Would it Be Wise to Study Wisdom? A Comment on the Chicago Institute of Practical Wisdom

On hearing the news, a few years ago now, that there were plans to open an Institute for Practical Wisdom attached to a major university my heart sank. The title gives the game away. It has a number of problems.

It conveys the notion that wisdom may sometimes be impractical, but is this the case? Whether an item of wisdom is practical in some particular situation is a matter of circumstance, as it is for a screwdriver, but a screwdriver can never be called impractical. In any case, the suggestion that wisdom may sometimes be impractical seemed to be jumping the gun, for the Institute had yet to establish this result or even itself. So, why the phrase ‘practical wisdom’ in the title and not just ‘wisdom’?    

Had the title been announced as the Institute for the Acquisition of Wisdom it would have seemed uncontroversial and an idea well behind its time, but in an academic context the study of wisdom implies a quite different project. It suggests the evermore pernickety intellectual dissection and theoretical elaboration of an elusive subjective phenomenon whose existence we only know about because we all possess a portion of it and for which there is already a vast literature. It suggests not the acquisition of wisdom but the study of how to have a theory about it. The word ‘practical’ in its title seemed to imply that the new Institute was planning to adopt the strategy of modern ‘scientific’ consciousness studies, which is to employ qualifiers in their titles to make clear they are not going to study wisdom or consciousness in any depth, God forbid, for this would require a study of metaphysics and mysticism, but just the respective merits of various non-reductive and non-empirical conjectural theories.

Conducted enthusiastically a study of wisdom, like a study of consciousness, is bound to require an investigation of metaphysics, mysticism and religion. If, as its chosen name implies, the new institute was not going to require its members and students to go on this adventure then what would prevent wisdom studies from becoming a practically useless and barren area of scholarship that cannot define what it studies and trivializes its subject matter in the manner of scientific consciousness studies? I decided to investigate further.    

The Cambridge Dictionary entry for ‘wisdom’ gives the initial definition, ‘The ability to use your knowledge and experience to make good decisions and judgements’. This ability could never be called impractical and may as well be called common sense, but is this really what wisdom is? A young child with minimal knowledge and experience may nevertheless have the ability to make excellent decisions relative to their ignorance and inexperience, but we would not normally consider them to be wise so much as sensible. We normally associate wisdom with knowledge and experience. So wisdom is more than this definition suggests. But what is it exactly?       

To the extent we have the ability to make good decisions in everyday life on the basis of our knowledge and experience we may be wise, but we cannot expect to make good decisions while having only a poor grasp of our situation and circumstances. Wise businesses conduct regular analyses of their strengths weaknesses, opportunities and threats in a global context, and this means establishing what their global context is. A person who wishes to understand wisdom would be profoundly unwise not to study metaphysics and mysticism, therefore, for these are the only disciplines that investigate the global context for our decisions and judgements and the only methods for revealing it. In the same way as the phrase ‘scientific consciousness studies’ the phrase ‘practical wisdom studies’ implies a reluctance to conduct such a study, and this omission would surely be as unwise as a decision by a commercial enterprise not to incorporate a regular SWOT analysis into its planning process. I was led to wonder whether it would be wise to study wisdom and how one would go about it. Would it even be possible?    

The Institute has been in business a few years now and the situation has become clearer. Its stated mission is ‘to deepen our scientific understanding of wisdom and its role in the decisions and choices that affect everyday life.’ This is a worthy cause. But, again, what does the phrase ‘scientific understanding’ mean? What role is played by the qualifier in this sentence? Is a ‘scientific’ understanding of wisdom an understanding of the science of wisdom, as opposed to an understanding of wisdom? This cannot be right, since it has only just been invented and as yet there is nothing to understand. Is it scientific virtue signalling employed to avoid the risk of appearing to show an interested in metaphysics and mysticism and losing credibility in the grant system? This would make sense. ‘Practical’ wisdom, it turns out, is wisdom that plays a role in our everyday choices and decisions. The suggestion seems to be that not all wisdom plays such a role, although this would be impossible to prove. Can it really be a coincidence that this is the very opposite of what the mystics tell us about wisdom?   

The mission is also to ‘connect scientists, scholars, educators, and students to initiate wisdom research & disseminate findings to the public.’ This was my fear at the start. The public cannot expect this mission to do more than confuse them. The impact of the literature of scientific consciousness studies demonstrates the effects on the public of disseminating the confusion of researchers who speculate on topics about which they know little because they do not, in fact, investigate it scientifically but by speculation. This literature makes a significant contribution to our post-truth and almost-past-caring-about-truth society and it does not seem a wise idea to add to it. No doubt we will soon see the title ‘Wisdom Explained’ in book shops to help the general public fail to understand it.

