The Forest Passage

A Meditation on a Book by Ernst Jünger

Welcome to the third edition of Underlined Sentences. If you missed the two previous editions, you can read the first one here and the second one here.

My goal with this series is to offer thoroughly researched, informative, and insightful observations on the “underlined sentences” of both timely and timeless books or other written documents that I feature. And, most importantly, to explore how they have challenged me to think about my life and how I can tap into their wisdom to get to the heart of the difficult matters that increasingly plague us, and to help guide us through them, if only by holding each other’s hands in the tumult.

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“In the forest passage we consider the freedom of the individual in this world. An account must additionally be given of the difficulty—indeed of the merit—of managing to be an individual in this world…. Neither a liberal act nor a romantic one, it is rather the arena of a small elite, which knows what the times demand, and something more.”

—Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

I am trapped in a morning meditation session at a Zen monastery in the forests of the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. I’m sitting on a round black cushion, my legs are crossed, my hands are resting palms down on my thighs, my back is straight, my eyes are closed. And I’m falling asleep.

The irony is not lost on my meditative mind. The clarion call of all meditation practice is to wake up. Wake up from the slumber of our daily routines; wake up from the ongoing stories we tell ourselves to justify our anger, our resentment, our desires for retribution; wake up from our euphoric and ephemeral spells of infatuation and lust; wake up from our ungrounded fears.

But I’m teetering on the brink of unconsciousness. The night before, I couldn’t sleep. I was trying to do so in a dormitory of seven other men in bunks, every one of whom, it seemed, snored. Loudly. It was as if invisible freight trains were roaring back and forth through the darkened room. I do not snore and I am a light sleeper and I laid awake hour after tortuous hour, wondering if I should get up and sleep in my car. But I never lost consciousness and before I knew it a monk with a wooden clapper came around to stir everybody up from their night’s peaceful slumber, which I did not have. After a short and silent breakfast, it was off to the meditation hall. As my morning jolt of caffeine wore off, I sensed trouble. My mind was getting wobbly, and my head was already bobbing for apples.

During a break, I go to the men’s room, come out, and sit on a wooden bench outside the meditation hall. Delirious, I watch the two dozen or so others on this retreat begin to file back in. I can barely move. In his swooshing black robe that announces his presence before I even see him, the teacher brings up the rear and nods for me to get up and head back in with the others. “I think I’m going to sit this one out,” I say. What I don’t say is that I want to go back to my bunk—or even better, find a patch of soft pine needles I can see in the dappled morning sun just outside the windows, smell the earth, daydream—and take a nap. The teacher stops, glares at me, and snaps, “That is not an option. You can either join us or leave.” Loyal practitioner that I am, I stumble back in for another agonizing round of attempting to sit still and quiet the mind. And not pass out.

This monastery is renowned for its regimented approach to meditation. There is a reason for this. Much like Christian missionaries who beat the bushes for converts to save and bring into and strengthen the Church, Buddhists believe that when each of us is on the path to awakening, the support of a community—a sangha—is needed to break through our individual and collective mind games, with each of us pulling on a strand of the interconnected web of life that contributes either to the chaos or harmony of the world in and around us.

The idea is that a critical mass of devotees all around the world, sitting in meditation in monasteries or at home or at work or wherever, is required not only to save ourselves from the massive delusions under which we all live, but also to help save others and, by saving others, save the totality of humanity itself—and all sentient beings, for that matter, who suffer under our sway—from slouching into self-destruction. It’s a tall order. But at the time all I wanted was a some shut-eye.

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I’d gone to this monastery years previously and for many years after I continued to go to other Buddhist monasteries and study centers. I was determined to find enlightenment and believed I was on the correct path. When covidmania struck in March 2020, I knew almost immediately that humanity was under attack by a colossal psyop intended to put us all under a spell of fear the likes of which the world had never known. And, from what I gather, my entire Buddhist community, from neophytes to teachers to everyone in between, as well as millions of others supposedly on the path to enlightenment all around the world, fell right under it. And now that they were ensorcelled, there appeared to be no way to snap them out of it. No slap in the face or dose of smelling-salt truth bombs could break the spell.

They became falsely yet completely convinced of the existence of a deadly and fast-spreading pathogen that could only be stopped by shutting down the entire world, wearing face masks, and keeping six feet apart from everyone else. Eventually, they were also convinced that getting jabbed with a supposedly miraculous vaccine was going to save us so we could return to the business of our exiting from the snares of samsara, or the endless and tormenting wheel of birth, death, and rebirth from which any Buddhist worth his or her salt seeks to escape from once and for all.

According to Buddhist tradition, it takes eons to attain the precious gift of a human birth. Now, to my mind, these meditating coronamaniacs were setting themselves back eons, deeper into samsara, and straight to a rebirth into one of the Buddhist hell realms of hunger, fear, and ignorance, where the natural laws of karma exact their awful price. Sort of like being sent back to the primordial swamp of Buddhist evolution.

