“Birds are really smart, aren’t they, Nana? They’re even smarter than people, I think.” She takes a clean sheet of paper out of the cabinet and begins drawing.
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause they can fly, and we can’t.”
“Hmmm,” her brother looks up from his video game and flashes me those smiling blue eyes. “She’s got a point there… But we can build planes,” he adds.
“Yeah,” she says, “but birds don’t need to. ”
He laughs out loud.
The ancients understood, as my grandchildren seem to still, that humility is the source of all grace and wisdom – which is the same thing as knowing how little we actually know, and therefore, how much we have to learn.
It’s all too easy to take for granted the people and opportunities that we love and the many gifts we are fortunate to have. Too often, we let days pass in busy distress as we live them, not as ends in themselves, but as mere means to other ends. I’d surely spent too much time that way when my own daughter was young…worried, working, wanting what was still around the corner.
But then I had a dream, in which my father, long gone by that time, reminded me to “pay attention!” The day will come, he said, when you will wish, and would give anything, to be back here and now. I understand now just what he meant.
There is a scene in Thorton Wilder’s play, Our Town, that illustrates this point well. A young woman who had died in childbirth is given a chance by her spiritual guide to go back to revisit just one day of her life. Her first impulse is to choose a very memorial day, her sixteenth birthday perhaps, or maybe her wedding day. But her wise guide cautions her that it would be best to choose a perfectly ordinary day - for even that will seem so truly miraculous as to be overwhelming to step back into. If only we could see our blessings for what they are…while we still have them!
All the cliché’s are right - we “don’t know what we’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” What matters “isn’t having what you want, but wanting what you have.” I’m a big fan of other people’s creativity, btw…just one more thing to be grateful for.
I did not always love books the way my granddaughter does now. Too many assigned book reports had taken much of the fun out of reading. But I had come to appreciate them anew after my daughter was born…seeing their potential to illuminate what is too often obscured by the struggles of life.
As Thoreau wrote in Walden, a book that change my life, “For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?”(75) “There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.”(161) But “the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them.”(76) But “the works of the great poets have never been read by mankind for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.”(77-78)
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations.”(77) While “the orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion…the writer, who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspires the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”(76)
But to hear any of these voices of nature requires listening. For the universe speaks out loud and clearly for any who are listening. Its wisdom comes just when we need it, in the growth of a flower and the song of a bird, in the lyric of a song, or the deep message of a book, in the question of a child and the voice of a stranger.
As Henry David Thoreau so eloquently put it, we must:
"Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it.(p.163)
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.(p.63)
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness…to imbrute them.(p.165) Goodness is the only investment that never fails . . . Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.”
I like this idealistic view of the world. It is comfortable and comforting, and keeps hope alive, illuminating our higher potentials, even in the dark of impending doom. But idealism alone, like technology and slow time, can lull us into a false sense of security, even blind us to the challenges we must face. The whole truth requires we hear the realists voice as well, for it is they who show us what we must do to change what is into what could be.
*
It was become a parent that brought books back into my heart, revealed their meaning, and allowed me to see what had been beyond my understanding, until then. I used to read for fun, once upon a time, but at some point, it came to seem a waste of time. Even if one found a good book, there was no one to talk with about it anyway. And feedback on ‘book reports’ informed me that my interpretation was simply wrong, more often than not, as if this or that author had only one thing to say, and I had missed it altogether. So, under the pressure of assignments and deadlines, books had come to seem more like chores to me. But with the birth of my daughter, they came to feel like play again, their authors like old friends, their ideas like lights illuminating a darkened room.
’Unto you is given to know the mystery, but it will be told in parable,’ says the Gospel of Mark.
Fiction has a precarious place in the history of philosophy, if only because so many tend to read so literally, rather than laterally. Plato was baffled how many in his time had taken Homer’s stories of the gods, already ancient in Plato’s time, literally.
