Category: thatch

Solitude emerged in the early modern era, attempting to recover the motive of the medieval hermit, polished over several centuries to become a suitable alternative. But the process was slow and tortured, and has never realized the validity of eremitism. The validity of medieval eremitism was purposeful and spiritual, wherein life became a project, but by the early modern era had been identified as quaint, eccentric, and irrelevant.

Medieval eremitism had always been deprecated by the Church, and was attacked by the twin pillars of Augustine and Benedict as a practice riddled with thieves and vagrants. Eremitism was intolerable to authority because it represented the priority of the individual and the moral over the institutional and the rote. Still, great efforts by eremitic innovators of the central Middle Ages, from Romuald to Stephen Muret to the Beguines, attempted to reconcile the two. Eremitic religious orders patterned after the decentralized communities of the desert hermits thrived until the end of the medieval era, until Church and state combined to overthrow the remnants of eremitism. The subsequent wars of religion attacked eremitism from both a Catholic and Protestant critique. By the dawn of the Renaissance and early modern era, eremitism was formally ended.

A few early modern era thinkers (Petrarch, Montaigne), hearkening to Stoicism, hoped to salvage solitude for its core ethics. This core was noticed intuitively, hesitantly, tentatively, without a firm structure applied to living. Solitude in this era wavered between disintegrating into eccentricity and instability, presented one moment as a balm to society and at another a dangerous disaffection. Stoicism was insufficient. Solitude was not truly the hallmark of Stoicism, as Seneca (the chef ancient Stoic) reveals.

The hesitancy of Seneca in his moral advice to Lucilius is indicative of how the later moderns might proceed with solitude. Seneca knows that solitude is an aberration in society and cannot be justified because the world condemns solitude and the individual who is alone. The logic of Seneca is that aloneness, without check from a guardian, friend, or mentor, leaves the individual open to temptation and dissolution. (Of course, Seneca’s notion of solitude is not coming from a tradition of eremitism but from the somewhat cold-heartedness of ancient Greek Stoicism). The following passages (from Letter 25, to Lucilius) is indicative:

“There is no real doubt that it is good for one to have appointed a guardian over oneself, and to have someone whom you may look up to,someone whom you may regard as a witness of your thoughts. It is, indeed, nobler by far to live as you would live under the eyes of some good man, always at your side; but nevertheless I am content if you only act, in whatever you do, as you would act ifanyone at all were looking on; because solitude prompts us to all kinds of evil.”

What Carl Jung called “culture” in his assessment of social impacts on the stages of life, and in his presentation of the dichotomy between nature and culture, is here presented by Seneca as the strong censorious character of society that will pass judgment on otherwise innocuous social conventions. Thus, to the young Lucilius, Seneca cautions against an embrace of solitude because it will appears too anti-social, too youthful, too revellious, too flagrant. Not only that. Solitude will appear to be a cover for immoral behavior!

“You ought to make yourself of a different stamp from the multitude. Therefore, while it is not yet safe to withdraw into solitude, seek out certain individuals; for everyone is better off in the company of somebody or other — no matter who—than in his own company alone. The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd. Yes, provided that you are a good, tranquil, and self-restrained man; otherwise, you had better withdraw into a crowd in order to get away from your self. Alone, you are too close to a rascal.”

Clearly, Seneca is not a true proponent of solitude as it would be understood in modern circles. He is conscious of its attractions but uncertain if it would not alienate the solitary from all social interrelations, whether in society or even among friends. In the worldly sense, Seneca’s advice is sound, perhaps. If we must function in the world we may as well conform to certain (or many) conventions. This position reveals the absence of psychology and effectively leaves solitude to those who can afford it. And, perhaps, he is right. Perhaps the hermit is not made for society, not made to succeed in the world.

In searching for a prototype modern hermit, one is confronted by the reality that after the Middle Ages, hermits in modernity were destined by authorities to disappear. In order to survive, eremitism transformed into solitude, and hermits transformed into solitaries.

Unlike historical hermits, however, who seem so similar regardless of geography, culture, or era, solitaries present more variable phenomena. Life styles of modern solitaries depend more on circumstance and personality. Solitaries were not necessarily more accesptible to society, but at least were more readily disassembled and concealed.

