“The ancients knew something, that we seem to have forgotten.”
Albert Einstein
In his beautiful books on the world’s ancient wisdom traditions, religious historian Huston Smith’s illuminates why "The wave of the future will be in a return to the past."[1](Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, p.145)
So we might begin by asking - which past will be the wave of the future? Which ancients had voices we need to hear again? The short answer is almost certainly, all of them - for whatever they are worth – which turns out to be more than we, in our new-is-better world, might guess. Learning to sort the best from the rest is part of the process of growing intelligence, which turns out to be something the ancients tended to be very good at.
But why should we think we have anything to learn from these ancient traditions? The short answer is simply this: “for the help they offer on problems."(p.14) For what the best of the ancients sought to pass on was not merely theoretical knowledge, but practical wisdom, skills and insights that answer to the very challenges that most plague our lives, indeed, our age.
But as Socrates would remind us, “nothing is an answer if we haven’t asked the question.” And one of our most pressing problems is that we’ve been well conditioned to simply believing what we are taught, without question. And as Indigenous sages understand, this is a problem because, “You cannot believe and think simultaneously.” In fact, “belief limits thinking.”(OI, Trudell, 322)
So among our first challenges in learning from ancient wisdom is to recognize that they are not trying to get us to believe anything. They aim only to help us understand. And understanding comes with a process of inquiry to which we have grown unaccustomed in our modern world.
And so asking the hard questions is the first thing they would encourage us to do. We cannot expect to simply receive understanding passively, but must actively seek it as we are ready to truly learn. And because we each and all face different challenges and so ask different questions at different times in our lives, we cannot simply learn what the ancients have to teach us all at once. Philosophy, in this small-p sense, is a process of progressive discovery and revelation, both chronologically, through the ages, and throughout all the days of our lives.
While each of these wisdom traditions offers us insights that are valuable in their own right, however, it is in the dialogue between these traditions that a real depth of understanding is achieved – just as two eyes add depth to what can be seen with only one.
And just what would it mean, after all, to “return to the past”? Does it mean that we must regress, give up the extraordinary advances that human creativity has brought forth? Learn to live without the technology that has rendered our age a sort of renaissance? Sacrifice the comforts and conveniences that too few already enjoy, rather than expand those benefits so that more lives might be made easier? Must we all grow our own food, suffer the elements, and carry our own water from nearby riverbanks?
The short answer is, probably not. We may not need to give up all the benefits of human progress, IF we learn from our ancient betters, and soon, before our window of opportunity closes. For what the ancients understood, that we seem to have forgotten, is how to use the whole mind for all it’s worth. So it is not enough, and they would not teach us to simply change our behavior, but rather to develop our inner resources – those creative capacities for problem solving and healthy relationships that human beings throughout time have understood to be our highest, even divine, potentials and our best chance at real happiness.
There’s little wonder why so many today deny the changes we face, if it means to them that we must move backward, sacrifice the security and opportunity that centuries of hard work and progress have brought to human existence. If the challenges of our age bring us to envision a future without the tools and toys that are the source of so much ease and joy for us, then naturally many will be reluctant to change. How can we be anything but depressed and even crippled without a vision of what is still and always possible, when people put their minds together?
Our greatest hope is still and always what Chief Oren Lyons calls simply,
the “power of good minds.”(OI, Lyons, 61) Ancient and Indigenous cultures understood that “their most important natural resource is themselves, the mutual understanding and cooperation they can maintain among themselves…one of the oldest and most important human technologies for survival.”(OI, Biesele et.al.,83)
Some call it “peace technology.” The Sans Bushmen of Africa, for instance (who were legal to hunt until 1963, btw) have “honed this very carefully and organically from their ancient traditions…specific ways to keep peace and harmony in their societies.” These are “ancient methods…of keeping the communication flowing.” When we come to understand it, we can see why they consider it to be “the obvious ways that human beings should behave.”(OI, Biesele et.al., 75)
For preliterate cultures, these are “the literal and metaphorical instructions passed on orally from generation to generation for how to be a good human being living in reciprocal relation with all of our seen and unseen relatives. They are natural laws that, when ignored, have natural consequences.”(OI, Nelson, 3)
For literate traditions, those ancient insights are passed on in sacred texts. And at least one popular writer has made the claim that “Every culture on earth had its own sacred book - its own word - each one different and yet each one the same," though this is almost certainly an overstatement. It's true that, "For Christians, the word was the Bible, for Muslims the Koran, for Jews the Torah, for Hindu’s the Vedas, and on and on it went.” The Rosicrucians even anticipated a time when “all books will be read as one text.”(*Brown)
The more we learn, the better we understand that it is not a mere fiction to say that, “The ancient texts are obsessed with the power of the human mind. The Vedas describe the flow of mind energy. The Pistis Sophia describes universal consciousness. The Zohar explores the nature of the mind, spirit. The shamanic texts predict Einstein’s‘ remote influence’ in terms of healing at a distance. And don’t even get me started on the Bible.”(p.498)
And yet there were many wise preliterate traditions that passed their wisdom forward in oral form. And perhaps this is recognized in the proclamations said to be made by no less than God himself: “In the beginning, there was the word,“ and “The word shall light the way.”
