Simple Living and High Thinking

Simple Living...High Thinking

Human life is meant for simple living and high thinking. In the  Śrīmad Bhāgavatam it is said:

कामस्य नेन्द्रिय-प्रीतिर्

लाभो जीवेत यावता

जीवस्य तत्त्व-जिज्ञासा

नार्थो यश् चेह कर्मभिः

kāmasya nendriya-prītir

lābho jīveta yāvatā

jīvasya tattva-jijñāsā

nārtho yaś ceha karmabhiḥ

Life's desires should never be directed toward sense gratification. One should desire only a healthy life, or self-preservation, since a human being is meant for inquiry about the Absolute Truth. Nothing else should be the goal of one's works.

When I was a young man in the 1960s there was a trend popular for a while that involved "getting back to the land." This was before "living off the grid," since back then the "grid" wasn't as organized as it is today. There was no "matrix." The internet didn't exist.  Computers were in their infancy. Still, there was a tendency for making life simpler.  People left the cities in search of a simpler life.

¨Hippies¨Weddin

Rampant consumer culture, deteriorating urban landscapes, and the imminent corruption of Western Civilization impelled us to look for alternatives. 

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, a deep-seated social discontent developed among young people in the United States. These were men who’d been forced to fight a war they didn’t believe in only to return home to a country that didn’t want them. The country was filled with college graduates lacking any job prospects, young women who refused to lead their mothers’ lives, and the myth of an “equal” society that couldn’t seem to shake its nasty history of segregation and inequality.

A byproduct of this dissatisfaction was the alternative culture that came to be known as the "hippies," who created their living spaces, and utopian communities. As University of Kansas professor Timothy Miller said, “Reason had run its course; now it was time to return to the mystical and intuitional…the hippies rejected the industrial for the agrarian, the plastic for the natural, the synthetic for the organic.”

But the "back to the land" movement and the search for alternative lifestyles based on "simple living and high thinking" wasn't started by hippies in the 60s. One of the early "back to the land" people was American Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau.

Thoreau wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."In 1845 Henry David Thoreau opted out of urban live to "live deliberately" at Walden Pond. He took a break from the pencil factory owned by his family and retired to the woods for self-reflection and a minimalist life. It was partly an exercise in journal-writing and partly a  spiritual quest. He lived in a small cabin in the woods at a pond called Walden.

Thoreau wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Thoreau's journey of self-discovery takes place over the course of two years. At one point he receives a chest of books from a friend containing many translations of Indian classics. There's the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita. Thoreau is thrilled.  He writes:

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.” 

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Thoreau was the inspiration for many home-grown "back to the land" movements in the 1960s. When I was in my teens I read Thoreau and admired his principles. Another great admirer of Thoreau was this man:

Count Lev Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, later found fiction and literature to be superficial. He did his best to live by the gospels of Jesus.  He wanted people to live by a simple model of subsistence agriculture while contemplating the kingdom of heaven within them. To this end he established a vegetarian commune at his family estate, Yasnaya Polyana. One of his great inspirations was Thoreau and his Walden. Another was the Bhagavad-Gita.

Usually we think that young people promote social change, while old folks prefer social control. Yet, Tolstoy is an exception; the older he got, the more radical he became. As a consequence in the last years of his life he consistently expressed a religious form of utopian freedom.

Tolstoy’s politics, which combined Christianity with pacifism and a rejection of authority, has always made the government and church uncomfortable. Teachers laud the power, the realism and the sincerity of his literary imagination, but aren't interested in his politics or spirituality. Among his admirers was Russian revolutionist V.I. Lenin who considered Tolstoy a genius and one of the greatest writers in history.

Lenin praised Tolstoy's passionate critiques of the state and the church, and his unbending opposition to private property. Tolstoy expressed, Lenin wrote, as no other writer did, the deep feelings of protest and anger that the nineteenth century Russian peasants felt towards the Tsarist state. Yet when Lenin came to consider Tolstoy’s ‘Christian anarchism’ he was harshly dismissive. Tolstoy was a ‘crackpot’, a ‘landlord obsessed with Christ’, someone who failed profoundly to understand what was going on in Russia and who preached non-resistance to evil asceticism and an emotional appeal to the ‘spirit’ that were in essence reactionary, misguided and utopian.

Tolstoy promoted nonviolence and an adherence to the Gospel or teachings of Jesus over the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church.  He felt that it was important to live a simple, ascetic life, eschewing luxury and focusing on the divinity within. He was a pacifist who didn't believe in the violent resolution of conflicts. His favorite teaching of Jesus was the Sermon on the Mount which can be summed up by 5 simple ideas: Love your enemies; avoid anger; don't resist evil with evil, but return evil with good; Avoid lust, and avoid taking oaths derived from corrupt political authorities. He was a vegetarian and promoted vegetarian communal living at his farm, Yasnaya Polyana.

While Lenin rejected Tolstoy as a "crackpot" we may judge a tree by its fruits. The legacy of Lenin was a bloody revolution where millions were butchered and executed. Tolstoy's legacy lives on in the ideals of those who would continue to live simply and contemplate divinity. 

One of the most influential disciples of both Tolstoy and Thoreau and another strong proponent of simple living and high thinking was Mahatma Gandhi, whose movement of passive resistance ultimately ended 200 years of British rule in India.