Raising children, one can’t help but see that value of fiction though, when done well…or the danger of it, when done poorly.
In one especially optimistic work of recent fiction, Dan Brown put it this way: “The Apocalypse is literally a reveal-ation. The Book of Revelations in the Bible predicts an unveiling of great truth and unimaginable wisdom. The Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but rather, it is the end of the world as we know it.” For all we know, it could be the beginning of an “age of enlightenment.”(p.467)
Of course, this is not the kind of ‘revelation’ most people are expecting. But then people have been wrong before.
*
You might think the relevant dialogue would be between climate scientists and so-called ‘climate change deniers’, but it takes two willing to understand to make a dialogue. When the intention of one is only to muddy the water, there is no mutual understanding to be found (except to understand that one is conversing with someone who does not want to understand). Fallacy only dumbfounds dialogue, leaving listeners with their mouths hanging open, shaking their heads, and needing to sort sense from nonsense, truth from deceit.
Perhaps the relevant dialogue is between realists and idealists, who together have the voices that can illuminate the path from what is to what could be, that can guide us, individually and collectively. Scientists are, by the nature of their enterprise, realists. And philosophers tend to be, by and large, idealists. In the dialogue between we might find our way from here to there.
Unfortunately, modern philosophers have, by and large, lost their idealist orientation, so we have to turn to fiction for ideals of higher purposes.
*
Maybe Dan Brown is right. Maybe we have “been born into wonderful times… a change is coming…[and] human beings are poised on a threshold of a new age when they will begin turning their eyes back to nature and to the old ways…back to the ideas in… ancient texts from around the world.”(p.60)
Brown reminds us that many have forecast the potential for “a moment of great human transformation,”(p.240) and it is likely to be “preceded by a brilliant explosion of knowledge, a flash of clarity to illuminate the darkness -- and give mankind a final chance to veer away from the abyss and take the path of wisdom.”(p.54)
Maybe “we are on the verge of a truly great period of illumination, and all of us -- all of you -- are profoundly blessed to be living through this pivotal moment in history. Of all the people who have ever lived in all the eras in history,” he says, “we are in the narrow window of time during which we will bear witness to our ultimate renaissance. After a millennial of darkness, we will see our sciences, our minds, and even our religions unveil the truth.’”(p.409)
I’d like to think he could be right. Maybe crisis will turn out to be opportunity, after all. Perhaps…if we are lucky, and if we are wise, it could all turn out for the best…but that’s not the way the signs are pointing
He’s certainly right though when he says that “Powerful truth has it’s own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.” And there may well be good reason to hope that “There will come a day when modern science begins in earnest to study the wisdom of the ancients…that will be the day that mankind begins to find answers to the big questions that still elude him.”(p.60)
It could happen… we may someday tip the scales toward such a change in the collective mind, but this transformation begins only with individuals, each of us doing our own part.
Brown illustrates (in a way that only fiction can) how it’s up to each of us to live up to our potential, whatever that might mean, in order that all others can live up to theirs. Deep in the body of his story, we come briefly upon a blind monk who had dreamed when he was young that the fate of the world rested in his hands, and that he could be that person who would change the world. But we meet him near the end of his life, when he’s long since realized that his part will not be as heroic as he had once hoped it might. Still, no one is perfect, he knew, and he was content that he had at least done his best, which is all anyone can do, after all. Little does the old monk realize (as only the reader, with a god’s eye view, can see) that by simply going about his daily work, this one blind seer had (for reasons he wasn’t sure of himself) left a single door ajar, and in the process provided the key without which none of the other heroes of the story could have succeeded in their work.
So it turns out, he was right. Little did he know, but he had indeed changed the world, for his tiny part was nonetheless a critical part – and the fate of the world actually did depend on him. We may never know our true importance to the big picture, but all the same, “everyone has a part to play.”
