Scenes from the lives of modern hermits

[rex]

Nice photo essay with notes (pdf download):

 

http://www.parallelozero.com/images/stock/download/32d35042e03172bb476a2d62880af5d72111dd95.pdf

 

One featured hermit combines Taoism with Christianity and likes speaking to animals. Uncoincidentaly enough he’s a Franciscan ...

 

Edited August 18, 2018 by rex
tYops

[Fa Xin]

Sounds like a fun read. Thanks!

[rex]

Cheers Fa Xin! A picture is worth a thousand words and there’s some good’uns there!

[lifeforce]

Wow, incredible. Thanks for this rex.

[silent thunder]

That was refreshing rex.  Thank you!

[gj551]

i liked this ^.^

[Marblehead]

20 hours ago, silent thunder said:

That was refreshing rex.  Thank you!

I thought you said, "That was refreshing sex."

 

[rex]

On 21/08/2018 at 2:12 PM, Marblehead said:

I thought you said, "That was refreshing sex."

 

I gotta admire your sauce!

[Geof Nanto]

Thanks for the link, Rex. All these people come across as abiding in great dignity. It’s an intense form of a path that's appropriate for many people in the second half of life. To my observation, for a young person it would most likely be a futile attempt at escape, except for short periods of retreat.  

 

Jung elucidates this theme in his essay The Stages of Life. He describes consciousness (as in the conditioned mind / acquired mind) as the source of our ‘problem,’ contrasted with nature and instinct. For modern times, the ‘problem’ disrupts the psychological progression of life’s stages. The cultivation of the Self that ought to logically be the provenance of maturity, experience, and wisdom, is undermined and overthrown by the artificiality of consciousness, not only the continued adolescent behaviour of older people as an example but more deeply the modern failure to cultivate value.
 
Thought, like desire and achievement, does not address the problem of consciousness but exacerbates it. The tendency of our thinking is rigidly linear. We only understand that kind of thinking which is a mere equation from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. Jung laments how few people are aware of the character of the stages of life, how many enter them successively neglecting their significance and failing to make the necessary and healthy transformations.

 

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”   
 
Jung uses the sun to illustrate the stages of life. Visualize a circle, then place a cross within it to create four quadrants, which, from the lower left clockwise to the lower right, represent the sun’s progress across the sky, and our human stages of life from infancy to old age. The first quadrant is childhood, when our consciousness emerges from nowhere to begin its progress. Youth should not be impeded but allowed to grow, experience, and learn. In the long midday and afternoon span the adult years of career, profession, social obligation, and self-image, conforming to the many responsibilities of the ego and the instincts of the species. 

 

“Obviously it is in the youthful period of life that we have most to gain from a thorough recognition of the instinctual side. A timely recognition of sexuality, for instance, can prevent that neurotic suppression of it which keeps a person unduly withdrawn from life, or else forces him into a wretched and unsuitable way of living with which he is bound to come into conflict. Proper recognition and appreciation of normal instincts leads the young person into life and entangles them with fate, thus involving them in life's necessities and the consequent sacrifices and efforts through which their character is developed and their experience matured.” 

 

Then the sun begins to set, and new lessons by the aging must be observed and taken to heart in order to appropriately derive the lessons of this last stage. Jung draws out these lessons:
 
For the mature person, however, the continued expansion of life is obviously not the right principle, because the descent towards life's afternoon demands simplification, limitation, and intensification—in other words, individual cultivation. A person in the first half of life with its biological orientation can usually, thanks to the youthfulness of their whole organism, afford to expand their life and make something of value out of it. But the person in the second half of life is oriented towards inner cultivation, the diminishing powers of their organism allowing them to subordinate instincts to spiritual goals. Not a few are wrecked during the transition from the biological to the spiritual sphere. 

 

For the aging person it is a duty and necessity to devote serious attention to themselves. After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illuminate itself. Instead of doing likewise, many older people prefer to be hypochondriacs, misers, pedants, applauders of the past or else eternal adolescents — all lamentable substitutes for the illumination of the Self, but inevitable consequences of the delusion that the second half must be governed by the principles of the first. 

 

 

(The above is adapted from an article written by Meng-Hu http://www.hermitary.com/thatch/?p=1787 .  

His website http://www.hermitary.com/ has extensive information on hermits including some quality videos. )

 

[Cueball]

Great stuff, thanks Yueya and Rex.