hermit's thatch

Blindness is both a condition and, in popular speech, a metaphor. The blind person cannot see, while the metaphor makes blindness both a virtue and a a stigma. Justice is blind, it will be said, and a just person does not weigh appearance or visual details when making a moral judgment. At the same time, to be blind can be a metaphor for stubborn ignorance, as in the saying that there is none so blind as one who cannot see, or does not want to see, or when someone rants at another about missing something obvious in a task or an argument: “How could you be so blind!” or “Are you blind?”

Clearly, common speech and metaphor has not yet sorted out the difference between physical condition and mental ones, as words like lame and dumb are still widely used for multiple meanings.

A classic literary presentation of blindness is in the Mary Shelley character of De Lacey in her novel Frankenstein. The plot revolves around the “monster” that scientist Dr. Frankenstein has created but now rues with a compelling desire to destroy it. The “monster” represents the outsider, the persecuted, the ugly and repulsive to all he encounters, with evil intent ascribed to his mere appearance though he is originally without “sin” or harmful desire. One night the monster enters the DeLacey house. The family is away except the blind DeLacey, who sits alone in the parlor.

The monster apologizes for the intrusion and tells him:

I am an unfortunate and deserted creature. I look around and I have no relation or friend upon earth. … I am an outcast in the world forever.

After more conversation on the subject wherein the monster seeks the kindness of none other than De Lacey’s family, described obliquely, the old gentleman replies:

I am blind and cannot judge of your countenance, but thesre is something in your words which persuades me that you are sincere.

Reassured, the monster thanks DeLacey for his kindness and aid, hoping thereby that “I shall not be driven from the society and sympathy of your fellow creatures.” DeLacey responds that even if this visitor was hunted as a criminal, it would not abrogate his humanity and virtue as a person.

Two ironies emerge: first, that DeLacey himself is a political exile and deemed a criminal because of his revolutionary politics, and, second, that the monster is unreflectively placed by DeLacey in the company of human beings identified with entitlement to beneficence, when the source of his origin as a creature is at issue: his humanity or lack of it, his acursed existence and animosity toward his creator who made him so flawed. Thus the monster’s plight and DeLacey’s blindness are aspects of the same flawed humanity.

Shelley’s views are romantic but morally charged. English poet John Milton, writing centuries earlier, went blind in adulthood but bargained in his own manner for his Lord’s grace against the unassuming fictional DeLacey, even less Frankenstein’s monster. Milton in his poem “On His Blindness” credits his patience with affliction a source of redeeming virtue for him. At the same time one senses in Milton’s verbal demurring from resentment the suggestion that God’s blindness itself is the true moral issue at hand.

A curious case of a blind hermit depicted in art is a painting by the British painter Thomas Stothard (1755-1834). The painting, held by the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts (U.S.), is conventionally labeled “Blind Hermit” by most sources. But in fact the painting is “Belisarius the Blind,” depicting an event in Byzantine history — dubious in having been written five centuries after the supposed event. Belisarius was the outstanding conqueror-general of Emperor Justinian, whose suspicions were aroused by his general’s successes and presumed ambitions. Upon returnng to the capital, Justinian had Belisarius blinded and cast out as a beggar. Undoubtedly, however, the portrait easily evokes a hermit, and his young helper an angelic presence.

Stothard’s painting, too, may evoke Tobit of the Old Testament and his son, though his son was older by the time of his father’s blindness, and the old man Tobit is not a hermit but a doublet of Job, even to his complaints against God, who has done this to him.

The American engraver William French (1815-1898) also created a blind hermit with young guide, sentimental and stylized, closly parallel to Stothard, enough to sugget imitation. His blind hermit has no classical robe, however, and is less ambigously a medieval monk, complete with beads. French’s work is also held by the Perkins School.

The suggestive incapacity of blindness coupled with the near-outcast status of the hermit makes an image of pathos, especially when assigned a story of past success, as in the depiction by Stothard. In the imaginative novel The Bee-loud Glade of American writer Steve Himmer, the protagonist drops out of the rat race to become a decorative hermit but grows nearly blind as he ages, now become a true hermit living in concealment and solitude. Incapacity pursues everyone who ages, but for the hermit the challenge is greater. This writer knows because double vision and glaucoma slow his pace, especially for reading, writing, and research.