Today, the topic of solitude is standard fare in popular psychology. Even the most aloof bureaucrat to the most troubled artist is tolerated for solitary behavior, indeed, even redeemable and rewarded for eccentricity and showmanship. In offering solitude to their audiences, columnists bid us to cultivate solitude as a preliminary to big events: athletic, business, legal, artistic, or personal. Solitude is treated as a homeopathic remedy: not too much such as to appear strange, but just enough of a suggestive remedy to overcome a lack of confidence or mettle, a meditative moment before embarking on stress.

How far solitude has come in the modern mindset, stripped from its roots and mental character, far away from eremitism. Thus, pop psychology plays a contradictory theme. Solitude in small doses is good for a fighting spirit, but too much solitude is neurotic and dangerous habit. Too much solitude leads to loneliness, isolation, and depression — a chief malady of the old, we are told, who do not socialize enough. The goal of the populoar adviser is often mercenary and views solitude flippantly yet like a prescription. How can one approach solitude not as a temporary remedy but a “lfestyle” that does not undermine itself? Can its link to erenmitism be restored or reconstructed?

A useful model for beginning this project is found in psychologist Carl Jung’s 1931 essay on “The Stages of Life.” In this essay, Jung moves through the individual’s psychological stages, but within the context of the perennial factors of Nature versus Culture. Here the danger of oversimplification also obscures the real context of our lives and the stage of life. Nature is not merely heredity but the autonomy of the growing person to come into contact with Nature and its context of universals. This is where each life stage discovers not only its self-interests but its relationship to our universe. In contrast, Culture (what some writers call Nurture, a midsleading term) is society, relationships, institutions, ideologies,in short, all the binding contrivances that we encounter in the stages of life, their character and impact relevant to the moment, intertwining their contrived content with the capacities and vulnerabilities of the individuial in the given culture. This presentation by Jung gives full reckoning with the influences of stages or situations, so that we cannot think of stages outsideof the context of material and cultural contexts. We cannot make the stages mere abstrctions. We can never know the content of the psyche without understanding that Culture is not merely a context but is content, depending on the individual.

This is all prelude to understanding solitude. Solitude could come out of the individual will, but it also emerges in relation to Culture, so that we are obliged to ask why this phenomenon of solitude, why now at this stage, why in this social context what it is? Could it not have been different? In fact, is it different elsewhere? Resisting the temptation to dismiss solitude as subjective also means resisting the temptation to view solitude as social failure or unintention, society letting down its guard. Revisting Jung restores complexity, but also reinstates simplicity, addressing the inner and outer factors while inviting us to look at their conjunction, the conjunction of what the individual is made of and what society is really all about.

All of these factors were, ironically, visited by the Rousseau versus Hobbes debate about human nature. Jung refreshes the debate with a subtle presentation of the psyche that neither Enlightenment progenitor coulod have addressed. Rousseau, however, was quite willling to concretize the historical chasms; Jung merely goes back and illustrates them with logic from psychology. All that’s needed is to plug the hermit of history into the conversations.

Here are a few favorite random snippets from Zen resources:

from Iron Flute.
14. Pai-Yun’s poem:
Where others dwell,
I do not dwell.
Where others go, 
I do not go.
This does not mean to refuse association with others;

I only want to make 
black and white distinct.
*****
from Gateless Gate.
19. “Everyday Life is the Path.”
Joshu asked Nansen: “What is the path?'”
Nansen said: “Everyday life is the path.”
Joshu asked: “Can it be studied?'”
Nansen said: “If you try to study it, you will be far away from it.”
Joshu asked: “If I do not study it, how can I know it is the path?”
Nansen said: “The path does not belong to the perception world, neither does it belong to the nonperception world. Cognition is a delusion and noncognition is senseless. If you want to reach the true path beyond doubt, place yourself in the same freedom as the sky. You name it neither good nor not-good.”
At these words Joshu was enlightened.
*****
[Added poem to 19. “Everyday Life is the Path.”]
In spring, hundreds of flowers;
in autumn, a harvest moon;
In the summer, a refreshing breeze;
in winter, snow will accompany you.
If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is a good season for you.
*****
from Gateless Gate.
24. “Without Words, Without Silence.”
A monk asked Fuketsu: “Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?”
Fuketsu observed: “I always remember springtime in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable
kinds of fragrant flowers.”
*****
from Iron Flute.
67. Genro:
The whole world is my garden.