The prescription they offer is simple:
Whether literate or pre-literate, ancient wisdom cultures knew that “We have the responsibility to use our intelligence.”(OI, Trudell, 321) “Our original instruction is that we have intelligence so we need to use it clearly and coherently."(OI, Trudell, 320) So I think that that’s the kind of lesson that we can learn from some of these longest tenured societies,” * Biesele has put it.(OI, Biesele et.al.,76) "We need to take responsibility for our lives and think. We must use our intelligence to think, to create the reality that must be created.”(OI, Trudell, 320) And it is an Intelligence we can discern only when we “put our minds together as one mind.”(OI, Nelson, xix)
“Ancient and Indigenous cultures understood “…the kind of sharing, mutual consulting, and negotiation that has gone on for a very long time,” but has too long been neglected and nearly forgotten in our modern world. (OI, Biesele et.al.,76)
As Plato so aptly put it, “it is as if all lines of discourse converge on a common center.”(Republic) But this synchronicity of truth is illuminated only in the dialogue between them.
This is what they ancients have to offer us – a view of what is still and always possible in this world, not inevitably, but when when we put our minds together. In this way, we can use our intelligence to solve, rather than cause problems, to resolve, rather than create conflict. For not everything humans create is equally good. And the capacity for good judgment, which we need to tell the difference in the divine and the diabolical, is one among many of the higher human potentials we have failed to fully actualize in our modern world.
For this reason, we might understandably wonder whether we have anything worthwhile to learn from the ancients, given our inclination to believe everything we’ve been taught. If what they knew was so important, after all, why was it forgotten in the first place? This may seem a rhetorical question with an obvious answer, but the truth of the matter may surprise us. For history has almost always been written by the winners - who may or may not have been the ‘good guys’ (though they almost certainly paint themselves that way in hindsight, in a way that believers seldom question).
And the consequent of this is that, when we look back, we sometimes see things that never were or ever should be. For we have too often learned to simply believe those who offer us something less than the whole truth. And this deception isn't necessarily malicious, but because it’s what they themselves have learned. They repete it with all the best intentions, believing themselves right and good.
And at some point, education based on secondary sources becomes more like a game of telephone than an actual search for (philia) truth or wisdom (sophia).
And for this reason, these ancient insights might come as a surprise, a revelation even, to those well conditioned into the paradigm of western culture, where we sometimes overvalue the kinds of scientific intelligence that has been cultivated in our age. Which is why, and they would be the first to remind us, such wisdom as the ancients offered is unlikely to be learned in the process of education as we know it. We simply don't believe it's of any worth...and that's only the first of many mistakes we make about the past.
For many of us, it was a parochial school education that limited our understanding of all this. But as it turns out, public schools are not much better, for here too we are restricted by the paradigm that is to us like water for fish. How much of this ancient wisdom has been neglected in our public education, which (quite rightly) adheres to a constitutional separation of church and state. Unfortunately, much of the best of human wisdom has been usurped by what we think of as religion (though they often did not think of themselves that way). And the result is that we tend to throw out the baby with the bath water in our attempts to protect religious freedom. In our efforts to prevent indoctrination, we also inhibit any inspiration that might come from these inspiring wisdom traditions.
And the solution is certainly not that we should teach religion in public schools (unless by teach we mean what the ancients understood to be a dialogic process), but we would do well to offer our young these powerful insights and uplifting texts in dialogue. For we offer our young little or no education in the history of ideas, especially when they come from cultures other than our own.
And little do we recognize how much has been lost along the way - not only in the slow tumble of time, but in the deliberate bulldozing of the past. And when we begin to see how much we have missed, we cannot help but lament how thoroughly the most inspiring and uplifting ideas and insights of human history have been neglected and deliberately ignored in our education - an especially incideous cause of the effect that is ignorance.