The popular conception of blindness as a physical reversal of sight but also a possible and mysterious alternative yielding true insight remains a literary and artistic convention. Add the historical perception of the hermit as self-sufficient in both simplicity and wisdom and the archtype is relatively complete.

The structures and morals presented by traditional religions, especially the three scriptural religions of the West, have a clear historical and cultural basis. By the time the historical religions address many of the essential issues, it is too late — human beings have developed particular instincts, behaviors and values that are already set long before the religions conceive of values and abstractions that can affect social existence. Neurology and anthropology now contribute research that only further demonstrates what has always been anticipated by sage individuals who did not bind themselves to the tribal and cultural circumscriptions of the historical religions of their day. That they could borrow from them, reform them, or transform them, even as firm and long-lived institutions, was at most an adventitious sally.

The human brain developed primordial behaviors that predate formal history. The first such stage is amply demonstrated by the paleolithic, characterized by sheer survival interests: food, shelter, hunting, territoriality, and reproduction, a set of behaviors dominated by the amygdala, a stage appropriately called reptilian in its instictiveness. The era of the instinctive brain saw the expansion of human beings over Africa and Europe and beyond. The era brought the whosesale extermination by humans of entire species such as the wooly mammath and saber-toothed tiger, destroyed by rapacious hunting. This behavior also created the rudiments of society, for as humans sought larger and more numerous prey they came to realize that cooperation in numbers led to more effective hunting. Thus was nurtured familiar social behaviors, hierarchies, power displays, and tribalisms.

The second stage of brain development is the limbic or emotional, which provided sensations, responses, and feelings to human experience. The more primitive responses were within the realm of fear as human gauged situations and became capable of responding to them, chiefly as fight or flight. Thus the experience of the paleolithic (fight not flight) is transmuted into the reflectiveness of, for example, what is witnessed in the Lausaux cave paintings, where we see humans clearly engaged in the activities of the Paleolithic but now becoming aware of the patterns in animal life, movement, and migration, and suggesting that these patterns evoke emotions. From the limbic stage, memory rituals evolve to capture the emotional experiences, engendered by a desire to give greater meaning to the animal hunt, to put the animal and the human into a larger context evoking feeling. Second stage sensibility tempers the later Indo-European and Semitic animal sacrifice rituals into religious expressions.

The third stage of brain development is the most decisive: the neo-mammalian complex, which in turn developed four distinct areas (and functions), these functions further enabling existing evolutionary potentials to finally find a conscious channel of control and use. The five senses, for example, could now be consciously applied and used, as opposed to being merely passive and receptive functions without self-consciousness, without even the tentative self-consciousness of the second stage hunter. The developed neocortex included four brain lobes and their attendant functions: the occipital (visual), the perietal (spatial), the temporal (sound, speech, voice), and the frontal (integrative and coordinating the other three). This development provided human beings the ability to assign context and continuity to all human experience and memory.

With the fourth stage we are led to the holistic being identified today as a person.

The fourth stage of brain development was the sophistication of the prefrontal cortex, which allows for the immediate processing and assigning of meaning for retention of all the experiences initially processed in the third stage. Development of the prefrontal cortex provides the essential regulation of fear as an emotion, to the entire “fight or flight” syndrome. The prefrontal cortex does this by providing context to events, by providing emotional feedback and reason (or at least sensibility) to address events and context, and, importantly, to compare experiences, judge them, and make plans for addressing them in the here and now and into the future. In terms of brain development, stages one and two form the clearest distinctions of behavior, while three and four emerge logically and are available for social application.

Historically, brain development provides tools and functions, and only hints at socially functional and ultimately culturally and morally viable behaviors. Use of the brain to optimially develop beahviors and ethics is an elusive pursuit, and has never been of predominance in the institutional and cultural history of the major civilizations, where stage one behaviors around power, hierarchy, and control, enhanced by late stages for incorporating reason and persuasion, make the stage one behavior more formidable and lethal. War, aggression, and violence have been the hallmark of society.