Birds sing my song;

Winds blow as my breath;

The dancing of the monkey is mine;

The swimming fish expresses freedom;
The evening moon is reflected
In one thousand lakes,

Yet when the mountain hides the moon,
All images will be gone

With no shadow remaining on the water.
I love each flower representing spring
And each colorful leaf of autumn.
Welcome the happy transmigration!
*****
88. Yüeh-shan’s Lake.
Nyogen: “Zen monks like to dwell intimately with nature.
Most Chinese monasteries were built in the mountains or by a lake. Zen records many dialogues between teacher and monks concerning natural beauty, but there must also be many monks who never asked questions, simply allowing themselves to merge with nature. They are the real supporters of Zen — better than the chatterboxes with all their noise in an empty box.
*****
89. Hsüeh-fêng’s Wooden Ball.
Nyogen: When Yüan-wu gave a lecture on Hsüeh-tou’s selected koans and poems, he criticized one phrase after another, then published them all in book form under the title, Pi- yen-chi, or Blue Rock Collection. After his death, his disciple, Ta-hui, gathered all the publications together in front of the temple and made a bonfire of them. What the teacher builds in shape must be destroyed by the disciples in order to keep the teachings from becoming an empty shell. Western philosophers create their own theory, then followers continue to repair the outer structure until it no longer resembles the original. In Zen we say, “Kill Buddha and the patriarchs; only then can you give them eternal life.”
*****

An acquaintance of an acquaintance indicates that a relation, a man nearly forty years old, has passed away. This man was scorned by family, rejecting of society, and clearly suffered much trauma. He was autistic, reclusive, anxious, depressed, obsessive-compulsive, suffered diabetes and cardiac issues, dying of heart failure. He eked out a life dependent on disability funds, and lived in a basement.

His life presents the involuntary solitude born of psychological trauma, brought low by illness, not at all conscious or deliberate solitude. The basement, an inexpensive hovel sufficient for his circumspect needs, was reflective of his entire self. Yet he had enlisted himself as an organ donor, perhaps because he despised his body, or because he played a final trick on the world, showing them that he was capable of “caring” wherein “they” were not. No one knows.

One cannot help but note an analogy to the famous basement dwellers of recent literature: Dostoyevsky’s anonymous denizen of Underground, and Ellison’s hapless Invisible Man. In literature, the subtleties of psychology are not over-analyzed. We are presented with a seamless lot of syndromes and maladies, to be accepted as a literary package, with the off-goal of entertainment, even as the authors hope for deeper appreciation of their protagonists and how they might reflect issues of the day.

But in the case of the afore-mentioned acquaintance, there is no reflecting or speculating. He is known-of and gone in the same instance. One might have imagined conversing with such a person (though it is said that he insulted anyone who came too close). How far away from the imagined cave-dwelling historical hermits, for example, Paul of Thebes, who would receive others and converse with them, if only to chide them about their tolerance of their worldly milieu. We have no right to inquire too much, but with our literary protagonists we can only nod and think that, yes, given their premises, they were bound to turn out the way that they did. Can we say as much to justify ourselves?

We often ascribe personality and character traits to animals: courage to lions, wisdom to owls, cheerfulness to beavers, for example. Simon & Garfunkel’s popular 1967 song “At the Zoo” offers a clever rendering: “The monkeys stand for honesty / giraffes are insincere / and the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb…”

Seldom are insects included among the popularized animals; their simplicity and lowliness ascribes no traits to them. But their lowliness has attracted pensive poets who respect the humility of insects and derive insight from the ways of these creatures. In the West, the Romantic poet Keats is usually cited for his poem “On the Grasshopper and the Cricket,” but the impact of the poem is probably based on its eccentricity. The Japanese poet Issa is an excellent representative of the poetic subject, often citing spiders, fleas, flies, cicadas, butterflies — and crickets – especially if we make cicadas the poetic equivalent of crickets. Another poet and observer is Mary Oliver, a closer contemporary looking at the cricket (more below).

