Einstein to Alan Watts and Beyond: Who Are We?

"You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is therefore to dispel, by experiments and experience, the illusion of oneself as a separate ego. The consequences (however) may not be behavior along the lines of conventional morality."

-- Alan Watts --
("The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are")

The illusory way of seeing the world from the perspective of the individual "self" of the human ego is a problem recognized by deep-thinking scientists and philosophers alike. Whether Einstein's view on the illusory nature of the ego informed or was informed by his paradigm-rattling theory of relativity, one cannot but help think that it may have helped him in framing his famous thought-experiment of "the twins paradox." (In this paradox, one identical twin remains on earth while another travels the stars in a space ship that is going at nearly the speed of light. When the second twin arrives back on Earth, to their amazement the Earth-bound twin will have aged appreciably more than the space-faring twin due to the effects of relativity.)

Irrespective of what came first, his "twins paradox" or his views on the illusory nature of the human ego, it is clear that the latter informed both Einstein's work as a humanitarian and as a pacifist. In one of his many quasi-scientific/quasi-philosophic observations, he famously remarked:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."

"This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

The polymath philosopher, Alan Watts, a dozen-or-so years after Einstein's comments (which were made in 1954, at the height of the Cold War), came to much the same conclusion. After presciently warning against the arms race, overpopulation and environmental degradation - issues that have only become more acute in the intervening decades - Watts observed:

". . . (T)he problem of man and technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking."

"Yet," he observed, "the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body - a center which "confronts" an "external" world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange. Everyday figures of speech reflect this illusion. "I came into this world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature.""

"This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe," he notes, "is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not "come into" this world, we come out of it, like leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely if ever experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" in bags of skin."

This stark delusionary "reality," Watts points out, results in two distinct, but interrelated problems; problems that have only grown more acute as man's technology and his increasing sense of isolation from the whole have spiked in recent years. Together, these factors lead (a) to an ever increasing exploitation of our environment and (b) to the inability of individuals, let alone nations, to act with a common sense of purpose, even in the face of the glaring existential threats that we have created.

"The first result of this illusion," Watts notes, is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile. We are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria, and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious order. . . . The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events - that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies - and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends."

"The second result of feeling that we are separate minds in an alien and mostly stupid universe is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours, and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive) propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a powerful technology." 

[Watts, "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," pp. 12 - 13.]

"We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive," Einstein warned. Such a new way of thinking must, as Watts points out, originate from a much deeper place in our consciousness (both personal and collective), from a state of consciousness and being where we do not conceive of ourselves and others as merely separate "egos" encased in "bags of skin."

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."

Axial Age Syncretism: Ancient Greece Encounters Buddhism

Growing up in the West, my worldview was that Buddhism was an Eastern and foreign religion. I did not know much about Buddhism, which is as much a philosophy and psychology as it is a religion per se, nor did I know too much about early history, European or Asian. I suspect many readers are in the same boat.

The Greek influence is clearly evident
in this statue of the Buddha circa the
1st-2nd century CE.

(Tokyo National Museum)

 

Since then, however, I have learned much more about the so-called "axial age," which saw the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece, the rise of Judaic monotheism, the emergence of the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, and Lao-Tze in China (among others). Several historical facts about this pivotal era in the story of civilization had eluded me. First, that the Greek Empire stretched much further into Asia than I had realized. (I had always pictured the frontiers as lying on the border of the Persian Empire, some distance to the west of modern Iran). Second, that Buddhism was not a Far Eastern phenomenon at that time, but rather it had spread across the Indian subcontinent (where it competed with, and was an offshoot of, the Sanata Dharma of ancient Vedic India). Third, that Buddhism(or Buddhist philosophy and influence) had rapidly spread west along the ancient Silk Road. And, fourth, that Indo-Grecian nations were set up along the Silk Road and survived for many centuries following the death of Alexander, facilitating the East-West flow of ideas, technologies and philosophy.

Indeed, I did not know that Alexander had conquered and established colonial cities in what is now modern Afghanistan. Nor did I know that he had pressed further into Kashmir and the Punjab, before being repulsed by strong kingdoms along the Ganges and retreating back into Asia Minor where he fell ill and died in Babylon in 323 B.C.E. Nor, at the time, had I heard of King Ashoka (304-232 B.C.E.), the great unifier of the Indian sub-continent, who subsequently adopted Buddhism and sent Buddhist emissaries far and wide, or that those emissaries had traveled as far as Egypt and Athens, itself. It was, it seems, a much smaller "world" in ancient times than it appeared to be, a factor that was not fully conveyed in the Eurocentric account of history I had been taught.

