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

Finding Your Happy Place

Although it’s hard for me to leave the lush Hawaiian valley I call home, I travel to the mainland about twice a year to visit the friends and family who would otherwise spend a disproportionate amount of time and effort visiting me. Two weeks ago, I got up early, drank one last cup of tea on the porch of the tiny hut which holds my kitchen, turned off the water lines and solar system, loaded my suitcase into a red and grey wheelbarrow shiny with rain, and pushed it through the tall grass. By the time I got to the riverbank where my neighbor was waiting with his truck, my feet were slimy with mud, and the “nice” pants I’d selected for the plane were speckled with the dirt and grit flung up by my sandals with every step.

I used to despair at the impossibility of making it off my remote homestead in a presentable state. I would get to the airport and feel self-conscious about the burrs on my sweater and the soggy black footprints my boots left on the floor, or the hair I’d forgotten to brush for several days. Now I find comfort in the mud that clings to my ankles and the dirt that hitches a ride under my fingernails. I feel claimed by the valley, as if its steep green walls are saying, Sure, take a trip, but don’t forget where you belong.

My first few days in the city are always bewildering. I feel shocked by the presence of so many cars, on so many streets and overwhelmed by the social events that involve not only my close friends, but friends of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. I marvel at the assortment of tasty foods I rarely eat back home: vegan ice cream made from cashews, cups of coffee which are so much stronger than the green tea I normally drink, and mainland fruits like apples and blueberries.

I can tell that these trips to the “real” world are good for me. I learn a lot from my city friends, who are involved in art, politics, and activism in a way I cannot be, living in as secluded a location as I do. They expose me to new ideas and new experiences I would never encounter in the cozy confines of the valley walls, and I drink these things up thirstily, newly conscious of the limits of my knowledge and perspective. The conversations I have outside the valley serve as a bulwark against the complacency that can settle in when I speak only to the same small group of neighbors day after day, mulling over the same set of hyper-local concerns. I remember (with some shock) that the tiny rural community where I live is not, in fact, the center of the universe, and that there’s more to life than broken chainsaws, lost dogs, and rivers that flood just when you were hoping to go to town.

But no matter how much I appreciate these aspects of my visits to the city, it’s only a matter of days before a sense of despair comes over me. How can my friends live with so much noise, all day every day? How can they live without trees to prune or gardens to tend? How can they accept an orange sky at night, the stars nowhere to be seen? How can they live so much in their minds, without tools to tinker with or structures to build?

I open up a map on my internet browser, and gaze morosely at the grid of streets, calculating how far I would have to walk to reach a forest. The thought of driving in a car just to go for a walk in the woods is shocking to me. Instead, I take long walks around the neighborhood, my mind filled with complaints at the absence of tall trees. I spend more time reading and writing, taking advantage of the relative absence of physical labor, and do my best not to seem too affronted by city life—after all, this is my friends’ home.

I remind myself that many visitors to my homestead feel an equal and opposite sense of discomfort about my living situation. They put on a brave face, while privately asking themselves: How can she live without art galleries, restaurants, people? How can she live in such tiny, ramshackle structures, without a washing machine, a toaster, or a fridge? How can she talk to the same handful of people day after day, hardly ever meeting anyone new? They gaze at the thick forest and feel just as lost as I do when I contemplate the endless grid of city streets. They try their best not to seem too affronted by the mosquitos or the perpetual damp in their clothes, but when I drive them back to town on their last day, their spirits visibly brighten—just as mine does when I get ready to leave the city and go back to the forest again.

The late Thich Nhat Hahn wrote, “There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path.” In other words, happiness is a practice that we can work with daily, no matter where we are in the world. True happiness isn’t a thing we find when we’re finally in the ideal environment or with the ideal group of people, but can instead be the magic sauce that transforms anywhere we go into the ideal place, and anybody we’re with into the ideal person or group of people.

