and allowing ourselves to simply be…

Meditation is a powerful antidote to our purposeful, growth-oriented, war-mongering, speed-driven, ever-productive consumer civilization, which is rapidly devouring the earth. We retreat in meditation not from reality, but from our habitual escapes from reality. Meditation is a social and political act. Listening and not-doing are actions far more powerful than most of us have yet begun to realize. But meditation is much more (and much less) than all of this. Meditation is not knowing what meditation is.

I find this such a healing reminder amid the clatter and panic of the news media – not to mention the social ones – that I feel like printing it out and keeping it next to my heart. Of course we are intimately, intricately connected, one with another, and all that we do affects every one of us. To sit still in the storm is perhaps the single most powerful act we can contribute; it just doesn’t feel very powerful, because we are so used, so addicted, to purposeful action, discursive thought, polarised and polarising emotion. To the ego, meditation is doing nothing. The ego is right. Nothing, though, is what needs doing.

Sitting still like this, the webbed patterns that connect us all become clear, like bright wires against the dark; all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right, and our presence now is all that is needed. It is all that was ever needed; it is what we have been given, our work and our home, both of these.

A messy business

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[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude… The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos… It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them…

Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth…

One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.

Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions, with thanks to Maria Popova

I have written often enough before here about my own strange calling to a kind of solitude; Merton, with typical honesty, puts his finger right on one of the inevitable difficulties of this kind of life.

For a long time, since in fact long before I had developed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards stillness, and towards this kind of unseen apartness. And, over the years, my more settled contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on one’s inner life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising; on the other hand, their effects on one’s life in the world may be anything but subtle.

Inward solitude, as Merton points out, can be a messy business. Approached like this, as a perhaps inevitable concomitant of the contemplative life, rather than as a willed commitment to what is too often described as a “vocation”, it can often only really be reached after many, at times excoriating, false starts. It seems to be a path unusually unsuited to maintaining a high opinion of oneself!

I suppose that when it comes down to it, what I am trying to say is that the path of inward solitude, or whatever it should be called, is something one finds oneself falling into when everything else has fallen to bits. Only when there is no other way does the way open; and it is the way one has been searching for all along.

Second best?

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Occasionally I find myself wondering if living the contemplative life outside of a community, be that a monastic community of some kind, or merely a community of faith – a sangha, or a eucharistic community of some kind – is somehow second best; if, in effect, I am missing out on a vital component of the spiritual life. After all, one is continually reminded in every other email newsletter that the sangha is the third of the Three Jewels, or that “there is no such thing as a freelance Christian.”

But for some time now I have been convinced that, for me at least, however reassuring a framework formal religion can provide for contemplative practice, the stifling effects of  dogma and the scriptural imperative can seem to weigh on the spirit like a heavy woollen hood. Of course there is always the strong, and conventionally approved, temptation to declare oneself a member of some religion or other, and even of some tradition within that religion, but AC Grayling uncannily nails my own experience when he describes the humanist as one escaping to “cool waters and green groves.”

As I recently quoted from Rodney Smith (in an excellent article in Tricycle Magazine a few years back):

For a few people, a full lifetime as a monastic or living many years on retreat is a wise direction. Each of us has a unique spiritual design that pulls us toward freedom. The problem arises when we listen to others for our direction, or think we “should” do something because others have done it in the past. Spiritual growth is a fine-tuning of our ear to the needs of our heart.

Hardening of the oughteries – the sense that one life, one’s actions, are never enough, that one “must try harder” in the words of the old school reports – is a well-known occupational illness in the spiritual life. To truly pay attention in practice will, sooner or later, reveal our own iteration of Smith’s “unique spiritual design”; and open awareness will lay bare the treacherous thoughts of inadequacy and weakness that give rise to the oughteries, and they can be left be the roadside like any other thoughts.

It sounds easy; it isn’t. Millennia of conformity and obedience, centuries of misdirected authority vested in the structures of religion, stand in our way, muttering of heresy and disobedience, exclusion and damnation. Who are we to question such “thrones and dominions”? Each of us must find the path our own feet were built for; but the way of the “cat who walks by himself” is an ancient and honourable way, whatever the guardians of the faiths may say. As I said once before here, I think perhaps we should recognise the Einzelgänger or Einzelgängerin as a distinct and proper calling in themselves. I don’t mean by this literal loners, nor hermits in either the religious or the colloquial sense; but 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; those, in fact, who can only thus be true to their “unique spiritual design”.

