Friday, July 30, 2010

An Interview with the Urban Hermit: A Nobody for Our Time Part II

By Henry David Toro

“My instinct tells me my head is an organ for burrowing; as some creatures use their snout and forepaws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” H.D. Thoreau, Walden

HTD: After the last interview, I have some understanding of why you call yourself a hermit. But why “urban?” That doesn’t seem to go with the tradition of hermits at all.

UH: Yes, hermits are usually in the forest or out in the desert, like St. Anthony facing down his demons, not living in the middle of Utica. The hermit archetype we’re familiar with is associated with wilderness for a good reason: the hermit’s “job” is Self-knowledge, and wilderness is a good metaphor for the Unconscious, or the Soul. One answer is, I designate my hermit self as urban because that’s where I am, here in Utica, and since the wilderness of the hermit is also an inner experience, why not here as well as anywhere? If I imagine I need to be out in Nature, I’m done for, since that’s not in the cards for me. And it isn’t in the cards for many people who lack the means or the freedom from responsibility to just up and take themselves off to the mountain or the ashram or the desert.

HTD: But isn’t that a mistake to impose limits on yourself as to where you can go, as well as to what you can be? Isn’t it true that one’s intention, at least to an extent, allows the unforeseen to happen in one’s life? So isn’t it self-limiting to say “I can’t do such and so because I can’t afford it?” What about dreams and visions?

UH: I am a major proponent of following dreams and having a vision. But even dreams have to stand up to some standard of the common good, or what is good for the community, first of all. Not that all dreams are held to such standards, of course. No independent council of community elders checked out Henry Ford’s dream and its consequences down the line, or the development of atomic weapons, or Monsanto’s seed technologies before they went on line. Some “good” is always served by these innovative dreams, but who is looking at the larger good? With the earth being destroyed at an ever increasing rate, with social structures in shambles, the welfare of children down the tubes, dreams have to refer to the context of the world we are in, and to an ethic of compassion and justice. Living in the city, with its strong essences and real diversity, I can never abstract too much, or get too ”spiritual” and lost in my own head. I am frequently annoyed, frustrated, and even depressed by the reality around me. But my job is to remain awake, no matter what my surroundings: if I can’t “bloom” here, what am I saying about myself? That I have to have a $250,000 house in the suburbs or I cannot be happy? In a way, living here forces me to go against a tendency in me to seek a kind of undisturbed gated peace. There is a part of me that really wants badly to go to sleep. I’d rather be awake, no matter what it is I am awake to.

So, really, like Booker T. Washington famously said, “Cast down your buckets where you are.” These words have been misinterpreted to mean “make the best with what you have and things will get better by and by.” Spoken to former slaves who faced a futile competition for industrial employment with white laborers and even immigrants, Washington was counseling a kind of self-reliance; rather than continuing to run futilely after the white man’s economy, black men and women should establish their own, from the bottom up. Today, the advice seems prescient, for what has running after the white man’s economy done for any of us? If we wish to “carve and paint the very medium through which we look,” and “keep ourselves awake,” first we must see that where we are, the limitations that bind us, are our allies in some way. The tasks of consciousness are great enough if you are in one place, married to one person, as Thoreau eloquently pointed out to us. This is a limitation I have chosen to live within. In these momentous times calling for us to change our way of life, this is something I have wrestled with in fine St. Anthony fashion: that is, how to be “stuck-in-place” (Utica or wherever) and prepared to find that “richest vein” at the same time. The answer to this conundrum might save a lot of marriages, as well as slow down the destruction of the planet.

In a well-known Russian fairy tale, The Maiden Czar, the boy Ivan finds himself at the Baba Yaga’s terrifying cottage in the middle of the deep woods. He is asked by the crafty Baba, Have you come here by compulsion or of your own free will? Ivan is no slouch in terms of cunning, either. He answers her in a way that keeps him out of being eaten and his skull added to the other trophies lined up along the Baba Yaga’s picket fence: “Largely by my own free will and twice as much by compulsion,” he replies.

