hermit's thatch

Composers of classical music have always tried to reflect moods, themes, narratives, and settings in their works, sometimes literally as in Respighi’s The Birds or Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. Genre works prefigure the mood, such as Romantic, but even in intellectual or abstract works, listeners inevitably interpret motives and emotional and psychological states, even when the composer may not have intended the specific interpretation. Bach’s mystifying Art of Fugue or Musical Offering are abstract but still reveal the creative mind entering a particular mode of expression that differs from his more transparent keyboard works or cantatas.

Can silence and solitude be presented as program music, or simply reflected in abstract work? Here it is not the quiet morning sunrise of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, or the occasional hushed calm of Debussy’s La Mer. Representations of silence are not the same as a theme that suggests silence. Satie broke down complexity of melody and rhythm while consciously trying to portray an environment of silence in the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, while still maintaining an image linking to “program” music. The music is not less complex or thoughtful for its simplicity. Mompou’s Impressions intimes or Musica Callada (Silent Music) continued this style, which is simple, wistful, and reflective, but not dark, ambiguous, or concealed. No single composer (including Satie) has worked exclusively in this classical genre (the genre proposed here!); some works of some composers before and after have been close to this aesthetic: Fauré, Koechlin, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Milhaud, even the early Cage. And while modern chorale and other composers exemplify a transcendent feeling in their work (Rutter, Tavener, Vasks, Part, Lauridsen, Hovhaness), the sectarian sources they tap may limit their audience.

The transition from classical has been via New Age music genres creating atmospheres or space music. This avenue has long been original and fruitful (Liquid Mind, Jon Serrie, Steve Roach, Rudy Adrian, and many others) but their relegation by industry to a genre of “relaxation” unjustly traps these composers and their work into mental background music. Just as classical music was not originally dependent on publisher profits, the need to break through directly to listeners has arrived with technology and new models of listening.

An interesting contemporary phenomenon, therefore, is the emergence of computerized or digital music, available to composers and listeners without the strictures of profit and marketing, approximating the genre of silence or “silent” music. For example, The Free Floating Music website (http://www.freefloatingmusic.com) identifies its purpose as promoting this genre, and does so with completely free downloads.

Free Floating Music exists to release and promote serene, peaceful ambient music –- music that grows out of and flows through the silence around it, sculpting spaces for reflection, repose and rejuvenation.

Some of the site’s works are tense or dark, or may feature (even once) a twang or crescendo or unwelcome surprise. But the idea of identifying music that approximates silence is an important insight into a subject that inevitably has an aesthetic component and, ironically, and aural one. The persistence of silent music is significant, a mirror to an ignored reality, a palliative to a frantic world.

Whether dwelling in forest, mountain, desert — or crowded urban center — the hermit is the most peaceable of people. Sometimes irascible, pedantic, sarcastic, reclusive, cynical, perhaps on occasion more characteristic of the recluse — the ideal hermit shuns the overreactions against sufferings and above all is at peace with self and the world, for this is intrinsic to eremitism and necessary to successful solitude.

The peaceful person is vilified by society because society is perpetual conflict, in a state of turmoil and struggle, adversarial and warlike. The face of society is at most seen to foster competition, entrepreneurial wiles, an optimism invested in the system, but its means and ends are incompatible with the creation of a peaceable person and a peaceful society. The hermit retires from this realm in order to seek peace, with self, others, nature, God, and the universe. But society summons him, breaking his silence and intruding into his solitude.

Zarathustra meets the “involuntary beggar” in a distant field — the beggar being another manifestation of the hermit in Nietzsche’s tale — and the beggar gently mocks the sentiment of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, saying, “Blessed are the kine” — that is, the cows, for they and not men are the true peaceful ones, the true peacemakers.

And it is true that discerners of the world often get along better with animals. Animals are always peaceable, especially the plant-eaters, who have not developed or exacerbated the instinct for aggression with which humans are burdened. Animals reach their limit, but collapse into vile or miserable beasts when humans control them. Humans, rather than transcending their limitations instead accentuate, refine, and employ violence in their relations, be they personal or international. In contrast, tales of hermits dwelling with forest deer or bear or lion all manifest the image of the hermit as paragon of humans at peace with themselves and the world.

