Self As Spiritual Prisoner

Self as Spiritual Prisoner Plato (429-347 BCE) was born an aristocrat, a member of one of Athens' most powerful families. Plato was on the way to becoming a composer of tragic dramas when his life was decisively changed by meeting Socrates (470399 BCE). Many have noted that the sheer brilliance of Plato's writings strongly suggests that even if he hadn't met Socrates, Plato would nonetheless be known to us— that there would have been four great writers of Greek tragedies, that Plato's name would be joined to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The idea of contemplation is extremely important in Plato. Contemplation: 'looking at,' 'seeing,' 'witnessing.' Plato never lost the touch of his early training as a tragedian, and

he regards the various levels of human experience as various levels of theater. For example, consider the Myth of the Cave. There are portrayed three distinct levels of theater: 1. the theater of shadows 2. the theater of realities 3. the theater of the myth itself, which portrays both. Despite Socrates' claim that the prisoners of the cave are "like to us," they are emphatically not— specifically we have a perspective that they lack. As readers of Plato's myth, we are already "en route": we see what the cave-dwellers do not— that they live life from a limited perspective. We see the inferior theater of the cave from two superior perspectives: the (2) theater of reality and the (3) theater of the Myth of the Cave.

That is the stage-setting; what then is the drama? The drama is an archetypal one— the quest for freedom. The prisoners sit locked in place, as Plato tells us, "their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads." If you've seen the film A Clockwork Orange, recall the 'treatment' against violence given to the character Alex: his head is locked in place and he's forced to look at the flickering shadows of films. That's the idea; that's how things are at the bottom of the cave. The cave-prisoners never see realities, but unsteady and flickering shadows of realities, shadows cast onto the cave wall in front of them by the dancing, unsteady light of a fire. An undignified and dismal situation. Now the good news: escape is possible. Escape is possible, yes, but not easy. Escape requires effort and discomfort. It entails

being freed from the seat into which one finds oneself locked, turning round, seeing the real condition of the cave, making the ascent out of the cave into the sunlight, the sunlight where for the first time one is able to see realities rather than turbid shadows of realities. And in this glorious sunlight, one is free. But every step toward the sunlight is painful and confusing. Why? Because as humans we have been habituated to take the dark circumstances of the cave as the only reality— "that's just how it is" we were told, and we believed it. Let's take the myth on its own terms: the natural state of human life is debased and far beneath our full capacities. How then did this situation come about? How did I get here? How did you? Plato supports his cave myth with a theory of reincarnation, a theory presented in yet another myth— the Myth of Er, found in Book 10 of the Republic. We needn't spend a lot of time on this myth, our

focus is "How did we get here in the Cave, Plato?" And Plato's answer is that we have been incarnated here, imprisoned in flesh, because of our incapacity to govern the body's appetites and impulses. Just before being reborn, the psyche is submitted to a kind of ordeal: "...they marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness, which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then toward evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things." The river of Unmindfulness, the River Lethe, induces forgetfulness. You are very, very thirsty. You must drink some water from the river. But only the tiniest bit . . . careful!: it is

the water of Unmindfulness. If in previous lives you developed the habit of controlling bodily appetites, you take the smallest of sips, and depart with much of your hard-won wisdom intact. For the rest of us: gub, gub, gub, gub, gub, gub.... And here we are: in the cave, remembering nothing, abjectly identified with our body and its appetites, utterly committed to the delusion that our highest hope is to feel good, to gratify our appetites, to go shopping. Recall the three levels of theater in the Myth of the Cave. What does our superior perspective, the perspective of the myth itself in which both the cave and upper sunlight regions are depicted, what does this show us? Several things. But let's start with the most obvious: the myth portrays people held as prisoners in an underground cave. To return to Socrates' claim that the prisoners are "like to us," it is clear that Plato means to liken this dismal scene to what we ordinary