A cohort of millions living in accordance with the dharma, or Buddhist teachings, who’d made a vow to themselves to wake up and help others wake up, fell into the most massive delusion of our lifetimes—and perhaps of all time because of its scale—and allowed themselves to be led into a waking nightmare of superstition far beyond the torments of my one sleepless night of distress years before. To be sure, I may have failed at waking up to much of anything that weekend years ago. But now, I must give myself a big pat on the back for passing this bigger test with flying colors when it came to waking up to the colossal lies being spun all around us and from which there was no place to run except to one’s own awakened mind.

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One of the books that attracted me earlier this year was Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage, originally published in 1951. I was drawn to this book because for the past four years I’ve been drawn to reading about all forms of resistance to the Leviathan, or omnipresent totalitarian state in its many manifestations, which much of the world had suffered under in the first couple of years of the so-called pandemic. This is why early on in this coup against humanity, I was first drawn to, and inspired by, the writings of Albert Camus, who was a member of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation of parts of France, including Paris, during WWII. The Forest Passage (der Waldgang in the original German) was written after the fall of Nazism and the growing threat of Soviet Communism, and it is critical of both. It is also critical of the imminent threat of liberal democracy and its inevitable devolution into tyranny, which we are seeing today, especially among the American Left.

Jünger was one of 20th-century Germany’s most prolific and controversial writers. Born in Heidelberg in 1895, he died in 1998 at the ripe old age of 102. When he was 18, Jünger joined the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. At 19, he volunteered to fight in the German army in WWI, during which he was wounded at least seven times, the last of which nearly killed him. When WWII broke out, he was reluctantly conscripted into the German army as a captain and posted to occupied Paris, where he served as a military censor and kept a contradictory set of acquaintances, which included anti-fascist artists such as Pablo Picasso but also Nazi collaborators. He also sympathized with French Jews and helped some escape by secretly passing on sensitive information regarding transports. And he was close to the conspirators behind an attempted assassination of Hitler in 1944 but escaped execution when, supposedly, Hitler himself insisted something to the effect of “nothing happens to Jünger.” He was dismissed from the army instead.

Criticized for his militarist swagger, mostly because of his 1920 memoir about WWI, Storm of Steel, Jünger later published a novel in 1939, On the Marble Cliffs, a thinly veiled parable against the rise of the Nazis. “It was already clear that Ernst Jünger’s thinking had changed prior to World War II,” writes one commentator on the Russell Kirk Center website. “The change accelerated after the war as Jünger retreated to live in southern Germany. More importantly, he also retreated from the world of politics and militarism, embarking on an existential quest to find meaning in an increasingly materialistic and nihilistic world.”

Perhaps shell-shocked from his many physical wounds and from the psychological scars of being in the thick of two massively deadly wars—and suffering from the disillusionment that many soldiers and civilians endured in the years afterward—Jünger withdrew to a self-imposed exile in 1950 to a forester’s house on a baronial estate near Wilfingen, in southwestern Germany near the Swiss border. He lived there for the rest of his life, experimented with various drugs, including LSD and mescaline, and continued to write into his 90s, producing more than 50 books. (The house is now a museum, The Jünger-Haus Wilflingen.)

Educated in entomology, Jünger must have felt at home on this estate and in the forest that surrounded it. And it must have been a totemic inspiration for this book, which speaks to the theme of retreating from the madness of the world. The forest is a recurring and archetypal symbol in cultures around the world. It is both enchanting and dangerous. Haunted by witches, elves, hermits, and monsters, it holds secrets and surprises. Think of Dante being lost in “a dark wood” that must be navigated on his risky if not terrifying journey of transformation. The forest is especially valorized in the German romantic spirit and works of sturm und drang (German for “storm and stress”). Consider the episode in Faust where Goethe's character, fearing he will corrupt a woman with his conflicted feelings, runs away to the forest to live for a time in a cave. The forest still holds sway with Germany’s love affair with waldeinsamkeit, an archaic German term for the feeling of “forest loneliness” and its remedy for stress.

The forest is not just a remedy for stress, however. It is also a source of strength. For Jünger, it was a particular source of inner strength, especially when it comes to the essential human task facing death. In The Forest Passage, he writes:

“To overcome the fear of death is at once to overcome every other terror, for they all have meaning only in relation to this fundamental problem. The forest passage is, therefore, above all a passage through death. The path leads to the brink of death itself—indeed, if necessary, it passes through it. When the line is successfully crossed, the forest as a place of life is revealed in all its preternatural fullness. The superabundance of the world lies before us.”