That being said, it can feel so much harder to practice happiness when you’ve formed a strong opinion about something. The mind says, “How could anyone be happy here, under these circumstances?” In its ever-so-helpful way, the mind builds a case for unhappiness, and argues that case unrelentingly. When my mind does this, I can very quickly convince myself that the only place I can be happy in the entire world is the six-by-twelve porch where I drink my tea in the mornings when I’m at home in Hawaii—thirty-six square feet, on a 5,610,000,000,000,000 square foot planet! I start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, my mind is exaggerating.

When I’m feeling those waves of stress and anguish in the city, it can be easy to tell myself that any time I spend outside the valley is time I am squandering. Having been given the precious opportunity to live in such a special place, why am I wasting a single moment outside of it? By maintaining friendships and connections in the outside world, aren’t I diluting the intensity of my experience as a solitary homesteader in a wild and remote part of the earth? Maybe I should rush home, close the gate behind me, and devote myself to the worship of those misty green cliffs, letting the noisy and confusing outside world carry on without me.

At the same time, I know from experience the importance of practicing when it isn’t easy. Whether you’re training for a marathon, learning an instrument, or trying to master the unruliness of your own mind, some of the most important learning happens when conditions aren’t ideal. In the city, happiness can be an uphill jog; it makes me sweat, and I’m not used to sweating quite so much. But just like a challenging run, I suspect that it also strengthens my heart, increases my lung capacity, and helps me correct the weaknesses that I would otherwise overlook for years at a time.

After my predictable meltdown around the halfway point of a visit to the city, I usually find my footing again. I wean myself off the brain-frying cups of black coffee that I can’t seem to keep myself from drinking when I’m there and return to my little thermos of green tea. I find a quiet place to meditate, even if it means perching on a pile of suitcases in my friends’ cluttered basement. I go to the forest, even if it means a long bus ride or a nerve-wracking drive on the freeway. Most importantly, I remind myself to practice happiness, the same way I would practice good posture or any other skill.

As the overwhelm subsides, I begin to appreciate the gifts of the city once more—the wide-ranging conversations, the encounters with strangers, the convenience of doing laundry in a machine, and the opportunity to fly home with a renewed appreciation for the quiet and predictability of life in a small, rural community. I’m grateful for my life in the rainforest, and for the city friends who gently insist on expanding my world, feeding my mind, and reminding me that we are all on this journey together, whether our vantage point is a misty valley or a busy street.

As spring arrives, I wish you all a beautiful season of flowering and growth. May you all have the opportunity to practice happiness—and to find it wherever you go.

Sincerely,

Hilary T. Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

The Magic of Oneness

Dear Reader,

A short way down the trail from my cabin in rural Hawaii, there is a little old man who lives in a shack with a pig, three dogs, and four cats. Everyone worries that he is getting too frail to live in our remote off-grid community—carrying bags of dog food across the river in a faded green backpack, feeding his pig with overripe breadfruit he hauls down the trail in five-gallon buckets. Although we all lend a hand when we can, none of us are equipped to give him the kind of full-time care he’s getting closer and closer to needing.

A few weeks ago, he had a serious health crisis. My neighbor heard him shouting and called an ambulance, then lifted him into a wheelbarrow and rolled him all the way to the river, where the paramedics would be waiting to pick him up. That evening as we sat around under the monkeypod tree, my neighbors and I all wondered if he would come back. Perhaps he would go live in town, which was surely the right move for a person in his fragile state of health.

But just a few days later, I was on my way to check the water lines when I ran into him on the trail, a heavy bag of clothes and groceries in each hand. He was skinnier than ever, with pipe cleaners for legs and white hair sticking out from under his ballcap. He reminded me so much of the stray cat that had made its way back to my land even after I’d driven it three miles and several water crossings away. I stopped and offered to carry his bags, and he readily accepted. Even as I made this automatic offer, I felt a twinge of weariness—I was already so tired after a morning of working on my land in the hot sun, and still had much to do. After carrying the bags all the way to my neighbor’s place, I would have to return the way I had come and climb up the waterfall, which was my original errand. Although my body had extended itself reflexively to my neighbor’s aid, my mind began to protest at the cost.

