Was your ascetic journey slow and steady Jack, or did you just go for it? I think there can be an inherent danger in repressing desires without filling them with something else. Something spirit-given. Do you think it's less giving up, or more like being filled with something, making the old ways irrelevant. As in "Life in all its fullness" John 10:10. Is that maybe where the "honest" ascetism springs from, where as the other could still be a bit self-serving.
I appreciate the way you and flatcaps and fatalism have conducted this conversation. Thanks to both of you for keeping the dialogue going.
Hi Jack, I like the title. Did you ever read Mark Boyle's book, The Way Home? He says he doesn't mind being a hypocrite (because people point out details of his life that are not primitive enough)-- and his lifestyle is far more authentic than we could ever aspire to. He also says that he likes to think of a spectrum between comfort and aliveness... the more comfort the less alive and so on. I have been realizing how much of a hypocrite I am. I have in many ways escaped the worst of the machine but am still swimming in it. Stuck in traffic the other day I felt so revolted and so depressed by the highway and the long lines of shiny vehicles, but there I was part of it all, adding to the congestion.
I am doing what I can over here in my corner. Waiting on the rest of the family to grow as ready as I am for a move to the country, little by little I feel the ship turning. You are right about property taxes... they are awful! Even in rural Maine they are 3,000 or 4,000 per year on some of the farms. Cheaper in West Virginia but then you never know if the mountain you live on will be torn open and your well polluted by mining chemicals. I wonder how Mark Boyle pays his taxes?.... must be by the writing. You could do that, I'll bet. I love the footnotes thing, that is your own unique style, making the footnotes almost as meaty as the essay. Thanks for writing and sharing your journey here. I look forward to hearing where you are led.
Its is good to be self-aware and not take at face value the motives of our actions. It is good to question ourselves. However, we can also waste time and energy on this. My teacher said, as long as we have a mind, we will always have doubts. There comes a point where we will have to take the leap of faith. This applies to doubt about our faith as well as doubt about the path we should take.
How much of your asceticism is hypocritical, how to justify your modern lifestyle while yearning to flee and be silent, is going to the desert just escapisim. All good wrestling of the soul, it will train your spiritual muscles. This second-guessing, however, can go on forever. One thing I have learned during my own struggles, is to learn how to open your heart to God as much as you can. God will show you what to do, but you must first learn to trust Him. To trust Him, it helps to know Him. To know God is the big chapter in the spiritual life.
There are many paths to this knowledge, be brave and follow your heart. I think that God is a mystery and we cannot approach it using logic and reason. We can however, get closer to God via means like love, awe, adoration, prayer, yearning, being still, emptying oneself, etc. It also helps if we re-acquaint ourselves with our soul. The soul, to me, seems to be the part of us that was built to know God. There is so little literature on the soul, and on Presence. If this appeals to you, search out these teachings. Try to feel God’s Presence as much as you can. It will help immensely.
That is a great term! Sadly it’s hard to see many people doing even that much. The very idea of saying no, of depriving oneself, is anathema in our world. Worse, when a parent limits their children (avoids over-indulging them with “stuff” and distractions), the children themselves, after looking around at the surrounding culture, may see their parents as being unfair, even a bit cruel or out of touch. I raise the issue of kids because they hold the cards to the future. It will be their wisdom, or lack thereof, that will dictate the fate of nations.
As always Jack, I enjoy hearing your voice. I agree that it is a problem if the connections between people are only online. I can't, and won't, let go of the hope that connections made online will someday somehow lead to real meetings, face to face. I can live with that hope. I would like to gently challenge your assertion that the possibility to live on a plot of land, in community, is only for the rich. I would like to encourage you to nurture that vision for yourself, if it is your wish. Who knows?
Thanks for continuing the conversation Jack! Sorry it has been a couple of days before I commented, but I've been away from the computer and only saw it just now. I guess this is bound to be a risk in an internet conversation between people who mistrust the medium itself!
