hermit's thatch

Neurologist and popular writer Oliver Sacks has long chronicled the oddities of neurology. His most striking anecdotes involve hallucinations, both visual and auditory. In Musicophilia, Sacks describes patients who experience musical hallucinations as instances of unwanted music breaking into “hearing,” arising by controlling auditory functions. The noise is fired off by offending brain activities that heighten the forced hearing of nursery rhymes, old patriotic and religious songs from childhood, pop tunes, and other unwanted auditory detritus. From low incessant murmurs these tunes become excruciating maladies.

Sacks’ patients were usually in their seventies and had suffered hearing loss, so the explanation for these musical hallucinations is over-stimulation of nerves and synapses, still an as yet unknown process. The patients may feel that they are experiencing psychotic episodes, but Sacks assures them that they are auditory but not psychotic.

Of course, hearing music, or voices, has historically been defined as psychotic by science, or either demonic or spiritual by religion. Neither is correct in Sacks’ case studies, but the issue suggests that events are always internal, and that others may never understand unless they, too, experience the same phenomenon — yet why would we want them to?

Most of Sacks’ patients learned to live with their malady. But perhaps the malady is in part the product of auditory functions themselves and the ability to discern sound, even when the sound is potentially music but, in these cases, offensive. A sector of humanity is disabled in its ability to appreciate music anyway, and one may wonder if they have enured themselves from potential degeneration through musical hallucination. Another sector, the deaf or near deaf, will not hear sound at all, and one can wonder if that is the only way to avoid musical hallucinations.

But is any music intrinsically benign? Can any music not potentially become a hallucination? The structure of music, specifically melody, what makes a piece “catchy,” seems to be the chief factor for memory, storage, and reproduction. Sacks’ patients all regurgitated childhood pieces, long interred in the subconscious brain, not extirpated, overwritten, or even replaced by better music. (Some patients actively played instruments and listened to the “best” classical music, just to end this way!)

Such facts suggest that only a deep, calming meditative silence can gradually extirpate not only bad music but bad memories, habits, thoughts, intentions, or desires. The recovery of primordial silence is the return to home, to peace, to originating state that tradition refers to in speaking of the mind. Meanwhile, simple sounds like predawn birdsong break the silence of night may be enough to solidify the benign effects of silence in the mind. Similarly, some ambient music, too, has the effect of addressing vulnerable parts of the brain with regard to sound, even though ambient music is modern and synthetic.

But the world militates against such silence, such simplicity of sound, even when composed and played on muting nontraditional instruments or when, by design, the music intends to evoke a spiritual purpose. In Huxley’s Brave New World, for example, the authority’s use of suggestive repetitions, like songs, condition children from infancy to childhood to form social values. Adults are further conditioned by, among other things, music both loud and rhythmic, deliberately charged with erotic and violent energy in their purpose — in fact, not unlike nearly all of society’s music from earliest times to today!

As Nietzsche quipped, only sick music makes money, but in the brave new world, only sick music need exist. Music is a social phenomenon, susceptible to manipulation, whether of the weak body and spirit or the collective industry that manufactures it. Plato understood this, but did not know enough about music to do anything with it. What to do with music is up to ourselves, but realizing its potential effects, both individual and social, ought to alert us to what we do when we dismiss silence.

Popular media today, including book popularizations, describe the atomization of people in modern urban technological culture, lamenting a lost — perhaps conjured — community and conviviality of the past. The image of young people burying their faces into their smartphones while ignoring peers and others around them is common — as if young people made the world of today what it is and somehow steer its authorities and powers. But stereotypes of alienation cannot be so recent. Any close reading of history and culture will suggest otherwise.

Loneliness is social alienation, a more specialized product of modern culture, but not just historically modern. Sue Halpern, in her book Migrations to Solitude, described lonely people as suffering “involuntary solitude.” The emphasis must be on volition; most will understand solitude as being away from people or unable to connect authentically with others. Truly lonely people are made, not self-willed. Lonely people suffer imprisonment, bereavement, grief, disease, abuse, addiction, mental illness. These factors alienate them from others and themselves, creating their cycle of psychological entrapment, which is also social. Foucault remarked that “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” Society and its powers build the structures of loneliness for their own purposes of control and impose “involuntary solitude” upon as many as it can.