Better yet, the forest passage, Jünger writes, “is possible everywhere on the planet.” In other words, the forest passage is not so much a place on earth but rather a state of mind and a way of being. As Jünger writes:

“As far as location is concerned, the forest is everywhere—in the wastelands as much as in the cities, where a forest rebel may hide or live behind the mask of a profession. The forest is in the desert, and the forest is in the bush. The forest is in the fatherland, as in every territory in which resistance can be put into practice. But the forest is above all behind the enemy’s own lines, in his backcountry.”

I found myself especially encouraged about the idea of living behind enemy lines. Where I live in New York’s bucolic Hudson Valley, I feel as if I am indeed behind enemy lines. My few nearby awakened friends feel the same. As the Presidential election looms, we see untold numbers of Harris/Walz signs littering the front yards on every road we drive along. I wish it were just all a bad dream. I wag my head in despair. Yet, what else could I expect? This area is deeply blue and there are times when I flirt with the idea of moving. But I know in my heart that I’m not going anywhere just because I disagree with the inane politics of most of the people around me. I won’t give anyone who knows where I stand that satisfaction. I’ve been here for more than half of my life. I’ve ancestors who fought in American Revolution. I’m not going to abandon my post. I’m staying put to carry on the fight.

The renowned Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz had a chance to leave Warsaw during the city’s Nazi occupation during WWII. He never did and had no regrets passing up other opportunities that he might have been given had he emigrated. “[M]y knowledge of the crimes which Europe has witnessed in the twentieth century would be less direct, less concrete than it is,” he writes in his 1953 memoir The Captive Mind. I feel much the same way. I want to be able to say now and in the years to come that I stayed put and played my small part in the fight (once again) for our freedom.

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Back when I was a mindful atom in the infinite Buddhist cosmos, I considered myself a part of what Jünger called “a small elite,” as I quoted above, “which knows what the times demand and something more.” Had I read The Forest Passage years ago, I would have considered myself on such a passage. I would have seen myself as one of Jünger’s forest rebels. Moreover, I would have placed myself in a group of practitioners who knew that the times demanded that we all wake up. And Jünger’s “something more” was the challenge of leading others to their own awakening through our teaching and by our example.

Now, I see it as something else. Now, the tables have been turned. Now, this “small elite” is made up of a significant minority of us who did not fall for the lies, who “consider the freedom of the individual in this world.” People who most likely have never come within a mindful mile of a Buddhist monastery. And if you are reading this, chances are you have found yourself among this growing but still small resilient brigade of resisters and have probably felt banished and mostly on your own.

This is nothing new. Jünger points out the common trajectory for those of us who find ourselves in such a world. He writes:

“A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources. This was considered honorable, and it still is today….

“None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the stage props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner’s flag are hoisted on it.”

But rest assured, despite banishment, you are connected by that invisible yet ever-present web of life. I am reminded of the time years back when that Zen teacher told me that sitting out that session of meditation was “not an option.” Because now, cowering before the difficulties of holding our ground against the barrage of delusions, lies, betrayals, and gaslighting is also “not an option.” We need each other now for the same reason I was taught that those of us on the Buddhist path needed each other. It was not only for individual support but also to become that critical mass of believers who keeps the light of truth burning brightly in a dark world.

This is our forest passage.

We have moved into a different world even if we never left where we’ve been all along. And we have moved on from much of our previous oft-petty concerns. We have changed so much because the times have changed so much. Our priorities and our concerns have higher stakes than they have ever had. As Jünger writes:

“Our concern is far more the imperilment of the individual and his fear. He is preoccupied with the same conflict. Fundamentally, he is motivated by the desire to devote himself to family and career, to follow his natural inclinations; but then the times assert themselves—be it in a gradual deterioration of conditions, or that he suddenly senses an attack from extremist positions. Expropriations, forced labor, and worse appear in the vicinity. It quickly becomes clear to him that neutrality would be tantamount of suicide—now it is a case of joining the wolf pack or going to war against it.”

You might not have risked speaking the truth among your family and friends and colleagues who fell for the hoax because you knew you’d lose them to this strange, new, and apparently inescapable cult; you might not have joined any demonstrations to call for truth and freedom; you might not have posted anything on your social media accounts to alert others of the plot against humanity that you saw as clearly as the rising run and about which so many others remained willfully, hopelessly blind. But if you refused to get the jabs at the risk of losing your friendships, relationships, and job, if you risked being banned from participating in society like everyone else who sheepishly complied, you did not remain neutral. You went to war against the wolf pack. You said no. This was one of those times that this one, small word said so much. “It would be a sign that the oppression had not entirely succeeded,” Jünger writes.

In saying no to becoming an easy target for the dark entities pulling the strings in the highest and most iniquitous levels of governments who want us dead, you said yes to life. In saying no to the prison planet being built around us, you said yes to freedom. When you said no to the insanity you said yes to reason. When you said no to the shameful levels of humiliation and degradation, you said yes to individual sovereignty and autonomy. Your voice may not have been heard in the cacophony. But your presence was felt because, as Jünger points out, “Even when they are silent, like submerged boulders in the stream they always generate a certain agitation in their vicinity.”