It is surely obvious that this new area of study is a small part of a much larger territory, and that little sense can be made of it when it is divided up into discrete parts divorced from the whole. The muddle in scientific consciousness studies shows that when we study deep features of the world without consideration for metaphysics and mysticism we end up with a muddle of competing speculative theories none of which work. How will taking this approach to wisdom assist the public in their choices and decision-making? In what sense can this approach be called scientific? Will this sort of limited analysis help the public in any way whatsoever? Consider these extracts from articles circulated in just one of the Institute’s email newsletters.  

You don’t have to be old, gray (sic) and perpetually peaceful to be wise, according to the new science of wisdom. 

Old age brings creaky bones, memory lapses, and lower energy levels, but, according to science, going gray has its consolations. On average, the older we get, the happier and more self-confident we become. And, of course, according to just about all the world’s philosophical traditions, the wiser we grow. 

But according to a recent surge in the scientific study of wisdom, this important but hard-to-define quality isn’t something that magically appears.

3 Signs You are Wiser than you Think You are – Jessica Stillman

Perhaps it was slow news week. The first sentence is a classic in the popular journalistic genre ‘scientists announce…’.  There cannot be many people unaware that we do not have to be old to be wise so why mention it, let alone announce it as a scientific discovery? And which member of the Institute has proved that we can be wise but not peaceful, or that wisdom does not bring peace? Is peacefulness not one of the critical markers for wisdom? Whoever heard of an angry and irritable wise person?

For an adult audience it is quite unnecessary to announce that growing old has its consolations and unsurprising that these are the same consolations that everybody always thought they were, despite having no scientific understanding of wisdom.  And what does the phrase ‘according to the new science of wisdom’ mean? There is no new science of wisdom. There is no new science of wisdom for the same reason there is no new science of consciousness. There only ever was one way to study these things and if scientists want to study them then they will have to bite the bullet and do it the same way as everybody else. They will have to acquire their own wisdom or examine their own consciousness. As for the recent ‘surge in the scientific study of wisdom’ mentioned here, this is hyperbole. The surge may be explained by noting that this science has only just been invented.       

Apparently, as we age ‘this important but hard-to-define quality we call wisdom is not something that magically appears’. Are we quite sure about this? There must be something a little magical about it if top experts in the new science dedicated to its study are unable to define it. It is not as if ‘wisdom’ is a new word. And is it not just a little magical that the fundamental nature of reality, its ultimate aspect from which the cosmos arises, is capable of evolving to become a multitude of conscious human beings capable of recognizing, discussing and even acquiring wisdom? Is it a coincidence that the new science of consciousness is also unable to define its subject matter, also rejects mysticism as magic and also closes its eyes to the idea that an explanation for consciousness would requires a study of metaphysics. Are these really sciences? Not if we share the views of Karl Popper. The newsletter includes a book description.     

Chapter summary: Psychological wisdom is a growing and flourishing field of research. However, despite several promising efforts to systematically conceptualize and operationalize this construct, no consensus exists about the definition of wisdom….

An Integrative Framework to Study Wisdom – By Le Vy Phan, Laura E. R. Blackie, Kai T. Horstmann, and Eranda Jayawickreme

Clearly, the language is developing fast and may be expected to do so without end. It has already developed as far as the phrase ‘psychological wisdom’. What could this be? Is there such a thing as non-psychological wisdom? At least it is made clear here that all attempts at a scientific definition of wisdom have so far failed. They will never succeed while researchers feel it necessary to place qualifiers such as ‘scientific’, ‘practical’ and ‘psychological’ in front of their ideas and in this way limit their thinking. The use of this language betrays an ideology antithetical to the subject of study.

When we try to pin down the quality we call wisdom and trace it to its source we are forced to investigate consciousness and reality, thus metaphysics and mysticism. If we see a scientific approach as excluding these areas of study then we will adopt a narrow and superficial approach that skirts around the main issues. We are following the lead of scientific consciousness studies and burying the central issues under a deep layer of complex and fast-developing language. This becomes clear as the chapter summary continues.