The brain’s development has ben frustrated at every cultural turn by the rejection of late stage behavior in favor of stage one behavior orcestrated by elites utilizing late stage behavior manipulatively. One need only glance at the scriptures of ancients, from Hebrews to Greeks to Etruscans to Persians, from Indo-Europeans to later Semites, to witness the hunter stage extended into civilization and urban life and institutions, often with the clever use of late stage behavior. (And the same can be said of modern society.)

Thhe input of religious thought — itself a product of the same given cultures — is therefore always too late chronologically in mitigating this process of social and political behvior. Either the religion ends up collaborating with stage one behavior or underestimating the entrenchment of society in stage one behavior. One looks to more authentic later stage behaviors prompting the human ability to specialize, plan, appreciate, create, and aspire only to find these behaviors compromised and corrupted by the institutions that suppressed these behaviors and thoughts in favor of the powerful.

Inevitably the exceptional sages and the eremitic personalities of antiquity and not the mainstream religious or philosophical thinkers were to provide intellectual breakthroughs and social models alternative to their contemporaries and their cultural circumstances — in India, China, Japan, and tangentially in East Asia and Europe.

Salvation is an integral concept in the mature world religions East and West. Christianity and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, contain salvific mechanisms, although their methods differ. In early religions, salvation is ambiguous because afterlife is ambiguous. The ancient Greek Hades presented a murky underworld, and the Jewish sheol was a vague state of unclear lingering below, which evolved into hell in Christian thought. Vedic Hinduism, too, did not evolved a notion of salvation because it had no clear views on afterlife but, like Judaism, concentrated on correct ritualism. Corrupted overworlds like the Norse Valhalla, or the literalist pleasures of Christian heaven or Muslim Jannah full of gold, foods, and triumphalism are of little persuasion to the wise.

Salvation itself is a tenuous element even in religious vocabularies because there can be no definite description, only desire. In Western thought, salvation is the product of divine intercession because of this tenuous status of will and grace, wherein salvation cannot be achieved by personal effort. The figure of Jesus as divine intercessor parallels the prophetic intervention of Muhammed. In the East, salvation is mediated in part by the Buddha, but the entire salvific mechanism in Mahayana Buddhism especially is made more tenuous by the absense of true divinity or theism as regulatory intercession.

What is the need for salvation if not afterlife and perpetuation of integral being? — a proposal about which mechanism so little can be said even by religionists? In the East, the mechanism of karma absorbs the moral justification for perpetuation, but cannot retain individual identity because there is no self in Eastern thinking. Instead, the karmic element transmigrates to another person, and while this mechanism preserves some of the moral persuasion of the religion, it is comparable to the shade of the Greek underworld in its viability.

Salvation in the East consists of retaining moral elements to pass on to strangers, which is for the individual an ineluctable process with no particular individual reward. The Mahayana tradition of Buddhism in particular presents the work of bodhicitta as exemplary, the work of saving all sentient beings even if the effort means postponing all reincarnation or nirvana, the latter being dissolution of the cycle of life and death. The Boddhisatva, therefore, like the Muslim martyr or Christian saint, dedicates a life to salvific work, perpetuating religious viability through the lives of witnesses and the people they influence — a very social undertaking. Hinduism, more traditional in its karmic cycle, has no such role except, perhaps, within the person’s defined caste. Karma cycles serendipitously, like the later Christian election based on good works but not on priesthoods or castes or the prayers of others, where grace falls like rain where it may.

Where the point of view of observers today lies in reviewing these cultural interpretations of salvation is squarely within personality and culture. Someone raised within a religion and not given to social change will likely remain within their traditional beliefs, nor can it be argued that intelligent religious believers are few. But anyone with a critical faculty and a modicum of curiosity will review these world responses to life, death, and afterlife, and consider where the notion of salvation falls. Does a person need to be saved? Late post-Christian sects such as Unitarians proposed universal salvation, which begs the question of any efficacy to having a moral criteria and designing the nature of afterlife. The premisses of afterlife govern many people’s moral compass, and salvation is for them a necessity of authority and behavior.

The hermit of every world tradition, including religious hermits, do not view the issue of salvation in terms of a personal goal or mandate. The hermit recluses from the world specifically to avoid the mundane debates about what it takes to be better or worse and to merit salvation or not. Similarly the hermit avoids the social functions of salvation, and the presumed necessities of pursuing social activities that justify salvation.

