The Adventure of Philosophy
Welcome by Rollie Smith
Welcome to your new adventure. In a moment I will present your guide for the trail up Mount Sophia. I believe you will enjoy this first leg of the climb. It is the “bunny hill” part of the slope.
Later there will be steeper trails, strewn with turns and bumps, which you may choose to take. But this one is just to get you on your way. When you finish it, if it isn’t too foggy, you will be able to see the summit towards which you are going. From then on it’s up to you. There are many different trails to take to the top of this mountain. You can try some of them to see if the climate, terrain, and scenery suit you best. They are all fun but can be a bit demanding. Or maybe they are fun because they are so demanding.
As you go along, the trail becomes more of a challenge. You may have to get some new equipment to help you along the way. Like walking sticks, rope, cables, and spiked shoes. New unusual concepts will be constructed that you don’t use every day. And special spectacles will be required to see the signs that point the way. Some of that equipment your guide will give you on this first leg.
Let me tell you. I have had many great adventures. I’ve skied and whitewater rafted the Rockies and Sierras. I’ve climbed Yosemite’s Half Dome and hiked Hawaii’s volcanic craters. I scuba-dived in the Caribbean. I eloped with the woman of my dreams fleeing to Toronto where our first child was born. I have traveled in Europe, Asia, and Africa. I was a leader in the fight against the Vietnam war and for civil rights. But my greatest adventure has been my lifelong walk with the guide I now present to you.
Without further ado, let me present our guide, the one who has been my constant companion. She never fails to help me get up when I fall, to point the way when I take a wrong turn, to cheer me on when I get tired and discouraged, and to always point out the summit towards which I climb. She will do the same for you. Here she is, Ms. Philosophia.
Philosophia speaks:
Thank you, Rollie. And congratulations to all of you who are willing to try my path.
First let me introduce myself to you. Most people call me Philosophia. But don’t let my name scare you. It just means “love of wisdom.” You know intuitively what love and wisdom are; and so you already know me a little bit. But I hope you will get to know me, the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love, much more by taking this voyage with me. As we walk I will tell you more about myself. You will learn my stories, my purposes, my relatives, and my paths
My story.
You learn who someone is by listening to their story. Many of my lovers have told my story, each in his own way as they walked, followed, and developed the paths to the summit with me. So you see I have many stories. Though different, all of them are correct and you can best know me by knowing more than one. Perhaps after our walk you can tell your own story about me.
I am very old. My life began with the dawn of human thinking. As a companion and a lover, I need people to exist. In ancient times, they considered me a god; but like all the gods, people had to believe in me in order for me to be. Some put my birth with the ancient Greeks from whom I received my name. And these folks believe that Plato was the very first philosopher although he had predecessors in Socrates and others who they call the pre-Socratics. And indeed Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were midwives that gave me birth in what you call western civilization.
But I had many names in different languages in different cultures in different human tribes, nations, and civilizations. And I hope you will see how their stories are a part of mine as well. For even though old, I am also very young, constantly being reborn in all human societies who choose to think anew.
In the ages before writing, extended families and tribes venerated their older people who kept and passed down the traditions and stories of the beginnings of the people. These stories told of the herbs that were safe and even medicinal to eat, of hunting methods and tools, and of the rules, learned by experience, that would sustain the tribe. By sharing these stories, people developed common languages, beliefs, and practices to unite them and help them work together in pursuing the needs of life. These stories, languages, beliefs, and practices make up the culture of a tribe or community.
As tribes grew, some of the more extraordinary of these men and women story-tellers were felt to be in touch with the unknown and transcendent ones, spirits and places, that were the source of the knowledge and culture of the community. We now name these special people shaman, medicine persons, spirit walkers, and sages. I was there just beginning to grow as they tried to fathom the ancestors that guided them and the living beings that nourished them.
With agriculture came cities and civilization. With civilization came specialization, special classes of people, those who tilled the soil, those who brought it to the city to sell, those who took it to other cities, those who governed the cities, who determined and enforced the rules. There the kings supported by the aristocrats who held the land, the military who defended the land and rule, and the priests who sanctified the rule and the city. And there were the peasants whose toil in the fields and provided the surpluses to finance the city and its classes. But also came some sages, sometimes called prophets, who criticized rich rulers who were oppressing poor peasants. They attacked the order of society that made people less than human. They helped people see the bonds, which were tying them down, and encouraged them to free themselves in mind and body.
