Coming out of a village on the plains of central India into the squalor of a city undergoing unrestrained development soon took its toll, and within 24 hours my throat was sore and my nose was running as my body tried to adjust to the high levels of pollution. I escaped into the countryside one day in order to find relief from the petrol fumes, but by the evening I was back in my room wheezing and coughing. After a couple of days of this I was getting furious headaches and body aches, and was glad when it came time to take my flight out.

No Tears

I flew to the north
overtaking the rains
that made their way
along the west coast

The Indian plains
at this time of year
are intensely hot
and the winds are driving

The rivers have dried
and in search of water
the peasant walks long
across the baked earth

The land all about
is arid and barren
and it seems for sure
that death must conquer

I raise up my eyes
and want to cry out:
“We are all exhausted,”
but even tears dry before falling

40 The Meditation Centre

The first book was entitled Contemplating Creation (1992-1993) and comprised three main chapters:

1 Sri Lanka (The Hills)

2 India (The Plains)

3 Sri Lanka (Back in the Hills)

The second book was called Out of the Silence (May 1993 – May 1994):

4 India (The Rains)

5 Sri Lanka (The High Hills)

6 India (The Southern Plains)

A collection of sermons on The Eremetic Life I gave to the Missionary of Charity sisters in Kandy were in another (undated) book.

And a collection of short sayings or Reflections (1994) on the meditative life were in another book.

I have included basic navigation for ease of progress through the material.

* * *

The Christian background is obvious, and I had converted around 1990 to Catholicism under Fr. Bede Griffiths at Shantivanam.

But I was also very much under the influence of the person who became my main meditation teacher, Acarya Godwin Samarartne, and he in turn was influenced by Jiddu Krishnamurti.

The two journals especially show the latter’s influence I think, being similar in structure to Krishnamurti’s Commentaries on Living Series, but with, of course, my own ideas and observations.

Two other main influences were the Bible itself, which I sometimes quoted from, and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which influenced the structure of the Reflections.

The thing that strikes me now is how much of my mature thinking about meditation and the monastic life were already formed during these years, though the expression took another, and rather different, form at that time.

J.

If there is some peace and calm and space in your life, then maybe you will be able to find God also in the small breeze. To live your life with such a degree of sensitivity that you are able to find God even in the small breeze means that you have made your life into a prayer. We can say that there are two ways of praying, the first is where you are speaking, and it means pūjā, sandhyā, and so on. The second is where you are listening. This is really the greatest art of life, learning to listen very carefully for truth to manifest itself in different ways, and in all aspects of our lives. What happens in that space where you have brought reaction to an end, where there is self-silence, is that there is great internal clarity, great inward balance, and in that space there God may be born.

I’m always rewriting my own words, and I rewrite everybody else’s too. So there is this sentence of St Matthew and St Luke. Matthew puts it like this: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (5:48). I think it sounds impossible and you think what can I do about such a demand? But we can interpret it to mean: be holy. ‘Be holy as your heavenly Father is holy.’ To be perfect means to be complete, to be whole, and therefore holy. And you become whole when all movement of denial has ended and you can see the totality of yourself. St Luke says: ‘Be compassionate, even as your Father is compassionate’ (Luke 6:56), and when you accept the totality that is the place where compassion can arise, so I feel it’s a good rewrite that bridges the two versions.

We return at the end to this point about vocation, it’s not just a vocation to the hermit life, but everyone receives this call to give birth to God in their lives. And holiness also means to be separate: be separate, be yourself, be whole, be an individual, undivided against yourself. The hermit is someone who is trying to respond to that call with his whole being, and has set aside his life for that. And in that commitment there is the wholeness of life, the holiness of life.

1 These Things I Have Seen

Can we learn not to fear pain? Can we be hurt without being subject to reaction? Can we be engaged with suffering, our own and other peoples? Because that is compassion – you can only suffer-with-somebody if you haven’t cut yourself off from them.