For Issa, insects, like us, are subject to birth: “First cicada. life is cruel, cruel, cruel.”
Insects eke out a life: “Don’t kill the fly — it wrings its hands, its feet.” Sometimes insects are companionable: “Daybreak — working as one, two butterflies.” Sometimes they are even exuberant: “Moment of fierceness in the first butterfly.” But we know their fate, and ours: “Autumn cicada — flat on his back, chirps his last song.” The insects teach us quietly, humbly: “Weaving butterfly, I am no more than dust.” May they remain our companions always: “When I go, guard my tomb well, grasshopper.”

Mary Oliver perceives all that Issa does in her poem “Nothing is Too Small Not to Be Wondered About,” from her 2016 book Felicity.

The cricket doesn’t wonder if there’s a heaven
or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.

A characteristic of institutional religions, east and west, is consolidation of scripture and doctrine into ritual.

This is especially conspicuous for Westerners seeing the evolution of Christianity into a set of founding narratives followed by evolution of doctrine and rote ritual, primary institutions of church and monasteries, and the providence of bishops, priests, abbots, and monks. In the same way, eastern instances show that the chief institution is the monastery, and the presentation and condification of scripture, doctrine, and ritual comes to dominate.

The institutions in either Buddhism or Christianity present a dilemma for the historical hermit who arises out of either tradition. In the Zen tradition of Japan, the dilemma is expressed by contrasting the eremitic tendency, which concentrates on self-awareness and methods such as meditation, with the monastic tendency concentrating on successfully handling koans promoting instant enlightenment. In Japan, Rinzai Zen masters dominated the monastic institutions and drilled their novice monks with koans. Whether the monastery was large or small, the methodology came to dominate, as did the authoritarianism of the masters, who saw violence in word and action as legitimate tools of instruction or fostering of cirrect answers.

Dissent from this approach harkened back to the Japanese master Dōgen (1200-1253), the founder of Soto Zen. An example of these contemporary tensions is found in the life of Zen master Bassui (1327-1387).

Bassui was born questioning the customs and beliefs of his time; as a four-year-old child at his father’s funeral, seeing the food offerings presented, he wondered how his father would eat the food. Told that his father’s soul would receive the offerings, young Bassui asked what is the soul. And when Bawsui became a monk at twenty, he refused to wear monk’s robes because — he said — he became a monk to understand the great issues of life and death, not to wear robes. Later, after an enlightenment experience, confirmed by multiple masters, Bassui built a hermitage in the mountains, the first of many for the next seventeen years!

As Bassui translator Arthur Braverman has noted: “Bassui was very critical of the Rinzai practice of studying koans, perhaps because they were becoming more and more formalized, hence losing their original spirit. He seems to have been attracted to the Soto sect for its stress on being attentive to all one’s everyday activities.”

And in a famous letter written toward the end of his life, Bassui writes: “The gurgle of the stream and the sigh of the wind are the voices of the master. The green of the pine, the white of the snow, these are the colors of the master, the very one who lifts the hands, moves the legs, sees, hears. One who grasps this directly without recourse to reason or intellection can be said to have some degree of inner enlightenment. But this is not yet full enlightenment.”

It is not full enlightenment, concludes Bassui, but may be sufficient to end rebirth in one’s successive lifetime (thus addressing a representative doctrine). But when one does attain this point, one will see “that all the sermons of the Buddhas are nothing more than metaphors that point to the minds of ordinary people.”

Bassui’s emphasis on the ordinariness of mind, of self-disipline, of insight, refreshingly transformed Zen into the tool it became for art, expression, simplicity, appreciation of nature, and enlightenment. His apprroach was the fruit of eremitism combined with the inspiration of the great master Dōgen.

URL: https://www.hermitary.com/articles/bassui.html

Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) considered historiography as a morphology, like the biologist studying an organism, from birth to maturation to eventual decline and death. This trajectory does not necessarily represent a circle, like that proposed by the historian Giambattista Vico (1688-1744), or the eternal recurrence proposed by the philosopher Nietzsche. In biology, the same entity does not return, but a new entity is generated. At the same time, study of the entity is examined for its form and structure, while Spengler refrained (or presumed to refrain) from examining its function. The latter exercise would presume a valuation, an opinion about the value of the culture and its values and ideas. Of course, the whole exercise suggests a valuation of the cultures Spengler examines, but his goal is ostensibly to demonstrate a process, a biological process. The inevitability of this process, applied by Spengler to the Western world, is grounded in the morphological analogy.