…We argue that there is a need for integration of wisdom models to forward the field as a whole. For this purpose, we use a comprehensive framework, the Nomological Lens Model Network (NLMN; Rauthmann, 2017), to systematically review and categorize major models of wisdom. The NLMN is a combination of a nomological network (Cronbach & Meehl, 1955), a lens model (Brunswik, 1956), and the 4 Ps (Person, Presses, Products, and Processes) as derived from creativity research (Rhodes, 1961). The nomological network and the lens model provide a perspective that allows for a diagnostic evaluation of wisdom models…

How is one to respond to such language? If all we want is a model then ‘a perspective that allows for the diagnostic evaluation of wisdom models’ must be a good idea, but having so many models that such a system is required betrays a certain befuddlement. Anyway, what would be the point of having a well-diagnosed model of wisdom? Would we not rather be wise? Would it not be profoundly unwise to make decisions in daily life guided by a well-diagnosed theory of wisdom rather than wisdom? There may come a day when the general public are so confused about wisdom they will hardly dare utter the word unless they have a doctorate in Wisdom Studies from an expensive university.  

So what exactly is wisdom? Is it not the case that as we become more knowledgeable, by whatever means we choose, what we usually think of as wisdom begins to look more and more like well-informed common-sense? Is wisdom something additional to well-informed common-sense? Not according to the definition quoted above. The literature of mysticism is known as the ‘Wisdom’ literature, yet as we acquire knowledge and experience we find it boils down to knowledge and common sense. I once asked a Buddhist to characterize Buddhist teachings and in a flash he answered, ‘Enlightened common sense’. After all, if we have sufficient knowledge and experience then what else would be required for wisdom but common-sense? At no point on a journey to acquire knowledge and experience would a person require a theory of wisdom. They would not even need a theory of common-sense. A theory is exactly and precisely what they would not require, for it might lead them wildly astray. No wise person would judge the wisdom of a decision, action or teaching on the basis of a theory of wisdom, since not doing so might be a minimum condition for common sense.  

There is a large and wonderful book by Whitall N. Perry entitled A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom containing tens of thousands of extracts and quotations from hundreds if not thousands of contributors to the Wisdom literature sourced from all continents, cultures and ages. They are systematic, such that there is no disagreement between any two of them as to the nature of reality and ‘what is the case’. This implies wisdom, and yet the title may be misleading. If we assume this unanimity arises because its contributors were well-informed, this being the only plausible explanation, then it contains knowledge and not, as its title might suggest, a distinct substance called wisdom. In mysticism wisdom simply is knowledge, and the word is usually used as a noun in this sense. It seems correct to call this book a collection of wise sayings since it is well-informed and full of common-sense, and certainly it contains no examples of impractical wisdom, but where quotations describe reality they are either true or false and where they contain advice and guidance they are well-informed common-sense. Consider the second-century Buddhist master Nagarjuna’s famous text widely known today as Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, one of the most important books in the literature or mysticism. His original title was Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, since from his point of view there was nothing wise about these verses. The word ‘wisdom’ is a later addition used to indicate their truth, profundity and importance, not to denote some magical substance called ‘wisdom’ that can be extracted and studied scientifically. His text is a logical proof and either it is valid and sound or it is not. As such it cannot be judged wise or unwise, albeit perhaps his decision to construct and circulate it might be judged one or the other.

Let us examine a case of practically wise decision-making. Suppose on a car journey we become lost and arrive at a fork in the road where one fork leads over a cliff and the other leads to town, and town is where we want go. It would be no more than common sense to take the road to town. If we are not sure which road leads to town then common sense would be enough to cause us to stop and check the map. But we could say it would be wise to stop and check the map, for we are being wise relative to our knowledge. Within the limits of our knowledge our wisdom is coincident with our common sense. Inevitably, however, our common-sense will only be reliable if we are wise enough to recognise the extent of our ignorance. But again, to take account of our ignorance is just common-sense. If we think we know which road leads to town, perhaps because we have a well-diagnosed scientific theory, then we will not look at the map and our seemingly wise and common sense decision to take the road to town may see us driving off a cliff.  

Perhaps, then, one item of practical wisdom related directly to our decision-making would be to remember the extent of our ignorance. Descartes notes that an awareness of our own ignorance is an important part, perhaps the most important part, of our knowledge. Only when we are aware of our ignorance we will be able to behave as wisely as our knowledge and common-sense allow. Thus the importance of what in Zen is ‘beginner’s mind’, for this is said to be the beginning of wisdom. We may be wise while being poorly-informed, but only to the extent we know we are poorly informed. Not to be aware of this would be unwise, and not to take account of it would be idiotic. Would it be wise, then, to adopt beginner’s mind? Or would it be just a matter of common sense? At what point does ordinary common sense become practical wisdom?   

