“Ontological insecurity,” losing your grip on who you are

 Snow melted, flowers bloomed, insects droned, deer bred. Years passed, or minutes. “I lost grasp of time,” Knight said. “Years were meaningless. I measured time by the season and moon. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand.” Thunder cracked, ducks flew, squirrels gathered, snow fell.

Knight said that he couldn’t accurately describe what it felt like to spend such an immense period of time alone. Silence does not translate into words. And he feared that if he tried a translation, he’d come across as a fool. “Or even worse, as spouting off phony wisdom or little koans.” Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude “that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.”

What happened to him in the woods, Knight claimed, was inexplicable. But he agreed to set aside his fear of phony wisdom and koans and give it a try. “It’s complicated,” he said. “Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can’t dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant.”

The dividing line between himself and the forest, Knight said, seemed to dissolve. His isolation felt more like a communion. “My desires dropped away. I didn’t long for anything. I didn’t even have a name. To put it romantically, I was completely free.”

Virtually everyone who has written about deep solitude has said some version of the same thing. When you’re alone, your awareness of time and boundaries grows fuzzy. “All distances, all measures,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, “change for the person who becomes solitary.” These sensations have been described by the ascetics of early Christianity, by Buddhist monks, by transcendentalists and shamans, by Russian startsy and Japanese hijiri, by solo adventurers, by Native Americans and Inuits reporting on vision quests.

“I become a transparent eyeball,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature.” “I am nothing; I see all.” Lord Byron called it “the feeling infinite”; Jack Kerouac, in Desolation Angels, “the one mind of infinity.” The French Catholic priest Charles de Foucauld, who spent fifteen years living in the Sahara Desert, said that in solitude “one empties completely the small house of one’s soul.” Merton wrote that “the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.”

This loss of self was precisely what Knight experienced in the forest. In public, one always wears a social mask, a presentation to the world. Even when you’re alone and look in a mirror, you’re acting, which is one reason Knight never kept a mirror in his camp. He let go of all artifice; he became no one and everyone.

The past, the land of wistfulness, and the future, the place of yearning, seemed to evaporate. Knight simply existed, for the most part, in the perpetual now. He does not care if people fail to understand what he did in the woods. He didn’t do it for us to understand. He wasn’t trying to prove a point. There was no point. “You’re just there,” Knight said. “You are.”

Tenzin Palmo, who was born Diane Perry, near London, was only the second Western woman to become a Tibetan Buddhist nun. Long retreats are still commended in Buddhism, and the current Dalai Lama wrote that a life of seclusion is “the highest form of spiritual practice.” Palmo felt immensely drawn to solitude, and in 1976, when she was thirty-three years old, she moved into a remote cave in the Himalayas of northern India. She ate one meal a day—supplies were occasionally delivered to her—and lived through intense high-alpine winters, spending most of her time meditating. A seven-day blizzard once blocked her cave entrance, threatening asphyxiation.

Palmo remained in the cave for twelve years. She never once lay down; she slept, sitting up, inside a small wooden meditation box. Her solitude, she said, was “the easiest thing in the world.” Not for a moment did she want to be anywhere else. She overcame all fear of death, she insisted, and felt liberated. “The more you realize, the more you realize there is nothing to realize,” she said. “The idea that there’s somewhere we have got to get to, and something we have to attain, is our basic delusion.”

The British naturalist Richard Jefferies spent much of his short life—he died of tuberculosis in 1887, at age thirty-eight—walking alone in the woods of England. Some of his ideas seemed to parallel Knight’s. Jefferies wrote, in his autobiography The Story of My Heart, that the type of life celebrated by society, one of hard work and unceasing chores and constant routine, does nothing but “build a wall about the mind.” Our whole lives, Jefferies said, are wasted traveling in endless small circles; we are all “chained like a horse to an iron pin in the ground.” The richest person, Jefferies believed, is the one who works least. “Idleness,” he wrote, “is a great good.”

For Jefferies, like Knight, the desire to be alone was an irresistible tug. “My mind required to live its own life apart from other things,” wrote Jefferies. In solitude, he said, he could ponder ideas that allowed him to “go higher than a god, deeper than prayer”; there was nothing greater than to stand alone, “bare-headed before the sun, in the presence of the earth and air, in the presence of the immense forces of the universe.”

But isolation has a razor’s edge. For others, for those who do not choose to be alone—for prisoners and hostages—a loss of one’s socially created identity can be terrifying, a plunge into madness. Psychologists call it “ontological insecurity,” losing your grip on who you are. Edward Abbey, in Desert Solitaire, a chronicle of two six-month stints as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Monument, said that being solitary for a long time and fully attuned to the natural world “means risking everything human.” Those who fear this will feel only loneliness, the pain of social isolation, rather than experiencing solitude, which can be by turns exhilarating and turbulent.

“I was never lonely,” said Knight. He was attuned to the completeness of his own presence rather than to the absence of others. Conscious thought was sometimes replaced with a soothing internal humming. “Once you taste solitude, you don’t grasp the idea of being alone,” he said. “If you like solitude, you’re never alone. Does that make sense? Or is that one of those koan thingies I’m doing again?”

In an attempt to gain some empirical understanding of solitude, a cognitive neuroscientist at New York University placed more than twenty Buddhist monks and nuns inside magnetic resonance imaging machines, tracking blood flow to their brains while they meditated. Other neuroscientists conducted similar studies. The results remain preliminary, but it appears that when the human brain experiences a self-consciously chosen silence, as opposed to sleep, the brain does not slow down. It remains as active as ever. What changes is where the brain is functioning.

Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated—the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.

While sitting slump-shouldered on his stool in the visiting booth of the jail, speaking of his inner voyages, Knight seemed to be in an introspective mood. I wondered, despite his aversion to dispensing wisdom, if he’d be willing to share more of what he learned while alone. People have been approaching hermits with this request for thousands of years, eager to consult with someone whose life has been so radically different. James Joyce wrote in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that a solitary person is able to tap into “the wild heart of life.”

from: The stranger in the woods : the extraordinary story of the last true hermit / by Michael Finkel