The theme of Spengler’s Decline of the West is that the institutions and values of the West had proven not sempiternal but moribund, that the process of decay and collapse dissipated the strength of the West, leading not only to internecine conflict of states and potentates but within the fabric of power and culture itself. The result would be slow or precipitous, depending on events and on one’s vantage point, but inexorable.

Spengler perceives this process in numerous and representative examples and historical instances, contrasting ancient and classical forms of thought, contrasting the West and other civilizations, wherein the universe is given as being, and the restless morphological processess and sheer movement (social, technological, etc.) connote only “becoming.” Thus:

In the world as seen by the Faustian’s [i.e., Western] eyes, everything is motion with an aim. He himself lives only under that condition, for to him life means struggling, overcoming, winning through. The struggle for existence as ideal form of existence is implicit …

To Spengler, even the Western religious orders, presumably originating with the goal of providing paternal stability in religious practice, are “movements” not orders, in sharp contrast to what Spengler calls the “askesis of the early-Christian hermit.” Askesis is asceticism, the hallmark of the hermits. Spengler sees the stability of the hermits in terms of identification with “being.” In contrast, the rush of war and acquisition in greater society, and the spinning of elaborate dogmas and religious privileges among churchmen, reflect “becoming.” The process of becoming accelerates the morphological process, planting the seed of self-demise. Asceticism means “being.”

The moral collapse of the medieval monasteries (among other events), engendered the mystics as alternatives, among them hermits being prominent. But the late Middle Ages were too late to recover the simple and stolid askesis of the past. The reform movements within and outside of the Church were not restorative but self-destructive.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were urban monks, and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards. Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages of quiet valleys to the scholar’s study of the Baroque.

Part of this dissolution of institutional religion in the West, Spengler maintains, was due to the priesthood itself, turned to hollowed form and superficial function. The ancient spirituality bound up in what he calls the Magian, its shamanistic and ascetic character, was lost: “the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy steadily loses in symbolic significance.” Thus, over time, the religious function devolves into an irrelevance to the world’s circles of power and authority. “The religious man will always try in vain, catechism in hand, to improve the instincts of his political environment. But it goes on its way undisturbed and leaves him to his thoughts. The saint can only choose between adapting himself to this environment -— and then he becomes a Church politician and conscienceless -— and fleeing from it into a hermitage or even into the Beyond.”

With the devolution of the West, in a process witnessed many times before in other world civilizations, war and struggle for power lay waste the earth, and the masses are thrown into despair, until the end. Even then, Spengler notes, the triumph of the hermits endures.

There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual -— and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it -— but it is there.

One of the more colorful theological figures of the eighteenth century is Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). In an era of rationalism and the exhaustion of wars of religion in he West, Swedenborg revived and extended mystic thought. Not mysticism as medieval figures like the thoughtful Meister Eckhart or the spiritual Richard Rolle or Julian of Norwich may have pursued it. The tradition of cautious theological speculation and heartfelt religious emotion were dissipated. Swedenborg revives the imagery of Jacob Boehme, assured of its literal descriptions of God and angels, heaven and hell. Nor here the modesty of St. Paul telling the Corinthians of being rapt to heaven: “I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—-whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—-whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows—-was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” Pau dared not relate details, whether he wanted to or not, feeling humbled. On the other hand, Swedenborg tells of revelations and intricate detail. He propels the literalism and imagination of later theosophy and its variants, as much as in literal Christianity in evangelical and prophetic modes.

As an illustration of the mysticism of imagination: In Three Principles, the early modern mystic Jacob Boehme is eager to reveal the seven properties of nature, the first being Saturn: “The First property is a desirousness, like that of a magnet, namely, the compression of the will; the will desires to be something,and yet it has nothing of which it may make something to itself; and therefore it brings itself into a receivingness of itself, and compresses itself to something; and that something is nothing but a magnetical hunger, a harshness, like a hardness, whence even hardness, cold, and substance arise.” Similarly described are the other six properties: 2. Mercury, 3. Mars, 4. the Sun, 5. Venus, 6. Jupiter, and 7. The Moon. Each planet is linked to property (hardness, light, fire, noise, cold, etc.) and thence to a human disposition. “Now these are the seven properties in one only ground; and all seven are equally eternal without beginning; none of them can be accounted the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or last; for they are equally eternal without beginning, and have also one eternal beginning from the Unity of God.”

