Read: Separation and internalisation

I am currently working on a new collection of academic essays for a book titled Religion and the Sense of Self. In between receiving draft essays from authors, sending them out for review, and negotiating deadlines for edits, I’ve been working on my own contribution. This is an extract from that essay, on contemplative practices and the sense of self. All subscribers get a nice chunk to read here. Paid subscribers get a little extra. I hope you enjoy it.

Early image of St Cuthbert courtesy of Wikipedia

Many pre-modern guides to contemplative practices start with the prerequisite of isolation, if not deliberate separation. The pre-modern yoga practitioner, for example, aspires to an ascetic lifestyle, “marginal to society, but nonetheless closely implicated in it” (Mallinson and Singleton 2017, 52). Even for householders, the practice of yoga is to be performed alone, at home (Mallinson and Singleton 2017, 58), and the histories and hagiographies of saints and gurus alike are marked by an eternal tension between the holy person’s desire to wander away from the world of the everyday, and the requests of disciples and petitioners for their guidance and instruction.

The idealised image of an (orientalised) ascetic alone with their practice still haunts each Instagramable image of a contemporary meditation practitioner alone in the dawn light of a beach in Bali. Contemporary schools and brands of yoga and meditation continue to trade on the aesthetic ideal of unworldly practitioners, enlightened gurus, and saints in seclusion (Wildcroft 2020, 268). But beyond that, saints of all faiths in all eras have climbed mountains, or built cabins on the shores of the ocean, or even climbed poles to be closer to something divine, by being further from the distractions of the mundane world. In many traditions, and across the centuries, the idea of isolation is either aspirational or foundational to the actual performance of contemplative practice.

The Christian mystic, St. Cuthbert, was revered for his piety and charity to the point of being made bishop of Lindisfarne, an isolated monastic settlement off the coast of Northumberland, in 684 CE. Yet after a few short years, he returned to the even smaller and more isolated island of Inner Farne that had been the home for his life of contemplation for many years, and where many miracles were attributed to him, most of which involved turning a place of barren rock into one of abundance (Hegg 1777, 5). Bede describes his hermitage as “a place remote from the church, and encompassed on all sides by the shifting waves of the sea” (Bede and Sellar 2019, Book 4:30), and his practice as “a solitary life, in great continence of body and mind” (Bede and Sellar 2019, Book 4:27). But this tension, between the isolation that enables contemplation, and the community of practice built upon it, was evident throughout Cuthbert’s life. It is a tension embodied and enacted on the shores of Lindisfarne to this day, which remains an island of two identities: a bustling place of tourism and pilgrimage when the causeway to the mainland is open, and a quiet rural idyll when not (Hegg 1777, 4).