In China and India and then in Greece and Rome, teachers collected students into schools of learning. Some of the schools were for the well-born to help them rule better. Some were for the peasants, merchants, and workers to help them be productive citizens. All were for learning how to live well, cooperate, and be happy even in their toil, oppression, and suffering. These teachers questioned, reinterpreted, and retold the stories of the gods and outer powers that the people had used to deal with their oppression and suffering. The development of writing, with stories and knowledge engraved on stone and marked on papyrus, gave civilizations more permanence and spread their cultures to other civilizations.
In these ancient times, Buddha Sidartha and Lao Tsu, Moses, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Zeno, Diogenes, Lucretius, Jesus, and so many of their students brought me into the affairs of humanity. All these saw me not as some secret doctrine or ritual, the way of the mystery religions. Rather they engaged me in a way of life that would bring them meaning and happiness. They used me to free themselves and others so they could cope with and diminish the suffering and enjoy the pleasures of living. They called me the Way, the Path, the Quest, and the Practice. They attempted to discover first principles in and beyond nature that could explain nature. And they called it metaphysics. They looked for the Rule of the universe behind the rules of the city, the God behind the gods of the priests, and the Force behind all the forces of their daily lives. They sought the meanings beyond their words, gods, stories, and symbols. They sought the meaning of their lives personally and together. And I helped them in their search.
In what you call the Middle Ages, when great civilizations dissolved and renewed, I became the handmaiden of the great religions used by priests to advance their civilizations and to explain their culture to outsiders, new members whether by conversion or by conquest. Then they called me theology because I served the beliefs and symbols and rites of their culture. But I also helped creative men and women to question their culture with all its beliefs, practices, and knowledge and even to rebel against the beliefs and practices that kept them from questioning and from pursuing new ways to understand their world and their lives. Thus, my way is the way of skepticism.
The modern age arrived when I was separated from religion and gave birth to science. Now I sought not only reasons but reasons guided by free inquiry instead of religious belief, reasons supported by evidence which all free inquirers could see and confirm. Natural philosophy became the physical sciences. Political philosophy became the social sciences. Psychology as a branch of philosophy became neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. In this age of reason, religious faith waned as science progressed to explain nature based on evidence. And theology, as the explanation of all things, became shunned by my offspring. Until, that is, science itself comes to the realization that it cannot know all things with certainty.
In the modern age of reason and science that ushered in great industries and technologies, there is no need for the gods or for first principles, no call for the supernatural and the metaphysical. Yet philosophical inquiry prompted by faith in the ability to know and do better becomes the way sciences, the arts, the religions and all human culture can encourage, guide, and criticize itself as humans move past the modern age as you will discover on our journey.
All these names and stories make it seem that there are many of me. And in description and expression there are, as many as there are peoples and cultures. But I am really one as all people of every land and time and color and culture and orientation and sex are really one. I am one because I am the question and quest in each one of you and the source of all your questions in every place and time and community. In so far I am one and the convergence of the expressions of many cultures, I am called Perennial. Philosophy.
Once you emerged from your mother’s womb and were fascinated by the light, I was born in you. When you felt the warmth of your mother’s embrace, I was touching you. When you heard your father’s words that somehow gathered what you felt or saw, I was speaking with you. As you grew older and used categories to combine things in your world, I was gathering with you. When you kept asking, what is this and why did that happen, I was questioning with you. When you put your fingers in tide pools to find living organisms and looked up to the stars and drew lines of connection, I was wondering with you. As you were painting and singing your world, I was flowering with you in many shapes and colors.
My purpose
You can tell who someone is, not only by their story, but by their intention or mission in life. I have many missions, but I wager that you can see that they converge as one. And once you get to know me better, you will express my mission for yourself. Here are some of my missions that some of my companions have conveyed.
· To critique. Criticism is questioning the product of thinking. It asks about books, paintings, movies. Under my guidance you question the expression of a thought in order to keep the act of thinking going. But to do this well, you must go through and identify with the original act of expressing that birthed the thought you are trying to understand. Those expressions of thought are made in words, drawings, even smells and feelings — all of which we call symbols.
· To reflect. You are born in a world of things defined in the languages you get from your caregivers, your peers, and your teachers. You already know your world as you learn to speak and write, as you learn to paint and play, as you learn how to do and make things useful to our community. I help you reflect on what you are seeing and hearing. I help you relate all these things to each other so they can be passed down to your children and theirs. But I help you not only to question things and how they connect. I also help you notice yourself questioning and knowing things.
