Nikolai1

Hi stosh We gain pleasure from all that brings us truth, beauty, goodness and bodily bliss. God is beauty, God is truth, God is good and God is bliss. God is all these. Each pleasure, insignificant in itself, is a fragment of God. We call it a fragment because it is a specific and short-lasting experience - but in essence each pleasure is God. The purpose of life is to find God in ways that are as broad and and as long-lasting as we can. There are many people whose highest moments of their life have been felt while drunk. But with the poor spiritual technique night swiftly follows day. With the good spiritual technique the height of daylight seems to last and last. The alcoholic must be told: "Yes, what you felt was good. We understand your experience and you are not mistaken about its significance. But there are much, much better ways I promise. Let's find them" The alcoholic must go cold turkey from the alcohol, but do not expect him to go cold turkey from God. This would be the path to despair. To save himself he must return to drink. But he doesn't understand this - he is bewildered. But say a disapproving word and he will get very, very angry. He must defend something but he knows not what. To deprive a man of his relationship to the divine is the cruellest wound you can inflict on him, on his society. The white men did this to the native Americans, fenced them in and barred them from their sacred places. They were left to scrabble around and find God wherever they could. Like I said, there is pleasure to be found in everything. There is no purer hedonist than the saint. When we find God we recognise that all that we have ever sought in everyday life had a weak taste of God. God is the supreme pleasure - the one pleasure. When any given person embarks on what is normally called the spiritual life, they are merely exploring another person's normality. The party-going materialist becomes dissatisfied with his life. He wants more, something different - and finds himself going to Church. He calls this new life the spiritual life. His neighbour has been going to church since his childhood - suddenly he finds himself disgusted by the falsehoods and hypocrisy. He finds himself attending the science club. He calls it a deep need for truth. This, he thinks is the true spiritual life, not the farce of the church service. Properly, seen there is no such thing as normal or spiritual. There is just life. We call spiritual that life which comes after an abrupt change of heart. In my OP I call this change of heart the beginning of expertise. Too often, the party-goer completely swaps his parties for church services. He must go through this phase when his expertise is still latent. His expertise becomes manifest when he again parties hard on the saturday and then is up early for the Sunday service. Now he is a whole person. Now he is the expert.

CT You and I probably aren't in disagreement because I'm not for one minute recommending excessive drinking. I just think its important to see things in their proper light. There is a link between your former drinking and your presence here on a forum discussing the spiritual life. It was the noblest part of you that drank the southern comfort, and the same genius in you moved on to other techniques. Yes, it's s shame that more people can't do as you did...but the fact still remains that alcohol is for many people the only rich and authentic experience of the divine that they get. The alcoholic is caught in a kind of riddle that they can't understand. How can something so 'wrong' feel so 'right'? None of the explanations that society offers for his drinking explain nor resolve the riddle. Only when his drinking is revealed as a spiritual behaviour can he consider the existence of better spiritual behaviours. Abstinence is no substitute. This drinker is a spiritual genius who needs the heights. There are religious techniques that can give him the ecstasy he needs. Carl Jung recognised that alcoholism requires a transcendental solution, and his ideas form the basis of Alcoholics Anonymous. Let's not be afraid to pay alcohol the highest possible compliment. Until we do this the alcoholic remains trapped in his own riddle.

Man, everyone keeps asking about her but I don't want to discuss it here. RV could you please delete that, thanks?

Hi CT Drinking alcohol is an authentic and effective spiritual technique alongside many others. It is particularly effective for those who seek to experience the depth of God. It takes a certain genius to be able to extract this from alcohol. There are many people who do not have the capacity for such a deep union, and these are the ones most likely to denigrate alcohol. What they haven't experienced for themselves they are hardly likely to understand. For some, alcohol brings God to the level of consciousness in a particularly effective way. When intoxicated such people feel the grandeur of themselves and their potential in a most direct and lively way. However much they hear alcohol denigrated, the spiritual drinker will not, in the depths of their heart, share this view. They know what they know. And they are not wrong. Through alcohol they gain a true and authentic glimpse of God - a glimpse denied the average drinker. Such people are then placed in privileged but perilous situation. They have discovered a key, but it will leave them unable to return to sobriety. The alcoholic is so often an individual of native spiritual gifts. But they exist in a society which tells them only of alcohol's harm. We do not understand what is truly precious about alcohol, and so we do not recognise that the precious part can be obtained in other, better ways. Alcohol, though an authentic technique is a very bad technique. Very, very bad. It's function is purely to reveal God - to show us what he looks like. Only the chosen few can respond to alcohol this way. And only the chosen of the chosen have the foresight to see that alcohol is a double edged sword and that its benefits need to be swiftly found in other more stable ways. If you want to help an alcoholic, you must recognise the grandeur of the drink and of the drinker. Call him bad names and he will need to contradict you in the way he knows best - in drink.

Great thanks marblehead - for the record the young wealthy male isn't me!

For starters, we all already can. If we confidently feel that the sun shall rise tomorrow morning then that is predicting the future. Seeing the future is all about understanding how things change – from what, into what. That is all it is. So why can’t we do it all the time? It’s because we have got it into our heads that we are all imperfect, vulnerable beings that need certain things to happen in the future. We think we can’t be well or happy unless things that we lack come our way. We see these amazing things come to other people, we look at the sequence of events that led to the success and we think we can replicate them. We think that we can simply lift the ingredients out of that person’s unique circumstances and apply them to ourselves. This is magical thinking, pure and simple. But these kind of illusions fill our head. We spend 99.97% of our mental energy on trying to orchestrate outcomes that were never going to happen and don’t even need to happen. But there’s something even more tragic… Every now and then we imagine something amazing and desirable. And this time, we are right, it really will come our way. The dream job, the love our lives, really are our destiny and ours for the taking. We all know this feeling. But because we think that we are the aforementioned individuals with our own wills, we don’t realise that it’s OK to be passive We totally ignore the fact that we just need to be patient, that the time isn’t quite right yet. We don’t believe that time itself will help us a lending hand. So we rush blindly on, cause upset and strife…and end up delaying what is rightfully ours. So we needlessly chase what we won’t ever get. And then we push away what was almost ours already. This is human suffering in a nutshell. So how do we know what great stuff will really be ours? How do we see the difference? You can’t know, not logically – the solution, as always, is spiritual. All you can do is have the confidence to know that what you really want and desire, you already have. Through meditation and prayer you must get to know the serene self that is pretty much OK whatever happens. When you get to know this inner guy, you are in a position to discern the following: If you want something really badly but you see that it will cause others or yourself pain or anxiety…then the time is not right. You have a vision for the future, but others do not share it. If they shared it, your plans wouldn’t cause them pain. For to have pain and anxiety is to fear the future. And we only fear the future when we are unable to predict it. You don’t know who is the better prophet, you or they. Have you divined something they can't see? or can they not see, it because it is just you chasing fantasies that aren't going to happen? So you must sit right back, and what for time to show you. One of two things will happen: 1) Your desire will remain constant and adverse circumstances will change in your favour. 2) Adverse circumstances will remain constant and your desire will fade away until you are adjusted to them. Either of these processes brings you peace. The peace that comes when your desires and reality are no longer in discord. Repeat this for as many times as you need to, after a while your erroneous inauthentic desires for the future will cease. Each time you learn to lean back and rely on your serene inner self, you strengthen him and weaken the fearful guy who imagines things wrongly. From now on, the only thoughts you have about the future will be what will actually happen. Now you can see the future!

Yes, its funny how our thinking on what is magical completely reverses. What normal people see as magical fantasy we now see as more than possible. What we now see as fantasy is what normal people consider sensible and obvious!

