May 9, 2022
Every project, discussion, investigation, or attempt at understanding begins with what you think and believe at the beginning. Every single thing you do from this point forward in your life begins with the assumptions you now hold. Each of us lives within a vast framework of assumptions, and even the most scientific of endeavors rests upon a scaffolding of assumptions that will have a dramatic effect on the outcome.
If this is true of science, it is even more true of inquiries that involve things that cannot be precisely measured, including all philosophical, psychological, and spiritual investigations. And it is especially true when dealing with questions about how to live one’s own life.
My earlier books and essays discus these key ideas at some depth. If you would like to explore these ideas and assumptions more fully, or discover how I came to them, you can do so there.
If you have the time, it would be valuable to use these eighteen ideas and assumptions as a tool for meditation and reflection — to see which ones you hold and which you do not. That in itself would be a valuable step toward understanding the starting point for your own life from this moment forward.
- In the early part of your life, perhaps around 3 or 4 years of age, you woke up one day and realized that you were conscious, that you were aware of being alive, aware that you existed as an individual human being.
You did not understand how this so-called consciousness came to you, nor what it was or how it worked. You just became dimly aware one day that you existed as a separate being. (Reflect for a moment: When did you first realize you had a separate individual self?)
Since that time all those years ago, you probably haven’t figured out the answer to the questions about consciousness, or know how you came to have it. Rather, you simply take consciousness for granted, in the same way that you take many other mysteries for granted. For instance, you don’t know where the universe came from, or how life arose from inorganic matter, but you go on about your life without thinking about these great unknowns very much.
There are, of course, many theories about the mysteries of existence, from the reductionistic to the mystical, from the mundane to the spiritual, but none of these theories has widespread support, except within the tribe that holds each particular theory. Every tribe has its own theory, from the materialist tribe to the Australian aborigines, from the many-worlds physicists to Christian mystics and Buddhist monks.
Most people in each tribe believe that smart people somewhere within the tribe know the answers, and they put their faith in that. But I wager that you yourself do not know how the world came to exist, how life emerged, what consciousness is, or how you came to be conscious. And if you are like most of the rest of us, you are still trying to discover how to create a life that brings the fullness of meaning, fulfillment, love, wisdom, peace, and joy.
- Closely associated with the mystery of consciousness is the mystery of memory.
Nothing is more central to human life than the ability to remember countless facts, stories, scenes, and situations in incredible detail, and then somehow make sense of them. Further, we are able to retrieve single, specific facts when we need them from among the billions stored somewhere (no one knows where or how they are stored) without sorting through all the others or even being aware of their existence at that moment. How does this happen? How do you do this? No one knows.
Again, there are theories, but no widely accepted ones about how memories are created or stored. No one has ever found a memory in a brain. Instruments can detect impulses in the brain, but no instrument can tell when, or whether, an impulse is a memory. The only way to know if an impulse is related to a memory is to ask the person being studied. But then it is only a guess if any particular impulse relates to a particular memory. No matter how much memory is studied scientifically, only the individual has personal, subjective access to their memories. An impulse detected by a machine is not a memory, and how the two relate is a matter of pure speculation to this day. Thus memory, a central component of being human, is a great mystery to us. Yet there it is, in each one of us, in all its vast splendor.
- The next step is that, emerging from the mysteries of consciousness and memory, you developed an individual “I,” a unique and separate identity.
In addition, most of us assume that billions of other human beings have separate identities as well. We cannot know this for sure, because we cannot get inside other peoples’ minds, but assuming everyone else has an individual “I” like you do, pause and consider this incredible phenomenon for a moment. In the last 50,000 years, about 108 billion individuals have had a unique individual “I.” Yet we still do not understand how an individual “I” comes to exist.
Not that we haven’t tried to understand, of course. For at least 5,000 years (and probably much longer), the wisest among us have been trying to understand what this “I” thing is. There have been many theories. But the accepted theory within each culture has changed over and over again. And today, the individual “I” is as mysterious as ever. If anything, there is a proliferation and acceleration of the number of theories about it.
(I will now include you, dear reader, in a conversation between my long-time inner skeptic and my inner wisdom figure, who often debate ideas I am trying to work out.)
Skeptico: Wait a minute; back up. Are you saying there were humans like us 50,000 years ago?
