Ancient Wisdom for Modern Minds

“Ancient wisdom for modern minds.” This is a phrase I’ve used occasionally to describe the philosophy classes that I teach. It struck me recently that it’s also a pretty good indication of the type of reflection I try to do in my daily life. No surprise there— I’ve always viewed my work in the classroom as an extension of the work that I try to do outside of the classroom. In a nutshell, that work consists in learning from the wise and seeking to incorporate their teachings into my everyday life.

This work is different from the sort of thing I was trained to do when I studied philosophy in graduate school. Philosophy as an academic discipline is different from philosophy as a life practice. When you study philosophy as an academic discipline, you practice honing certain verbal and cognitive skills. You learn who said what, who came up with which theories, how they defended them, and so on. You learn how to draw careful distinctions, how to generate instructive counterexamples, how to formulate logically precise arguments, and so on. In short, you learn how to play a certain kind of intellectual game. The game is fun—at least for people of a certain temperament—and it’s genuinely useful in promoting intellectual understanding of a certain kind. But it was always a little unclear to me how this game connected with the business of cultivating wisdom in my daily life. The practice of philosophy—as opposed to the study of it—is about cultivating wisdom.

What is a practice? We often use the word to describe professional endeavors: Jim has a medical practice downtown; Mary practices law. What I have in mind, though, is not so much a profession as what we might call a life practice. How do we relate to our lives on a day-to-day basis? What aims, ambitions, concerns, and orientations lie at their center? In short, what are we doing with our time on this earth?

For many of us in the modern West, the idea of a life practice as distinct from a professional practice can feel odd. We are used to a model whereby our professional careers form the center of our lives, and the lion’s share of our time, talent, and energy goes into that. The rest of our lives are viewed as “free time”— a bit of this and a bit of that, with no overarching aim or orientation. The practice of philosophy invites a different approach to life, one which brings the many different spheres under a common aim or purpose: that of living wisely and well. Practicing philosophy in this sense means really heeding Socrates’ call to lead an examined life— a life of careful attention and worthy cultivation. This type of examination is not intellectual but practical, earthy, mundane. We do it not just in the classroom or when reading a book or discussing a podcast, but when making and consuming our breakfast; when dropping our kids off at school; when speaking to the checkout clerk; when reading the news or posting on social media. Our lives are fertile ground for the growth of wisdom; practicing philosophy means tilling the soil and tending the crop.

Before I got caught up in seeking accolades and academic prestige, I came to philosophy because of a genuine desire to understand myself and my place in the world. This may seem a lofty or cerebral aim, but the main drive for me was emotional and spiritual. I grew up under rough conditions. We were poor; things were unstable. I sometimes developed elaborate schemes to steal food from a local gas station when my mother was away at work and we were out of food. I was quite good at this, and I took a lot of pride in my ability to game the system. And then I’d be pricked by my conscience— was this wrong? What if I got caught? Why do I feel guilty if it’s not my fault that I don’t have food to begin with? Such questions would lead on to more general musings about the nature of fairness, the weight of guilt, the flimsiness of conventional ideas about “right” and “wrong.”

In the midst of those musings I was groping, however inarticulately, toward an understanding of my humanity. I wanted to understand myself— first-personally, from the inside, from the perspective of my own intimate and subjective experience. It took me many years to figure out how to do that, and along the way I’ve found the great wisdom teachers of the past to be incredibly helpful.

I experienced a lot of confusion and isolation as a child. As one does. How to respond to that? I had no idea. With little in the way of traditional guidance, I came into adult life saddled with a host of vices and a lot of ignorance about myself and the world. I was also by that time quite bitter and arrogant, which didn’t help. How does one work with arrogance? How to soothe the astringent pains of a bitter soul? Why would one even want to do these things? It can be pleasant to indulge in our bitterness, to nurse our arrogance until it gets so big it hides the hurt of our own shortcomings. There’s a certain kind of self-satisfaction in all of this. How do we get past that?

Wisdom is what helps us get a handle on questions like these. It helps us to see the specific questions that are relevant for our own life circumstances— the questions we need to wrestle with in order to grow and mature and live in accord with our highest ideals. Wisdom is about seeing the details of your life in a way that promotes clarity about what’s truly good, noble, worthwhile. (And it helps you see what’s better left alone.)

The “clarity” I refer to here is not an intellectual knowing but a kind of seeing, a kind of perception. We might call it “seeing with clarity and conviction,” for wise seeing brings with it wise response. This is why wisdom is associated with balance. It has a depth and a firmness to it. When we see things clearly, we feel grounded in that clarity— even when there’s nothing much we can do to improve the situation, we feel a kind of nobility in facing up to that truth.