folks— you and I, my friend— what we are pleased to call "the real world." Another way of describing this "real world" is to say that it is the world delivered to us through our senses. And our senses, of course, are rooted in our bodies. The "cave" that Plato presented us, then, can be understood in two ways: (a) as the world perceived through the bodily senses and (b) as the body itself. And in regard to both, the punch of Plato's myth turns on the idea of imprisonment: we are imprisoned in the sense perceived world, or nature, and we are also imprisoned in our bodies. The prison from which we can escape, that from which we are freed, is nothing other than our own bodies and the mode of experiencing the world through those bodies. To state the situation in brief: Plato's theory of the self is one that not merely distrusts the body, but disowns it. For Plato, you are not your body; you are a psyche that is

imprisoned in the body, imprisoned in alien matter— matter that drastically blunts the capacities of the psyche. The implications of this underground scenario are profound, and all the more so because of the degree to which they have cast an influence over the entire course of Western civilization. The 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead claimed that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. No doubt Whitehead's assertion sounds like an exaggeration, yet there are reasons for taking it seriously. One of these reasons is that, through the influence of the brilliant theologian St. Augustine (354-430 CE), Plato's attitudes toward the body were incorporated into institutional Christianity. Through Augustine's writings and influence, Christianity became "Platonized." Specifically, the self in its natural state was taken to be in a squalid condition; the true self was taken to be a non-material psyche and not the human

body. More: nature came to be understood as a corrupt and fallen domain, a domain from which freedom was sought, freedom through an ascent to a higher, more real, more valuable realm, the realm of "heaven." The attitudes and values articulated in Plato's Myth of the Cave were incorporated into Christianity and thus mainstreamed into Western culture. Indeed, the Christian ideal of the "soul" or personal spirit, that which survives the death of the body, owes far more to Plato's philosophy than the Judaism out of which Christianity ostensibly emerged. Some of these Platonic values are splendid: an assertion of the need for critical thinking, for not taking circumstances at face value; an aspiration to transcend known horizons; to attempt to be more than you thought you could be. Again, splendid. But in addition, this historically influential myth conveys an ominous freight of contempt

— a contempt for matter, for nature, for the human body. (You're about to get an editorial here, can you tell?) Contempt for material nature, indeed for nature itself, has, over time, helped to generate a dismissive attitude toward nature in the West. There were other historical factors, of course. But a disparagement of nature, coupled with the allure of a 'higher' world, one that is oh so much better than nature, has contributed if only subliminally to the ecological crisis in which the modern world finds itself. Contempt for the body with its appetites and desires, when mixed with Christian notions of sin, guilt, and inherent unworthiness, can yield an ugly cocktail of self-loathing that induces anything but the freedom to which Plato aspired. And this is not justified by virtue of its keeping so many psychotherapists gainfully employed and off the streets.

Contempt for materiality and the body has generated a kind of cognitive dissonance among those who, with utmost sincerity, are committed rethinking our culture's values and sense of the sacred here at the beginning of a new millennium. Because often (not always, but often) such folks express revulsion at the thought that the wet and fleshy brain is inextricably involved in human consciousness. Consciousness is taken to be pure and spiritual; the brain is, well, meat. Straight out of Plato. Contempt for the body and for nature yields, here at the beginning of the 21st century, attitudes toward death that are a quirky combination of sentimentality and horror. On the one hand, a person can be attracted to a vision of spiritual survival of death— like the one dramatized in entertaining films like Ghost and The Sixth Sense.

Again, straight out of Plato. But the same person who thrills to this vision can, with something like another compartment of their mind, see things darkly otherwise. The same

person can also see that personhood and individuality, whether spiritual or psychic or whatever, has shared a developmental trajectory with the body and, in every likelihood, will share the dissolution of the body. And so: when death is considered casually, in connection with life-insurance or in elevated conversation, lovely images of spiritual beings may be invoked. But should death confront us profoundly, say, in the form of an unhappy medical diagnosis, we may find ourselves unable to invoke images of lovely spirits and instead feel ourselves confronted by death as a specter of horror. And this horror is grounded not in realistic assessment, but in the fact that we have avoided realistic assessment through our invocation of lovely spirits when the idea of death came to mind. Then, on that grim day, death confronts us as a horror, as a ghastly and outrageous reality.