There’s a peculiar strength in non-resistance, which is what Jesus knew, and it’s what Gandhi knew also. People use power and position and knowledge to defend themselves, but it’s just different sorts of violence. And can you see this: you only defend vested interests. When you’ve invested in something, physically or psychologically, you are seeking security. What you invest in is property, you want to possess something, be it a house, or be it an idea, and you want that something to have continuity – but nothing has continuity, so if you’ve made an investment of any sort there must be fear once more, and you’re no longer living in love.

But if you don’t have possessions that you want to defend, then two things may happen: one is, that you find room in your heart for the violence of others, and maybe in that acceptance it can be transformed; but also that calm, undistorted heart may act as a mirror in which people can see themselves clearly, perhaps for the first time, and maybe they can see that there is no justification for their behaviour, this was Gandhi’s great insight – if you don’t resist and you remain steady, eventually those involved in violence or oppression may see in the mirror of their relationships that they are acting unjustly. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t. But we can know for sure that if you react to violence with your own violence – which is self-defence – then what you do is create a spiral of violence. You may be able to suppress it, but you won’t be able to transform it, it will still be there, and at some point it will find an outlet.

Now a hermit is interested in breaking through this spiral of violence in the world, both political and personal – they are not really a different movement. So meditation is about breaking the chains of action and reaction, both internally and externally. You have to see the truth of this: that there is darkness and light in us all, no one is immune, and therefore we are all responsible for the violence in the world. To a large extent what is inside of you will find a place outside of you, so if you’re divided inside yourself there will be conflict on the outside also. So you have to bring these things to an end and you have to do it through psychological revolution, which is a turning away from yourself and your vested interests, which is metanoia and conversion, a turning to God so that His life can find a home in you.

There is a certain humility in being able to accept what is given, especially accepting signs of other people’s love and care, everybody has a need to express their love in this way, and you know there is a certain power in giving, it’s especially important to see this if you’re involved in the active life, running schools, hospitals, and so on. You can cut yourself off from other people giving to them all the time. Sometimes you see in primitive society that the person who gets to be the headman of the tribe or village is the one who can give the most away. The tribe would gather every year and the person who has the most is the person who can give the most and he becomes chief. You may laugh, but it’s exactly the same in the most sophisticated society: because the United States can give the most they get to run the United Nations. So I hope you can see how this works.

Also, I feel that if you are able to accept all that comes to you, you will be able to grow in holiness in every minute of your life. There are three great things that people fear existentially, the three things that Buddha saw before renouncing all to seek the truth, they are: sickness, old age, and death, and when you see that these things are coming to you too. I think you must ask yourself, what is really important in life? and surely the most important thing is the birth of God. If you can accept what is given then where is the problem? The problem only arises when there is resistance.

17 The Hermit is listening for the Small Breeze

The hermit is most interested in seeing an end to suffering and an end to fear, so I feel if we can look at this, just to see how fear arises, in relationship to what it arises, and how it continues, if we can see the whole structure of it and how unnecessary it all is, then maybe we can bring it to an end. When you are full of fear then there is no place where love can abide in your life. In his first letter St. John says: ‘There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear’ (John 4:18), but it also works the other way round, and if you are full of fear that casts out love so I think it’s very important that we get to the bottom of this.

When we’re thinking about fear then we should distinguish between psychological and physical fear; the latter is a good and appropriate response in the face of present danger. If you’re walking in the woods and you come across a wild animal you get a shot of adrenalin and hopefully you are able to deal with the situation. But psychological fear is not of that kind at all. Psychological fear always exists in regard to the unknown. The mind is the organ of self-security, and in and of itself it is performing a vital function in life, which is to maintain the integrity of the organism. This is obviously necessary, but if it’s not kept within strict limits then we end up sacrificing life itself, in any meaningful sense of the term, in order to secure ourselves from any pain or disturbance. Psychological fear is a construction of thought, and we can put an end to it, because we are responsible for it; and I feel we need to take responsibility for it, because we fear not reality but a projection or a shadow, so in the end what we fear is our selves, and it’s a self-perpetuating trap.

