Solitude and Sangha

When I tell new friends and acquaintances about my life on a ramshackle off-grid homestead in a remote part of Hawaii, one question that often comes up is “Don’t you get lonely?” People imagine a solitary life in which my only companions are the birds, and where interactions with other human beings are few and far between; a monastic existence characterized by noble silence and quiet contemplation.

I’m quick to reassure them that, far from going days or weeks with no human contact, I live just a few steps from neighbors whose lives interweave with my own. On a typical day one or more of my neighbors will stop by to share a piece of fruit, ask for a hand moving a heavy object or nailing up a board, use my satellite internet to make a phone call, or sit on the edge of my porch and chat. Although I do travel long distances to visit friends who live outside the valley, on a day-to-day level my social life feels richer and more replete than many of the city dwellers I know.

But I have to admit that every now and then, a week will go by when this comforting daily rhythm of visits is disrupted—a neighbor is sick or out of town, or heavy wind and rain make it too difficult or dangerous to tromp across the stream or brave an obstacle course of falling tree branches for a visit. During such times, I taste an enormity of solitude. I wake up knowing that I may not see or speak with another person all day, or that a five-minute exchange in the morning or evening will be all the social contact I have.

Sometimes, these experiences of solitude are intensely creative. I’ll write, draw, and play guitar, astonished at how quickly time passes—even wishing the storm or flood would last longer so I can delay my re-entry into the social world. Far from craving social contact, I’ll feel mildly averse to having my daydreams interrupted by the thoughts and queries of others. I’ll think of the shamans and monks who practice solitude as part of their spiritual paths and feel grateful that I’ve been given the opportunity to do the same.

During such times, solitude feels like a cocoon in which my soul is being formed. I can stare into space for hours, watching the mist moving over the dark green valley walls and letting my mind roam in wordless contemplation. I feel a sense of deep intimacy with myself, and a fierce sense of loyalty to my own process of discovery. Gazing at clouds, sweeping the floor, and listening to music, I feel completely content.

Other times, however, the solitude feels challenging. Every morning, I’ll wake up to a mountain of hours I must somehow climb, only to find myself at the bottom of that mountain again the following morning. Like Sisyphus with his boulder, I can sometimes despair at the futility of the task. Far from finding stillness, my thoughts proliferate to fill the silence until my mind feels like a firehose I can’t shut off. The precious intimacy turns into an overwhelm of mental activity, and the deep insights of quiet contemplation are replaced by neurotic overthinking. I’ll walk out to the swollen river and gaze at the impassable water, wishing I could just drive to a friend’s house in town; I’ll eat the last of my bananas and avocados, wishing I’d gathered more before the rain.

I tell myself that this, too, is part of the cocoon. The ability to confront the contents of your own mind comes in handy when you live in a remote place, and is a prerequisite for spiritual practice in many traditions. The same self that gives me the songs and drawings that emerge during my periods of creative solitude is also responsible for that firehose of thoughts I find so hard to deal with. If solitude has shown me anything, it’s that my mind is an endlessly creative force whose powers I am only beginning to understand.

Spiritual traditions from around the world emphasize the importance of solitude as a vehicle for awakening. People who practice meditation may log weeks, months, or even years in silent retreat, intentionally limiting their interactions with others in order to explore the depths of the mind. Shamans and medicine people seek out time in the wilderness, where their only companions are the mountains, the desert, or the deep forest. Religious texts from Buddhism to Christianity tell stories of seekers going into the wilderness to better hear the voice of God.

In India, students of classical instruments such as the tabla and sitar will sometimes undertake a forty-day chilla during which they lock themselves in a room and do nothing but practice, while subsisting on a meagre diet; there are tales of musicians developing extraordinary powers as a result of their chilla (not to mention a few stories of musicians going insane!)

When treated as an extreme sport, solitude has the power to dissolve the ego and profoundly alter our consciousness, but even in gentler doses, it can bring about meaningful transformation and bring us to a deeper understanding of who and what we really are. In some moments solitude can still the mind, opening new dimensions of focus, contentment, and inner peace. In others, solitude reveals our inner maniac, whose fantasies and projections gleefully crowd out reality. The opportunity to watch this pendulum swing back and forth is a great gift, if we are prepared to receive it.

A few weeks ago, the biggest storm I’ve ever experienced moved over the valley in the middle of the night. I woke up to a solid wall of rain pounding on the metal roof of my hut. Deafening crashes of thunder echoed off the valley walls, and flashes of lightning bathed the room in otherworldly white. There was no possibility of going back to sleep. I lay, and watched, and listened, wondering how long this could possibly last. I felt profoundly grateful that I was no longer sleeping in a tent, which would surely not have survived the onslaught. I also felt a pinch of sorrow: a dear friend of mine was supposed to come visit for the weekend, and with the river flooded there was no way she’d be able to make it.

