Category Archives: monk in the world

A Prayer Is a Prayer, Is a Prayer, Is a …

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‘I’ll carry on with my Gita then,’ I said to my partner hermit after we’d been discussing something for a while.

‘I’m enjoying reading my prayers this morning. So I’ll read a few more then read a few verses’ (of the Bhagavad Gita).

‘Reading’ my prayers? Is that what I’m doing? Surely a prayer – prayers – are for praying? Anyway, not simply for ‘reading’.

Of course in this particular instance, the forms the prayers are taking – on the most superficial, worldly, material level –  are as words written by human hand (mine) on paper pages in a little book.

But, right now, the big question, the existential question really, is have I been merely reading those prayers? Or have I been praying those prayers?

Then there’s another, equally existential, concern that arises: How to know the difference. Reading? Or praying?

I feel like saying that the first thought that comes to mind – the first answer to reach the tip of my pen on this page – is this: Actually, the answer has come in the form of a rhetorical question:

If a prayer is prayed, how would it ever even occur to me query if  it is in fact a prayer, and not just words on a page to be read?

Yes, first thought best thought here I think. When a prayer is prayed, even if its form is words written on a page, there is a movement beyond those words on the page. In fact, there is a transcendence of all that is of the material world that takes place.

A prayer is what it’s always been: a prayer. The forms prayers take are, I think, literally endless, uncountable, and can never be submitted to categorisation by us humans.

Prayer is for praying, that’s the lesson for me. Just pray.

You’re the Voice, Try and Understand It

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One of the things I like about one of our local coffee shops is that they play a nice wide selection of music. Mostly popular songs from pretty much every decade back to the ’60s. I think they have one of those looping playlists you hear sometimes in shops and cafés.

It must be quite a long list because you don’t necessarily hear the same songs repeated at every visit. Which is a nice thing too.

Anyway, yesterday the chorus of a song I heard played got stuck in my head. The song, You’re the Voice, was a hit around the world in 1986 when it was released by Australian singer John Farnham.

It’s essentially a protest song reminding us that we all have a voice, and encouraging us to use our voices to stand up against corruption and war. One of the co-writers Chris Thompson missed out on going to an anti-nuclear protest because he slept late. He felt so badly about sleeping in that he wrote the lyrics reminding us about taking personal responsibility and making our voices heard.

Okay, back to the chorus getting stuck in my head.

You’re the voice, try and understand it
Make a noise and make it clear Oh woah.
We’re not gonna sit in silence
We’re not gonna live in fear Oh woah

You see? It’s very catchy, and an excellent piece of advice too. And, for a hermit monk, it’s actually advice I could and do aspire to live by. Just not quite in the sense the song intends perhaps.

This morning, when my partner hermit suggested we just sit in silence for a while, I spontaneously started singing the chorus, though a slightly modified version:

We’re just gonna sit in silence
We’re not gonna live with fear.

Then, as I sat in said silence, I got to thinking about the words of the chorus.  Nobody wants to live in fear, yet it is an aspect of the human condition and something so many people live with constantly all over the world. All through human history as well.

The message of the song reminds us all that we have a voice which we can use to help create a state of affairs in which we don’t have to live in quite so much fear, fear that’s coming at us from so many sources.

For me, this is a vital, fundamental, and absolutely essential principle. Without those who do stand up, those who do use their voices to try to right wrongs, then, well I can’t think of what that might mean.

Yet, for me, I’ve chosen silence. Not only chosen I must admit: temperament, my own nature, health, all are factors that have made silence the best course for me to take. Silence as in seclusion from the world, minimizing outside imput, and reducing as much as possible the attachment to the world and its things and fears.

And this way of living ironically allows me to use my voice in my own ways to address the Truth as I see it; to help effect change and contribute to the healing so sorely needed.

Being ‘out there’ and engaged with worldly things and activities and interacting with people constantly causes me so much anxiety that it threatens my health and ability to act in the world.