If we are to seek and find peace, we must critically examine and reject the world. Some will enjoy the process of examination, the research and reflection, the analysis and intellectual excursion. This is recommended to all, regardless of educational background, for knowledge and information are useful self-persuasion. But some will reject the world from a spiritual instinct that does not look back to accommodate sentiment or kinship. This latter person’s rejection of the world need not be in anger or disgust, not be flamboyant defiance or cynical surliness. One need not burn bridges or make enemies or renounce loved ones and friends and acquaintances altogether. Each hermit will discover the necessary degrees of solitude. Errors along the way will not be more numerous than the errors of anyone else in the world on their personal quests. Mistakes need not detain anyone. The process for the hermit will be positive, however, in the discovery of self, personality, strengths, skills, and disposition, for there is no ambition to outdo the world, rather survive it.

If the examination of society is thorough and the progress towards the goal steadfast, the world will simply drop away, slowly or quickly, when we realize that we don’t need this or that or the other thing. We may realize that the apparatus of society, the presumed defense of social values, the structures that govern the lives and aspirations and imaginations of so many masses of people, are hollow, empty, mere distortions with false premises, interpretations turned bad. The social values of valor, bravery, service, and heroism are exercises in militarism, lust, violence, acquisitiveness, consumption, and concentration of power. Or, having seen one act of injustice, the spiritual-minded may right there abandon this vale of tears.

The destruction of life and the planet in the quest for contentment, self-assertion projected large, is vanity at best, madness at worse. Where is peace and a peaceable existence to be found when daily one witnesses the overthrowing of all that is derived from divinity or reason itself? It is not a matter of aligning oneself with the presumed victors, the loud and noisy claiming all prescience, in order to feel free. That is the heart of sham, and no recruit to such a school or army survives with integrity but loses the moment’s insight to pursue the eremitic path.

Sometimes the hermit will wonder if she is mad, that how in blindness has no one yet noticed anything or concluded anything about the world. This is an observation that becomes the very heart of conviction and makes a hermit. The solitude and space that distances the world from the reality perceived palpably by the hermit is too great.There is only that self, that fragile self that Rousseau lamented is so easily and wantonly crushed by society in its onslaught over the individual. And that self, though latent in each person, is conscious only for that one who contains or expresses or experiences it. Only by embracing a thorough-going peace, contrasted from every department of the world, will the aspiring hermit be convinced that the goal is within reach, that the enlightenment is true and attainable by silence and solitude.

“To hope” is to maintain an expectation, but often a vain, idle, naive one, something unlikely to come to past by sheer logic or probability. What is missing in the bare notion of hoping is the application of context. Can we expect anything beyond the obvious, the day-to-day reality that faces us? Are we avoiding rather than comprehending reality? To look to the long-term at a possible change in one’s life means to apply a plan, a method, a progression, with the expectation of results. But to stand aside and hope without changing attitude or behavior or practice is trivial and not serious.

In Buddhism hope is not wishfulness but the concrete expectation that a given method leads to a given result. The process is experiential and tested by practice, a kind of scientific method. The first premise is to understand the context of a given situation, enumerate and describe the relevant elements and factors, assess them, and begin research or experimentation. This was the Buddha’s method sitting beneath the tree. It is the method of someone who wants to learn about how to build a house or how to address a disease or how to put away a bad habit. Such a method does not build hope or false expectations. It busies itself with that which is necessary to accomplish the task. And if the results are not satisfactory, it is because of the wrong premises, or an incomplete understanding of the context, or simply one’s flagged efforts. It is not a failure of hope, nor a failure on the part of the individual. We can’t do everything we want to.

In the Western world, hope is a complement of belief: one believes then trusts, because the belief is so positive, so illuminating, so awe-inspiring, that to trust that it is the right target or trajectory in life must be good. In Christianity hope is a virtue. In the sense of complementing a belief, hope is not wishing but the expectation of positive outcome, expectation of the efficacy of pursuing a certain behavior or path. One follows the moral code, let us say, and the result is a good behavior. One did not hope that this would be the result, but rather it should have been by definition. To trust in this way, as with the method of the Buddha, is perhaps not the conventional understanding of hope, but it is sustainable.