But the ancients understood much that has been forgotten, to our detriment. So it’s worth our while to learn from it - ALL of it - and to bring all that has been neglected, maligned, and even ridiculed in our own education into a truer light for generations to come.
What kind of education would they recommend to us? We might call it Socratic, but Socrates himself was born long after it had become the sourse of true learning across indigenous cultures. Socrates would ultimately call it dialectic, that is, dialogic, the kind that recognizes we are all teachers, just as we are all students, and the process goes back and forth. And it brings out the best in us by pushing us continually upward (as thesis meets antithesis and gives rise to synthesis, which is in effect a new thesis which gives rise to another antithesis, and new synthesis take form), toward a higher understanding.
The nature of complementarity makes depth of understanding possible and wisdom grow by continuous dialectic learning - for the same reason that a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one.
As Socrates put it, “A natural gift for dialectic is the same thing as the ability to see the connections between things.”(Republic, 7.537)
It is by this dialectic method that we come to see that the only truth worth seeking is the whole truth. And this will necessarily involve an ongoing process of making connections, finding the balance between perspectives, or, as Socrates would say, of tethering one thing to another as our cumulative understanding grows.
And this is true with regard to any object of our knowledge - we are like the blind men of ancient lore who each perceive and describe the elephant as something very different (e.g. a tree trunk, a wall, a snake, etc.). The whole truth about the elephant includes all of these, and it is in the interest of each and all to consider the perspectives offered by all others. Anything meaningfully called the whole truth would have to include as many perspectives as possible, for which empathy is a natural skill, and dialogue is a useful tool. For whether the object of our knowledge is as concrete as an elephant or as abstract as our justice, beauty, love or God, none of us defines the truth about such things by virtue of any limited or privileged view.
And the good thing about the truth is that it stays true. And though we may have ignored, and even forgotten the truth, it waits...however long it takes for us to rediscover it, again and again. Fortunately, “Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.”(Brown, p.60) But again, “nothing is an answer if we haven’t asked the question,” and so crisis can be opportunity, since we’re unlikely to ask the hard questions until we most need the answers.
So the time is right to seek what all wisdom traditions have in common, rather than by taking sides with one against the others. In fact, it is frightfully easy to misconstrue the meaning of ancient teachings when we listen to only one voice, and deem all others wrong. Indeed, it is arguably for lack of this dialogue that “We have been raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last learn to praise the colonizers of dreams.”[1]
So the task of learning from the past is a personal challenge for each of us - not something that can be handed to us, but something that must be earned - that we might come to see things as they really are, to overcome our biases and misconceptions, and to open our minds to all that we have to learn, even from those we are most inclined to dismiss, and most especially those traditions we take to be our opponents or, god forbid, our enemies. Indeed, it stands to reason by this view that our worst enemy may well be our best teacher, for they are the most likely to see what is in our blind spot.
Aristotle gave us his views about this wisdom of crowds long ago:
"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.... [For] 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)
It may be true that everything good that has happened to humanity began in a single mind, but it is also true that it was only by sharing that thought with others does it begin to do it's good.
Therefore, as Aristotle says, "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. And we would have no Socrates to begin with without those sages who came before him. And the same is true of all the great thinkers that all other great thinkers have drawn upon. Our best course is to listen to all of them, for whatever they are worth.
To be fair though, one readily discovers that they are not all equally worthy, and while this may not be something we can pre-judge, there are simply some wisdom traditions who have proved more practically valuable than others. All of them may have gained this kind of knowledge by learning, as Smith says, but “not all of them put their knowledge into practice.”(p.353) “Some are better than others, not by virtue of intelligence, but obviously because they take responsibility” for what they have learned, act on it, and pass it on.(p.353)
For instance, when we talk about ‘the Greeks’ in this context, we certainly don’t mean the bloodthirsty ones that made so much of what we tend to call ‘history’ – in fact, we generally mean the critics of those bloodthirsty tyrants, the dissenters who made ancient Greece unique in world history as the birthplace of democracy, as well as philosophy, specifically for the purpose of advancing justice. True golden ages only get that way because there are great souls uplifting the rest – sometimes kicking and screaming – to their higher potentials. And sometimes they have little choice but to be alone in that climb, in that discussion. But fortunately for us, others came after to answered to them intelligently. And so onward the dialogue goes.
