Dangerous Wisdom: Essential Medicine for an Insane World

For the film version (using a shortened version of the text below), click HERE.

Wisdom is dangerous. Love and beauty are too. Our culture has kept us away from them, and must do so to perpetuate the insanity we see all around us. 

Thus, mainstream education in the dominant culture has one principal function: to protect citizens from philosophy. Of necessity, this also means protecting citizens from art and nature. 

Our education system expresses and constitutes our personal and cultural philosophy of life—our vision of a proper way of life. But our way of life is in crisis. We face a crisis of meaning, a crisis of attention, a crisis of ecology, a crisis of knowledge and truth, a crisis of disconnection and division, and more. 

All these crises are one: a philosophical crisis, which could result in the breakdown of organized human life, even the end of the human species. We cannot have true peace, happiness, freedom, justice, and well-being—in ourselves and in our world—unless we properly address human ignorance. Only the wisdom traditions can fully empower us to do this. Hence their dangerous character.

“PhiloSophy” literally means LoveWisdom. If we love anything or anyone at all, that love demands wisdom. “Philosophy” reflects the unity of wisdom and love: a limit in our wisdom marks a limit in our love, and vice versa. Love has its own wisdom, and the path to wisdom is love (and beauty).

Philosophy isn’t a bunch of abstractions, a set of clever arguments, or a bundle of questions with no answers. Rather, it’s so concrete and practical that we often fail to recognize it—sometimes because it feels threatening. For instance, philosophy is training for death, and honesty about death leads to a renunciation of much of the nonsense an ignorant culture depends on. 

No one can get through life without being a philosopher, because philosophy is how we do things. Wisdom means doing things in a way that fundamentally works—without negative side-effects. Philosophy is thus the most personal and intimate aspect of life, yet wisdom, love, and beauty have an inescapable pragmatism, precision, and lack of bias. 

Our ways of doing everything relate to the functions of philosophy in a culture. Every philosophy provides or depends on an image of what a human being is, what the world is, what the nature of reality is. A vitalizing philosophy does this holistically, skillfully, creatively. The philosophies that drive the dominant culture lack these qualities. 

We have unskillful, unrealistic, and fragmented images of ourselves as atomized, self-interested, aggressive, sinful, and competitive (in a zero-sum sense), a view of the world as a mere storehouse of “resources” to extract at will, and a view of reality as a collection of matter that doesn’t really matter. 

Our culture—our planet—suffers from these and other elements of exceptionally bad philosophy . . . or, perhaps, drably foolish philosophy at an exceptionally large scale. We find the concreteness of this bad philosophy in our bodies and minds: plastic in our lungs and our blood, lead in our brains and bones, forever chemicals in our rain and our livers, the anxiety and depression, the trauma and loneliness, the dead zones in our oceans, the droughts and floods, the extinction of species, the social-political-economic circus. 

Despite Panglossian assurances that we live in the best of times, something seems tragically out of balance. A lot of “rational,” “pragmatic” solutions amount to doubling down on the problem, though we tend to repress our sensitivity to this fact. 

We need something that leads to insight and vitalizing transformation—something that puts nourishment in our blood and bones, in our minds and hearts, rather than toxins. We need the wisdom that most threatens ignorance and injustice. We need this medicine. 

With it, we can heal the suffering in ourselves and our 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, because that doesn’t seem to be working as well as it could, and the consequences are concerning, potentially catastrophic. 

The vastness of the great mystery gives rise to a diversity of expressions and paths of life. Indeed, we rely on spiritual and biological diversity to create a thriving world. Nevertheless, wisdom is something we hold in common. It’s a common ground, like love—in fact, the same common ground as love, the same common ground as our sense of beauty, sacredness, and wonder. 

Common ground, common humus, common humanity, common humility. We need to tend to both our spiritual and ecological commons, caring for them in their nonduality, and thus attending to the interwovenness of the whole community of life, seeing that we share a common health and wholeness, that our well-being and our sacred potential transcends the duality between Nature and Culture, individual and collective, sacred and profane. 

The most dangerous wisdom: Everything is fluid and completely interwoven—everything. It is the image of the divine. In this mystical image, what we practice is what we realize—and, at the same time, we are originally free and spontaneous expressions of wisdom, love, and beauty.

This means we have nothing to stand on except our actions, and simultaneously we depend on the actions of all sentient beings as well as the mysterious whole. All our relations in the vast community of life work to make our life possible. We thus owe them a sacred responsibility, a practice of reverence for life, a practice of the wildness we all depend on. Success in life means that practice—including all our thinking, speaking, and action—presences wisdom, love, and beauty.

All venerable spiritual traditions have a special place for wisdom, love, and beauty. We must actively cultivate these, which includes cultivating the skill of compassion. 

No venerable spiritual tradition teaches us to value money or to organize our culture around money as a functional center of gravity. We must renounce the currently unhealthy meaning of money, and arrive at practices of economy rooted in wisdom, rooted in spiritual and ecological reality. This includes organizing our culture around compassion, care, and cooperation. 

We need truly meaningful work that fosters the conditions of nature and culture (seen as a whole). We must renounce or rethink any activity (including work) that degrades ecologies, bodies, or souls (those are not separate things, nor are they separate from mind). Our lifestyle and livelihood must arise from a holistic ethics that helps us realize the nonduality of wisdom and wildness, the nonduality of nature and culture (or, nature and mind), and the practices of becoming indigenous again.

The energy of our bodies and minds makes the world we see. The energies of countless bodies and minds in the natural world make our human life possible, and we must make their lives possible in return in order for us all to flourish.