This is why individuals who prefer solitude are described, even by sympathetic media, as lonely and in need of friendship and socialization, if not rehabilitation. The popular route for recovery is simply to imitate how others carry on a social life, engage in social activities, consume the products of society in order to feel part of society, in order not to feel alienated. Other approaches, more serious psychological approaches to rehabilitating lonely people, may attempt to mainstream lonely people or sufferers of mental illness by using pharmaceuticals to suppress their depression. Usually no authority will recommend a transition to what may be called “voluntary” solitude because such a state does not or should not, in their estimation, exist. Loneliness is conflated with solitude in order to stigmatize historical solitaries and their modern versions. Those who fail to rehabilitate themselves from loneliness are returned by society, in one way or another, to involuntary institutionalization, a built-in social recidivism.

Like the classic introvert, the solitary personality derives its self-image from intuition and perception, not from external people and events. The ability to tolerate the erratic values of society through a crafted self-discipline that is blessed in part by an innate or congenital center of calm allows the solitary to become a keen observer of self and others, at least to the point of a self-knowledge that alerts the individual to danger, hostility, guile, deception, or unsavory motive.

As Oldham’s personality scale shows, the solitary faculty can deteriorate to dysfunctional paranoia. But, then, all personality types have a dysfunctional counterpart on a spectrum. Thus, indubitably, the solitary who is guided by a religious, spiritual, or philosophical motive remains most balanced or focused, as does the wilderness solitary who closely identifies with nature and larger natural cycles, rhythms, and harmonies. Historically, most hermits were so characterized. People suffering from mental illness and exaggerated or exacerbated their solitary intuitions with visions and mad behaviors were often made to be representative of all solitaries, whether by church, state, or other authorities. This was a useful device for generalization: to make all solitary behavior suspect and dangerous. The medieval church as much as the Enlightenment rationalist opposed unregulated solitaries, who symbolized the opposition to the barracks, prisons, hospitals, and institutions mentioned.

Despite media attention to the virtues of solitude and silence, the goal of such pieces is often to co-opt the power of authentic solitude and silence in order to further hone the skills of defeating rivals, overthrowing groups, and grasping more power for self and organization. Such presentations are made to those who otherwise belittle too much solitude and too much silence — the caveat revives, signalling bad motives. The exploitation of solitude and silence parallels the business and corporate uses of meditation, yoga, and other spiritual-mental practices in the way that athletes and soldiers cultivate the body and mind to more effectively harm others.

There can be no substitute for the authenticate wellsprings of solitude and silence found in the historical hermits East and West. There can be no transition from involuntary solitude but to a rehabilitation or reconciliation with a mad society. Lacking original malice, lacking no loss of original volition, the true solitary can bypass the devices of society and reach a self-discipline that is not compatible with those devious arts derived from social and commercial products and promises.

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945) was not only Japan’s foremost philosopher but remains a significant world philosopher of the 20th century. Though little known in Western circles, Nishida mastered the varieties of Western philosophical expression and promoted its encounter with Eastern thought, specifically Buddhism, in a manner beyond any Western thinker.

Nishida’s studies are wide-ranging, from Greek philosophers to Christian mystics, from rationalists and empiricists to Enlightenment thinkers, from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to contemporary Christian thinkers — all are brought forth to an encounter with Eastern thought.

Nishida’s early venture begins with Aristotle and the entirely dominant role of logic and reason in the Western world. His analyses culminate in Kant and Husserl in attempting to explore the cognitive patterns in which logic discloses noetic and subjective needs. The range of human intent is necessarily self-expressive and therefore existential and concretely individual. Personal awareness and consciousness of internal contradiction reveals the ethical self — unresolvable, and paradoxical (in the world). The individual identifies the intuition of a historical existence. Yet it is a plunge into a bottomless contradiction, between existence and nothingness, with the concomitant awakening of what Nishida calls a religious awareness.

This religious awareness is not a conventional belief system but a realization of the nothingness behind the awareness of the world and its absolute presence in the historical — like a crossroad (if the individual is properly self-conscious) of the intersection of Absolute and Nothing.