Brown’s book makes much of the concept of a talisman, which has magical connotations in some contexts, but it has another meaning too. It comes from the Greek telesma, meaning ‘complete’ – “a talisman is any object or idea that completes another, and makes it whole. The finishing element,” if you will.(p.167) Like the “Unfinished Pyramid” that we see on the dollar bill. It’s apex was flat -- a small square area -- a blank space symbolically awaiting its final piece…that piece which would transform it from an Unfinished Pyramid to a True Pyramid.”(p.187) This tiny capstone was a talisman, but not the magic kind…the far older kind. It was “a symbolic reminder that man’s ascent to his full human potential was always a work in progress.”(p.161)
*
The Ancient Hindus had a metaphor that captured this ideal of learning. While life is a journey, and we may well be traveling to the same destination, but there are nonetheless “many paths to the same summit.”
“At first this may seem surprising; if there is one goal, should there not be one path to it? This might be the case if we all started from the same point, but in actuality people approach the goal from different angles, so multiple paths are needed… The result is a recognition...that there are multiple paths to god, each calling for a distinctive mode of approach.”[3]
This powerful metaphor taught their young tolerance, appreciation and mutual understanding by illuminating for them that the reality that all religions, all wisdom traditions, even all individual lives, are what Plato might call. “lines converging on a common center.”
Our paths are different because people are different. We are born in different places, have different challenges and opportunities, develop unique skills and talents, we face different moral dilemmas, have different ancestors passing on different stories and mythologies by way of different languages. Naturally, we each and all have very different experiences in this life - so why should we not see our lives through different eyes, develop different perspectives or windows on the world? It only stands to reason that we should follow different paths toward the single end we all have in common, not only with each other, but with all living things -- that of reaching our own highest potential - what the ancient called simply our good.
In modern times, we have lost this sense of balance and mutual respect. We tend to take our faiths so literally, rather than laterally, that we have come to think of different worldviews and perspectives as competing, as if the claim that any one of them is true implies that the others must be false. This is fed by practitioners who feel the need to compete for followers - but Jesus was not one of these. His efforts to teach people to love their neighbor did not exclude those of different faiths, nor did the claim that there is one god entail that other gods were false. Logically, why would we not all see the same god differently?
“Truth is one,” the ancients said, though “sages call it by different names.”[4]
So while many throughout history have made it their mission to enforce one view over another, and endless wars have been fought and blood has been shed over who is right about what is true, by and large, those who inspired these faiths did not see themselves or the wisdom they taught in this exclusive way. By their lights:
“All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself.” While it may be true that, “One can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion, It is in ignorance that people say, ‘My religion is the only one, my religion is the best’.”[5]
So this ‘many paths to the same summit’ view may be among the most fruitful conceptions that ancient cultures offer us, for it embodies, in the notion that we all see the same world, differently, that learning comes, not only from the lessons of our own journey, but is the process coming to see through others eyes. Since none of us can follow every path, it is the art of dialogue by which we learn from one another, and mutual respect that is the foundation.
And, as Mill put it:
"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest…The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental and spiritual. "[p.17]
Still, we can learn from one another, for if we want to understand more of the whole truth about the world, then it behooves us to do so by way of listening, empathy, dialogue and healthy argument – which requires cooperation, as well as competition. Unfortunately, have learned to be one-sided – confused into thinking that if a little competition is good, then a lot must be better. But this is a fallacy, and in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Putting aside the fact that Darwin never used the cliché ‘survival of the fittest,’ “its original usage referred to fitting into the natural order.” The athletic fitness metaphor that dominates our worldview today is a connotation that grew up in an economy that emphasized competition, forgetting that cooperation is the essence of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ philosophy. As Socrates put it, specialization benefits all for the same reason that a farmer needs a shovel maker – for he does not have time to make his own.
