Humanity has been fortunate in that spread around the world there have often been a few insightful people who have been or who are awake, that is to say, aware of the distinction between illusion and Simple Reality. As a whole, however, we have been unfortunate in choosing not to acknowledge or incorporate the wisdom of these community members into the worldview of the general population.
That behavior has not changed over time despite the growing sophistication of the human intellect. Why is that? Obviously, so called enlightenment has nothing to do with the intellect but is instead a function of wisdom. Wisdom then, is precious, it is beautiful, it is Truth, it is freedom, it is—alas—rare. And because it is all these infinitely valuable “things,” we should place a high priority on it; but instead we continue to refuse the one thing that can save us from our self destruction and suffering.
What is this elusive thing called wisdom?
Traditional learning in the fields of art, science and mathematics, for example, have steadily increased but this is not true of wisdom. Any given individual (given certain favorable conditions) has always, during the period of oral and written human history, been able to attain wisdom but so far the human race as a whole does not seem to evolve in its attainment of wisdom. And in fact, we seem to have less discussion of what wisdom is today than we did in ancient and medieval times.
Another trait of wisdom unlike other forms of “knowing” is that it is married to action. The wise are not passive in the world. Perhaps that is because at the heart of wisdom is compassion which connects us to others in the act of “suffering with” which is the literal meaning of compassion. Compassion connects and binds humans together in mutual support. No wonder wisdom has been valued in the past and obviously, in view of the current human condition, needs to be visited again.
Buddha and Jesus, two renown teachers of wisdom, are long gone. We failed to avail ourselves of their guidance. Does that mean we missed a rare opportunity? Not at all. As we just said, not only is wisdom accessible within each individual but we have always had—and we repeat—scattered through time and space around the planet, ancient and modern day teachers, living and breathing prophets of the “good news.”
If wisdom is found in each individual, why aren’t we doing a better job of creating a sustainable global community today? Where did we get off track? Why haven’t we established contact with or been able to hear our inner “still, small and wise voice?” One reason (in the West at any rate) is ironically called “the Enlightenment.” The ultimate “head” people, our Western philosophers, stand out as being among the culpable who helped mesmerize the vulnerable, fear-driven mind. They, if course, had lots of help from the rest of the human community.
“Locke’s (John Locke, 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.”[i]
Seeking the origin of Western philosophical thought that provides the foundation for P-B, is of interest for those of us who want to understand how Western humanity developed an unsustainable culture.
Locke’s “new empiricism,” relying as it does on the senses, is obviously flawed for we know that the senses are designed for and limited to enabling the human organism to survive in the physical world. The senses supported by the intellect create the basic human survival strategy but do not provide the possibility for a deeper understanding of where and who we are and for behaviors that allow for the sustainable worldview underlying P-A. We must, therefore reject the philosophy of John Locke, et al. as too limiting in its understanding of reality.
Irish philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753), also failed humanity by rejecting the very wisdom that is essential for the shift from P-B to P-A. He denied the existence of “innate or transcendental knowledge,” what we have called “intuition” which is fundamental to our ability to distinguish “emotion” from “feeling” or “reaction” from “response.” Connecting feeling and response are at the heart of the behavior we call The Point of Power Practice.
The American Transcendentalists, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, were able to come much closer to a profound world view because they affirmed our intuitive connection to what Emerson called the “Oversoul” or what David Bohm called the Implicate Order.
What science calls evolution is not progress toward a paradigm shift. Philosophers can get excited by what may appear to them to be increased human consciousness when in fact humanity remains firmly committed to P-B and the false self.
“Kant [1724-1804], for instance, enthusiastically hailed Rousseau as the Newton of the moral world, and Condorcet in his Progress of the Human Spirit enumerated the ten stages by which man had raised himself from savagery to the threshold of perfection. Material progress was certainly an observable fact; and since nature held all the secrets that a man needed to know, and reason could unlock them, eventually man could control his environment. If he therefore would only use his mental and moral powers to their fullest extent, the argument ran, man could go in one direction only, onward and upward.”[ii] Such is the illusion created by the functioning of the human intellect.
