The Greatest Escape - Adventures in the History of Solitude

August 16, 2019

Table of Contents

Prologue

life of solitude - either through periodic retreats or continuing inner solitude in society - may be the best answer to cries that modern world is inevitably a “lonely crowd.”
your lonely quietude may be bothered by demons of lust, vainglory, or melancholy. Your fears and vanities will follow you into solitude.
The essential thing is to be apart from society for some time, physically, mentally, or spiritually.
There is the simple joy of doing nothing, appreciating life away from the crowd.

Overture

Nietzsche’s call

like Heraclitus in the Temple of Artemis, the Buddha under his Bodhi Tree, or Thoreau at Walden Pond, Nietzsche felt and thought best an most deeply when alone.
The deep quiet in which I live and grow against the world, and harvest what they cannot take from me by fire or sword."
every philosopher, says Nietzsche, is a hermit.
You’re not really a Friend [of Solitude] unless you’ve either chosen isolation or, if it were thrust upon you, you came to appreciate its therapeutic, creative powers.

Petrarch’s Life of Solitude

The Apologia

be still and see that I am God (Psalm 46)
begin, in this life, to feel the delights of the life eternal.
Among the great benefit of books, says Petrarch, is that they do not ask for food or drink and are content with a narrow portion of one’s house, yet they provide inestimable treasures of mind. In their authors, on has unfailing companions always prepared to be silent or to speak, to stay at home or to accompany him in the woods, to travel…
isolation without literature is exile, prison, and torture; but supply literature, and it becomes your country, freedom and delight.
Petrarch stresses, however, that his closest friend in solitude was his own reflective mind.
solitude can supply what he calls a “divine fertility of intellect”

Laura and a Writing Cure

around the age of forty “I renounced abruptly not only those bad habits, but even the very recollection of them - as if I had never looked at a woman. This I consider to be among my greatest blessings, and I thank God,
his love for Laura was all part of his spiritual education. At first, she had been his exquisite worldly torment; then a guiding light from heaven; finally, his salvation.

Augustinus

he admits that he is still tied to the miseries of the world by two “fetters of gold”. One is his love of Laura; the other is his desire for fame, as symbolized by the laurel wreath with which he was crowned poet laureate.
earthly success may run counter to his heavenly goals, that he should put virtue before glory

Lady Solitude

Solitude is indeed something holy, innocent, incorruptible, and the purest of human possessions. To whom does she reveal herself amid forests, for whom does she display her charms and thorns? … With whom, finally, does she ingratiate herself, who does she seek to please, except the person who has penetrated the inmost recesses of solitude and for whom therefore there is no solitude?
Let the others be constantly in a state of restlessness and agitation, let us establish ourselves with feet firmly planted on the rock.

A Brief History

But what vistas of mystical sensation, what luminous mental landscapes, what avenues of planetary reverie are opened up when one follows these voyagers through the void! – John Cowper Powys, A Philosophy of Solitude, 1933

Prehistoric Solitude

no one in the house understood him, and no one believed in him.

The Power in Caves

One of his teachers, Pherekydes, portrayed caves, or what he called hollows in the Chthoni (the “earth mother”), as receptacles of the divine hand of creation.
the cave at the summit of the mountain signifies the most typical site of the divine epiphany, the place where, after a period of occultation, a redeeming god, a prophet, or a cosmocrator make his appearance.”

Above Ground

a shaman cannot become truly powerful until he is capable of “seeing the body as a skeleton” - in other words, contemplating the reality of death
True wisdom is only to be found far away from people, out in the great solitude, and it is not found in play but only through suffering. solitude and suffering open the human mind, and therefore a shaman must seek his wisdom there.

solitary initiation

having thereby feed himself of all vestiges of self, intellect, and other noisome worldly illusions, the neophyte should learn through psychodramatic experience that samsara (the material world of the senses) and nirvana (the transcendental void of the spirit) are one

hermits of india

munis, or “silent sages”
“maddened with silence.”
“we have mounted the wind! our bodies are all you mortals can see!”

power hermits

eremitic epidemic

heterodox hermits

recluse may achieve “a state of joy and ease born of detachment”… at a still higher level of attainment, the recluse may “suppress all reasoning and investigation,” then “hold aloof from joy,” so as to enter a state of “attentive equanimity.” finally, he may give up happiness and sadness completely to enter “a state of pure mindfulness and equanimity beyond both pain and pleasure.”

compromise, sophistication

virtually al of them [howto guidebooks] begin with the same advice: “find a lonely spot.”
if one is satisfied with living alone in an empty place, regarding the agents of defilement as bitter enemies, and content with his own company, then he may drink the “nectar of spiritual exultation” and enjoy “happiness greater than that of paradise.”
redirection of passions to a higher degree of “pleasure” in immortality or god’s grace.