Wisdom Seeker: It is impossible to know for sure, but there were homo sapiens back then who were anatomically the same in body and brain as we are today. In fact, at least 200,000 years ago, human bodies and brains were physically like ours. I picked 50,000 years ago as a starting point because statistician Carl Haub provides the best estimate I can find for the total number of humans who have ever lived, and he starts at that time. I also like 50,000 years ago as a starting point because the exquisite cave drawings in southern Europe and southern Africa started about that time, and they reflect a sensibility that is deeply connected to ours today. (Dating the cave paintings is difficult; they could go back 70,000 years, while some argue for a date about 30,000 years ago, but the point is the same in either case.)
Anyway, I said it is impossible to know for sure because we have little idea what people 70,000 or 30,000 years ago thought about who they were. We can speculate—but only in the broadest way. About 5,000 years ago, however, we do have the start of a more detailed record of human thought, including writings that convey a clear understanding of being human, of people who had a sense of personal existence and were conscious of having an individual identity.
- With great intensity, at least since the Axial Age, we humans have been trying to understand how we came to have an “I” and what we are supposed to do with it.
Thousands of Shamanic and tribal cultures all over the world have probably tried to understand individual existence for at least 50,000 years, and larger collections of people in population centers in the Middle East, Central and South America, the Danube Valley, Egypt, India, China, the earliest going back at least 10,000 years, have likely wrestled with the question of identity, but the Axial Age was a special time nonetheless.
Starting with Zoroaster in Persia in the seventh century BC, followed in the sixth and fifth centuries by an explosion of important transformative figures all over the world — the Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu (probably a composite figure), the great Hebrew prophets, Socrates, Plato, and many others — the Axial Age was a time when ideas about what it meant to be human and what human life was about generated great speculation. Many of the central ideas and value systems we live from today were formulated during that time.
Skeptico: Do you mean to say that all of our accumulated knowledge of the last 2500 years has gotten us nowhere?
Wisdom Seeker: All I can say is that, in spite of this intense focus and speculation of all those years, no consensus has developed with regard to the core questions of life, nor do we seem to be any closer to such a consensus than we have ever been. In fact, the answers given by many of the wise ones of old are as good, often better, than many of the answers being offered today.
- In respect to many of the most important areas of life, the average person in the modern industrialized world is no better off than people in many societies in the past.
In the areas of science, engineering, conquering some diseases, and manufacturing material goods for large numbers of people, much progress has been made. But in terms of finding a fulfilling life — to love and be loved, become a good person, create and maintain rewarding relationships, raise well-adjusted children, prevent crime, organize well-functioning communities, foster healthy lifestyles, and prevent substance abuse — it is almost impossible to argue that most people today are better off than large numbers of people were in stable societies through the centuries.
In fact, many people today seem much worse off in terms of anxiety, depression, despair, and feeling that life is meaningless than did many who lived in well-organized societies in the past. There have certainly been cultures in which people were worse off in general than in the industrial societies of today, but there have also been many in which people seemed happier and more fulfilled. From stable tribal societies, the high civilizations of India, China, and ancient Greece, and on through many well-organized cultures since that time, there is good reason to believe that in many areas of life and living, a significant number of people in the past were happier and better adjusted than many of us are today.
The plain fact is, in terms of happiness and fulfillment, the idea of progress has little meaning. Rather, in many times and places, societies developed healthy patterns of living that led to many having fulfilling lives. In any given area of the Earth you wish to choose, you will find that healthy cultures have risen up, lasted for a few generations (and sometimes for centuries), but then gave way to disintegration and conflict. And if you pick any time period in history, you find places where societies were functioning in a healthy way, while there were others in which disruption and chaos reigned.
This pattern of the rise and fall of healthy cultures characterizes the history of every place on Earth, which makes the idea of progress non-sensical, except in the previously mentioned areas of science, engineering, and the production and dissemination of material goods. These are important, but looking at the level of unhappiness in developed countries today, they clearly do not have much to do with meaning, fulfillment, or the overall happiness of a group of people.
- Although cultures rise and fall, it has always been possible, no matter the circumstances, for an individual to find and live a fulfilling life.
Material comfort is not necessary for fulfillment; some of the most fulfilling lives have been lived by individuals in the most difficult of circumstances. Think of the struggles that confronted (or were chosen by) Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, and on and on. There is much truth in the words of Kahlil Gibran in his work, The Broken Wings: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. The most massive characters are seared with scars.”
