5 – Learning from the Wise
Existence. Consciousness. Identity. Three great mysteries at the heart of human life. It is not surprising their exploration has been considered vitally important in all the religious and spiritual traditions.
First, existence. Why is there something rather than nothing, the starting point for the human journey and a key part of any search toward understanding who we are and what life is about. As the great writer, philosopher, poet, statesman, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe put it: “Bewilderment about the fact that there is anything at all, and curiosity about meeting that fact as a wonder, is the best part of us.”[1] This bewilderment, this curiosity has given rise for millennia to the quest for wisdom and helped set in motion science, philosophy, religion, and many other disciplines of inquiry.
To consider the question of existence, though, must start with consciousness, for it is only because we are conscious that we are able to consider why there is existence: Until you have become aware of a separate self that is differentiated from the world, no “world” outside exists for you. To be conscious of yourself as separate is the prerequisite for the existence of a world “out there.” No individual consciousness, no world.[2]
In light of this, it is little wonder that all the wisdom traditions of the world suggest that the exploration of identity and consciousness are two of the best ways to arrive at an understanding of life and living. Through such questions as “How did this marvelous thing, the light of consciousness, come to me?” “How does my separate, personal consciousness relate to any other consciousness that might exist beyond me?”—the broadest issues of the spiritual search are opened.
The starting point for the spiritual search
These questions, then, are where a spiritual search often begins. Here are three much too brief summaries of how central and important such inquiries have been and are to the wisdom traditions:
- Hinduism says that consciousness must be the starting point, because it came first. Consciousness existed before there was a material world and is necessary for there to be a material world. Thus, especially jnana yoga, the path of wisdom, uses consciousness itself as a primary path of opening into realization and liberation. By various methods developed over thousands of years, a seeker is given tools to discover the truth beyond individual identity, beyond egoic name and form, and to open into a greater realization of the deepest truth.
Ultimately, Hinduism asserts that we exist in an eternal state that begins and ends in satchitananda, Being, Consciousness, Bliss. Being is existence itself, Consciousness is knowing that existence, and Bliss is the result of Knowing It fully and completely. In this system, the goal is to use increasing penetration of the mysteries to open fully into satchitananda as your own, primary experience of life.
- Buddhism says the world we perceive with our everyday senses is illusory, and that becoming conscious of this through learning to perceive more accurately leads to the deepest truths. Thus, cultivating conscious awareness is a skillful means to “wake up” to what really is and who we really are.
Buddhism goes on to say that the final possibility beyond the illusion of our daily life in the world is Nirvana. Of course, Nirvana is a mysterious word, and has been speculated about and debated endlessly since the Buddha first borrowed it from Hinduism to describe the ultimate goal toward which he was pointing. Whatever it is, it has something to do with the basic nature of existence, as well as with our true identity. Buddhism urges us to use the tools of consciousness and awareness to awaken to this highest possibility, and if we do, what we discover and become will be “timeless, deathless, permanent, imperishable, unborn, and unbecome.” Seems a worthy goal.
To think about this more playfully, we can, with that sometime Zen practitioner Alan Watts, try to discover the “which than which there is no whicher”?[3] And speaking of Zen, there is a famous phrase in the Heart Sūtra that has become a well-known chant: “Gone, Gone Beyond, Gone Beyond the Beyond. Hail to that Awakening.” What might this chant suggest for the possibility of human life? Whatever the answer, it certainly cannot be pinned down in discursive thought, nor put into normal intellectual categories. Yet perhaps reflecting on what is “Beyond the Beyond” is a doorway to a direct grasping of the ultimate nature of consciousness and identity.
- Christianity says we each have the possibility of stepping into Christ Consciousness. From his earliest teachings, Jesus emphasized expanding our consciousness. Consider the critically important word metanoia, which had a crucial place in the message both Jesus and Paul delivered. “Repentance” is frequently used in English translations of the New Testament for the word metanoia that was used in the original texts. But the Greek word metanoia does not mean being sorrowful or having regrets as the word repentance is often understood in modern churches. Rather, metanoia as used in the earliest texts we have of the words of Jesus means “to change one’s mind” or “change one’s consciousness.” The message he delivered, then, that comes to us in the English=speaking world as “repent” meant to Jesus “to think differently,” to step into a different (and larger) frame of mind. The Apostle Paul was also very focused on this: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus”[4]—which I understand to mean that those who follow the way of Jesus must attempt to expand into the state of consciousness that Jesus exemplified. And Paul did not say this consciousness first appeared in Jesus. Rather, he said that it “was also in Christ Jesus,” suggesting that this Christ Consciousness existed outside and prior to Jesus being born on earth. For this reason, many spiritual traditions, including Christianity, have equated consciousness itself with God, the Divine, or with “Being.”.