greece and rome

solitude - as an “end in itself” and the highest realization of the good life in the polis. “for contemplation,” says artistotle, is “the highest form of activity, since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known.”
after Narcissus died, according to Ovid, he was transformed into a beautiful spring flower.
Pythagoras “sought out not only agreeable seclusion but even vast and frightful wildernesses, and often went on toilsome journeys in deserted regions in his zeal for investigating the truth.”
Democritus, was so enamored of solitude that he “tore out his eyes in order to see the truth and avoid seeing the mob, which is the enemy of truth.”
Abaris … lived without food, and traveled all over the world as a wandering missionary like Aristeas bearing a golden arrow, symbol of the god Apollo.
the goddess of “avenging Justice” welcomed him graciously and taught him the marks of true Being, the immortal essence of all things. As important, she taught him the method of correct thinking - that is, logic. The dialogue marks the first appearance of logical argument in Greek philosophy. Using that powerful tool, the goddess explains that Being must be the only entity that exists, because it is the only thing that did not “come into being.” For if Being came into being in the past or will do so in the future, then “it is not.” But since Being does exist, says the goddess, it must be “unborn and imperishable, whole, unique, immovable, and without end.” She even asserted that Being has a shape: “It is complete on every side, like the mass of a well-rounded sphere.”
one may rise on the wings of Eros through several interrelated stages toward a kind of enlightenment: first, by directing one’s love to other bodies; then by transforming that love into a meditation on the “beauty in souls”; then by turning one’s mind to “the great ocean of beauty, and in contemplation of it give birth to many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts in the abundance of philosophy.” Finally, at the highest level, one may contemplate “being by itself always in simplicity.” “Therein,” said Diotima, “is life worth living.” For he who comprehends “Beauty itself” will be “the friend of God, and immortal if any man ever is.”
both Parmenides and Socrates imply that the way to understanding the transcendent world of Being or the imminent worlds of Truth and Beauty is through a mental journey of some kind.

Heraclitus

Without tension and change there would be nothing, and no self-understanding. As to what is the ultimate nature of Nature, Heraclitus warns that we will never know - “so deep is the logos.”
One should, in other words, steer clear of the watery element (drunkenness, weepy passions, the mob) and face the truths of existence squarely, without the supporting hope of a loving divinity.

Lonely Pleasure

The objective of moderation and “the end of all action,” says Democritus, is euthymia, which may be translated as “cheerfulness,” “well-being,” or “contentment.” … equanimity, tranquillity, and a wise retirement from social turmoil.
The man who wishes to have serenity of spirit should not engage in many activities, either private or public, nor choose activities beyond his power and natural capacity. He must guard against this, so that when good fortune strikes him and leads him on to excess by means of (false) seeming, he must rate it low, and not attempt things beyond his powers. A reasonable fullness is better than overfullness.
Democritus maintained that contentment will grow as one is satisfied with less
his emphasis on pleasure was the opposite of self-indulgence or libertinism, for he viewed it not as excess, but as the absence of pain and anxiety.
“Withdrawal into obscurity is the best form of security.”

Roman Retirement

“I’m alive, royally alive, when free of all you adore and rise up as high as heaven,”
“You ask me to say what you should consider it particularly important to avoid. My answer is this:” he wrote to the young Lucillius, “a mass crowd.”
The wise man is content with himself
The supreme ideal does not call for any external aids. It is home-grown, wholly self-developed. Once it starts looking for outside itself or any part of itself it is on the way to being dominated by the fortune.
Men seek seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains - a dream you have cherished for yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself.

Otherwordly Directions

Philo’s man of virtue does not love solitude out of misanthropy. He is rather a lover of men who spends his time in an out-of-the-way place to avoid the vices of the multitude.
“alone with the Alone”
cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiseling your statue until there shall shine from it the godlike splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect Goodness established in the stainless shrine.
to rise through mystic contemplation above the pains and flaws of this world to an ideal world of perfection, where “the essential man outgrows Being, becomes identical with the Transcendent Being.”
“image to archetype.”
This is the life of the gods and of godlike and blessed men, - liberation from the alien that besets us here, a life taking no pleasure in the things of earth - a flight of the alone to the Alone.

Ancient China

history of solitude in China is one of balance and worldly practicality.
Stop your thinking, he said. Destroy your concepts. think without “thinking.” The text reads: Let there be no seeing, no hearing; enfold the spirit in quietude and the body will right itself. Be still, be pure, do not labour your body, do not churn up your essence… When the eye does not see, the ear does not hear, end the mind does not know, then your spirit will protect the body and the body will enjoy long life.

