Philosophy as a "midwife" to Spirituality

or
Sleepwalking is no frame of mind
for going on the spiritual path

 

Philosophy’s wake-up powers

Recently we had the writers’ great pleasure: someone called in on a radio talk show to say that he’d read our second book The Paradigm Conspiracy, and it had changed his life. We learn a lot from our readers even if they don’t like our stuff, but when someone really connects with it, well, it’s a treat. Without intending to, Marty (that’s his name) gave us a vision for how spirituality may work in the twenty-first century, while also giving us a new sense of our third book, Love, Soul, and Freedom. What Marty said was, as well as we can remember from a midnight call-in: “It took me a long time to read your book, and I had to think about each section, something I never do with novels. I just crunch them. But when I finally finished The Paradigm Conspiracy, I felt different. I seemed to be more aware of things, more awake to what was happening around me. And when I went to work, it seemed as if everyone else was just dazed or asleep.”

Philosophy always has a waking-up quality—something we can hardly take credit for. Plato described the power of philosophy to shift our perspective in his famous allegory of the cave from The Republic, which he wrote 2400 years ago (we have a version of it on this site under “Things we’d like to share with you”). Waking up is not only the core of philosophy, though. It’s a prerequisite for spirituality as well. Marty’s comments reminded us of this and reinforced the rightness of the order in which Paradigm Conspiracy and Love, Soul, and Freedom were published—something we weren’t sure about at first.

The logical order of our books—something we didn’t see

The Paradigm Conspiracy evolved over a period of five years, and finding a publisher for the book wasn’t easy. We’d more or less given up the idea of it ever appearing in print, so we started working on Love, Soul, and Freedom. When Dan Odegard, at that time the associate publisher from Hazelden, called us in June of 1995, we weren’t sure which book to publish first. Dan wanted to go with The Paradigm Conspiracy, so that’s what happened. But we wondered if Love, Soul, and Freedom wouldn’t go down easier—if Paradigm Conspiracy wasn’t too much of a mouthful, too demanding.

Now—in light of Marty’s comments—we feel the order was right, that Paradigm Conspiracy had to come first. There’s a logic here, beyond what we thought of in terms of reader digestibility. This logic has to do with clearing the way for genuinely new-paradigm spirituality. Something can sound new but really be the “same old, same old” dressed up in more appealing language. Scratch the surface, and we’re feeling, thinking, and reacting in the same heavy ways, only we’re using different terms to do it—“karma” instead of “punishment,” for example, or “low self” or “id” instead of “original sin.” But control paradigm is control paradigm. Its version of spirituality has a telltale feel and smell—if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck. . .

Getting our mind-powers in gear

Spirituality means many things to many people, but one thing we all agree on is that it’s different from institutionalized, organized religion. The organized version tells us what to believe—what we can and can’t think. Thinking for ourselves isn’t welcome. To break out of the dogmatic, control-paradigm packaging of spirituality—even hiding under the name of New Age thinking—we must first wake up to what’s going on. To engage with spirituality is to engage with who we truly are, and to do that, we need to be awake—inwardly free to do our own thinking.

Getting us to wake up has traditionally been philosophy’s job. If we could choose a work that best exemplifies this, it would probably be Plato’s. His dialogues feature Socrates, Plato’s teacher, talking to somebody about some idea—exchanges which are designed to switch on our minds. He wanted the internal philosophical machinery that we all have to flex and get lubricated, so that it starts turning again and getting up to speed.

In other words, persuading us to believe this or that doctrine wasn’t Plato’s purpose. Fixed beliefs shut down open inquiry. Often at the end of a dialogue, Plato offers no conclusion, no “right answer.” Socrates says something like, “Well, that was fun, but we really left a lot of questions open, so shall we make another go at this tomorrow?” In a letter, Plato wrote that we’d never know what he really thought from the dialogues. Socrates’ purpose wasn’t to establish belief or doctrine but to wake up our minds—to get us thinking and questioning things for ourselves, especially things we’ve taken for granted simply because that’s how we’ve been raised.

Socrates even described himself as a “gadfly,” whose job it was to sting the “sleeping horse” of Athenian consciousness into wakefulness. Asleep, the horse might drift into real harm without realizing it. Gadflies may be annoying, but they do the horse a service—so much so that in his defense at his trial for “denying the gods” and “corrupting the youth,” Socrates argued that, instead of being put to death, he should be given a life pension for his philosopher services to the city of Athens.