We fear anything that is unknown, precisely because it is unknown, because we are not able to control it, we have no power over it, and therefore it is, at least potentially, dangerous. First of all we fear the present, meaning the present moment of living, because it contains so many unknown factors, therefore we are always trying to understand the present in terms of the past, we are interpreting the present moment trying to make it conform to a pattern which is known, but in doing so we miss the uniqueness of what is before us, and we miss the beauty of it also because we are not attentive to what is there, it’s as though we were always seeing with double vision, there’s the reality of the moment and superimposed over it the shadow of the past.

The other thing we fear is God, who is by definition unknowable, and I’m sorry to say that religion, for the most part, is simply an attempt to bring the unknowable into the realm of the known, where it can be made safe. Most of what we’re pleased to call ‘religious’ practice consists of no more than the self-seeking to control the most unknown and incomprehensible factor of all, which is God. No one can see God and live (Exodus 55:19ff), as Moses was told; for the self to come face to face with God means death to the self. In the light of the truth about self the darkness of self passes away. Fear is the very movement of self, because it is the movement of the past looking for security and conditioned by pleasure and pain. To cast out fear is to cast out the self and its accumulations, which really keeps us from fulfilling our call to holiness. To be empty of self is to have made room for God, which is why faith is so important. Faith – which is not belief – enables us to live our lives with some degree of openness. If you trust in God and His creation then there is no need to live in fear.

16 The Hermit doesn’t defend Himself

Now the common idea is that the hermit life is an extremist life, but the heart of this way of life is simplicity and harmony that gives room for God’s plan to find fulfilment in life. To my mind those who are led by the forces of division are the ones who have renounced the world, the hermit is the one who has found it. You don’t need a lot for God to be born into the world, you don’t need great business interests or a whole library of books, in fact these things can be a great hindrance as the Pharisees and the scribes show. All you need is an open heart, one that is listening, and that is responsive to this call. If you are present to God and your life finds fulfilment in that then you don’t have great material needs: sufficient food, clean clothes, a shelter over your head is enough (Luke 2:7).

A professional is someone who has developed a marketable skill which he sells and thereby makes his living, But the hermit is one who has found some silence in his own life, and hopefully he’s helping others to find silence also, but that’s not a marketable thing, you can’t measure it or package it, so the hermit is strictly an amateur, he’s not doing what he’s doing for payment of any kind, neither for money, not for cultural capital either, which we may define as power, position, respect, and so on, you can also trade in these things, but a hermit must discard economics and calculation of this sort.

An amateur works for love, he loves to see the flowers blossom and to see people blossom too. He loves the trees and the birds, and this love shows in the care he takes of the things around him. He loves the night sky even though it’s of no possible use. I feel if you really knew how to look at the night sky and if you realised just how vast it is, you would be enlightened. The universe is unbelievably big, the nearest star is light years away, and you are the tiniest atom – and yet God loves you and cares for you. I think if you can just learn to walk quietly in the world, you will find that you are in the midst of revelation.

I think the hermit is someone who is always at home because he lives in God’s presence, and therefore he is no longer alienated. From all the time since the fall we have been alienated and divided against ourselves, because we have been alienated from God, and Jesus came to show us and to lead us back to the Father, he is the pioneer (Hebrews 2:10) who shows us the way back into right relationship with God, but that must become a reality in one’s life.

God is present in all the joys and all the sorrows, the happinesses and the pains, He is there when you are in relationship with Him. The world is the primal sacrament, and it comes before ever there were temples and mosques and churches. The whole of humanity has this sacrament, and it’s only in the development of culture that people get divided from one another. We divide over culture, but we should remember our natural togetherness as the human race, as part of the totality of creation: one people under one Father, joined together in God and in creation.