The “Best Men”

shih ritual, in which an adept would make himself or herself as quiet as a corpse in order to communicate with the dead.
“Do not stay in a state which is in disorder. When the empire possesses the Way, be seen. When the empire does not possess the Way, hide.”
Don’t escort the big chariot; You will only make yourself dusty. Don’t think about the sorrows of the world; You will only make yourself wretched.
If only my mind can be beautiful, it matters nothing that I often faint for famine."
Keep your soul from confusion, and it will come naturally," says Wang: Await in emptiness, before even inaction. All other things proceed from this…
When I looked, my startled eyes saw nothing. When I listened, no sound met my amazed ear. Transcending Inaction, I came to Purity, and entered the neighborhood of the Great Beginning.

Taoist Philosophers

“It is ever so that the essence of things is what gives them life.” That essence - the Tao - is silent, compact, and obscure, which no fixed place. The supreme quality for men, therefore is also quiescence.
If quiescent, you will then obtain it. If hasty, you will then lose it.
A noble person with sufficient inner virtue may give the appearance of a fool. Therefore, give up your high-handed manner, your desires, your vanity, and your zeal - for they are no use to you.
“When you have little, you’ll attain much,” he wrote. “With much, you’ll be confused.”
The secret lies with understanding - or, more precisely, feeling, absorbing, and living in “the true essence of things.”
tales that do not over-explain but rather point the way to freedom, happiness, and perfection in unexpected quarters.
The first step, she explains, is to put the world outside of your-self… then to put things outside of yourself… then to put life outside of yourself, at which point you will be able to achieve the “brightness of dawn” and to “see your aloneness.” At that point, she says, one can “do away with past and present” and “enter a place where there is no life or death.”
not only to withdraw for a time from society but literally to isolate oneself from oneself - from all the excess baggage of one’s painful memories, rigid habits, and learned feelings.
“You have too many policies and plans and you haven’t seen what is needed… You are still making mind your teacher.” Instead, you must fast!"
Listening stops with the ears, the mind stops with recognition, but the spirit is empty and waits on all things. The way gathers in emptiness alone…
the ancient Chinese hermits advocates a kind of worldly mysticism… they were somehow less ashamed of the body and more optimistic about prospects of being happy in the world.
be more like Emperor Yao, who neither possessed men nor allowed himself to be possessed by them. “So I ask you,” says the Master, “to rid yourself of hardship, to cast off your cares, and to wander alone with the Way to the Land of Great Silence.”

The Desert Fathers

“Abolish every childish time of life,” he says: My son, throw every robber out of your gates. Guard all your gates with torches which are the words, and you will acquire all these things for a quiet life. But he who will not guard these things will become like a city which is desolate since it has been captured, and all kinds of wild beasts have trampled upon it.
“only those who are solitary will enter the bridal chamber.”

Paul and Anthony

As happened in India and China, it is no coincidence that the flight to the desert coincided with a period of dramatic socio-economic change and associated questioning of traditional values.

Desert Wisdom

“A man who lives apart,” said the reformed Ethiopian robber Abba Moses, “is like a ripe grape. And a man who lives in the company of others is a sour grape”.
the way to salvation in the desert was to seek purity of heart by cultivating one’s “inner man.”
“Any trial whatever that comes to you can be conquered by silence.”
take care that you never bring into this cell the words of another."
My Rule is to receive you with hospitality and to let you go in peace".
If you cannot attain stillness where you now live, consider living in exile…
The proof of having achieved a state of apatheia will come, says Evagrius, “when the spirit begins to see its own light, when it remains in a state of tranquility in the presence of images it has during sleep and when it maintains its calm as it beholds the affairs of life”.
“You too must reach the point where you no longer take offence at anything”.
“There are not many outstanding experts in worldly philosophy,” he said. “But I would claim that rarer still are those who are truly expert in the philosphy of stillness.”

Sufi Soloist

Do you ever fear solitude? If you had tasted the delight of solitude, you would long for it, away from your self. Solitude is the beginning of the worship of God. What is the first thing you find in solitude? Peace far away from human intercourse and safety far from the evils which accompany it. When may the servant taste the bliss of intimacy with God? When his love for God becomes pure and he communes with him with a sincere heart. When is his love pure? When all his desires are concentrated in one: to obey God.
“If you are capable of erecting an iron wall between yourself and your desires, then do it”
“the people are the wild beasts of God on the earth. They show no affection for any human being.”
serving God through asceticism - that is like breathing vinegar and mustard. Possessing divine knowledge - that is like scent of musk and ambergris.
“he renounced everything save God.” Thereafter, his true self was at one with the Infinite, so he had nothing more to either renounce or desire.