It might be argued that most people from time to time act in a manner contrary to common sense while being sufficiently well-informed to know they are doing so, thus that common sense is not enough for wise behaviour. But this assumes a limit on knowledge. The mystics say that if we could see the big picture and understand the meaning and consequences of our actions we would immediately, as a matter of common sense, stop acting unwisely. A Buddhist would say that the wisdom of the Buddha consisted in his knowledge and intelligence, not in a further mysterious quality worthy of separate study. Perhaps the Institute feels it can ignore such profound matters for being unscientific or impractical, but the question remains of how practical and useful a science of wisdom can be if it does not bother to study the global circumstances under which human beings make decisions.             

It must be wise to study the world in order to better understand better our situation, enlighten our common sense and improve our ability to look ahead with clarity when making practical decisions. In this case the word ‘wise’ still has a meaning and we have not quite explained it away. But why would it be wise to do this? What do we mean by saying it would be ‘wise’ to study our circumstances before making decisions? We can only mean it would be in our own best interest to do so, and no more than common sense.

The problem with not understanding the global context within which we make decisions is that while they might seem wise to us when we make them they may be profoundly unwise in a wider context. They may be unwise even from our own personal perspective. How can we judge that our decisions are in the best interests of ourselves or anyone else unless we have some understanding of our situation as a human being? This complication entails that a study of wisdom must overlap with a study of metaphysics. Often it would be unwise to do what is in the best interest of our ego and its interests. Thus well-educated and intelligent people may be seen making unwise decisions almost everywhere one looks, for they consider it wise to pursue their own interests. Even altruism is dangerous when uniformed, for it may well do more harm than good. How is the Institute going to distinguish between wise and unwise decisions unless it looks beyond short-term selfish interests to the wider context for human behaviour? Kant argued that it would be wise to act in the best interest of everybody, but how can we do this unless we know what would be in their best interests? How can we know this unless we study the nature of reality and human life? Would it not be best for everybody if we all tried to understand our place in the Cosmos a little better, in order that our common sense is better informed? It seems certain to be in the best interests of everybody if even one person does this. Is the new Institute going to help us in this respect? Only if it studies how the world works and what is, in fact, best for us. How can the Institute going to discover this if all it does is create speculative wisdom models? Of what practical use will be its work?   

Would it be wise to study wisdom, then, and if so how would one go about it? I see no point in studying it and no way to do it. Better that the Institute study and encourage the development and application of well-informed common sense, where ‘well-informed’ implies an understanding of the global context for our decisions and actions. If we have little knowledge of this then we will be unable to distinguish between wise and unwise decisions for we will have insufficient understanding of their consequences. If the new Institute can persuade the public to take up this study then will undoubtedly help to make the world a better place. If it decides to avoid the acquisition of knowledge and experience for the sake of a ‘scientific’ understanding of something it cannot define called wisdom then it will suffer the same fate as academic consciousness studies, which is to say stagnation, pointlessness, a hopelessly and needlessly confused general public and a lot of words signifying nothing.

No doubt this could be judged an arrogant and much too casual comment, but is it a wrong one? And is it arrogant or wise? Or both? Or is it just common sense, as I believe? Would we have to become an expert in the science of wisdom to judge which of these things it is, or just wise? Or should we ignore science and not worry about wisdom and judge on the basis of ordinary commons sense? The reader must decide, but I doubt this one of those everyday practical decisions the general public cannot make without help from the new science of wisdom.  

Why Young Philosophers Should Avoid Going to University

I am appalled by the state of university philosophy and believe students and the general public are being deceived and misled. Stephen Hawking famously declared that philosophy is dead and given that he, like most physicists these days, equated philosophy with what is taught in our universities I can only agree with him. That philosophy is dead is more or less the orthodox view in the modern academic world and it is not expected to revive. .

Consider this comment from a recent issue of The Philosopher, (not the original journal but its academic-ised spin-off). Michael Marder (“Thinking from a Void”, Autumn 2021) begins his article, ‘If philosophy is the art of posing good questions, rather than providing correct answers, then…’. This casual remark is published without a murmur of objection from the editor, and readers are expected to skip over it as if everybody already knows that philosophy is a waste of time. It might as well have stated there would be no point in reading the article. Its author should not be singled out for criticism, however, since his view is ubiquitous.    