I said this was an editorial, right? If you disagree, good. Do so with vigor!

The Man Who Woke Up His name was Siddhartha Gautama. He is thought to have lived from 563―483 BCE. He was a human being. He was nothing more than human. This last point may sound like stating the obvious yet, in the story of Buddhism, it is of extraordinary significance. (Details to follow shortly.) Siddhartha was born to a royal family. His father, so the story goes, was a king. This king was told that his son was born to greatness, that he would be either the world’s greatest political leader or he would be the world’s greatest religious teacher. Like many fathers, Siddhartha’s dad wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. To promote this hope, he surrounded the boy with luxury and distraction. There were beautiful people, fine

food, elegant music, grand elephants― I’m always reminded of the lines from Samuel Coleridge’s poem "Xanadu": "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. . ." Surroundings designed to deflect any budding interests in religious concerns. Or so the thinking went. And the plan worked― up until Siddhartha was about thirty years old. Then, one version of the legend goes, Siddhartha’s charioteer got it in his mind to show the young man something of the real world. Then, as you’ve read in the section titled "The Three Sorrows," Siddhartha was confronted with the realities of old age, sickness, and death. The pleasure dome was just not the same. Siddhartha developed a firm determination to discover the causes of human misery, and a means to overcome that misery. He left his father’s domain; he left his wife and young son. He traveled from one teacher to the next, studying among various Hindu yoga-

masters. Finally, Siddhartha took up with a group called Jains. The Jains were dedicated to non-injury, and to a radically ascetic lifestyle. Siddhartha joined them, and engaged in what might be fairly termed as savage selfdiscipline. Then, after a few years, he left the Jains. He went off by himself, he ceased his ascetic discipline, he ate, he washed, he slept. He was no longer an ascetic, but he was as determined as ever to find the root cause of human suffering. Legend has it that Siddhartha sat under a ficus tree, known to us as the Bo Tree. He was resolved not to get up until he’d understood the dynamics of human misery. He attained a realization; he was infused with confidence that he could teach this realization to other. He returned to the Jain community that he’d left earlier, to a group of friends that he’d made in that community. The Jains, recall, were radical ascetics, they were after their fashion the "tough guys" of

religious practice. Characteristic of tough guys, Siddhartha’s Jain friends kept their distance― in their eyes, he'd wimped-out. But as Siddhartha approached them, there was something about his presence that impressed them. A passage from "The Middle Path" section of the Text tells what happened next: But when the Blessed One approached in a dignified manner, they involuntarily rose from their seats and greeted him in spite of their resolution. Still they called him by his name and addressed him as "friend Gotama." When they had thus received the Blessed One, he said: "Do not call the Tathagata by his name nor address him as 'friend'. . ." [2-3]

The Jain friends are then said to have asked "What, then, are you?" And Siddhartha, so the story goes, answered "I am awake." And thus the career of the Awakened One, the Buddha, began. (The word buddhi means awake.)

Thus "the Buddha" is a title, not a surname, not Siddhartha's last name. And the Buddha proved to be a master teacher: he brought his friends to the realization of "awakeness"― he brought them to be Buddhas themselves― in short order. We now return to a point mentioned earlier: Siddhartha Gautama, the man who woke up, the man who became a Buddha, (the Buddha, for many, in acknowledgment of his origin of the teaching)― this extraordinary individual was a human being. Just like you and me. He was not a god, he was not informed or inspired by a god; his insights and teaching were the result of his own determination and brilliance. He was a human who developed a unique understanding of what it is to be human. He did not offer a new theory of nature, or another in the great Indian tradition of sophisticated metaphysics. He offered human insight into the human condition.