One person who lived through a very difficult time and then studied the best way to a fulfilling life was Viktor Frankl. Interred in a concentration camp during World War II, Frankl lost his family in the Nazi death camps, but then spent the rest of his long life teaching that fulfillment is not determined by material circumstances or even the amount of suffering one is given, but by how a person responds to circumstances, including the suffering they experience. Whatever suffering we are given, Frankl concludes, our degree of meaning and fulfillment will be determined by the way we deal with it. In fact, “suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
Frankl’s work makes vivid that the circumstances you find yourself in do not determine whether you will have a fulfilling and meaningful life. Material comforts will certainly not be the determining factor, nor will whether the society we live in is making “progress.” You had no control over the circumstances in which you began your life journey, and little control over many of events of your world. But whatever your circumstances, you have the capacity to develop a conviction about what you will live for and to make a conscious decision about the most valuable ways to spend the moments of your days. And that is sufficient. The great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it succinctly in these oft-quoted words: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
In short, those who have something to be “about” — something they feel is worthwhile to live for that is larger than the small ego’s drives and ambitions — those are the ones among us who will experience fulfillment. As Martin Seligman, a noted psychologist who was deeply influenced by Frankl, put it: “In a meaningful life you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.”
There are differences in each age and culture, but it has never been easy to find and live a fulfilling life. In some ways, it might be easier today, but in others, much harder. That does not matter. The wisdom figures of all times say it is always possible. And it seems crystal clear that the guidance for how to find a meaningful and fulfilled life offered by Jesus, Socrates, Confucius, and the Buddha is at least as good, if not better, than much of the popular advice offered today.
- One thing all the wise ones through the ages had in common is that they wrestled with the questions of existence at a deep level in themselves.
Each individual life starts with advantages and disadvantages. But wherever you start from, you must work with what you were given and then find answers to the basic questions for yourself. You can, of course, put your faith in the answers you were given by your tribe when you were young. But how do you know if they are the best for you if you do not explore the alternatives? For thousands of years, we humans have disputed among ourselves the answers to the most important questions about life, but no widely agreed upon answers have been found. Today we have more access to information about the various answer systems than has ever been the case in human history, yet this has not made it easier to find what is best for our own lives. Perhaps it has made it harder.
Maybe all this means that there is not one right set of answers for everyone. Perhaps this is why the wisest among us for thousands of years have searched for answers for themselves. This also might explain why the answers you were given by others don’t really solve the core questions for your life, which leads to a key lesson given by all of the great wisdom figures: Grappling with the questions for yourself is a crucial factor in discovering and implementing a life worth living.
Ultimately, if the answers you were given when you were young do not feel sufficient now, the only way to a fulfilling and meaningful life is to wrestle with the fundamental questions for yourself. It is quite possible that the wrestling itself is crucial: If you were given the answers too easily, you wouldn’t be able to understand them nor be able to live them. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it in a 1903 letter to his nineteen-year-old protégé:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and … try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. … Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.[2]
- In the process of living, after a spontaneous impulse has arisen, we humans have the capacity to stop, reflect, and reason about what actions we will take.
Modern biological theory holds that instincts and feelings arise from some mixture of brain function, biology, and enculturation. Most everyone agrees on this, from the mystics of old to modern day materialists. Beyond this agreement, however, the views of modern materialists and those of all wisdom teachers diverge sharply. Materialists argue that everything is determined by biology and that the material of the brain somehow manages to create immaterial consciousness, leaving no explanation for free will or the possibility of a person living in harmony with something larger than their instinctual drives and desires.
If all human actions are determined at the material level — by brain, biology, and cultures that arise only from material processes — then free will is an illusion. But we humans seem to have the capacity to stop and think about what we will do. And, after reflecting, no one has shown the ability to predict what actions a person will take. This is a strong indication that we do have at least a degree of personal choice. Individuals who are biologically similar and have been enculturated in similar ways react quite differently after stopping to reflect. Some who are provoked to anger will plan a murder, others will choose to forgive. Some who were abused as children become abusers, while others dedicate their lives to helping the abused. No one can predict which person will choose which path, and materialism and determinism have no explanation for this at all.
- The differences between humans that cannot be explained by determinism stem from our capacity to make choices.