Hi guys, I’ve started this thread as both an explanation and discussion on how the intellect can be used on the spiritual path. For the 15 years of my adult life philosophical thought, alongside meditation, has been my main practice and I now feel that I’m in a position to share what I have learned. It took years for me to realise that my love of the philosophers and my near constant asking of the question ‘why?’ was at heart a religious yearning for truth; Christianity is the main religious narrative in the west and tends to prioritise love, devotion and the emotional life as being the authentic traits of spirituality. It was only when I started to read the Indian and Chinese philosophers that I realized that philosophical questioning can and does lead to spiritual realization (and that many of the lesser Christian theologians had discovered this). Perhaps I should make this a bit clearer. Although, properly understood, the spiritual life is not different to the earthly life, it does help to imagine that the two constitute different phases in a person’s life. Spiritual growth is therefore the move from an earthly existence to a spiritual existence. We can understand this as either a moving towards heaven, or we can understand this as a moving away from earth and this distinction helps to make sense of the various religious practices. To move towards heaven, or the spiritual life, we must first believe it to exist, and then secondarily set about confirming our belief. Methods used to confirm might be prayer, meditation, devotion to a deity or guru, ritual, church attendance, physical exercises and many others. These are all extremely important methods, and everyone must eventually seek recourse to methods of this nature if they are to discover spiritual truth. But all the ritual and ceremony in the world will achieve nothing unless we are able to understand how to move away from our illusory and unsatisfactory earthly existence. We must learn to doubt the reality of all our earthly beliefs in order to become open to spiritual beliefs, and the cultivation of doubt is probably the best definition of philosophy I know. Philosophy teaches us how to challenge and thus move away from all the illusions and the superstitions that keep us bound down to earth. I am not trying to present philosophy as some kind of ‘true way’. People vary widely in temperament and the vast majority will have neither taste nor inclination for intellectual activity. But philosophy is suitable for more people than we realise, and gets overlooked due to the widespread belief that intellectual activity is somehow inimical to the religious life, which should be a matter for the heart. Any person who is both philosophically and spiritually minded soon learns a rather depressing truth. Wisdom, when it comes, does not come in the form of ‘correct answers’. The philosopher is never in a position where he can provide correct infallible solutions in the manner of say, the arithmetician. Truth is instead a matter of realizing that the question, in the first place, was asked in error. We solve nothing at the level of the questioning, but we are at least at the advantage of no longer fretting over illusory anxieties. The philosopher learns that all of human suffering is due to anxiety over nothing. We are like children terrified of monsters that do not exist. Truth, then, does not exist in the form of facts and errors…but perhaps our first illustration might give some indication as to how this might happen. The Coffee Mug Imagine there are two men sat opposite to each other at a table, and between them is a coffee cup. As you approach you realise they are arguing. One is politely and firmly insisting that coffee cup is for right-handed people like him. The other man is respectively disagreeing; he insists that the cup is for left-handers, and to illustrate his point concretely his is now lifting the cup with his left-hand, and now attempting the same thing with his right-hand. The difficulty he encounters is the most practical and sensible evidence he can muster to support his left handed position. In this simple example we can discern all the principles of earthly ignorance, as well as all the principles of spiritual wisdom. I’ll list these in turn. 1) The nature of the word An ignorant person, that is, a person who is low in spiritual wisdom is unable to separate reality from their conceptions of reality. ‘Right-handed mug’ is a concept and they believe that this concept is intrinsic to the object. They do not understand that the arising of the concept ‘right-handed’ is dependent on their perception of it. The mug is right-handed, and this is an objective fact independent of them. To say that the right handed mug is also left-handed is as impossible to the ignorant person as saying that a cat is also an airplane propeller. No-one believes in the truth more than the ignorant person. The wise person, on the other hand, is able to see that the mug can be both left-handed and right-handed and is therefore intrinsically neither. They are strangely agnostic on the truth of the matter. And yet this person is still able to use the concepts right and left intelligently and appropriately. Were a blind man to ask which had to use to lift the cup he would answer with reference to one concept, and one concept only. 2) The role of truth in the emotions The argument at the table is getting more and more heated. Anger is what happens when a person’s understanding of the truth is threatened. To have a truth is to have a passion for it. Both men have their truth and must protect it, both for their sake…and for the benefit of their misguided opponent. The wise person, on the other hand, could not side with one of the men even if he tried. Once he has seen into the truth of the concepts right and left handed he will never be able to go back to be like the men. He now walks the earth immune to a certain type of ignorance and a certain type of anger. He is therefore a less angry person. As he grows a wisdom he will come to realise that all human anger and strife is rooted somewhere in a false one-sided appraisal of reality identical to that made by both of the men sat at the table. Spiritual peace is the product of wisdom. If the wise person is to feel anything towards the two men it will be compassion for their unfortunate situation. 3) To see truth is transcendence of earth The ignorant man at the table is chained to his situation in time and space. He knows only what he sees before him. The right-handedness of the mug is as clear as day to him, and he lifts it with his right hand to prove it. He lacks an important intellectual skill, which is also a special spiritual gift. He is unable to float from his chair and seat himself where his neighbour sits, and see his neighbour’s reality through his mind’s eye. He is unable to see that his right is another man’s left. So we can see already some very important principles. First, that a concept of reality is not the same as reality. Second, that this insight affords us emotional tranquility and third, that the gaining of this insight spiritualises our consciousness and makes us less earth bound than we had been. It is certainly true that the above example is a form of ignorance that would exist only in children, but in principle it is identical to all human illusion. Spiritual wisdom, and the transcendence that comes from that is something that all people have achieved to a greater lesser extent. This is why much talk of earth and heaven, ego and higher self, as being distinct phases are unhelpful. But all people have their limits as to how much transcendence we have achieved. At some level, and on some questions we are still just dumb men arguing over coffee cups. We are all deeply chained to our earthly existence because of our attachment to a whole range of intellectual delusions. We believe that some things are good rather than bad, we believe that we are free to choose some things and not others, we believe that some things are true and others false, we believe that some things have happened in the past and that others are yet to happen in the future, we believe that some things are here and others elsewhere… But most of all we believe that we exist and we do not see that we also do not exist. And it is this one that is the biggie. We do not see that declaring our individual existence is as foolish as declaring that a coffee cup is for right-handers and not for left handers. Understand the truth about existence and you have understood the highest truth that the mind is capable of. I plan to discuss some of these big questions and hopefully help, if not to show the truth, but to show that what we once thought is not the truth. I guess I’ll start with some of the the easy stuff, but if you guys have anything that you want to talk about we can do that too. There is no right and wrong order. Philosophy clears the mind, first by occupying it. After the effort, a flash of insight leaves you in a state of mind that is cleaner and fresher, less bogged down. Once you have seen the truth on any given issue you are able to march on unhindered. The true philosopher’s mind is left remarkably vacant – they are no longer able to ruminate over things that less philosophical people love to mull over. This is a kind of paradox: but the true philosopher is no absent-minded professor. The true philosopher has left thought behind. But their path continues beyond thought - this is the true meaning of meditation. Unless you understand that something so rich and sublime as the meditative life lies at the end of philosophy you are going to feel alarmed at losing all your once cherished beliefs – perhaps you’ll worry about what shall be left. But by the same token this awareness will help those who worry that all this intellectual activity takes them further away from their formal meditation. If you can be honest and say that despite all your sitting, all you Qi Gong you still hold a lot of intellectual beliefs then it might be that a bit of good old philosophizing might be just the thing. I look forward to hearing from you guys!