We will now meet and listen to a few of the present and past insightful mystics and others who discovered of the principles that distinguish reality from illusion and others who failed to do so. Perhaps some of us are ready to begin making different choices than we have made in the past. If so, we will have all the help we need from those who “embody” the always present human wisdom and our own connection with it as we proceed to take the responsibility of creating our own reality and expressing the deepest yearning of the timeless Universe.
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.”[iii] 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.”[iv]
Pagels is saying listen with your heart and you will be able to hear people like Ken Wilber. “Among Western thinkers who have studied Asian philosophies in depth and have incorporated aspects of the latter into their own thought, a notable modern example is Ken Wilber, whose ‘Integral Psychology’ openly draws upon the work of the Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo. In his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), Wilber pointed out the similarities between Asian wisdom traditions and various schools of psychology current at the time, thus drawing attention to the real and valuable contributions to be made by non-Western schools of thought, and in particular by those of India. He has shown that Western psychology can benefit enormously from the thousands of years of empirical experimentations in the field of consciousness studies and psychology conducted by these practitioners, albeit under different names.”[v]
Ram Das expresses an insight on why fear plays a prominent part in our failure to benefit from wisdom when it is so readily available. “Wisdom recognizes that you can be connected because of that part of you which is not different from others. When you fall into separateness and take that seriously, you lose wisdom. The mind is where knowledge resides, and the heart is where wisdom resides. We are afraid to open our hearts for fear that we’ll have to give up our separateness and that in doing to, we’ll be overwhelmed.”[vi]
Having begun with Wilber, Pagels and Ram Das, we will trace wisdom going back through human history. We will see that wisdom today and wisdom thousands of years ago in both the East and the West has remained unchanged. Indeed, that which is “real” does not change.
How does a wise person behave? One great American judge, Learned Hand (1872-1961) recognized it in his colleague, Benjamin Cardozo (1870-1938). As we have learned wisdom requires a certain detachment from the false self. “Yet from this self-effacement came a power greater than the power of him who ruleth a city. He was wise because his spirit was uncontaminated, because he knew no violence, or hatred, or envy, or jealousy, or ill-will. I believe that it was this purity that chiefly made him the judge we so much revere; more than his learning, his acuteness, and his fabulous industry.”[vii]
Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1794) in a conversation with his biographer James Boswell (1740-1795) revealed that he understood the pitfalls of reaction and the freedom of responding in the present moment:
Dr. Johnson expressed “approbation of one who had attained to the state of the philosophical wise man, that is, to have no want of anything.”
Boswell then observed that “the savage is a wise man.”
Dr. Johnson explains: “Sir, I do not mean simply being without—but not having a want.”[viii]
The wise man knows it is the “craving” for and not the lack of possession that is the origin of suffering.
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)[ix]
Wisdom and compassion are synonyms in that we cannot err when being guided by an open heart in the present moment, our natural and compassionate state of being. The well-known Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross [1542-1591], uses the word “natural” to mean just the opposite in the next sentence. “In order to attain this state [the NOW] the natural operations [false-self behaviors] must be completely disregarded [stop the identification with the body, mind and emotions], and this happens, as the Prophet [Jesus] says, when the soul comes into solitude [the NOW], according to these its faculties, and God speaks to its heart.”[x] In short, reactive behavior must cease before we can access the Implicate Order, our inner wisdom.
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.”[xi] 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.
“By contemplation [meditation] it is possible to attain to this Grund [“ground” or present moment], leaving aside the discursive and imaginative activities [the intellect in P-B] which normally characterize conscious [unconscious] life.”[xii] This insight of Meister Eckhart (1290-1328) would alone have gotten him into trouble with Pope John XXII even though he was the superior-general for the whole of Germany and former vicar-general of Bohemia. “Eckhart’s teaching that God creates the world in the same ‘eternal now’ in which the emanation of the divine Persons from the Godhead takes place could be understood as implying the eternity of the world—a doctrine that conflicts with the literal sense of Biblical revelation.”[xiii]
It didn’t pay to speak of knowledge, let alone wisdom in the Church of the 13th century. Eckhart was charged with 28 counts of heresy and perhaps escaped severe punishment by dying. There was a parallel between the beliefs of Eckhart and the Indian teacher Shankara whom we shall meet in a moment.