Thus we see discussions on youtube with titles such as ‘Has science made philosophy obsolete?’ in which Neil deGrasse Tyson talks with Richard Dawkins, two prominent scientists who appear to have no understanding of philosophy and no hope for achieving one but are happy to make their ignorance public, or ‘Has science killed philosophy?’, a video documenting this year’s Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Debate, as if any intelligent scholar would consider this to be a sensible question let alone one for debate. These public discussions reveal the depths into which the practise and teaching of philosophy in our universities has sunk. Truly it is dead and rigour mortis is well advanced.  It is not even understood that given a thousand years to do so the physical sciences will never decide a metaphysical question. To believe otherwise would be to make a schoolboy category error yet we see eminent scientists making it all over the place.  

It is clear, then, that any young person wishing to understand philosophy must at all costs stay away from institutions of higher education. They teach that your wish can never come true. In respect of philosophy our universities are not centres of learning and research but cosy clubs for ideologically-hidebound unadventurous thinkers locked into a communal group-think where the blind lead the blind and whose members are unable even to decide whether philosophy is dead or alive without a grand public debate.

We can avoid these institutional problems merely by recognizing that there is more to philosophy than the limited notion of the subject that is taught and discussed in our universities. How many professors of philosophy have a decent grasp of non-dualism, emptiness, a neutral metaphysical position, self-enquiry, Unity, dependent-origination? How many study the philosophy of the Upanishads? How many believe it would be worth doing so? How many know what Perennial philosophy has to say about ethics, freewill, origins, God, mind, matter, knowledge, consciousness and space-time? How many bother to wonder why Erwin Schrodinger spent forty years arguing that this description of reality is the only one that makes sense? I once mentioned this on the private online discussion group of the astrophysicist Victor Stenger and was told by a professional scholar that when it comes to religion ‘there is no accounting for taste’, as if one of the most highly respected physicists of all time was an idiot. The idea that the Upanishadic doctrine may be safely dismissed as a speculative religion will not survive a few hours of trying to prove it but is common in today’s physics and philosophy. This is the level of scholarship.    

If we look beyond the walls of the Academy we will notice that there is no philosophical pessimism in the Perennial philosophy, where omniscience is said to be an achievable philosophical wish and answers are given for all metaphysical questions. If we do not know the explanation it gives for the problems of philosophy are incorrect and cannot prove they are then we have no right to go around suggesting that philosophy is useless, dead or can do no more than ask questions. It betrays a failure of research. Those who suggest such ridiculous things reveal their narrowness of their scholarship. Their dying patient could be revived in an instant if they opened the window and let some air in.  

In a recent interview on youtube the English historian David Starkey has come right out and suggested that young people should probably avoid going to university. For vocational and technical courses such as music and mathematics this would be poor advice and I doubt he had such courses in mind, but for many subjects it seems a practical strategy for saving a lot of time and money.

A student of philosophy just starting out, if they wish to make progress, must first verify that the academicians are unable to answer even one metaphysical question, which may be the work of half-an-hour, and then ask themselves why not. They will then notice that the study of mysticism and an investigation of the answers it gives for fundamental questions about the nature of reality is off-limits in the academic world. These answers are rarely known. From here onward all they need do is join the dots. If they do so, then they will soon see, for it requires little expertise to see it, that there is only one description of reality and consciousness that survives philosophical analysis, does not render philosophy incomprehensible and has answers for fundamental questions and it is not studied or taught in our universities. Where would be the sense in a young person going to a university in order to learn no more about the subject than this?

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What Problem of Consciousness?

I’ve taken a long break from posting on this blog while finishing a book on metaphysics and mysticism. It is now almost complete and what is has to say about consciousness and modern scientific consciousness studies is briefly summarised in a recent article for the online journal The Philosopher here http://www.the-philosopher.co.uk/

The article is critical of modern ‘scientific’ consciousness studies and explains the reason why the discipline is unable to make any meaningful progress. It never will while it continues to ignore metaphysics and remains ideologically-blinkered by its refusal to study the Perennial philosophy and the explanation of consciousness given by those who study it scientifically rather than merely speculate. It stops short of calling the current academic project to explain consciousness fraudulent, but only just.

I plan to begin posting more regularly again on this blog and pondering on what would make for interesting topics. If you have any questions or objections relating to this article and want to post them in the form of prospective essay titles this would be helpful.

