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Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Do you know the date of your birth? How do you know this?

Recently I listened to the Dalai Lama teach on three ways that we come to know things. The first is perceptual knowledge that comes to us through our senses. The second is experiential knowledge. Even though we may be able to convey the knowledge we gained, the experience of obtaining it may remain mostly ineffable.

The third way of knowing is information we accept on faith as completely true. The analogy the Dalai Lama used to demonstrate this point is how you know your birthday. You were told. You have no perceptive, and likely, no intuitive way to conjure the date on your own with absolute accuracy. However, you may have a way of discerning how you feel about what you were told.

The further point He made about this third way of knowing was that until you reach the stage of enlightenment yourself, you will need to accept on faith what other enlightened humans tell you about it and how to attain it. Now, He didn’t say that faith needed to be blind. In fact, He encouraged using discernment to consider the teacher’s character and to see if they had any reason to lie to you.

It has never occurred to me to question my mother, or any member of my family, about the date of my birth. And, the whole analogy He used may seem trivial and useful only because it’s common to all. But, I found it quite profound.

Think about it. Your date of birth is one of the most important identification markers in your life. If you believe in astrology charts, your birthday has everything to do with how you relate to your world for the entire time you are here. Recall how many legal documents you’ve filled out that required both your name and your birthday. In fact, your birthday is a more stable I.D. than your name, which could be legally changed. Or, you could prefer to be addressed by a nickname or alias.

Considering that the date of our birth is so intimate and so important to our identity, it’s amazing that we accept this information about ourselves on pure faith and have no way to independently verify it within ourselves as absolutely true. Every fact we encounter about it depends entirely on someone telling someone.

The key to Buddhism is that the Buddha was a human being who attained enlightenment. We have no way to independently verify this statement. If those who are inclined to this teaching cannot accept it on faith, then they cannot practice Buddhism. Otherwise, it would be striving for a fairy tale.

Until I attain enlightenment, the best I can do is place myself among teachers that I believe to be telling me the truth in so far as they can speak the ineffable, and in so far as they know the truth of ultimate reality. It is up to me to discern what I can about what I am told and about what I experience. The rest I take on faith until I have a way to know directly.

There is no doubt that what we say is a reflection of how we think. In fact, what we think becomes our belief system, that becomes our philosophy, and shifts the culture we live in every day. That is one way our thoughts become reality.

Most every adult in the U.S. remembers when the term politically correct turned into the verb being PC. We began to wholeheartedly embrace the fact that being mindful of our language changes attitudes.

While most of that thought reformation has been targeted toward social justice in recent decades, it’s worthwhile to note the changes it has brought to our rational understanding of reality as well.

It took many years for folks to come to terms with the principles set forth in Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and his work Opticks, which is about the nature of light. After that, scientists were ready to close up shop, stating that everything that needed to be known in physics had been revealed.

Thankfully, human curiosity cannot be so easily satiated. About 100 years later, Einstein showed that Newton’s laws were merely a subset of a larger truth. Einstein’s bold statements began the quantum revolution that ensured we would never stop investigating because the new theories clearly demonstrated the profoundness of our ignorance.

Most of us weren’t alive in 1905 when Einstein released his first papers that changed everything. We have no way to remember what it was like to live through an intellectual revolution of Copernican magnitude. Most believe that E=mc2 was as popular then as it is now. Unfortunately, Einstein suffered the same shunning and disbelief as Newton until others could check the math and see the truth for themselves.

We are sentimental creatures who are hard-pressed to relinquish what brings us pleasure or security in our world. For instance, even though we know full well that we live in a solar-centric system, we are still enamored with the words sunset and sunrise. When folks in the U.S. and in Australia both point up, they are actually pointing in different directions out. And, think about our casual use of the word universal when, thanks to Einstein and every astrophysicist since, we clearly have evidence to show that what we experience on this planet is anything but universal.

Language is a living thing. Currently, there are two key words in cultural flux that are shifting us into another revolution. They are heart and brain. Material realists would have us believe that without a brain, or another physical processing center, there would be no thought. The other philosophy vying for dominance right now is that consciousness is the basis of everything and both matter and energy are an epiphenomenon of it.

The tenuous compromise being struck is that perhaps the organ in the head is not the only intelligence processing center. The term emotional I.Q. came into vogue a few decades ago and now the term heart intelligence is gaining in popularity.