In the attached videos, the folks at OpenSourceBuddism.org, give an insightful account of the spread of Buddhism, and do a masterful job in describing the extent and effect that Buddhist teachings had on ancient Greek philosophy, as well as describing the Greco-Buddhist syncretism that purportedly played a large role in establishing the Northern School of Mahayana Buddhism (which would later spread to Tibet, China and Japan, even as Buddhism more or less died out in its native India, with the exception of Sri Lanka).

The Language and Context of a New Pespective

Do we have a choice in the worldview we adopt, or is it culturally determined? If it is the former, what choices should we be making? If it is the latter, what can we do to influence our cultural environment, so that collectively we can deal with the many existential challenges we face?

Looking back at history, philosopher and spiritual seeker, Aldous Huxley observed that the motivations and conceptions which humanity has turned its faculties to have been largely a matter of choice - and that choice, in turn, has dictated the language and direction of further inquiry.

"Certain thoughts," he wrote, "are practically unthinkable except in terms of an appropriate language and within the framework of an appropriate system of classification. Where these necessary instruments do not exist, the thoughts in question are not expressed and not even conceived. Nor is this all: the incentive to develop the instruments of certain kinds of thinking is not always present."

For millennia on the India sub-continent, on the Himalayan plateaus, and in South-East Asia, China and Japan, the great thinkers turned inward studying the subtle levels of consciousness and charting paths to the attainment of enlightenment. Meanwhile, in Europe (and then in the 'New World') the direction of enquiry turned outward to the 'material' world, and so birthed the study of the natural sciences.

Thus, Huxley pointed out, "(o)ur perceptions and understandings are directed in large measure, by our will. We are aware of and we think about, the things which, for one reason or another, we want to see and understand. When there's a will there is always an intellectual way. The capacities of the human mind are almost indefinitely great. Whatever we will to do, whether it be to come ot the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, or to manufacture self-propelled flame-throwers - that we are able to do, provided always that the willing be sufficiently intense and sustained."

Huxley made these observations in his classic work, "The Perennial Philosophy," which was first published in 1945, immediately in the wake of the devastations wrought by world war. Since the passage of what now seems to be an almost historic gulf, has mankind substantially changed the language and direction of his enquiry? Certainly, the West has become more acquainted with Eastern modes of thought as our own religious and wisdom traditions have begun falling away. Yet, for all the evident interest in exploring the inner path to consciousness and enlightenment, it seems that the principal impetus in the direction of our language and thinking - East and West - is towards the further development (and many would say exploitation) of our outer world and "reality."

[Aldous Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 17.]

"A hundred years ago," wrote Thomas Merton (one of the great contemplatives in the next generation of spiritual seekers), "America began to discover the Orient and its philosophical tradition. The discovery was valid, it reached toward the inner truth of Oriental thought. " However, he observed, "(t)he intuitions of Emerson and Thoreau were rich in promises that were not afterward fulfilled by successors. America did not have the patience to continue what was so happily begun. The door that had opened for an instant, closed again for a century."

In his 1961 book, "Mystics and Zen Masters," Merton speculated as to whether an impulse to turn once more to the teachings of the East was once again arising.

"Now," he writes, "that the door seems to be opening again (and sometimes one wonders if it is the door of the same house), we have another chance. It is imperative for us to find out what is inside this fabulous edifice. From where we stand," he observes, "we can descry the residents dressed in our kind of clothing and engaged in our kind of frantic gesturing. They are tearing the place apart and rebuilding it in the likeness of our own utilitarian dwellings, department stores, and factories."

"Not that there is anything wrong with industrial production, with its higher standard of living," he points out. "Yet," he cautions, "we know, or should know, by this time, that our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 69-70.]

Merton's warning, written at the beginning of the 1960's when there seemed to be a brief flaring of the potential for a new western culture - albeit, one that quickly gave way to the materialism and consumerism of the last several generations - seem all the more apt today. Cultural awareness of our existential problems - an unchecked population explosion, global warming, mass environmental degradation and species extinction, to name but a few - should prompt our looking for a new cultural paradigm that is inwardly focused, rather than being focused more and more wholly on materialism and consumerism.