The Tavern of Ruin

Peace, brothers, is my aloneness. Because my Beloved is alone with me there - always. I’ve found nothing to equal His love, That Love which arrows the sands of my desert.
drinking of wine as a symbol of the joyful ecstasy of divine union… The cup of unending joy
What you get by wanting is only as big as your capacity to desire. Give you desire therefore, think that whatever you get is what you want, and in this acceptance find ease and joy.
Renounce desire a hundred times or else not once will you embrace your desire.
The wine we really drink is our own blood. Our bodies ferment in these barrels. We give everything for a glass of this. We give our minds for a sip.
Externally he is congenial with everyone. Inwardly, he is a stranger to all. He is at peace with all people, yet within himself tranquillity is to be found only in Divine Love.
Die, and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died. Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
“The phenomenal is the Bridge to the Real,”
one must rise above all things worldly, including asceticism and preprogrammed concepts of Heaven. It only stands to reason, therefore, that no images are inherently bad; any of them may provide concrete material to build a joyful spiritual bridge or tools to break out of the prison of ordinary life.

Medieval Europe

anchorite is not to think highly of himself, but rather that he is being enclosed so as not to fall further into sin

Return of Plato

See ’to it that there is nothing at work in your mind or will but only God. Try to suppress all knowledge and feeling of anything less than God, and trample it down deep under the cloud of forgetting.
Be still. How? The author recommends focusing the mind on a single word, such as “love” or “God.” And, he says, “If your mind continues to intellectualize over the meaning and connotations of this little word, remind yourself that its value lies in its simplicity. Do this and I assure you these thoughts will vanish.”

A Tumult of Love

“take off your clothes,” so that “not the slightest thing can be between you and me.”
to love nothingness, to flee somethingness, to stand alone, and to “drink the water of suffering.”
the first step toward becoming a bride of Christ (a state that may be attained equally by men or women) is renunciation of self and the world to the point of complete emptiness and lowliness. One should become like a valley between two mountains awaiting the radiance of the sun (i.e., Christ) as it rises to noontide.

The Dark Night

“We have got realize,” she says, “the littleness of creation and to see it for the nothing that it is before we can love and possess God who is uncreated.”
No soul can rest until it is detached from all creation.

Scholars and Ch’an Masters

with the right mental attitude of equanimity, one may find the joys of solitude even in the city

Bodhidharma

the emptiness is also fullness, containing all forms and phenomena above and below Heaven.
a state of “not craving” should be the object of true meditation and attentive living.

Zen Soloists

personal enlightenment (of the selfless self) can occur in the same way as one can see the universe in a dewdrop on a moonlit night.

Modern Recluses

Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself, to pay his court privately to himself, to hide!
all of man’s unhappiness derives from one thing, which is not knowing how to rest quietly in a room.
he was frequently “the happiest of men” when alone.
The sentiment of existence, stripped of another emotion, is in itself a precious sentiment of contentment and of peace which alone would suffice to make this existence dear and sweet to anyone able to spurn all the sensual and earthly impressions which incessantly come to distract us from it and to trouble its sweetness here-below.
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from the society."
“I am at home in MYSELF, I speak my own language, I hate extraordinary things,” says Teste. “Only weak minds need them.”
For sanity, he says, turn away from man to the enormous eternity of rock and to life attuned to that reality, as typified, for example, by a hawk.

On Cloisterphobia

It is an awful satire, and an epigram on the materialism of our modern age, that nowadays the only use that can be made of solitude is imposing it as a penalty, as jail.

The Hermit Bashers

the Protestant Christian, beginning with Martin Luther, became what might be called a “do-it-yourself” clergyman responsible for the welfare of his own soul.
Quaker meetings, which begin in silence and remain so until any one of the attendees is moved to speak.
Rather than believing that religious contemplation might help to foster spiritual life, the Protestant, says Weber, places greater emphasis on a belief that selfless, worldly industry is the way to achieve God’s grace.
the religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work became “the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith.”
the ascetic discipline of the monk and the hermit - the self-denial, the submission to authority, the dedicated industriousness for a greater good - was transformed into the worldly asceticism that is now the foundation of that most successful of modern institutions: the corporation. We might better term it the “capitalist monastery.”
“the spirit of religious asceticism - whether finally, who knows? - has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer.”

No Manner of Purpose

The chief complaint, rather, is lodged against the hermit’s flight from social responsibilities.