Hope is trivialized daily in a modern materialist culture. “I hope I win the lottery” or “I hope I find happiness” are the typical sayings and mental constructions of hope, skipping the parameters of reality and begging the question of what the person is doing to attain the so-called goals. Such vanity is worse than wishing, which, after all, everyone knows carries no effort or self-discipline; such vanity relies on the culture rewarding conformity to its material standards.

In the end it is better not to hope, not to make vain expressions of desire for this or that outcome to life, even the most serious. Often attributed to Goethe is the saying that “Hope is better than despair,” but despair is not the opposite of hope. The opposite of hope is “not hope.” To not hope does not suggest despair or resignation or fatalism but rather stoicism, understanding, tranquility of mind, and an affirmation in the harmony of the universe.

To judge means to come to an affirmative conclusion, whether the process be a quick or a studied reflection. Judgment suggests thorough attention to nuances and thorough access to the relevancy involving a person or situation. But often it is not the case. whether studied or hasty, judgment implies certainty that is definitive. Neither seems optimal, especially if what is being judged is itself a passing phenomenon, an avoidance, or a prejudice made manifest. On that basis comes the advice of Jesus: “Do not judge.”

The factors for judging unerringly or simply without scruple, mercilessly, as it were, are seldom available in a totality. If the situation to be judged does not, ultimately, matter — not to oneself at any rate — judgment is a mere alternative to a lack of caution. We may want to judge what we take to be thoroughly embedded in an infrastructure of harm, but lots of people will make uninformed statements about what we observe without knowing much about the context and circumstances.

So judgement may be perpetually tentative, leaning towards a flattery of our prejudices, or, less nefariously, coaxing ourselves to a safe ambiguity or relativism, a lackadaisical avoidance of having to make up one’s mind. After all, our instinct is to fight or flee, that is, to judge and fight or judge and flee. Sometimes the effort to fight is literal and violent, sometimes it is just anger-provoked fulminations. To judge in a hasty, prejudicial obnoxious way is usually the reaction of crude and stupid people. Most people want to avoid provocation to anger. It doesn’t mean that their style is less stupid or erroneous.

But the rest of the saying of Jesus about not judging is “… lest you be judged.” This is the obverse of fight, the caution and foresight that must accompany all judgment, however accurate in one’s eyes. We expose ourselves to backlash, namely of the nuances of the situation that will undermine or invalidate the presumed power of our judgment. And this can happen with any abstract or theoretical issue, or event a real–life situation when one claims one thing and another person claims another, or when one argument seems sound but another has its logic, too. The pragmatism of not judging lest you be judged is essentially paraphrased as “Do not fight lest you meet your match, and then what.”

But there is no counterpart harm to fleeing, no saying like “Do not flee lest you ..” Lest you what? Be shamed for not fighting? Be called a moral coward by those on the sidelines of your dilemma? Or, worse, be labeled with as suffering from an antisocial disorder, as would DSM5.

Judgment is the provenance of those enmeshed in the world, bent upon making broad moral statements, even fulminating against nature, the world, society and the design of the universe — if not their neighbor or others not like themselves. Note that the motive here is not knowledge or experience or understanding but speaking, projecting one’s thoughts and emotions beyond the circumscribed world of that self. Indeed, if the judge lives within very narrow circumstances, others may suffer from these outbursts more than the world — one’s family, acquaintances, work colleagues, little circumscribed circles. The more power one has, the more impact the judgments will make, and the more noxious the results because of the “fight” element intrinsic to all expression. The advantage of the powerful, and what makes them uninhibited in their dispensing judgments, is that their judgments have a more noxious impact on larger and larger social circles, circles based on power that expands with every judgment.

The absence of judgment is the “flight” aspect of the duality of response. Perhaps the flight suggests fear or social avoidance. Perhaps, as many common people are wont to say, silence or lack of fighting engagement and repartee means fear. Such a view is so entangled with social relations and protocols that it represents a fear in itself. But to avoid society because of its inevitable habit of setting up social and psychological power over others, over ourselves, is not relativism or fear. Are we to praise the predator and admonish the prey? — for that is the relationship that society has constructed for all of its vital activities.