But, with a somewhat jaded eye, can we say that an apparently renewed interest in spirituality and Eastern insights that may help us address some of these imposing problems we face will be any less impervious to a flickering out than it was with the great Transcendentalists, or with Huxley, Merton or the radicals and gurus of the 1960s? One can hope that it will not be so, for it seems imperative (as Huxley noted) that we develop a new language and framework that will allow us to address our problems.

With an ever more widespread awareness of the perils that we collectively face, the possibilities of such a new language and framework for seeing both ourselves, our world and our place in the grander scheme of things seems more likely and more important now than it has ever been. "Where there's a will there is always an intellectual way," as Huxley observed.

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.

On Non-Duality, Karma and Consciousness

"All philosophies, all science, all religions, inform us that this world of shapes, forms and names 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 human reason, intuition or faith."

-- Yogi Ramachakara --
["Lessons in Gnani Yoga," Chap. 1.]

Mars Hill, Athens

One of my favourite passages from the New Testament is Paul's "Sermon on Mars Hill," in which he is asked by the Athenian Stoic and Epicurean philosophers to expound upon what was then a  new philosophy/religion.

"God that made the world and all the things therein," observed Paul, "seeing that he is the Lord of heaven and earth dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all things life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth . . . For in him we live and move and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring." (Acts 17:24-28)

It is among my favourites because (a) it speaks of the omnipresence of a higher order in which everything exists, (b) it brings the reality of this higher order out of religious places and frees it of ritual worship, and (c) it recognizes that all true philosophies, religions and wisdom traditions, alike, speak of the same higher order or Godhead, and that each of these is non-exclusive.

As the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, observed: "Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."

[Marcus Aurelius,"Meditations," 4:40]

Physicists have demonstrated the conservation of mass and energy. With each inhalation of the cool morning air and each warm, moist exhalation of carbon dioxide, this is demonstrated. Indeed, every atom of our bodies, save hydrogen, was forged many billions of years ago in the implosion of some unnamed star, and our very bodies are thus a testament to the preservation of mass and energy.

Yet what about consciousness? How can it be that this seeming third aspect of the manifest universe, which along with mass and energy (themselves interchangeable) pervades and precipitates even the smallest sub-particular interaction, alone perishes?

"A human being is a part of the whole called by us "the universe"," Einstein noted, "a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of consciousness."

"This delusion is a kind of prison for us," he observed, "restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

"In God," Emerson wrote, "every end is converted into a new means." This, to me, seems inherently true; it has the "ring of truth" to it. It circumscribes the law of karma, in which each moment is seen as an effect produced by a chain of causation stretching back to the very first movement of the universe, and each such effect becoming a further link in this causal chain. Thus, everything that is reaped has been sown, over and over, many times.

If as has been said (and demonstrated, it seems, in science), "Nothing is wasted in God's economy," how can it be that the one perceptual sense underlying all others - that being consciousness itself - is the one and only thing in this 'Great Economy' that perishes? Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; but where except back to the Universal consciousness - that which underlies and pervades the manifestation of all mass and energy in the universe's singular field - goes the consciousness, the soul of each being? For has not each individualized consciousness been at all times part and parcel of this Whole?

Santayana: On Finding Meaning in Life

George Santayana
(1863-1952)

"The whole machinery of our intelligence," wrote the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, "our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."

Widely viewed as a "pragmatist," like his professor and then colleague in Harvard's philosophy department, William James, he eschewed the label and his iconoclastic philosophy is difficult to define; perhaps, because he was a man decidedly of his moment, yet embued with a pragmatic sense of the past. His was a voice of reason in the increasingly irrational twentieth century, who may be best known for his observation: "Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

Denis Doyle/AP

Pablo Picasso's "Guernica"

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory," he remarked. "It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe."

On "Reason in Religion," he observed: "Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." In every age the most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy."

Moreover, long before it became intellectually (or theologically) fashionable to advocate the use of reason, rather than faith, in understanding the tenets of established religions, Santayana (an agnostic who described himself as an "aesthetic Catholic") saw that reason and religion need not be antithetical.

"The enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion — something which the blindest half see — is not nearly enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and their true function. Such studies would bring the skeptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief occasion for art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is "so malapert as a splenetic religion," a sour irreligion is almost as perverse."

[George Santayana, "On Religion"]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

See the video, below, for more on Santayana's reasoning about philosophy and the quest to find meaning in life:

Paul Brunton: Spirituality and the Necessities of Life

Paul Brunton (1898-1981)

For those not familiar with him, the late philosopher, mystic and prolific author, Paul Brunton left a vast record of his spiritual quest and spiritual realizations. Chief amongst these was the realization and teaching that for modern man, though the pressures of our hurried lives are always pressing, daily practice of meditation and prayer is necessary if we are to attain to the heart of our being - what Brunton (like Emerson) called the 'Overself.'