Let me give an example. The conditioning of my mind is such that I have a tendency to carry on little verbal battles in my head, often with people who are nowhere in sight. It’s really quite absurd. I’ll just be sitting there or doing some task and I start sparring with someone. Sometimes they’re real people from my life, people I have difficulties with. Sometimes I’m sparring with no one in particular—just defending myself against some imaginary challenger, as if I’m in a perpetual courtroom or debate. Little mental programs start running, and my mind will start generating arguments, criticisms, disputations. Then it starts formulating responses. “You don’t know what it’s like.” “That’s wrong because…” “I can’t do that because…” “Yeah, well maybe if you would have done like I told you to…” and on and on.

None of this is a conscious endeavor on my part, and I’m sometimes only dimly aware that it’s going on. Sometimes, being aware of it, I can stop it through willpower. But not always. And when I stop it that way it often starts right back up again after not too long. It’s exhausting; it saps away my energy and vitality, and then I walk around wondering why I’m so tired when all I did today was… and so on.

Such programs do not need to be suppressed through willpower in order to cease. When I am able to see clearly what’s happening — when there’s enough calm and spaciousness and sensitivity in my mind — then things appear in a very different light. I see this whole interplay of challenge and defense as a certain kind of poison in the mind. It really looks that way: I can see the noxious fumes, the sapping of energy, the sheer uselessness of it all. And I see the impersonal nature of it: this is just old habit energy chugging along, each recrimination and response adding steam to the train. And in that seeing everything shifts. The program slows down. Emotions loosen up. Sometimes a short little peal of laughter wells up from somewhere deep within. And then the whole thing fizzles out. Space. Clarity. Peace. This is the nature of things.

None of this is arrived at by way of reasoning or argument. I might formulate certain thoughts to myself as a way of expressing what I see: this is unhelpful; it’s poisoning my heart; it goes nowhere useful. But even these words are a bit of a distortion of the actual experience. It’s not that I apply some general idea about “poison” or “unhelpfulness” to my experience. Rather, that’s how the whole program appears to me in the moment— I see it as poison. The words are something I use after the fact to describe the insight, but the insight itself is direct and immediate.

Wisdom is what enables us to have this kind of pre-verbal experience of insight. It’s what allows us to see the details of our lives with clarity and conviction.

All of this is in contrast with the orientation I have when I’m in the sparring thoughts, hashing out the arguments, mounting my defenses, meting out an appropriate amount of blame, etc. When I’m in the thoughts — or perhaps I should say, when I’m taken in by them— then even that little voice in my head that says “Hey, this is exhausting, it’s not useful” doesn’t really link up with any deeper knowing. And so it’s impotent; it doesn’t have any real effect. What’s helpful here are not the words or ideas that the thinking mind brings onto the scene, because those ideas just get entered into the same embattled arena. It’s like putting one more gladiator into the fight. It might shift the balance in a particular direction, but it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the game. It’s still a fight, and it’s still exhausting.

With wisdom, though, there’s a kind of stepping back, a slight disengagement, a shift of perspective. Ah, this is what’s happening now. And then there’s a response. It happens of its own accord. We don’t have to do anything. This is our natural intelligence coming to the fore. As that grows, one starts to see the intimate contours of one’s life more clearly in terms of what’s helpful and unhelpful, skillful and unskillful, wholesome and unwholesome. And the clarity of that seeing brings with it a kind of conviction, the conviction to incline towards the skillful.

Seeing this, we can perhaps see why the growth of wisdom requires not just the development of intellectual skill, but a commitment to responsibly managing one’s own inner life.

So, why “ancient wisdom for modern minds?”

Wisdom is about clear seeing, and this is something we can train, something we can grow in ourselves. How do we do that? We do it by living in a certain way. There’s no substitute. Wisdom grows in fertile souls, and we make our souls fertile by tending them with care. Thankfully, we can learn from good gardeners who have done this work before. My two guiding stars here are Socrates and the Buddha—two truly remarkable human beings who lived roughly 2500 years ago. There is much to be learned from the example they set. And one doesn’t need a lot of advanced knowledge to do that. Socrates was a humble stone worker, only partly literate at best. The Buddha left the world of rarified princely duties and discourses behind for a life of alms mendicancy. And yet they both managed to provide extraordinarily profound teachings whose power reverberates to the present day. They did this largely through the example of their lives. They did it by tending the garden. By looking to their example, we can learn to tend our own gardens.

It’s an amazing fact that we moderns can learn from the examples and teachings of those who lived long ago. But this can be a challenge. We live in a very different world— a highly regimented world, fast-paced and thoroughly mechanized. There are many wonderful things about this world that we’ve fashioned for ourselves, but it does have a tendency to cut us off from some basic and important truths. Such as the truth that we are a part of this earth; that we are all subject to aging, sickness and death; that pain and unpleasantness and inconvenience are unavoidable in this life; that our own hearts and minds and bodies are sensitive, feeling, organic things, not mere machines; and that this sensitivity is deeply affected by moral and spiritual qualities. Of course, we may know many of these truths on an intellectual level, but we don’t often see the world or ourselves in their light. And we often don’t feel their full significance. Thoughts for us tend to stay at the level of verbalization and conceptualization, and they don’t fully penetrate the heart— a distinctive plight of the modern, highly literate and highly abstract mind.