There is also the personal choice aspect, common to so many who live a contemplative life. Silence – when I can actually achieve such a state – gives me the energy and clarity to write; it gives me the mental, emotional and spiritual ‘space’ and energy to pray, to contemplate, and to foster the ‘good vibrations’ I feel are also necessary to turn the world towards peace, healing, and truth, as well as to assist in maintaining the wellbeing of all life.

The world, and all of life, needs both those who can’t or won’t be silent (I’m definitely not suggesting the world needs more noise). We all need people who can and do raise their voices against war, poverty, corruption, and all the ills that plague us.

And it needs those who are able to ‘just sit in silence’. The work to be done is the same; the outcomes perused are the same; and in essence the means themselves aren’t all that different either. Silence as mentioned can include the use of our voices in ‘quiet’ ways, in ways that don’t have to relate so directly the affairs of the world.

It really is a symbiosis: Those of us living secluded and contemplative lives with our prayers, our witness, our creative endeavours, support those active and vocal ones out there trying to heal the world.

And at the same time those out there in the world support the secluded and contemplative ones. Their efforts and hard work, and simply knowing they are there, are encouraging and nurturing for the secluded and contemplative ones.

We are One after all.
Yet our voices are all unique, each and every one.
That’s what I understand to be true.

As Promised: A Prayer of Praise and Gratitude to Trees

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Greetings friends

This post is from several months ago. I was reminded of it as I read a book that’s partly about humankind’s relationship with trees.

Seems like a good good moment to share this prayer with you all once again

At one point in my last post on Bhakti (if you missed it you can find it here) I mentioned that I hoped to soon publish a recently written prayer titled A Prayer of Praise and Gratitude to Trees.

Even as I typed those words in that previous post, I thought: ‘soon’? Why the delay? What’s wrong with now? So, without any further delay, here is our next post and in it I’m very glad to be sharing that prayer with you.

As my comment in that previous post explained, this prayer (and others too) is one more little step in my ongoing effort to cultivate a mood or feeling, and a practice, of Bhakti or loving devotion to the Divine.

If you’ve read that last post you will recall that I stressed my deeply held and heartfelt conviction that the Divine is everything. As I may have actually said: there is only the Divine; one, whole, partless and indivisible. Now, to knowingly repeat myself: The Divine is one without a second; that’s all there is.

This prayer to trees is an attempt to acknowledge that oneness of which each and every tree – just like you and me and all other beings – is a manifestation, each with its own unique name and form.

This prayer, though composed by this particular name and form, is in fact just one more expression of that oneness we all share. As such it is as equally yours as it is mine. As I said earlier, I am glad we are sharing this now.

A Prayer of Praise & Gratitude to Trees

Dear Aranyani

With this prayer we greet you. We offer you our praise, and our gratitude.

When we come into your presence, you remind us that in meeting and greeting you, we are in fact meeting and greeting God.

We bless you and we thank you for the shelter that you steadfastly provide to so many living beings. In so doing you support, protect, and nurture the continuance of life for all of us.

Your every exhalation is for so many other living beings the breath of life, of Prana – the life force itself.

You remind us as we witness your strength, your resilience, and your calm flowing with the winds of change that we too share that strength, resilience and the potential for calm flowing with those winds of change that are also constantly buffeting us.

Om Aranyani Namah

PS Who is Aranyani? She is a Hndu deity of the forests and all that dwell within the forests. Basically she is the Goddess of Trees and here is simply the name and form representing all trees.

Sacred Strings, Sacred Tree

Self Enquiry: Listen to Your Self

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This last little while I’ve been going through some serious contemplation, some deep questioning, on how to be ‘more of a monk’. Things like how to pray more deeply, and often; how to have a more focused and concentrated devotional practice; how to be a nicer person. Things like that.