Where Thoreau had written "On Civil Disobedience," Gandhi put it into practice, later affirming that Thoreau's writing contained the essence of his own political philosophy.  Gandhi in turn also influenced the American Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King. 

One may argue the practicability of Gandhism as political theory, but the ideas of Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Thoreau while difficult to practice may be better models for community living than the ideals of consumerism and globalism now devastating the planet.

If Thoreau's retreat to Walden was a response to growing threats of industrialization, urbanism and commercialism in the mid-nineteenth century, what should be our response today, when natural habitats are disappearing and animal species are in danger of extinction? If Tolstoy's commune at Yasnaya Polyana was the precursor of the back to the land movements of the 60s, what would a modern commune look like today?

The past few decades have been solidly urban, consumerist, and technology oriented, and the idea of “back to nature” may now seem totally passé and laughable.  The hippie communes of our parents and grandparents are relics of a naive era vanished in a mist of marijuana smoke. 

But, the idea of simple living and high thinking has a way of returning just when it seemed to have disappeared altogether. In the early 2000s, fears about genetically modified foods, insecticides and pesticides, as well as climate change drove new interest in growing your own food. The great recession and its destruction of the American Dream, coupled with the receding green areas in our lives have driven a new "back to the land" era.

Some call it "minimal living" others refer radical homemaking, “simple living,” “intentional living,” “sustainable living,” “slow living,” “voluntary simplicity,” or “downshifting,” all terms that have entered or reentered the lexicon in the past few years. But “homesteading” seems to have emerged as the modern term of choice for this new kind of self-sufficient, home- focused, frugal, slowed-down lifestyle.

Victory gardens and urban farms, even rooftop gardens are springing up everywhere. First Lady Michelle Obama has her own truck garden at the White House and encourages people to be more self-sufficient. According to statistics, 25% of Americans are simplifying their lives, taking a pay cut or cutting home spending while focusing on the "homesteading" lifestyle. In Australia, people have "downshifted" making voluntary, long-term lifestyle changes that involve accepting significantly less income and consuming less. 

According to one study, over a quarter of British adults ages thirty to fifty-nine have voluntarily moved to lower- paid jobs to spend more time with their families. The author of this study says these people are part of an entirely new social class who “consciously reject consumerism and material aspirations.”

“This isn’t a fringe thing anymore,” simple-living guru Wanda Urbanska told O, the Oprah Magazine. “There is a shift going on. When I first started talking about this in 1992, I was seen as a wacko zealot. Now simple living is fashionable.”

The movement is not only fashionable. According to research by Kasser and others, it may in fact produce happier people. According to psychology research, voluntary simplifiers earned $15,000 less than their fellow citizens (about $26,000 compared to $41,000) but were found to be “significantly happier.” The same study showed that more than a quarter of Americans had already taken voluntary income cuts in favor of lifestyle.

Kassler's study shows that not only were the voluntary simplifiers living in a more eco- sustainable way than mainstream Americans,” Kasser says, that given the variables in the study, overall  "The voluntary simplifiers were happier than the mainstream population."

New books also eplore the resurgence in "back to the land" themes.  For many, “going back to the land” brings to mind the 1960s and 1970s—hippie communes and the Summer of Love, The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. More recently, the movement has reemerged in a new enthusiasm for locally produced food and more sustainable energy paths. But these latest back-to-the-landers are part of a much larger story. Americans have been dreaming of returning to the land ever since they started to leave it. In Back to the Land, Dona Brown explores the history of this recurring impulse.

Brown's book points out that while back-to-the-landers have often been viewed as nostalgic escapists or romantic nature-lovers, their own words reveal a more complex story. 

In such projects as Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City,” and Helen and Scott Nearing’s quest for “the good life,” Brown finds that the return to the farm has meant less a going-backwards than a going-forwards, a way to meet the challenges of the modern era. Progressive reformers pushed for homesteading to help impoverished workers get out of unhealthy urban slums. 

Depression-era back-to-the-landers, wary of the centralizing power of the New Deal, embraced a new “third way” politics of decentralism and regionalism. Later still, the movement merged with environmentalism. To understand Americans’ response to these back-to-the- land ideas, Brown turns to the fan letters of ordinary readers— retired teachers and overworked clerks, recent immigrants and single women. In seeking their rural roots, Brown argues, Americans have striven above all for the independence and self-sufficiency they associate with the agrarian ideal.

The back-to-the-land movement was a social movement based around the idea of living a self-sufficient life close to nature. It was characterized by the idea that everyday life is methodically practiced and based on a set of moral values or choices. For many people homesteading became a spiritual practice, giving meaning to daily life through adhering to values of simplicity and anti-consumerism.

In the end, it may be difficult for us to live strictly according to the ideals of Thoreau, or Tolstoy or Gandhi. But we can still take the meaning of the Bhagavatam to heart and try our best to live simply while sticking to spiritual values.

The Bhāgavatam says

कामस्य नेन्द्रिय-प्रीतिर्

लाभो जीवेत यावता

जीवस्य तत्त्व-जिज्ञासा

नार्थो यश् चेह कर्मभिः

kāmasya nendriya-prītir

lābho jīveta yāvatā

jīvasya tattva-jijñāsā

nārtho yaś ceha karmabhiḥ

Life's desires should never be directed toward sense gratification. One should desire only a healthy life, or self-preservation, since a human being is meant for inquiry about the Absolute Truth. Nothing else should be the goal of one's works.

But what sort of healthy life is meant here?