The hermit, including the religious hermit, has insight into the human condition and the folly of deriving a philosophy of life based on the mass sentiment for ameliorating sin and evil, the inevitability of fall and grace, the vicious cycle of act and regret. The hermit has dropped all of this and does not act, does not impose, interpret, seize, desire, or persuade. The hermit’s solidarity is with the permanence of whatever cycle he or she has identified and detailed, however consciously, and it is in the eremitic life that the hermit finds salvation.

Love is romantic, emotional, even spiritual, according to the various points of perception: literary, psychological, or religious. The dictionary is mundane: love is compulsion, desire, even obsession. This is the understanding of most people, who see love originating with physical and aesthetic attraction, then personality, then hormones. After this phase, love continues in a subtle, quiet allegiance, loyalty, or identification based on longevity, companionship, and shared values. The origins of love is as a survival instinct, and when young people begin to express this interest, one can be sure that the expression is instinctual, filtered by cultural factors. The duration of love is a testimony of successful complementarity and affection.

These are not new facts. The acceleration of the expression of love through vertical stages of presumed sophistication, from physical to aesthetic, to psychological, to abstract cultural to relgious or spiritual, culminating in love of God or the grand analogy of “God is love,” at least in those with a particular religious interest is perhaps new to the dictionary. The mundane train of thought suspends the consideration of a durability, a horizontal character, to love, inevitably biased towards the emotional and romantic, to the vertical. So in the mundane view, love is identified with the vertical, not the horizontal.

But how does the lofty acceleration from instinct to absolute, entirely vertical, change the mundane definition of compulsion and desire? Or, rather, is it not an extension of such thinking?

Many attempts to spiritualize the trajectory of love as purified of the carnal can be found among spiritual writers. Rumi distinguishes the “temple of love” (the physical) from love itself (the spiritual), and Teresa of Avila portrayed her ecstasies by analogy with physical raptures but sanitized spiritual experiences, though in contrast to some mystics like Eckhart, her pursuits appear to be invoked and intentional. But even for the intentional spiritual interest, love cannot escape the instinctual element; love must be other than a vertical ascent but cannot escape this experience because it seeks to reproduce the analogous path or way, which is physical and psychological. Love with an object, however absolute the object, cannot but fit the mundane definition.

In Eastern thought, love is a difusion of identification with the universe, with all sentient beings. Not that lay people and householders are assuming this in their personal relations. Rather, spiritual practitioners do not imitate or transcend the instinctual vertical instead bypassing it for a completely different application of the affective faculty. Because God is within all reality, the expression of love cannot be analogous to the instinctual expression. This love does not take on a function of adding pleasure in order to promote survival. In Eastern thought, love is compassion for its innumerable objects, not desire for one object, even if that object is God. For Eastern thought, all reality is in the same existential plane, and worthy of compassion, worthy of love. The Western aberrations of love — lust, greed, ego, obsession — are made not impossible by Eastern though but irrelevant to the process of love or compassion. They are on a different plane. The plane of compassion is almost horizontal, and not, like Western love, constantly piqued to a vertical height that overshadows any other emotion, sentiment, or desire.

The hermit can see this distinction and retains it in daily life. The peaks of vertical ascent are to be avoided; enlightenment is naturally horizontal, it is not going up or down but within, while retaining a grand vision of identifying with nature. The excesses of Western love are in the same bucket as temptations, and are not sanitized to justify a spiritual expression of desire, greed, or obsession. The hermit, whether Eastern or Western, is in the fortunate situation of being able to express love as compassion, serving all and serving none, by the faculty of understanding and empathy, lacking the tribulations of what is commonly called love.

Robert Bly’s discursive book Iron John (Addison-Wesley, 1990) intended to identify a new mental and social model and updated myth for the modern male psychology, which Bly found confused and incoherent because of the degradation of traditional myths, social and technological changes, and shifting cultural values. Bly’s approach is through mythology, literature, and anthropological speculation; his explorations make a useful search for the place of people (in this case men) in the modern social world.