Missing the Good Things

some warn of another danger that the secular Friend of Solitude enjoying spiritual, philosophical, or antithetical flights is just wasting his time with worldly pleasures.
The intrepid philosopher may indeed be exploring the depths of his soul, but he is missing the most profound adventure - that is, climbing a real spiritual ladder to God.
True solitude is found in humility, which is infinitely rich. False solitude is the refuge of pride, and it is indefinitely poor. The poverty of false solitude comes from an illusion which pretends, by adorning itself in things it can never possess, to distinguish one individual self from the mass of other men. True solitude is selfless.
life of solitude will almost inevitably run afoul without the discipline and support to be found in a religious community.

The Hermit’s Madness

J. Moussaieff Masson, for one, posits that “all ascetics suffered massive traumas in their childhood in one of three ways: they were sexually seduced, or they were object of overt or covert aggression, or they lost those closest to them early in their lives.
pervaded by sadness; their rituals, their obsessive gestures of every kind, are an attempt to recapture the lost childhood they never had.

Reply to Cloisterphobes

fear that should solitude again become popular all the achievements since the Renaissance will be lost and the world would again plunge into medieval darkness.
“but solitude is the school of genius”
“I was never less alone than when by myself.”
soon-to-be-world-historical figure withdraws into solitude at a certain troubled time in his life, and at a crucial turning point in the development, more commonly the disintegration, of his civilization. Alone, he rethinks the predicaments in which he finds himself. Then, in a mysterious action of the soul, he produces new seeds of thought that may be capable, at one extreme, of altering the growth pattern of the entire civilization, or at the other, of destroying genius in madness.
“Willed introversion,” Cambell explains, “is one of the classic implements of creative genius.”
Emptiness, stillness, limpidity, silence, inaction are the root of the ten thousand things.”
“All the great nations have been prepared in privacy and in secret. They have been composed far away from distraction.”
being alone for a while can add depth, clarity, and perspective to thought that might otherwise be drowned out in the clamor of social life. As an added benefit, quiet mediation may be therapeutic. Or it may be charged with inspiration, divine or otherwise.

Economics of Solitude

it is in solitude - perhaps only in solitude - that one may learn to become truly social.
“solitude is necessary for society as silence is for language and air for the lungs and food for the body.”
only someone who is ready for anything, doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
hermits make the best lovers, in both the spiritual and physical senses.
Much of that time would be better spent going for a walk, admiring landscape, digging our gardens, or on “science and art; not to impress somebody, but for love of beauty that each discloses.” We could even be quit occasionally, he adds: Better than such discourse doth silence long, long barren silence square with my desire.

Compromise

do not argue against such things as friendship and simple enjoyment of life, but rather for greater balance between the life of solitude and that of society.
“start cultivating a relationship with poverty” by appointing certain days on which he gives up everything and makes himself at home with next to nothing. “At the end of it, believe me,” he says, “you will revel in being sated for a penny, and will come to see that security from care is not dependent on fortune - for even when she is angry she will always let us have what is enough.”
only through complete isolation and dedication to the infinite do we have any hope of achieving enlightenment. All other solitudes, says Merton, are false.
Enlightenment or grace may come in away we cannot fathom in advance. So again, in the meantime, let us try to enjoy, understand, and live life in the world as it is - and let us do so in periods of solitude which will quicken our sensibilities and possible lead us to subtle answers to the unanswered questions.

Marketing Solitude

tendency of consumerism to oversimplify and to debase what must be a subtle, personal, secret feeling if the gift of solitude is to work its magic.

Extreme Solitude

asceticism is as much the lot of men tied to jobs and mortgage payments as it is the practice of religious hermits
for philosophers, scholars, and sundry free spirits, self-deprivation and even lust for glory are justified because they constitute a “preparation of the intellect for its future ‘objectivity.’”
Wisdom, proclaims Nietzche’s Zarathustra, is a woman: “She always loves only a warrior.”

The Case for Mysticism

It was out in the Great Solitude that the first Iglulik shaman discovered shamanism and he later dove physically into the ground to discover the secrets of hunting. After days of fasting in solitude, the young Ojibwa initiate discovered the secrets of how to grow corn and thereby save his tribe. Buddha achieved enlightenment only after many years in ascetic solitude, when he looked like a skeleton with skin. And Saint John of the Cross made a point of saying that it was the “Dark Night” of his suffering in solitude that led to his unfathomable nearness with God.

Judgment versus Faith

true faith required selfless, meditative prayer and stern discipline… those who are not willing to work at it patiently will finally end in compromise. Here, as elsewhere, compromise is only another name for failure.
If we are to be truly happy and fulfilled, to understand the rhyme and reason for All, or enter the tavern of ruin, then stronger medicine, more perseverance, and a jarring life experience may be required. These may be necessary if we are to renounce worldly desires and embrace sufferings - thereby to rise above both to another plane.