Confronting programming: suffering and slavery

Sleeping horses and stinging flys to wake them: the metaphor works as well today as two-plus millennia ago. We’re not just lulled into sleep, though, but systematically programmed into mindless obedience. We’re so conditioned into conformity that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between that and full-blown slavery. And we’re not excluding ourselves from this—we catch ourselves falling into this or that programming all the time.

Who of their free choice, for instance, would work gawd-awful hours under life-draining stress—and with no time for real relationships much less family life—to exploit, defoliate, impoverish, or foul the planet: nothing that at the end of one’s life one could be truly proud of having done? No money is worth doing that. It’s slavery. Granted, unlike conditions centuries ago, there’s air conditioning now, the whips and lashes aren’t physical, the uniforms are better (though expensive and uncomfortable), and the hours are spent not in fields but in oxygenless buildings and airplanes. But it’s slavery nonetheless, a slavery that starts by chaining our minds with long justifications of why we have no choice but to live this way.

What makes us agree to slavery? Why sacrifice everything for money and “lifestyle,” so we can retire and promptly die, since we’ve never connected with any real reason for existing beyond being a slave? Programming makes us agree to it, and powerful programming.

All programming involves pain—think of “The Manchurian Candidate” or “The Ipcress File,” for example, or the times you were punished or humiliated. Conditioning us to accept economic slavery is no exception. We settle for slavery, because we believe our alternatives are worse, involving greater suffering. Suffering and slavery: these are the very things that get good philosophers like Plato or Socrates going—and will awaken our own inner philosophers.

So, ironically, programmers can do their worst, but all they do is wake up the sleeping philosophers in all of us. Their deafening snores sound the alarm for the rest of us. In the meantime, with our own loud snores, we jolt ourselves awake.

Everywhere we look, that’s what’s happening—humanity’s philosophical side is waking up. We’re asking why we’re here now, what the purpose of life is, and what kind of culture we’re building with our life-philosophies. Where are we going with all this stuff we own? What are we doing with our hours, days, and years?

We’d venture to say—and we’re not alone in saying it—that people sitting staring at the rain and rethinking life are doing more good for themselves and the planet than all the CEOs and politicians combined, hellbent as they seem to be on doing any harm if it will bring them money or power. The philosophers in us want to know who we are and what’s worth wedding ourselves to. What do we love to do, and what’s worth doing? What kind of societies do we live in? How well do they serve our creativity? And how much freedom do they give us to explore our souls’ purposes?

Exploring spiritual values with our minds unbound

Freeing ourselves to think is the philosophy part, and given the depth of programming, it’s no small job. But once we start thinking about life’s essence, we’re headed for the domain of spirituality. That’s why, after Paradigm Conspiracy, we found ourselves pondering what’s most basic in life, the intangibles that make our tangible lives worth living. With Rumi’s help, we boiled the basics down to three essentials: love, soul, and freedom.

We all want love—being connected—but do we have to sacrifice our souls and freedom to get it? We began to wake up to how these three work in our lives, and not always well. As we went along, it dawned on us: what better way to trap us in programming than to use something we all want and need—love—as bait?

In control-paradigm worlds, love comes at a price—in personal love, but also in bonding with families, groups, jobs, businesses, religious organizations, professional positions, or even social clubs. When we bond with some person or community, what do we have to give up in order to be loved, valued, and respected? What aspects of ourselves do we have to hide as the condition for belonging? Do we experience love and friendship, or do we feel manipulated, controlled, and lost? Do we feel connected at deep levels, or do we feel used? Are our souls present, or do we split off inwardly, believing that denying ourselves is necessary to keep the relationship going? Do we have the freedom to express who we are while at the same time maintaining the relationship?

With Socrates’ gadfly of philosophy biting us, we ask these questions, and we don’t settle for comfortable, don’t-rock-the-boat answers.

 

Love, soul, and freedom: unite or bust

When any of these three—love, soul, or freedom—split off on their own, they make a mess of our lives and cultures. For love alone, whether it’s the affection of someone or the possession of something, we may sell our souls and freedom to get it. Without soul and freedom to guide us, love—a desire to be linked with someone or something—can take us straight into destructive relationships or groups, not the least of which are corporations that profit from some form of destruction.

Soul by itself may get too navel-gazing to have true intimacy, too insecure to venture out in the big world, or too self-involved to care how the culture goes.

Freedom alone may give us the wanderlust so badly that we can’t get near love, or it may lead us to act in ways that harm our connectedness. That’s more or less how we’ve interpreted the concept of “free-market capitalism,” namely, the freedom to ravage and exploit people and the earth for personal (or stockholder) gain: freedom without love or soul.