Although certain core truths about the human condition have not changed since ancient times, the specific shape and contours of our minds are likely different in important ways than they were in the time of Socrates and the Buddha. Because of the world we live in, most of us probably spend more time in our heads and less time in our hearts and our bodies. We certainly spend more time being distracted, entertained, stressed out, and just getting pressurized by the ever-thrumming pulse of the modern world. We are more abstract, more literate, more informed, more efficient— and more alienated from ourselves. All of that shapes how we see things. And so it can be a real challenge to work our way into the words of a Socrates or a Buddha, to really get what they are saying, not just as a kind of verbal comprehension, but to grasp it from the inside, to feel it in our hearts.

So one needs to do some work in order to bridge that gap— to make the ancient teachings come alive for minds that have trouble hearing them. This isn’t so much a matter of updating the teachings as it is of finding ways to grasp them deeply in one’s own experience—and then to convey what one has grasped to others. This is what the most skilled philosophers and dharma teachers are able to do. I don’t claim to be especially skilled at it myself. But I do the best that I can, and sometimes people have found my attempts to be helpful. Hence the creation of this website.

Some elements of practice

Here are some things I have found helpful in practicing philosophy in the sense described above. I’ll try to write more about them in future reflections.

Slow reading. I occasionally come across videos advertising some new technique or other that will enable you to read 10 novels a week. My students sometimes brag that they can get through their readings twice as fast by finding the audio version and cranking up the speed. I recommend doing the opposite. Learn to read slowly. Read meaningful things and let them sink in. Pause frequently. Be sparing and judicious in thinking and analyzing. Allow enough space to feel what you are reading, to let it move you emotionally and spiritually. Such movements occur within a broad space of humble silence. Practice reading in a way that cultivates that space.

When I was in college, I studied English and Russian Literature. In those fields you are trained to read and analyze literary texts. You come up with a thesis and you argue for it. In my case this often involved a heavy dose of theory. A bit of Marxist analysis here, some Freudian perspective there, and a few hermeneutic or semiotic whizzbangs thrown in for good measure. It was fun and interesting, but it did not nourish my soul.

Here’s a picture in contrast. One night some years ago I was reading my favorite novel, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and when I got to an important confession scene, I found myself setting the book aside and kneeling down beside my bed to pray. I felt so deeply something about the power of forgiveness, something somehow mysterious and unsayable, that I was moved to tears. I could not explain this or put it into words. I am not a Christian and I don’t pray. But I was moved, and something about the imagery of the Christian religion that I’d absorbed through growing up in a Western culture — combined, of course, with the symbolism and imagery in the book — felt deeply resonant in that moment. And prayer felt like an appropriate response. That’s the power of slow reading.

Meditation. This has been by far the most powerful practice for cultivating wisdom in my life. More than any reading, discussing, studying, or reflecting, it is meditation that has helped me to get a straight handle on the crooked timber of my soul. Meditation lies at the very center of my life; it is that which fuels my entire practice of philosophy. There are many approach and styles, and different ones work for different people. After many years of practice and exploration I’ve found that a firm commitment to the Buddhist path of meditation and cultivation is the one that really speaks to me. Feel free to explore my meditation page if you are interested in learning more about my approach.

Ethical commitment. The Buddha said that virtue is the basis for wisdom. This idea is widely shared among the sages of old. Socrates left behind his youthful zeal for philosophical speculation about the heavens in order to orient his life around ethical questions of how to live. He was convinced that this is where any true seeker must begin their journey. Plato considered knowledge of the good to be the highest form of knowing, that from which understanding of all else flows.

These ideas are all gesturing at a profound truth. By making an effort to live a life of virtue and integrity, we clean our minds and make them fit for insight. The felt energy of virtue is stable and upright. We need that kind of stability for wisdom to arise, for wisdom cannot grow in a wavering mind. It needs strong roots. That’s where ethics comes in.

One needs to tread carefully here, though. Ethics is a tricky topic for many people because it can so easily bring up feelings of guilt or self-righteousness. The type of practice I have in mind is not about stirring up those feelings. It’s about taking responsibility for our lives. It’s about getting in touch with that which truly nourishes us; it’s about bringing care and sensitivity to the way we treat ourselves and others.

In my own life, I’ve found the five Buddhist precepts to be a very helpful starting place for cultivating an ethical practice. A quick Google search could provide you much useful information about that if you are curious to learn more. I will also try to write more about this in a future reflection.

Okay, that’s it for now. May these thoughts be of some use to you in your journey to live wisely with joy and with purpose. :)