Likewise, not all teachers and leaders have been equally wise, just as not all self-proclaimed philosophers have been equally honor worthy. But as Socrates said, this is no reason to condemn philosophy herself. Everyone probably tries to bring something valuable to the discussion, but all the same, some are simply weighed down by belief and confusion, and “we should see them as they truly are.”(Euthademus)
Philosophy in its truest sense – the ‘search for truth’ or the ‘love of wisdom’ – has always aimed to bring out the best in young minds of all ages. Not all who call themselves philosophers have honored philosophy in this truest sense. So we must be careful to distinguish the best from the rest.
This genuine search for truth is arguably the truest purpose of education, and the reason why Socrates and Plato, among others, argue that leaders themselves must be thoughtful teachers (i.e. philosopher kings and queens). Which is to say, those who can bring out the good in others.
So, again, it’s important to remember that when we talk about ‘the wisdom of the ancients,’ we mean the best of them, not the rest of them! Those that we have the most to learn from are distinguished by the wealth of practical wisdom they’ve tried to pass forward (however successfully we've ignored it). There are simply some ancient traditions that have adhered to this law of nature more earnestly, and are thus more worthy of our limited time and attention than some others.
It is for the purpose of resolving our contemporary problems – educational, environmental, economic, political, and religious – that so many to whom we attribute great wisdom have advocated this return to the wisdom of the past. So I will focus here on those that prove their worth in the most practical terms. These include Primal and Indigenous cultures, Vedic Hindu, early Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Greek and Gnostic - all pre-Christian cultures (though there is considerable evidence in the Nag Hammadi texts, found only within the last century, that Jesus himself learned from them all).
We might wisely consider some more contemporary traditions as well, including both philosophical and scientific, among other multidisciplinary voices, in search of the great voices they too bring to this dialogue.
Henry David Thoreau, for instance, expresses this sentiment beautifully in his masterpiece, Walden:
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) (Thoreau n.d.)[2]
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)[3]
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. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it.(p.163)[4]
Perhaps Buddha best illustrates this. “In his later years, when India was afire with his message," Smith says, "people came to him asking…‘What are you? Are you a god?’” Buddha replied, “‘No.’ ‘An angel?’ ‘No.’ ‘A saint?’ ‘No.’ Then what are you?’” Buddha’s reply was simply, "I am awake."(p.59)[5]
And so we see how Buddha got his name from “The Sanskrit root budh,” which “ means to awaken and to know.”(Smith, 60)
What ancient philosophers understood better than we do today was the way to grow true happiness, true intelligence, true friendship, and true love – that is, by seeking pleasure intelligently, and treating others, not as means to our own ends, but as ends in themselves.
This is what Huston Smith means when he says, "The wave of the future will be in a return to the past."(p.145)[6] But make no mistake, he adds, for:
"If we have left the impression that the primordial philosophy counsels reversion, we should speak more plainly. The needed return - a kind of homecoming - is in outlook only; it is in worldview and sense of reality... For the issue does not really concern time at all; it concerns truth, truth of the kind that is timeless."(p.146)[7]
This brings, as Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki puts it, “the awakening of an inner sense which enables one to look into the actual workings of things.”(Suzuki, p.109)[8]
In the words of Deepak Chopra, what “We need [is] to see the truth, and in the process we will awaken the profound powers that were promised to us thousands of years ago.”(War of the Worldviews) This, the ancient Vedic Hindus tell us, “refers to an insight that lays bare the meaning of things at large,” what the Upanishads call, “a knowing of That the knowing of which brings knowledge of everything.” (Upanishads, Smith)
What we need, Smith concludes, is a "return to our inner eye - ontological spaces we have forgotten exist, landscapes crowded with presences the knowing of which can turn men into saints."(p.36)[9]
[1] Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, p. 145.
[1] Peter S. Beagle of J.R.R.Tolkien , "Introduction" to The Hobbit; or There and Back Again, (Ballantine Books; New York, 1937) [Watsonville, California, July 14, 1973] Beagle said this, in praise of J.R.R. Tolkien and visionaries like him.
[2] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p.165.
[3] Thoreau, p.66.
[4] Thoreau, p.163.
[5] (Smith, Illustrated World's Religions n.d.)
[6] (Smith n.d.)
[7] (Smith n.d.)
[8] (D. T. Suzuki 1964)
[9] (Smith n.d.)
[1] Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, p. 145.