Eckhart’s insights were also not unlike those of Buddha wherein during his contemplation, Eckhart found the distinction between the observer and the observed dissolve, an experience of Oneness. “The experience of the introverted mystic includes a state of consciousness in which there is both a sense of illumination and an absence of distinction between subject and object; that is, the contemplative is not having an experience like that of ordinary perception, where the thing conceived can be distinguished from the percipient.”[xiv]
P-A provides a vantage point that brings clarity to the observer and adds to his store of wisdom. Lucretius (99-55 B.C.) found nothing “more gladdening than to dwell in the calm high places, firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others, and see them wandering hither and thither, going astray as they seek the way of life.”[xv] Wisdom brings the perspective of Oneness, the Great Insight.
“Plato (427-347 B.C.) had set a theme by picturing the Ideas of God as the patterns on which all things were formed; the Stoics had combined these Ideas into the Logos Spermatikos or fertilizing wisdom of God; the Neo-Pythagoreans had made the Ideas a divine person; and Philo had turned them into the Logos or Reason of God, a second divine principle, through which God created, and communicated with, the world.”[xvi] This could be read as the chronicle or history of the Implicate Order, as conceived by the human intellect of course.
Substituting Logos for the more common translation Word in the familiar passage from the Fourth Gospel, we can get a better feel for how the Implicate Order and wisdom are more inclusive synonyms for God.
In the beginning was the Logos; the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. All things were made by the Logos; without him nothing was made. It was by him that all things came into existence. So the Logos became flesh and blood, and dwelt among us.
— The Fourth Gospel[xvii]
Wisdom is intuitive, simple and insightful. By insightful, we mean that wisdom penetrates through the illusion of P-B. The following example illustrates both insight and simplicity. From E. J. Thomas’ Life of the Buddha, we have the Four Noble Truths followed by the simplified Simple Reality version. [xviii]
Buddha’s First Noble Truth Now this, oh monks, is the noble truth of pain: birth is painful, sickness is painful, old age is painful, sorrow, lamentation, dejection and despair are painful.
(Simple Reality) Reaction instead of response results in afflictive emotions or suffering.
Buddha’s Second Noble Truth Now, this, oh monks, is the noble truth of the cause of pain: that craving, which leads to rebirth, combined with pleasure and lust, finding pleasure here and there, namely, the craving for passion, the craving for existence, the craving for non-existence.
(Simple Reality) The creation of our survival strategy, deriving our identity from our body, mind and emotions and our being contained in P-B, leads to delusion and dissatisfaction.
Buddha’s Third Noble Truth Now this, oh monks, is the noble truth of the way that leads to the cessation of pain: the cessation, without a reminder, of that craving; abandonment, forsaking, release, non-attachment.
(Simple Reality) By using The Point of Power Practice, choosing response over reaction, we transcend the old story, the old identity and the old unconscious, reactive behaviors that are the source of our suffering in P-B.
Buddha’s Fourth Noble Truth Now this, oh monks, is the noble truth of the way that leads to the cessation of pain: this is the noble Eightfold Way: namely, right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.
(Simple Reality) The eight behaviors named above are, in fact, among the results of our choosing to stay in the present moment, not the “causes” of Simple Reality. In the fourth Noble Truth, Buddha had put the cart before the horse.
It will be difficult for many of us in the West to understand how the intellect is a barrier to Simple Reality given how enamored we are of our ability to “reason.” The “Enlightenment” that we believe ushered out the dark ages of superstition is not the Enlightenment of transcendence. Buddha (563-483 B.C.) seemed to understand the distinction.
“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.”[xix]
“He refuses to express any opinion as to whether the world had a beginning or will have an end: whether the soul is the same as the body, or distinct from it: whether, even for the greatest saint, there is to be any reward in heaven. He calls such questions ‘the jungle, the desert, the puppet-show, the writhing, the entanglement of speculation,’ and will have nothing to do with them; they lead only to feverish disputation, personal resentments, and sorrow; they never lead to wisdom and peace.”[xx]
Wisdom is indeed found only beyond words in the fruitful realm of silence. We cannot “understand” but we can “feel” the truth of the cosmos, we can “feel” the “heart” of Creation because it is not separate from or alien to us. We are an integral part of all that is, we are That.
