The Philosophic Life: Ancient and Modern Views

Philosophy, like salt strewn on the floor of the temple, may have lost its savour. In modern times, philosophy (linguistically speaking, 'the love of knowledge') seems to be the purview of long-winded arguments and arcane proofs of the highest order questions, while in more ancient times, and in other cultures, one either lived as a philosopher, or one did not. It was, and in some rare instances still is, a way of life rather than an academic discipline.

One such modern 'philosopher,' in the truest sense of the word, was the late Paul Brunton. Having adopted philosophy as his station in life rather than as a mere vocation, Brunton was a spiritual seeker of profound breadth and depth. On philosophy and the life-long pursuit of spiritual knowledge as a way of life, he wrote the following:

"Everyone wants to live. Few want to know how to live. If people permit work to take up so much of their time that they have none left for their devotional prayer or mystical meditation or metaphysical study, they will be as culpable for this wastage of life as they will be if they permit transient pleasures to do so."

"Those," Brunton observes, "who have no higher ideal than to chase after amusement and to seek after pleasure may look upon religious devotion as senseless, metaphysical studies as boring, mystical meditation as time-wasting, moral disciplines as repulsive. Those who have no such inner life of prayer and meditation, study and reflection will necessarily pay, in emergencies or crises, the high price of their hopeless extroversion."

"The needs of external life are entitled to be satisfied in their place," Brunton notes, "but they are not entitled to dominate a man's whole attention. The neglected and unnoticed needs of internal life must also receive their due."

[Brunton, "Notebooks of Paul Brunton," Vol. 1, pp. 28-29.]

For his part, Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, a man who came as close to living Plato's ideal of a philosopher-king as any other Western leader, ancient or modern, had the following self-effacing comments on his attempts to live the philosophic life:

"It will tend to avert complacency if you remember that any claim to have lived as a philosopher all your life, or even since reaching manhood, is now out of the question; indeed, it is as evident to many others as it is to yourself that even today philosophy is still far beyond you. Consequently your mind remains in a state of confusion, and it grows no easier to earn the title of philosopher; also, your station in life militates constantly against it."

"Once all this is seen in its true light," he observes, "you should banish all thoughts of how you appear to others, and rest content if you can make the remainder of your life what nature would have it to be. Learn to understand her will, and let nothing else distract you."

[Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations," Book VIII, para. 1.]

Paul Brunton
(1898-1981)

On reconciling the material life with a life of philosophy, Brunton observed: "It is quite true that if a fortunate fate has not relieved him of the necessity, he must work, trade, scheme, or gamble to get the money for (material) things. But all this is insufficient grounds for him to pass through life with no other thoughts in his head than those of bodily needs or strivings. There is still room there for another kind of thought, for those concerning the mysterious elusive and subtle thing that is the divine soul. The years are passing and he cannot afford such a wastage of time, cannot afford the luxury of being so extroverted at the cost of having lost touch with the inner life."

For his part, Aurelius was well aware that the pressing concerns for the 'needs' of everyday living were every bit as much an obstacle in ancient Rome as they remain in our own modern, consumer society. His quest, like Brunton's was how to live a philosophic life in the midst of the pressures and demands of the mundane life.

"Up to now," he reflects in his Meditations, "all your wanderings in search of the good life have been unsuccessful; it was not to be found in the casuistries of logic, nor in wealth, celebrity, worldly pleasures, or anything else."

"Where, then," Aurelius asks, "lies the secret? In doing what man's nature seeks. How so? by adopting strict principles for the regulation of impulse and action. Such as? Principles regarding what is good or bad for us: thus for example, that nothing can be good for a man unless it helps to make him just, self-disciplined, courageous, and independent; and nothing bad unless it has the contrary effect."

Consciousness: The Intersection of Science, Metaphysics and Religion

"We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge."

-- Erwin Schrodinger --

In the true spirit of 'philosophy' - that is, the love of knowledge - the polymath English philosopher, Herbert Spencer, once famously observed: "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." And perhaps nowhere in our modern culture are the bars thicker than between the seemingly exclusive fields of science and religion.

One of the foremost contemporary critics of religion, neuroscientist and author ("Letter to a Christian Nation"), Sam Harris, continually makes the case for an epistemological 'Chinese wall' between science and religion, physics and metaphysics, faith and reason, etc. Yet, in a recent article on the Huffington Post, he not unwittingly (perhaps) highlights the particular area - consciousness studies - in which the seemingly antithetical disciplines of physics and metaphysics seem to intersect.

"There is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention," Harris observes. Speaking only for himself, he observes that he spends much of his waking life "in a neurotic trance." Yet, speaking of his experiences in meditation, he suggests that there is an "alternative" to his state of consciousness and being. "It is possible," he concedes, "to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for a moment."