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The Marketing of Philosophy – A Preliminary Report

Here’s another guest essay for the blog of Bernardo Kastrup, this time addressing the marketing problems troubling professional philosophy in the West at this time. Departments are closing, jobs are being lost, respect is at an all time low and many scientists are asking  what philosophy is for and receiving no effective reply. External consultants recommend an urgent review of the product, now unchanged for twenty centuries.

The Marketing of Philosophy – A Preliminary Report

Aristotle, Nagarjuna and the Law of Non-Contradiction in Buddhist Philosophy

I’ve recently contributed a guest essay to the site of Bernardo Kastrup discussing the relationship between Aristotle’s ‘laws of thought’ and the logic of Buddhist philosophy as explained by Noble Nagarjuna. It proposes that few philosophers in the self-styled ‘Western’ or ‘Rational’ tradition of thought use the laws of thought correctly and even fewer of the general public, and that this renders philosophical problems intractable and causes Buddhist philosophy to appear paradoxical.

http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2017/05/aristotle-nagarjuna-and-law-of-non.html

Extracts from the Literature 3: Mysticism and Oneness: From ‘Mysticism’ F.D. Happold

“A common characteristic of many mystical states is the presence of a consciousness of the Oneness of everything. All creaturely existence is experienced as a unity, as All in One and One in All. In theistic mysticism God is felt to be in everything and everything to exist in God.

In ancient Chinese philosophy the creation of the phenomenal universe is envisaged as coming out of Tao, the Primal Meaning and Undivided Unity behind everything, by the pulling asunder of polar opposites. Out of Tao sprang the principles of phenomenal reality, the two poles of yang (light) and yin (darkness), which are evident throughout the whole of the universe as it appears to us. We cannot conceive of light except as the opposite of darkness, of above except as the opposite of below, of before except as the opposite of after, of goodness except as the opposite of evil. Our perception is conditioned by the existence of these polar opposites. Yet, they are only active in the realm of phenomena.

In this realm of polar opposites man is imprisoned. He is conscious, therefore, of a division in his soul. His deepest spiritual instinct is to break through the polar opposites and find again the Primal Meaning, so that he may once again be restored to the Undivided Unity which he has lost.

God is to be found, said Nicholas of Cusa, beyond ‘the coincidence of contradictories’. There can, however, be no escape from duality through sense perception, for sense perception is conditioned by the presence of polar opposites, nor through discursive thought, which is bound by the same dualism. For to the mystic is given that unifying vision of the One in the All and the All in the One.

There is little doubt that this sense of the Oneness of everything in the universe and outside it is at the heart of the most highly developed mystical consciousness. All feelings of duality and multiplicity are obliterated, including the duality between man and Deity. Though it may be expressed differently, this is equally true of Hindu and Sufi mystics, of Plotinus and of the great contemplatives of Christianity.”

F.C.Happold, Mysticism, Penguin 1965

Extracts from the Literature 2: On Simplicity, Unity, Firstness and Secondness: The Enneads of Plotinus

“Standing before all things, there must exist a Simplex, differing from all its sequel, self-gathered not interblended with the forms that arise from it, and yet in some mode of its own to be present to those others: it must be authentically a unity, not merely something elaborated into a unity and so in reality no more that unity’s counterfeit; it will debar all telling and knowing except that it may be described as transcending Being – for if there were nothing outside all alliance and compromise, nothing authentically one, there would be no Source. Untouched by multiplicity, it will be wholly self-sufficing, and absolute First, whereas any not-first demands its earlier, and any non-simplex needs the simplicities within itself as the very foundation of its composite existence.”

Plotinus, Enneads, V. 4, How the Secondaries Rise from the First: And on the One, 1.

“That awesome Prior, The Unity, is not a being, for so its unity would be vested in something else: strictly no name is apt to it, but since name it we must there is a certain rough fitness in designating it as unity with the understanding that it is not the unity of some other thing.

… Think of The One as Mind or as God, you think of it too meanly; use all the resources of understanding to conceive this Unity and, again, it is more authentically one than God, even though you reach for God’s unity beyond the unity the most perfect you can conceive. For This is utterly self-existent, with no concomitant whatever. The self-sufficing is the essence of its unity. Something there must be supremely adequate, autonomous, all-transcending, most utterly without need.

Plotinus, Enneads, VI. 9. On the Good, or the One, 5-6.