Actually, that’s not exactly right is it? These are questions, enquiries, that for a number of years (is all my life too big a stretch?) habe occupied me. I’ve consistently been making enquiries, addressing questions, to Self – as well as to God or the Divine.

Still, like all things in life, self-enquiry goes through more intense, then less intense phases or periods. Let’s just say that lately I’ve been immersed – sometimes to the point of distraction – in one of those more intense periods.

(note from internal editor: Do I have to remind you once again to get on with the story you are here to tell?)

Okay then; let me see. Oh yes, right. Last night I was looking forward to beginning a new book. I’d read the introduction and thought that it was going to be just my cup of tea as it were, that it was something I would enjoy and learn from.

Anyway, as I opened the book on my tablet, I was suddenly stopped by a sort of wordless warning. The sense I had was that this book would indeed be a little piece of the answers I’ve been seeking.

Not so much in the contents I felt, it was more about approaching the book with more openness, less skepticism, more generosity of spirit and mental attitude. And the idea seemed to also include taking these qualities with me later as I thought about what I had read (or was about to read I should say).

You see, being more open, less skeptical, and more generous, come under the umbrella of being nicer. Still given the subject I was about to read about, I was a bit surprised by this ‘warning’.

As it turned out, I finished the entire book, so enthralled was I by the contents. The only things that tested my resolve to ‘be nicer’ was a number of occasions when the author’s worldview and interpretation of events, stretched my patience.

But, I managed. I didn’t become inpatient or outraged or irritable . When threatened by such responses I simply reminded myself that I was reading about another person, and I didn’t have to have an opinion one way or the other about what they believed or how they lived. Not only do I not have to have an opinion, I’m not sure I really have the right to an opinion about someone else’s life at all.

Besides, haven’t I just got through describing how I am myself deeply engaged in a process of self-enquiry? And wouldn’t such a process involve exposing myself to ideas, worldviews, kinds of information, new to me or not in alignment with my own beliefs? Surely bursts of impatience, indignance, judgement, and the like, would close me off in my search for answers?

Anyway, as I said I was so enthralled by the book – my reading informed by a little more generosity, a little less judgement, a renewed attempt at openness – that I finished the book in that one sitting.

Mind you it was only one hundred and something pages long. Still, for me, it was pretty good going.

PS Speed reading wasn’t – isn’t, nor ever will be – a part of my ongoing self-enquiry into the depths of my monkhood. Perhaps I need to add something like ‘Transcend the ego’ to my list.

Note to Self: Have a Little Faith Will Ya?

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As a hermit, I am a pilgrim, dependent on a pure faith that I am exactly where God would have me be. I am here, and it is now.

I forget in which of his books I read this, but it’s a prayer written by Thomas Merton shortly after he’d finally moved into his hermitage full time. The ‘I am here, and it is now’ I added, though of course it’s also borrowed.

It’s a prayer, an affirmation, I recite at least once a day. And, like Merton, I aspire to that ‘pure faith’. Faith is a strange thing: it may grow and develop and then it does indeed support me in my intentions and living, not to mention the comfort it provides..

But, all of a sudden it can just flow away, leaving me adrift, bereft, and not sure of anything.

I am a pilgrim, it’s true. But as Bhajan (a bhajan is a sacred song, a hymn) singer Krishna Das sings:

I am a pilgrim/the road’s so long.

And sometimes it seems a lot longer than this particular pilgrim would like. Still, as they say, how long’s a piece of string? And it’s rougher than I’d like as well. but again how rough is rough? Layers of meaning in that word longer.

Yes, I am a  hermit, and my mind’s not the same, as Jackson VanHorn sings. Same as what? Whose mind is mine different from? Is my mind somehow not that same as it once was? True though: my mind is hardly ever the same.Here’s the whole chorus as it spoke to me:

Yes I am a hermit
My mind is not the same
Yes I am a hermit and ecstacy’s
my game.

