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All about Pico Iyer’s new book

His first visit to the hermitage was after his home in the hills of Santa Barbara (near LA) burnt down in the fire of 1990. There is a topicality to the book’s subject in light of the fires that have ravaged Los Angeles.

“People globally are thinking about how to keep the inner flames alive when the outer flames are wiping and reducing to ash everything that they know and love. How do you remain hopeful in a world of uncertainty and stay firm in a world of impermanence?” Iyer said at Kepler Books in Menlo Park, California, on the evening of January 14.

Iyer has written about the experiences and the calm reactions of the monks of the Benedictine monastery at the time of the fires, and his spiritual journey via his visits to the hermitage. “I’d always felt a certain longing when I stepped into a monastery. The way some people do when they see a beautiful person or when they see a strawberry cheesecake. I would come into a special silence and feel a really strong pull that was difficult to resist.”

He also spoke about many stereotypes and preconceptions about monks that his over 100 visits in the last 33 years have helped him overgrow. “The most open-minded hearts I know and less dogmatic than I and most of my friends,” adds Iyer.

Narrating his experiences in the monastery and the prime practice of silence, he said, “It’s not always easy to be alone, and when you are alone in a cell with nothing but your memories and your thoughts, your shadows and demons can come up. I feel ecstatic whenever I go to this place. It’s great to be liberated from oneself, and what I have come to experience is that by doing nothing, I can do anything at all.”

Iyer said he has tried to challenge his complacency and ecstasy, and what has worked for him might not work for others. “I realised that the solitude and joy I found in that space had to be a gateway to leading a more community-filled and a more compassionate life and to be less solitary than I might be,” he added.

The author also shared in the book the experiences of his wife on her visit to the monastery and adds that most people who stay there are women who are not all catholic but can be practitioners of other faiths like Buddhism, Sufism or belong to no religion or belief system. ”It’s not at all the austere, all-male environment.”

He alluded to the preamble of awakening from the illusion of separateness that the monks practice and mingle with practitioners of other faiths and beliefs at this monastery. “One of the reasons I wrote this book after 33 years of spending time in the monastery is because I feel our country and our world are more divided than ever, and here’s a vision of people living beyond their beliefs and beyond their words in a place where we come together.”

The book about the transformation within us emphasizes the practice of gratitude also.

On what he has been able to bring to his everyday life from his stays at the monastery, Iyer said, “Gratitude is a large part of what I experience there. It’s a very slow accumulation, and one hundred stays have transformed everything. I felt there was a fork in the road between success and joy. It was not hard for me to choose joy.”

His experiences in the hermitage also helped him choose a minimalist lifestyle. “Luxury is not defined by what you have but what you don’t need.”

Iyer said a large part of his writing practice is taking walks every day and reducing the amount of stimulus that he consumes. “There’s so much coming on to us every moment, it’s hard to sift the trivial from the essential. It’s hard to sustain an inner life because the outer is so overwhelming.”

Emphasising the importance of silence, “It would be hard to conceive of my life in the real world without the monastery. The reason I stress silence so much in the book is that I think it’s non-denominational and available to everybody,” suggested Iyer.

Shalini Kathuria Narang is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, US.