Albert Einstein
In his beautiful books on the world’s ancient wisdom traditions, religious historian Huston Smith’s illuminates why "The wave of the future will be in a return to the past."[1](Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, p.145)
So we might begin by asking - which past will be the wave of the future? Which ancients had voices we need to hear again? The short answer is almost certainly, all of them - for whatever they are worth – which turns out to be more than we, in our new-is-better world, might guess. Learning to sort the best from the rest is part of the process of growing intelligence, which turns out to be something the ancients tended to be very good at.
But why should we think we have anything to learn from these ancient traditions? The short answer is simply this: “for the help they offer on problems."(p.14) For what the best of the ancients sought to pass on was not merely theoretical knowledge, but practical wisdom, skills and insights that answer to the very challenges that most plague our lives, indeed, our age.
But as Socrates would remind us, “nothing is an answer if we haven’t asked the question.” And one of our most pressing problems is that we’ve been well conditioned to simply believing what we are taught, without question. And as Indigenous sages understand, this is a problem because, “You cannot believe and think simultaneously.” In fact, “belief limits thinking.”(OI, Trudell, 322)
So among our first challenges in learning from ancient wisdom is to recognize that they are not trying to get us to believe anything. They aim only to help us understand. And understanding comes with a process of inquiry to which we have grown unaccustomed in our modern world.
And so asking the hard questions is the first thing they would encourage us to do. We cannot expect to simply receive understanding passively, but must actively seek it as we are ready to truly learn. And because we each and all face different challenges and so ask different questions at different times in our lives, we cannot simply learn what the ancients have to teach us all at once. Philosophy, in this small-p sense, is a process of progressive discovery and revelation, both chronologically, through the ages, and throughout all the days of our lives.
While each of these wisdom traditions offers us insights that are valuable in their own right, however, it is in the dialogue between these traditions that a real depth of understanding is achieved – just as two eyes add depth to what can be seen with only one.
And just what would it mean, after all, to “return to the past”? Does it mean that we must regress, give up the extraordinary advances that human creativity has brought forth? Learn to live without the technology that has rendered our age a sort of renaissance? Sacrifice the comforts and conveniences that too few already enjoy, rather than expand those benefits so that more lives might be made easier? Must we all grow our own food, suffer the elements, and carry our own water from nearby riverbanks?
The short answer is, probably not. We may not need to give up all the benefits of human progress, IF we learn from our ancient betters, and soon, before our window of opportunity closes. For what the ancients understood, that we seem to have forgotten, is how to use the whole mind for all it’s worth. So it is not enough, and they would not teach us to simply change our behavior, but rather to develop our inner resources – those creative capacities for problem solving and healthy relationships that human beings throughout time have understood to be our highest, even divine, potentials and our best chance at real happiness.
There’s little wonder why so many today deny the changes we face, if it means to them that we must move backward, sacrifice the security and opportunity that centuries of hard work and progress have brought to human existence. If the challenges of our age bring us to envision a future without the tools and toys that are the source of so much ease and joy for us, then naturally many will be reluctant to change. How can we be anything but depressed and even crippled without a vision of what is still and always possible, when people put their minds together?
Our greatest hope is still and always what Chief Oren Lyons calls simply,
the “power of good minds.”(OI, Lyons, 61) Ancient and Indigenous cultures understood that “their most important natural resource is themselves, the mutual understanding and cooperation they can maintain among themselves…one of the oldest and most important human technologies for survival.”(OI, Biesele et.al.,83)
Some call it “peace technology.” The Sans Bushmen of Africa, for instance (who were legal to hunt until 1963, btw) have “honed this very carefully and organically from their ancient traditions…specific ways to keep peace and harmony in their societies.” These are “ancient methods…of keeping the communication flowing.” When we come to understand it, we can see why they consider it to be “the obvious ways that human beings should behave.”(OI, Biesele et.al., 75)
For preliterate cultures, these are “the literal and metaphorical instructions passed on orally from generation to generation for how to be a good human being living in reciprocal relation with all of our seen and unseen relatives. They are natural laws that, when ignored, have natural consequences.”(OI, Nelson, 3)
For literate traditions, those ancient insights are passed on in sacred texts. And at least one popular writer has made the claim that “Every culture on earth had its own sacred book - its own word - each one different and yet each one the same," though this is almost certainly an overstatement. It's true that, "For Christians, the word was the Bible, for Muslims the Koran, for Jews the Torah, for Hindu’s the Vedas, and on and on it went.” The Rosicrucians even anticipated a time when “all books will be read as one text.”(*Brown)
The more we learn, the better we understand that it is not a mere fiction to say that, “The ancient texts are obsessed with the power of the human mind. The Vedas describe the flow of mind energy. The Pistis Sophia describes universal consciousness. The Zohar explores the nature of the mind, spirit. The shamanic texts predict Einstein’s‘ remote influence’ in terms of healing at a distance. And don’t even get me started on the Bible.”(p.498)
And yet there were many wise preliterate traditions that passed their wisdom forward in oral form. And perhaps this is recognized in the proclamations said to be made by no less than God himself: “In the beginning, there was the word,“ and “The word shall light the way.”