I wondered how long the storm would last—days? weeks?—and how I would hold up. Would this be one of those deeply peaceful and creative spells of solitude, or would I be phoning my friends in town to say, “Help, I’m trapped on my homestead with a crazy person and she won’t stop talking to me?” Would I glide around my land with the serenity of a Zen monk, or wander in circles looking for something to do?

The rain ended an hour before dawn, and to my surprise, the day was sunny. My neighbors all wandered out of their homesteads to share reports on the water that had licked their front steps and drowned their gardens, and lawnmowers pulled up onto the porch just in time. We all walked out to the river together and stood around marveling at the way it had escaped its banks, completely obliterating what had once been our dirt road. I knew it would be days before anyone could get in or out.

But with the sun shining, the sky blue, and my neighbors at my side, I felt the same sense of joy and excitement upon seeing the ruined road as I used to feel for snow days when I was a child growing up in the northeast. I realized that this time, the storm hadn’t ushered in a period of solitude at all. On the contrary, I knew that for the next few days, all of my neighbors would be out and about, repairing fences, clearing debris, and trading speculations about when a bulldozer would come to dig us out, and who would be driving it. There would be plenty of opportunities for shared labor, laughter, and commiseration. We would drag muddy branches out of the walking trail in the daytime, and gather for board games at night.

I remembered that in Buddhism, sangha, or community, is one of the Three Jewels, equal to Buddha and Dharma in the process of awakening. A supportive community anchors our physical and mental health, so that we can take the great leaps that are sometimes required of us. The benevolent presence of others can act like the ballast in a boat, giving us stability when we need it most—and if we’re lucky, we can play that role for others in return. Living off-grid, I am grateful to have both solitude and sangha, like two trellises on which beautiful flowers can grow.

As we approach the summer solstice, I wish you all the support of a loving community, and the deep and mysterious solitude in which your soul can thrive.

Sincerely

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Is the Mind an Escape Room?

Dear readers,

Sometimes—many times—my work at Hierophant just makes me grin.

Reading Professor Chris Niebauer’s brand new book last weekend was one of those times. In The No Self, No Problem Workbook: Exercises and Practices from Neuropsychology and Buddhism to Help You Lose Your Mind, he writes, “What if life is an escape room? This is a game where a group of people pay to be locked into a room, find clues, and solve puzzles in order to get out. Maybe consciousness locks itself in a room of hidden clues and then goes on the adventure of finding its way out.”

For those unfamiliar with the tenets of Buddhism, the concept of anatta, or “no-self” describes the idea that the self is an illusion from which our mental suffering stems. In his previous book, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology is Catching Up to Buddhism, Professor Niebauer applies his expertise in neuropsychology to the concept of anatta to demonstrate how neuroscience supports the Buddhist idea of a fictional self. But how are we supposed to escape our thinking minds?

The No Self, No Problem Workbook provides the tools to do exactly that: outwit the “escape room” of the limited, imaginary self—dominated by the left brain—and experience the weird, wonderful, and expansive realm of “no-self,” accessed through the right.

Not only do I love escape rooms, but I have a soft spot for books that jolt me out of my ordinary state of consciousness and do something to my brain. The No Self, No Problem Workbook is exactly that kind of book!

After spending a pleasant afternoon working through the thought experiments, riddles, and hands-on practices designed to quiet the thinking mind and induce this “no self” experience, I truly felt I had entered an altered state of consciousness. Suddenly, I could feel the workings of my brain in a way that had never been quite so clear before. Even as I write this, several days later, I feel a renewed sense of excitement about un-knotting this magical, elusive, and endlessly confounding illusion called the self, and discovering what lies beyond it.

I first stumbled upon the power of “no self” when I was in the midst of a health crisis in my late twenties. I’d been suffering from severe, chronic insomnia for several years. This maddening condition had proved resistant to just about everything—yoga, meditation, herbs, therapy, acupuncture, Western pharmacology. My quality of life was very poor. Every day was a struggle, with no relief in sight. At the peak of this suffering, I found myself Googling things like at what point do you die from insomnia?, and researching whether euthanasia was legal in my state.

I was well aware that these thoughts of death were alarming. But what could I do? I’d consulted every doctor and alternative practitioner under the sun, and nobody had been able to help me. If this painful and debilitating condition was truly incurable, it seemed to me that death should not be ruled out as a viable alternative.

After sitting with these thoughts for a week or two, I had a brilliant idea. If I was considering death as a possibility, why not practice being dead? I could try death on for size, right here, right now, by lying on the floor and pretending I didn’t exist. I wouldn’t have to sign up for the real version until I was sure that I liked it.

Intrigued by this idea, I lay on the floor in savasana—otherwise known as corpse pose, in yoga—and stuck an eye mask over my eyes. My head soon began to fill up with its usual weary thoughts—All this traffic on our street is driving me crazy. I’ll never finish the novel I’m working on—but now there was a difference. For every thought that came up, I now had the perfect response: So what? I’m dead!