Many who have adopted materialism as their act of faith assert that, although it cannot do so now, it will eventually be able to explain human functioning completely. But there is absolutely no proof that materialism will ever be able to explain everything about human beings, so this view is purely an act of faith. It has no more support in science than many other worldviews.
In fact, all attempts to explain every human choice through materialism alone amounts to “promissory determinism.” This is an adapted version of the idea of Sir John C. Eccles, a neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. Eccles used the phrase “promissory materialism” to highlight the emptiness of assertions that all human actions and decisions would eventually be explained by materialistic assumptions involving brain and biology alone. Eccles said:
We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists … who often confuse their religion with their science.
Renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper also used the phrase “promissory materialism” in a similar vein — to emphasize that when materialists speculate that at some time in the future a biological explanation will be found for things we do not now understand, such speculation is not scientific. In fact, it is purely metaphysical speculation. Promissory materialism is therefore an act of faith, asserting without any proof that someone, somewhere in the future, will discover the needed proof for one’s act of faith.
- A great deal of the living of one’s life involves goals, plans, self-evaluations, choices, and decisions by the ego.
You find yourself alive on this planet with a sense of an “I,” in Freudian terms, an ego. This small word “ego” is, of course, a mysterious and controversial thing, with many differing definitions. But using the modern psychological understanding of that word, every one of us has an ego (perhaps with the exceptions of those with severe mental impairments and a very small number of fully enlightened beings).
A crucial point is that you did not have much control, or even input, into the formation of your ego. It was just there. It came into existence before you started to make conscious decisions. Yet it is the part of you that plans, organizes, make commitments, forms relationships, holds a job, and brings to fruition anything you wish to create. The ego must organize your life if you are to fulfill a vision to create a painting, a business, a nutritious meal, a healthy child-rearing pattern, or anything else you wish to make real in the world.
In essence, the most accepted definition of ego includes all of who you think you are. It includes everything you consciously feel and think. Even if you have adopted a negative view of the ego, this is still the case. You still use the ego to organize your life, unless you are an enlightened saint or mad.
I believe there are a few saints “who take no thought of the morrow,” those who give no thought whatsoever to what they will eat, where they will sleep, what they will do in the next minute, or building a life in the world. They can live without an ego, as can those who have reached a certain level of insanity. But if you are not completely free in one of those ways, then your life activity is organized and carried forward by the part of you that falls under the most common definition of ego.
The unconscious impinges on everyone’s life, and as long as these powerful forces remains unconscious, they will be affecting you without your understanding what is happening. These unconscious forces will be driving you here and there and if you have not made them conscious, they will be doing so without your knowing why you are doing much of what you do.
The unconscious forces that are driving you could be having a positive or negative effect on your life, but “you” will not know which — until you make them conscious. If you wish to live a more conscious life, then, the solution is to make the unconscious motives within you more conscious. To bring them into your conscious sense of who you are, to bring them into your ego. Only when you have brought them into ego consciousness can you begin to make conscious choices about who you are and how you will live.
- The ego is important, but human beings are more than just their egos. There are many other levels that make up who we are.
Wisdom figures for thousands of years have said that you are more than your ego, that there are aspects of you beyond the ego self. At the unconscious level, you have a wide range of desires, urges, ambitions, and expectations that provide motivations to get up in the morning and to take action during the day. These motivations seem to bubble up from within, coming from that vast reservoir of the unconscious. In a sense, someone who is mad is submerged in the unconscious without an ego to manage it, while saints and sages, through inner work and self-knowledge, have transcended the ego.
One powerful sign that there is more to us than just the ego is that many people have had transcendent moments and experiences. But as soon as you make any attempt to understand them, communicate them, or include them in your life, they become part of your ego consciousness. Yet those other dimensions are still there, always available to us if we can open to them.
- Besides these different levels, there are also many competing goals and desires within each of us, and our focus shifts frequently from one to another.
The list of goals and desires to which each person is drawn is long and varies enormously from person to person. But most of us have a few toward which we gravitate, yet even these change as we go through life. Therefore, much of the time of our lives is spent (a) pursuing several goals that conflict with each other for our time and attention, and (b) living from various levels of ourselves, levels that have very different points of view and differing motivations.