In Boehme’s footsteps, then, follows Swedenborg with the ambitiously-titled The Earthlike Bodies Called Planets
in Our Solar System and
in Deep Space, their Inhabitants,
 and
the Spirits and Angels. In this book, the intimate knowledge Swedenborg reveals is the result of neither insight nor imagination but privilege: “Buy the Lord’s divine mercy the deeper levels within me, which belong 1 to my spirit, have been opened, enabling me to talk with spirits and angels—not only those near our world, but also those close to other planets. Because I have had a longing to know whether there are other worlds, what they are like, and what their inhabitants are like, the Lord has granted me opportunities to talk and interact with spirits and angels from other planets.”

Like Boehme and Swedenborg, Helena Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, pursues the same interest in planets in her Secret Doctrine, where she presents seven planets as constituting a “planetary chain,” though some planets are downgraded and others prioritized in her system. She significantly sophisticates the epistemological sources by appealing to ancient documents.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in this essay “Swedenborg; or The Mystic,” in Representative Men: Seven Lectures, described Swedenborg as a colossal, an adherent of science and technology, but whose personal beliefs classed him “a visionary and elixir of moonbeams.” Swedenborg meticulously describes heaven and hell, the social atmosphere of quiet conviviality, and the forlornness of hell. As an example, he records: “As for angels being human forms, or people, this I have seen thousands of times. I have talked with them
 face to face, sometimes with just one, sometimes with several in a group,
and as far as their form is concerned, I have seen in them nothing different from that of a human being. At times I have felt surprised that they were like this; and to prevent it being said that this was some illusion or hallucination, I have been allowed to see them while I was fully awake, or while I was in full possession of my physical senses and in a state of clear perception.”

Here are other random citations to illustrate both the detail and the confidence of Swedenborg:

I have often been allowed to see this [different levels of heaven and different manifestations of beings]when I was in the spirit and therefore out of body and in the company of angels. … Several times I have been allowed to see that each community of heaven reflects a single individual and is in the likeness of a human being as well.

The earliest ones, who were heavenly people, did their thinking from correspondence like angels, so they could even talk with angels. Further, the Lord was quite often visible to them, and taught them. Nowadays, though, this knowledge has been so completely lost that people do not know what correspondence is.

People living in their organs: “People who are in the head, of the universal human that is heaven are supremely involved in everything good. In fact, they are in love, peace, innocence, wisdom, intelligence, and therefore in delight and happiness. These flow into the head and into the components of the head in us, and correspond to them. People who are in the chest of the universal human that is heaven are involved in the qualities of thoughtfulness and faith, and also flow into our chests and correspond to them. However, people who are in the groin of the universal human or heaven and in the organs dedicated to reproduction are in marriage love. People who are in the feet are in the outermost heaven, which is called “natural-spiritual good.” People who are in the arms and hands are in the power of what is true because of what is good. People who are in the eyes are in understanding; people who are in the ears are in attentiveness and obedience; people who are in the nostrils are in perception; people in the mouth and tongue in conversing from discernment and perception. People who are in the kidneys are in truth that probes and discriminates and purifies; people in the liver, pancreas, and spleen are in various aspects of purification of what is good and true; and so on. They flow into the like parts of the human being and correspond to them.”

[A form of spiritual materialism inevitably troubling literalism, re angels’ appliances, clothing, housing, re housing]: “Whenever I have talked with angels face to face, I have been with them in their houses. Their houses were just like the houses on earth that we call homes, but more beautiful. They have chambers, suites, and bedrooms in abundance, and courtyards with gardens, flower beds, and lawns around them. Where there is some concentration of people, the houses are adjoining, one near another, arranged in the form of a city with streets and lanes and public squares, just like the ones we see in cit- ies on our earth. I have been allowed to stroll along them and look around wherever I wished, at times entering people’s homes.”