Yet when I picked up my neighbor’s bags and felt the weight of them transfer from his body to my own, something miraculous happened: I had a sudden, visceral awareness that this transfer was taking place not between two distinct beings, but within a single organism. I wasn’t depleting “my” energy reserves—I was experiencing a kind of homeostasis, with energy flowing naturally to the place it was needed the most. Although my mind grumbled after the fact, my body had carried out the gesture automatically, the way certain trees will automatically send sugars to their less-healthy neighbors through roots and fungal networks underground.

Later, I wondered: did I stop and help my neighbor because I perceived the two of us to be a single organism, or did that brief and striking shift in perception arise from the physical act of making his burden my own?

Living off-grid, you can’t help but become aware of energy: where it comes from, where it goes, and the many ways it is used, recycled, and transformed. Light comes into the solar panels and the tool batteries greedily consume it, snug in their plastic chargers beside the power strip.

The energy stored in the tool batteries then goes into turning screws, cutting wood, and mowing grass. You spread the grass clippings in the garden to build the soil, and before you know it you have papayas, pumpkins, and sugar cane to feed your hungry body at the end of the day.

You scheme about ways to save energy—a more efficient light bulb, a lower-wattage computer monitor. Keeping your tools in a place that doesn’t require you to climb up and down a ladder fifteen times a day, which will cause you to burn fewer calories, which will make your stash of pumpkins last a couple of days longer, which means you won’t have to carry a pumpkin all the way home from your neighbor’s garden half a mile away, which means you will have more time and energy left over to finally fix your chainsaw, which means you can help your neighbor cut up the windfall bamboo, thus repaying the debt of energy left over from the time he helped you fix your solar system.

You notice the ways your neighbors are constantly transferring their energy to you—through their labor, their gifts of food and other resources, their encouragement on hard days. You transfer energy back in the form of your own gifts and words of encouragement, and the strength of your own body applied to a common task. The flow is organic, spontaneous, and unplanned. There is no ledger, yet all debts get paid; no accounting, and yet all that which is depleted gets restored.

As an editor at Hierophant, I don’t frame roofs, cook meals, or harvest vegetables with the authors I work with, but there is nevertheless an aspect of shared labor, and therefore of community. When editing a manuscript, I receive the gift of the author’s wisdom; at the same time, I apply myself to the project of helping that author express their wisdom in the clearest possible way. Because many of the books I work with deal with spirituality, there is also a sense of chipping away at a shared mystery, and becoming part of one long chain of human endeavor to understand and celebrate the divine.

Recently, while editing a book chapter in which an author was describing a significant event in her life, I had an experience not terribly unlike the moment when I picked up my neighbor’s grocery bags. Gazing into space, as I do at regular intervals when I’m writing or editing, I tuned into the emotions the author was describing, allowing them to play out in my own body. As I pondered the idea she was trying to express and toyed with different ways of expressing it, I felt a sense of oneness with the work in which I forgot that an “author” and “editor” existed, and instead felt myself to be part of a unified field of humanity, all working on these deep problems of life, all shouldering the burden of being human together.

Although there are practical reasons for putting an author’s name on a book and giving that book its own title and cover art, this is really for the sake of convenience. As don Jose Ruiz likes to say, “We’re all working for the same boss.” Just as flowers come out of the earth, ideas come out of the great pool of human history. A flower couldn’t exist without the earth, and a book couldn’t exist without thousands of years of humans thinking, feeling, searching, and dreaming. Whether or not you ever have your name on a book, you’ve probably helped write one just by being alive. All labor is shared, whether we realize it or not—and realizing it can make us feel happier, more grateful, and more alive.