Various models have been developed through the centuries that try to make sense of this complex picture of who we are. One I have used often was developed by Carl Jung, but there are many other excellent ones, such as the chakra system of India, the Enneagram, and Ken Wilber’s Four Quadrants. All suggest that we humans are made up of many different levels, points of view, motivations, and currents. The idea of our complexity is so universal that it is hard to make a coherent argument that does not include many currents and levels — some conscious, some unconscious.
Thus, we each begin life within a complex structure, the formation over which we had little conscious choice. That is where we start. One of the great challenges of life, then, is to figure out how all these different aspects of ourselves relate to each other, which ones are most important, and how to live in the face of the conflicts between them.
- The next step on the conscious journey — if you choose to take it — is to begin to make conscious choices about where you will focus your energy and attention, and how you will spend the time that remains for you in this life.
Perhaps you have reached this point; perhaps not. Many people stay in life patterns shaped only by their basic urges as they were channeled and directed by their enculturations. All these live their lives solely within the dynamics of the Freudian model: the id, ego, and superego.
There is nothing wrong with this — millions of people have lived out their lives in this way. If, however, you have a feeling that there is something more, if you wish to find your way to a more conscious life, the next step is to develop a better understanding of that which lies beneath (all that lives in your unconscious), and beyond (whatever there is that transcends the materialist and Freudian models). If you begin to take steps toward becoming more conscious and to assume more control over your life, you will discover that you have a great deal of personal power. You will also find that there is another dimension to reality that you can access, one that will help you discover who you really are, and how best to live.
- The saints and sages of all times and places have said that there is an underlying harmony in the universe to which you can become attuned, and can provide guidance you need.
After a lifetime of study and reflection, William James, one of the greatest American psychologists and philosophers in history, said that there is an “unseen order,” and that it is the basis for all the world’s wisdom traditions. Further, he concluded that all the great traditions taught that “the supreme good in life lies in finding the right relationship to that.”
Skeptico: What is this “unseen order”?
Wisdom Seeker: First, whatever conceptions you might have about this “unseen” are not it, for it cannot be captured in conceptions or words. Whatever this unseen order might be, it is beyond the ego, beyond the thinking mind, and thus will always defy our concepts and reductionistic explanations.
Second, it is not solely dependent on culture. Causation is the other way around. All the great value and meaning systems that sustained cultures through the ages arose from the founders of the wisdom traditions after they had a glimpse of this underlying harmony.
Third, every single wisdom tradition has insisted that there are things to be considered beyond brain and biology, that the universal harmony is far beyond the material realm alone.
Fourth, they say that each of us can learn to align with and live in relation to the unseen order, and that only by doing so will we ever find true meaning and fulfillment. Only in this way will anyone ever find a truly fulfilled life, or the deep peace, harmony, freedom, and joy that the saints and sages have said is our birthright as human beings.
- Each one of us has the opportunity, and the challenge, to create and live a fulfilling and meaningful life.
The perennial longing we feel for “something more” is the longing to be in harmony with the “unseen,” with that which is greater than the ego self. Most human beings who have ever lived have felt this call, and it is this longing that gave rise to much of philosophy, religion, literature, poetry, the spiritual search, and even science. As Albert Einstein said: “It is very difficult to elucidate this cosmic religious feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. … In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.”
- We each must undertake the journey where we are right now, no matter how advantageous, or disadvantageous, the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Most of us feel this calling today, whether we acknowledge it to ourselves or not. It is the continual restlessness we feel, the sense that we have not yet found all that life has to offer. All the saints and sages felt it, although the road they had to travel to find what they sought was usually difficult. That does not matter. As poet T.S. Eliot said:
And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
In short, whether your circumstances are better or worse than those of someone else is beside the point. The challenges we are each given are the raw materials with which we must work. Where we start is outside our control. The only issue is how we deal with our own unique set of challenges; that will determine the outcome for us.
In this light, it is valuable to think about the two most influential life stories in history, those of Jesus and the Buddha. These two individuals started from opposite ends of the opportunity spectrum, as the world measures such things. The Buddha began his life with every earthly advantage, the most “propitious” starting point it is possible to imagine. He was born with every worldly opportunity for which one could wish. He was a prince who would inherit a kingdom; was said to be brilliant and handsome; had a beautiful wife and lovely young son; and at almost thirty years of age, he had been kept from coming into contact with all the things that cause most of us anxiety and fear. But he left it all behind. He chose instead to spend six years living with great deprivation and hardship.