Another relationship with our theme from Christianity is that Jesus often used the phrases “Kingdom of Heaven” or “Kingdom of God” to point to the ultimate fulfilment of our lives. Exactly what these phrases were suggesting has been hotly debated for two thousand years, but most agree that whatever they point to, it involves an “eternal” state—outside of time and space as we normally think about those things. And this eternal state—or place, or Beingness—is inseparable from any Christian understanding of existence and identity. All are intertwined. For me, the best understanding I can reach of the Kingdom of Heaven is not to think of it as a concept to be believed, but as a state of consciousness to live into and become.
Jesus said in Luke: “For, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”[5] Which means to me that if it is already within me, my task is simply to realize it, to become it. Among the earliest sayings of Jesus we have, found in the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi cave discovery, Jesus says, “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it.”[6] Thus, again, it is already right here, right now, so our task is to realize and consciously become one with “what already is.”
Opium of the People
All this does raise another issue, though. Before using any wisdom tradition as a vehicle for awakening, freedom, or connection with something greater than our egoic selves we must make an act of faith in the possibility that one or more of the great teachers discovered something important you and I have not yet discovered. And some people have a problem with this. Consciously making an act of faith is not in vogue nowadays. The reason to do so becomes clearer, however, when you realize that the only alternative to a conscious act of faith is an unconscious one, for we each act and live on the basis of many acts of faith. You cannot live otherwise.
For example, a number of people in the modern world have made an act of faith (either consciously or unconsciously) that all religious and spiritual beliefs are delusions, illusions, or “opium of the people.” But they have done so in spite of the fact that there is not one shred of proof that such an act of faith fits reality. To deny the views of the wisdom traditions is an act of faith, just as much as to adopt one or more of them. Not only is there no proof, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that all the wisdom traditions are wrong or mistaken. Perhaps your understanding of one of the traditions is flawed. Maybe the version you were taught was distorted. You do not know for sure what the great wisdom teachers saw and understood, so to reject all their ideas can only be an act of faith.
Further, making this act of faith can be quite problematic for one’s life. Each of us was raised within a culture deeply influenced by one or more of the wisdom traditions, even those who were raised in a non-religious way, because every culture grew out of beliefs developed by the traditions. Every culture teaches to its young one set or another of ideas about how to live, values that are important, and images of what is meaningful, and each one is grounded in a wisdom tradition. Thus, even those who say they reject all the wisdom teachings can’t just throw them off, for they were steeped in one or more while growing up, and these teachings are embedded in the unconscious.
This is the “myth of the given” within which each of us lives. Each of us takes ideas and beliefs we absorbed when young as “truths,” often without knowing where they originated. In the final analysis, every person’s beliefs about “what is obviously true” came from one or more of the wisdom teachings passed down through the centuries. Go back far enough and you will find that every person’s myth about what is “given truth” originated in one of the wisdom traditions of the world. This doesn’t mean what each person was taught is true, because many of the teachings have been twisted and distorted through the centuries. But you and I, and every other person alive, was marinated in one of these systems, whether we realize it or not, so to think we can reject all the traditions is much harder than it at first might seem.
Further, on what base can one stand to reject all the systems? To make a judgment requires a starting place, and the wisdom tradition we were taught is our starting place.
Skeptico: Then I will use reason!
Wisdom Seeker: Sorry Skeptico, that isn’t possible. Reason doesn’t provide such a starting point. Reason can only start operating after a set of assumptions has been adopted to create the framework for its operation. For most of us, this is the “myth of the given” we were taught. If we reject that, the only path forward to adopt another set of assumptions—none of which can be proved. Further, as David Hume pointed out, and much recent research has shown, we mostly use reason to justify what we feel, want, or want to believe.
So even if you succeed completely in rooting out every single value and belief you were indoctrinated to accept while growing up, you must replace your “givens” with some other system, for no one can create a whole new set of beliefs starting at ground zero. So, if you are able to get rid of all your old beliefs, you will be forced to take new beliefs from people you consider “wise.” But how will you make this decision? And how will you know where these new beliefs came from? If you trace them back, you will discover they are always grounded in part on prior wisdom traditions. Except if you adopt the position of absolute and total nihilism. Even here, there is no argument to establish its truth, so to adopt a nihilistic worldview is just as much an act of faith as to adopt a religious one. There is no escape. Your only truly real choice is to consciously choose which belief systems to use as your starting point.