To live within limitations such as place and marriage, for example – and don’t forget, life that is circumscribed between birth and death is the biggest limitation of them all - one has to be possessed of an alive imagination, and, not only that, one must be able to connect with the other realm - the spirit realm, which is the realm of true freedom. If we believe literally that either we must be able to escape a circumstance that has come to seem intolerable or we will be chained to misery the rest of our life, we are missing entirely the third way, the way of being in that circumstance consciously or imaginatively, and thereby transforming it. One cannot be a bliss-follower without learning this approach to the seemingly intractable problems that confront each of us during the course of a lifetime. Putting the problem out there, on the spouse, the environment, the neighbor, the crime-ridden city, means your answer to the Baba Yaga’s question is that you are here by compulsion. She’ll eat you for dinner.

If on the other hand, you insist that you are entirely a free agent, free to do or be whatever you want, she will eat you for dinner. Being brought up in the materialist American context, with its accompanying belief in free will, it is nearly impossible to answer the Baba Yaga’s question except with an answer that will get you eaten. That is why there is such a dearth of genuine aliveness and thoughtfulness in our modern culture, and so much addiction, numbing out, and escape. Many of our society’s adults have failed their encounter with the Baba Yaga. Or rather, they are unaware of that level in their being, and so simply pass from one sleep to another. We are taught not to believe in the invisible, spiritual realm, that if something cannot be empirically proven; if it does not meet with the criteria of rationalism, then it must not exist at all. This is a terrible and consequential narrowing of consciousness. The consequences of such a rigid materialist or secular view begin with unconsciousness on the part of adults toward the very real fears and sorrows of childhood, and their very real needs for intangibles like solitude, and unprogrammed experiences with nature.

Robbed of the inner realm, individuals are helpless to withstand the message coming from a society that has mysteriously become the Baba Yaga, out of control and devouring her young. If we ignore Nature, or if we refuse to learn what Nature teaches us through our bodies and souls, that does not make Her go away. On the contrary, it causes her to gain in destructive energy; in these times it is easy to picture the Baba Yaga having had to build multiple fences to hold all the skulls of her hapless visitors who have upgraded to their flat screen high-def TV and 500 channels on the cable, or who believe that being on Facebook is a good way to be a friend. So, for me, one part of my answer as to why I call myself an “urban” hermit is very much connected to this great lesson of learning to live within the given limitations, as consciously as possible, which is also, I must point out, not the path of deprivation but of desire.

HDT: You mean the Baba Yaga can be defeated by people following their desire?

UH: Well, yes. I hadn’t been thinking that, but it is true, and that’s in the fairy tale as well. In the fairy tale, Ivan is following the “maiden czar,” the awakener of his own spiritual longing for beauty, meaning, a relation to his own soul. Thoreau expressed it as the desire to not “live meanly.” Another way I have of picturing this is that we are called to live the artist’s life, even if we do not think of ourselves as artists.

Prophetic voices today are calling for contraction of our economy, and that means contracting our way of life as well as the whole idea of a global, ever-expanding-without-limits economy. As we can see, the engines of the economy are helpless to stop themselves. Only individuals who themselves can manage the contraction of their way of life – fundamentally a spiritual undertaking - can begin to withdraw themselves from the economy based upon ever increasing consumption. To me this simply means we have to learn once again to honor eros, or the longing of the soul for this adventure of meaning and purpose that we have tried as a society, and failed, to do without. Nothing else – other than our changing the “very medium and atmosphere through which we look –“can turn the sacrifice of contraction into a bountiful feast of a different kind - a feast of beauty, meaning and deep connectedness to Nature and all of life.

H.D. Toro: So an old rust belt town’s lack of illusions, pretense, or false purity can make it a good place to mine for Thoreau’s alternative wealth?

UH: Loss is always a good starting place to meet up with the soul.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

An interview with the Urban Hermit, A Nobody for Our Time
By
Henry David Toro

Interested as I am in how people at all levels in our society are responding to the growing environmental calamity, and to what seem to be death throes of our western civilization, I determined to seek out individuals who characterize themselves as living out a response to this crisis, albeit not by means of traditional activist venues. Being myself a sort of deep ecologist, and knowing that nature thrives in diversity, I assume there have to be a multiplicity of these responses. The days of the mass movement driven by a collective ideology, to which individuals sacrifice their individual “light” for the greater good, are gone. Secretly, I have long envisioned a grassroots response guided not by ideology but by that which is innate, instinctual knowing of the individual. My anarchic vision would be for a change originating in individuals, in, metaphorically speaking, each grass root, each dandelion, each nondescript clover that we walk over without noticing, sort of a revolution of the “silent and plant-like,” salvation by the utterly unextraordinary.