It is to find this place, this space, this ground of consciousness, that embarked Nishida on an exploration of the semantic features of the religious and tapped the philosophy of Buddhism. Indeed, his final essay, in the year of his death, was titled “The Logic of the Place of Nothingness and the Religious Worldview.” It may be said that Nishida’s entire career, working doggedly on this central issue of ontology, culminated in this essay.

In this work, Nishida begins his journey with Kant. In his Critiques, Kant saw the existence of God and the immortality of the soul as logical postulates of the will. Kant capitulates (if not exhausts) Western philosophy’s dependence on reason, and logic’s defense of the preeminence of scientific logic. Kant updated Aristotle, grounding self-reflection and the a priori into human faculties of reason and the inevitability of logic. Elements outside of reason or deduced ethics are not legitimate in this tradition — namely moral will or religious consciousness, however these may be defined.

While appreciating the structure of Kant’s philosophical architecture, Nishida also notes its absence of consciousness individually, the absence of existential identity, of the ground of consciousness which is eschatological and therefore “religious” in Nishida’s more rarefied definition of the latter. It is this being-ness, this space, this matrix of the self-forming historical world that is immediately expressed in the self that Nishida wants to account for. To this process he brings an encounter between that absolute present and the nothingness of Buddhist tradition.

As Nishida translator and commentator David Dilworth notes:

Nishida argues that neither paradigm, Aristotelian or Kantian, can account for the historical self as an individual self-conscious being that knows of its own mortality. It is only when the self becomes aware of its own existential contradiction — of the fact that it is a unique living being that must die — that the religious problem arises.

By any definition, then, Nishida seems to be an existentialist, taking off directly from Kierkegaard in considering the final existential insight to be a religious one, or at least religious in the eschatological sense, the crisis sense, that Walter Kaufmann uses as a criterion for defining existentialism. But Nishida differs in the evolution of his thought. He stands out from phenomenology as the ground of existential thinking, and the stands clear from both the angst-ridden or the action-oriented philosophies that existentialism became in the mid-20th century West. Nor is Nishida speaking of practices or even dogmas of world religions, all of which are symbolic, he tells us.

Rather, our actions in the Kantian plane or realm of logic and intelligibility is unaware of historical existence. Morality itself is unaware, and death has no effect on this plane. Like Kierkegaard, Nishida states that only with self-consciousness does the self become aware of its own death. Death is not an event but a condition residing in the being, here and now, an absolute now, the “eternal now” of Dogen.
Nishida calls this point of consciousness the essential religious question because it generates a logic of contradictory identity, a logic of nothingness. The existential is the absolute, one dying in the other in absolute simultaneity and identity.

Nishida speaks further of a non-dualistic place of nothingness and a formless form. This vocabulary hearkens of Taoist, Buddhist, and Neo-Shinto thought. Mind arises, having no place to abide — a familiar Buddhist sentiment. Samsara and Nirvana are non-dual, co-originating, constituting an existential realization in enlightenment, or in transcendence in the terminology of Aristotle and Kant.

Nishida alludes to Nicolas of Cusa’s phrase: “The Absolute cannot be a One.” The Absolute is simultaneously absolute nothingness, absolute negation, maintains Nishida, further utilizing Plotinus, Eckhart, Boehme, and Cusa, but applying to this body of insight what Nishida calls “Asian nothingness” and a “logic of nothingness” to contrast both religious logic and Western “concrete” logic with the historically unencountered East. This encounter is the strength of Nishida, what makes him indispensable to philosophy, and what happily spills over into the culture of eremitism that already explores the commonalities of Eastern and Western expression.

According to scientists, solitary animals are those animals which — with the exception of the evolutionary necessities of feeding and reproduction, including migratory habits — do not live in groups. A significant number of animals are , in fact, solitary. Among mammals are big cats and bears — pet owners of cats will notice their characteristic “indifference” as a remnant solitary behavior. Such solitary behavior presumably originated from territorial necessity, given that the roaming pattern for feeding required a large habitat per individual, but the behavior lingered even when such a necessity was not in play.

A second category of solitary animal is so defined because the animal eludes human and other animal observation, hiding, as it were, from potential predators but, in effect, from everyone. These may seem to elude humans, such as reptiles, when it is just a matter of observation. Others, like the famous hermit thrush, simply blends into their environment well or, like owls, are nocturnal. We call them solitary by default, which makes a significant portion of the world’s animals solitary, or as far as human observation is concerned.

