The Philosopher's Tao

[Nikolai1]

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

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

Hi cat

 

 

I would be grateful if you were able to speak about subjective wisdom in relation to time.

 

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 guess one could decide to be like this constantly. It seems to me it is like wearing braces on teeth..or learning to stand up straighter and not slouch.. it has to be a retraining of a shape, a retraining of a laxity.

 

How to stay alert enough?

 

How do you stop the habit of falling asleep into the old habituation?

 

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!

Edited August 28, 2013 by Nikolai1

[Nikolai1]

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.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Nikolai1

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

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

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

Hi cat

 

 

Desires imposed upon us by.. by the undeniable significance and joy of them?

 

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

Edited September 2, 2013 by Nikolai1

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

Because to be unable to experience pleasure is.. to be unable to find a glimpse of a reverbation of a whiff of heaven?

 

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

Edited September 3, 2013 by Nikolai1

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

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

[Nikolai1]

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

[Nikolai1]

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

[hydrogen]

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

 

Can you do something about it?

 

You might be in a position to figure out a new way to treat the mental illness patients. Working inside an organization is easier to change it than someone from outside.

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

Hi Hydrogen

 

 

You might be in a position to figure out a new way to treat the mental illness patients.

 

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

 

 

depression

 

Maybe there is some other word, one that could carry different connotations.

 

I'm not sure SGP (spiritual growth pain) would really take on - except maybe in California.

 

Best wishes

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[三江源]

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Edited July 21, 2014 by cat

[Nikolai1]

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

[Marblehead]

Great thread Nikolai1. Thanks for sharing with us.

[Seeker of Wisdom]

You should put all those essays on a PDF eBook.