For this hermit, ecstacy is not a stage experienced all that often. Mind you, there are fleeting moments, but like the pilgrim road, there are long distances to be trod between one of those moments and the next.

And as for Tim Moore claiming he’s

‘… sittin’ peacefully on Hermit Rock’?

Well, yes the rock – the hermitage – has much potential for peacefulness; a peace expereienced quite often actually. It’s a sacred space

But, as in any way of living, any way of being, peace comes and peace goes. And when it goes, it can seem like it never existed, and that ‘sittin’ peacefully’ is, and always will be a fantasy never to be realised or made real.

It’s about equinimity 

That’s something else I heard today. Well, there’s not a lot of equinimity in this hermit pilgrim today. Seems, then, that there needs to be some shifting of perspective; some peace needs to be restored

My Lord Ishvara

Deep withn the still centre of my being

May I find peace.

Silently withing the quiet of the grove

May I share peace.

Gently and powerfully in the wider circle of humankind

May I radiate peace.

Om Tat Sat

Om Shanti Shanti Shanti

Afterword:

A few hours have passed since I made these notes; I have regained a little balance, but still thought it was important to publish this post.

Thank you for your patience

Love and peace

Paul the hermit

A Gift Came to Me in an Email

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Even a Leaf

A couple of days ago I recieved a beautiful gift in an email. I often receive wonderful things through the email, and this one, as with so many of the others, has profound meaning for me.

Not only that, but this gift has served as a reminder to me of that significance. I’d like to share with you that gift, as well as some thoughts on its importance and meaning to me.

There are a multitude of sources online where you can learn all the technical stuff, word meanings, history, origin, when it’s used and all the rest. I would like, however, to just ‘think out loud’ in my own words, and follow my own heart’s promptings.

Hari Om Tat Sat, is actually two mantras in one: Hari Om, and Om Tat Sat.

Hari Om represents the totality of what we might call God. Hari refers to the manifested cosmos, as well as the creative impulse in its manifest form. I call that Ishvara, but it doesn’t have a name I’m sure!

Om, is the unmanifested universal consciousness, the Absolute Reality. Meaning, as I understand it, existence itself. I call it Brahman, or God, but again, names are just labels we humans apply to things to make it all seem so neat and tidy!

They say that Om Tat Sat is the most sacred of mantras (in Hinduism). It’s used at the completion of prayers and rituals as a way of invoking the presence of the divine and ‘bringing it all together’ you might say. Well not so much bringing, more like a reminder that everything is one already.

I really like the chanting of Hari Om Tat Sat. It’s a centering practice I would say, a way to remember the oneness of all. And I say it, as the traditionalists do, as a closing to prayers or other practice; it’s like ‘Amen’ or ‘It is so’ or ‘Let it be so’ or, well it’s endless – and personal and subjective.

As mentioned, Om means Brahman – or God in the unmanifested state; Tat, not only sounds like that but does in fact mean all that is. In other words, Brahman or the Absolute. Sat means Truth, Absolute Truth or, once again Brahman.

For me it is a little prayer of its own actually. And I’ve heard it used as a greeting many times. It’s a means I think of honouring the divine within the one being greeted, while at the same time I have a sense that it is a recognition, or acknowledgement rather, of the oneness, the unity of the greeter and the greeted along with everything else.

This is why I don’t really feel the need to break the mantra down to explain in technical detail all the constituent syllables (even I were qualified to do so, which I most surely am not).

It really is a way to acknowledge the oneness of all, the Absolute, which includes, obviously, me and you. The Truth is absolute, it says, so must we be, absolute.

Hari Om!
Om Tat Sat

A Lesson in Humility

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Opening my Bhagavad Gita this morning for my daily reading, I noticed that I was about to begin a new chapter. I always like when that happens, but this post isn’t about that; it’s inspired by a small scrap of paper glued on the facing page.