Extracts from the Literature: Hell, Fear, the Ego and the Holy Instant – from ‘A Course in Miracles’

“The Holy Spirit teaches thus: There is no hell. Hell is only what the ego has made of the present. The belief in hell is what prevents you from understanding the present, because you are afraid of it. The Holy Spirit leads as steadily to Heaven as the ego drives to hell. For the Holy Spirit, Who knows only the present, uses it to undo the fear by which the ego would make the present useless. There is no escape from fear in the ego’s use of time. For time, according to its teaching, is nothing but a teaching device for compounding guilt until it becomes all–encompassing and demands vengeance forever.

The Holy Spirit would undo all of this now. Fear is not of the present but only of the past and future, which do not exist. There is no fear in the present when each instant stands clear and separated from the past, without its shadow reaching out into the future. Each instant is a clean untarnished birth, in which the Son of God emerges from the past into the present. And the present extends forever. It is so beautiful and so clean and free of guilt that nothing but happiness is there. No darkness is remembered, and immortality and joy are now.

This lesson takes no time. For what is time without a past or future? It has taken time to misguide you so completely, but it takes no time at all to be what you are. Begin to practice the Holy Spirit’s use of time as a teaching aid to happiness and peace. Take this very instant, now, and think of it as all there is of time. Nothing can reach you here out of the past, and it is here that you are completely absolved, completely free, and wholly without condemnation. From this holy instant wherein holiness was born again, you will go forth in time without fear and with no sense of change with time.

Time is inconceivable without change, yet holiness does not change. Learn from this instant more than merely hell does not exist. In this redeeming instant lies Heaven. And Heaven will not change, for birth into the holy present is salvation from change. Change is an illusion, taught by those who could not see themselves as guiltless. There is no change in Heaven because there is no change in God. In the holy instant in which you see yourself as bright with freedom, you will remember God. For remembering Him is to remember freedom.

Whenever you are tempted to be dispirited by the thought of how long it would take to change your mind so completely, ask yourself, “How long is an instant?” Could you not give so short a time to the Holy Spirit for your salvation? He asks no more, for He has no need of more. It takes far longer to teach you how to be willing to give Him this than for Him to use this tiny instant to offer you the whole of Heaven. In exchange for this instant, He stands ready to give you the remembrance of eternity.”

A Course in Miracles (Ch15, p214, pp8)

THE CREATION OF GOD

My s/h bookshop came through for me again. I have just picked up a book by Philip Carr-Gomm called In the Grove of the Druids, discussing the druidic teachings of Ross Nichols. The author is the current Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, an order founded by Ross Nichols. It is a wonderful exploration of symbol and myth.

With its origins tracing back to ancient Persia I expected to see a vague outline of the perennial doctrine, nonduality, esotericism and so forth, probably garbled almost beyond recognition into some sort of Nature worship. What a dunce I am. I did, I must admit, skip most of it as being irrelevant to a Zen practitioner, who needs no heavy soup of symbolism and myth to sugar the truth-pill or find it, and to metaphysics, which is impossible when it is overlaid with so much psychological trickery, but it has its nuggets of straightforward no nonsense talk and these reveal that modern Druidic thinking is not much if at all at odds with the writers of the Upanishads or the Buddhist and Sufi teachings.

Here is an extract from a short essay by Ross Nichols that is included. I have omitted a few sentences as unnecessary.

 The Creation of God 

The shaping-out of God by man is a profound truth – as well as a shallow one for fools: …

…We all make God. The deific force inheres in us creatively and that is the intention. Perhaps also it is well to feel that He is there only, within me and you. Yet this cannot be objectively true, and cannot be accepted philosophically except as solipsism. The only possible conception, to me, is one of a sort of hierarchy of nodes of Godhead inhering at a number of levels in beings and masses that we hardly recognise as god-recognisant, such as the actual globes of earth and planets, or the planetary system as a whole – down to the atomic levels and the infinitesimal, which so far as we can perceive have vigorous movements meaning life of some sort. And wherever is life is consciousness, and consciousness is God…

…Those nodes moreover, if they are gone out of living conscious memory, are still there for the recalling: the Egyptian Godform in particular can embody startlingly almost as soon as called upon…I have experienced, so have others… However these are of the more outer perception, whether psychic or ‘real’, and we were discussing the realism of God within…

…The omni-competent and everlasting God cannot be enclosed in our little concepts. It is both many and one, as completely present in our most distant node as in the first. There is a veil of time and matter at the rhythmic intervals of the Great Breath, when an outgoing into previously emanated matter (breath) of patterns of which the above is an image occurs through the aeons.