Psychology

Go sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything. – Abba Moses, fourth-century Egypt.

Parade of Hermits

often soul-wrenching - time spent alone can produce some of the most extraordinary riches.
Secluded meditation guards him who meditates, lengthens his life, gives him strength, and shuts out faults; it removes ill-fame, and leads to good repute, it drives out discontent, and makes for contentment, it removes fear and gives confidence, it removes sloth and gives vigor, it removes greed, hate, and delusion; it slays pride, breaks up preoccupations, makes thought one-pointed, softens the mind, generates gladness, makes one venerable, gives rise to much profit, makes one worthy of homage, brings exuberant joy, causes delight, shows the own-being of all conditioned things.
what Patanjali emphasizes is the highest attainment of the yogi, who should finally renounce the siddhis and rise to the “infinite knowledge” and final liberation of the Self, which he calls the “Rain-Cloud of Divinity.”
solitude may be creative by providing a mental environment that helps to produce something that wasn’t there before.

Search for Consistencies

the fruits of solitude are remarkably consistent across time and culture, there is little consistency in the outward circumstances of the Friends’ eremitism.
Simplicity of life - and, at higher strength, poverty and asceticism - seem naturally to be associated with the life of solitude.
Diogenes Laertius, he was once spotted laughing to himself in a lonely spot. When asked why he took such pleasure when alone, he uttered this famous reply: “That is just the reason!”
bitterness of mind should be “avoided like a plague.”
education seems to have provided a discipline of thought that enabled them to get busy with creative output in time alone.
Consciousness has never functioned in the manner of a conventional computer, which allows some processing to go on entirely separately from all other processing in the same machine. Instead, we are constantly distracted by the social noise of daily affairs, along with the internal residue of society in the form of memories, regrets, desires, and habits.

Creativity

“The righteous man,” says the Sufi al-Arusi, “is changed forty times a day, but the hypocrite remains in the same state for forty years.”

Reverie

Solitude leads the mind to those sources from whence the grandest conceptions are most likely to flow.
“for by reason of the disturbance caused by this affair of the world he cannot see his sins, but if he lives in the peace and quietness of the desert he is able to see God clearly.”
By “fasting,” he does not mean simply a restriction of diet, nor merely intense concentration alone. He advocates, rather, a complete emptying of the normal self, with its excess baggage of fears and habitual beliefs
world’s greatest, most creative thinkers - he mentions recent ones, from Descartes to Wittgenstein - lived alone for most of their lives. Storr reasons that creation begins, in its first stage, with preparation, during which the creative person develops an interest in a particular subject, collects material, reads everything he can on the subject. Over time the accumulated material simmers in the mind. “We do not understand what goes on during this period of incubation,” Storr admits, “but it is a necessary prelude to the next stage, that of illumination.”
dreams have an information-processing function, which is concerned with allotting new experiences to the right slot in permanent memory.
In such a solitary, daydreaming state, the prepared mind, with its mysterious sorting process, may be better equipped for performing the essential and difficult creative task of “forming new links between formerly disparate entities.”
The best way to arrive at this state is through walking, forgetting, and a “cheerful imagination.” “Movement which does not come from outside then occurs inside us”

Passion

Nietzsche states explicitly that by avoiding the distracting effects of both physical and social intercourse, inner resources of passion can be used to boost intellectual powers.
“the ‘higher phallus,’ with the head as the seat of creative realization.” Neumann explains that as consciousness develops in individuals it takes its impetus from innate animal instinct. That instinct, or libido, is required to make the ego strong enough to break away from the collective unconsciousness - that is, the collective transpersonal archetypes of the world, or what Neumann terms the “Earth Mother.” As the conscious ego develops sufficient autonomy, it then has a desire to use the same libidinal energy to reenter the mysterious Earth Mother. The result is enrichment of both consciousness and libido.

Inner Resources

The obvious problem with the source of creative energy is that human passions are very difficult to control
“capacity to be alone” is something developed early in life.
It also helps if one has something to be passionate about - a problem to be solved, discovery to be made, or a project to be completed - which will, in effect, distract one’s attention from the distractions of society.
“if you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.”

Altered States

Sometimes the best thing is to set aside the burden of concentration and go for a walk.
An occasional return to society can easy the sense of loneliness and balance the mind, and nearly all of the Friends who we associate with extreme solitude made such forays.
Shamanic states, in other words, may make possible in preliterate culture a form of thinking that employs intuitive abstraction without making use of the rational abstractions available to modern thinkers.