Bly concentrates on the Wild Man myths that have existed since antiquity (from Gilgamesh to Esau, to Persians and Greeks to Native Americans) and through the medieval Western mind (such as Merlin and the Fisher King) and up to the classic fairy tales as in Grimm, to modern poetry evoking symbols of sea, forest, walled garden, and to the literature of coming of age. The “Iron John” of the title is a classic fairy tale wherein a Wild Man instructs a boy in that which must be done in order to come of age. The Wild Man is distinct from the Savage Man of anthropology and modern urban disdain, and from the famous medieval Green Man who lived in the wild. And because the true Wild Man has examined the wound that is life and consciousness, he “resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woodsman more than a savage,” says Bly.

In Bly, the Wild Man lives alone in the forest but emerges periodically to enliven village and social life with his moods, abandons, and freely expressed urges. In this respect, Bly’s Wild Man originates more in Pan and the satyrs than in Diogenes or the medieval forest hermits. But both the secular men of the village and the philosophers or religious men of the desert experienced the demons of sexual temptation, and learned how to address them. In the modern world, where the role of men as husbanders, farmers, craftsmen, and adventurers has been suppressed and channeled into urban, mechanized and institutionalized settings, men are robbed of nature, endure splitting families, and reduce their spirits to conventional channels of cultural expression culminating in violence, exploitation, pornography, and war — or its tamer media surrogates. (Bly concentrates on classical themes, however, not venturing into extrapolations like these.)

Bly does not pay much attention to the function of solitude, both in shaping the personality as a practice or in its expression as an avocation. Yet solitude, like the fabled walled garden, is a place of both respite and introversion. And because mythologically the garden is maintained by feminine deities such as Demeter but also seen as a fecund and fertile counterpart settings to the open lands of plains and valleyes, as nature circumscribed but crafted to complement the psychological needs of the individual, the garden is an appropriate symbol of solitude.

Bly translates a portion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem wherein the world can be seen as that which is not the garden of self:

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every moment holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with
my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.

“Meditation” is being popularized by media, but the technique is not meditation but “relaxation.” The distinction arose with the 1975 book The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson, a Harvard University cardiologist who had devised scientific criteria to account for stress and anxiety signs and presented a scientific method for overcoming them in average people. Today, the business, corporate, and institutional sectors of the modern economy are touting what they call “meditation” to its employees. Reducing stress and anxiety allows employees to work harder for less, ignore ethical complications, and simply cope. (One U.S. commenter on Amazon lauds the book’s techniques for their ability to reduce stress and anxiety when on military night patrols during his tour in a war zone in the Middle East.) The methodology is relaxation, decidedly not meditation.

Since nearly everyone in modern urban technological society suffers from stress, anxiety, and forms of depression due to wrong livelihood, environment, relationships, goals, values, and social problems, proposing and teaching relaxation can be lucrative. Medical approbation makes the relaxation industry even more likely to be successful financially and in terms of swaying public interest.

Here is a representative example of relaxation masquerading as meditation, taken from no less than the Mayo Clinic website (but this is just an example and not intended to specifically malign the entity; examples are everywhere). On one visit to the website, the video was accompanied by an ad for Abilify, a powerful anti-psychotic drug (the website disclaims the ad as advertising, not endorsement). The problematic title “Need to relax? Take a Break for Meditation” alerts the viewer/reader to a contradiction. In the first place, no one can meditate watching a video (perhaps they can relax). Staring at a candle flame is not a meditation technique, but an advanced yoga eye exercise. And the ongoing breathing patterns and self-affirmations, while popularized in some circles, is generally a great distraction to true meditation because it requires mental interruptions. The valediction saying “return to a peaceful day” exemplifies the institutionalized use of relaxation to get workers (or equivalent) back to their jobs and carry on as prescribed.

The conflation of relaxation and meditation, of a pragmatic psychological method and a spiritual practice undermines the goals of both methods, but relaxation remains the more problematic in not seeking the more fundamental roots of anxiety.

TRANSCRIPT:

Need a few minutes to relax?

Get comfortable in your chair. Loosen any tight, uncomfortable clothing. Let your arms rest loosely at your side. Allow yourself a few moments to relax.

If your thoughts wander, just let them while gently moving your attention back to the relaxation. If you become anxious or uncomfortable, stop the relaxation by clicking on the pause button.

To begin, focus your eyes on the candle flame. Notice its simplicity and its beauty.