Hi all, Well I've given a broad overview of what I call the intellectual path to realisation. The subject is as big as life itself! I won't post any more essays for now, but if anyone can think of anything interesting to discuss then I'd be happy to join in! Best wishes

Hi Hydrogen It always seemed to me that our understandings of mental illness is constructed by our whole society, and mental health services merely reflect them. Supposed treatment techniques may arise from within the industry, but they assume an understanding that is shared by all. I personally never felt able to help people with something like depression. I think if you are viewing depression as something bad that needs to be removed then that view alone means that you won't be of any lasting help. And for 99.9% of people, depression is an obviously bad thing to go through. You feel no joy - only a dark heavy agony. You become unproductive in your work You become unsociable and distant from your loved ones Your human concern contracts so much that you find it hard to care about anyone but yourself. And you want to die, and then berate yourself for being too cowardly! How can this be in any way a good thing? The highest goods in the normal person's eyes - love, work, happiness - are all denied to you. I think it's only when we realise that there is other higher side to us - a side that emerges when we are able to distance ourselves from normal pleasures - that the 'withdrawal' of depression can instead appear as a process of growth. Like I said, the recovered depressed person kind of gets this when they look back on their experience. But unfortunately for them, it is perfectly likely that their depression might return and this insight gets lost again. As a society we are nowhere near understanding our spiritual identities. The predominant narratives around mental health are thoroughly materialistic, and therefore negative. I think the best we can do is to try and express this more optimistic view in our own lives, because we all meet with anxiety and depression on a daily basis if we look hard enough. Hi cat I'm not sure SGP (spiritual growth pain) would really take on - except maybe in California. Best wishes

Hi all, Here is the Philosopher’s Tao in summary – a spiritual path that starts the moment we are born! Stage 1 – Infancy This is the intellectual state of the very young baby. It is a state of direct interaction with the world of form. There is no subjective realm of ideas or reflection. Stage 2 – Childhood The child’s inner subjective realm has emerged. The child is able to have private ideas, fantasies and dreams. At this stage, however, they do not naturally complement the world of form. They cannot therefore be used to enrich lived experience, and add a dimension of understanding. In other words, the subjective phenomenon we normally call ‘memory’ is not available to shed understanding on the present situation. Conversely, reality is not able to modify the fantasy world and the child may take their fantasies as real. The child swings between subjective and objective realms, with little interfusion. Stage 3 – Relativistic breakthrough This is the ability to combine subjective knowledge and objective knowledge into wisdom. We see that the coffee cup’s handle is on the right hand side, but we understand through the use of our subjective ‘mind’s eye’ that the handle is also on the left-hand side. We also learn to tell the difference between objects and subjective concepts. We see the apple, but whether the apple is the colour red, or dark pink, we see is a matter of subjective judgement and not intrinsic to the object. This stage is the characteristic intellectual style of perhaps 60% of the adult population. Stage 4 – Relativistic sophistication This is the stage of the intelligent adult – maybe 40% of the adult population. Here the subjective realm of ‘memory’ is available to shed wisdom on a wide variety of situations and the adult is functioning highly and skilfully in virtually every domain that is required of them. Such people lead society and instruct the next generation. Intellectually, the difference between the concept and reality is understood well. Important areas of life: politics, ethics, education and the arts are understood as being fields of large difference of opinion. The intelligent person is therefore able to take a broad, even-minded perspective. When it comes to making a decision they naturally seek a balanced and representative view of the subject. This distinguishes them from the stage 3 adult, who tends to passively seek the ‘right answers’ from those who ‘know best’ The differences between the stage 3 and stage 4 adult is demonstrated in every area of life – from the jobs they do, to the type of newspapers they read. Stage 5 – Crisis This stage represents an intellectual breakthrough experienced by only a very small population. It is characterised by the clear understanding that all rational conclusions are based on premises that are themselves mere assumptions. To believe in the power of any given argument is only possible therefore if you have a blind belief in the premises. One blind belief is no better or worse than the next. Alternative viewpoints are, at their root, therefore the same. This insight therefore leads to a perceived collapse of certain truth. It is a very distressing state of nihilism. It alienates you from the overwhelming majority of intelligent adults and the absurd world they live in. You are torn between an old habitual expectation and desire for meaning, and the new irrefutable observation that there can be no meaning. Suicide is a very real danger at this stage, particularly if you reached this stage too quickly in your life span, typically very early adulthood, when your unconscious spiritual instincts are as yet undeveloped. Resolution of this crisis is only possible if one’s instincts lead you to other, non-intellectual, methods of enquiry into reality e.g. meditation, Qi Gong. Stage 6 – Intellectual completion Increased focus on reality itself, rather than reality mediated through thought, leads you to recognise that the basic structures of our world – time, space and the self – are also just intellectual opinions. It is seen that the desire for meaning that led you to crisis was a consequence of erroneous views about the world. This liberation from the need for meaning and the life of the intellect brings a building sense of peace and healing. We recognise that our individual identity is an artefact of a thoroughly irrational worldview. Who we actually are is something different. This is therefore the stage where our spiritual identity is raised to consciousness. We are able to relate to other adults again, but only those who can join us in this new worldview. Stage 7 – Emptiness Subjectively we feel like we have been re-born. We have discovered and started to live in whole new worldview. But we are still objectively living in a society dominated by the aims and opinions of the intelligent adults we left behind. We therefore feel aimless and alienated. To others we appear listless and depressed like we did at stage 5. But on the inside we are at peace and have a dim sense of hope and expectation. Stages 6 and 7 are the stages we have talked about most on this thread so far. Stage 8 – Testing and growth This is the time when our aimlessness starts to create testing changes in our outer circumstances. Jobs, relationships and interests start to fall away due to their discordance with our new selves. We find it impossible to invest time and effort into anything that does not accord with our new inner selves: things start to fall apart. This is a difficult time when we are cleansed of all the attachments that hold us back from attaining further peace. It is also a time when we are able to attract relationships and situations that correspond to who we now are. The fear of letting go can alternate with the excitement of discovery. Indeed, life at this stage can feel like a series of projects set for us by life. All we need is the courage to let go, and the enthusiasm to forge ahead. Stage 9 – Peace Our journey is completed. We no longer experience any discord between our inner and outer selves. Our will is united with the flow of life. Things proceed smoothly, effortlessly and successfully. Our spiritual selves have created an objective world to settle in. Such a guileless life of spontaneity and joy looks on the surface rather like the immediacy of the infant in stage 1. But the saint who has reached stage 9 is no helpless infant but rather the highest example of humanity. Best wishes, Nikolai

Hi all, The testing time described in the last post comes when you have attained perfect realisation in your own distinctive path and the rest of your being has to catch up. The better part of you has surged ahead, and is unable to finish off the realisation process. In the case of the philosopher, it is because he has intellectually dismantled the dubious cognitive notions that we need to believe in say, hatha yoga, or devotion of an avatar or deity. Life itself must finish the job for him, against his will. The intellectual gifts of the philosopher may very often have led him to neglect the emotional and physical aspects of his being. He might find himself falling hopelessly in love – only this will awake his dormant heart and enable him to love all of life. Conversely, exclusive and narrow emotional attachments which hinder universal love might be severed in the form of death, divorce or estrangement. He might suffer serious injury or illness because only this will force him to give his physical body the attention it deserves. From a spiritual perspective, all illness is actually healing. Pain is what brings disease to consciousness, and is therefore the same as the healing. Pain is the healing process. There therefore comes a time when spiritual progress can only come to the philosopher in the form of trials and hardship. But as he comes to recognise the positive effects of overcoming the hardships, he starts to see that they are blessings in disguise. It is a hallmark of the spiritually developed person that they are able to take pleasure in what he might once have considered the gravest misfortune. This is because the spiritually developed are always able to see things from the perspective of their immortal and untouchable spiritual self. As life goes on, there is less and less reason to chase, or run from, anything. Anything that comes is of benefit, whether to our bodily or spiritual selves. There is therefore no possible reason nor grounds to make this distinction. We are entirely whole. We are entirely in accordance with what life presents to us because we have no possible grounds on which to object. We cease to create the disturbance in our lives and others that comes when we chase what they are chasing. We live in complete non-contenton. Therefore our circumstances and relationships flow smoothly and give us unfailing delight. This is the life of wu-wei. Wu-wei is the pinnacle of Taoism, and the pinnacle of the spiritual life in general. We’re kind of at the end of the road. In the next post I’d therefore like to summarise with a description of the stages on the philosopher’s way. Best wishes