My proclivities bring me with great interest to the Urban Hermit. It was her nom de plume at first that intrigued me. Its anonymous declaration of retreat from the world, following a tradition going back to the desert fathers, offered an interesting contrast to the mass striving for stardom, the desperate craving to be recognized in this massest of mass societies. In such a massified context, the central message of which is the replaceability of the individual, I wonder, how can we return to the spirit of localism, local economy and local culture, to the diversity that can challenge the corporate-powered centralized monoculture and its destructive, hell-bent joy ride.

So here, in the person of the Urban Hermit, is someone doing it, that is, choosing to be ordinary and to make a difference, to perhaps slow that apocalyptic joyride down simply by opening up the imaginative possibility of another way.

HDT: What is it like, being a hermit in modern life? And how do you feel being interviewed – an unlikely activity for a hermit?

U.R. First of all, Henry, everybody, or every adult, anyway, were we each able to reconnect with the invisible parts of ourselves, that is, with soul and spirit, is a hermit. Hermitry is simply a way of being whole. It is a metaphor for the particular individual located within the collective of society. What we have in mass society is a loss of that which is absolutely requisite for individuality. Human beings are imaginative as part of their intrinsic make-up; what is called “reality” must feed imagination as well as body, so to speak. We require, to be healthy, a basis which includes all parts of the human organism, rather than what we have, a materialist-defined reality that excludes spiritual reality. On the other hand, as you suggest, the last thing a mass person wants is obscurity, which has already been thrust upon her. Cut off from the stable context of community over time, families crumbling right and left, encouraged to follow a career climb that will bring one the material rewards of the culture, as well as identity and a measure of power, (but will further assure one’s estrangement from self and others), the choice to be anonymous and ordinary – a hermit - seems like choosing to be buried alive.

But the reason there is such distaste – not really distaste, but a lack of imagination about - for the local and the ordinary is precisely that materialist base. Outside of the materialist base, and that is an addictive context, by the way – since man cannot live on matter alone, the craving for spirit leads directly to addictions – if one can find her/his way there, it is possible to find a way to live human life meaningfully. Just as religion provided the context of meaning for generations before us, that realm of meaning is still open to she or he who will “knock.” The God that died - as Time magazine declared in the 60’s - was not the eternal reality that is beyond language, but the particular metaphoric version – the collective archetype - that guided western civilization since the middle ages or so.

As to being interviewed, it is a great treat for me. I have no rules against interacting with the society, but I do not seek it, even though I have mostly been convinced it will never come and discover me. In medieval times and later, if you read your Brothers Karamazov, (which I just did last year!) devout people sought out hermits for a perennial truth or a wisdom less bound by society’s fleeting standards. Did you see, by the way, Michael Caine’s brilliant performance as the hermit-hippie Jasper in the movie Children of Men? There is something undeniably nutty about us hermits, but, as with the Caine character, it is a principled nuttiness. Or better yet, a nuttiness that understands, with Blake, that the fool who will persist in his folly will become wise. Today we cannot understand someone who isn’t motivated by fame or status, whose creativity is driven not by ego but by the need to embody the wholeness prefigured in the Divine. Witness the general cluelessness regarding J.D. Salinger’s choice to do exactly what he had been led to do by the “divine” inspiration of his own writing: to become, in effect, a hermit. If we are to become a society of ordinary, common-as-daisy kings, that can bring humanity into its full flowering bloom by bloom, this change is necessary. It depends completely upon switching from the materialist base to the “spirit-in-matter” base.

H.D.T.: Two questions occur to me: what do you mean by the materialist base vs. the ‘spirit-in-matter” base, and what does it mean to “knock” on the door of the realm of meaning?