At least three reclusive creatures have been dubbed “hermits”for their solitary behavior or for their penchant for concealment: 1) the hermit crab, 2) the hermit thrush, and 3) the hermit ibis. Other animals could have earned the hermit sobriquet, but a little humor shows why these three have earned the title, at least to this observer.

1. The lowly hermit crab is the digambara of the solitary animals, sky-clad and entirely vulnerable. This crustacean is without shell and takes a covering as it finds it, typically from deceased crustaceans, the garb ill-fitting and object of human derision. Scientists have identified rare accumulations of hermit crabs (analogous to the vast Kumbh Mela festival of India held every 12 years, attracting sadhus and holy pilgrims) wherein the crabs shed their garb and find larger, more suitable garb from their brothers.

2. The hermit thrush delights listeners of its “somewhat melancholy” song, which emanates from deep hidden forests. Scientists have recently confirmed (“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US),” Nov. 2014) that the hermit thrush approximates the mathematical structures of human music. Science News reported that

In its somewhat melancholy songs, North America’s Catharus guttatus thrushes mix in strings of short, non-wavering tones. In 54 out of 71 thrush songs, two statistical methods showed those tones related to each other much as notes in human musical scales do, researchers report November 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The hermit thrushes “have a strong preference for the same simple ratios [such as 3:2] that humans seem to like,” says paper coauthor Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna.

When recordings of the hermit thrush song are slowed down, the sound is distinctly like that of a flute, so the next question is whether the sound approximates the Japanese shakuhachi, the Indian Carnatic flute, or Mozart. Our preference, especially with the description of “melancholic,” is for the first. Not pursued by distinguished panel was whether humans somehow inherited this capacity from birds as part of evolution or if they imitated the hermit thrush, which is not familiar with Pythagorean mathematical principles. Also to be determined is whether all this singing (bird or human) is simply to attract a mate, much like human behavior in adolescent rock bands, interminably outliving both their youth and reproductive needs.

3. The hermit ibis is also called, less diplomatically, the northern bald ibis, though it winters in southern Africa and flies north along East Africa to Turkey (or, more romantically, East Asia, Anatolia, etc.) The hermit ibis looks like a vulture, and thus lives up to the hermit characteristic of wandering, feeding indiscriminately, and retaining a certain ugliness by worldly standards. (The hermit thrush wisely conceals its good looks to retain its hermit identity.) Like the early desert hermits, the hermit ibis lives in rocky arid places, and achieved a religious respectability with report that it guided Muslim pilgrims to Mecca during the Hajj. Indeed, a 16th-cetury Austrian bishop declared the hermit ibis a protected species, but the species died out in Europe (not unlike thriving eremitism) around the same time. Today, the hermit ibis continues to haunt arid places from Syria to Morocco, indifferent to the conflicts of human populations, their religions, and their disdain for hermits.

Montaigne’s essay “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” is filled with quotations of the ancient Romans because they reflect Montaigne’s own interests and personality — slightly bemused by the affectations of others, skeptical of their motives and foolishness, and reconciled to the folly of worldly endeavors. In the essay, Montaigne strives, with the gentle assistance of Horace, Lucretius, Catullus, Seneca, plus Cicero, who provides the essay title, to keep a sober perspective on our aspirations, to root the self to a simple sense of virtue. With the Romans, he takes the view that nature exercises a great wisdom in refusing to spare living things of death. “Our mother Nature” speaks thus, he says:

Chiron refused immortality when informed of its conditions by the very god of time and duration, his father Saturn. Imagine honestly how much less bearable and more painful to man would be an everlasting life than the life I have given him. If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for having deprived you of it. I have deliberately mixed with it a little bitterness to keep you seeing the convenience of it, from embracing it too greedily and intemperately. To lodge you in that moderate state that I ask of you, of neither fleeing life nor fleeing back from death, I have tempered both of them between sweetness and bitterness.