We do not have time to follow all paths – but we do have voices to teach and can learn to listen, listen to learn. This is why the ancients tried to teach us to argue well, not to win, but to understand one another, so that we might learn from one another’s experience. Ideas compete, in a sense, but they also cooperate, and it is in this way that we come to understand one another, rather than to merely to win. So we might “merge our windows” on the world, rather than fight over who has the better view. This will to win did not come from the ancients – not Jesus, or Buddha, or probably Mohammad either. This tendency has been infused into religion by subsequent followers who did not understand the ancient insights that gave rise to it to begin with.
The Hindu’s had a joke: “God gave us truth - then the devil came along and said, ‘Here, let me organize that for you. I’ll call it religion’.”
Deepak Chopra sharpens this point, reminding us that ‘enlightenment’ originally meant ‘to rise above,’ or to ‘lighten up.’ [6]
None of us changes the world by ourselves and all alone…but each of us has a part to play and may be key in some way to helping others do theirs, maybe without even realizing it. This book is a dialogue for that reason, because every voice brings something critical to the discussion.
As Aristotle put it:
"The truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, [and] in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not a particular part…shows the difficulty of it.... No one individual is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, [rather] every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."(Metaphysics: Book II/Chapter I)
Therefore, "… we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought. It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus.”
“The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former."(Meta Book II/Chapter I)
So too, we would have no Plato without Socrates, and no Aristotle without Plato. Likewise, we would perhaps have no Socrates without those without those who came before him. And the same is true of all the great thinkers that all other great thinkers have drawn upon.
*
And as John Stuart Mill adds:
“On every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends upon a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.... He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that....nor is it ever really known but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest possible light....the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner…"
*
Aristotle, Mill, McKibben, Brown, Chopra, the ancient Hindu sages have all done their part, and there are many other great teachers from whom we all have to learn. They each offer their perspectives on this whole and cumulative truth. Some wrote, and some were written about. We need them all now, more than ever!
[1] (Smith, 26)
[2] (Smith, p.56)
[3] (Smith, p.56)
“Why do you say that?”
“’Cause they can fly, and we can’t.”
“Hmmm,” her brother looks up from his video game and flashes me those smiling blue eyes. “She’s got a point there… But we can build planes,” he adds.
“Yeah,” she says, “but birds don’t need to. ”
He laughs out loud.
The ancients understood, as my grandchildren seem to still, that humility is the source of all grace and wisdom – which is the same thing as knowing how little we actually know, and therefore, how much we have to learn.
It’s all too easy to take for granted the people and opportunities that we love and the many gifts we are fortunate to have. Too often, we let days pass in busy distress as we live them, not as ends in themselves, but as mere means to other ends. I’d surely spent too much time that way when my own daughter was young…worried, working, wanting what was still around the corner.
But then I had a dream, in which my father, long gone by that time, reminded me to “pay attention!” The day will come, he said, when you will wish, and would give anything, to be back here and now. I understand now just what he meant.
There is a scene in Thorton Wilder’s play, Our Town, that illustrates this point well. A young woman who had died in childbirth is given a chance by her spiritual guide to go back to revisit just one day of her life. Her first impulse is to choose a very memorial day, her sixteenth birthday perhaps, or maybe her wedding day. But her wise guide cautions her that it would be best to choose a perfectly ordinary day - for even that will seem so truly miraculous as to be overwhelming to step back into. If only we could see our blessings for what they are…while we still have them!
All the cliché’s are right - we “don’t know what we’ve got ‘till it’s gone.” What matters “isn’t having what you want, but wanting what you have.” I’m a big fan of other people’s creativity, btw…just one more thing to be grateful for.
I did not always love books the way my granddaughter does now. Too many assigned book reports had taken much of the fun out of reading. But I had come to appreciate them anew after my daughter was born…seeing their potential to illuminate what is too often obscured by the struggles of life.