Philosophy wakes us up to how these essentials are working in our lives—either in isolation badly or well together. Nor is it solely our personal doing if they’re split. According to traditional gender programming, for instance, little girls are raised to sacrifice soul and freedom for connectedness (love), while little boys are raised to sacrifice connectedness and soul for freedom, usually defined in terms of money-making power. We make the trade-offs just as we’ve been raised to make them.

Imagining the “impossible”

What no one is allowed to think possible is having all three work together in harmony. Yet that’s exactly what real spirituality requires. Philosophy prepares the way for exploring real spirituality by challenging the programming that shuts down our minds to its possibility.

Specifically, thanks to programming, we believe trade-offs between love, soul, and freedom are inescapable, and that a spiritual life of having them work together is a pipedream, unattainable. Bargaining between love, soul, and freedom is all we know and all we can do. The people sitting in the cave don’t know any other reality exists, until something wakes them up to thinking differently. Even then, they can resist the wake-up call. That’s why we need our philosophy powers well-oiled and in top condition, so we don’t drift into new ways of describing the same old cave-shadows and justifying life in the cave as the only possible world.

Reclaiming our powers by challenging a “spirituality” that excludes them

Waking up clears the way for us to explore our possibilities, which means following the spiritual path as it’s ours to do, not as some person, institution, or programming packages it for us. Prepackaged concepts of what’s spiritual haven’t got the ring of truth, because they’re not ours. They don’t resonate with our core, what feels true in our bones, and for a good reason.

Instead of allowing us to be who we are, prepackaged spirituality expects us to think, act, be—or at least appear to be—a certain way. To get us to do that, control paradigms require that we leave behind many of our innate human powers—powers that would otherwise rock the boat. Using notions of spirituality as justification, control paradigms ask us to leave out some key parts of ourselves that seem threatening to the established order—our histories, our sexuality, our emotions, our loves, our freedom, our truth, even our souls as we ourselves experience them, but especially our minds and intellects. “Spiritual people” are above the world and don’t worry about it. Communing with bliss, they’ve risen above their critical intellects—that part of us which says, “Hey, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. . .” or “what’s going on here?”

Adding insult to injury, this brand of spirituality says that if we’re not in perpetual bliss—if we dare to say “wait a minute. . .”—we must be fallen sinners or, in more au courant terms, misguided, unevolved, unenlightened, karmically bound, low-self entities, in need of something—anything—other than who we are.

Why do we fall for this stuff, especially when we have counter-examples such as Gandhi? We fall for it because our philosophy powers are all but shot. The programming we receive in schools (much less from television and the media) systematically numbs our minds, until they switch off in self-defense. For a control agenda, that’s ideal, as long as we leave on our “accept” and “obey” mental functions—functions that oppressive parents, teachers, bosses, religions, governments, and corporations are delighted to have “on.”

In other words, it takes no Socrates come from Athens to see that philosophy and spirituality are subversive, because they question all this. But as in Socrates’ case, they question our otherwise accepted ways of thinking not to be annoying for its own sake, but because that’s the first step toward reclaiming our forgotten powers.

Philosophy and spirituality: a potent team

How, then, do we break the programming and reclaim what’s ours, especially our right to live with love, soul, and freedom united? According to the logic of the order of our last two books, the process begins with philosophy and its power to tease us into thinking for ourselves. The more we experience genuinely free and open thought, the more we claim our freedom to do more—to think beyond our programming.

Socrates pursued an idea like a dog does a bone—he didn’t settle for easy answers. That’s how philosophy works. It gives us the inner authority to go on the quest and to choose our own path, to question things even if all the world accepts them the way they are. Socrates was homely, overweight, penniless, positionless, and as bumbling in manner as Peter Falk’s Columbo. Clearly, we don’t have to be personally impressive to do philosophy. We just have to be willing to wake up and think.

As we do, our sense of spirituality blossoms into something real, meaningful, and deeply transforming—into something that engages our whole being. We wake up to the possibilities of who we are as more than how we’ve been programmed. And we wake up to the possibilities of what our world can be if we claim who we are and refuse to live with our loves, souls, or freedoms bargained away.

So thank you, Marty. Your comments on that radio program woke us up to how philosophy precedes spirituality, at least as long as we live in a world filled with control models and the programming we get from them. To use Socrates’ image, philosophy serves as a midwife to the birth of our essence. And you woke us up to an order at work in our books, even if we ourselves were clueless to it at the time.