Amidst all the orchestrated, atonal chaos and confusion of coronamania, you looked at the compass within your heart, saw the needle pointing toward truth, and you went there. Although there was nowhere you really had to go. You stood your ground. You drew the line in the sand. You said no. I said no. We were banished. And bereaved. We embarked on the forest passage standing right where we are. All it takes is non-compliance and non-participation.

Jünger continues:

“In this sense the word ‘forest’ is also not the point. Naturally, it is no coincidence that all our bonds to timely cares so marvelously melt away the moment our glance falls on flowers and trees and is drawn into their spell. Here would be the right line of approach for a spiritual elevation of botany. For here were find the Garden of Eden, the vineyard, the lily, the grain of wheat of Christian parable. We find the enchanted forest of fairy tales with its man-eating wolves, its witches and giants; but also the good hunter, and the sleeping beauty of the rose hedges in whose shadow time stands still. Here, too, are the forests of Germans and Celts, like the Glasur woods in which the heroes defeat death—and, again, Gethsemane and its olive groves.

“But the same thing is also sought in other places—in caves, in labyrinths, in the desert where the tempter lives. To those who can divine its symbols a tremendous life force inhabits all things and places. Moses strikes his staff on the rock and the water of life spurts forth. A moment like this then suffices for millenia.

“All this only seems to have been given to remote places and times. In reality, it is concealed in every individual, entrusted to him in code, so that he might understand himself, in his deepest, supra-individual power. This is the goal of every teaching that is worthy of the name.”

***

I will never return to that Zen monastery. It’s not because I’ll probably never get any sleep there. It’s because on its website under the heading of “For Health & Well-Being: Covid Precautions” there is a list of requirements for all overnight stays and retreats. One of them is: “Vaccination and boosters are encouraged but not required.” This is senseless paranoia. Even more daft is this one: “Negative rapid test ON THE DAY OF ARRIVAL.” Guests are told to send a picture of the results to the monastery registration office. I will not go there because I will not comply to this level of ridiculous regulations. Having to grocery shop with a useless mask on and follow the one-way directional arrows on the floor of the aisles like cattle was as compliant as I am ever going to get. I did it because I needed to eat. I can search for enlightenment at home and meditating on my own because complying to such indignities just to set foot on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery is heading in the opposite direction to anything remotely called enlightenment. Whatever it is, it is not this.

“Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage is a call for resistance,” writes Russel A. Berman in the book’s introduction. “It maps a strategy of opposition to oppressive power. Undertaking the forest passage means entering an anarchic realm beyond the control of a seemingly omnipotent state, which settle oneself apart from the masses who sheepishly obey the rulers’ commands. The few who can tap the inner strength to fight back become ‘forest rebels,’ partisans pursuing freedom against unconstrained power.”

Another commentator writes: “Jünger, and the forest rebel, laugh at the idea of egalitarianism as a denial of basic reality. The forest rebel is an aristocrat, not of blood, but of virtue, which is real aristocracy. To Jünger and the forest rebel, it is blindingly obvious that all men are not created equal—they may be equal before God, but the forest rebel is superior to the masses, for his choice is hard and risk-filled, yet objectively better.”

These people are now my sangha. We need each other for solace and support. Jünger writes: “Holding out against this force requires a new conception of freedom, one that can have nothing to do with the washed-out ideas associated with this word today. It presumes, for a start, that one does not want to merely save one’s own skin, but is also willing to risk it.”

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One final note. Jünger opens his slim book with a hypothetical voter trying to decide whether or not to vote in an election he knows is rigged. With the American Presidential election looming, Junger’s exploration is a timely one.

He writes: “The voter find himself face with a real dilemma, since he is invited to make a free decision by a power that for its part has no intention of playing by the rules. This same power demands his allegiance, while it survives on the breaches of allegiance. He is essentially depositing his honest capital in a crooked bank.”

In the end, the voter goes through with his intention to vote. Jünger writes, “[A] vote like this cannot be lost, even if it issues from a lost cause. Precisely this status gives it special meaning. It will not shake the opponent, but it will change the person who has decided to go through with it.”

Yet, he writes, “Our solitary voter is not yet a forest rebel. From a historical perspective he is even in arrears; his act of negation itself indicates this. Only when he has gained an overview of the game can he come up with his own, perhaps even surprising, moves.”

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Selected Bibliography

Jünger, Ernst. The Forest Passage. Translated from the German by Thomas Friese. Candor, New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2013.

Milosz, Czeslaw. The Captive Mind. Translated from the Polish by Jane Zielonko. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

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