If you are at home in creation in a loving relationship with the world and with other people, then you will also be at home in eternity. But if you’re divided against yourself now if your life is an endless round of conflict internally and externally, you will carry that with you into eternity also. So the question is: is the kingdom of heaven a place that we can enter now? Because if it is then we will also enter it when we pass from this world of time and space into eternity. It is the meaning and purpose of creation, as I see it, that God should become present in our lives now, then when we pass into the fulness of God’s presence when we die, we may find that we are at one.

15 The Hermit must be Fearless

If there is no meaning to creation, if we’re born, have some pleasures and sorrows, and at the end of it all we just die, and it’s all simply an accident of natural forces, then only two attitudes are worth pursuing: maybe you seek pleasure in this passing world, or when you see the futility of that, your only escape is to separate yourself from this transient world and its sorrows. Most people waste their lives pursuing the first path; and the second path, unfortunately, has been spiritual practice throughout the ages. But this second way is based on a kind of radical dualism, in which God is seen as totally transcendent, and when that is the case creation has no ultimate significance.

But we see in the creation story that God made everything good (Genesis 1:4,10,12, etc.). In the origins God is at one with the world, and the world with God. Now if you look around you, at the stars in the heavens, the birds in the trees, the seas and the earth, they still all fulfill their nature perfectly. There is no problem until Adam and Eve arrive on the scene, and then we get alienation, degeneration. So if creation was, and is, harmonious and at one with the Creator, we have to ask what is it that brings about duality? The problem starts when Adam and Eve are in the garden and they have an idea, and that idea is that they want to be something other than the way they were created, and they’re persuaded to this idea by what is called the most subtle creature (Gen 5:1 ff), so what is the most subtle thing in creation? Surely the mind is, is it not? They are persuaded by the mind to be something other than what they are, what they want is to know good and evil and to be like God. These are stories of course, they are myths, but there is great meaning in them, great truths are embedded in them when you get below the surface, and see the depths of what is being said. Before they have this idea they are simply walking around in the garden, and God is present, but they reject their limitations, try to move away from the reality and totality of who they are, and that creates the primary dualism, and they get thrown out of the garden, out of love’s presence, and of course their descendants start killing each other (Genesis 4 ff).

Now if you’ve heard this call, I feel that you must place your trust in God and in creation, which means accepting your limitations, and your darkness and light, and my experience is that in the moment that you accept your poverty, not wanting to be elsewhere, that is when God is present to you. That is the meaning of the atonement. Jesus didn’t refuse the darkness which he could have done of course, he could have called upon ‘more than twelve legions of angels’ (Matthew 26:55) to save him, but he didn’t, he accepted the darkness, the pain and sorrow of the cross, and it was the suffering of one who is totally desolate, all sin is on the cross, and sin is separation from God and Jesus felt this which is why he asked ‘My God my God why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:55). But still he placed his trust in God and at the end, ‘crying with a loud voice he said, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46). That is why the cross is so meaningful: Jesus bears the pain and sorrow of the whole world, and out of that comes the resurrection, the rising to new life.

Since the fall of Adam and Eve people have only related to creation by seeking to dominate it, and if you look at history you can see that the fall is still continuing. As we get more and more enmeshed in thought, as culture becomes more important so we are getting farther away from nature and from God. If you look at the lives of tribals or peasants, whether farmers or herders, they still have a kind of reverence for the earth. But as culture has developed we have become very alienated, enclosed in factories and offices and suburbs, and we’ve lost contact with nature. We get caught up in theories and ideas, and with repeating them and passing them on, and we’re trapped in this world of the mind, the world of thought and culture, and we’ve lost contact with the earth, our mother, and with God our Father. And when there is this alienation and domination, when people have stopped wondering at the world about them, it’s at that point that the destruction of the environment begins. Thousands of trees cut down in the Amazon each day, huge dams destroying ancestral homelands, and all the rest of it.