· To enlighten. Many of my companions use the image of a beam of light, as from a flashlight in the night. (A bat would use the image of beep of sound and echoes!) That beam shines a light on things in the world. That beam is you questioning all things and then questioning the beam itself. That beam is your awareness of things and also of your self joined with many other selves using words and other images to discover and create your world. That beam is called “consciousness” by modern philosophers and scientists. They know that consciousness is a wonderful characteristic of the brains of all living beings. They know that symbolic consciousness is the special characteristic of human beings. Another word for this capacity is imagination. We do not yet know exactly how it works. But we are trying to learn why and how it works because human existence is so wrapped up in it.
· To dispel illusions. Your beam not only lightens up things through symbolic expressions, including images, words, formulas, metaphors, and analogies, that we can prove real and true. Your beam into the dark also creates illusions or appearances that distract or block the way to the nature of the universe and the true state of things. It’s like exploring a cave when your flashlight casts a shadow that looks like a new passageway and you go to the entrance and find it is not really there. Your illusions are quite natural because they are part and parcel of imagination. They can even be helpful because they raise more questions. They help you shine your light in other places. But only if you recognize them as illusions. Later in our journey, I will tell you four of the most important illusions that you should recognize.
· To interest. I will try to keep you interested, but really that is up to you. “Inter-est” means being in the middle of things. Think about it. When you are most attentive to things out in the world, that’s when you feel the most alive, i.e. have the most inner awareness. That is your consciousness of space. When you are best interpreting the past, you are best projecting the future. That’s your consciousness of time. When you are most alone is when you have the greatest appreciation of others. “Never less alone than when alone,” is what hermits say. That’s your consciousness of community. And there is your feeling of always being between the world as it is and the world as you would like it to be — the real and the ideal. That is your consciousness of possibility.
And you guessed it. The four illusions I will tell you about later come right out of those four dimensions of consciousness. You could even say that my main project is the exploration of consciousness as personal and collective, past and future, inner experience and outer content, actual and virtual. But that will come on the paths yet to come on our journey.
· To agitate. My job is to keep you going. I want to prod you on your path while at the same time warning you about stones that may trip you and detours that might waste your time. To agitate means to stir a person to action. To experience, you need to experiment. To know, you need to act. Prodding you to act with others to discover and create your world is my mission because it is the mission of human existence. When you act with others in and on the world, you have power. You take responsibility for yourself and for your world. You liberate yourself from your illusions, personally and collectively through both spiritual and physical exercise. I, Philosophia, am not separate from organizing yourself, your community, and your world. I am the experiment and the exercise of your existence, of your very being in the world.
· To please and console. For the young I am Play, the game of words, ideas, puzzles, and puns to be enjoyed at the start of life’s journey. But I am also the preparation for their struggle, their conflict, and their passing. For the old I am Consolation as they see more clearly their final days approaching. But I am also the celebration of all they have done and especially become in their lives.
In sum, if I may be allowed to sound arrogant, my mission is to save humanity, most often from itself, by getting people to think. Not repeat, not opinionate, not preach, not believe, and not know with certainty, but think.
My relatives
Now you have learned who I am through my story and by my mission. But you also discover who someone is by their relationships and how they are the same and how they are different. I am often confused with science, to religion, to morality, and to politics. I will discuss my relationship to them so that you can know me better.
Science
When I told you my story, I said that I was considered to be science (knowledge of nature) for many years. Then I gave birth to modern science which became separate from me in the schools and also in daily life. Like science I use imagination; that is, we conjure up images in words, diagrams, and models to explain the universe and ourselves within the universe. We make conjectures as propositions and/or formulas based on data, the evidence of experience and offer it to all persons to check to see if their explanations fit the data or do not.
In science, however, it is the data of the senses received in interaction with the physical environment that are used. Experiments are designed that can falsify and/or verify the explanations; experiments that can be repeated universally. In philosophy the data is consciousness itself, the experience of the act of experimenting and verifying. When the scientist turns from the problems that arise in the data of sense perception to the data of the consciousness of oneself in union with others doing science (or any act of knowing the world), he comes to me and becomes a philosopher.
Science is directed to the external world and I to the inner one. Science is dealing with objects that are perceived as “out there, while I deal with the activity which is experienced as “in here.” This is why science will never fully explain consciousness or mind or me.
In other words, when science broke off from me to study the arrangements, relationships, and origins of things in the physical universe, I was left considering the data that science could not explain or design experiments around. I focused not on content of our conscious acts but on consciousness itself in action. I focused on the world from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. Therefore, since modernity, I attended to the mind and its development in thinking, how data and its imaging is shaped by mind and culture, how science relates to other conscious acts of speech and of mythic, religious, and artistic expression.