Montaigne embraced the Stoicism of the Greeks and Romans as the reconciling philosophy of a chaotic age. The Greeks had lost faith in democracy with the Peloponnesian War and the Hellenism of empire, just as the Romans had witnessed the disappearance of their republic. Only dramatists and philosophers could resolve the contradictions of worldly affairs and tragedy, which includes death. The ancient eras of chaos were reproduced in the France of Montaigne’s era, bloody civil wars of religion, with, again, only dramatists and philosophers — but not the clergy — to reconcile the contradictions of religion and the world.

Catholic writer Richard John Neuhaus does not take this context into account when he avers (in his As I Lay Dying, p. 127) that

Montaigne wrote a famous essay, “To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die.” I do not believe that. I believe that one learns to die not by philosophizing, but by dying.

But did Neuhaus read the essay? Or did he read the rest of Montaigne? For Montaigne did indeed learn a great deal — from the deaths of his father, his brother, his best friend, five of his six children — but especially from his own near-death, which he describes in the essay “Practice” written only a year or two after the previously mentioned essay.

Montaigne’s near-death experience resulted from a fall from his horse. He lost consciousness and his retainers hauled him back to his chateau, where he wavered from half-lucid awareness to unconsciousness, on the brink of dying. Eventually he recovered, concluding that death was no terror, did not even require philosophical inquiry, but only required one to cede to nature, which has arranged a simple and unremarkable passing.

Of course, the cumulative lessons of life, plus Montaigne’s own personality, brought him to a mature state of mind that nevertheless did not contradict his original philosophical observations, only broadened them to a more secularizing sensibility suited to fideism, not just fatalism. Understandably, Neuhaus demurs here, but the wonders of modern technology that saved him from cancer should not override a philosophical or natural point of view about death, inevitable even for the initially saved. Montaigne is both philosophical about death and did indeed learn to die by dying. He embraced contradiction, and the life of contradiction that necessarily seeks tranquility in a chaotic world.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca displays Roman ignorance when he blithely reports (Epistle 108) that he is acetic because he abstains from mushrooms and oysters — not wine, however, because it is easier to consume it moderately than to abstain altogether. A similar misconception about ascetic practice can be found in the historical Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays, a practice deftly abused by certain medieval monks who devised exemptions for travelers arriving on their grounds on Friday, and took walks to qualify themselves as travelers exempted from the ban on meat consumption.

Perhaps these practices were mere moral shortcomings. Or perhaps these failed practices are distinctly Western failures, as Heidegger suggests in a larger context in “The Origins of the Work of Art.” They represent the Western failure to comprehend the original motivating experience behind practices. The failed practices (Heidegger begins by suggesting words and concepts) only bring a version of translation, an inorganic appropriation, to an uncomprehending culture.

This translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek words. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.

Thus, asceticism in the Christian Greek world — based on not only the language but the authentic experience of Syriac and Egyptian practices — is not a translation in the degree that Latin Roman practice, distant in time but also in spirit — not to say culture and language — inevitably remained. Western asceticism begins not in practice but in thought, in thoughtful reconstruction of what the desert experience was, now filtered through the Roman mentality of codes, hierarchies, and rituals.

Perhaps embedded in this issue, too, is what Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman refers to when he describes his personal search for authenticity in world religious tradition. Sanskrit and Tibetan alphabets are comprised of polysyllables, essentially words, but Western alphabets are comprised of contrived symbols that not only mean nothing but cannot be sounded without conjoining with other letters. What is the sound of “b” without adding “a” or “e”, for example? Hence reason and logic are applied to contrived symbols rather than to lived experience expressed. The Western form of translation, here, too, is “without a corresponding, equally authentic experience,” to return to Heidegger’s observation.

Without this lived experience, asceticism remains a set of contrived rules, an artificiality. No wonder the West must endlessly dabble in imported pieces of religion and spiritual practices that must be packaged for meaning because the pieces are not lived experience.

This phenomenon overtakes yoga, tai-chi chuan, meditation, prayer, belief, philosophizing, asceticism — any non-Western experience, any historical phenomenon that only individual practice at the heart of meaning, prior to culture and translation, can hope to address. As Heidegger says elsewhere, the East has “no thought” but the West, steeped in reason and logic, can only use thought to try to go beyond thought. And this can only be accomplished by the solitary individual.

Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross (1926-2004) defined five mental or behavioral stages of dying in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. The stages are:

1. Denial and isolation
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

The stages were later extrapolated to grief in general. Opponents argued that the stages are not necessarily ordered, depending on the subject, and not necessarily experienced at all in situations where social environment is healthy and individuals are resilient. But the objections come late compared to Kubler-Ross’ work in the fifties and sixties when death, dying, and grief were still experienced by most Americans (those are the subjects she interviewed) in a traditional fashion. Medical personnel was aloof and hospitals were themselves intended to be a last stage for dying patients. Kubler-Ross recounts her childhood in Switzerland and the forms of dying centered in family and village life, the absence of medical technology and hospitals, and the centrality of religious and cultural expression — none of which are constructive factors today, with the larger exception of the hospice movement that Kubler-Ross inspired.

Kubler-Ross notes that hope of recovery was consistently high, even to the end, not only in religious-minded patients but in firmly non-religious. Perhaps it was culture-based, personality-dependent, or simply a survival mechanism. Otherwise, psychology and personality may alone have formed the attitudes of those harboring degrees of anger and resentment. Kubler-Ross’ gentle methods of eliciting a consciousness of these feelings in her patients shows that, indeed, she was aware of variables in individual temperament and resilience.

In retrospect, depression is not as dominant a stage as one might guess. Deriving grief from depression, in turn, suggests a backward application of depression in dying. While real, depression and grief are nevertheless experienced very subjectively. Not surprisingly, they early were targets of the medical and pharmaceutical industries to which Kubler-Ross referred negatively and which preempt the dying process decisively today.

The dying process best culminates in voluntary and conscious decathexis, the withdrawal from people, objects, environments. One might apply the term philosophically in order to approximate the eremitical and sage traditions that have always suggested that life is a process of dying, and that withdrawal and simplicity best nourish this course.

Later in life, Kubler-Ross took a serious interest in near-death studies, tangential but somewhat more speculative, to be sure, versus the psychology of dying. In meditative traditions, the phenomenology of near-death experience is parallel to the pursuit of esoteric powers, to be looked upon with suspicion as a distraction from the true goal of living, and dying.

Less noticed but effective in On Death and Dying is how Kubler-Ross links poetic lines from Rabindranath Tagore to the various attitudes and mindsets typical in the emotional life and in the dying process. This poetic context enriches the somewhat clinical observations in the book, which are, after all, largely transcripts of dying people’s feelings. By developing this poetic and philosophical sense of life and nature, death and dying, the question of resilience and environment can give way to a sensibility that is whole and complete, as should be the dying process itself.

1. Denial and isolation.
   “Man barricades against himself.” (Stray Birds, 79)
2. Anger.
   “We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.” (Stray Birds, 75)
3. Bargaining.
   “The woodcutter’s axe begged for its handle from the tree. The tree gave it.” (Stray Birds, 71)
4. Depression.
   “The world rushes on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness.” (Stray Birds, 44)
5. Acceptance.
   “I have got my leave, Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all and take my departure.
   Here I give back the keys of my door — and I give up all claims to my house, I only ask for last kind words from you.
   We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.” (Gitanjali, 93)

The “pro-introvert” advice of writings like Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking risks manufacturing a class of aberrant individuals with special needs. Cain herself compares introverts to women in a patriarchal world, calling introverts “second-class citizens.” But the intent to help introverts succeed in an insane world is inevitably paralleled by advice to authorities, managers, and bosses on how to best tap the skills and insights of introverts — for the former’s use.

But the mature introvert doesn’t want to succeed in an insane world, and powerful people only want to employ, direct, and socialize with others useful to themselves.

Introversion is a personality characteristic that exists across all cultural and social groups, and largely created by heredity, family, psychological, and social environment in children (especially to age 5 years). Introversion is not pursued consciously as a style but within the persona as integral to the psyche. Other factors in their early lives include treatment by parents, haphazard evolution of self-esteem, slower emergence of social skills, and the development of solitary self-sufficiency in routine pursuits of play and interest in environment.