The prescription they offer is simple:
Whether literate or pre-literate, ancient wisdom cultures knew that “We have the responsibility to use our intelligence.”(OI, Trudell, 321) “Our original instruction is that we have intelligence so we need to use it clearly and coherently."(OI, Trudell, 320) So I think that that’s the kind of lesson that we can learn from some of these longest tenured societies,” * Biesele has put it.(OI, Biesele et.al.,76) "We need to take responsibility for our lives and think. We must use our intelligence to think, to create the reality that must be created.”(OI, Trudell, 320) And it is an Intelligence we can discern only when we “put our minds together as one mind.”(OI, Nelson, xix)
“Ancient and Indigenous cultures understood “…the kind of sharing, mutual consulting, and negotiation that has gone on for a very long time,” but has too long been neglected and nearly forgotten in our modern world. (OI, Biesele et.al.,76)
As Plato so aptly put it, “it is as if all lines of discourse converge on a common center.”(Republic) But this synchronicity of truth is illuminated only in the dialogue between them.
This is what they ancients have to offer us – a view of what is still and always possible in this world, not inevitably, but when when we put our minds together. In this way, we can use our intelligence to solve, rather than cause problems, to resolve, rather than create conflict. For not everything humans create is equally good. And the capacity for good judgment, which we need to tell the difference in the divine and the diabolical, is one among many of the higher human potentials we have failed to fully actualize in our modern world.
For this reason, we might understandably wonder whether we have anything worthwhile to learn from the ancients, given our inclination to believe everything we’ve been taught. If what they knew was so important, after all, why was it forgotten in the first place? This may seem a rhetorical question with an obvious answer, but the truth of the matter may surprise us. For history has almost always been written by the winners - who may or may not have been the ‘good guys’ (though they almost certainly paint themselves that way in hindsight, in a way that believers seldom question).
And the consequent of this is that, when we look back, we sometimes see things that never were or ever should be. For we have too often learned to simply believe those who offer us something less than the whole truth. And this deception isn't necessarily malicious, but because it’s what they themselves have learned. They repete it with all the best intentions, believing themselves right and good.
And at some point, education based on secondary sources becomes more like a game of telephone than an actual search for (philia) truth or wisdom (sophia).
And for this reason, these ancient insights might come as a surprise, a revelation even, to those well conditioned into the paradigm of western culture, where we sometimes overvalue the kinds of scientific intelligence that has been cultivated in our age. Which is why, and they would be the first to remind us, such wisdom as the ancients offered is unlikely to be learned in the process of education as we know it. We simply don't believe it's of any worth...and that's only the first of many mistakes we make about the past.
For many of us, it was a parochial school education that limited our understanding of all this. But as it turns out, public schools are not much better, for here too we are restricted by the paradigm that is to us like water for fish. How much of this ancient wisdom has been neglected in our public education, which (quite rightly) adheres to a constitutional separation of church and state. Unfortunately, much of the best of human wisdom has been usurped by what we think of as religion (though they often did not think of themselves that way). And the result is that we tend to throw out the baby with the bath water in our attempts to protect religious freedom. In our efforts to prevent indoctrination, we also inhibit any inspiration that might come from these inspiring wisdom traditions.
And the solution is certainly not that we should teach religion in public schools (unless by teach we mean what the ancients understood to be a dialogic process), but we would do well to offer our young these powerful insights and uplifting texts in dialogue. For we offer our young little or no education in the history of ideas, especially when they come from cultures other than our own.
And little do we recognize how much has been lost along the way - not only in the slow tumble of time, but in the deliberate bulldozing of the past. And when we begin to see how much we have missed, we cannot help but lament how thoroughly the most inspiring and uplifting ideas and insights of human history have been neglected and deliberately ignored in our education - an especially incideous cause of the effect that is ignorance.
