And so I set out to write a book that might illuminate the hidden justice that prevents the unworthy from seeing what they are missing, and what else is possible - that immaterial aspect of reality that is obscured by our over-emphasis on the material world and blinds us to so much that is worth seeing - including our own higher potentials and happiness.
Plato called these parallel realms the visible and the invisible, the latter being beyond the perception of those who look at the world only with physical eyes, and fail to look into the dynamic workings of the world through the mind's eye. He tried to teach us of their common dynamics, because “the good is to the invisible world of ideas what the sun is to the visible world of objects.” For just as “the Sun not only makes the things we see visible, it also brings them into existence and gives them growth and nourishment.” Likewise, we can see by the light that goodness shines the many benefits it causes. And while we cannot talk or point to the good itself, any more than we can look directly at the sun, we can see and talk about its effects. Just as "the Sun is not vision, but it is the cause of vision and also is seen by the vision it causes,” so “knowledge and truth are both seen and caused by the Good.”(Republic) So goodness – or what some call virtue or excellence - is to reason and its objects in the invisible but intelligible world of knowledge, what the sun is to vision and its objects in the visible world of sense and matter - it illuminates truth, generates understanding, and nurtures the growth of wisdom.
In short, if we we understand how the laws of nature work in the visible physical world, we can come to understand the invisible psychological world by seeing how the same laws apply to it. And so we can see how the conservation of energy and the laws of motions - for instance, that 'every action creates an equal and opposite reaction' - will help us understand what the ancients called karma, that "inexorable law renders the cosmos perfectly just.”
These are insights held in common by many different traditions, not because they learned from one another, but because they all learned from nature, which is everywhere and always the same. But we, in turn, have ignored much that nature teaches, and too often taken our cues from mere men, who may or may not have achieved their vision through the mind's eye.
We can credit Isaac Newton, for instance, for advancing our understanding of the physical laws of motion, and scientists and thinkers of all sorts since have followed suit and mastered the art of looking at the world 'out there,' analyzing and manipulating it's constituent parts, but at what cost? By focusing our attention on the brain, for instance, our knowledge of the physical may have come at the expense of actual understanding of the psychological mind, the dynamics of attention, and of the full complexity of consciousness itself - the world 'in here,' which cannot be perceived by the Newtonian method that is strictly outside-looking-in. And even when we have turned our analysis on consciousness itself, it has too often been from outside-looking-in, as if the workings of the mind could be understood as a machine, a set of working parts that might be understood as a mere object outside of us. When we would do better to look, not at, but through the mind - for as the ancients understood better than we do today, consciousness can be understood only by way of experience, by being developed into the fully functioning organic system that it is, or could be at any rate, when it's put to work for all it's worth.
This inside-looking-out wisdom is the kind that ancients understood better than we do today, and they prescribed it for just such a time as now, when we would need this inner wisdom most. We may have mastered the study and analysis of those objects of knowledge that can be perceived as distinct from their background, the kind that present with perimeters we can distinguish as surfaces. But this is only one material sense of the word 'objective.' But we have yet to take seriously, at least in modern times, the study of those objects of knowledge that are 'subjective' and cannot be perceived as objects outside of us since we are inside of them - such as love and consciousness itself. These subjects my exist 'objectively,' in this sense, and yet can only be perceived from inside-looking-out.
These include, for instance, the ecological and reciprocal feedback dynamics of human and nonhuman relationships, a kind of wisdom about the inner workings of things that the ancients mastered because it reveals our true and divine powers - not the power of outer force, as Newtonians valued, but the power of inner strength by which our higher selves might be actualized. The ancients endorsed this divine power because it gives us the power to create the future - creativity that parallels that of what some call 'the Creator' - perhaps why some say we were 'created in his image.' And it should matter to us because the lack of this wisdom about the healthy working of things gives us the unwitting power to destroy the future - one we have recklessly manifest.