When we break out of the worldly paradigm, we become hermits, not in the sense of social avoidance but in the sense of leaving the world behind to its errors. We judge the world — that is inevitable. But we judge “back” as it were, we do respond but not with violence or anger, without cowardice but with courage, made or forced to respond to the world’s “fight” instinct. So the hermit flees, and that flight constitutes a judgment, but it avoids judging anyone or anything as well. The sage goes to the mountain or forest or desert no longer motivated by repugnance or exasperation. Truth is not in society or in the world but there in the silence and solitude.

The hypersensitivity towards the body today has its ironic counterparts in two divergent classic points of view: the derived hedonism of ancient Greek thought mistakenly identified as Epicureanism, and the extreme asceticism described in the biography of the Buddha which he attempted but came to reject.

Both extremes view the body as an irresistible physical blunt force to be exploited, either for pleasure or for the antithesis of pleasure. In both cases, the body is assigned an ineluctable essence contrary to any subtle or cooperative context in the breadth of being and function.

Society is always on the brink of either extreme as a model of power and temptation, but usually, given the average person, society slouches towards hedonism. The other extreme of asceticism is reserved in the popular mind as a temptation for the scrupulous, of which there are fewer, it seems, every day, unless their scruples are quietly turned into neuroses, in which case they intersect with the hypersensitive of the hedonist school. Again, most people avoid the extremes from wariness if not conviction or taboo.

In contrast, the body is better conceived as a conduit of living forces by other, subtler, traditions: the temple of the Holy Spirit by mature Christianity, or the channel of energies by yogic and Eastern schools of thought. In both cases the body is viewed as a natural living entity with a necessary ordering function that promotes optimal health functions for physical and mental well-being. Such a view can then better sustain other fields of human efforts: ethics, environment, and proper social relations, extrapolations not available to the narrow indulgent’s views of the body as bundles of evolutionary instincts to be either crushed or exploited.

The premises of the solitary with regard to a system of thought about the body thus becomes relevant. The average person of average beliefs and habits succumbs to cultural norms that do not promote health or healthy habits while at the same time curbing the moralistic aspects of this indulgence. Gluttony, sloth, or other vices are acceptable under different names and more circumspect indulgence. Such a person may object that they do not pursue extremes, that they are not ascetics or hedonists. This protestation will fit the spectrum. They are in the average, the mean, the norm, of indulgence versus abstinence. But in the case of food habits, any participation in the average fare of modern culture will itself be a form of indulgence, for modern culture promotes a point of view that is unnatural. The food technology industry masks the natural character of food with unnatural food, unnatural food growing, and contrived “food.” Bodily health and its attainment is therefore nearly impossible with the given fare of modern society.

From eating habits to views of health, medicine, and disease, credence to cultural habits impact economics, knowledge, environment, and the entirety of social and cultural premises about peace, harmony, and well-being.

The goal of the solitary in safeguarding the physical aspects of solitude is linked to maintenance of health and avoidance of society’s exploitation of the body through sources of disease and debilitation. Indeed, these sources only come from society’s technological contrivances and modifications. In this effort, most people will pursue an extreme, themselves being at an unwitting extreme of indulgence that has become so mundane that it is not recognized. True, the care of the body (and health) echoes the ascetic’s discipline of appetite, but this practice can be conducive to health without being labelled an extreme. The ancient hermits were often extreme — or stories about them went to extremes in order to make a point. But as with any perception, the wisdom of self-discipline is in the observation to be incorporated into one’s life and habits, for there is to be found a source of wisdom distinct from the act or motive of the past era.

Reincorporation of what is lost, the safeguarding of the temple, the opening of the energy flow, bring us into conformity and harmony with larger forces. Regulating the complex of bodily activities becomes a responsibility to those who want to understand and promote their well-being — the opposite of a passivity that accepts society’s definitions of food and food habits. This internal harmony becomes a ground for mind and spirit, a prerequisite condition for working towards greater well-being.

The solitary is best disposed to pursue these goals of well-being because of the predisposition to avoid social pressures in media, health, consumption, life-style, and conformity. Ultimately, good habits and self-discipline extend the solitary’s efforts to cultivate the ongoing state that daily vitalizes the sense of well-being that is intrinsic to solitude.