As spirit we are present through all these aeons: we have witnessed and we have created, God is in us so far as anywhere. All that semi-infinite scheme is us, of course, and naturally creative power breaks through us.

From time to time to the larger units their nodes have special manifestations and there are teachers, revealers, saviours, whom the race-aspiration have created, as much as deity has given them from the non-apparent. Their teachings are all for their ages equally true, and equally poisonous for successive ones that need something else. The gods were poison to the philosophers, the Hebrew ritualism poison to Christianity.

There is a point in all outbreathing of return to inbreathing, a point of nadir and maximum density. It may have been reached for humanity in the systematic materialism and sensuality of the Roman Empire: which was why a maximum counter-demonstration had to be released in the force called Christ, which came down to earth in several senses – brought teaching down to emergency levels, gave it ‘low’ as well as ‘high’, and created a ‘person’ to be revered, to counter the persons of gods and emperor. This is hardly the highest manifestation that can be made, but was the best for a period, perhaps for 2000 years as astrology suggests…

And all this is within us –the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the first and purest utterance of the Christ-manifestation, before it descended to personality and the crucifixion image that did so startlingly ‘save’ in that gross world.

Now it is for us to give out a new kingdom. We pass as our ritual says through kingdom after kingdom. Indeed, we make the kingdom daily, on several levels. To do so perpetual problems need tackling. And to respond completely to the day’s problem, without ‘attachment’ to it in the Buddhist sense, is in fact the maximum building of the kingdom, outward and inward…By one and one are the stones laid in the temple.

 

Solving the One-Many Problem

It is very difficult to see how the Universe can be One when it is so obviously Many. So difficult, in fact, that to this day western philosophy is unable to reconcile these seemingly contradictory properties and it remains a famous metaphysical paradox. This may be because this tradition of philosophy reifies Time and Matter. It cannot understand how to avoid reifying Time and Matter since it is predicated on the dogma that the doctrine of the Upanishads is false, and this would be the only plausible way to reduce Time and Matter. What allows us to call this tradition of thought ‘western’ is that as a matter of principle it rejects mysticism with its ‘principle of nonduality’ as the solution for such paradoxes. It then has nowhere to go but must remain puzzled forever. If we do not fall into this comfortable and inviting intellectual trap then the non-paradoxical Upanishadic solution for the One-Many problem is available and all such paradoxes cease to trouble us.

In his Divine Life, while speaking of the three ‘poises’ of the Divine Supermind and of how these would be no more than reflections or treatments of the same unified Truth, Sri Aurobindo briefly explains the ‘nondual’ or ‘Middle Way’ solution for the One-Many problem. It would entail the rejection of all partial or dualistic metaphysical views for a unity then can never be achieved in language or thought but which, nevertheless, can to some extent be discussed. Only by a conceptual division of this unity into aspects, reflections and treatments would discussion and analysis become possible. The eternal Tao cannot be talked, says Lao Tzu, but must be talked, and this would require that we talk about its aspects and reflections as does Aurobindo.

His words may shed light on what ‘nondualism’ would mean in respect of formal analytical philosophy as well as psychology and experience. They may also explain that when it is proposed that Prakriti, the space-time creation of Maya, is ‘unreal’, ‘not really real’, has merely a ‘dependent-existence’ or is an ‘illusion’ this is not to reduce human beings to insignificance but just to concede their origin beyond Time and their ‘epiphenomenal’ or emergent status. The proposal would be, to the contrary, that human beings are far more significant than we usually believe them to be.

“The language of the Upanishads, the supreme ancient authority on these truths of a higher experience, when they speak of the Divine existence which is manifesting itself, implies the validity of all these experiences. We can only assert the priority of the oneness to the multiplicity, a priority not in time but in relation of consciousness, and no statement of supreme spiritual experience, no Vedantic philosophy denies this priority or the eternal dependence of the Many on the One. It is because in Time the Many seems not to be eternal but to manifest out of the One and return to it as their essence that their reality is denied; but it might equally be reasoned that the eternal persistence or, if you will, the eternal recurrence of the manifestation in Time is a proof that the divine multiplicity is an eternal fact of the Supreme beyond Time no less than the divine unity; otherwise it could not have this characteristic of inevitable eternal recurrence in Time.”

Sri Aurobindo
The Divine Life (159)