Voices

It is an effort to strike out beyond the limits of intelligence
Perhaps he is right not to attempt explanation, for that would be to murder the mysterious wit, which is the soul of all creativity.

Joy

“To shun familiarity with others, as if they were a thorn in the flesh, shows a sound judgement”.
Thoreau said that more than being a writer of books, he wanted to make his life a work of art. Often, he went a step further to advocate appreciating life as a transcendent work of art, in idleness.
the super-sensibility that solitude helps to engender

Moderation

strategic moderation. “The truest happiness,” as the philosopher explains in his Letter to Menoecus, “does not come from enjoyment of physical pleasures, but from a simple life, free of anxiety, with the normal physical needs satisfied.”
“We must not send our desires upon a distant quest, but we should permit them to have access to what is near, since they do not endure to be shut up altogether.”
“cleaner conscience” is one of the greatest rewards of the secluded life. “In solitude,” he said, “one is removed from the object of the sin, from temptations as well as the influence of wrong-minded men.”
When the mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd: it is so easy for it to go over to the majority.
there is a sense of well-being and physical and mental control that may be achieved by following a program of strenuous training - which, appropriately enough, is precisely the meaning of the Greek askesis, from which our word asceticism derives.

Defence Mechanisms

Buddha continues to recommend a balanced asceticism in the form of mendicancy and self control.
according to Freud, the “oceanic feeling” which the mystic aims to achieve is merely “memory of a relatively undifferentiated infantile ego state.”
“childhood remains within us a principle of deep life, of life always in harmony with the possibilities of new beginnings”.

Self-Aggrandizement

Alexander himself said, “Had I not been Alexander, I should have liked to be Diogenes.”

Enlightenment

in the reality that most of those who would speak of enlightenment will agree that it is real and powerful, but ultimately indefinable.

Detachment

Plotinus likewise plotted the course to that immortal realm through a flight to the Primal Beauty of the Alone. “To attain it,” he says, “is for those that will take the upward path,” and enter the celebrations of the Mysteries laying aside garments, “in the nakedness, until passing on the upward way all that is other than God, each in the solitude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure.”
“No soul can rest,” she said, “until it is detached from all creation.”
wandering homelessness
if you have nothing, you have nothing to lose; if you desire nothing you have everything to win.
there is no hope of achieving a true and lasting happiness in the world as it appears to us viewed through the lens of desire.
suicide is just another form of self-caring and desire. So truly to give up desire, one must give up desire for death, perhaps even desire for enlightenment, along with one’s incessant pessimism. As a second step, then, one may think: “Instead of isolating myself from the world, why not just give up the idea that I deserve or might win any further rewards from the world than the mysterious majesty of existence that already presents itself before me? What more do I want?” At that point, something miraculous seems to happen. For aside from all the philosophy and religious dogma that later come into play and quicken the process, optimism beings to grow, seemingly from nothing.
If you abandon the affairs of the world, your body will be without toil. If you forget life, your vitality will be unimpaired.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace.

Selfless Love

It is literally eroticism, he writes, which gives chaste souls the energy or motivation to climb the spiritual ladder to God.
“If they ask what Love is”, he says, “tell them it is the sacrifice of will. For if you have not left your will behind, you have no will at all.”
Yes, to become lowly, lowlier still - as lowly as possible. This is the great secret of mystical life. And then, having reduced oneself to a single point and become nothing more than a soul and heart which loves, to get used to a complete reversal of the usual position - the eternal position of pride, and the uneasy position of the ego which always sees itself as the center of the universe.

Thoughtless Philosophy

Only when there is no pondering and no cognition will you get to know the Way. Only when you have no surroundings and follow no practices you will find the rest in the Way. Only when there is no path and no procedure can you get to the Way.
to become a true bride of Christ one must not only become lost in a fierce tumult of love; the lonely contemplator must also have “lost himself in a Waylessness and in a Darkness, in which all contemplative men wander in fruition and wherein they never again can find themselves in a creaturely way.”

Experience

gratitude for the majesty of existence.
Youth are initiated into adulthood by “killing” their youthful ways, by being taken away from the protection of their mothers and families, and by being introduced forcefully to the great but also fearsome world outside the tribe where ancestors and good and evil spirits lurk. As Eliade puts it, the initiate “dies” to the temporal, profane world and is reborn into the world of the sacred, which is beyond time and the font of the group’s culture, spiritual values, and protections. The initiatory death, he says, “provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new man.
the neophyte should now be emancipated from all concepts, pious and impious.
“We do not need philosophy to drive us to work. Necessity will do that,” he says. Rather, we need philosophy to “kill boredom, to destroy inertia, to dispel lethargy, to drive away weariness, to overcome a sense of futility.”
We must philosophize with our malice. We must be as gods, selecting and rejecting. To accept the Cosmos in its entirety is the gesture of a slave not of a man.