Aristotle is noted for his description of the ethical mean (in the Nichomachean Ethics) as balance or

mean between two vices, the one involving excess, the other deficiency. … It [the mean] is such because its character is to aim at what is intermediate in the passions and in actions (Bk. 2, 8-9).

Thus Aristotle extends reason, the abstract tool of philosophy and science, to the reasonable in ethics, based on the premise that all actions and behaviors tend toward happiness, and ultimately toward virtue. He warns against the pleasant and the pleasurable as criteria for ethics or virtue because reason cannot check passion: “We do not judge impartially.” What, then, of reason? To hit the mean is “hard in the extreme,” Aristotle owns, for in doing so we are being carried from one extreme to another, when our object should be to hit at the right moment, in the right circumstances, in the right context, and so forth. Ethics, in Aristotle, is reduced to a scale, based on situational criteria:

This formulation works in the abstract and with a “reasonable” person. But actions and behaviors can be largely based on psychological complexities and cultural boundaries, so that what is reasonable to one is not to another, and what is excess or deficiency to one is not so to another. Means can easily become reductions to a least common denominator, as the culture or individual may want. We are so much a product of our immediate culture and society that other measures of value will never occur to us or seem strangely excessive or deficient.

Scholasticism liked Aristotle’s ethical scale because medieval thinkers had already defined the overarching criteria for moral actions and behaviors, and the scale operated within it. The Enlightenment, too, embraced the primacy of reason because the dominant classes defined the overarching standards in politics, law, and society. From both, for example, comes the just war theory, wherein war is itself deemed reasonable and a matter of whether the means are excessive or insufficient.

In modern Western ethics, Aristotle’s scale absorbs everything: consumption, violence, art, health, economics, judicial interpretations, personal relations — is it too little, too much, or Goldilocks’s mean? The goal of the mean is a society that is functional, not whether it is ethical or whether the ethical premises are themselves to be questioned. This was the mischievous work of Nietzsche in pointing out that the whole structure of ethics in contemporary Western society is based on a premise of control and authority, not reason or reasonableness, on a criteria defined after all by the given culture and society, not by philosophers. But, as J. Krishnamurti put it: “Who wants to be well adjusted to a sick society?”

Alas the hermit, relegated by society to the extremes of behavior. Society may accommodate itself to the hermit being innocuous and eccentric, but also excessive in the search for solitude, and deficient in being disengaged from social activities and participation. The mean, it will be argued, is what society values, and as Aristotle argued, humans are “social animals.” Subordination to the instincts of the society will be a necessity for function, harmony, and order.

What a different conception of ethics from what Westerners are accustomed to as a priori are ideas such as Lao-tzu’s who says that mining injures the earth, or the Hindu-Buddhist and later view that eating animals is violence against sentient beings, or the idea that war is wrong and not a reluctant necessity or an offense of excess. In these examples, ethics is not based on “reasonableness” from the subjective and passionate human view but on a deep ethics universalizing the best understanding of human evolution and ethical reflection.

Of course, an entire culture that would embrace such ideas would have redefined ethics to go beyond deficiency and excess, which would be relegated to the wavering and compromising instincts and the cerebral flashes that have gotten society to its present level of moribund complexity, unable to create and pursue an ethics not dependent on a given society or mood. Ethics remains dominated by the oscillations between phlegmatic indifference and virulent aggression. The mean has become the “quiet desperation” to which Thoreau alluded.

Many scientists lament the apparent fulfillment of Fermi’s paradox, which states that as the universe rapidly expands, the likelihood of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life rapidly diminishes.

The point of discovery has passed, if, indeed, it ever occurred. Why should this perturb us? The 20th-century scientific community sought extraterrestrial life as the holy grail. Astronomer Carl Sagan established the SETI project, designing the odd information plates and accessories that would accompany the missions into outer space. Whether motivated by hubris (we humans are the definers of intelligence), delusion (they’re out there, I tell you!), bias (may technology be everywhere!), or revenge (there is no God, there is only the search), Sagan and many other scientists have lamented not finding anything.