But the ancients understood much that has been forgotten, to our detriment. So it’s worth our while to learn from it - ALL of it - and to bring all that has been neglected, maligned, and even ridiculed in our own education into a truer light for generations to come.
What kind of education would they recommend to us? We might call it Socratic, but Socrates himself was born long after it had become the sourse of true learning across indigenous cultures. Socrates would ultimately call it dialectic, that is, dialogic, the kind that recognizes we are all teachers, just as we are all students, and the process goes back and forth. And it brings out the best in us by pushing us continually upward (as thesis meets antithesis and gives rise to synthesis, which is in effect a new thesis which gives rise to another antithesis, and new synthesis take form), toward a higher understanding.
The nature of complementarity makes depth of understanding possible and wisdom grow by continuous dialectic learning - for the same reason that a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one.
As Socrates put it, “A natural gift for dialectic is the same thing as the ability to see the connections between things.”(Republic, 7.537)
It is by this dialectic method that we come to see that the only truth worth seeking is the whole truth. And this will necessarily involve an ongoing process of making connections, finding the balance between perspectives, or, as Socrates would say, of tethering one thing to another as our cumulative understanding grows.
And this is true with regard to any object of our knowledge - we are like the blind men of ancient lore who each perceive and describe the elephant as something very different (e.g. a tree trunk, a wall, a snake, etc.). The whole truth about the elephant includes all of these, and it is in the interest of each and all to consider the perspectives offered by all others. Anything meaningfully called the whole truth would have to include as many perspectives as possible, for which empathy is a natural skill, and dialogue is a useful tool. For whether the object of our knowledge is as concrete as an elephant or as abstract as our justice, beauty, love or God, none of us defines the truth about such things by virtue of any limited or privileged view.
And the good thing about the truth is that it stays true. And though we may have ignored, and even forgotten the truth, it waits...however long it takes for us to rediscover it, again and again. Fortunately, “Powerful truth has its own gravity and eventually pulls people back to it.”(Brown, p.60) But again, “nothing is an answer if we haven’t asked the question,” and so crisis can be opportunity, since we’re unlikely to ask the hard questions until we most need the answers.
So the time is right to seek what all wisdom traditions have in common, rather than by taking sides with one against the others. In fact, it is frightfully easy to misconstrue the meaning of ancient teachings when we listen to only one voice, and deem all others wrong. Indeed, it is arguably for lack of this dialogue that “We have been raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last learn to praise the colonizers of dreams.”[1]
So the task of learning from the past is a personal challenge for each of us - not something that can be handed to us, but something that must be earned - that we might come to see things as they really are, to overcome our biases and misconceptions, and to open our minds to all that we have to learn, even from those we are most inclined to dismiss, and most especially those traditions we take to be our opponents or, god forbid, our enemies. Indeed, it stands to reason by this view that our worst enemy may well be our best teacher, for they are the most likely to see what is in our blind spot.
Aristotle gave us his views about this wisdom of crowds long ago:
"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.... [For] 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)
It may be true that everything good that has happened to humanity began in a single mind, but it is also true that it was only by sharing that thought with others does it begin to do it's good.
Therefore, as Aristotle says, "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. And we would have no Socrates to begin with without those sages who came before him. And the same is true of all the great thinkers that all other great thinkers have drawn upon. Our best course is to listen to all of them, for whatever they are worth.
To be fair though, one readily discovers that they are not all equally worthy, and while this may not be something we can pre-judge, there are simply some wisdom traditions who have proved more practically valuable than others. All of them may have gained this kind of knowledge by learning, as Smith says, but “not all of them put their knowledge into practice.”(p.353) “Some are better than others, not by virtue of intelligence, but obviously because they take responsibility” for what they have learned, act on it, and pass it on.(p.353)
For instance, when we talk about ‘the Greeks’ in this context, we certainly don’t mean the bloodthirsty ones that made so much of what we tend to call ‘history’ – in fact, we generally mean the critics of those bloodthirsty tyrants, the dissenters who made ancient Greece unique in world history as the birthplace of democracy, as well as philosophy, specifically for the purpose of advancing justice. True golden ages only get that way because there are great souls uplifting the rest – sometimes kicking and screaming – to their higher potentials. And sometimes they have little choice but to be alone in that climb, in that discussion. But fortunately for us, others came after to answered to them intelligently. And so onward the dialogue goes.