That there might be hope for our children and theirs, this book attempts to illuminate for the open and willing mind the power of subjective perception int he dynamics of the objective world. We have long recognized the subject's ability to distort reality, but have not yet or fully understood its power to reveal, clarify, and create reality. Some popular 'new-agey' movements have tapped into this ancient wisdom to suggest that this 'law of attraction' gives us abilities to actualize our potentials, but without a better understanding of how the mind/world system actually works, we might still do as much harm as good, for ourselves and others, by what some taught as the power to get what we want. The challenge for humanity is to learn to want what's actually good for us and for all.
Unfortunately, contrary to what the ancients tried to teach, we treat learning as a process of accumulating facts, what Paulo Friere called the banking system of education, one in which deposits of information are made from outside-in, as if this alone were enough to give rise to knowledge. But as Socrates tried to teach us, true education is more like gardening, an organic process by which understanding grows by question and answer. The seeds of ideas may be planted and cultivated, but teachers are like midwifes when it comes to the labor of learning, assisting young minds to give birth to knowledge by a process of thought and reasoning. For the teacher cannot do for the students what they can and must do for themselves!
Unfortunately, our young make it all the way to college with little or no such exercise, and so with little or no actual understanding of much of anything they are supposed to have learned in the twelve year journey that is elementary and high school education. We keep them so busy with memorizing and regurgitating facts on tests that education as we know it amounts to little more than behavioral conditioning that simply habituates them to following directions and doing what their told - a system that is altogether unfit for creating healthy human beings, much less citizens for a healthy democracy.
.' ignorance' is, after all, the active root of 'to ignore'.
Our system of education renders our young ignorant of all that education might have helped them 'see' - including all that the ancients tried to teach about using the mind for all it's worth! And mind you, it's not educators themselves who fail us, for even the best cannot undo the damage done by a paradigm that is like water for fish - and conditions us all to see only material reality. We ourselves have been taught to see only the world out there, and to ignore the world in here, '
So how can we be expected to teach our young better than we ourselves have been taught? By going beyond what we've been taught to learn what we've been missing, to actively pursue the understanding that our education failed to provide. As Indigenous Peoples have tried to remind us, "Our original instruction is that we have intelligence so we need to use it clearly and coherently. We need to take responsibility for our lives,” and “use our intelligence… to create the reality that must be created.”(Trudell, 2007) And Socrates would add, we must learn to use our intelligence, not merely to get what we want, but to learn to want what's actually good for us! For while many are smart, too few are wise - that is, understanding of true value, of "what's worth trading or what."
And so this book is my humble attempt to share those ancient works that have the power to illuminate the matters of the mind that, arguably, matter most...if true happiness, health, and well-being has any meaning left for us. And for those who might scoff at first, then my hope is that these words might open the heart and the the mind's eye so to begin to see in the dark. For the dynamics of the invisible world generate light that reveals truth that are real and all around us, whether we see them or not. The best of ancient wisdom can convince the heart that it is worth all our efforts to make ourselves worthy of seeing the good all around us, though it may remain unseen by all who believe only the material matters.
Seen or unseen, the subjective realm is itself objectively real, but like rainbows and all beauty, perceived only in the eye of the beholder. Whatever else consciousness is, it is where joy happens! And also where suffering takes its place when the means to perceive joy have been forgotten.
This is "what the ancients knew...that we seem to have forgotten" - the practical wisdom that gives us, each and all, the power to become happy. Life is nothing if not the opportunity to be this...but no one can teach us what we ourselves must actively learn. Words are only tools, used by the worthy to help others to become worthy of understanding themselves in the process of coming to 'see' what is obscured from the sight of the as yet undeserving. Such wisdom is available to all, and obvious only to those whose karma is good. But it must be recovered by those who've lost the natural goodness they were born with.
And we can do this, the ancient will remind us, by way of a process Indigenous Peoples call ho'ponopono - making things right. Others call this purification, initiation, or simply the work of being a true and healthy human being - as close to divinity as we can come. This is a process that brings all the rewards of human life, including sensitivity, sensuality, and sexuality, as well as the powers of the mind. For, as they ancients will remind us, mind and body are one and the same, different sides of the same currency that is the true wealth of a rich soul!
This is the inheritance I wish to leave my grandchildren and theirs. And for this reason, I address this book to them, that they might ready themselves to life's beauty, and all else they might otherwise miss.