In years long gone, a less minimalist me would collect bits and pieces cut from newspapers, magazines or wherever (no Internet in those days). This particular strip of paper was cut from a newspaper (makes me shudder a bit to think how I would devour newspapers every day if I could. Shudder in horror) and has the title Today’s Text. It was a daily quote, usually a verse, from the Bible, and I’d often cut out those that appealed to me. As this one obviously did.

No longer collecting such bits and pieces, this one somehow survived the now ancient culling of excess material stuff, and has ended up in my Bhagavad Gita. Don’t ask me how or when.

Anyway, before I get off track, or too far down the track, here’s the quote we’re talking about

A man of knowledge uses words with restraint.
    Proverbs 17:37

I paused when I read this. As you probably are already guessing, I just had to write it down and added some notes of my own before getting on with my Bhagavad Gita reading.

What comes next is essentially what those full of first thought notes said, plus a little context setting to begin with.

In addition to the Bhagavad Gita, I am also reading, bit by bit, another sacred text. A couple of times (including today) I’ve been frustrated at having to plough through a page and a half (for example) of a description of a concept or idea that I’ve thought could have been said in no more than a couple of sentences.

Is he, the author, a person of knowledge? He most certainly is. He has wisdom too. He was a respected teacher and scholar. Some, many, say he was a saint.

So, perhaps it’s me demonstrating my own lack of knowledge here. Perhaps it is me, also lacking in wisdom, who is using words without restraint. Just because my opinion proposed using fewer words, does not mean by any means that they are better words.

Perhaps it’s me in error: passing judgement on an author I consider knowledgeable and wise, and who is certainly more than intimate with the topics he’s commenting on.

So, allow me to put another perhaps into this mix: Perhaps if such a person takes one and a half pages to describe an idea, then it might just mean that I am in need of more knowledge than I think I have. Surely I am missing something.

At the very least I am being prompted to reread the sections in question, that I was so hasty to dismiss as too wordy. Perhaps (what is it with this word today? Have to nominate it word of the day – perhaps) there is something for me to actually learn before letting my mind run away with critical thoughts based on quick and ill-informed judgements.

A Few Thoughts on the Big Question: Why a Monk’s Life?

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Just now, on rediscovering a quote I’d noted down months ago, I spontaneously decided to download again the book I took it from. This will be the third reading: seems to be one of those books that keep calling you back.

The book (The Abbot’s Shoes by Peter Robertson) tells the story of the author’s foray into monastic living in New Zealand way back in the early 1970s when he was twenty something.

One of many mini monastries we’ve been blessed to live in

I’d like to share the mentioned quote with you, because I think it really speaks to my own commitment to the contemplative, hermit life, which is for us a monastic life too – a hermitage is actually a mini monastery.

Sitting in his apartment one night, completely dissatisfied with life the universe and everything, the author contemplates the state of the world around him.

‘All the marching, all the writing, all the campaigning in the world isn’t going to change this insanity, brutality, and carnage.’

Actually this isn’t the quote I’d made a note of; it’s the preceding  sentence which I saw again today and it seemed to just fill out the context for me. Anyway, after a few moments of quietness and thought, the author concludes:

‘I somehow intuited that the most powerful, significant , and influential  action I could take to change the course of this kind of history, was to hide in a monastery.’

He goes on to reflect that by doing so – living simply, in a community devoted totally to contemplation and prayer – he could become a tiny part of ‘the turning of the tide’.

Years later, reading Thomas Merton‘s diaries, he discovered that Merton had felt the same way, concluding that those living simple, prayer filled, contemplative and quiet lives were ‘keeping the universe from crashing in pieces and falling apart.’

There is a strong sense among contemplatives, hermits, nuns, monks, that this is their function: keeping the whole thing going. Or as our author says, each playing a tiny part in the big picture. I would say, like I know Merton did many times (and acted upon his words), that action in the world is absolutely necessary; it’s just that it can’t do all the work alone.

