To Know Thyself: Part 1

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” – Charles Bukowski

Anyone with children knows they are famous for taking the words of their friends as gospel. “Susie says that the school janitor’s body is still buried under the playground and that’s why kids keep getting hurt on the swing set!” We roll our eyes at these impassioned ‘truths’ and counsel our children not to believe everything they hear. Nevertheless by their teens kids know more or less everything and by old age we humans are said to be ‘set in our ways’ (translation: our minds are more or less sealed shut to anything but that which we’ve already come to believe is true).

It is the rare individual who notices not merely this steady growth in mental intransigence, but the way parents create this pattern in their own children. Driving some young boys to football practice the other day, I listened as two brothers belittled a gathering of immigrant day laborers as “hobos.” When I responded that they were not, in fact, hobos but simply men looking for work, the boys insisted that no, they were hobos. Asked who taught them this they responded, “Our mom.” And so it goes.

From the earliest age we humans are tasked with learning great gobs of other people’s knowledge. Well-intentioned parents shove their children into schools and religious institutions and extracurricular activities – advanced studies, dance, piano, foreign languages, sports – and we commend ourselves for preparing our children for a competitive world. By graduation the heads of these young automatons are absolutely packed with the thoughts, words and truths of others and we proudly urge them into the world with admonitions to “be themselves.” Ha ha ha.

For most of humanity this pattern of reinforcing inherited knowledge continues and they live out their days in a kind of blind ignorance, utterly unaware that what they are marching to the beat of those who came before them. These are the billions said to “live lives of quiet desperation,” that desperation fueled by a stubbornly unsatisfying search for peace, happiness, security, love, or purpose.

Occasionally, however, perhaps through great suffering or some other instrument, an individual may be inspired to reconsider all that he or she has come to regard as the truth. Instead of asking others ‘why,’ we redirect the questions toward ourselves. If we poke and prod long enough our investigation eventually takes on an existential quality and the simpler ‘whys’ become more complex, more intimate, more revealing: What is life really all about? Why am I here? And that most profound of all questions, Who or what am I? Our search is said to have taken a spiritual turn.

This is where the herd thins still further. Self improvement. The spiritual path. Orthodox religion. Gurus. New Age. Most spiritual seekers eventually latch onto one of these as the answer to what ails them, and forever after they can be counted on to parrot the words of scripture, gather at the feet of a beloved guru, even immolate themselves (and others) at the behest of some fundamentalist calling. Their search is still predicated on the words and thoughts of others, on finding an answer in the outside world.

But a very few push on with the ‘road less traveled.’ They take to heart the mystical teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, Meister Eckhart, Ramana Maharshi and others, who uniformly counseled that all Truth lies within and only within.

It is at this point that the world is seen to have nothing left to offer, that even God itself can no longer be the object of the search since God too is a mind-made concept. Only self-truth matters because, obviously, this is the only truth any of us can ever actually know. All else is, in the words of David Carse, “dream stuff, layers of mask.”

In one of Plato’s dialogues Phaedrus takes issue with Socrates for failing to ‘better’ himself by learning the great courses in mythology and the gods. Socrates counters that until a man knows himself he can know nothing of the world around him. From Socrates’s perspective, adding more mind-made knowledge to an illusory self moves one farther from the goal – the only true goal that matters.

“It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning,” said P.D. Ouspensky who, like so many philosophers, mystics, sages and seers, cautioned that until a man knows himself he is doomed to forever exist in a dream state, unconsciously swept up in the machinations of the mind.

To be continued….