Hi all, We’ve talked a lot about the changes in attitude that come when one has realised the full nature of our selfhood. We are no longer fully invested in ourselves as individual mortals. We no longer live in fear of what others fear – boredom, suffering, death. We find as well that we can’t take our pleasures in quite the same way. We are rooted in a sense of self that is eternal and unchanging. Whatever good things may happen to us, the moment of good fortune will be just another moment like this: it will be just like this. We have less expectation from things. We don’t go chasing outcomes because we see in advance that they will only marginally improve on what we already have. The more we live this way, the more it becomes clear to us that all the strife in the world is created by the egoic worldview. We suffer because we all want the same things: we strenuously compete, and only some of us succeed in getting them. We also suffer because we are all afraid of the same things, and we will trample all over others in order to make ourselves safe against what we imagine shall harm us. Spiritual realisation is seeing that we are, in a very real sense, untouchable from harm…and happy no matter what happens. This is the joy of the spiritual life, and it is the only way that we can personally cease to participate in the world of conflict and suffering. But spiritual realisation does not occur overnight. We have seen in the previous post how we might be realised intellectually, but not physically and emotionally. It therefore happens that our intellect prevents us from subscribing to the very purifying practices that our emotional and physical selves need. We must therefore throw in the towel and let life itself finish off the work. Life will disturb our philosophic tranquillity and ravage us with desires that we are powerless to resist. This can be a very confusing time. The suddenness and clarity of the desires have an imperative nature. We think to ourselves: ‘if there is such a thing as Divine command, this is surely it.’ And we are of course severely tempted to yield to this desire. Very often, there is no reason not to yield. Harm will not ensue, and we are detached enough from our egoic selves to see that we can take our pleasures as they come and as they leave. Such desires are gifts from heaven, so to speak, and we enjoy them while they last and are grateful. But other times we are ravaged by a desire that we see will have negative consequences. Our desire for the promotion will leave our friend and colleague disappointed and perhaps ruin the friendship, for perhaps they deserved it more. Our love for the woman in our mediation class would upset the woman we married and had children with. Such desires still feel like the same divine imperative, a bolt from the blue, but following our heart’s desire will this time create suffering and distress. At this time we feel not heavenly gifts, but stern and exacting tests – that seem tailor made to challenge us to the hilt. We find that we still have egoic desires, but our spiritual cultivation has left us with a repugnance for the violence and suffering that such desires create. We therefore feel like we have to choose. But whichever way we choose is going to create suffering in ourselves. Whether we say good bye to our family, or to the woman in class who we love, it is going to hurt us and them. Conventional society often has pretty clear ideas about the best course. ‘You act selfishly over the promotion, but ditch the woman on the side’. You however, know the shallowness and fickleness of conventional views and so they cannot much help you. Reason cannot therefore resolve a true spiritual test. There is never a good reason to hurt one person more than the other. Our emotional and intellectual will is paralysed. We do not know which way to move, and either way will create emotional pain. Talk of following the head or following the heart is senseless. It is in these times that we truly learn the meaning of wu-wei. We must have the patience to wait, and the trust to know that the Tao will provide with a win-win solution. We must sit with the confusion with true trust and patience, we must observe the transformation of the situation and our feelings towards it. We must learn to notice feelings towards our options: feelings of love, hatred, hope and despair as if they were clouds in the sky. And like the clouds we must learn to dispassionately see what our shifting emotions herald. We must learn to see the future, and move in accordance. The truth is, we only ever grow closer to the Tao. The dilemma was created by a conflict between our egoic and spiritual selves, but the only way is up. And only time and patience will show us where our egoic attachments actually were. Were we too attached to our ego-satisfying status as the sensible, responsible head of the family? Or were we egoically attached to love, sex and the excitement of a new start. Only time will tell. But time will tell, and once the lesson has been learned, there is no need to repeat it. Life will have both purified us emotionally and brought that self-knowledge to us intellectually. The next test will be of a different nature. Eventually there will come a time when life has no more tests to set. This is the time when all of our desires accord with both our head and heart – a skilful life of one win-win situation to the next. It is the natural, joyous life of wu-wei – which is also the life of the highest moral rectitude. I don’t have much experience of this, but I would like to speculate a bit in my next post! Best wishes

Yes, pleasure is a real taste of heaven. The aim of life is to find this pleasure, and there are skilful ways and unskilful ways. Those who seek worldly power and wealth so often know the true good of life. They understand how it tastes better than most, and this is what makes them seek so hard in life. It is no wonder such people are so often revered by others. What they achieve of real spiritual significance. But their power is all dependent on the outside situation. Sudden changes in circumstance can take them back to square one. Those who take their pleasures on the inside, carry them around wherever they go. You cannot take away the inner realisation that you are well and happy whatever happens. This confidence adds peace and security to their pleasure. the power seeker always worries that what they have will one day be lost. Inability to experience pleasure is only ever a temporary state. But in those who have not yet developed inner compensation, loss of pleasure is a truly horrendous experience. It is feeling of emotional and moral desolation. I say moral because the moments we take our pleasure are our greatest moments: we know it is good, and we are ennobled by the experience. Recovery from this depressions is possible only by the development of inner well-being. Then we can return to our former pleasures with a securer base. When you talk to people who have battled depression they often report feeling a kind of gratitude fro the experience. They feel that it matured them, made them more compassionate perhaps, and added a richer dimension to their existence. I used to be a psychologist in the NHS but all this talk about mental illness as pathology really bothered me, I always seemed to see something almost productive in it best wishes

Hi cat Desires always bring joy. And in this basic sense, one desire is as good as the next. One person might desire a best friend and sunset to gaze at together. The next might desire a prostitute and a gram of coke to get through together. In terms of the pleasure gained in the moment these might well be as good as each other. Pleasures can be experientially the same but differ widely in the technique needed to get them. Some pleasures come easily and cheaply, benefit many people and endure over time. Others are short-lived, nenefit only one-person and may even come at the expense of others. I think this is an important point. We can't begrudge another's pleasures. Pleasure, in whatever form it comes, is a true and authentic spiritual gift. But with the development of wisdom, we are able to discover ways to make these pleasures more intense, longer lasting and more available to more people. A spiritually developed person will start to notice that , for himself, some pleasures are better then others. It is easy to forego pleasures that to others seem quite important. The person acts like an self-mortifying ascetic. But the mortification is a trade-off for something better and is therefore still the same old hedonism. For the wise person there is no concept of sin: only pleasures, and less good pleasures. They find it hard to get bothered about the less-good stuff, and this alone sets him apart from normal people. best wishes