We were saying before how we need healing inwardly, and how others need healing, but we’re at a point in history where the earth itself, which is being torn apart by greed, also needs healing. The world is a vehicle for God’s self-realisation, and it’s being torn apart by those who do not know God, except the god of their own vain imaginings. You needn’t be romantic or sentimental about creation, you must see the truth of it, which means seeing that there is this process of life and death. It’s not what your ideas would want it to be. But what are you placing your trust in – your fears and desires, your need for continuance and security? or do you place your trust in God and His creation? We fear life and death, we ignore it when it can be kept at length, and when it gets too close there are other more devious ways of separating ourselves from it. Death, or the dissolution of self is a primary fear that we all have. But if you trust God, if you turn away from yourself, that is metanoia, that is conversion, and when you’re no longer trying to be away from reality, when you are walking with God once more, then you are back in the garden.

14 The Hermit is not an Extremist

An open heart sees the totality of the other person and doesn’t reject any of it, and that loving attitude can help another find healing and wholeness. All people have both a dark side and a light side to their nature, and sometimes the dark side can be very dark indeed. But if you can be with that, if you don’t reinforce the divisions, then healing can take place. Therefore the hermit is full of compassion – the word compassion is from the Latin, and it means to suffer with another – if you can allow that suffering a place in your life, then you can transform it. Generally people can’t allow suffering a place, their own or that of other peoples, they want to get away from the sorrow.

But if you can allow somebody to suffer and say don’t be frightened of this, then it may be that they will no longer be divided against themselves. So a hermit is one who can live with another’s suffering because he sees that is where true healing can take place. Both meditation and the hermit life can be seen as part of the healing ministry – it’s of great importance that we heal people physically of course, but the healing that we all really need is the spiritual healing that takes place when you have some sort of relationship to God, when you have opened your heart and can be led by the Spirit.

An open heart means not condemning others because you’ve stopped condemning yourself. If you’ve been touched by God’s love in your life, if you know God’s forgiveness, how that has made you whole, you don’t condemn others either, and then they have room to grow. The key is love. You must know God’s love of you, you must love yourself, and from that you will be able to love others also, and that love can bring about a transformation in another’s life. You must realise that God is able to bring about this healing in all people, nobody is outside the pale, even if it takes a long time for them to respond.

A hermit doesn’t run hospitals, schools, or aid and relief projects, all the normal church activities, and the reason is not that they are unimportant, but in the end they are insufficient, because healing somebody’s body is not sufficient for salvation, nobody was ever saved because they were well-educated. Salvation in the long run is what is important. You see, education, hospitals and so on can be a sign of love, but the problem is we stop at the sign, it’s really very lazy, we think when we’ve taught our children or bandaged someone’s wound that that is enough – but it’s not.

A hermit witnesses to something beyond material comfort, security, education, and so on. A hermit gives witness to God, who may be present in these things, but He is also beyond all these things. There’s this saying in the Gospel that ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4). It doesn’t say that man shall not live by bread at all, but he shall not live by bread alone: people have to be fed, be healthy, and educated, and all these things, but it’s not what you live by.

There is a nice term in the Celtic church that I like, which is ‘amchara’, it means a spiritual friend. The Celtic church was founded on the eremetic life, coming out of the Syrian desert, travelling to southern France and Marseilles, where John Cassion founded his monasteries, and then coming into Ireland and Scotland, where the early missionaries lived as hermits, and out of the depths of that silent life they evangalised the whole of northern Europe. I came across this term in a life of St. Columba.

You see a hermit is not a guru who has something you don’t, and if you’re lucky he will share that with you too, a hermit is not separated from others in this way. An amchara or hermit is one who shares with equals, as Jesus said: ‘No longer do I call you servants... you are my friends’ (John 15:14-15). We’re equals because we have been raised to the status of children of God, we have the same limitations but in the end the full flourishing of man’s spiritual nature is simply to realise his God given capacity to go beyond himself so that the life of God can be present to the world.

13 The Hermit Lives in the Presence of all Creation

The hermit’s place is not to give answers but to help others find their own reality, to hear this call from God so that they are able to go forth from that. Otherwise all you do is conform others to your pattern of thinking which is of no consequence at all. If people just start repeating what they’ve heard that has very little meaning, one must learn how to think clearly, express yourself coherently, and so on, it doesn’t mean agreeing with this or that idea, but being able to think for yourself.