As Thoreau wrote in Walden, a book that change my life, “For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?”(75) “There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on the face of things for us.”(161) But “the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them.”(76) But “the works of the great poets have never been read by mankind for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.”(77-78)
“Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations.”(77) While “the orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion…the writer, who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspires the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”(76)
But to hear any of these voices of nature requires listening. For the universe speaks out loud and clearly for any who are listening. Its wisdom comes just when we need it, in the growth of a flower and the song of a bird, in the lyric of a song, or the deep message of a book, in the question of a child and the voice of a stranger.
As Henry David Thoreau so eloquently put it, we must:
"Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it.(p.163)
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.(p.63)
We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness…to imbrute them.(p.165) Goodness is the only investment that never fails . . . Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.”
I like this idealistic view of the world. It is comfortable and comforting, and keeps hope alive, illuminating our higher potentials, even in the dark of impending doom. But idealism alone, like technology and slow time, can lull us into a false sense of security, even blind us to the challenges we must face. The whole truth requires we hear the realists voice as well, for it is they who show us what we must do to change what is into what could be.
*
It was become a parent that brought books back into my heart, revealed their meaning, and allowed me to see what had been beyond my understanding, until then. I used to read for fun, once upon a time, but at some point, it came to seem a waste of time. Even if one found a good book, there was no one to talk with about it anyway. And feedback on ‘book reports’ informed me that my interpretation was simply wrong, more often than not, as if this or that author had only one thing to say, and I had missed it altogether. So, under the pressure of assignments and deadlines, books had come to seem more like chores to me. But with the birth of my daughter, they came to feel like play again, their authors like old friends, their ideas like lights illuminating a darkened room.
’Unto you is given to know the mystery, but it will be told in parable,’ says the Gospel of Mark.
Fiction has a precarious place in the history of philosophy, if only because so many tend to read so literally, rather than laterally. Plato was baffled how many in his time had taken Homer’s stories of the gods, already ancient in Plato’s time, literally.
Raising children, one can’t help but see that value of fiction though, when done well…or the danger of it, when done poorly.
In one especially optimistic work of recent fiction, Dan Brown put it this way: “The Apocalypse is literally a reveal-ation. The Book of Revelations in the Bible predicts an unveiling of great truth and unimaginable wisdom. The Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but rather, it is the end of the world as we know it.” For all we know, it could be the beginning of an “age of enlightenment.”(p.467)
Of course, this is not the kind of ‘revelation’ most people are expecting. But then people have been wrong before.
*
You might think the relevant dialogue would be between climate scientists and so-called ‘climate change deniers’, but it takes two willing to understand to make a dialogue. When the intention of one is only to muddy the water, there is no mutual understanding to be found (except to understand that one is conversing with someone who does not want to understand). Fallacy only dumbfounds dialogue, leaving listeners with their mouths hanging open, shaking their heads, and needing to sort sense from nonsense, truth from deceit.
Perhaps the relevant dialogue is between realists and idealists, who together have the voices that can illuminate the path from what is to what could be, that can guide us, individually and collectively. Scientists are, by the nature of their enterprise, realists. And philosophers tend to be, by and large, idealists. In the dialogue between we might find our way from here to there.
Unfortunately, modern philosophers have, by and large, lost their idealist orientation, so we have to turn to fiction for ideals of higher purposes.
*
Maybe Dan Brown is right. Maybe we have “been born into wonderful times… a change is coming…[and] human beings are poised on a threshold of a new age when they will begin turning their eyes back to nature and to the old ways…back to the ideas in… ancient texts from around the world.”(p.60)
Brown reminds us that many have forecast the potential for “a moment of great human transformation,”(p.240) and it is likely to be “preceded by a brilliant explosion of knowledge, a flash of clarity to illuminate the darkness -- and give mankind a final chance to veer away from the abyss and take the path of wisdom.”(p.54)
Maybe “we are on the verge of a truly great period of illumination, and all of us -- all of you -- are profoundly blessed to be living through this pivotal moment in history. Of all the people who have ever lived in all the eras in history,” he says, “we are in the narrow window of time during which we will bear witness to our ultimate renaissance. After a millennial of darkness, we will see our sciences, our minds, and even our religions unveil the truth.’”(p.409)
I’d like to think he could be right. Maybe crisis will turn out to be opportunity, after all. Perhaps…if we are lucky, and if we are wise, it could all turn out for the best…but that’s not the way the signs are pointing
He’s certainly right though when he says that “Powerful truth has it’s own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.” And there may well be good reason to hope that “There will come a day when modern science begins in earnest to study the wisdom of the ancients…that will be the day that mankind begins to find answers to the big questions that still elude him.”(p.60)
It could happen… we may someday tip the scales toward such a change in the collective mind, but this transformation begins only with individuals, each of us doing our own part.