A few barely organised thoughts:
'Only the rich can now afford the simple life' - I think it goes beyond even this. A simple life has become a status and class marker in numerous subtle ways. Natural fibres tend to be higher status than synthetics, organic food is fashionable in elite circles, and so on. The rejection of consumerism becomes repackaged as a desirable product to be consumed and Moloch sells us the dream of escaping him, cunning old schemer that he is.
The ' Atrophy of Man' section as a whole reminds me very much of Illich's diagnosis of our ills, and I would largely agree.
I like the idea of hypocritical asceticism. I've mentioned Judith Shklar in my newsletter, but I haven't really talked about one of her core insights which is that a society, to some extent, must order vices. For instance it must say things like, 'yes snobbery is bad, but cruelty is worse'. The motivation for this is the simple recognition that life is complicated, we are flawed, and often the best we can manage is to choose the lesser of two evils.
If you accept this general outline, then the vice of hypocrisy is an interesting one. In our purity-obsessed partisan political culture, it is often held up as a very terrible thing - 'this politician did not act as he said' - but that seems to me to be merely a side-effect of the simple-mindedness of the times. Not to say that hypocrisy is good; but it is a vice that generally only appears when you are at least paying lip-service to the good, given human fallibility it is close to inevitable in anyone who tries something very hard, and - most important of all - there are worse wrongs.
The little zones of freedom make me think a little of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, (although with much less over-the-top flowery prose!)
“…I was treated to a sickly-sweet detergent smell on a regular basis.”
Truly one of the banes of urban reality. I lived in a densely populated area for years, where a friend of mine called it the “stench of suburbia”. Some days you couldn’t sit in your tiny backyard without feeling like somebody was posting sticky notes to your lungs.
My grandaughter wants an I Pad. Her mother thinks it's a great idea. Her father thinks it's an awful idea. Her mother does not want her to miss out on technology. Her Dad reads to her every night. She's only four years old.
Nate Hagens of The Great Simplification also has some stunning predictions on the fast impending energy crisis. We can’t live this way much longer - even if we want to - kind of puts all the culture war nonsense into perspective!
Was your ascetic journey slow and steady Jack, or did you just go for it? I think there can be an inherent danger in repressing desires without filling them with something else. Something spirit-given. Do you think it's less giving up, or more like being filled with something, making the old ways irrelevant. As in "Life in all its fullness" John 10:10. Is that maybe where the "honest" ascetism springs from, where as the other could still be a bit self-serving.
I appreciate the way you and flatcaps and fatalism have conducted this conversation. Thanks to both of you for keeping the dialogue going.
Hi Jack, I like the title. Did you ever read Mark Boyle's book, The Way Home? He says he doesn't mind being a hypocrite (because people point out details of his life that are not primitive enough)-- and his lifestyle is far more authentic than we could ever aspire to. He also says that he likes to think of a spectrum between comfort and aliveness... the more comfort the less alive and so on. I have been realizing how much of a hypocrite I am. I have in many ways escaped the worst of the machine but am still swimming in it. Stuck in traffic the other day I felt so revolted and so depressed by the highway and the long lines of shiny vehicles, but there I was part of it all, adding to the congestion.
I am doing what I can over here in my corner. Waiting on the rest of the family to grow as ready as I am for a move to the country, little by little I feel the ship turning. You are right about property taxes... they are awful! Even in rural Maine they are 3,000 or 4,000 per year on some of the farms. Cheaper in West Virginia but then you never know if the mountain you live on will be torn open and your well polluted by mining chemicals. I wonder how Mark Boyle pays his taxes?.... must be by the writing. You could do that, I'll bet. I love the footnotes thing, that is your own unique style, making the footnotes almost as meaty as the essay. Thanks for writing and sharing your journey here. I look forward to hearing where you are led.
Clara
Its is good to be self-aware and not take at face value the motives of our actions. It is good to question ourselves. However, we can also waste time and energy on this. My teacher said, as long as we have a mind, we will always have doubts. There comes a point where we will have to take the leap of faith. This applies to doubt about our faith as well as doubt about the path we should take.