An important implication of all this, not always acknowledged by later Buddhist traditions, is that the Buddha is a teacher. As such, he is not to be worshipped, but studied. Better, his teaching is to be studied. As we’ll see, some schools of Chinese Buddhism see reverence for the teacher, reverence for the Buddha, as a major impediment to the realization of Buddhahood. No worship, no excessive reverence; no razzle-dazzle, no woo-woo. Just a method. Nothing fancy. The Buddha's ideas, which came free of complicated theology and philosophy, were addressed to lay persons as well as to monks— no antecedent spiritual qualification needed. It’s clear that, in the context of traditional Hinduism, the Buddha is revolutionary. He rejected the caste system, a monentous innovation in the context of Indian culture. Further, he rejected the authority of the central Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads. He,

and those who followed him, were no longer Hindus. In this, his revolution from the mother-tradition to which he was born was far more radical than that of another great religious innovator― Jesus. Jesus lived and died a Jew; his later followers, even those who did not see themselves as Jews, still acknowledged the Jewish scriptures as part of their Bible, as the "Old Testament." Before turning to the details of the Buddhist teaching, something must be said about the approach of the Buddha. He has been called an "anti-metaphysical pragmatist." Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy and religion that deals with the question "What is there?" The Buddha refused to be involved in what he took to be idle and distracting speculation― an intellectual diversion that prevented a direct engagement of human misery. A human has only one intelligent concern, according to the Buddha― the elimination of the conditions that make human

life unhappy. To this end, one of the most important stories of the Buddha is what you’ve read in the section titled "An Enquiry into a Poisoned Arrow." There, we find the following questions dismissed as distractions: 1. Is the world eternal or not eternal? 2. Is the world infinite of finite? 3. Is the soul the same as the body or are they different? 4. Does the Buddha exist after death or does he not exist?

The importance of this dismissal is that these question are central concerns in most religions― certainly so in the Hindu religion that the Buddha had left behind. Equally, the reader will no doubt recognize, these questions are central to the Christian religion. If not with such urgent questions, then, what was the focus of the Buddha's concern? They are known as the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths are expressed in various ways throughout the vast Buddhist

literature; the rendering presented in the section of your reading is only one of many. They can be summarized this way: 1. There is dukkha. 2. Dukkha is caused. 3. Dukkha can be eliminated by eliminating its causes. 4. There is a method, a way, to accomplish this. There is dukkha. Often, indeed usually, dukkha is translated as "misery," or "suffering." Many scholars of Buddhism point out that this is mistranslation because it is an incomplete rendering of the concept of dukkha. Words like "suffering" and "misery" tell only a part of the story of dukkha, and not the most dangerous part at that. Dukkha involves not only pain, yes, but it also involves also the pleasure that keeps us hooked into the cycle of pleasure and pain. It is the cycle of pleasure/pain, of joy/sorrow, that constitutes dukkha. Pleasure and joy are

the "fun" side of dukkha that keeps us in the game, they are what keeps us buying tickets on the roller-coaster ride of agonies and ecstasies that is life as we experience it. The point here is of extraordinary importance: we are deeply invested in the conditions of our dukkha; for all the noisy lamentations that go on during the "down" sides of the cycle, we jealously and fiercely defend (to ourselves and to others) the cycle itself. "Mine!" Is this making sense? Dukkha is caused. For a moment, I'll be a bit crude. You've seen the bumper-sticker, you've heard it said often enough: "Shit happens." Dukkha is unlike shit in this crucial sense― it doesn't just "happen." Dukkha, it is said, is caused. This may sound like a trivial point, but in fact it is momentous: because dukkha is caused, a coherent strategy can be invoked to end it. The claim that dukkha is caused elicits in the mind a spirit of inquiry― what causes it?