Brown illustrates (in a way that only fiction can) how it’s up to each of us to live up to our potential, whatever that might mean, in order that all others can live up to theirs. Deep in the body of his story, we come briefly upon a blind monk who had dreamed when he was young that the fate of the world rested in his hands, and that he could be that person who would change the world. But we meet him near the end of his life, when he’s long since realized that his part will not be as heroic as he had once hoped it might. Still, no one is perfect, he knew, and he was content that he had at least done his best, which is all anyone can do, after all. Little does the old monk realize (as only the reader, with a god’s eye view, can see) that by simply going about his daily work, this one blind seer had (for reasons he wasn’t sure of himself) left a single door ajar, and in the process provided the key without which none of the other heroes of the story could have succeeded in their work.
So it turns out, he was right. Little did he know, but he had indeed changed the world, for his tiny part was nonetheless a critical part – and the fate of the world actually did depend on him. We may never know our true importance to the big picture, but all the same, “everyone has a part to play.”
Brown’s book makes much of the concept of a talisman, which has magical connotations in some contexts, but it has another meaning too. It comes from the Greek telesma, meaning ‘complete’ – “a talisman is any object or idea that completes another, and makes it whole. The finishing element,” if you will.(p.167) Like the “Unfinished Pyramid” that we see on the dollar bill. It’s apex was flat -- a small square area -- a blank space symbolically awaiting its final piece…that piece which would transform it from an Unfinished Pyramid to a True Pyramid.”(p.187) This tiny capstone was a talisman, but not the magic kind…the far older kind. It was “a symbolic reminder that man’s ascent to his full human potential was always a work in progress.”(p.161)
*
The Ancient Hindus had a metaphor that captured this ideal of learning. While life is a journey, and we may well be traveling to the same destination, but there are nonetheless “many paths to the same summit.”
“At first this may seem surprising; if there is one goal, should there not be one path to it? This might be the case if we all started from the same point, but in actuality people approach the goal from different angles, so multiple paths are needed… The result is a recognition...that there are multiple paths to god, each calling for a distinctive mode of approach.”[3]
This powerful metaphor taught their young tolerance, appreciation and mutual understanding by illuminating for them that the reality that all religions, all wisdom traditions, even all individual lives, are what Plato might call. “lines converging on a common center.”
Our paths are different because people are different. We are born in different places, have different challenges and opportunities, develop unique skills and talents, we face different moral dilemmas, have different ancestors passing on different stories and mythologies by way of different languages. Naturally, we each and all have very different experiences in this life - so why should we not see our lives through different eyes, develop different perspectives or windows on the world? It only stands to reason that we should follow different paths toward the single end we all have in common, not only with each other, but with all living things -- that of reaching our own highest potential - what the ancient called simply our good.
In modern times, we have lost this sense of balance and mutual respect. We tend to take our faiths so literally, rather than laterally, that we have come to think of different worldviews and perspectives as competing, as if the claim that any one of them is true implies that the others must be false. This is fed by practitioners who feel the need to compete for followers - but Jesus was not one of these. His efforts to teach people to love their neighbor did not exclude those of different faiths, nor did the claim that there is one god entail that other gods were false. Logically, why would we not all see the same god differently?