Hi all, A couple of posts back we talked about ‘taking sustenance from the mother’ in terms of wisdom and understanding. In the next couple of posts I’d like to talk about the same in terms of actual conduct in the world. For the philosopher, what must come before all else is the intellectual realization that all things are impermanent – that thoughts and perceptions are both fleeting flashes, annihilated in the moment. The self, which is based on the illusion that the subjective is ‘in here’ and the objective is ‘out there,’ is therefore destroyed by the vision of impermanence. The philosopher realizes that his individual self is just a one-sided opinion, and that there is also this other universal aspect to his self. We’ve discussed how this realization has an immediate impact on his functioning in the world. He sees that the world and all its activity is driven by people who believe that their individual self must be given pleasure, and spared harm and pain. Normal people do not question the individual self, and so this behaviour is perfectly rational to them. But to the person who has seen beyond the individual, this conduct can no longer be fully rational. The philosopher finds that his will and motivation to participate in the everyday world is hugely diminished. We talked about how this can leave him feeling empty, bereft and nostalgic, as well as drawing disapproval from those around him. The philosopher learns that he is intellectually equipped to dismantle as senseless nearly all of the inane motivations that are expected of him. He cannot ‘fear what others fear’ and he cannot enjoy what others enjoy: ‘what abysmal nonsense is this’. But… His intellect has striven well ahead of the rest of his being. This is his nature as a philosopher, and is forgivable, but his feelings and emotions must catch up. Yes, he is able to dismiss most of the hedonism and defensiveness of the normal person, but he still has his blind spots. He can dismantle the superstitions that are imposed on him from the outside, but from within he still has many remnant desires. And when these desires strike him he finds that his intellect is unable to resist. This is most obviously true of those desires that are most quintessential of his individual mortal existence: food, sleep, warmth. He cannot philosophize his hunger away, and so he naturally eats when he is hungry. But in addition to this he has desires that are not essential to his survival, but which are able to trample down his intellect nevertheless. What these are depend on his individual nature, but a love of status, or the opposite sex, or of power for example may seriously disturb him. And they attack him from behind. He cannot with his reason see them coming. If he could see them with his reason he would dismantle them with his reason. This phase is felt as distressing and fearful, because it highlights to him his lack of control. He sees that his path as a philosopher has reached its end. He can no longer proceed according to his own will. His own particular powers have been used to the full, and are now expended. His raft has taken him across the river, yet he is still not at peace. Therefore he must abandon himself. He must become passive. He must hunker down and wait as the storms of desire rage over his head. And he must have the trust that there will come a time when his peace will be permanent. Difficult as all this is, it is his first introduction to his life of wu-wei. Wu-wei is such an important concept in Taoism, but practically impossible to explain to anyone who has not experienced it themselves. We are so used to viewing ourselves as active agents in some situations, and passive patients in others. The notion that we might be active and passive at the same time is a paradox very hard to grasp. Too often wu-wei is understood as passivity, as yielding, as going with the flow…though not fully wrong, this is not wu-wei. As with all paradoxes, it ceases to be one once you have a full understanding of reality and selfhood. In the case of the philosopher, you must first realise that you are not simply a mortal individual. This realization will bring about a huge reduction in the amount of desires you experience. This reduction will leave episodes in your life, at first brief, when you are quite literally without desires…and those that are expected of you seem ridiculous. By knowing the bland quietness of this indifference we are able to clearly recognise any radical change of state: the BOOM when desire strikes. And we are also able to see our absolute powerless inability to do anything other than follow the booming desire wherever it takes us. Our reason cannot even give good reason not to follow our desires. And so we see that our desires are both imposed upon us (we are passive) and at the same time we see ourselves actively engaging in them (we are active). Some of these desires we disapprove of, and others we approve of. Those we disapprove of tend to conflict with other desires, either ours or other people’s, and therefore bring about conflict, loss and confusion. Those we approve of seem to create win-win situations to everyone involved. Learning to tell the difference between good and bad desires is a difficult lesson, and a time when we find ourselves thinking much about following the ‘head’ and following the ‘heart’. I’d like to talk about the next, for it is only when head and heart are in total accord that the true bliss of the wu-wei life begins. Best wishes

Hi all We will not call something the truth until we both know it with our heads and feel it with our hearts. A proposition may have strong logical appeal, but unless we feel it also, we will hesitate to name it as the truth. Truth brings a state of peace, a kind of relief - we are happy to settle for the interpretation of things that we have found. After a period of confusion and unrest we can move on with a feeling of peace and confidence, once we have found our truth. We do not have to be some wise sage to experience this. We all experience that feeling that comes when our intellectual interpretation fits with the current situation and we feel peace. it is because of this feeling of peace that we come to value the truth. We consider the possession of truth to be a good thing. Not just philosophers, all people. Our error comes when we try to think that the intellectual interpretation that brought peace to our hearts in that moment, can be lifted from the unique sequence of events. Error is nothing other than the belief that there are truths that transcend the uniqueness of the moment. But we all have our opinions that we cling to. We wear them like lenses over our eyes. We believe in the goodness they once brought us. We believe in them so much that we try to apply them where they don't belong. We find to our astonishment that our believes bring us no peace..But we know and remember the peace they once brought, it was so good for us, and we will not let it go. How can we let go of our truths? We must learn to dismantle them logically. We must learn to see that what might be true from our perspective might be false from another person's. We must learn to see truth as provisional. Truth does not transcend the time and place. We must be intellectually open enough to apply the truth that is required in that moment - to feel it and to love it - and then to let it go in the next as if it were the basest falsehood. To live as a philosopher we find that in one moment we argue that 'black is black' and it gives us peace. And in the the next moment we argue that 'black is white' and this too gives us peace. This is the intellectual openness that truly allows us to think and act effectively in the world. We must have the intellectual openness to see what is needed now, and to attach ourselves to nothing. No remnant of an opinion must pass from one situation to the next. This is wisdom. Our task is to root our own opinions, and challenge them. To those who are attached to their truths this is true mortification. If you are not at peace, then you are holding on to a worldview that is disturbing you. Whether you are conscious of it or not, you are applying a belief about you or the world that is harming you and your well-being. Your erroneous worldview is inspiring behaviours that pervert the natural flow of events. The more you cleanse yourselves of your believes, the more you are able to live naturally and well. In Taoist terminology to live this way is to practise wu-wei, and this is what we shall talk about next.