And science became my partner in my search, and especially the human sciences, the study of societies and cultures, evolutionary anthropology and psychology, and now the study of the human brain as the organic source of mind. But I was the one who was putting it all together and giving it back to the scientists for further study and experimentation. And I guided scientists to draw back from their scientific findings and engage in philosophical inquiry into their engagement through science in the world.
But like science, I am at my best when I only use data available to all humans, and make conjectures for explanations that are natural, i.e. that do not appeal to some supernatural or metaphysical cause or being or place.
Religion.
Religion is often described as doing just that: i.e. giving explanations that rely on a revelation from outside the human and natural world. Religions often speak of gods, unembodied spirits, and places outside of space-time beyond human existence. It uses poetry, stories, and other art forms to do so. It sometimes uses me. It develops a discourse, doctrine, ritual, organization and authority for its survival. It has an important function in unifying culture, stabilizing the social order, and conforming persons within the culture and to the social order. Most important it gives persons a sense of meaning by expressing symbolically the terms of their transcendence.
Transcendence is the ex-tension of human existence to surpass itself. In your in-tention to the world as you adapt to your environment and adapt your environment to yourself, you experience your potential, your openness to new possibilities. In your presence — here and now and with — you are stretching to the out-there, to the yet-to-come, and to others beyond the present. You experience your expressions as inadequate or to be revised. You are a work in progress and so are all your products. You experience yourself in tension. The tension that constitutes your being in the world is transcendence.
My followers have described human existence as transcendence, as a drive, an elan vital, a desire to know, a pursuit of truth, a craving for love, an orientation to the future, a search for union, a longing for paradise. The experience of being present, in tension, and transcendence is always with you, but usually in the background and not attended to until you reflect, do a turn from the objective to the consciousness out of which objects arise, are named, and get meaning. That is what I am about: to guide you in making that turn and attending to consciousness in your presence to the world, the tension and transcendence of existence.
Religionists have realized, or made real, Truth, Love, Future, Union, Paradise by giving these notions concrete form as though they have absolute reality. But I urge you to recognize their symbolic and metaphoric character and keep up the longing, search, wonder, and pursuit. Do not let the belief in Transcendents outside of human nature be an occasion to diminish the transcendence of human existence.
Religion can block the transcendence of human existence by reifying the metaphors and so undoing the tension to pass beyond. Because I push persons to pass beyond the doctrines and certainties of religion, religionists have condemned me as irreligious and atheistic. Grasp existence in all its tension, opposition, and polarities. But do not make absolutes of any of its poles as religions do. For then you lose existence.
But I have no quarrel with religion. I am neither theist, nor atheist — and in a sense I am both. I value religion in so far as it represents the transcendence in human existence. I value religion because it stirs up the faith in human existence and the collective action to preserve and enhance human existence. I also value religion because it highlights the importance of choosing, following a way of life towards truth, love, beauty, and happiness, and often supporting the spiritual exercises that allow the transcending character of existence to appear. But I do not value religion when it makes itself the ultimate, the transcendent, the truth on our way to it.
Morality.
A way of life, including the values and attitudes that foster that way of life, is called morality. The moral life is one that embodies the cultural values and follows the given norms of a society. A moral life is a life that pursues good rather than evil however that is perceived by a person.
I help you to scrutinize your way of life. I urge you to consider the principles and values that you are living by. I urge you to consider the attitudes and habitudes of your life. I also help you to identify the criteria by which you understand and choose what is good and what is evil in your life.
Religion as part of a culture often dictates the good and evil you intend. And from the point of view in one culture that could be very different from the point of view in another. Sacrificing babies, capital punishment, and human bondage may be deemed good and proper at one time and place, but recognized as evil and sinful in another. A religiously sanctified practice in one culture, may be an abomination in another.
What I help you do is examine your morality from a more universal point of view. As my disciple Socrates said: “an unexamined life is not worth living.” To achieve a more universal point of view, it helps to examine many moralities in many cultures. But most important is the developing perception of the structure of consciousness that is present in all human beings. That is the structure of human existence itself in its tension between the poles of existence I already mentioned when talking about illusions.
This perception of consciousness in action is named “moral consciousness” or, in English, “conscience.” The examination of moral consciousness with my assistance is called ethics. Ethics is the use of reason to reflect on and criticize morality. Sometimes philosophers are considered “immoral” because they are criticizing the morality of a certain society. But through ethics they are assisting in the development and extension of morality by articulating and challenging many of the hidden values and precepts of a morality that have destructive consequences.