The obverse is represented by the Catholic paleontologist and thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), writing after the tumult of World War II, virtually rhapsodizing about the new astronomy’s revelations as a key to the philosophical understanding of the life force in the universe. Teilhard linked modern and post-war science to a theory of progress, and to social notions of the inevitable planetization of consciousness. His optimism was unflagging. He saw evolution not as halting jerks and missteps of mutation but as a mystical directionality of Noosgenesis, concentrated no longer in the stars and galaxies but here on a unique planet, within evolution as its greatest project, culminating in the consciousness of human beings (of “Man,” as he would say collectively).

Teilhard had, at any rate, reconciled himself to notion of a universe of concentrated but non-living matter. Perhaps his religious faith did not invite him to go further into the issue of extraterrestrial life. But he did not need to.

Teilhard saw the convergence of consciousness and forces of concentration (the latter mainly social) as positive signs that the technologies being rapidly invented and deployed evidence human cerebralization as a forerunner to human solidarity. Evolution had stopped making physical and biological progress and shifted, with human beings, to psychosocial progress.

In his introduction to the English translation of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man, Julian Huxley describes Teilhard’s views on evolution as

an anti-entropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and high degrees of organization.

Despite the inimical uses of those very technologies, however, Teilhard saw technological advance as proof of humanity’s increasing ability to join in common goals which, he maintained, would eventually evolve into benign and positive expressions, what he called “complexifications.”

We may be reassured. The vast individual and social system by which we are enveloped does not threaten to crush us, neither does it seek to rob us of our soul. The energy emanating from it is free not only in the sense that it represents forces that can be used; it is moreover free because, in the Whole no less than in the least of its elements, it arises out of a state that grows ever more spiritualized. —The Formation of the Noosphere, 1947

Who today can make this boast for the benignity of technology? This is the old theory of progress refurbished for a post-War West, still in ascendancy as it was when the Enlightenment centered progress in reason and science and described humanity as increasing in Reason. Hegel, in turn gave Reason a “Spirit” as the crowning achievement of the Universe — an inversion of Teilhard’s later apex of the cone of the Noosphere. At this point, God need not be whispered about in his theology, being adequately reduced to that force of progress that empowers the philosophers and patrons of the modern state. Though Huxlley could not follow Teilhard’s Christocentric cosmology and its trappings.

Fortunately, perhaps, the universe does expand, and the hypothesized intelligent life quickly distances itself from eccentric humanity, especially from its ambitious apologists for modern thought. We are left to an unobserved fate, lamented by Sagan as leaving us “a little lonely.” The Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen has popularized the term Anthropocene to describe the geological era of today, marked by human destructiveness of a fragile little planet, a destructiveness perhaps unconsciously recognized as the probable direction of embraced progress by many scientists themselves — more consciously by famous Einstein and Oppehheimer, for example. Such was the very destructiveness Teilhard doggedly considered a product of human consciousness, evolving into something better.

How would Teilhard characterize the Anthropocene? Teilhard is one of those ironic figures in history (like Galileo). He was forbidden by his Church to teach or to publish, a Church embarrassed by his theology, but as much, no doubt, embarrassed by his dubious optimism.

Science and its social impact is analogous to religion and its social impact.

In a Scientific American report, test subjects (i.e., college students) were asked to morally judge a rape case, but were first given scientific material to read before the case was introduced. Follow-up comments of the students were uniformly condemnatory towards the rape. The researchers deduced that thinking about science is sufficient to promote morality. In fact, the article title is: “Just Thinking about Science Triggers Moral Behavior.”

How “scientific” is such a deduction? Even accounting for mere correlation, the researchers insist that there was an important relation between thinking about science and making moral judgments. Science is viewed as supra-moral or trans-moral by modern opinion when buzz words like “hypothesis” “observation” and “deduction” are used.

A greater moral challenge could easily have been introduced to overthrow the handy conclusion. Instead of a rape case — which the researchers obviously saw as irrefutably as a strong moral topic — what about financial corruption, destruction of aquifers, bombing of civilians, selling of disease-inducing foods?

A more tentative and plausible conclusion might be that public opinion habitually distinguishes scientists’ personal behavior from scientific work.