U.R. The materialist base is simply what we have in our culture to base meaning on. It is the view that the only real things are the things we can see, touch, eat – the things with physicality. There are many consequences to our having reduced reality in this fashion. We have only to switch our gaze cross-culturally and we can see that not all cultures are so drastically materialistic as we are, and that our extreme and strenuously defended (often in the name of “freedom”) materialism is a consequence of our affluence. Peasant cultures, for instance, where people have few to none of the things that for us make life interesting and “worth living,” often have an abundance of spirit. We enjoy being among these people; they make us feel comfortable, at home and “good enough,” in a way that our own cultural context does not. Indigenous cultures, where the separation is not made between spiritual and material the way it is here, do not base human worth according to the criteria of materialism, and can live meaningfully in circumstances we would consider “reduced.” To say nothing of the fact that they also know how to live harmoniously with nature, as we emphatically do not. I’ll say more about “spirit-in-matter” at some other point, but suffice to say it is a base for meaning (familiar to indigenous people but not to our deeply dualistic worldview) that rejects neither the material nor the spiritual. It is a “middle way” that is also the way of living harmoniously with the planet.

To answer your second question, I can use my own case. First of all, the expression, “Knock and the door will be opened to you,” probably is familiar to many in a historically Christian culture like ours. ("Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7) What door? That is what I might have responded with, had I given it that much thought, for much of my life. What I learned is that “the door” is not the door to belief, but to inner experience. Experience precedes belief, or ought to. And when one has experience, the matter of belief, and of different beliefs, is nullified. ( I suppose the fact that one calls a certain profound and private kind of experience “spiritual” or a “conversion” means that the mind decided to call the experience this and not that – which is a kind of belief This is precisely the reason we need guidance from tradition, so that such numinous, individual experience can be understood as being humanly meaningful. No matter how far out and obscure the images in a dream, for instance, we pay attention, and take insight from them if we understand these as being the voice of the soul.)

To materialist, rationally based people like myself, as I was raised to be, the matter of belief in God as promulgated by mainstream Christian churches is a serious stumbling block. My own situation was further complicated by the fact that my father, being an artist, moved the family a certain distance away from 100% acceptance of the materialist base. Clearly something else (i.e., my father’s painting) was very important which could not be explained materially. Perhaps partly for this reason, I would never get out of the cul-de-sac of materialism by surrendering my will to, essentially, the religion of Jesus defined by others. In my family, received, conventional wisdom already had a crack in it.

For whatever reason, I had to knock on the door for myself, the door, that is, of direct experience of the Divine. Sounds mystical, is mystical, but that doesn’t mean it’s at all exclusive. We are all mystics, as Matthew Fox among others points out. We are all mystics, but if we remain within the materialist, rationalist context we are not going to find this aspect of our nature. What is more, we will remain afraid of seeking that door. We will dismiss our wildest most profound dreaming, like Ebenezer Scrooge, as being caused by the modern, low-carb, high in Omega 3 equivalent of “ a bit of bad beef.”

My own discovery of the door was the result of a process prompted in part by the deeply unsettled state of mind I found myself in through much of my twenties and thirties. I was utterly clueless as to a path or a purpose in my life, though I ended up with a Masters degree in Divinity by 1979. Marital conflict was also a huge factor in the pain that was driving me toward exploring my inner realm by means of psychotherapy. Mind you, in my region of upstate NY, and this is still true, one does not discuss in public such things as analysis and psychotherapy. There was a sense at that time of moving out from the norms of my original culture even just in going to talk to a therapist about my depression. In combination with this was the fact that I had prepared for the Unitarian Universalist ministry and was serving a church in upstate NY during my 30’s (the 1980’s, roughly). This clergy identity was another way in which I was in, but not of, my local central NY culture. Because of the ideas afloat in liberal religious circles of that time, I began to delve into feminist spirituality, Jungian psychology, and eventually the 12 step recovery process. The process of finding out “what was wrong with me” was turning into a spiritual process! All of this culminated in the summer of 1988, after I had left my job in the church, declaring my need to “find out who I am.”