“Truth is one,” the ancients said, though “sages call it by different names.”[4]
So while many throughout history have made it their mission to enforce one view over another, and endless wars have been fought and blood has been shed over who is right about what is true, by and large, those who inspired these faiths did not see themselves or the wisdom they taught in this exclusive way. By their lights:
“All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God Himself.” While it may be true that, “One can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion, It is in ignorance that people say, ‘My religion is the only one, my religion is the best’.”[5]
So this ‘many paths to the same summit’ view may be among the most fruitful conceptions that ancient cultures offer us, for it embodies, in the notion that we all see the same world, differently, that learning comes, not only from the lessons of our own journey, but is the process coming to see through others eyes. Since none of us can follow every path, it is the art of dialogue by which we learn from one another, and mutual respect that is the foundation.
And, as Mill put it:
"Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest…The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily or mental and spiritual. "[p.17]
Still, we can learn from one another, for if we want to understand more of the whole truth about the world, then it behooves us to do so by way of listening, empathy, dialogue and healthy argument – which requires cooperation, as well as competition. Unfortunately, have learned to be one-sided – confused into thinking that if a little competition is good, then a lot must be better. But this is a fallacy, and in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Putting aside the fact that Darwin never used the cliché ‘survival of the fittest,’ “its original usage referred to fitting into the natural order.” The athletic fitness metaphor that dominates our worldview today is a connotation that grew up in an economy that emphasized competition, forgetting that cooperation is the essence of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ philosophy. As Socrates put it, specialization benefits all for the same reason that a farmer needs a shovel maker – for he does not have time to make his own.
We do not have time to follow all paths – but we do have voices to teach and can learn to listen, listen to learn. This is why the ancients tried to teach us to argue well, not to win, but to understand one another, so that we might learn from one another’s experience. Ideas compete, in a sense, but they also cooperate, and it is in this way that we come to understand one another, rather than to merely to win. So we might “merge our windows” on the world, rather than fight over who has the better view. This will to win did not come from the ancients – not Jesus, or Buddha, or probably Mohammad either. This tendency has been infused into religion by subsequent followers who did not understand the ancient insights that gave rise to it to begin with.
The Hindu’s had a joke: “God gave us truth - then the devil came along and said, ‘Here, let me organize that for you. I’ll call it religion’.”
Deepak Chopra sharpens this point, reminding us that ‘enlightenment’ originally meant ‘to rise above,’ or to ‘lighten up.’ [6]
None of us changes the world by ourselves and all alone…but each of us has a part to play and may be key in some way to helping others do theirs, maybe without even realizing it. This book is a dialogue for that reason, because every voice brings something critical to the discussion.
As Aristotle put it:
"The truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, [and] in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not a particular part…shows the difficulty of it.... No one individual is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, [rather] every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."(Metaphysics: Book II/Chapter I)
Therefore, "… we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought. It is true that if there had been no Timotheus we should have been without much of our lyric poetry; but if there had been no Phrynis there would have been no Timotheus.”
“The same holds good of those who have expressed views about the truth; for from some thinkers we have inherited certain opinions, while the others have been responsible for the appearance of the former."(Meta Book II/Chapter I)
So too, we would have no Plato without Socrates, and no Aristotle without Plato. Likewise, we would perhaps have no Socrates without those without those who came before him. And the same is true of all the great thinkers that all other great thinkers have drawn upon.
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And as John Stuart Mill adds:
“On every subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth depends upon a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting reasons.... He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that....nor is it ever really known but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest possible light....the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner…"
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Aristotle, Mill, McKibben, Brown, Chopra, the ancient Hindu sages have all done their part, and there are many other great teachers from whom we all have to learn. They each offer their perspectives on this whole and cumulative truth. Some wrote, and some were written about. We need them all now, more than ever!
[1] (Smith, 26)
[2] (Smith, p.56)
[3] (Smith, p.56)