Common Wisdom, Common Ground—Second Contemplation
Second Contemplation
Wisdom is dangerous. So are love and beauty. If you have never seriously thought of philosophy and spirituality (a.k.a. LoveWisdom, philo/sophy, love/wisdom) as dangerous, ask yourself why not.
Here’s the basic why not: Your culture has kept you away from it. The dominant culture has organized itself, and in particular it has organized education, to protect you from wisdom, love, and beauty. This means limited and limiting exposure to genuine philosophy and spirituality, and highly controlled exposure to ethics and the arts.
The dominant culture could not exist in its present form if children received a real education that rooted them in wisdom, love, and beauty, and it could not sustain itself if children grew up into adults who prioritized wisdom, love, and beauty, along with ongoing education and practice (“love” here includes compassion, and the concrete practices of love and compassion).
Why do we have the world we have, with the problems we face? Because wisdom, love, and beauty threaten the causes of the problems we face, and thus the culture keeps us away from wisdom, love, and beauty—therefore the problems persist, often taking various forms, often unfolding under the false guise of “progress,” but perpetuating a kind of craziness and unhealthiness that limits all of us, and makes most of us unwell in one way or another.
Here’s what wisdom tells us: The American Dream is dying (the basic dream of the dominant culture that has now infected most of the world). All of us know it, even if many of us want to deny it—in one way or another stick our heads in the sand. We try not to see and accept the death of the American Dream as part of our training to avoid LoveWisdom.
Because the culture keeps us away from wisdom, love, and beauty, many of us experience a great deal of suffering. We can heal the suffering in ourselves and in the world, but it will take enough courage to admit the causes, to face the crisis, to wade into the unknown—which means letting go of what we think we know (even what we think we know with a lot of certainty), because it doesn’t seem to be working as well as it could, and the consequences are worrisome, potentially catastrophic.
We find ourselves in the midst of a crisis of energy and attention, a crisis of mind and heart, a crisis of body and world. We can feel drained from every direction. Our bodies experience a rise in toxicity and what are technically non-contagious diseases (things like cancer and heart disease, as opposed to obviously contagious diseases like small pox). We live in an age of anxiety and loneliness, an age of consumption in which we ourselves are consumed: Our attention is consumed, our energy is consumed, our behavior and our bodies are consumed.
We face a crisis of meaning . . . How many things do we find ourselves doing that we think of as meaningless, that we think don’t really matter? How many of us experience our jobs and even our lives as a slow death of the soul?
All of these crises are one crisis, a crisis of wisdom, love, and beauty. In, through, and as this crisis, we face an unprecedented world.
At the same time, we face a familiar situation. This sort of thing has happened before, just on much smaller scales. For instance, Socrates, one of the great sages of the west, looked around at his culture and offered a prophecy: This will not long endure . . . the Athenian Dream is dying, because the culture keeps wisdom, love, and beauty at bay. He was right. And the Athenians killed him for it.
At the time, the Athenians didn’t “know” their culture was going to fall apart. But they knew Socrates wasn’t playing the game, the game of delusion that unwise cultures expect their citizens to play.
Jesus didn’t want to play the game either. He too got killed for it. We can find all sorts of people who didn’t want to play the game, and got a lot of flak for it, even got killed for it. Anyone who speaks dangerous wisdom runs the risk of getting into trouble for it. Maybe I’m writing all this down in case something happens to me.
Socrates, Jesus, Hallaj, Marguerite Porete, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others presented a great danger to the delusions of their culture, and this got them into trouble. Not everyone who gets into wisdom-trouble ends up getting killed for it. But any genuine manifestation of wisdom, love, and beauty in a highly deluded context will likely give rise to a sacred kind of trouble—not violence or aggression on the part of those taking a stand for wisdom, love, and beauty, but often some degree of tension, fear, confusion, and resistance on the part of those still attached to the deluded context. Sadly, wisdom, love, and beauty require courage because ignorance and fear will incite people to reactiveness and even violence. It has been like this as long as we have lived in “civilization”.
Let’s talk some dangerous wisdom and find out what kind of trouble we can get into, because things seem to be a mess. As Zorba the Greek said, “Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.” He meant that in a good way. We look for trouble the way Superman or Wonder Woman look for trouble—not to “save” anyone, but so we can help, because our love and liberation are totally entangled with everyone else’s.
Somehow, we have to see why things as a whole seem to have become such a mess when a lot of things considered as parts and pieces seem pretty good. On the one hand, we have the opportunity to live long lives, but, on the other hand, a lot of us will get cancer, dementia, and other diseases that can for some of us make a long life a questionable blessing, at least when we go through those diseases and add to them the issues created by income inequality, failures in the education system, and a general lack of spiritual and philosophical depth in the culture. A long life comes as a mixed blessing if that life doesn’t feel meaningful and allow us to fully mature and fulfill our purpose and potential.
To note a few other major symptoms . . . The U.S. has more people in prison than China or Russia do, and we don’t see those cultures as bastions of freedom and justice. Social mobility in the U.S. is about on par with medieval England.[1] Moreover, the number of slaves in the world has never been higher, and the level of ecological degradation and environmental toxicity has also never been higher.
We find tremendous tension in the souls of many citizens of the world, including many in the U.S. Despite all the Panglossian assurances that we live in the best of times, something seems off. How can we address it? Our approaches so far haven’t worked, and a lot of rational, pragmatic solutions amount to doubling down on the problem—though we tend to repress any sensitivity to this fact.
We need something dangerous. Not violence or aggression, not arguments or opinions. We need something that leads to insight and transformation. We need healing. We need wisdom.
Wisdom is something we hold in common. It is a common ground, like love—in fact, the same common ground as love.
Common ground, common humus, common humanity, common humility.
Wisdom demands humility, and at this point we may even face some humiliation—in order to get back to our humanity, our humane heart, our healing humus, our sacred soil, our shared liberation.
In other words, “human,” “humane,” “humility,” and “humus” all share a common root meaning. The sacred soil of this place was made for us, and we have behaved as if we are above it. We have to get back to Earth, and it might feel humiliating at first. But we have a divine imperative to take care of this place and each other, and a shared life and liberation at stake.
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[1] http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/11/26/uc-davis-economics-professor-there-is-no-american-dream/ . . . the analysis to support this claim can be found in the book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. See http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/the_Son_Also_Rises.html for information on this book and other writings.