That July, my husband and I got ourselves down to Kirkridge retreat center in Pennsylvania to attend a workshop offered by Ann Wilson Schaef, author of When Society Becomes An Addict, Codependence: Misunderstood, Mistreated, and other books. The mantric phrase for the weekend, repeated often by Schaef, who encouraged personal reflection even to the extent of doing that rather than listening to her talks, was “Trust the process.” There I experienced, amidst much anguish that came up for me during the three days, the most profound awakening of my life thus far. It was Anne Schaef’s use of those words, “Knock and the door shall be opened unto you” that did it for me. For the first time I understood that the Christ was within me, and that that inner Christ (or
Self archetype, in Jungian terms) was what I must follow. My life up until that point had involved, even for our culture, an extraordinary amount of repression. I was so terrified of my interior I had avoided going near any kind of counseling or therapy during my 4 years of training for ministry, when my fellow ministers-in-training at Yale Div were flocking to it. I was terrified of that immersion that must have felt to me then like the threat of annihilation.

Well, dear reader, of course it was an annihilation! But what joy there was for me in that reunion with my lost Self, with my long-rejected soul! I cannot exaggerate. The experience at Kirkridge led to a greater commitment to 12 steps, to a conversion experience to belief in the Christian God, and to eventual confirmation as a Roman Catholic in 1990.

HDT: Yikes! Catholicism? From the perspective of the New Age, that could sound to some people like a great leap backward!

UR: Well, don’t forget, I was devoutly following my process – or my heart rather than my head - at that time. Catholicism appealed hugely to my starved protestant imagination. Also, it appealed to the powerful need I felt at that time for Father. Having been influenced by archetypal psychology and the comparative mythology preached by Joseph Campbell, I was certain that my being there in the Catholic church was part of the re-emergence of the feminine, of the Goddess, in that theology and tradition. I felt belonging as I had never known before or since, and the period of my Catholicism was great for my marriage as well. Everything was finally making sense. The fact that I was shunned by my liberal friends did not bother me. I was “On the road to find out,” as Cat Stevens, another convert to a scripture-based faith, used to sing.

HDT: I know from things you’ve written that this period of reprieve from “the struggle” for self knowledge ended with a kind of scary and profound collapse in early 1994. After all the work you had done at that point, which after all, was more change already than most people experience, and now you say things were going well with your spiritual life - why do you think this happened?

UH: Brief answer: With the new and strange experience of happiness I was having, I believe for the first time I was strong enough to experience the real initiation. Just recently I was reading an interview (The Sun) with Malidoma Some, the West African spiritual teacher and author, where he talks about the initiation experience. He mentions in a couple of places that in fact, initiates in his Dagara tribe do not always make it through the initiation. They die, literally. Initiation is real; it is an experience of coming against the power of nature, of the death-life-death cycle, of finality. This is the awareness of the initiated adult, not of the pre-initiated child. For all the work I had done, I was still not initiated. Through my first conversion, and the deep sense of safety and belonging it brought me - belonging in the sense of belonging in my life and also of belonging in a religious tradition - I had achieved innocence at last. Experience, that of meeting up with the dark aspect of God, was still ahead of me.

HDT: Are you saying that experience or initiation has to involve the actual risk of death or, as in your case, of madness?

UH: I am saying the process is not for the faint of heart, yes. On the other hand, I was faint of heart – never would have taken on the type of experience that forces one to face mortality in this way, which is perhaps why in my case the hand had to come up and pull me down. But remember, the path of initiation, while in many cases brought on by an accumulation of pain from grief or loss, is also and equally the path of desire. Joseph Campbell’s oft-repeated adage Follow your bliss was intentionally meant to bring people into initiation. No way you can follow your bliss without meeting up with the Baba Yaga for real!

HDT: I don’t remember Campbell ever saying this. You make it sound as if he had an agenda beyond just teaching comparative mythology and encouraging folks to follow their true desire.

UH: It’s not hard to figure out. He was a teacher, remember. Everything he talked about was there by intention to help convey his teaching. Remember his showing us the planet earth as seen from space, and telling us we need a new mythology that crosses boundaries and will include the planet? He preached a revolutionary message, but subtly, as befitted someone who actually thought about his audience. As he pointed out, if you are out there preaching against the status quo, you too will risk crucifixion. I hear his story about the tiger and the goats as being exactly about this issue, and as explaining his choice to “appear as” a mellow, kindly, tweedy college professor – an acceptable persona in our society. That’s what he truly was, but he was also, and really, the tiger.

HDT: As we all are.

UH: As we all are.

Interview to be continued. Next installment, the interviewer asks the Urban Hermit to talk about” spirit in matter” in an accessible way.