Likewise, not all teachers and leaders have been equally wise, just as not all self-proclaimed philosophers have been equally honor worthy. But as Socrates said, this is no reason to condemn philosophy herself. Everyone probably tries to bring something valuable to the discussion, but all the same, some are simply weighed down by belief and confusion, and “we should see them as they truly are.”(Euthademus)
Philosophy in its truest sense – the ‘search for truth’ or the ‘love of wisdom’ – has always aimed to bring out the best in young minds of all ages. Not all who call themselves philosophers have honored philosophy in this truest sense. So we must be careful to distinguish the best from the rest.
This genuine search for truth is arguably the truest purpose of education, and the reason why Socrates and Plato, among others, argue that leaders themselves must be thoughtful teachers (i.e. philosopher kings and queens). Which is to say, those who can bring out the good in others.
So, again, it’s important to remember that when we talk about ‘the wisdom of the ancients,’ we mean the best of them, not the rest of them! Those that we have the most to learn from are distinguished by the wealth of practical wisdom they’ve tried to pass forward (however successfully we've ignored it). There are simply some ancient traditions that have adhered to this law of nature more earnestly, and are thus more worthy of our limited time and attention than some others.
It is for the purpose of resolving our contemporary problems – educational, environmental, economic, political, and religious – that so many to whom we attribute great wisdom have advocated this return to the wisdom of the past. So I will focus here on those that prove their worth in the most practical terms. These include Primal and Indigenous cultures, Vedic Hindu, early Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Greek and Gnostic - all pre-Christian cultures (though there is considerable evidence in the Nag Hammadi texts, found only within the last century, that Jesus himself learned from them all).
We might wisely consider some more contemporary traditions as well, including both philosophical and scientific, among other multidisciplinary voices, in search of the great voices they too bring to this dialogue.
Henry David Thoreau, for instance, expresses this sentiment beautifully in his masterpiece, Walden:
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) (Thoreau n.d.)[2]
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)[3]
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. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who does not hear it.(p.163)[4]
Perhaps Buddha best illustrates this. “In his later years, when India was afire with his message," Smith says, "people came to him asking…‘What are you? Are you a god?’” Buddha replied, “‘No.’ ‘An angel?’ ‘No.’ ‘A saint?’ ‘No.’ Then what are you?’” Buddha’s reply was simply, "I am awake."(p.59)[5]
And so we see how Buddha got his name from “The Sanskrit root budh,” which “ means to awaken and to know.”(Smith, 60)
What ancient philosophers understood better than we do today was the way to grow true happiness, true intelligence, true friendship, and true love – that is, by seeking pleasure intelligently, and treating others, not as means to our own ends, but as ends in themselves.
This is what Huston Smith means when he says, "The wave of the future will be in a return to the past."(p.145)[6] But make no mistake, he adds, for:
"If we have left the impression that the primordial philosophy counsels reversion, we should speak more plainly. The needed return - a kind of homecoming - is in outlook only; it is in worldview and sense of reality... For the issue does not really concern time at all; it concerns truth, truth of the kind that is timeless."(p.146)[7]
This brings, as Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki puts it, “the awakening of an inner sense which enables one to look into the actual workings of things.”(Suzuki, p.109)[8]
In the words of Deepak Chopra, what “We need [is] to see the truth, and in the process we will awaken the profound powers that were promised to us thousands of years ago.”(War of the Worldviews) This, the ancient Vedic Hindus tell us, “refers to an insight that lays bare the meaning of things at large,” what the Upanishads call, “a knowing of That the knowing of which brings knowledge of everything.” (Upanishads, Smith)
What we need, Smith concludes, is a "return to our inner eye - ontological spaces we have forgotten exist, landscapes crowded with presences the knowing of which can turn men into saints."(p.36)[9]
[1] Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, p. 145.
[1] Peter S. Beagle of J.R.R.Tolkien , "Introduction" to The Hobbit; or There and Back Again, (Ballantine Books; New York, 1937) [Watsonville, California, July 14, 1973] Beagle said this, in praise of J.R.R. Tolkien and visionaries like him.
[2] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, p.165.
[3] Thoreau, p.66.
[4] Thoreau, p.163.
[5] (Smith, Illustrated World's Religions n.d.)
[6] (Smith n.d.)
[7] (Smith n.d.)
[8] (D. T. Suzuki 1964)
[9] (Smith n.d.)
[1] Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth, p. 145.