It thrilled me to be “dead” in this way. Suddenly, I had no problems. I no longer had to fix anything. The traffic on my street had nothing to do with me. My unfinished novel would remain so, and that was not my problem. My suffering lifted almost instantly, and I experienced a mental lightness I hadn’t felt in years.

So what? I’m dead! became my mantra, and savasana my go-to yoga pose. Whenever I felt myself becoming overwhelmed by real or imaginary problems, all I had to do was “die” for a few minutes and my relationship to those problems would right itself. Needless to say, my thoughts of actual death dissipated completely—and not long afterwards, my insomnia cleared up too.

I think Chris Niebauer would say that in teaching myself to “die,” I’d cracked an important puzzle in the escape room. After all, if I was dead, I had no problems to solve—and if I had no problems to solve, there was no longer anything for my left brain to do. With my left brain temporarily stunned into silence, my right brain got some breathing room. The contracted, suffering “self” who had to deal with traffic and write a novel flickered off like a hologram, leaving behind…what, exactly? Bare existence. Light and shadow. Sound, vibration, color, scent.

Suddenly, it didn’t matter if I achieved great things. It didn’t even matter if I recovered from insomnia! As Niebauer writes in his first book, No Self, No Problem, once you become aware of the left brain’s talent for inventing problems out of thin air, “You may even stop trying so hard to change certain things in your life, or to become this or that in the future, because you begin to notice that the problems you are trying to overcome are mostly creations of the left-brain interpreter and you see how once they are overcome the left-brain interpreter will simply create new ones.”

In other words, the left brain’s full-time job is to endlessly produce more problems for the imaginary "self" to shoulder. If you’re tired of having problems, get in touch with your right brain—and ditch your self.

Ten years after my insomnia crisis, I still like to practice being dead. Lately, this takes the form of selecting a random moment in the day and imagining in as much detail as possible what that moment would be like if I wasn’t there.

For example, if I’m at home in my cabin, I’ll listen carefully to the sound of the frogs, the creaking bamboo, and the rushing stream, and imagine what these things sound like when I’m not there to hear them. I imagine the cabin exactly as it is, but minus me: still, empty, a couple of dry leaves blowing across the floor. I see the stars, the dark shape of the hills, and the tools leaning against the wall of the shed, and imagine that these things are simply here, without anyone looking at them.

This practice brings me a deep sense of peace. I like to know that this place has a life without me, that this world has a life without me—indeed, that I have a life without me, or at least without the jumble of thoughts, plans, and opinions my left brain would have me believe is “me.” As I sit in my cabin, imagining that I’m not there at all, I become more present than I am when I am there. And if that’s not a riddle worth pondering, I’m not sure what is.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten was from a young woman who advised me to “ride loose in the saddle” if I wanted to survive as an off-grid homesteader. She was referring to a willingness to do any job rather than clinging to specific career plans, but I’ve found that this advice applies splendidly to just about any aspect of life. When you ride loose in the saddle of jobs, you find yourself learning skills and making connections you never would have imagined possible. (Rare plant propagation? Sure! Translating medieval French poetry? Okay!) And when you ride loose in the saddle of the self, you understand that the self is just for fun. As Niebauer would put it, the self is what pure consciousness dreams up to entertain itself. We’re not supposed to rigidly defend it, we’re supposed to play with it—wholeheartedly, and with great delight.

When you embrace this attitude, life becomes a lot more fun. Opportunities arise where before you could see only dead ends. If your “self” is just a suggestion, you really can write your own ticket in terms of jobs, relationships, and just about everything else. If your “self” can be anything, it is threatened by nothing. You can enjoy the escape room, knowing it’s just a game.

I will always treasure the moments in my life where I’ve gotten a glimpse of no self—that bright, expansive, infinitely peaceful state. Indeed, someday, I hope to make it my permanent address. As Niebauer writes, “It is possible to make no self your home, and self a place you sometimes visit.”

May we all “lose our minds” in 2023, and treat our selves like the fun, well-meaning, charming illusions they really are.

Sincerely,

Hilary Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Click here to read Hilary's previous essay, "Pruning Trees, Words, & Life."

Ready to tackle the escape room of the mind yourself? Check out The No Self, No Problem Workbook.

In this groundbreaking workbook, Professor Chris Niebauer takes a deep dive into the incredible link between Eastern philosophy and recent findings in neuropsychology, which is now confirming a fundamental tenet of Buddhism: anatta, or the doctrine of “no self.”

The exercises and practices in this book are designed to help you recognize and disidentify with the fictional self created by your left-brain interpreter. Learn how to become more present, find inner peace, and see the world through the eyes of what Niebauer calls “clear consciousness.”