Don’t analogies exist everywhere? Does widespread scandal change people’s view of their own religious beliefs or those of a church or institution to which they adhere? Does war, aggression, and militarism affect the perception of the moral beliefs of war leaders? Does the personal behavior of musicians, composers, performers, movie actors, professional athletes, not affect how one perceives their art or industry?

In each case, the premise is that we separate the act from the actor, that there is no necessary affiliation between the two. Such is public opinion, and the advice of a pragmatic wisdom. But is it valid?

According to this line of reasoning, if a priest or guru pursues sexual passions, it does not mean that their professed beliefs about god, soul, morals, philosophy, etc. are intrinsically flawed and should have been robust enough to have preserved their integrity (but wasn’t for that one person at that one time). There are too many variables to belief and personality, it can be argued. They fell short of the beliefs, the high standards, the ideal behaviors that they should have professed. They are not emblematic or representative. They are not even necessarily “bad” though the act was “bad.” They are, to continue the argument, the product of their upbringing or mental state. In short, nothing intrinsic has transpired within these people, so that nothing intrinsic should affect our shared beliefs.

This is a difficult line for the solitary to accept. We are all products of our upbringing and mental states. We all struggle with the same social context. And our humility and charity understand the universal fragility of all individuals. The clue and the answer lies in society and our relation to society — society meaning the totality of environment, culture, mores, and civilizational premises.

Every belief system, every tradition, is flawed by degrees, and their adherents, even at the apex of the system, reveal something objectionable. Rather than begin with the social circumstances of a given scandal, the solitary recognizes that society as a whole cannot be a context or environment from which to expect dis-ambiguity, let alone purity. Therefore, the solitary starts with the self.

The solitary pores carefully over the content of the self’s mind and heart, extirpates that which is external and debilitating, or internal and debilitating. Solitaries and hermits understand the world’s temptations and interpret them intrinsically, in terms of “the world,” the totality of human context. Hence the radicality of those who fled for mountain-top, forest, or desert, having witnessed, perhaps more tangibly than others, the enormity of the gap between ideal and self, between professed belief and actual practice.

No principle or belief, however absolutely we may define it in our belief system, is absolute in its power to fully engage the self, to purify the self of all desire and intention and predisposition to shortfall. The hermit, the individual alone, must undertake this work. No reliance on beliefs, principles, or authority can suffice to bring about the consciousness that the solitary pursues.

Is not survival the most fundamental instinct of living beings? And if we imagine that all beings are animated by some being-ness, is not survival the fundamental instinct of the universe? Coming into being is not so fundamental as maintaining being. Having come into being summons the instinct to remain “be-ing.”

Yet the fundamental law of the universe is change, flux, degeneration and regeneration, coming-into-being and passing away. Western tradition militates against the finality of this latter principle, while many Eastern traditions do not exempt even the gods from death, much less the myriad living beings or non-animated ones. Death as finality haunts both traditions, and the modern sleight-of-hand that particles reassemble somewhere offers little comfort to assuage the traditions. Is a new tradition, a new version, tenable?

The particles of physics are as transient as the stars. But only human beings are conscious of this necessity, and in their most hopeful moments have built and projected and ritualized absolute stillness, unmoving, incorruptibility, and spaces where nothing changes.

If the instinct for survival is universal, so that even rocks and trees and stars and animals strive to retain it, to achieve a stasis or stability, then the most fundamental instinct is at tragic odds with the most fundamental principle, and the latter wins.

In human beings, the circumscribed efforts of construction and maintenance become pattern, aesthetics, and reflection — civilization, art, religion. Science is born of the acuteness of minutiae-watching, of excess vigilance as a personality, of the desire for categorization and absolute order. Technology is born of aggrandizement, of the morbid desire for control and manipulation. Both are spin-offs of decay and decline. The fundamental instinct of survival has imploded due to decadence and aggression. Such is the shared history of the universe, or at least the perceived human one.