But disciples of mine not only articulate a new examined morality or ethics, they live that moral life. Like religion, and sometimes with the aid and insight of great religious leaders, my disciples train themselves to appreciate the universality of human moral consciousness and also to follow what they have learned. Many call these spiritual exercises an examination of conscience, toward the development of ethical behavior and character.
Politics.
But it is not just personal behavior, but also social behavior which is at stake in ethical character. There is no individual behavior except within a context and system of collective behavior. This is why politics is the extension of ethics.
Political thinking is reflecting on our associations, how we govern ourselves, how we create social habits or institutions, what works and doesn’t for whom, and for what principles, values, and interests.
I told you that one of my missions is to dispel illusions. I referred to four illusions that arise in our thinking that we need to be aware of. In political thinking, those four illusions can be named 1) the libertarian illusion, 2) the literal illusion, 3) the authoritarian illusion, and 4) the despotic illusion. Let me discuss them one at a time, their positives and their negatives, and show how they might affect our political reasoning and discourse.
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The libertarian illusion is the illusion of the independent self and totally free will. Consciousness is the loop back of our behavior to objects in the world. We know from experiment that our brain moves our body to act before we are conscious of that act; and we then rationalize that act as if it came from nothing but our will. We experience ourselves in charge of our activities, oblivious to the background experience of how determined our decisions are by genetics, upbringing, and especially interaction with others.
For the libertarian, freedom is lack of restraints, the negation of limits. The individual is a rule unto himself and has no need to rely on others. Nor should he do anything for others since that destroys the others’ freedom. Such freedom is the basis of laissez faire capitalism and neo-Darwinian morality. For the libertarian, the common good is simply the sum of individuals acting on behalf of their own self-interest without interference.
Free will of the independent self is a helpful illusion because it encourages us to take responsibility for our personal acts. It also encourages us to treat others so that they become more responsible and self-reliant. But it is an illusion that can be very destructive when it rationalizes inequity and blames the less fortunate instead of working with them to change the conditions of their oppression.
The literal illusion: The classic liberal (and modern conservative) assumes that there are eternal values ordained divinity or nature. And it is the responsibility of Tribe, Church or State, to enforce the rules and norms that correspond to those values.
The conservative discovers these rights and laws in the past and especially in the great ideas taught by our ancestors. The liberal discovers these rights and laws in a future anticipated by the trajectory of history. Both are subject to the illusion of time as an object out there and of history as divinely or naturally determined as it so seems in our lived consciousness. Both the liberal and the conservative claims to be on history’s side. They both believe that there is a key to the portal to progress and they have it. Both believe that there are correct principles to righteousness and they know what they are.
The illusion is helpful in that it encourages persons to consider the role of culture with its values and ideas in shaping our viewpoints and our worlds. This makes reform possible. But it is destructive insofar as it accepts the inevitability of the division of humanity between the endowed and the less endowed as well as the inevitability of progress. It is an illusion that overlooks that culture and history are fabrications of human thinking rather than divinely or naturally ordained. It often overlooks the fact that values and ideas are human artifacts which can lead to the next illusion.
The authoritarian illusion: Often called the illusion of the absolute or the objectivistic fallacy. This illusion arises because in your activity in the world you are focused on things, objects we have named. “A rose is a rose by whatever name,” the bard wrote, as is snow, mountains, dogs, and humans. This attention to the objective neglects the roles our brain, culture, history, and consciousness are playing in shaping the object. You tend to think that the truth is absolute and “out there.” Propositions are true when they correspond to the reality we experience as shaped by language and culture. And if you do not experience things the way someone else does, or the way your tribe or nation or religion does, too bad for the other person. He is in error.
The illusion is helpful in that it does direct you to the world and to the data you are receiving as you interact with the environment and each other. It is hurtful when it does not uncover the fantasies of myth and leads to fixed ideological thinking without understanding the origins and fallacies of ideological thinking. It confuses beliefs with a faith that transcends all beliefs and stimulates critical thinking.
The despotic illusion: you are born as naive realists taking everything that you see and hear as the way things really are. Through education you begin to understand that conventional thinking or common sense expressed in ordinary language is continually challenged. Even so you want to believe that the truth is out there in the wisdom of the ancient sages, the formulas of science, the authority of sacred writings and divine revelations. And yet presently even the new science, accounting for new data through advanced technology, is questioning the classical science of Newton to Einstein.