Identity, change or impermanence, and Simple Reality are closely linked. We are indestructible energy not individual personalities. “Even the saint, even Buddha himself, will not, as a personality, survive death.”[xxi]
Nirvana (Simple Reality) as Buddha taught, meant the extinction of all individual desire. Living in the present moment beyond the illusion of time and space is also living beyond the conditioning that causes reaction, beyond the identification with body, mind and emotions.
“‘Now,’ says Buddha, ‘this is the noble truth as to the passing of pain. Verily, it is the passing away so that no passion [reaction] remains, the giving up [choosing response], the getting rid of, the emancipation from, the harboring of, this craving thirst.’”[xxii]
Emerson’s famous essay on self-reliance was no doubt influenced by his study of the Upanishads and or the sutras where Buddha said “And whosoever either now or after I am dead, shall be a lamp unto themselves, and a refuge unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but, holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, it is they who shall reach the very topmost height! But they must be anxious to learn.”[xxiii] And “they” must embrace life as a meditation, choosing response over reaction, moment by moment, day by day; that is the way to the topmost height, to the mountain top called liberation.
Oneness as the basis for our true identity lifts our experience of life to new heights the epiphany of compassion. “When we see ourselves as parts of a whole, when we reform ourselves and our desires in terms of the whole, then our personal [false-self] disappointments and defeats, our varied suffering and inevitable death, no longer sadden us as bitterly as before; they are lost in the amplitude of infinity. When we have learned to love not our separate life, but all men and all living things, then at last we shall find peace.”[xxiv] This is what Buddha taught, we would do well to listen.
Why do we need to study more ideas, facts and concepts when they are the very source of the problem, i.e., ignorance itself? Because the process of studying and reading provides a context wherein we struggle with our own process of awakening. Similarly being in community provides a context in which our “Self” is reflected back to us and our “self” is exposed as an illusion. Both are a self-encounter that creates “consciousness.”
You will never know all of these facts, these reflections—but you will vividly know the sole reality which is reflected. And thus does Lao Tzu proclaim:
Without going outside, you may know the whole world
Without looking through the window, you may see the ways of heaven.
The farther you go, the less you know.
Thus the sage knows without traveling.
— Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.)[xxv]
In our journey back through time in search of wisdom we arrive at the Vedas, the earliest level of Hinduism developed in the last half of the second millennium B.C. The Vedas began as an oral tradition or that which is “heard” from the mystical realm. We will focus here and elsewhere in this encyclopedia on Vedanta, the mystical aspects of the Vedas most in harmony with Simple Reality.
“Vedanta refers to the philosophical school of nondualism. But in a larger view, Vedanta means the religion based on the Vedas, the revealed scriptures of India. In another sense, Vedanta is a philosophy founded on a set of mystical truths that are in complete agreement with the fundamental teachings of all the great religions.”[xxvi] Unfortunately, the great religions have lost touch with these “fundamental teachings.”
Simple Reality teaches response as a practice to lessen our identification with body, mind and emotions to weaken our false-self conditioning. “Vedanta says that the most important goal of the spiritual aspirant is to cease identifying himself with the body, mind and senses and recognize his true nature which is divine.”[xxvii]
“After the first few lessons, every student of Vedanta philosophy quickly learns not to identify with his body, nor with his breath, nor with his feelings, nor with his perceptions, nor with the highest reaches of his intellect.”[xxviii]
What is left of the false self after these many profound Self realizations? What remains in today’s Freudian terms what we call the ego or personal self is a shadow of the former persona, but it has no desires, wishes, or needs. It cares nothing for the survival strategy pursuits of plenty, pleasure and power. It has no desire to control events, circumstances or people. It lacks nothing within itself; therefore, it does not seek gain inasmuch as all is complete at every moment. There is not even a desire for continuance. There is nothing one needs or wants to experience.
Both the East and the West have grappled with the fundamentals of the human story. “Vedanta philosophy occupies a central position between realism and idealism. Western realism and idealism are both based on a distinction between mind and matter; Indian philosophy puts mind and matter in the same category—both are objects of knowledge.”[xxix]
We will conclude our revelations on wisdom, our search back through time and space, with a source of wisdom who transcends time and space. Seth has told us elsewhere in this encyclopedia that time and space a part of the illusion of P-B, but not so with wisdom. Wisdom is “real.” Thank heaven for that!