Such a concession, wittingly or unwittingly made, points to the reality of religious experience as opposed to religious faith. In each of our inner realities, there is the potential for a greater, unitive state of consciousness, a point made by pioneering psychologist, William James in his classic work, "The Varieties of Religious Experience."

"(I)f we look on man's whole mental life as it exists," James notes, "on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science, and they inwardly and privately follow, we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account is relatively superficial."

"If you have intuitions at all," he points out, "they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rational talk, however clever, that may contradict it."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 73.]

This knowing - the same standing "free of the juggernaut of self" that Harris speaks of - lies at the heart of all the world's great religions and wisdom traditions. The miracles, origin mythologies, rites and rituals of organized religion - most of them thousands of years old - are all superfluous to this essential truism: we are far more than the individual self/ego. Religious practice - most particularly, meditation - serves only as an aid for us to experience the wider, selfless state of pure consciousness which exist within us all.

In railing against 'religion' most of the new breed of evangelical atheists (like Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al.) lose sight of the 'tree' of higher consciousness amid the 'forest' of religious superfluities. If we are to move toward the "unitive, all-embracing knowledge" which Schrodinger sets out as our birthright, it will require open-minded investigation into what consciousness is, and how it manifests individually and collectively. For this, it seems, there may be no better starting place than the experiential insights based on millennia of inner investigation practiced by religionists.

"A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism," Sir Francis Bacon observed, "but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." Or, as Einstein remarked: "Science without religion is lame, (while) religion without science is blind."

Rumi on 'Breathing'

Beyond the four Cardinal Directions . . .
beyond North, South, East and West . . .
beyond time and space. . . 
beyond the in-breath . . . and the out-breath . . . 
beyond religion, science and metaphysics . . .
beyond the poet . . . and the muse . . . there is only Rumi . . .  and Shams el-Tabrizi . . . 

the Lover and the Beloved . . . .

Advaita Vedanta and Non-Duality

In "A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga," (available at Gutenberg.org, here), author William Walker Atkinson, observes:

"All philosophies, all science, all religions, inform us that this world of shapes, forms and name is but a phenomenal or shadow-world - a show-world - back of which rests Reality, called by some name of the teacher. But remember this, all philosophy that counts is based upon some form of monism - Oneness - whether the concept be a known or unknown god; an unknown or unknowable principle; a substance; an Energy, or Spirit. There is but one - there can be but One - such is the inevitable conclusion of the highest known human reason, intuition or faith."

Sri Ramakrishna
(1836-1886)

All the world's great wisdom traditions ("Hear, O' Israel, the Lord, thy God, is One!"), as Atkinson notes, devolve back into an understanding of non-duality, an understanding that there is no separate existence apart from the Whole, the Ground of Being. But, perhaps, the concept of non-duality is nowhere more deeply examined than in the Advaita Vedantist tradition of India, particularly in the Shankarya school.

Explaining the non-dualistic philosophy of Shankara (a.k.a. Samkara), Vedantist teacher, Swami Prabhavananada (in "The Spiritual Heritage of India") observes:

"The world, according to Samkara, 'is and is not.' Its fundamental unreality can be understood only in relation to the ultimate mystical experience, the experience of an illumined soul. When the illumined soul passes into transcendental consciousness, he realizes the Self (the Atman) as pure bliss and pure intelligence, the one without the second. In this state of consciousness, all perception of multiplicity ceases, there is no longer any sense of 'mine' and 'thine', the world as we know it has vanished. Then the Self shines forth as the One, the Truth, the Brahman, the basis of the apparent world."

"The apparent world, as it is experienced in the waking state, may be likened, says Samkara, to an imagined snake which proves, on closer inspection, to be nothing but a coil of rope. When the truth is known, we are no longer deluded by the appearance  - the snake-appearance vanishes into the reality of the rope, the world vanishes into Brahman."

[Swami Prabhavananda, "The Spiritual Heritage of India," pp. 283-284.]

The following video serves as a brief introduction to the Advaita Vedanta, and introduces its many teachers, old and new, including Shankara as well as the late Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta.

A Spiritual Evolution Rap

The imperative for spiritual awakening may be more pressing in the young than in the middle-aged or elderly, despite the much-touted 'middle-age crisis' or the inevitable facing of one's ultimate humanity. For starters, it is the young who will face the brunt of the existential problems stemming from the lifestyles we have bequeathed them. Fortunately - for us as much as them - they have been raised with the power of technology and the Internet, and that may ultimately see them through.

As the attached video demonstrates, young artists are expressing their awareness of our common existential problems and are embracing and advocating an evolutionarily-fueled spiritual solution.



This rare combination of metaphysics, flamenco guitar riffs, the 'Finger of God' nebula and rap poetry shows that we have moved irrevocably past the failed revolution in consciousness that was the 60's, the "Me Generation" of the 70's, and even the 80's "Generation X" . . . Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll will no longer suffice.