Travel or Community: Good Luck

A person isn’t really tested by solitude. Solitude is beatitude—provided, of course, that it isn’t marred by physical stimulation. Physical equilibrium, solitude: beatitude. Excitement, distraction, over-stimulation: the fallen state.  Escape is really only present when the person is genuinely sovereign in midst of the fallen state, not by merely muting its effects.

The Sufis teach that genuine learning takes place in the world, thus in the midst of hardship, hence they send disciples on travels. Travel is hard work. If you can keep yourself centered in that environment, you’ve got your stuff together; if not, you have a ways to go. A wonderful contrast comes to me by means of Kathleen Norris’ magical book†. She quotes a saying of St. Benedict’s that living in a community is asceticism as such. Or as Sartre once said, “Hell is other people.” The two teachings, in effect, are functionally identical.

Expanding on this just a little. A great chasm exists between mere knowledge and experience—and the dubious value of either emerges when the two are not actually fused. Experience alone is insufficient. It must be understood. Knowledge by itself, no matter how high or detailed, creates a false sense of superiority. When knowledge is tested by experience, the sense of one’s superiority is blown away like a useless bit of litter in strong wind.

A bit more. The body merely experiences—and by body here I include the whole structure of ordinary being, thus also “states” of mind, reflexive thought, emotions. And these in turn merely record reactions. The more dense the stimulus, the more dense the reactions. And to control this in theory simple input-output system demands an active state of detachment. But the detachment required isn’t merely “recollection in tranquility” but active presence in the midst of turbulence. That presence requires a kind of energy; but the hurly-burly consumes it—sucks the oxygen right out of the system—hence one loses one’s grip of the situation far too easily. Tough sledding, all of this—or an arduous climb. Tranquil solitude is but a kind of breathtaking in midst of an unending labor.

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†Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Public Debate

The loud public debate on atheism, sounds of which occasionally reach me by way of posts on various philosophical sites, reminds me that the borderzone’s a region of solitude. And the sounds then, in turn, remind me: that word, hermit, comes from the Greek word eremites, which (as the Online Etymology Dictionary tells me) literally means a “person of the desert.” That word is fashioned from eremia, desert, solitude. The picture in my mind is of a great stadium packed with many thousands. A championship game is taking place. The crowds roar their joy or rage. But I’m in a little shaded park quite some distance from the stadium, sitting on a bench, reading a book—but close enough so that I can still occasionally hear the crowd. Now, of course, we don’t originate in deserts but issue from communities. It’s a slow, hard, gradual trip out into the deserts of understanding. Memories remain of time when our passions flared with heat; we had our favorites we desperately wished would win. But comes a time when we have learned enough to sooth that partisan impulse rising reflexively. Past that. Forget it. The sun shines. The trees above cause dappled patterns of shade and light to move over the pages of the open book as a breeze blows. Distantly the masses roar, subside…