Ego and Authority

We bid ourselves to temper our ego, by which we really mean two things: first, to eliminate self-harming actions and thoughts such as pride, covetousness, lazin...

Compassion

Can a solitary develop compassion, or what the Buddhists call “bodhichitta”? For it seems that the highest compassion requires intense socializing, ...

Ambitions and sorrows

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus quotes this Persian saying: “The bitterest sorrow that anyone can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothin...

Path-pursuing

Concepts of God and God’s functionality in the universe are as often derived from experience and feeling as any formal philosophizing or theologizing. Dar...

Sisyphus, solitary

Albert Camus was one of the more acute and responsive thinkers of the past century. When he speaks of “the unreasonable silence of the world” (The M...

Modes of religiosity

One of the paradoxes of traditional religions and sects is that when they are pursued exclusively in their ritual and formulaic modes as institutions of power a...

Atheism V

The first major atheist of the modern West, Paul-Henri-Dietrich d’Hollbach (1723-89), described the atheist as “one who destroys human chimeras in o...

Sentience

Archaic thinking proposes the existence of a soul or spirit within living things like birds and insects and trees, and even within inanimate things like stars a...

Land

One of the great malevolencies of modern (if not Western) culture is the treatment of the habitat of hermits and solitaries, which is to say the habitat of all ...