Like many of our wise ancestors and current insightful and wise fellow travelers, Seth begins with a warning about our over-reliance on our intellect and our so-called “free will.” “With the large freedom provided by the conscious mind, however, man could stray from that great inner joy of being, forget it, disbelieve in it, or use his free will to deny its existence.”[xxx] Ouch! I’m glad I don’t do that, aren’t you?
“The splendid biological acceptance of life could not be thrust or forced upon his emerging consciousness, so to be effective, efficient, to emerge in the new focus of awareness, grace had to expand from the life of the tissue to that of the feelings, thoughts and mental processes. Grace became the handmaiden of natural guilt, then.”[xxxi] The “church fathers” of our various religions were quick to see the opportunity here and most of us throughout human history were conned into believing the story they concocted to solidify their power and control.
“Man became aware of his state of grace when he lived within the dimensions of his consciousness as it was turned toward his new world of freedom. When he did not violate it, he was aware of his own grace. When he violated it, it fell back into cellular awareness, as with the animals, but he felt consciously cut off from it and denied.”[xxxii] This is why in Simple Reality we emphasize ceasing our identification with our body.
This article has provided food for thought about how we make everything so complicated in P-B. We could go on and on about the subject of wisdom but we have already described what it is many times over so this is as good a place as any to shut up. So wise-up dear reader and embrace the truth of your being. It’s not that hard.
What is the end result of the search for wisdom throughout human history? For those few who have been successful in transcending the illusion of P-B they have experienced a True self, a liberated identity that has no desires, wishes, or needs. It has no desire to control events, circumstances or people. It lacks nothing within itself; therefore, it does not seek gain inasmuch as all is complete at every moment. There is not even a desire for continuance. There is nothing one needs or wants to experience.
This is the freedom of Simple Reality available to all and it always has been.
[i] Magill, Frank N. [ed.]. Masterpieces of World Literature. New York: Harper, 1989, p. 254.
[ii] Fleming, William. Art, Music and Ideas. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1970, p. 280.
[iii] Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York. Random House, 1995, p. 167.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Malhotra, Rajiv and Gray, David. “Global Renaissance and the Roots of Western Wisdom.” Institute of Noetic Sciences Review. Petaluma, California: Institute of Noetic Sciences, June/August 2001, pp. 14-15.
[vi] Schwartz, Tony. What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America. New York: Bantam, 1995, p. 55.
[vii] Rathbun, Harry J. Creative Initiative. Palo Alto: Creative Initiative Foundation, 1976, p. 157.
[viii] Hutchins, Robert Maynard [ed.]. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Vol. II. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952, p. 1103.
[ix] Tolstoy, Leo. A Calendar of Wisdom. New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 185.
[x] St. John of the Cross. Ascent of Mount Carmel. Liguori, Missouri: Triumph Books, 1991, p. 221.
[xi] Ibid., p. 222.
[xii] Edwards, Paul [ed.]. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. II. New York: MacMillan, 1967, p. 450.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] Hutchins, op. cit., p. 1102.
[xvi] Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944, p. 594.
[xvii] Ibid., pp. 594-595.
[xviii] Durant, Will. Our Oriental Heritage. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954, p. 430.
[xix] Ibid., p. 431.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Ibid., pp. 435-436.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Ibid., p. 439.
[xxiv] Ibid., p. 436.
[xxv] Wilber, Ken. The Spectrum of Consciousness. Wheaton, Illinois: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1977, p. 177.
[xxvi] Johnson, Clive [ed.]. Vedanta. An Anthology of Hindu Scripture, Commentary, and Poetry. New York: Bantam, 1971, p. ix.
[xxvii] Johnson, op. cit., p. 3.
[xxviii] Ibid., p. 34.
[xxix] Ibid., p. 14.
[xxx] Roberts, Jane. The Nature of Personal Reality. New York: Bantam, 1974, p. 158.
[xxxi] Ibid.
[xxxii] Ibid.