In the attached video taken from his book, Perspectives (the first of sixteen volumes of his notebooks on the spiritual quest), Brunton observes that, "We need to balance our extreme tendency to activism with something of quietism."

"The fast pace of modern living and the busy clamour of modern cities," Brunton notes, "presents us from meeting ourselves. The true place of peace," he suggests, "must be found within the self by external moderation and internal meditation."





"Everyone, wants to live," Brunton writes, "(but) 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," he continues, "they will be as culpable for this wastage of life as they will be if they permit transient pleasures to do so."

"Those 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, (and) moral disciples as repulsive, he observes. "(However) those who have no such inner life of prayer and meditation, study and reflection, will necessarily pay, in emergency or crises, the high price of their hopeless extroversion."

Brunton recognizes that "(t)he needs of external life are entitled to be satisfied in their place." "But," he notes, "they are not entitled to dominate a man's whole attention."

"It is quite true," Brunton notes, "that man must eat, find shelter, wear clothes and amuse himself. And it is also true that if a fortunate fate has not relieved himself of the necessity, he must work, trade, scheme, or gamble to get the money for these 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 and financial strivings. There is still room there for another kind of thought, for those concerning the mysterious elusive and subtle thing that is his divine soul."

"The years are passing," Brunton warns, "and (man) 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."

"It is bad enough to be a sick person," he notes, "but it is worse to be sick and believe you are well. Yet the complete extroverts are in this condition, because they regard complete extroversion as the proper state for normal healthy living!"

Noam Chomsky: 'On Religion'

"I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon," observes noted scholar and activist, Noam Chomsky, "and I try to avoid irrational belief."

"On the other hand," he notes, "I certainly recognize that (religion) is a major phenomenon for people in general and you can understand why it would be. . . . It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that."

"In my view," he concedes, "there's nothing wrong with that. My view could be wrong, of course, but my position is that we should not succumb to irrational belief."





While Chomsky's views are laudable, particularly his view that one should perhaps "avoid irrational belief," he fails  - as so many others do, and will - to distinguish between the inner religious experience upon which most of the worlds religions and wisdom traditions are founded and fuelled, and the narrow outer religious forms that dogmas, doctrines and/or or mass 'belief' systems forge.

Failing to differentiate between the two - one 'experiential, which while largely subjective is nonetheless amenable to rational inquiry, and the other which is wholly subjective and therefore beyond the purview of rational inquiry - is a bias commonly held by even the best scholars (like Chomsky, himself) who are steeped in Western empirical methodology, a methodology that does not admit that it has its own built-in biases when it comes to examining phenomena that are in any way 'tainted' by subjectivity.

The higher states of consciousness afforded by experiential religious insight and practice are, as Allan Wallace points out (below), "the retinal blindspot of Western science." Yet, as a result of the scientific bias which lumps experiential inner religious phenomena with outer religious dogma, even as noted and fair-minded a scholar as Chomsky appears to make the common logical misstep of assuming that all aspects of religion - experiential and doctrinal - are necessarily "irrational" and thus vulnerable to emergent fanaticism in challenging times.

Sages: Paul Brunton on the East and West

"When the iron bird flies, and horses run on wheels, the Tibetan people will  be scattered like ants across the World, and the Dharma will come to the land of red-faced people."

-- Padma Sambhava --
[Eighth-century Indian guru; founder
of Tibet's first Buddhist monastery]

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Paul Brunton (1892-1981)

From age to age, and on all continents that were occupied by humankind, there have been great sages bearing messages of radical non-duality. Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisagardatta were two such sages from our modern era, and the relatively little-known philosopher Paul Brunton, a student of both, was another.

In speaking of the world's great sages (see the attached video, below), Brunton wrote:

"The world should be more grateful for the presence of such men. The good they do is mostly indirect, however, through intermediaries, or mostly hidden because psychological, so it escapes the world's notice.