Hi cat Lots of people already feel a bit uneasy about time. Our most prevalent creation narrative holds that time began with the Big Bang, but most people can't help but wonder what came before. Time, linear time, as it is usually understood is already a bit of a precarious concept. We feel like we are being cheated somehow - but this faint scepticism is useful to us. It also helps when we become aware of how variable our memories can be. We hardly notice until we compare them with other people's memories of the same event and we can be astonished how different they are. We start to see that memory has subjective elements that don't correlate with other people's memories. We then start to notice that a memory from the past and a expectation of the future, are both of the same nature. They are both inner mind states. Both past and future are the opposite of the 'now' - which is brightly lit and not a shadowy mental state. This similarity between past and future coupled with the previous realisation that we subjectively construct these mental states can shock us into noticing that we have no actual idea whether a future expectation is not in fact a memory, and vice versa. We see that we truly are unable to infallibly know whether we start young and grow old, or start old and grow young!! Shocking as this is, we see that our ageing is nothing more than a one-sided belief: a selective interpretation of merely mental states. The final stage is of course the simple realisation that whatever happens, is happening now. A memory is subjectively about the past, but is itself always a present event. And then we see that all things are present events. The present itself is not something that can be seen, known or talked about. The present is a container that we must understand and know spiritually. To talk about it is to fill the present with something is not it ltself. The moment we reflect on the present we immediately lose it. I think all spiritual practise is aimed at living more and more in what you call the 'moment, out of time'. Because this moment has so many postive aspects to it; beauty, truth, goodness, deep personal security and love - it is no surprise that the different spiritual paths sound so different. But I certainly identify the present moment with God, with the way, whatever you want to call it. Like I said in the OP, the philosophical path enables you to stay 'alert' by removing mental distraction. This is how it works. If you see the coiled rope in the woodshed and imagine its a snake, you will be filled with anxiety. You won't get the wood, you won't let your kids near it, you won't feel calm unless you see the snake dead...so you think. And then you are shown your error. And no matter what you do, you cannot go back to your former state of anxiety. You can try but your will won't let you - it will rebel. By seeing the truth you've been cleansed of the very kind of thing that bars you from the spiritual present moment. Of course, for most people there will immediately be another preoccupation to take its place. This is because the roots of all anxieties: time, space and the self still remain intact and potent enough to spawn a whole host of new anxieties. Fear of snakes is only rational to a person who already believes in individual mortality. Only when these final big ones are dismantled will your mind become noticeably more at peace. Alertness is our natural state, once we have cleansed our minds of empty superstitious anxiety. In the OP I talked about philosophy as moving away from earth. What I haven't talked about at all is the need to move towards heaven. When I think about my own path I find it hard to imagine that I could have seen the timelessness of time, or the emptiness of the self without the aid of sitting meditation. Even though all my life, along with all people, I've been making equivalent intellectually transcendent leaps (the kind that the men at the coffee table haven't made!) - it seem they've been possible because the world we live in is saturated with these kind of everyday relative perspectives. The world we are born into is already steeped in spiritual wisdom. But the people who have seen the relativity of, say, the self or time are very rare. You don't meet these people often. You would have to seek them out. if you find such a figure I have no doubt that having them in your social sphere will help you make that transcendent leap pretty quickly. But for me I had to settle for reading their books (these people often write books) and meditating silently in order to clear a space in my mind to see that they are saying. Where the will to do all this comes from I can't say. But the will is the most important thing and after that, in my experience there have been three components: personal intellectual enquiry, reading spiritual literature and meditation. If I'd personally met some kind of guru all the reading perhaps wouldn't have been necessary - in fact the guru may well have justifiably claimed that he the guru was the most important thing! I hope this helps!

Hi all, A couple of posts back we finished with talk about ‘taking sustenance from the Mother’. This can mean many different things in the life of a spiritually realized person: understandings and conduct in the world. As this thread is about the philosopher, we’ll try and stick to the transformations in wisdom that comes as we live sustained but the Mother. As you’ve probably realized, this isn’t some overnight transformation. The philosopher is not in the business of discovering exciting and powerful truths. His way is negative: he merely strips himself one narrow and one-sided views. As we believe so we act. The philosopher who has dismantled the very concepts that structure our world – time, space, the self – therefore finds himself somewhat stranded. He is now longer blinded by his own one-sided opinions. He no longer rushes headlong into courses of actions, whose meaning he does not understand but thinks he does. He is genuinely unable to act on impulses that at one time came so naturally – impulses which still constantly impel the vast majority of those around him. This is not a positive state for him. It is a state of nihilism, a crisis of understanding. Former strategies have fallen by the wayside and he is left unequipped by anything to take their place. He finds himself trying to invoke the arguments that inspire others to action, but to him they just leave him confused and distinctly uninspired. If the philosopher experiences a dark night of the soul, this is it – and the experience is perhaps described in those lines from the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 20. “What a fool I am! What a muddled mind I have All men are bright, bright: I alone am dim, dim. All men are sharp, sharp: I alone am mum, mum!” The philosopher needs to learn different mode of understanding the world: he needs to learn to act instinctively and intuitively - to take sustenance from the mother. As is always the case, this ability is not some new and exotic talent. It is something he has been doing all along. In the past the philosopher assumed that his knowledge was learned at one point, stored in the memory, and then avails itself as pertinent situations arise. But when one ceases to assume the passage of time, one is forced to view all knowledge as a present moment “intuition”. I meet my “old friend from school”. All that can certainly be known, as I look into his face, is that large quantities of information are available to me – information that allows a shared understanding and flow to the interaction. Talk about a shared “past” and “events that have happened” go beyond what is immediately known. What I imagine was merely tuited I must also see as intuited: what “has happened” is also something that has “never happened before now”. To understand things in term of time is a habit that we get out of the more we see that time is just an unnecessary intellectual construct. But it is the strong belief in time that dictates to us what can and can’t be known intellectually. If we strongly believe in time, we strongly believe that we cannot understand or know anything that we have not experienced or been told empirically. But when we see through time we become open to the notion that we might know things about say a person, even though intellectually we might be forced to recognise that they are complete strangers. As we dismantle our superstitious attachment to time, we remove perhaps the most substantial barrier to our wisdom. If you believe that there is a difference between tuition and intuition then you are placing a considerable restraint on your wisdom. You still have wisdom of course, but you understand it one-sidedly. Your wisdom is what YOU know. Your wisdom is a subjective knowing…but you do not realise how widely this subjective knowing can spread out into the world. Like I said we do not become omniscient overnight, and our subjective wisdom appears first in some areas and not others. A good example is what I talked about in my last post, the understanding of scripture. For so much of our lives we imagine that scripture holds a meaning, the meaning that was intended by the author, and that that meaning is a stable fact that has abided over history and can be discovered by the reader. It is only when we stop thinking about things in this time-steeped way that we are able to notice that scripture means different things on different occasions, to us. Another good example is in our understandings of our own bodies. If there is something out the ordinary, a pain or illness, we are in the habit of viewing our bodies as material objects that react to the environment in the same way as other bodies. This is the premise of general medicine. If we get ill we have been exposed to a pathogen whose existence in our life is ultimately random. But as we cease to view ourselves as beings in time and space we start to notice other patterns in our lives. We start to understand that our asthma attack last night was not just about the autumnal leaf mould, but also something to do with our life situation…our career troubles, and the problems in our marriage. We start to understand our illnesses in a light that mean nothing to anyone but ourself, and yet to ourselves is the best most adequate way of understanding and the way that will best inspire health-restoring interventions. These subjective explanations are so often called intuitions, but actually they are neither tuition nor intuition. All wisdom is the same. It is only when we stop believing that we are only able to know certain things, that our ability to know anything is unlocked. As the ability to hear your subjective view grows stronger, you start to show a depth of understanding that to other seems uncanny. “How did you know that?” It’s not uncanny, it’s actually perfectly natural and it’s a skill that we all demonstrate a million times a day. But because we think we understand how and why we understand, we end up not understanding as much as we might do. This is an interesting subject and I could go on with examples, but I’d be just repeating the same principle. We can discuss it more if you want, if not then maybe next time we can talk about ‘sustenance from the mother’ not in wisdom, but in our actual conduct and behaviour. Best wishes

Burana-C ?

Thanks Cat, yes the OP describes the feeling really nicely. There's also a trepidation because you don't know what will fall next. "What that too? Does that really have to go too?" Our mortifications come, whether we seek them out or not.