Take time to notice your breathing, gradually slowing down the rate of inhaling and exhaling as you become more comfortable.

Now relax and enjoy the feeling.

Close your mouth and relax your shoulders, releasing any tension that’s built up.

Inhale slowly and deeply through your nose. Let the air you breathe in push your stomach out.

Hold your breath in as you slowly count to four.

Breathe out slowly through your mouth as you continue counting up to six.

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three and four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Breathe in (three, four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

Breathe out (three, four, five, six).

Continue breathing in (four, five, six).

Hold (two, three, four).

And out (three, four, five, six).

Remember, if stray thoughts enter your mind, gently return your attention to the relaxation.

Now, as you breathe out, silently and calmly repeat to yourself:

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is easy and calm.

My breathing is easy and calm.

It feels very pleasant.

If you’d like, you may close your eyes now and focus on the music, or continue to look at the flame.

Continue to repeat to yourself:

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

My breathing is smooth and rhythmic.

I am peaceful and calm.

I am peaceful and calm.

Continue to take deep, rhythmic breaths. Let the tension fade away each time you breathe out. Let the music soothe you.

If you’ve closed your eyes, gently open them and gaze at the candle flame.

Return to your day peaceful, more focused and relaxed.

Perhaps reflective of the cultural mentality and spiritual crisis of the turn of the 20th-century and earliest decades thereafter, all of Hermann Hesse’s fiction reflects an autobiographical exploration of self and destiny. The protagonist of each story and novel seeks, first, the limits of self, aesthetically, morally, and physically, in order to discover exactly what they are and what they should think.

This questing, with its mythical connotations, is what attracts readers to given works of Hesse, while his succession of works present protagonists in new and different settings using the same theme. Ultimately, each protagonist’s quest for self is not “out there” in the different physical settings of each story and novel but spiritually within the self. The self was always accessible had the character looked inwardly. But Hesse dramatizes the quest in the real world, in the circumstantial world that we all face by necessity, before resolving his hero’s dilemma. Each quest, like the mythic quest described by Joseph Campbell and others, must end in self, as it began, but in Hesse, the rediscovery of self is not the discovery of a new strength or a new awareness so much as what Hesse translator and editor Jack Zipes refers to as a return to “home.”

This aspect is particularly vivid in Hesse’s fairy tales, written in the first two decades of the 20th century. In “The Forest-Dweller,” a young man defies the prevarications of elders to venture outside of the tribal boundaries, and, discovering that he can survive after all, he never returns. In “The Painter” a man takes up painting as an avocation but while away from his apartment returns to discover crowds eagerly milling about his apartment to see the paintings of the now-famous artist. The crowd interprets the paintings wrongly, misunderstands their themes, even misidentifies the objects portrayed, but they bid and buy and trade them. The painter, in disgust, quits the place and does not return. And in “Faldum,” a stranger appears at the village fair performing magic that grants anyone whatever they wish, first arousing vanity but progressively stirring malice, greed, and violence among the townspeople who demand their wish. A young observer, deeply affected, wishes to be far away and lofty like a mountain, and he becomes exactly that, arising just outside the old town, dispassionately watching it grow and decline over the years, watching the forests and its denizens, and the river and clouds from his welcomed solitude and disengagement, finally sensing his numbing consciousness wane in the course of the sun, moon, and stars overhead.

These stories ranged from the early 20th-century to the end of World War I (which experience turned Hesse into a pacifist, another form of disengagement from the world, but that is another theme). In another story of that era (1907), titled “The Wolf,” Hesse presents the plight of the small group of misfits, a hated pack of wolves, eking out existence in a harsh mountain in winter with the whole of (human) society set against them, eager to exterminate them. Here, too, with the protagonist, is Hesse the writer, the solitary, the seeker after self, the seeker after a home. All of these stories have a contextual merit as literature but also a subtle appeal to the solitary, to anyone who seeks home in this world.

The history of religion charts the relationship between environment and culture. The natural environment or geography in which ancient peoples lived was the physical context of their culture and society.