How much of your asceticism is hypocritical, how to justify your modern lifestyle while yearning to flee and be silent, is going to the desert just escapisim. All good wrestling of the soul, it will train your spiritual muscles. This second-guessing, however, can go on forever. One thing I have learned during my own struggles, is to learn how to open your heart to God as much as you can. God will show you what to do, but you must first learn to trust Him. To trust Him, it helps to know Him. To know God is the big chapter in the spiritual life.
There are many paths to this knowledge, be brave and follow your heart. I think that God is a mystery and we cannot approach it using logic and reason. We can however, get closer to God via means like love, awe, adoration, prayer, yearning, being still, emptying oneself, etc. It also helps if we re-acquaint ourselves with our soul. The soul, to me, seems to be the part of us that was built to know God. There is so little literature on the soul, and on Presence. If this appeals to you, search out these teachings. Try to feel God’s Presence as much as you can. It will help immensely.
“hypocritical asceticism”
That is a great term! Sadly it’s hard to see many people doing even that much. The very idea of saying no, of depriving oneself, is anathema in our world. Worse, when a parent limits their children (avoids over-indulging them with “stuff” and distractions), the children themselves, after looking around at the surrounding culture, may see their parents as being unfair, even a bit cruel or out of touch. I raise the issue of kids because they hold the cards to the future. It will be their wisdom, or lack thereof, that will dictate the fate of nations.
As always Jack, I enjoy hearing your voice. I agree that it is a problem if the connections between people are only online. I can't, and won't, let go of the hope that connections made online will someday somehow lead to real meetings, face to face. I can live with that hope. I would like to gently challenge your assertion that the possibility to live on a plot of land, in community, is only for the rich. I would like to encourage you to nurture that vision for yourself, if it is your wish. Who knows?
Thanks for continuing the conversation Jack! Sorry it has been a couple of days before I commented, but I've been away from the computer and only saw it just now. I guess this is bound to be a risk in an internet conversation between people who mistrust the medium itself!
A few barely organised thoughts:
'Only the rich can now afford the simple life' - I think it goes beyond even this. A simple life has become a status and class marker in numerous subtle ways. Natural fibres tend to be higher status than synthetics, organic food is fashionable in elite circles, and so on. The rejection of consumerism becomes repackaged as a desirable product to be consumed and Moloch sells us the dream of escaping him, cunning old schemer that he is.
The ' Atrophy of Man' section as a whole reminds me very much of Illich's diagnosis of our ills, and I would largely agree.
I like the idea of hypocritical asceticism. I've mentioned Judith Shklar in my newsletter, but I haven't really talked about one of her core insights which is that a society, to some extent, must order vices. For instance it must say things like, 'yes snobbery is bad, but cruelty is worse'. The motivation for this is the simple recognition that life is complicated, we are flawed, and often the best we can manage is to choose the lesser of two evils.
If you accept this general outline, then the vice of hypocrisy is an interesting one. In our purity-obsessed partisan political culture, it is often held up as a very terrible thing - 'this politician did not act as he said' - but that seems to me to be merely a side-effect of the simple-mindedness of the times. Not to say that hypocrisy is good; but it is a vice that generally only appears when you are at least paying lip-service to the good, given human fallibility it is close to inevitable in anyone who tries something very hard, and - most important of all - there are worse wrongs.
The little zones of freedom make me think a little of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, (although with much less over-the-top flowery prose!)
“…I was treated to a sickly-sweet detergent smell on a regular basis.”
Truly one of the banes of urban reality. I lived in a densely populated area for years, where a friend of mine called it the “stench of suburbia”. Some days you couldn’t sit in your tiny backyard without feeling like somebody was posting sticky notes to your lungs.
My grandaughter wants an I Pad. Her mother thinks it's a great idea. Her father thinks it's an awful idea. Her mother does not want her to miss out on technology. Her Dad reads to her every night. She's only four years old.
Great article!!
Nate Hagens of The Great Simplification also has some stunning predictions on the fast impending energy crisis. We can’t live this way much longer - even if we want to - kind of puts all the culture war nonsense into perspective!
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549?i=1000574967600
https://youtu.be/-xr9rIQxwj4