Brihadratha’s Lesson

his penance, no matter how fervent, will do him little good until he cultivates an understanding of this own Soul, which is also the Soul of the universe.
Incomprehensible is the supreme Soul, unlimited, unborn, unthinkable - His soul is space itself! In the dissolution of the world, He alone remains awake.
Verily, freedom from desire is like the choicest extract from the choicest treasure. For a person who is made up of all desires, who has the marks of determination, conception, and self conceit, is bound. By being the opposite of that one is liberated.
Enlightenment will only come, says Sakyanya, when “the intellect stirs not.”

Solitude in Society

Those who do well, do well wherever they are. – Meister Eckhard

Alienation

contemplation, which is essentially asocial, is a primary end of the zoon politikon.
proliferation of computers that digitize our minds, nine-to-five jobs that so sap our spirit we never have time to come back to ourselves.
Narcissism, he explains, “appears realistically to represent the best way of coping with the tensions and anxieties of modern life.
In response, the narcissist may turn to the literature of self-help and what Lash terms “the ideology of personal growth.”

What Is to Be Done?

Hegel’s basic point that alienation - in other words, solitude in society - is essential to individual human maturity and dignity.
what matters is to increase men’s capacity to cope with alienation.
it is only when we intentionally cultivate alienation and actively set the world outside ourselves once in a while that we will have a chance of seeing the world as it is.
Without alienation from the world, they say, one cannot know God. The worst form of estrangement in society is not one’s separation from a warm, well-tempered community - but one’s isolation from the transcendent, all-powerful One, which is the only true reality.
The state of existence is the state of estrangement… Man as he exists is not what he essentially is and ought to be. He is estranged from his true being.
“In moments of solitude,” he writes in his essay Loneliness and Society, “something is done to us. The center of our being, the innermost self that is the ground of our aloneness, is elevated to the divine center and taken into it. Therein can we rest without losing ourselves.”

Deleting Loneliness

I found many warnings that the sense of loneliness will continue to increase with changes in demographics, along with advances in technology and instant global communications.
The first step is to choose solitude, to find a lonely spot, a place that you can love and where you might escape your tolls, troubles, and distractions. There, you might listen to your timeless self; sort things out; moderate desires, or ponder how best to redirect your life to something important and true, something that will fire your passion.
Your worst fear, in addition to thoughts of death, is likely to be your fear of separation from the safety and nurturing warmth of society. But that is part of the adventure. Perhaps most important thing to remember is that separation is also freedom.
If you lose yourself in waylessness, you may discover something wonderful there. You may not find the happiness you expect, but you may discover something larger that is beyond your expectations and for which, like all art, music, solo journeys of shamans, philosophy, and religion, words can spoil the meaning.

Inner Solitude

it is possible and preferable to be solitary in a positive sense in society - simultaneously and continuously.
he could evoke a solitude of mind no matter where he was. Even in the city
mediate not on the ocean or starry heavens but on that which happens to be before me here and now.

Karma Yoga

It is not to relinquish worldly actions, but all attachment to the fruits of that action.
wise men should act with detachment to preserve the world.
he discovers joy in himself; joined by discipline to the infinite spirit, the self attains inexhaustible joy.
Bhagavadgita advocates not so much saving the joys of time alone for latter half of life, but rather solitude in society, acceptance of fate, and responsibility in the world accompanied by spiritual innerness.
His nature is free of conditions, Win or lose, It makes no difference to him. Alone in the forest or out in the world, A god in heaven or a simple beggar, It makes no difference!
Never seek the solitude of the forest, Nor running from the crowd. Always and everywhere, He is one and the same.

Knight of the Faith

“thundering silence,”
the way of the world and the way of the spirit should also be regarded as the same,
action in the world of affairs with the tranquillity of inner retirement
“The small hermit lives in the mountains. The great hermit lives in a town.”
“The world is like a bride,” says al-Ghazali, “He who loves her combs and decorates her hair. The ascetic blackens her face, tears her hair out, and rends her clothes. But he who possesses the knowledge of God is completely absorbed in God and does not worry about her at all.”
Westerners who do see the value and possibility of spiritual solitude in the world tend to be novelists, philosophers, or heretics.
If he really has God and only God, then nothing disturbs him…
One must learn an inner solitude, wherever or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed in his mind.