We'll consider these causes in more detail soon. For now, they may be stated simply: dukkha is caused most fundamentally by ignorance; it is maintained through cravings and aversions― cravings and aversions in regard to an understanding of life that is rooted in ignorance. And in regard to both elements of the causes of dukkha, you are the principle actor.

Dukkha can be eliminated by eliminating its causes. To say it again, the focus is on you. We're not talking about sin, here― you haven’t done anything wrong. You are, as we'll see, involved in an entirely natural mistake. The ignorance in which you're so enmeshed is more a misinterpretation than anything else. Specifically, you take what you actually experience and misinterpret it into something you really never experienced. And then― this is where it hurts― you become desperately invested in that misinterpretation. But

because it's you who has misinterpreted, because it's you who is so desperately invested, it can only be you who works out the tangle that is dukkha. No salvation here, folks― if liberation from dukkha is going to happen, self-realization is the way. You can only do it for yourself. So it goes. There is a method, a way, to accomplish this. And there is a way: this is what might be taken as the "good news" of Buddhism. There is a way out of bondage to the cycle of dukkha― a path― the Eight-fold Path enumerated in the presentation of the Fourth Noble Truths in your text. That Eight-fold Path is elaborated in another important early Buddhist text, the Dammapada. We’ll come back to the Eight-fold Path in a moment. For now, however, let’s consider what success looks like in the Buddhist quest for liberation from dukkha.

Liberation, in the Buddhist view, is a state in which the ignorance at the root of dukkha has been replaced with a realistic understanding of life, in which the cravings attendant on ignorance have been calmed, have been extinguished. This state of liberation, called nirvana, is another way of characterizing being awake― it is a state in which one has become a Buddha. The Buddha said very little about nirvana by way of positive statements. It is described in largely negative terms: the very word nirvana has negative connotations― "blown out," as in the blowing out of a candle's flame. Nirvana is cessation: the cessation of ignorance, the cessation of craving, the cessation of dukkha. The Buddhist doctrine of nirvana is not easy to understand in the modern West. The reason for this follows from the Buddhist diagnosis of the normal human condition. The first of the so-called Noble Truths is that life is dukkha. And the term dukkha, recall, is

typically mistranslated as "suffering" or "misery." Our normal joys and "highs" are a part of the cycle of dukkha. Our aspirations are formulated and pursued from within the context— the cyclic net— of dukkha. That is the Buddhist diagnosis. So when we hear of nirvana as a hopeful possibility, we naturally seek to understand it in terms of the biphasic cycle in terms of which we experience our life— in terms of dukkha. We are excited by the prospect of a transformative experience, but we seek to understand it through our untransformed minds. It is entirely natural that we do this. When we ask about something good, or something transformative, we inevitably ask from within the nexus of what is familiar to us; we both inquire and seek to understand in terms of the cycle of dukkha. We think about nirvana. We consider that it is a blowing out of the misdirected cravings that drive us, cravings

based on a false understanding of the self and things and people we encounter in the world— false understandings rooted in the process of reification. With one side of our mind that makes sense. On reflection, however, the prospect can come to sound dull and flat. The term "nihilistic" comes to mind. The passion, the emotional fire that makes life sing and dance. All that is to be— blown out? The term "apathy" comes to mind, with all its negative associations. Suddenly it all sounds sad and torpid, and this calls forth the hero in us. Yes: if I must suffer in order to experience the grand passions of life, then suffer I must. My splendid intensity, for better and for worst, is me, and I shall live my life on its terms or I shall not live with authenticity. Put otherwise: I gotta be me! Music by Mahler if you like— up with a swell. Okay, turn the music down now. We typically try to understand in terms of what we know. And in the Buddhist view, what we know, what

we have experienced, is dukkha. Nirvana is an alternative to that vacillation between joy and sorrow; it is alternative to living now in a state of unrealistic hope, and now in an equally unrealistic state of despair. Although, if all you know are these two states that are the "moments" dukkha, you are likely to confuse nirvana with that "blown out" state of self-defeat and despair that is the down side of dukkha. It is worth repeating that, according to the Buddhist theory of dukkha, happiness and unhappiness have a reciprocal relationship; our joys are complicit in our sorrows. We return, now, to the promise of the Fourth Noble Truth— that there is a method, a way, to attain the insight that dispells ignorance and quenches the fires of craving. The Eightfold ath is mentioned. And if you check your text, you'll see that the first step of the Eight-fold Path is Right Views.