Jesus, on the other end, was born into very modest circumstances, into a family at the low end of the economic ladder (most scholars today think that a “carpenter” in ancient rural Judea was a worker who subsisted from small job to small job on very low pay). Jesus had the additional burden in his early years of being considered an illegitimate child by his neighbors — which must have been a hard burden to bear in that day and time.
His life from the beginning, therefore, was probably a struggle. But making matters worse, he chose a path that resulted in being treated with great hostility by the powerful of his day. Finally, at a young age, he had to endure betrayal, much physical pain, and death. Yet Jesus and the Buddha, with all their struggles and suffering, have become the best-known and most influential individuals in all of history. Crucially, they have become the most powerful examples of how to find and live fulfilling and meaningful lives.
Skeptico: Okay, but I am not Jesus or the Buddha. What do you suggest for me?
Wisdom Seeker: This question is the subject of Embracing the Mystery, which is my attempt to give the hints and guesses I have discovered on my own journey.
- On the inner journey, you must try to live by a set of values and practice some of the virtues if you are to travel very far.
The wisdom traditions all say that each of us has the capacity to move toward the highest possibilities life has to offer, but to do so requires trying to live by some set of values such as courage, integrity, love, and compassion for others. And you must commit to practicing some virtues, such as being kind, developing healthy choices about where you will focus your attention, self-discipline, commitment, and cultivating gratitude. There are many important values and virtues, and no one set is perfect for everyone, and what is important for you might change over time. But the degree to which you incorporate some virtues and values into your life will greatly influence how rapidly you move along the path to meaning and fulfillment.
All the wisdom traditions insist upon this. The Buddha is known in modern times for stressing meditation, but many of the teachings that come down to us in the earliest texts we have of his teachings, the Pali Canon, are conversations in which he encouraged questioners to uphold values and practice virtues. The core of his teaching, the eight-fold path, is a set of practices for how one must live in order to reach the fulfillment he suggested was possible. He insisted, for instance, on the importance of: Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, and Right Effort. All these were necessary to generate wholesome states, and to prevent the arising of unwholesome ones. Doing these things was the starting point, and much of his teaching involved persuading people to live by these moral principles.
Confucius, likewise, stressed being a good person above all else. Mohammed insisted that key practices had to be followed. The Jewish tradition promulgated the Ten Commandments, and Jesus famously said, when asked which were the most important, that the central commandments were to “Love God, and love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Even Socrates, who was put to death partly because he was “irreligious,” insisted that our lives must be organized toward living into the highest virtues. Very poetically, he said:
Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and carry.[6]
All these figures and many more insisted that adopting values and practicing virtues were essential elements of living into a fulfilled life.
- Wisdom figures through the ages have said that it is crucial to “Know Thyself.”
Many of the goals and motivations from which we are operating now are unconscious to us, which is a big part of the reason life is difficult, complex, and confusing — even in the best of times. As each of us moves into our adult life, we start with: 1) a physical world that seems to exist outside of us — the presence of which we cannot explain; 2) consciousness and memory, also mysteries we do not understand; 3) a set of enculturations in our early lives that molded us but upon which we had no choice; 4) a set of values and virtues into which we were indoctrinated; 5) a personal sense of identity (an ego) that just seemed to be there without our creating it; and 6) for most of us, moments or experiences in which we seemed to be in touch with “something greater” than our ego selves.
These were the building blocks given to us, the foundation stones upon which we began constructing our lives in the world. As we entered adulthood, we had little understanding of any of them. Many of us never develop that understanding. But if we wish to have any conscious participation in how our lives unfold, the only way to do so is to come to “Know Thyself,” as Socrates famously said, including all the unconscious currents that are affecting you. Only then will you be able to make conscious decisions about what is truly important, and only through self-awareness will you be able to commit to the hard work of becoming the best possible version of who you might become.
Skeptico: All this is so complicated. Why can’t you make it simpler?
Wisdom Seeker: I wish I could, but the journey isn’t simple. If it were simple, we humans wouldn’t have been disagreeing about how to live for thousands of years. And there wouldn’t be as many people as there are today whose lives are a mess.
The wisdom traditions, however, provide guidance for how we can move along on the journey, and they offer many suggestions for how we can create fulfilling and meaningful lives. This book, therefore, offers many suggestions for living derived from what they had to say.