But I have really been dipping into this solitude. It is a rich, rich place, especially compared to what I will (perhaps arrogantly, and accuse me in your mind to your hearts content) call the stupid bullshit that preoccupies most people.
We are here. We know we die. We know our bodies are fragile. We know people lie and seek power, and that all religions most likely have been deformed somewhere in the past thousand years, if not much sooner. We know too many scientists today lie and seek power. They are our priests. It is not a new story: it is a very, very old story.
Wrestling with and coming to terms with Verworfenheit is the game, is it not? Nobody is going to do it for me, and nobody CAN or SHOULD do it for me. This is the heart of this thing we reify as “Life”.
Several weeks ago I realized, with a bit of panic, that the core problem with extended solitude is that I lack a mirror: there is no one to tell me I exist, to acknowledge that I exist, to say my name, to react when I do or say something.
What I am realizing today–and by the way, after getting drunk Thursday night I have fasted 44 hours, about which I will write more as I really get to know it better–is that there is a mirror. We are or can be present to ourselves, but ONLY IF WE ARE HONEST.
Solitude punishes liars. It punishes people who thrive on and live in worlds of self deception. Solitude makes them feel like they don’t exist, that they are dissolving. It fills them with nervous anxiety.
But I am finding that even with profoundly negative experiences, when they show up honestly, as they really happened, they are like old friends. They are pieces of me which I had lost. They enrich me, help me feel more complete.
I don’t really want to be a hermit, but I will suggest that solitude is one of the most profound truth serums you can take, if you are willing to do the work of listening. And it is work. It is evoked–or at least, you need to be ready when it comes to you unbidden. You have to sit listening, ready to pounce.
With respect to fasting I had read some time ago that the poet Hafez fell in love with some woman. To get here, he fasted forty days inside a circle where he sat night and day. At the end, he had fallen in love with God. This is how I recall it, anyway.
40 days is a bit crazy, but I do wonder if in coming years I might not try something like that for 2-3 days. Sufis in some cases call spiritual work “polishing the inner mirror”, which fits quite well with my own analogy. Such works yields more of the real You, and makes competing possibilities pale in comparison. This is why so many Tibetans, I suppose, die in caves.
Few of us in America have even begun to suspect what is possible. Maybe some of the people who have used hallucinogens, but my personal view is that such things have to be placed in the context of a much larger, very sincere spiritual practice, and my own experience is that such a thing appears to be vanishingly rare.
I am no doubt still quite blind, though. I must have missed things I might have seen. I am trying to wind myself down and open myself up to this possibility, to go and do things I have viewed for some years with distaste, like visiting my local Buddhist temple. Maybe they aren’t all assholes, even though I know for a fact at least one of the board members is.
My vision is spirituality with the F word, a firm grounding in reality with no bullshit, and a focus on basic sanity, which most of us lack.