The world is full of answers, everybody has an answer for every kind of problem you can think of – gurus, psychotherapists, politicians, they’ve got answers, and you have only to look to see that everybody is still suffering, so evidently it doesn’t work. What happens is that someone goes to, say, a psychotherapist, and they learn to speak a new language, and they learn to speak with a certain sophistication about themselves in Freudian or Jungian terms or whatever, and all it is is conformity seeking security. But a hermit should be totally uninterested in that, because all that happens is that the problem gets reformulated, and a hermit is interested in seeing an end to the suffering.

True suffering is to be cut off from God, true suffering is when you have no relationship to truth, and that is sin. So the question is, can we put an end to suffering in our lives? No one can do it for you, so can you find sufficient space in your life so that suffering can come to an end? This is what is important, is it not? To my mind there is no point at all in people learning a new language, or engaging in a new set of rituals, that is not conversion. The conversion that matters is when people convert to God – that conversion is of total significance. This was what the Lord taught also: ‘Repent, and the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17). Turn away from yourself, from your own petty concerns, from all your self-centred activity, and the kingdom will be upon you, will be present to you. Surely that is the conversion that matters.

Another reason a hermit must have ears not answers is because people need to talk, and nobody is simply listening – there are the professional listeners, but they obviously have an ulterior motive. Everybody else is too busy, but a hermit does have time to listen, and he doesn’t want to be elsewhere, because he’s discovered this wonderful secret that God is present in all things and in all people. In talking about oneself that is a place where self-revelation can take place – not when you’re still on the superficial level, but when you go deeper. The hermit gives room where people can speak about themselves and thereby come to a deeper self-knowledge.

12 The Hermit meets Everyone with an Open Heart

And people would always be welcomed by the fathers in the desert, peasants would come, and also bishops, they often made arduous journeys to seek out these people who had found some silence in their lives, some sense of the wholeness. The reason the fathers went into the desert was to face the devil, to find out the totality and the reality of this ambiguous existence, you see the devil is there in the selfish instincts, in the search for security at any price, and so on. When these things rule your every action, then your life is being run by the forces of division, rather than by a commitment to truth and love, which are the forces of unity and wholeness.

A hermit then, is one who is called aside not to exclude others but to be of service to others in a particular way. Everybody has this capacity for love, it’s present in some people, and potential in all. The hermit’s call is, I feel, that having seen how important that is, then he wants to create the space in which that birthing process can take place –you can’t come to a hermit and he gives birth for you: you have to do the birthing yourself, but I feel the hermit can help make it possible by creating the conditions in which it can become a reality. The hermit is always ready to break the silence to listen to the word incarnate.

People get entangled in their ideas and they think: the Lord is here, the Lord is there, he’s in the liturgies, he’s in the books, and so on, but you must find God present in all places or else it loses any meaning. Especially you must see that God often comes to you embodied. It’s another time that you must be sensitive in community, you get used to the people around you, you think you know all about them and even what they think and so on, and you’re no longer listening. There’s an art to listening, and nobody is teaching it: at school you’re taught, not to listen, but to develop memory capacity, to be able to reel out other people’s words and ideas, and you are terrifically rewarded for that. But obviously that is simply teaching conformity, and then of course you are not able to listen with any degree of attention. It would be much more useful if children were taught how to listen, how to be aware and sensitive, then they would be able to find things out for themselves, and that would be a skill for life.

There’s an art to listening, and it requires a great inner silence, it’s a silence that arises when you are totally engaged with another, and are present to the totality of that person. There is real humility in that, when you are able to listen without your own opinions and reactions. The hermit is listening because what he’s listening to is the word incarnate, to God in a body. Everybody is unique and the hermit is interested in how God is uniquely manifesting Himself in this person.

11 The Hermit should have Ears not Answers