Thus, the three scriptural religions of the Western world shaped cultures with a desert mentality, a desert religion. The vast horizontal land, arid and unpopulated, and the vast sky and unyielding sun, shaped the religion of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These religions demanded a huge god, an all-encompassing god, a god who must command and be obeyed if his followers are to be saved — just like the tribes in the desert, where no one could leave the group and survive. The individual only existed in terms of his smallness in the vastness, his dependence before God and his absolute loyalty to his absolutely unique tribe.

But in the Mediterranean, the landscape was different. Mountains descended to fertile valleys or temperate rocky crags, to meadows and streams, always bathed in dappled sunlight, down to the sea. Each village experienced variations of climate, soil, moisture, and what grew from the earth. Each geographical variations harbored a spirit of what it was (water or copse or mountain) but also of what it meant (fertility, foreboding, abundance, tranquility, color, grain, vine, woodlands). Gods and spirits in the rest of the world were bound to differ from the harsh and arid gods of the desert. Peoples were bound to differ, too, culturally, socially, and in terms of religion. And the variations only continued as history and time brought the confrontation of peoples and their cultural and environmental experiences into encounter, from north to south, east to and west.

When we study a set of religious beliefs, it is well to ponder where the beliefs came from, what experience the peoples had with their natural setting, and how these factors could evolve a particular way of looking at the universe, as much as a way of looking at their neighbors near and far. The xenophobia of the ancient Hebrews, based on desert survivalism, intrinsically affected Christianity and Islam. Christianity’s Jesus, an aberration from eastern religious influence, was quietly reabsorbed by the successive Judaic elements of the episcopates, with only the desert hermits escaping the larger rabbinical structure of Christianity. Islam’s Muhammed restores the primacy of prophet and desert imperium in the historical continuity of Abraham and Jacob.

In Europe, the Celtic spirits of rivers and trees are as alien to the dominant Western religions as are the Greek sprites and daemons, or the German forest view as haunted and deathly. The Indo-Europeans who brought Greek Mycenea its warriors and sky gods also brought India its horse sacrifices and holocausts, not to be overthrown but undermined, like Judaism, by the spiritual element of the Upanishads and Jesus respectively. In both cases, class, caste, and power elements eked their way back to the warrior and desert theologies of Indo-Europe and Hebrewism respectively.

The figure of Jesus looms so uniquely in the Western world because of its status as an aberration. But the influence of Jesus is well contained and neutralized by the dominant ecclesiastical structure. Not so such sage figures in the East, where no such religious structures existed due to the undermining of the brahmanic structure in Hindu spirituality, especially where sadhus embraced the forest environment as an alternative to the urban strongholds of the priest class. In China, a clear distinction arose between the Confucian collaboration with authority, and those circles outside this collaboration, specifically among Taoist and Buddhism circles, where, again, natural settings like forests were preferred to article environments such as cities.

Modern times set out to abolish natural settings because natural settings resist centralization of thought and control. The cathedral in a large city may retain the architectural inkling of a vast forest, but it has eliminated the analogy by restoring the inimical desert thinking and the necessary sense of dependence. The intimate chapel may retain the environmental inkling of the hermit’s cave or grotto, but connotes a refuge that cannot but be temporary and anomalous rather than the foundation of a body of thought. Ironically, Jesus advised praying in one’s room, away from crowds, away from other believers, away from authorities, and the desert hermits took this word to heart. Those hermits still lived in the desert, it is true, but their compatriots over the centuries learned how to reproduce their lives and insights in the hills, forests, and crags of Europe.

Eastern hermits were already perceptive of nuances, having lived among mountains and forests and rivers and witnessed the nurturing elements of these natural environments. While Confucius created a philosophical method for the authorities in urban areas, the Taoist and Buddhist hermits having discovered nature as a counterpart and alternative source of wisdom, created a spiritual method that could bypass the intellectualized and co-opted thinking of centralized authorities. Spirituality, and religion, was thus ascribed to the alternative sages and not to the official state religion. The West had no comparable movement. Jesus may have well have been reduced to the dry formulas of Confucianism, to the degree that his thought has largely disappeared within the folds of the ecclesiastical.

Just as hermits are often viewed stereotypically as eccentric wilderness recluses, so, too, the typical introduction to historical hermits is often to Antony the Great through the paintings of 19th- and early 20th century romantic and decadent painters, and fiction like Flaubert’s. Here the popular image of the hermit is a pusillanimous object of pity, mockery, or scorn, a weakling battered by sexual temptation, surrounded by the heated projections of the painters and writers themselves.