That the Buddha was an anti-metaphysical pragmatist means that he rejected arcane metaphysical speculations. He did not reject what he took to be common sense. And for him, common sense (what he calls Right Views) was a feet-on-the-ground orientation to your own experience. Right views do not concern splendid visions of reality, or the cosmos; Right Views are common sense insights into experience. Not experience in the abstract, now, but into your experience, your everyday experience. Among the most important of the Right Views are those listed in the section titled "The Three Characteristics of Experience." They are these: 1. Everything in experience is transitory. 2. Everything in experience is dukkha. 3. Everything in experience lacks permanent self.

We’ve already covered the second characteristic― that everything you experience is bound up in a cycle of dukkha. So let’s look at the first: that everything we experience is transitory. The Buddhist assumption is that change, not permanence, is the reality we experience. The problem is that we humans have a misdirected tendency to seek well-being in terms of permanence rather than the change that is the only reality we encounter. The "things" we encounter in experience are better described as events. And we tend to translate those events into things through a process that has been called "reification." Reification from the Latin word for "thing"― re. At times we are aware of the process of reification: we say "The weather is bad today." We speak of "the weather" as if it were a thing, but we're aware that "weather" is in fact a combination of processes. That awareness keeps this reification from being

dangerous. There are other times― most of them in fact― when we impute "thingness" to what we experience and are blind to the reification in which we are engaging. But this is getting too abstract. Consider, for example, the following illustration. Look at it, and ask yourself: How many black dots are there at the intersections of the lines? Obviously there is a bunch of them, because you see them― right? Or do you?

You see the black dots; without doubt you experience them. Equally evident, however, is the reality of those dots: they wink in out of your experience, they are eminently transient. For all that you experience them, cursory analysis makes it clear that they have no permanent existence. The black dots are events, they are not things. And just that, in the Buddhist view, characterizes everything you experience. No exceptions, absolutely none. Just that is the first thing you need to know about your experience. Just that is the beginning of Right Views. Just that is the first step to nirvana. Now take the idea of radical transience and apply it to the most seductive mode of reification― the self. The self with which you identify is no exception to the reality of transience. You speak of a self, you think of your self as some permanent. But in the Buddhist view, all you’ve ever actually experienced is a series of winking and

blinking moments of feelings, sensations, memories, and suchlike. These moments of experience are all you’ve ever experienced. And there’s nothing permanent among them. They― the moments themselves― tell the whole story. This yields a surprising orientation to an important question to which the various world philosophies address themselves. "Whatis there?"― what is the nature of the reality we experience? According to the Buddha's analysis, all there is exactly what you’ve experience― and nothing besides. And what of the self that experiences? You are exactly what you experience― and nothing besides. This orientation is surprising because it is so utterly pedestrian and common-sensical: no metaphysical fireworks, no whiz-bang realization of transcendence. What’s real is nothing other than what you experience. This commitment on the part of Buddhism is sometimes called psychological realism.

The question is not Do you agree?― the question is Does this make sense to you? Your life is dukkha for no other reason than your desperate attachment to something you’ve never experienced! (A sense of humor is very helpful here.) These are the basics of the original Buddhist teachings. But a remarkable punctuation to those teachings is found in the Buddha’s Farewell Address and in the Kalama Sutra. The Buddha’s attitude seems to have been― "Here is the teaching: try it for yourself; don’t just believe it on the basis of authority." Look: From the Buddha's Farewell Address: "Therefore, O Ananda, be lamps unto yourselves. Rely on yourselves, and do not rely on external help. [13] Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Seek salvation alone in the truth. Look not for assistance to any one besides yourselves." [14]

From the Kalama Sutra: It is proper for you, Kalamas, to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher.'