Further, in speaking of the interplay between Eastern spiritual traditions and the "materialistic" West, Brunton wrote:

"We Westerners ought to be humbler than we usually are in confessing that we need to borrow some spiritual bread from the Orient today, as we did long ago. We ought also to be humble enough to confess those defects in our civilization and culture which arise from our emphasis on the quest for material wealth or livelihood. But, this said, let us firmly reject the absurd exaggerations of those Orientals who accuse us of a materialism so gross that we are unable to respond to spiritual urges at all. This is nonsense. It is true that the Oriental's basic instinct moves toward religion. But, in this modern era, this instinct is being overlaid with those same urges which have made the West what it is today. The same process overtook medieval Europe. Let us all, then, face the truth about what is really happening to us, both here and there, to all races alike. For make no mistake: it is a universal phenomenon."

"When the era of science overtook the West, the era or reason applied to mechanical development and external institutions, the push towards it was so great, the rewards so attractive, that we lost much of our balance. The East is being drawn in the same direction, the chief difference being that it has started later in time, and same push is beginning to appear all over the East. Will it not lead ultimately to the same defects? Not quite, for the Easterner has the spectacle of our own lopsidedness to warn him whereas we had no living example to provide us with such a lesson. What is the meaning behind this universal process? For we cannot believe it to be accidental in a divinely ordered world?"

"Philosophy answers that it is a fated evolution that man everywhere is intended to develop his intelligence and refine his feelings in all directions. If it is not materialism to attend to physical matters, to work for one's livelihood, to seek the comforts and conveniences of applied science or even the beautiful homes of applied art. Man is a growing creature: his reasoned thinking demands that he seek the one, and his aesthetic feeling demands that he seek the other. The materialism enters when to get these things, we forget the daily need of prayer and meditation, of listening for the voice of moral conscience and heeding the laws of spiritual balance."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," pp. 16-17]

 Noting the then already-evident Western interest in Eastern wisdom traditions, Brunton writes:

"There is wider general interest in these subtle Oriental ideas than ever before but there is not much evidence of wider general willingness to practice with fervour the goodwill, the forbearance, and the compassion without which those ideas are half-dead, bereft of their best values."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," p. 35]

And, on the convergence of the Western scientific vision, with Eastern metaphysical traditions, Brunton observes:

"When the scientific wisdom of the West unites with the mystic wisdom of the East, we shall arrive at truth."

["The Notebooks of Paul Brunton," vol. 10, "The Orient," p. 57]

The 'Hard Problem' of Consciousness

Due to radical advances in brain imaging technologies - improved electroencephelogram (EEG),  positive-emission tomography (PET) and single photon emission computer tomography (SPECT) - it is now relatively easy to find out 'what' is going on in the brain at any point in time. What remains elusive is 'why' what is going on is, in fact, going on.

"Most neurophysiologists," says philosopher John Hick, Ph.D., "work on some highly specialized area of brain research and are not particularly interested in the philosophical issue, as they see it of the relationship between brain and consciousness." The 'easy problem,' according to Hicks, "is to trace precisely what is going on in the brain when someone is consciously perceiving, thinking, willing, experiencing some emotion, creating a work of art, etc." The 'hard problem', he notes, "is to find out what consciousness actually is and how it is caused."

The 'orthodox' position of most mind science researchers and theorists is that the brain generates consciousness bio-chemically, even though no specific neural correlate (a related area of the brain, or a 'nerve center') has been found for the phenomenon of conscious itself. This 'materialist' view of the origination of consciousness "is encouraged by the fact that it is possible to trace, with increasing precision, the neural correlates of conscious episodes," Hick observes.

Yet, despite a plethora of data detailing what areas of the brain are associated with which conscious (and/or unconscious) experiences, Hick notes that it is a mistake in logic to assume that the vast body of correlations speaks at all to the question of causation. Moreover, he points to a growing number of neuroscientists and contemporary philosophers of the mind who hold to a contrarian view, even if they reject the admissibility of introspective and subjective evidence into the question of just 'what' consciousness is on scientific grounds.

Hick, himself, is critical of both camps; but he is particularly so in respect of those dogmatic scientists and philosophers that insist that the almost 1:1 correlation of brain activity and conscious experience is proof that the former causes the latter.

"The question, Hick observes, "is how a conscious experience can be identical with a physical event in the brain, as distinguished from being precisely correlated with it; and to assume that the correlation constitutes identity simply begs that question. The belief that they are identical is not an experimentally established fact or the conclusion of a logically cogent argument but an affirmation of naturalistic faith. . . ."

"(W)ithin the parameters of normal science," he notes, "there is no possible observation or experiment that could ever decisively contradict mind- brain identity if it is false, and accordingly it is not a scientific hypothesis. In moving from examples of two apparently different physical objects or events being the same object or event differently described to the idea that brain and consciousness are related in the same way, we have moved from a scientific hypothesis to a theory that is in principle unfalsifiable."