Yet Athanasius’s Life of Antony barely dwells on sexual temptation, mentioning one incident early in the biography wherein one of the devil’s guises is as a seductive woman. For Athanasius, as with the standard collections of desert hermit sayings, sexual temptations are simply part of a range of temptations. Despite the absence of formal psychology or psychoanalysis, the hermits understood the power of the natural instincts of the body, specifically in survival, which are constantly asserting their presence through biological drives. Thus the drives for reproduction, food, water, shelter, temperature intervention (homeostasis), are fundamentally maintained by hormones (to simplify the science), which troll through the body as inevitable constituents of life.

Elder hermits regularly warn younger hermits not to despair of temptations. Antony is quoted by the Apophthegmata Patrum, for example, as saying that a brother must expect temptation “to his last breath,” and that from the body rises heat, movement, and energy, fed by food, by the will, and, externally, by demons. (Here food abets sources of greater temptation, while itself being a necessity).

Antony’s saying understands the necessary processes of the body and how they affect the will. Antony does not say that thoughts arise from temptations but rather that thoughts arise from the essential constituents of the body. Thoughts may be considered epiphenomena of the body’s heat and energy. But in order to become temptations, thoughts must be sustained, entertained, extended, and extrapolated, supported by the will, or, rather, supported by a subordinated will.

By viewing temptations as such a fundamental process, Poemen could thus argue that no one is saved if they have not suffered temptations. In short, being human means to suffer temptations because we are intrinsically bodies, even if bodies with will, mind, spirit, and soul.

The number of references to sexual temptations in written sources we have on the desert hermits and desert fathers and mothers is not many. Among worldly temptations, they had already confronted or had to confront family, property, money, fame, comfort, possessions, knowledge, power, social esteem, friendships, the proximity of people and objects common to daily life in the world. Among what was renounced was the potential for “more and better” in personal life, an aggrandizement or implied improvement for self, versus a diminution or effacement of self. For many this was assuaged by monasteries, where community still existed, though in modern times cenobitic settings have been problematic. For hermits, who did not want social interaction, there was Sunday as a ritual social encounter — and the occasional personal contact for the brutal purposes of confirming health and well-being.

Sexual temptations have been considered stronger than other temptations because pride and vanity are largely mental and social aberrations more readily broken down by social circumstances, nature, and solitude, while sloth and gluttony are cloying personality factors outwitted by vigorous physical pursuit, exertion, or regular exercise. Drives intended to preserve the species by propelling the behavior of individuals are more dogged in youth, which is more fluid in will and more readily affected by culture. But maturity is never exempt, especially as science and technology abet the vanity of age.

Meanwhile, society and culture respond by creating restricting codes while inevitably permitting the powerful and the disenfranchised to break them, secretly or otherwise. This tension has existed as long as society has existed, and no social mechanism can address this tension comprehensively — behavior and thought are only in the control of the individual. The sexual scandals of those in either church or state over history show the inadequacy of both institutions and individuals in addressing grand psychological and biological issues.

Violent punishment and shaming has been one historical response. Accommodation and hypocrisy has been another. Neither are solutions. Another response, presented in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World points to a more likely response in the future. The analogy to how society responds to ideology or political control and unrest is telling. In a letter of Huxley to George Orwell, author of 1984, Huxley wonders if totalitarian authorities in the future will not simply take the easy road to control via selective tolerance of drug-controlled drives versus the obsessive and constant policing of Orwell’s scenario. Ultimately, the sexual drive is seen as humanity’s greatest stumbling block.

But only the solitary understands that the response to nature’s mechanisms for reproduction is dichotomous: benign and constructive participation in the given culture’s mores and behaviors, or outwitting society, nature, and time — not by transcending the drives but by sidestepping them into a different perception of humanity and self. A practical wisdom for the hermit was to disengage from society. A practical wisdom for the lay person allows the drives to dissipate with age, to allow wisdom to overtake biology, a life-long process but one understood by the desert hermits as just as appropriate to themselves in the realm of temptations — all temptations. The hermits ultimately had to take up a lofty — and lonely — perch from which to view human existence and its many foibles.

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.