Introverts understand instinctively the role of these factors in their upbringing and how it limits them in social contexts. But while many introverts may find frustrating their inability to operate smoothly in social contexts, they quickly learn from discomfort that they can survive with a minimum or no such settings. They discover that they can be reconciled to their personality, and, indeed, find strong and fruitful resources to sustain themselves.

Non-introverts sympathetic with the marginalization of introverts in corporate or institutional settings need not fret that introverts are slighted, even punished. Knowing that they cannot coach introverts into behaving like extroverts or even balanced personalities, much well-intentioned advice instead ends up counseling corporate and institutional managers on how to elicit participation from introverts. Much of the practical advice is fair and do-able, and for managers and authorities to realize techniques for eliciting introvert input on group projects and “teamwork” is not unreasonable given the boss’s job. But an important insight is being overlooked in these relationships.

Introverts are frequently excellent critics of what goes on around them. They do not usually voice their views — not only because they are socially uneasy but often because they are not going to accede to group thinking, to organizational goals and objectives to which they ultimately may not subscribe.

Introverts develop their self-image from their own insights, imaginations, and vision — not from their work-for-money efforts or social circles of insiders, intimates, or buddies. In the corporate and work world, introvert know that the efforts are put on for vague social conventions, while workplace maneuvering is often just for private gain. Introverts simply don’t identify with these social methods or private gains. Simply put, smart introverts already know (or are on the way to knowing) themselves and their vision of how things should be, at least for themselves, whether in creative, natural, psychological, or spiritual senses. In nearly every way, these senses or intimations of how things should be in the world (but are not) differ from what a collective social group of any sort can attain, or, further, is even aware.

The appearance of distraction, alienation, lack of cooperation, or just an apparent “attitude” attributed to the introvert when in a social context is not directed against anyone or anything. It is just that introverts are actively tending their gardens while others either think they are ready to harvest or haven’t even planted a seed. Introverts have a low tolerance for small talk.

Pro-introvert advice that cheer-leads the hapless introvert is self-defeating. What can be more frustrating to the introvert in the world than the intransigence of authorities running institutions and organizations is realizing that his or her fate is in the realm of their worse skill, their least interest, namely, of pretending to be other than what one is.

The Metta Sutta or Metta prayer, petition, recitation or wish-granting aspiration, is a traditional Buddhist prayer originating in Theravada practice as the Karaniya Metta Sutta but popular in Mahayana practice as well in its association with the bodhisattva. More elaborate versions exist but here is a short, specific version:

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.
May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.
May all beings be free.

The prayer has an external philosophical meaning, an epistemological premise about the nature of things. Our wish or desire is a sentiment or aspiration (“may this, may that …” ), but with an understanding that no one can change intrinsic reality. We may throw up our hands at wishful thinking.

But internally the prayer transforms the reciter towards a motivation for enlightenment. All beings ought to be at peace in this universe. They ought to be happy. They ought to be safe. So while humans might claim this desirable state for themselves because we theoretically are capable of it, we now affirm the desirability on behalf of all creatures, something that not all religions incorporate in their aspirations.

May all beings be peaceful.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be safe.

And we affirm it for ourselves and all creatures not as a Kantian imperative from elsewhere — beings are not capable of it — but in the universal empathetic sense of responding to the question of why there is suffering. It ought not to be such, we say to ourselves on behalf of other creatures. And from that moment, we no longer think of ourselves but enter into communion with nature and all beings.

How is it possible to make a state of being for all beings that is peaceful, happy, and safe? Just as the bodhisattva vows to work indefinitely for this goal in an active way, the reciter of the Metta Sutta does so more modestly but positively nevertheless. It is done by changing personal actions, behaviors, and habits that promote this set of conditions in the self and indirectly promote these states for all beings. An ethical agenda emerges from an aspiration that now transforms self. How one lives, consumes, spends, eats, drinks, acts, speaks, lives — everything takes on an ethical dimension. What best promotes the well-being of plants, animals, people, even inanimate beings, promotes our own well-being.

Yet this progress of thought, which has the potential for progress towards enlightenment, is brought to one’s consciousness from outside of ourselves but emerges from deep thought about the nature of things. Thus it is not found outside the self ultimately, not coerced or compelled at this stage but grown by oneself, within oneself, often against society, social conventions and habits, and societal consciousness.

May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature.