There is no way short of introducing the scientifically dubious claims of parapsychology to prove that the materialist/rationalist school is wrong, Hick notes. (The ability to demonstrate that a theory is wrong, being one of the tests that all truly "scientific" theories must meet in order for them to be considered as being truly "scientific.") And, since "there is no way in which the idea that an electro-chemical event and a moment of consciousness are identical is falsifiable if false," Hick cannot help but conclude that "(t)he identity thesis is a theory stemming from a presupposed naturalistic philosophy, (and is) not (therefore) a scientific hypothesis."

Not that this resolves the chicken-egg question of whether consciousness or bio-chemistry is the first factor in the causal chain that forms, and informs, our conscious experience. It is equally impossible, again short of reliance on subjective parapsychology, Hick notes, to demonstrate the separate existence of consciousness, in and of itself.

Therefore, he concludes, "there is, surely, more than just a gap that a more complete knowledge of the brain may one day bridge, because no knowledge of the workings of the neural networks, however complete, can convert correlation into identity." Rather, "in spite of being so widely assumed within our culture, that mind-brain identity is a scientifically established fact, Hick states, "its status is that of an article of naturalistic faith." And it is, thus, exceedingly difficult, he points out, for philosophy "to avoid the conclusion at which so many neuroscientists have arrived, namely, that the nature of consciousness is a mystery."

The Condensed "Perrenial Philosophy"

Spiritual Teacher Ram Das (aka Richard Alpert)

In The Harvard Psychedelic Club, author Don Lattin traced the story of how Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (soon to become Ram Das) and Huston Smith (soon to be the "dean" of Comparative Religions studies) clashed with Andrew Weil (soon to be America's health food and integrative medicine guru) and the"powers-that-be" over the now infamous psilocybin and LSD trials conducted at Harvard University, clinical and non-clinical trials which "ushered in" the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. (A video of Lattin, at a book reading for the The Harvard Psychedelic Club is available here.)

Lattin is a chronicler of the ongoing spiritual revolution that was sparked in the 1960s. He is now working on  a group biography of English polymath philosophers Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, together with American social pioneer, Bill Wilson. Huxley's 1954 book, The Doors of Perception, sparked the interest of Leary, Alpert and Weil in the possibilities of using psychedelic drugs to create a mystic experience. With his friends Gerald Heard and Bill Wilson (one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, although definitively not acting in that capacity), Huxley conducted further experiments with LSD as a method of gaining the enlightenment experience described by saints and mystics of all the world's wisdom traditions. (Wilson reportedly thought an LSD trip might potentially spark the vital spiritual experience that the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, had identified as a possible curative for the disease of alcoholism.)

Bill Wilson was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential men of the 20th century, while Heard was a particularly well-known BBC commentator whose book, Pain, Sex and Time, Huston Smith credited with sparking his interest in religious studies. Nonetheless, it was Huxley, author of the immensely popular science fiction novel,  A Brave New World, who was the most recognizable and notable of the three.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Huxley's most influential work may have been The Perennial Philosophy rather than A Brave New World, however. A study of how mystics, saints and sages from all the world's wisdom traditions describe their journey and attainment of mystic enlightenment, The Perennial Philosophy is in a very real sense an updated and cross-cultural version of William James' groundbreaking work, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The Perennial Philosophy has remained in-print and is still widely available, while Heard's Pain, Sex and Time has only recently been reprinted. However, the most succinct statement of what all three would have called "the Perennial Philosophy," is found in Huxley's introduction to a translation of the Bhagavad Gita, The Song of God, by their friend and compatriot Christopher Isherwood together with Swami Prabhavananda, a Vedantist monk. (The Song of God is still available through the Vedanta Society of Southern California, of which Isherwood, Prabhavananda and Huxley were all members.)

In the following briefest of words, Huxley describes the underlying message and findings of all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions:

"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy we find four fundamental doctrines.

First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.

Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."

It is these four ideas - known by most cultures, but forgotten by many - that were at the heart of the Western spiritual renewal that was kickstarted in the 1960s, and which continues (minus the reliance on LSD and other psychedelics, which turned out to be a bit of a dead end) with us today. While Huxley died in 1963, before he was able to see the revolutions (religious and otherwise) spawned in the crucible of the 1960s, the ideas of the "Perennial Philosophy" continue on in the various non-dual teachings of Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, Andrew Cohen and so many others.