Nerds can’t help themselves because problem solving (in P-B) is their version of reaching the summit, of being “king of the hill.” Nothing wrong with that; let them have their fun, right? Not exactly. In a previous volume in this series, Science and Philosophy: The Failure of Human Reason in the Human Community, the title clearly communicates that we need to listen to the wise people, today and in the past, who have given a clear warning about being enamored of the human intellect. The title of the article in The New York Times Magazine wherein Bill Gates and his friend David Christian extol the virtues of the intellect is “Everything Is Illuminated.” That title should be followed by the simple word—Not!
Bill Gates (who admits being a nerd) likes to watch DVD’s from the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” while he uses his treadmill. “On some mornings, he would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography or U.S. history.” He discovered “Big History,” a Genesis-like synthesis or history of human knowledge created by the Australian professor, David Christian.
Christian’s course divides history into eight “thresholds” beginning 13 billion years ago with the big bang which he calls Threshold 1. The origin of Homo sapiens is Threshold 6, the appearance of agriculture is Threshold 7, up to the modern world which is Threshold 8.
Christian’s synthesis, an expression of the Homo sapien intellect, is an approach similar to how Simple Reality synthesizes the accumulation of human wisdom or the insights of human intuition, although Simple Reality is independent of history, space or time. Christian presents the “big-picture” of human knowledge in the context of linear time. Simple Reality transcends time and makes the distinction between what is “real” and what is an “illusion.” Christian and Gates are trapped in the world of form in the structure of human consciousness composed of the illusion of the context (physical world), human identity (false self) and the resultant self-destructive human behavior (history). Nevertheless, “Gates started down the path to bring Big History to schools across the country.”
We all have two “guidance systems,” so to speak, our intellect (also labeled the head) and our intuition (also labeled the heart, often called our inner wisdom). The intellect, as we are learning is the guidance system in P-B and our intuition is the guidance system in P-A (Simple Reality).
Insights or intuition could be defined as original and deep or penetrating thoughts. The foundation of the Hindu religion is found in the Upanishads which Schopenhauer praised for their “deep, original, and sublime thoughts.”
The limitations of the human intellect were also understood by Shankara. “The world of thought and matter has a phenomenal or relative existence, and is superimposed [projected] upon Brahman, the unique, absolute reality. As long as we remain in ignorance (i.e., as long as we have not achieved transcendental consciousness [Simple Reality]) we shall continue to experience this apparent world which is the effect of superimposition. When transcendental consciousness is achieved, superimposition ceases.”
“There is nothing stranger in the history of religion than the sight of Buddha founding a worldwide religion, and yet refusing to be drawn into any discussion about eternity, immortality, or God. The infinite is a myth, he says, a fiction of philosophers who have not the modesty to confess that an atom can never understand the cosmos. He smiles at the debate over the finity or infinity of the universe, quite as if he foresaw the futile astromythology of physicists and mathematicians who debate the same question today.”
In the 16th century Christian worldview the intellect was sometimes thought of as synonymous with the personified devil. “And finally all the worst deceptions which are caused by the devil, and the evils that he brings to the soul, enter by way of knowledge and reflections of the memory [conditioned reactions] … For the devil has no power over the soul unless it be through the operations of its faculties, principally by means of knowledge.” Here St. John of the Cross, because of his extensive meditation in solitude, expresses his experience that the intellect can be used by the false self [the devil] to distract us from Simple Reality.
We can understand wisdom in three ways: first, by meditation; this is the most noble way. Secondly, by being influenced by someone or following someone; this is the easiest way. Third is the way of experience; this is the most difficult way.
Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Wisdom cannot be found by means of the intellect because it is not conventional knowledge. The Greek word gnosis often translated as self-knowledge as in the Delphi oracles, “Know thyself,” is as Elaine Pagels says “… better translated ‘insight,’ or ‘wisdom.’” She goes on to quote the Gnostic teacher, Hippolytus: “Abandon the search for God, and creation, and similar things of that kind [in other words, the world of form]. Instead, take yourself as the starting place. Ask who it is within you who makes everything his own saying, ‘my mind,’ ‘my heart,’ ‘my God.’ Learn the sources of love, joy, hate, and desire … If you carefully examine all these things, you will find [God] in yourself.”
John “Locke’s [1632-1704] purpose in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was to inquire into the origin and extent of human knowledge, and his answer—that all knowledge is derived from sense experience—became the principle tenet of the new empiricism which has dominated Western philosophy ever since. Even George Berkeley [1695-1753], who rejected Locke’s distinction between sense qualities independent of the mind and sense qualities dependent on the mind, proposed an idealistic philosophy in response to Locke’s provocative philosophy and gave it an empirical cast which reflected Western man’s rejection of innate or transcendental knowledge.”
What is this innate or transcendental knowledge? We know it well, those of us who rely on it as the gateway to an “experience” of rather than the “meaning” of life. A contemporary of Voltaire, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre put what we and he called “feeling” above reason. “The further reason advances, the more it brings us evidence of our nothingness; and far from calming our sorrows by its researches, it often increases them by its light … But feeling … gives us a sublime impulsion, and in subjugating our reason it becomes the noblest and most gratifying instinct in human life.”
Today we are involved in an historical struggle, a classic tug of war. It is the same struggle that occurred in France before the Revolution over 200 years ago “between Voltaire defending reason with wit and Rousseau pleading with tears for the rights of feeling.” Collectively, humanity has made its decision siding with Voltaire and the Enlightenment philosophers. It is, as we will come to regret, not the best one.
David Christian’s approach to history is certainly intellectual and his Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity includes 48 lectures on the facts the human senses have cataloged about the human experience. No, there is no “innate or transcendental knowledge,” no hint of intuitive insights or the worldview of Oneness in these 48 half-hour lectures.
David Christian’s course “financed by Bill Gates, [may] continue to grow as a regular history offering in high schools. The curriculum, which subsumes the role of humans within the larger context of geology, biology and astronomy, is not only fascinating but also offers students a worldview that places them as actors in this long sweep of Earth’s history.” What’s wrong with the Big History approach to teaching high school students about the world they live in? Most fundamentally, it’s because P-B is not the world they live in and the identity they assume as “actors in this long sweep of Earth’s history” is not a profound understanding of who they are or where they are.
By putting our eggs in the basket being carried by the human intellect, by following the nerds, we are being led astray. The nerds are once again on the move fleshing out the definition of P-B, and for those of us expecting a sumptuous breakfast of ham and eggs will instead find precious little to eat on our planet in the not-so-distant future.
There is only one “Great Course” (Simple Reality) and it has the answers to any and all questions that would be relevant to a suffering humanity. The nerds may be on the move, but do they know where they are going?
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in Simple Reality books:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community