The primordial and pristine instinct of survival manifests itself in many ways, like evolutionary waves, from biology to spirit:

• Reproduction, procreation, generation, nurturing, succession. From this sequence, allied emotions and desires emanate: discovery, desire, pleasure, sociability, accomplishment, possession, power, order, fame, the sense of immortality. The initial sequence produces an antithesis:
• Aggression (that is, violence premeditated), war, law, class, ideology, politics, economics, centralization, science, technology, propaganda, sanctions. From this sequence emerge dysfunctional psychological personalities among both elite and mass populations and individuals. Ultimately what results is the dissolution of individual autonomy and the collapse of shared or convivial infrastructure, in short, the winding down of Spengler’s morphology, to use one mythopaedic structure.

To this devolution must be added today the effects of science and technology in the feedback loop of planet destruction, Its countdown simply paraellels the countdown engendered by the social and political and technological forces already unleased. Now, the instinct for survival embedded in the living Earth, Gaia (another mythopaedic image) asserts itself.

Alternatively, a possible synthesis is ever potential, occasionally actualized, but only in individuals:

• self-discipline, philosophy, higher conscious eros, harnessing the instinct of survival for deeper activity and response: art, creativity, faith, plastic arts, permaculture, aesthetics, asceticism.

Of the possible synthesis, the fruits of individual efforts ought to but cannot affect civilization or society at large. These efforts are seen as anomalies, in effect shooting stars, microcosms of universal processes achieving an apex and then collapsing again into memory and oblivion. This is the legacy of the sage, the wise, of those who have harnessed the potential of the instinct for survival and made of it what the universe most wants. But to know this one must know the sages, and be ready to speculate about what the universe wants but is bound to do.

Caroline Myss is the maven of New Age Thought. Her presentations have always included personal development themes in that curious abstract way that takes no account of sociological, cultural, environmental, or genetic factors. Her themes rely on a model that identifies completely with modern technological Western culture.

In her book Archetypes, Myss takes a classically-weighted concept crafted by Carl Jung to refer to a trans-cultural pool of psychological structures and transforms them into distillations of the latest lifestyles and mindsets prevalent among her well-to-do readers, specifically women readers, and specifically women “professionals.” The female preference for emotional life is contrasted with the male preference for concreteness in her list of archetypes — although her Archetype.me website includes men, and the same archetypes are used.

Where Jung sought multiple sources to identify specific psychological manifestations, Myss promotes the multiplicities as emotional responses, generating multiple archetypes, even in the same person. We are no longer talking about Jungian archetypes but social roles and behaviors, with some of the psychology behind them. The problem, of course, is that social roles are affected by the time and place of the society, but even Myss admits that ten years ago she would probably had offered different archetypes. Such mutable “archetypes,” therefore, should better be called roles and behaviors, not archetypes.

Myss says that her archetypes are the “primary power issues that define women today,” with women being defined today as “professional.” Given the technological and political culture of the present, the dilemma here is to distinguish women’s roles (“archetypes” for Myss) from those of men who, in the modern world, have defined the marketplace and its social roles and behaviors. This process of refining the archetypical models of behavior of women only works when the target audience is the better-off, the well-to-do, the captains of industry and finance, and the women in that world who can be profiled as “professional.”

The list of ten archetypes:

• Advocate
• Artist/Creative
• Athlete
• Caregiver
• Fashionista
• Intellectual
• Queen/Executive
• Rebel
• Spiritual Seeker
• Visionary

A convenient checklist under each archetype summarizes challenges, lessons, myths, behavior patterns, inner shadow, and affirmations. Plus male counterparts that women professionals should be watching for. The jumble of occupational styles (Queen/Executive) to values expression (Advocate, Artists, Caregiver, Rebel) to personality (Fashionista, Intellectual, Spiritual Seeker) makes sorting the behavior types a necessary process of mixing and matching. Advice to one archetype contradicts advice to another, based not per situation but per values. Thus the Spiritual Seeker is told to “Be humble,” while the Fashionista is told to “Be ruthless.” The descriptions seem vaguely grounded in Daniel Goleman’s multiple intelligences, mixed with Myss’s preconceived notions of professions of women today. But not archetypes.

Myss provides plenty of self-help; the bookselling industry labels Archetypes rightly as “Self-help/General.” The book is not about psychology, not even pop psychology. Presumably readers will only read what they already think they are, what they already want to hear. After all, the subtitle of the book is “Who Am I?” so the answer must lie within the summaries. The website makes it a lot easier to take the quiz, and its free.