Hi all and.. Both times I’ve quoted the Tao Te Ching I’ve been corrected by Aaron for doing so inappropriately. Rather than defend the quotes themselves, it might be easier if I explain my own approach to religious texts. A religious movement is only of practical use when it starts positively influence the well-being of the people. A religion that does not make the world a better place is a dead religion. The texts and scriptures must therefore serve as a guide and rule to those whose lives and well-being are to be improved. Those who have gained the inner wisdom to understand the texts are in a position to explain them to those who have not yet gained that wisdom. It follows therefore that those most in need of a clear and unambiguous presentation of scripture are children. Taoism is in the west still a nascent religious movement at best. If it is to become a force for good it is therefore necessary that its distinctive message can be made available. This enterprise will require the exegesis of texts like the Tao Te Ching, but it must come from those who have understood for themselves the core spiritual message. Only these people will be able to meaningfully relate this message to the spiritual, philosophical and historical nexus in the west. With this understanding, they are in a position to present the meaning of the scripture to western society. So we can see the importance at the societal level of a clear and shared understanding of scripture, and those who most benefit from this are those whose own inner wisdom is most underdeveloped. Spiritual seekers are all different. Some people are naturally most concerned about those whose wisdom is less then their own. They seek to help others up to their own level. We’ll call these the compassionates. Such people will instinctively try to help others by explaining scripture, which they themselves once had to struggle to understand. They perhaps seek to speed up people’s spiritual development by taking the role of scriptural teachers. They therefore present scripture as something clear and unambiguous. However, there comes a point when every spiritual seeker reaches “adulthood”. They know and understand how their society understands and approaches scripture. They can pass it on to children if they need to. But they still have a need to grow themselves. They are not thinking of those beneath them, they, themselves, need to grow beyond the generally shared understanding. They have spent early life trying to reach adulthood, but know they seek full maturity. People in this situation will start to notice changes in their approach to scripture. They find that suddenly passages generally considered dull and irrelevant are starting to fascinate them. Those overlooked sections obscure of societal relevance are now sparkling with individual meaning. Dusty passages suddenly feel like they are addressed personally to you. One day a passage can some full of beautiful meaning…yet you seek out the same feeling the next day, and all you find are arid, pompous speculations. (As an aside, the I Ching shall remain unaccessible to any who can't approach scripture this way) Scripture therefore becomes something very animated, very subjective. A living presence and companion. It starts to serve as a constantly shifting mirror to our present spiritual condition, and the notion of fixed interpretation seems impossible and therefore ridiculous. If scripture changes its meaning, in a moment, for me, how could it apply universally to all people? Once this way of understanding scripture first arises there is a tendency towards a kind of antinomianism. “Scripture”, it is said, “cannot and should not, be interpreted for us. We must do it ourselves. Exegesis is an art and not a science.” With time this reaction softens and we start to recognise that we are all at different stages, and that some people first need to internalise core principles from scripture before they can start to extemporise for themselves. I read Aaron’s blog The American Taoist. I think he is a natural teacher and writer, a compassionate, whose concern is for those whose understanding is not yet at his level. It also seems, that as an American, he is trying to develop an understanding of Taoism relevant to the West. This requires the development of good, broad and stable understanding of Taoist scripture which can be shared. This is an important exegetical project and I wish him well with it because he seems talented. It is a shame that his blog seems to be a case of “high quality, low quantity”! But… in my last post I quoted Chapter 20 to illustrate that subjective feeling of nostalgia and disconsolation that comes as we start to lose interest in the ways of the world: that feeling that we are being emptied of things, and that they shall not return, and that we must therefore say goodbye. I have always found that Ch 20 mirrors this sentiment. It is therefore not an ingenious allegory devised by a sage, not for me while I’m in this mood. It is an authentic cri de coeur, resounding down the millennia, from one bereft spiritual seeker to another. I shall continue to quote, and no doubt enrage people by my choices. But this isn’t a thread about scriptural interpretation so forgive me if I don’t have time to do more of it. Best wishes

Hi all, I was planning to write some more on epistemology but we can move on to the life of a philosopher. “'a vision that no longer fits into words'.. and communicating... am waiting for this next installment with appetite. Hope you will come and share.” Yes, how does the philosopher manage to communicate what cannot be put into words? Well of course, he does speak but is so often misunderstood, and so the best way is through his life itself: his behaviours, his choices, the way he lives his life. The growth of spiritual wisdom is paired by a transformation in character, but this doesn’t come suddenly. At first the change is experienced as being as much negative as positive, and so we’ll start with the negatives. The philosopher has come to realise that his identity as a mortal individual, is only one half of the story…but he has grown very used to this half-story, his life situation – job, family, interests - is still permeated by this belief, and he has to continue living in a society that functions almost exclusively from the perspective of the mortal individual. As we believe so we act. If we believe that we are individuals, then our notions about what is important, what is good and bad, what is desirable/undesirable are notions as they apply to the individual. For example, to be a mortal is to belief in death, extinction, and that for most people is the supreme evil. Next to death is pain, and avoiding pain is a major motivating factor in life. If avoiding pain and death through the pursuit of pleasure, health and longevity is a fundamental motivator to the individual, then beneath this fundamental there are all sorts of subordinate motivating factors. For example, fear of death leads to desire for health, which leads to desire for a certain diet, which leads to a desire for organic food, which leads to a desire for certain kinds of shops which exist only in certain kinds of towns, which leads to a certain kind of address and paypacket, and so on… What happens when the philosopher sees that he isn’t, strictly speaking, a mortal in the first place? Well he doesn’t stop eating, that’s for sure. His mortal existence is still as relevant to him as it always was. But it has been supplemented by an ever-growing sense of himself as an immortal spiritual being. This new sense of himself is only dim at first, but it is enough reason for him to start to doubt the rationality of those desires that are most distant from his egoic needs. He does not stop desiring food to eat, but he does start to feel it unnecessary to cross town on his bicycle just to get the bread that was produced organically. This one desire he is now free of, and his life is simpler as a result. Now of course this may be viewed as a positive as far as he is concerned, but for those around him who consider organic food to be most important (as he once did), this apathy is not a good development. And, being the philosopher he is, he is not now arguing that organic food is wholly pointless - he is just seen that, from a certain perspective it is pointless. And this new perspective is enough to make him…well, kind of apathetic. As time goes on this indifference towards things viewed important by others grows and grows. He, as his spiritual self, is pretty much happy whatever is going on – he’s at peace, and he starts to see that this peace is going to be with him whatever happens in the future, good or bad. Some big things will shake his peace, but most stuff won’t affect it all - it won’t really add nor take away from what he has right now. The normal person, he sees, spends the vast majority of time seeking out or avoiding things that really aren’t very essential. They are derivatives of the derivatives of the essentials. Not the important stuff. The overwhelming industry of society is geared towards securing goods or avoiding evils that really aren’t particularly good or evil. And seeing this, the philosopher find sit very hard to participate. He doesn’t like to dismiss it all, he can see that people are getting really geared up by this stuff…but to him its unimportant and he is…apathetic. Most people’s lives are filled to the brim with an overwhelming array of things to pursue or avoid. Desires are positively queuing up, and the moment one is fulfilled the next takes its place. The philosopher meanwhile, finds that his desires are becoming increasingly essential - and related only to the basic realities of his mortal existence. Gaps start to appear. Times when he is just living, and motivated only by basic needs: eat, sleep, warmth. Anything subsidiary to these may flicker briefly, but never really take hold. This might sound almost desirable, but we must remember that this individual is likely still wrapped up in social relations from his former self. Like his interests, people are either essential or inessential…but those essential ones, parents, spouse best friends are not necessarily following the same path as he. They may be important to him, but that does not mean they understand him. Their importance dates back to a former time and is now diminishing. So they worry about him, tell him to take more of an interest…and he can’t explain himself and is left feeling lonely, uncertain. A complete transformation in his circumstances, and all from a habit of philosophising. His family and friends start to tell him to stop thinking…his greatest skill and asset is ruining his life. All of this, from the emotional peace that comes with realising the identity of good and bad, right and wrong, to the social isolation and apathy is summed up in Ch 20 of the Tao Te Ching: Have done with learning, And you will have no more vexation. How great is the difference between ‘eh’ and ‘oh’? What is the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’? Must I fear what others fear? What abysmal nonsense is this! All men are joyous and beaming, As though feasting upon a sacrificial ox, As though mounting the spring terrace; I alone am placid and give no sign, Like a baby which has not yet smiled. I alone am forlorn as one who has no home to return to. All men have enough and to spare: I alone appear to have nothing What a fool I am! What a muddled mind I have! All men are bright, bright: I alone am dim, dim. All men are sharp, sharp: I alone am mum, mum! Bland like the ocean, Aimless like the wafting gale. All men settle down in their grooves: I alone am stubborn and remain outside. But wherein I am most different from others is In knowing how to take sustenance from my Mother. The philosopher’s realisation prompts a withdrawal from the ways of the world that he and others can easily view as negative. I wanted to get this out the way…but the other side of the coin is learning to ‘take sustenance from the mother’ and we can talk about that next time. Best wishes