With recent advancements in technology, science has been able to start measuring the subtle energy fields emanating from the hands of healers and Qigong masters. Even molecular biologists are jumping on the bandwagon by showing how our thoughts affect us at the cellular level.

The fact is, the physical body is a sophisticated, multi-faceted antenna system that transmits and receives all manner of informed energies. That’s what the first four chapters of The Sage Age are all about.

We may very well be adopting the language that will lead into another Copernican-level revolution. And our great, great grandchildren will think that all these theories and ideas must have been as popular with us as it is to them. And, they will be able to clearly see that what their great, great grandparents knew was merely a subset of a larger truth.

While researching topics covered in The Sage Age, I read many popular books that attempted to tie quantum physics to spirituality. They all made heroic attempts to translate the basic tenets of physics, which can only be truly understood in the language of mathematics, into accessible terms for the layman and then bind them to the ineffable concepts of spirituality, the true knowledge of which can only be gained through direct experience.

Some succeeded at this task more than others. When the author did find just the right analogy to convey the main point, it became a beautiful passage of words to highlight in yellow.

But, what I found glaringly missing from most of these books was a sufficient nod to the underlying philosophical principles behind the topics. Perhaps that’s because the masses, to whom these books are targeted, find philosophy either boring or too legalistic in nature.

Philosophy is the single most critical element in having any true understanding of the Shift we are currently experiencing. As Billy Joel sang, “We didn’t start the fire.” We didn’t get to where we are from a vacuum. With all of the attention being given right now to minding our mind and being more aware of our thoughts, it’s important to recognize that our thoughts become our beliefs that become our philosophy that shifts our culture and creates the world we live in.

At this moment, there are two main philosophical paradigms vying for dominance as the basis of reality. The first is material realism and the second is consciousness. Both have existed for thousands of years and have traded places over and over again throughout our history as the accepted theory.

The coup being waged now by the consciousness adherents, who see both matter and energy as an epiphenomenon of a wholistic something, is to overthrow the hardcore material realists, who see nature as a machine that they can bend to their greedy will regardless of consequence.

While both philosophies endeavor to vault humans to a central platform of being far more than just voyeurs in the universe, the pop culture currently co-opting the consciousness philosophy espouses that we are critically important co-creators of “All That Is.” That has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry of self-help instruction aimed at creating a self-regulation regiment that will restore Eden on Earth.

But, there’s a real danger in going overboard with that idea. The philosophy of material realism last came into prominence in the West during the Protestant Reformation, which was a revolt against science based on a moral code and idealism. Because it had gone unchecked and unbalanced for so long, the consciousness-type philosophy led to beliefs based on superstition and outright myth.

Now that a consciousness-type philosophy is attempting to rise again, it is serving the beneficial purpose of balancing material realism that is out of control. It is showing that the current way is aggressive, invasive, and destructive to the point of annihilation if it is not constrained.

There is another philosophy that can mediate this balancing act. It’s called existentialism. What most folks know of existentialism is either the famous quote from Nietzsche, “God is dead” or the neurotic parodies of Woody Allen on Nietzsche’s Being and Nothingness. In fact, if it had not been for the enduring quality of Allen’s work, existentialism may have phased out quickly as just another pop culture fad.

But there’s far more to existentialism than that. The focus is still on the human element, but it does help place humanity in its proper position with regard to the whole by leaving a little room for the great mystery of existence in general.

One of the best descriptions I’ve found of existentialism comes from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which states:

“On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science—including the science of psychology—could tell us. The dualist who holds that human beings are composed of independent substances—“mind” and “body”—is no better off in this regard than is the physicalist, who holds that human existence can be adequately explained in terms of the fundamental physical constituents of the universe. Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them. Nor can such an understanding be gained by supplementing our scientific picture with a moral one. Categories of moral theory such as intention, blame, responsibility, character, duty, virtue, and the like do capture important aspects of the human condition, but neither moral thinking (governed by the norms of the good and the right) nor scientific thinking (governed by the norm of truth) suffices.”

It’s good to learn all we can from science and morality. It’s better to hone both ways of knowing in order to have a full understanding of either. It’s best to balance the head and heart equally. When we, as individuals, learn how to do that, the culture will reflect it and balance itself out too. Perhaps then we will be in a position to move beyond this dualistic pendulum swinging between two philosophies and find a new way forward together.