Here quoted in full are two entries from the 1957 Book of Imaginary Beings, by Jorge Luis Borges, the first essay titled “Swedenborg’s Angels,” the second “Swedenborg’s Devils.” Borges is amused by Swedenborg’s imagination, as he is by esoteric thought like that of gnostics and theosophists, and writes with wry wit.

Swedenborg’s Angels
For the last twenty-five years of his studious life, the eminent philosopher and man of science Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) resided in London. But as the English are not very talkative, he fell into the habit of conversing with devils and Angels. God granted him the privilege of visiting the Other World and of entering into the lives of its inhabitants. Christ had said that souls, in order to be admitted into Heaven, must be righteous. Swedenborg added that they must also be intelligent; later on Blake stipulated that they should be artists and poets. Swedenborg’s Angels are those souls who have chosen Heaven. They need no words; it is enough that an Angel only think of another in order to have him at his side. Two people who have loved each other on earth become a single Angel. Their world is ruled by love; every Angel is a Heaven. Their shape is that of a perfect human being; Heaven’s shape is the same. The Angels, in whatever direction they look —- north, east, south, or west — are always face to face with God. They are, above all, divines; their chief delight lies in prayer and in the unraveling of theological problems. Earthly things are but emblems of heavenly things. The sun stands for the godhead. In Heaven there is no time; the appearance of things changes according to moods. The Angels’ garments shine according to their intelligence. The souls of the rich are richer than the souls of the poor, since the rich are accustomed to wealth. In Heaven, all objects, furniture, and cities are more physical and more complex than those of our earth; colors are more varied and splendid. Angels of English stock show a tendency to politics; Jews to the sale of trinkets; Germans tote bulky volumes which they consult before venturing an answer. Since Muslims venerate Mohammad, God has provided them with an Angel who impersonates the Prophet. The poor in spirit and hermits are denied the pleasures of Heaven, for they would be unable to enjoy them.

Swedenborg’s Devils
In the works of the famous eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, we read that Devils, like angels, are not a species apart but derive from the human race. They are individuals who after death choose Hell. There, in that region of marshlands, of desert wastes, of tangled forests, of towns leveled by fire, of brothels, and of gloomy dens, they feel no special happiness, but in Heaven they would be far unhappier still. Occasionally, a ray of heavenly light falls on them from on high; the Devils feel it as a burning, a scorching, and it reaches their nostrils as a stench. Each thinks himself handsome, but many have the faces of beasts or have shapeless lumps of flesh where faces should be; others are faceless. They live in a state of mutual hatred and of armed violence, and if they come together it is for the purpose of plotting against one another or of destroying each other. God has forbidden men and angels to draw a map of Hell, but we know that its general outline follows that of a Devil, just as the outline of Heaven follows that of an angel. The most vile and loathsome Hells lie to the west.

In a prologue titled “Emanuel Swedenborg, Mystical Works” Borges summarizes the hermit in Swedenborg thusly:

“Like the Buddha, Swedenborg rejected asceticism, which impoverishes and can destroy men. Within the boundaries of Heaven, he saw a hermit who had sought to win admittance there and had spent his mortal life in solitude and the desert. Having reached his goal, this fortunate man discov­ered that he was unable to follow the conversation of the angels or fathom the complexities of paradise. Finally, he was allowed to project around him­self a hallucinatory image of the wilderness. There he remains, as he was on earth, in self-mortification and prayer, but without the hope of ever reach­ing heaven.”

A series of related items on the topic of solitude is presented in the blog of Psychology Today. The chief article is titled “Motivations for Solitude Explain Why Loners Love Being Alone: A new 14-item questionnaire gauges various motivations for seeking solitude.” This item presents an important source from the January 2019 issue of the Journal of Adolescence, where the survey was first presented. The survey asks adolescents taking the survey: “When I spend time alone, I do so because…” with the response on a continuum between “not at all important or relevant” to “extremely important and relevant.”

1. It sparks my creativity.

2. I enjoy the quiet.

3. Being alone helps me get in touch with my spirituality.

4. It helps me stay in touch with my feelings.
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5. I value the privacy.