Finally comes the essential part tying in with Buddhist metaphysics. The true nature of all beings is interdependence, prescribing a necessary empathy or consciousness, confirming the previous affirmations. But also true of the awakening to true nature is the reality of impermanence, of transience, which all beings seem to harbor. This reality gives even more urgency to the delicate interdependence and the first three aspirations. To realize impermanence, to awake to this truth, is to awaken to true nature, unalterably reality.

May all beings be free.

Paradoxically, then, the Buddhist (and Hindu) notion of rebirth, springing from a more primordial, less philosophical religious tradition, seems to contradict impermanence, transience. Like rebirth, or fear of rebirth, the awareness of impermanence is a profound source of suffering. The poignancy of transience, of “mono no aware,” ought to frustrate the goal of aspiration. So in either case, we want, and all creatures want, to be free — free from suffering, free from rebirth, even free from transience. And this is nirvana.

Every search for a philosophy of solitude runs into Nietzsche, especially the clever aphoristic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The ancient argument of whether or not an author’s writing is projected autobiography immediately arises. For in Zarathustra is a prime representative of the issue, and the mask of Nietzsche rises to confuse a clear appreciation of solitude. Zarathustra celebrates solitude with a reluctant reconciliation, while at the same time disparaging not only his potential disciples but even hermits, particularly the mad desert hermits (as Nietzsche assessed them).

Zarathustra’s failures as a worldly prophet of eremitism (or, in this case, a brand of egoism under the umbrella of solitude, of the anti-societal) are absolved by his conscience. He returns, failing in his speeches in the marketplace and the byways, to his warm and friendly cave:

O solitude! O my home, solitude! Too long have I lived wildly in wild places not to return home to you in tears. … How happily and tenderly your voice speaks to me. We do not question each other, we do not complain to each other, we often walk together though open doors. … To be forsaken is one thing, to be lonely another. … You will always among others seem wild and strange.

Here Nietzsche is speaking of himself — wild and strange. The psychoanalyst will see complex feelings and emotional imbalances in Nietzsche’s personal life as the source of panegyrics like the one quoted. Similarly, too, are his praises of the “courage of hermits and eagles” and his reference to “my hermit’s heart.” But personally, Zarathustra-Nietzsche was not really reconciled to his solitude, and the contradictions, clever or contrived as may be, confirm this.

Nietzsche held a special venom towards those who successfully embraced eremitism or discovered a workable formula from their solitude:

In solitude, whatever one has brought into it grows. … Therefore solitude is inadvisable for the many. Has there been anything filthier on earth so far than desert saints? Around them not only was the devil loose but also the swine.

Here is the intellectualization, the abstraction, of lived eremitism, but not the reconciliation to it. Like the Enlightenment-era historian Edward Gibbon, very much a solitary not from philosophy but from personality, Nietzsche reacts vituperatively towards successful solitaries. Does he deduce that beliefs include and absorb solitude, or is a solitude capable that is not subordinate to belief? In short, is Nietzsche’s objection (like Gibbon’s) only to Christian hermits? What about his own atheist or secular hermits as solitaries, the latter represented by himself as Zarathustra?

Nietzsche had by this time already rejected Wagner’s romantic solitary as a reconstruction of Romanticism rather than a transcendence. And he had already rejected Schopenhauer’s admiration for Buddhism — and by extension its long tradition of eremitism — because it was not life-affirming, in his words. So perhaps the hermit or solitary in Nietzsche anticipates the Camus-like outsider or stranger, in both cases affirming not mere atheism but epicureanism or sensualism, as in Dionysus. Camus’ early works celebrate sun and sea and senses in a pagan rather than Enlightenment way; Nietzsche’s Dionysus would fit that mode of expression, the solitary (or ego) whom nothing reconciles.

Indeed, the Nieztschean solitary would evolve into the Ubermensch or Overman, leaving behind even the juxtapositions of Dionysus not Diogenes, and certainly of Zarathustra not the bikkhu or eremite. Even a secularized hermit, dwelling in wilderness or obscurity, was not good enough for Nietzsche. A Thoreau would be dismissed for his mildness and Stoicism.

In the end, Nietzsche’s solitude is an interim step to egoism, a skin to be shed, a mask to be abandoned.