6 The Hermit is reliving the Exodus
It’s a journey you make in faith, you are called out, set apart, to be holy. A certain aspect of the hermit life is to put fear aside, place your trust in God, and go out into the wilderness. When you are there you will find all manner of voices saying: ‘Would that we had died... there is no water to drink.’ (Num 20:3-5) and these voices want you to go back to the comforts of enslavement. In the desert you will be able to find out all the reality about yourself, if you reject nothing, all of life is there. We find slavery is alright most of the time, we can get by, and the wilderness can be more uncomfortable as the children of Israel found out. However there are times when slavery becomes unbearable, and many people come to the spiritual life when their lives reach a point where they are no longer able to bear the suffering any more. If you are open to it then it may be that in the pain and the sorrow that comes upon you that you hear this call, if you don’t try to escape from it but enter deeply into it.
The first step to be free of enslavement is to see that you are enslaved – most people simply don’t see it because they are living from a tiny part of their minds which are repeating yesterday, and the environment around them prevents perspective. The major part of the mind, which we call the unconscious, they don’t have any contact with that at all – but still it runs their lives. Meditation and the hermit life are about bringing the unconscious into consciousness, because then you will be free of it, and able to act intelligently in the world. When you find out you never look directly and simply at anything, that everything is seen through a veil of ideation and conception then you will have a new relationship with the world about you.
Everybody has both darkness and light, and what we normally want to do is to put distance between ourselves and the dark side of our nature which is so damaging to our self-image, but it’s simply a matter of observation that if you do that it never goes away, it’s like a shadow haunting your footsteps, no matter how far you run the shadow remains with you.
You have to trust not in your own powers but in God’s. It was the same for Israel in the desert, they went to look at the promised land and came back and said ‘we are not able to go... all the people we saw (in the land) are men of great stature’ (Num 13:54,52). But the Lord had told them time and again not to trust in their own strength but in His. We all trust in ourselves and we never get close to these darknesses, we try to suppress them and so they rule our lives unseen. But God is light, and when you bring the darkness into the light where is the darkness then? You don’t have to do anything the darkness simply goes away.