6. I can engage in activities that really interest me.

7. It helps me gain insight into why I do the things I do.

8. I feel energized when I spend time by myself.

9. I feel anxious when I’m with others.

10. I don’t feel liked when I’m with others.

11. I can’t be myself around others.

12. I regret things I say or do when I’m with others.

13. I feel uncomfortable when I’m with others.

14. I feel like I don’t belong when I’m with others.

URL: Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201904/motivations-solitude-explain-why-loners-love-being-alone;
Journal of Adolescence: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30472399

In their classic book Metaphors We Live By (2003), the scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson sought to demonstrate that most human speech is expressed as metaphor. Anthropologically, nature is confronted as menacing and mysterious, a source of danger, hostile and threatening, in short, Other. Specifically in the West, nature was disparaged as a force to be tamed, subordinated to the whim of human beings. With the passage of time, gentler forms of nature were accepted if processed as metaphor, especially in literature: the wind whispers, the stars wink, a river wanders, a storm is nasty or wicked, a bird sings.

When human actions are metaphorized, the results are more revealing of human action than of speech. A pertinent example offered by the authors is labeled “Argument is War.” Here is their example:

Your claims are indefensible.
He attacked every weak point in my argument.
His criticisms were right on target.
I demolished his argument.
I’ve never won an argument with him.
You disagree. Okay, shoot.
If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out.
He shot down all my arguments.

The authors rightly note that the “Argument Is War” metaphor “is one that we live by in this culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing.” One might add that other activities such as political debate and sports are often described the same way, with the same war metaphor.

The import of such metaphors is not merely to sanitize speech but to realize the mentality that underlies such a way of speaking. Essentially, we do not speak rationally about issues, we engage in an equivalent of violence and warfare. Is there a way to speak rationally and reciprocally about an issue, or is argument to be retained and sanitized, reduced to nuanced threats of future retaliation? Ultimately, is not arguing ethically untenable since it is a verbal form of war?

Thus, whether engaged in real warfare or merely speaking in a war metaphor, the culture commits violence. The alternative of peace in society and self is to eliminate the metaphor, to change our speech if not our hearts. This may be easier, perhaps, than outright eliminating (or hoping to eliminate) war itself. Silence is a simple and practical basis for peace in one’s life. This is the basis of a pacifism that is eminently practical and non-ideological.

Not to speak in the face of opposition or offense is not so unusual if one looks to the sages of history and considers their behavior in the midst of opposition. Silence is a virtue cultivated by the mindful, but further, it is the appropriate response to violence, coercion, and worldly notions of power. What opposes a universal ethic should collapse of its own untenable state, not requiring a response, a refutation, or a provocation. The beginning of ethics is in silence, and as metaphor shows, ethics resides not in human thought or contrivance but in embracing a receptivity to nature and nature’s way or path. Once nature is followed, nature’s beings — from inanimate to animate, from river, wind, and stars, to trees and birds — become our companions, become providers of insight and reflection.

Kahlil Gibran’s short poem “The Two Hermits” understands this presentation of argument succinctly. Here is the text:

Upon a lonely mountain, there lived two hermits who worshiped God
and loved one another.

Now these two hermits had one earthen bowl, and this was their only
possession.

One day an evil spirit entered into the heart of the older hermit
and he came to the younger and said, “It is long that we have
lived together. The time has come for us to part. Let us divide
our possessions.”

Then the younger hermit was saddened and he said, “It grieves
me, Brother, that thou shouldst leave me. But if thou must needs
go, so be it,” and he brought the earthen bowl and gave it to him
saying, “We cannot divide it, Brother, let it be thine.”

Then the older hermit said, “Charity I will not accept. I will
take nothing but mine own. It must be divided.”

And the younger one said, “If the bowl be broken, of what use would
it be to thee or to me? If it be thy pleasure let us rather cast
a lot.”

But the older hermit said again, “I will have but justice and mine
own, and I will not trust justice and mine own to vain chance. The
bowl must be divided.”

Then the younger hermit could reason no further and he said, “If
it be indeed thy will, and if even so thou wouldst have it let us
now break the bowl.”

But the face of the older hermit grew exceedingly dark, and he
cried, “O thou cursed coward, thou wouldst not fight.”