In our hermitage we too speak often of these ideas, and think about them deeply and try to realise how they affect our lives as hermit monks.

So, hiding in a monastery? Or in a hermitage? It’s true it’s very much a hidden life in many ways. For me though, it’s not about  being hidden, it’s more about just what Black Elk says, I’m trying to make my every step a prayer.

Speaking for myself, it’s not that I’m unwilling to pray for a specific individual, or for peace in such and such a country, or relief from poverty, and oppression for specific individuals or communities.

It’s more that: picking and choosing in that way risks leaving people and issues out inadvertently or through some unconscious bias.

I have chosen to live this life apart as much as possible from the world in order to minimise the anxiery being ‘out there’ causes me, to have the quiet, the time, the ‘head and heart’ space to simply pray. To make of my life a prayer

Let every step you take upon Mother Earth be as a prayer

Black Elk (Ogala Lakota Holy Man)

My partner hermit is fond of reminding me of the well known aphorism that a stone dropped in a pond will make ripples that spread out and out. Just like the vibes – the vibrations – emanating from a prayerful life, from all the prayerful lives.

Foster Your True Self: It’s A Big Deal

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Today I finished watching  a beautiful and extremely fascinating documentary.  It was about life in a Trappist monastery as well as a fascinating history of that movement. I was struck by something one of the monks said.

He was referring to what he and his fellow monks are actually doing with their lives in the monastery. He said their lifestyle was helping them to:

‘foster who we truly are before God.’

Hearing this, I had to pause the video, make notes, and do some thinking. What had actually struck me, my first thought on pausing, was that this is exactly what I’m doing as a hermit monk dwelling in our Hermitage. Exactly what I’m doing. Well, at least it’s what I’m aspiring to.

There are two aspects or primary intentions that inform the life I try to live as a hermit and monk that are in fact integral one to the other; they merge actually to become one primary focus of my life.

I practice an ever evolving and I hope intensifying devotion to the divine, with the upliftment of the world and all beings as its central theme.

The other, integral focus, is an equally ever evolving and intensifying quest for self-knowledge, for the answer to the question, who am I?

In other words, I am attempting to foster who I truly am before God. Foster as in ‘encourage the development of …’ (as one definition puts it).

In this case, the development is the growth of the knowledge of my true nature – who I am above and beyond this physical (and mental) creature running around madly trying to figure things out.

In my life there is much effort devoted to the cultivation – a synonym for foster – of that knowledge: meditation, prayer, contemplation, study, just sitting, being still. Did I mention the aspirational nature of all this? It’s an ongoing project to say the least.

Speaking of aspirational: Two more synonyms for foster that I like are nurture and support. Both are even more in that aspirational category; at least it feels like that sometimes. Actually, maybe there’s a more accurate way for me to be putting this.

After all, as I think about it now, even I would agree that my whole lifestyle, my entire way of being in the world supports and nurtures me.

Except for me, myself, and I, that is: Lest the inner grammarian sends me mad in a search for antonyms for foster, let me just say that I am overly skilled in the self-critical and self-destructive departments. My ability to put myself down and to tear myself apart is legendary.

Anyway, with overwhelming nurture and support coming from my partner hermit all the time reinforcing my sense of Self, all I have to do is work on ridding myself of these self-destrucitive and self-critical tendencies.

So, the conditions for the banishment of self-loathing are there; all that’s missing is discipline on my own part in seeing the Divine in myself as I profess to be trying to see it in everyone else.

I need to be rid of the forgetfulness  that blinds me to the Truth that is actually very plain to see.

Speaking of the Divine, the ‘before God’ is the vital element for me. God is all there is, so it is always before God that I act, whether in a positive or in a not so great manner.

The best prescription is for me to remember. To remember that God is everywhere and everything (did I say that already?). To remember that me, myself, and I, are also included in that everything and everywhere.

I think that once I do remember these truths even for the odd moment now and again, then the real fostering of who I truly am will have begun.