I’ll never forget the time I carpooled to a meeting in town with several of my neighbors. We were sitting in the bleachers of the high school gym, listening to some engineers give a presentation about plans for our road, when I happened to glance down. My feet and shins, I noticed, were caked with dried mud—the natural consequence of hiking through several streams on my way to the car. I rarely remember to rinse off my legs before going to town, and was feeling a little embarrassed at being seen this way by the town folks, when I saw that my neighbor’s feet were also brown with mud. Turning my head to look down the length of the bleacher, I saw that we all had the same dusty streaks on our calves and dried mud between our toes.

The sight of so many muddy legs nearly moved me to tears. I felt a sense of comfort, belonging, and something akin to pride. My neighbors knew the weight of a wheelbarrow, the value of a pig, a pumpkin, or a five-gallon bucket, the sound of rain on a metal roof. They knew what it was like to sit in your chair in a stupor at the end of a long day, too tired even to read; they knew the night-blooming flowers and the moon. When one of us was sick or weak, the rest of us didn’t carry that person’s burdens for them—we just carried them, period, because they were there to be carried, and we weren’t many beings, but one.

Readers, as we transition from spring to summer, may you all be supported by the energy of sun, earth, and community; and may your roots feed others, and be fed in return.

Sincerely,

Hilary Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Click here to read Hilary's previous essay, "Hitchhiking to Freedom."

A Tale of Two Waterfalls

Dear Readers,

For the first three years I lived on my land here in rural Hawaii, I didn’t have running water. Instead, I hauled drinking water from a spring in five-gallon jugs, and set out buckets to catch rainwater for washing dishes. This sounds like a hardship, and it was—but the upside of living without running water is that I was forced to walk to a nearby waterfall every day to bathe.

At first, my visits to the waterfall were utilitarian: I was sweaty and needed to rinse off. The water was cold, and I would wade in quickly and get out just as fast. As the days and months went on, however, my relationship to the waterfall changed. I realized that soaking in the cold water reduced the pain in my back after a hard day of work, and sometimes erased it completely. A dip in the waterfall was also extremely effective at resetting my emotions if I was feeling sad, stressed, or overwhelmed.

It wasn’t long before I’d stopped seeing the waterfall as a mere substitute for a hot shower, and begun to see it as a kind of mother, always ready to wrap her cold, wet arms around me whenever I needed a hug. I brought my sorrows to the waterfall, and my joys as well. I never walked past without pausing to say hello and pay my respects, even if I didn’t have time to get in for a swim. Other times, I’d sit on the rocks and utterly lose myself in the sight and sound of the waterfall, enchanted by the sprays of yellow leaves floating down from the trees to land on its surface, the prawns scuttling across its pebbly floor, and the ever-changing tune of its cascade.

Like the heady excitement that goes along with getting to know a new human friend, I found myself wanting to know everything about the waterfall, to catch up with it every day and see what was new. If I went to town for the day, I missed the waterfall and wondered what it was doing. When I got back home, I’d visit as soon as I could, eager to see its latest colors, hear its sounds, and submerge myself in its waters no matter what the weather was like that day.

Two years ago, my next-door neighbor offered to add me to his water line, which is connected to a separate waterfall. I was very appreciative for what was a huge gesture of trust and benevolence in a community in which the most basic comforts are hard-won. I bought some PVC pipe and the strange purple ointment that seals it together, a hose valve and a long green hose, and by the end of the day I had joined the ranks of people with running water. Now, my life was defined by relationships to not one, but two waterfalls: the one which had kept me clean and healthy during my first hard years on the land, and now this second rivulet, which was steeper and more austere, and whose high and rocky pools did not invite swimming.

Befriending this second waterfall was an entirely different matter. Hidden away on the side of a steep and crumbly cliff, guarded by dense thickets of coffee trees and storm-felled Java plums, it was not a place to visit every day. Instead, I bowed to it from a distance, catching sight of its pale white stream high on the cliffside as I walked home after a trip to town. Once, during heavy rainfall, I heard what sounded like a jet engine passing over my land. After a few minutes of baffled searching, I realized it was the waterfall, swollen so much from its usual flow that I could see it from my own front porch, high in the trees like an apparition.