Hi all, The philosopher is an habitual sceptic. Explanations that make perfect sense to normal people for some reason leave him dissatisfied. This feeling leads him to seek out alternative explanations. When he finds them, he is in a position to openly doubt the accepted doctrine because he has alternatives. Until you are consciously aware of alternatives your doubt is a vague unease that you may not feel able to express. As the philosopher’s confidence increases he learns to recognise the feeling of dissatisfaction, and starts to expect alternative viewpoints to present themselves: indeed often he goes looking for them from other philosophers who have felt the same dissatisfaction as he. The philosopher is however basically the same as people. If he feels no discomfort with a doctrine he is happy to accept it as the ‘truth’. Because he feels no discomfort he does not seek alternative viewpoints, and finds it hard to suppose there can be any. Truth is the absence of doubt…it is a state of comfort and a state that all people value, even those apparently quite uninterested in the intellectual life. The kind of relativism we discussed with the coffee cup is accepted by everyone, but there comes a point where relativism is not very welcome. It is unwelcome because it at some point it will introduce a discomfort that you didn’t previously feel. Many people who have read a writer like Nietzsche find it deeply uncomfortable. He says many things that we really, really don’t want to know and he therefore gets called bad names. Many philosophers, who have found their truths and feel comfortable there, will accept relativism in only some areas. When applied to those domains that really structure our lived experience, ethics, epistemology and ontology…relativism is often a very dirty word. There are some good people who are so sensitive to the pain and suffering in the world that they feel compelled to remediate it by leading moral lives extreme in their piety. And there is also such a thing as intellectual morality. Some people are able to feel intellectual discomfort even at fundamental viewpoints - viewpoints whose acceptance in his peers is near universal. Such viewpoints are the ones we have talked about here: the existence of time, space, self and world. To feel dissatisfied with these seems like craziness to nearly everyone, and yet there are people caused pain by them…and then they make us feel uncomfortable by disturbing our comfort. What we take as fundamental truths these people suggest are just opinions, beliefs. On some questions we are so aware of alternative viewpoints that we are able to concede that our own views are opinions. Politics is perhaps a good example, although knowing our opinions aren’t truths does not always prevent us from getting upset with opposition. But on some questions, alternative viewpoints are so rarely seen that we find it very hard to imagine that our opinions don’t constitute stable truths. So our deepest truths – time, space etc - are dismissed by this crazy minority as mere beliefs. This presents us with a hard question. If every truth is also just an unfounded belief, what then causes us to have truths in the first place? Surely there is some kind of reality? If not, what are we having opinions about? This is a good question and one that will baffle every philosopher right until the end. It is only when he is able to see that the world itself is an opinion that he is able to dispose of the question. Truths about things in the world he sees are beliefs based on a belief. The world is also no world; reality he now sees is nothing other than a vacancy – a known state that cannot be talked about, only felt. It is the over-whelming comfort and satisfaction that comes when we dwell in this vacancy that leads the philosopher to accept it as truth. All former truths were just watered-down preparations for this. Perhaps we are in position now to define truth and belief. Truth is an emotional state in which we accept and feel comfortable. We do not feel and anticipate that there could be any possible alternative view to that which gives us this feeling. Truth is therefore a state of heart and mind. But if there is an alternative view then that person holding that view will consider your view ‘mere belief’ and their own view the truth. Belief is the opposite of truth. Belief is something other people have, and which causes you to lose your intellectual peace. Belief is therefore a pejorative term, and a state of mind that we imagine we must avoid because we associate it with discomfort. We are all therefore alike in seeking truth, but so often we imagine we have found it in places where others see mere belief. But because we know the emotional peace and goodness that we had when we had our truth, before we met with opposition, we are willing to suffer conflict with the believers in order to regain it. If you subscribe to any viewpoint which you know others disagree with, then the reality of their disagreement automatically makes you a believer. The two men arguing at the coffee table were both passionate truth seekers, and therefore both believers. The person who ironically observed the senselessness of their debate is the knower. Only the knower is at true stable peace, and although he arouses the ire of both the men - he cannot get angry back because he knows the truth and it elevates him from their anger. The spiritual philosopher has risen above all argument. He knows and has seen through the assumptions that frame every single intellectual debate that could possible occur. He cannot speak his truth, it is a vision that no longer fits into words. He therefore disturbs all the peace of the truth-seekers and offers no intellectual alternatives in return. What then can he offer? Maybe in future posts we can talk about how the philosopher communicates his truth. Best wishes and thanks for reading

Hi guys - hope you all love the new title! (thanks Apech) The conversation we had about thoughts and perceptions is naturally very difficult because I'm asking you to think of a perception, then in the same breath I'm asking you to see that it isn't a perception. But hard as it is, this is a very important point and it is worth some perseverance. Spiritual realisation, whatever your path, is knowing and feeling that you are not simply a mortal individual living in time and space. The belief that we are mortals is completely dependent on the notion that we are subjects experiencing a world 'out there' To have inner 'thoughts' and perceptions of 'outer things' is an inevitable corollary of this world view. We therefore will not attain intellectual realisation until we see that thoughts and perceptions are indistinguishable. There is no other intellectual way than to make this particular duality a unity. If we want to transcend the division between self and world we must transcend the division between thought and perception. They do not and will not ever cease to comprise our lived experience, But we must learn to understand fully their shared nature and behaviour. In the western philosophical tradition this vision of transience was described by Heraclitus, but not until Hegel was it fully outlined (In the Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit). In the eastern tradition it was one of the core teachings of the Buddha - his term was anitya (often translated as impermanence) and he called it one of the three marks of existence. Impermanence is a teaching that gets woefully underestimated. Most often Buddhists who do not realise the truly radical nature of impermanence talk about change, about decay over time and death, about the subtle changing of the seasons etc. While this description is perfectly valid, impermanence goes a lot deeper than that. The decay and death of our bodies is an obvious fact understood by even very young children. Do we really suppose that one of the most influential and innovative spiritual teachers of all time's core teaching was something already deeply obvious? Zen Master Dogen said: "the teaching which does not sound like it is forcing something on you is not true teaching" This is certainly the case with impermanence. Impermanence only attains its true soteriological force when it is understood in its most radical sense, as both Hegel and the Buddha expounded it. The world of thoughts and perceptions is an a constant state of annihilation. In the briefest blink of an eye our world dies and is reborn. Our perceptions and our thoughts are both alike. They are of the same nature. They behave the same way. Each exists for the briefest flash of an instant and then dies, forever. The only world, the only self that we can ever find rest in is the that stable self that sees all this happen. To dwell in this self is to live in the Tao. Best wishes guys. Next time I'd like to talk about the role of the belief on the philosopher's path.