No one to blame

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I’m always a bit skeptical when people talk about the increasing interest in Buddhism and the numbers of people appreciating the dharma and turning to meditation. It’s like the first week of a romance. When you first fall in love with someone—even if that person has purple hair and all kinds of what we call “extraordinary embellishments”—there’s just the feeling of love. You don’t see the blemishes; you see only the good things.

Yes, meditation and being calm and peaceful and loving, and generating compassion and doing good for others, and being more aware—these are all very good! But in the initial romantic stage, you may be looking through rose-tinted glasses. After that, you will see the hard work involved, hard work that will be done by nobody but you. This is why interest in Buddhism increases at first and then dips—and this dip is steep, because hard work will never make Buddhism very popular.

Moreover, Buddhism is the only philosophy that doesn’t have anyone to ascribe blame to but oneself for what’s wrong. Nor is there anyone but oneself responsible for producing what is good. To be put on the spot like this is not always seen as favorable by the human mind. Our cultures, social upbringing, and the design of our world condition us to hold some person or people or circumstance responsible for our situation. We have politicians to blame; we have God and the prophets, religious masters, and original sin to blame. We have many things to blame, including karma. It is very difficult to come to the point at which you see that blame is not actually logical—that everything depends on you, yourself.

Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche, writing in Tricycle Magazine

Every so often I find myself longing to be able to hand over the responsibility for walking this path to someone else – divine or human – who could absolve me of the weight of all this moral, intentional, intellectual hard work. A religion would be such a comfort. And yet…

The longer I seem to be able to try to follow this way, the less it does seem to be someone’s responsibility, either mine or God’s. Yes, as Khandro Rinpoche says here, there is no one else; but responsibility, in the sense of being the one to make it work? It’s inevitable that the ego, the left-brained, thinking self, will want to take responsibility, absent someone else to lean on – but the “executive self” can’t do it, can’t even see that there is a path. Only by keeping still, by watching to see what happens – of itself – can the busy little mind be persuaded to give up. Giving the whole process names, and hence regulations, is the root of the religious impulse itself, it seems to me.

I do wonder sometimes if we aren’t going through some kind of unseen spiritual revolution at the moment. Yes, the great religions appear to be flourishing – except when they’re not –  and the purveyors of slick solutions appear to thrive, but under the radar a good deal of quiet, hidden, patient practice seems to be going on. It’s invidious to draw direct parallels, but I am often reminded of the Desert Fathers and Mothers; not in their asceticism, but in their rejection of compromise and expedience in favour of interior silence and continual practice. Who knows where this is going? But that doesn’t matter – where it is going is just the flow of the stream in its bed; this is not the time for dreams and plans, but for emptiness and quiet.

Outside the window as I write this it is dark, but pinpoints of light from the road, and across the yard by the old reservoir, prick the blackness. At this distance they can’t be seen to illuminate anything, but the little lights are there in their own brightness. It seems very still. There is nothing to do but watch.

Not knowing, intimacy, mystery—all are words that convey a simple, yet profound, openness to the moment without any attempt to master, control, or understand it.

Barry Magid, Ending The Pursuit Of Happiness, with thanks to What’s Here Now

Invisible

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For a long time, since in fact before I formed any kind of regular contemplative practice, and was still very unsure of the relations between philosophy, spirituality and religion, I have been drawn towards being somehow invisible among my peers. And of course, over the years, my contemplative practice has only deepened that longing. The effects of practice on life are sometimes subtle, and they are not always obviously connected to any subjective experience on the part of the one practising. All this tends inevitably towards the eremitic.

As I have said here before, 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; perhaps even for the commitment of active membership in some political or social movement. This may seem austere to a detached observer, but it doesn’t feel that way from the inside, as it were. It may even be a necessary discipline.

Oddly enough, I can’t seem to detach this eremitical instinct from an acute sense of the moral necessity of equality. It has never made sense to me that – often in religious just as much as in political contexts – some people were disadvantaged, often for reasons over which they had no control themselves, compared to their fellows. That the fact that someone was a woman, or Black, or poor, or gay, would have anything to do with the opportunities life presented has increasingly seemed to me morally obscene. In an interview with Andrew Copson, published in the recent What I Believe collection from Humanists UK, Kate Pickett says,

I’m always quite impressed by the way Quakers talk about it, they have a testimony towards equality. I think that’s the way I think about it as well. People get a bit bent out of shape when they talk about equality, saying things like: ‘We can never have equality, and can never truly be equal, it’s utopian.’ And to a certain extent, that’s true, but we can have more equality. And we can work towards reducing inequality gaps in various aspects. So we can think about working towards reducing gender pay gaps, for example, and that’s improving equality. And even if we don’t get to exactly the same level, then we’re still making progress.