Last month, a friend of mine who is an avid naturalist came to visit me on my land. As we sat on my front porch drinking tea, he continuously expressed curiosity about aspects of the natural world to which I’d never paid much attention. What was that bug doing? What was that bird eating? What kind of insect would hatch out of that foamy green mass of eggs? I felt a mixture of awe and embarrassment as I realized that my friend’s attention was capturing thousands of details that I routinely overlooked. He was loving, noticing, and attending to the animal life of the land, the same way I attended to the waterfalls.

He pointed out a jumping spider on a sugarcane leaf, and we walked over to take a closer look. The spider had a smooth, shiny back and milky aquamarine eyes. My friend explained that he’d once made friends which a jumping spider, and got to know him well over a period of about eight months. Jumping spiders are intelligent, he said—they can recognize individual humans, and even learn tricks. As we stood in the sunlight, admiring the spider, I let this startling fact sink in. The creatures around my home knew and recognized me—were attending to me, in their own particular way. What would happen if I finally started attending to them?

In the days after my friend went home, I found myself seeing and hearing things I’d never seen or heard before. I watched ants crawling on a bright pink ginger blossom, and two cardinals calling to one another across my ‘awa patch. I peered at the small white eggs my friend had discovered in a rolled-up scrap of tarp, wondering when they would hatch. I considered the elegant brown spider on my wall. I realized there was no end to the ways in which I could expand the range and depth of my attention, and in so doing, come into relationship with the whole world, and not only its human residents.

What good does it do to attend to the natural world? Certainly, we can speak of the benefits to ourselves—a sense of peace and health, a heightening of empathy—but does our attention benefit nature? Does a waterfall gain anything from being loved and admired, a jumping spider from being known? Surely, attending to a pine tree won’t stop it from burning in a wildfire, and listening to the minute details of a heron’s footsteps won’t stop the factories whose effluent pollutes the river in which that bird hunts for fish. Is attention merely a feel-good exercise, or is there something more to it?

In the modern world, most of us have been taught to reject anything that isn’t quantifiable. Gazing with love upon a waterfall or a spider doesn’t appear to “do” anything, and as we move out of childhood we learn to give up these pastimes in favor of more “productive” activities. If we care about nature, we sign petitions, organize protests, and campaign for earth-friendly policies—laudable and necessary actions which are the “yang” to attention’s “yin.” When it comes to protecting nature, we rightly put our energy into urgent doing. But I wonder if there is also urgency to the manner of our being—if our local waterways, spiders, and birds would benefit, in some mysterious way, from our stepping back into relationship with them.

Last week, there was a huge storm, and my neighbor and I had to climb up to a high pool of the waterfall to fix our water line, as we often do when the inlet gets blown out. This sounds like a hardship, and it is: the climb is difficult and dangerous. We grab at roots and at frayed scraps of rope, our feet slipping on the crumbly cliffside. My neighbor never fails to point out the spot where another neighbor of ours was killed by a falling rock several years before, as well as the latest landslides and downed trees.

But the upside of this hardship is that I know the water. I’ve seen it running brown and furious, thin and drought-stricken, clear and cold. Not only that, but I know my neighbor: some of our best conversations have taken place as we scrambled up the rocks, stories and confessions pouring out amid commentary about valves, fittings, and basic hydrology. The waterfall binds us to itself and to each other; in our mutual attending, we all become more alive.

It's not every day that we can stop a wildfire, save a coral reef, or make some other concrete “difference”—but no matter where we are, we can elevate our relationships through the quality of our attention. We can be friends to the wind, the water, and the jumping spider, without even knowing what “good” it does. Perhaps there is something more precious to this not-knowing than we will ever realize, and more good than we can ever perceive.

Sincerely,

Hilary Smith

Senior Editor, Hierophant Publishing

Click here to read Hilary's previous essay, "The Downside of 'Having it All.'"

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.”