Contemporary philosophy of science, enlightened by advances in neuroscience, has discovered that your knowledge of nature and of yourselves is mediated by the symbols and tools you use to categorize and relate the data. The holy grail of a unified field theory in which you have the theory of everything, the certainty of truth, and the definitive law of nature is recognized as a fool’s errand, an impossible dream. This for some might be an occasion to give up the quest and resign to a life without meaning. But for those with faith, it situates truth and good, not at the beginning or end of the journey, but actually in the quest itself. Your reason for life is not to receive meaning from some outside authority or illumination, but rather to creatively and collectively choose and make your meanings.
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These four illusions relate to a structure of human behavior that I, with the help of many of my mentors in science, religion, and philosophy, have described many times elsewhere. That structure I call presence — being here, now, with, towards. It affirms and even celebrates human existence as a tension between inner and outer space, between past and future time, between self and others in community, between belief and faith or transcendence.
The illusions consist in resolving the tensions by a preoccupation with or absorption in one of the poles. So the libertarian reduces community to the individual. The literalist reduces transient temporality to a past or future utopia. The authoritarian dogmatist loses the subjective in the objective. The despotic realist reduces becoming to being by denying existence in its ambiguity, contingency, and transcendence.
The despotic illusion leads to the great man theory of politics (including the rationalization of demagoguery or the divine right of rulers) and to tyranny in practice. This illusion leads to a fixed ideology, apocalyptic theory, and, in practice, to violent conflict including state terror and counter-terror.
All four illusions reinforce each other. Polarization of parties, withdrawal of people from political life, ordination of autocrats, acceptance of inequity, diminishment of publics and civil society, violence and terror, populist demagoguery born of fear of loss, measuring human happiness by private wealth, all are rooted in these illusions unrecognized as illusions.
Political thinking is a critical response to all four of these illusions. The illusions will always be there as long as humans exist, being-in-and-to-the world, through symbolic and mediated behavior. However, the political thinker recognizes and so dispels these illusions by seeing them as such.
But ethical and political thinking is more than a theory; it is a practice, a way of life and a way of action in the world. Political thinkers choose to 1) accept the contingency, frailty, and suffering of human existence, 2) engage in existence through action despite all evidence of the meaninglessness and futility of existence, 3) relate to others, and especially those who have been left or forced out, and work with them to create a relational world of shared power, and 4) expect progress towards the ideal by accepting the imperfections and contingency of the real.
The next path
Oh look, we are almost at the end of the first path. Now you can see the summit off in the distance. It may look a bit blurry in this fog and perhaps like an illusion itself. And in a sense it is an illusion because you are providing definition to the summit of your search as you move towards it. But the most important thing is to keep moving. The summit will keep revealing itself as you are revealed in yourself.
Can you see the trailheads of the paths ahead of you? There are five of them.
1. Existence: Who are we? human nature and existence.
2. Thinking: How do I think?
3. Knowledge: What can we know? How does it progress?
4. Society: Who are we with and for?
5. Spirit and Faith: Why do we go on? What is the meaning of it all?
Wait! There is another path over here. A sixth one. What do you suppose that one is and where does it go? Maybe you would rather try that one and name it yourself.
Choose the one that most suits you now. All these paths converge to include the others. You will find yourself crisscrossing between their teachings, between them and the arts and sciences, and between them and your profession and action in the world. You will need to connect to other seekers, all friends of mine, past, present, and in the future. Listen to what they have found along the way. Converse, read, argue with them.
I need to warn you once again, however. There are obstacles, the illusions of your own existence. There will be some who do not want you to progress, to criticize, to explore new trails, and to be free. They like things the way they are. You will get discouraged at times with your own limits and weaknesses. It will seem as though the summit is getting farther away. You will wonder if there is any way at all. This is the call for the faith that makes me possible. It is not the faith of true belief or final achievement, but the faith from and in your own transcending existence.
As you go along, know that I will be with you in all the listening, reading, and thinking you will be doing. In your experiments in life, in your social action and quest for justice, your love for others, and your mentoring of those who come after you.
Exhortation of Philosophia:
In the darkest of days, I know that the light of curiosity is born in you. I know that your family, teachers, and friends can help to keep you curious. But ultimately it is you. You cannot choose your family and not always your teachers. But you can choose your friends. Choose them carefully. Some of your best friends you may meet only in books, other pieces of art, and in your imagination. But there will be others who will discuss, argue, or without words just walk with you in faith. Grasp onto them, enjoy them, and go.