Organisations – even sometimes the Quakers! – have inequality gaps. It’s inevitable: the mere organising of people into structural groupings has this effect. Maybe the radical inward equality imposed by the contemplative life cries out against even this; perhaps that is why the longing for stillness and solitude seems somehow to include a longing for equality?

Certainly this instinct – and it is an instinct far more than a decision – for Einsamkeit feels like a healthy instinct for a wholeness, a completion, that I have far too often neglected. The inwardly eremitic life doesn’t, it appears, 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.

Unseen

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Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, from ‘Signs of the Unseen’, Tricycle Magazine, Winter 2024:

Ever since humans have had reason, both artists and mystics have been asking some variant of the following questions: What if what I see is not all there is? What if just beyond the limit of my senses there’s a whole other world, and what if that world has something important to teach us? In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James called this something “the Reality of the Unseen.” The Greek philosopher Anaximander called it apeiron, “the indistinct,” and identified it as the unifying, generative principle of all that we experience. In Zen we’d call it mind. My first Zen teacher, borrowing from Teilhard de Chardin, called it the ground of being.

“I don’t know what it is, but I know it is in me,” Whitman says, tiptoeing his way toward wisdom. And whatever it is, he adds, it’s untamed, untranslatable, without name—and then he names it: happiness. But this is no ordinary happiness. It’s not merely good fortune, nor is it subject to chance. It includes form, union, plan, eternal life. Taoism refers to it as the natural order of things, the eternal Tao.

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.


(Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation)

…This is why, amid so much that needs our attention, that needs our care, our work, our involvement, some of us stop and not do for a while. This is why we sit hour after hour focusing our attention on just one thing—the breath, a question, an image, a sound—diligently unnaming all the multiple things. So we can love them. So we can protect them the way we protect ourselves. We fiercely guard stillness and silence so we can guard that which in our to-doing gets lost or overlooked. We let go of thoughts so we can remember what we so easily forget. Yet paradoxically, it’s through forgetting that we remind ourselves of the unseen. It’s through the conscious, deliberate forgetting of names and forms and opinions and preferences that we recall what’s always been there, hidden just below the surface of our busy, clattering minds. (The Pali word sati, mindfulness, means to recall or bring to mind.) We could call this type of practice remembrance by forgetting or, in the language of the Tao Te Ching, attaining through nondoing. Its prerequisite: a cordoning off of our attention, a cloistering of our senses.

Sometimes I find myself hungry for this “cloistering” – so hungry it’s almost a physical sensation. One of the Desert Fathers, Abba Moses, is reported to have said, “Sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Everything? That’s the thing, that’s the hunger, only if it is that then it is no thing, and that is more than the human heart can hold.

There is an odd passage in the Old Testament Book of Job that almost nails this strange and awful hunger:

“And after my skin has been destroyed,
    yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
    with my own eyes—I, and not another.
    How my heart yearns within me!”

(Job 19:26-27 NIV)

I remember that once, in my early twenties, during a life not characterised by what a religious person might think of as “holiness”, I was suddenly struck one afternoon by the sense that if I were just to sit quietly enough for a while, in sufficient solitude, the doors of perception might swing open, and I would be confronted with the “Reality of the Unseen”; that which is no thing, the ground of being itself. Oddly enough, for someone who had been happy to experiment with psychedelics, I was terrified. This, I intuited, might turn out to be real; once seen, maybe, it might be impossible to unsee. Maybe, even more likely perhaps, it would unmake “me” altogether.

This is all at least slightly unnerving, of course, even at this remove of years. It’s odd to think of it, but there may be a real insight here. Maybe “forcing” the doors of perception (as one tries to do with any serious use of psychedelics, after all) is a bad idea, and maybe concentrated contemplative practice of any kind, without years of gradual work, really does carry mortal danger for the unprepared. Goddard again (I’d recommend reading her whole excellent essay):

[M]y longing got me thinking that maybe we use our knowledge and certainty as buffers. Maybe they’re our protection against taking in too much reality too quickly. So maybe it’s good that practice takes so long, that we generally see so piecemeal. We’re certain until we’re not, and then we go looking for a bit of ground to stand on. Slowly, tentatively, we take a step and then another, and we see a little more of what we couldn’t see before. Then we get cocky and become certain again—until we’re not, and then we take another step. And little by little, we walk ourselves into waking.

Einzelgänger und Einzelgängerin

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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.