What we call “workers” are sentient beings whose bodies and minds are in general exploited to produce “capital” (rather than to produce well-being, true happiness, palpable peace, and in general to further the conditions of life). This creates an insane situation. But these “workers,” being the vast majority, can reject this insanity, embrace reality, and begin the process of healing for themselves, all humans, and all of life. 

We need to think the way nature works—in attunement with the sacredness of the world. Countless evils arise from thinking out of attunement with our own spiritual and ecological insights. 

Big dangerous wisdom: Democracy is a dream we can make real—and we need functioning democracies. This requires citizen participation—a recognition that “voting” helped poison democracy, and only widespread direct participation (including democracy in our work life) will bring democracy (and culture) back to life. 

We need mutiny against Captain Clock, Colonel Calendar, and Commander Capital—a rebellion against our own domestication and the insane split we have made between Nature and Culture. We need shorter workweeks, more leisure time (especially in wild and natural places), and a renunciation of tyranny, injustice, and foolish abstractions and extremes. 

We live in a consumer culture—the vast majority of us are being consumed, by an apex predator called “the corporation,” a nothingness which devours our world. We need to use our imagination to think beyond the “isms” we have clung to or reviled. We cannot survive an economy that exists in denial of, and disconnection from, reality. 

Particularly dangerous wisdom: Because of the interwovenness of all things, we need clean air and water; healthy forests, mountains, rivers, oceans, etc.; and healthy soil that can grow nourishing food and medicine. Mind, memory, creativity, landscape, ecologies, medicines, magic—they arise altogether. We can only thrive on the basis of regenerative cultures—including wise, regenerative agriculture—rewildaculture. All citizens need to help build soil, increase biodiversity and biomass, replenish watersheds and reregulate hydrological cycles, reduce pollution, and create a more just and vitalizing culture.

To underestimate the dangerousness of this wisdom means failing to understand the depth of ignorance that grips the dominant culture. That we need healthy ecologies should come as obvious, and yet we have lost sight of this simple yet demanding fact.

We need to think more clearly and realistically about the carrying capacity of a thriving planet. We need to ethically, compassionately, wisely, and humbly bring the human population into alignment with spiritual and ecological realities. 

People should, in general, live in, and engaged with, an intimately familiar landscape, close to their loved ones and kin, enjoying the benefits of deep friendships and wise mentors, and experiencing a sacred sense of community with, and reverence for, other human beings as well as non-human beings and the natural world (including the wider cosmos and its sacred powers and inconceivable causes).

Abiding peacefully and passionately in place, we make our places and they make us. This requires a reinvigoration of rite and ritual, ceremony and celebration. To live well with places, we must relate with the sacredness we share with them, and listen to what they and the beings who abide there have to teach us. 

We must learn the nature of our own minds, and recognize the miracle of our own experience, the miracle of our own mind. Where is our experience? If we open our skulls, we will not find a mind or an experience in our brains. Where is the mind? Where is it located? Where is the edge of the mind? What a wonder!

We must stop being fooled by the wispiness of skin, and walk a path of a health, healing, holism, and holiness. We need insightful minds of ecology, and creative ecologies of mind. We must arrive at a nonduality of individual and collective, seeing that each individual arises only in, through, as larger ecologies of mind.

This also means confronting the reality of the unconscious mind. Fully acknowledging the unconscious is a grave threat to ignorance, and thus goes together with dangerous wisdom.

We acquire and deploy skills throughout our lives. This depends on skills so intimate we could call them the skills we are. Those skills cannot be explained in words, and we only have inadequate names for them: awareness, acceptance, connection, and nondoing. Education must root itself in these core skills, and in wisdom, love, and beauty, so that education produces true adults and venerable elders. This also means the practice of love in all its dimensions: generosity, ethics, joyful perseverance, tolerance and inclusiveness, well-put-togetherness of mind, and authentic wisdom. 

We must renounce the idea of education as a process of producing “good workers” and in general a process of manufacturing the consent of “the masses”. Life and learning arise fully intertwined, and a culture is only as healthy as its lived philosophy of education. 

Education, and all human activity, can have only one aim: To cultivate the whole of life onward, in a spirit of passionate reverence, mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation. Education must reveal to us, and empower us to participate in, the sacredness and total interwovenness that is the great mystery. Education must mean the practice and realization of hidden potentials and the values each individual holds dear, liberating us all to arrive at skillful interwovenness, skillful relationality. 

We need to practice better ways of knowing ourselves, each other (all sentient beings), and the world we share (all of sentient being). The knowledge we most need comes from a change in the knower, an evolution in perception and thinking that brings mutual healing into the world. The knowledge we need arises as wisdom, love, and beauty in action—the activity of originally good beings interwoven from an originally sacred mystery. Such transformed knowers can think and act from and toward wholeness. 

The path to this knowledge begins in recognizing four things: the preciousness of each life in a way that brings reverence and gratitude, the flux and fleetingness of all things that brings both comfort and urgency to our own life, the radical interwovenness of all things that makes everything we do important in ways no ego comprehends, and that, if we do not handle the first three properly, we create suffering for ourselves and others. 

The sages have taught us that we live as if asleep in our own lives. What would it mean to wake up? What would it mean to stop fooling ourselves? 

The greatest danger of wisdom, love, and beauty comes from the fact that commitment to them means an end to human-caused extinctions, an end to conquest and aggression, an end to pollution and degradation, an end to all delusions. Our ignorance cannot survive this danger. Our species, on the other hand, cannot thrive in the absence of this danger. Therefore, we must seek it—going to the places that scare us, helping those we think we cannot help, entering the practices of the wild, finding the great love we all carry—the great love that carries us—in the center of our being.