Choosing a path
In the final analysis, no one can give you a proven answer to the questions of where we came from, what is truly important, or how we should live—and anyone trying to answer these questions is led back to the fundamental issues of existence, consciousness, and identity. Further, whatever ideas you have about these issues was borrowed from others, or is something you worked out for yourself starting with the raw material you were given by others. Perhaps you have had an experience of knowing “the full truth” for yourself—a number of people have. But it is quite possible that your experience was partial, or even delusory, so you must make an act of faith as to whether it was really true and complete. All the most important issues of life eventually wind their way back to acts of faith as a starting point. Whether you make your acts of faith consciously or unconsciously is within your power, but whether you make one is not.
Once recognizing all this, the wisest path forward seems to be to study and practice the best suggestions the great teachers have passed on to us, and then to gradually work out the best answers you can for yourself. Nothing guarantees this approach will be free of mistakes, but using the guidance of those considered the wisest to have walked among us by the great traditions seems to me, well, wise.
This conclusion is strongly reinforced by studying history and there discovering that there have been thousands upon thousands of people through the ages, perhaps millions, who have found inner peace, joy, and a deep sense of fulfillment by following the guidance of one or more of the wisdom traditions. There are certainly errors and mistakes in much of what has been handed down to us, and any path you choose might be wrong. But the cumulative evidence of history is that many, many people have found fulfillment through following the guidance of the great traditions. There are more accounts than you will ever have time to read of people in all the traditions who came to great peace and joy. Not the majority of people in any tradition, by any means, but a significant number. I have read at least a thousand such reports.
Some might be exaggerated, some even delusory. But an important sign is that the wisest and most fulfilled figures in every culture had a profound positive effect on the people around them. Many people who were in their presence experienced a profound sense of peace, of love and compassion, joy and bliss. And when someone has this kind of effect on a significant number of other people, it is a clear signal that such a person’s understanding is real and true. On the other hand, I have found almost no reports of people who discovered deep fulfillment through sensory indulgence, by seeking wealth and power, by making a nihilistic act of faith, or among those whose act of faith was that all the traditions were delusions.
Further, those societies that abandoned rather than use the guidance of the great traditions, trying to form cultures without their guidance, have always crashed into the wall that Nietzsche foresaw—the only alternative to the teachings of the wisdom traditions is “raw power.” Nietzsche hoped that choosing to live from this “will to power” would bring beneficial results, but the experiments of Hitler in Germany, Lenin and Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, and Pol Pot in Cambodia are vivid examples of the danger of attempting to approach the creation of human cultures free of the traditions. (Nietzsche would certainly not have approved of any of the above-listed perverted manifestations of his ideas, but it is hard to discern a positive outcome for any culture that adopts his views. He looked back to the older Greek culture and the assertions of power from which that many of the major Greek figures, God and human alike, operated. But he failed to sufficiently acknowledge that all the humans operated within value systems given by those traditions, and all who ignored or transgressed those value systems eventually came to unhappy ends.)
To return to the central point: Although the teachings of the wisdom traditions have been distorted by those in power in the interest of self-centered and mean-spirited ends many times in human history (bringing unhappy results), there are also many examples of cultures that used the values and ideals of the wisdom traditions in healthy ways, which resulted in civilizations that brought peace and fulfillment to many people over long periods of time and provided a framework within which many individuals found their way to peace, freedom, fulfillment, realization, and joy.
What now?
How does all this relate to you and me and the living of our individual lives?
To have the best chance of finding deep peace and joy for yourself, it is important to:
1) Be as clear as you can about the core beliefs that underpin your life;
2) Spend time examining whether these beliefs seem right for you now;
3) Pick one or more of the wisdom traditions that seem most vital to you right now and undertake a set of practices from that tradition;
4) Use the help of a teacher if you can find one who seems right for you now in your journey;
5) If at some point you have a direct experience of answers, or have had deep insights in the past, don’t dismiss or diminish the importance of such moments. At the same time, don’t rush to conclusions about what they mean—any one experience might be just a single step on a long journey to wholeness, love, peace, and joy.
As you follow the best path you can find, be open to change, but persevere. And always keep in mind that you are operating from a set of unproven assumptions, so keep digging deeper. It is only in the deepest ground that you will you ever find a firm place to stand.
[1] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quoted in Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God: Awakening the Spirit in Everyday Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 20.
[2] See the earlier chapter, “The Mystery of Consciousness,” p. 2
[3] Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 75.
[4] Philippians 2:5 (King James Version).
[5] Jesus, Luke 17:20-21 King James Version
[6] Jesus, Gospel of Thomas, 113