This disposition to keep authority, emphatically including Buddhist authority, at a critical distance is one that persists in the Buddhist tradition. Those attracted to philosophy and religion as consolation will inevitably be given to attitudes of reverence and obedience to authorities outside themselves. That human tendency is discouraged in the original Buddhist teaching.

"You let yourself get all worked up over nothing." —Mom In fact the word 'nothing' is an overstatement. But both the Buddha and Epicurus would tell you that your Mom was making an important point. We fret and pray and weep and fight over a fundamental misconception about the self— we are desperately invested in the well-being and future prospects of something that really doesn't exist. Where Plato cautions us not to take our everyday experience at face value, to see the extent to which our senses distort and falsify reality, thinkers like the Buddha and Epicurus tell us to take everyday experience entirely seriously. Analyze your experience dispassionately, scientifically, they

recommend, and you will come to a wisdom rooted squarely in that experience. One might say that, on the one hand, the Buddha and Epicurus side with the African wisdom tradition in their insistence on the practical, this-life value of philosophy. On the other hand, however, they differ from the African assessment of life in that they see human life as a domain of menace and pain. Where African proverbial wisdom sees life as rich and good and something to be warmly embraced, the Buddha and Epicurus proposed their philosophies as therapies that would overcome the misery and terror of life.

Epicurus Epicurus lived from 342-270 BCE. His philosophical training center, or school, was originally set up (the year was 306) in a garden in Athens, and came to be called "the Garden." Epicurus lived in what is known

as the Hellenistic period, which dates roughly from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE until about 200 CE. The Hellenistic world embraced the entire Mediterranean basin— Greece and Rome and all of southern Europe, the Middle East, and northern Africa. The Hellenistic world came to be seen as a cultural 'cosmos'— a world. To be a citizen of that world was to be "cosmopolitan" (a word coined by Hellenistic thinkers) in a sense very similar to the way in which we use it today. In Hellenistic cosmopolitanism, one's birthplace meant far less than it had in earlier times; residence was increasingly accidental, rather than definitive. To the extent that people were cosmopolitan, they were to that degree less an Athenian, an Alexandrian, a Theban, a Sicilian, etc. Indeed, local communities were all but eclipsed by the huge Mediterranean cosmopolis. And the cosmopolitan individual was connected not to

the familiar community of her or his birth, but to a vast and impersonal welter of power and change. For many, the psychological ambience of Hellenistic cosmopolitanism was one of insecurity. Older cultural identities, the ancient gods of one's home city— too often these were powerless to mitigate that sense of insecurity. And just this is a key to Epicurus's philosophical mission: his teaching, like that of the Buddha, was first and last therapeutic. And like the Buddha, Epicurus saw the common human condition as one of suffering, a suffering grounded in ignorance. Perhaps he was less charitable in his assessment than the Buddha, for Epicurus's diagnosis of the natural human state has a wicked edge: "Most men when they rest are as in a coma; and when they act are as mad." (Vatican Sayings.1) And again like the Buddha, Epicurus believed that human wisdom (in the form of his own

teaching, naturally) was able to overcome that suffering. Epicurus's philosophy is an alternative outlook— one proposed in opposition to two trends gaining huge momentum in the Hellenistic world. They are these: Platonism. By now, because you've dealt with his Allegory of the Cave, you're familiar with the basics of Plato's philosophy. For Epicurus, Plato's philosophy is a headlong dash in the wrong direction. Its non-material conception of Reality, its understanding of the individual human being as a non-material psyche that is imprisoned within the body, imprisoned in nature, its blatant otherworldliness— to Epicurus these serve as an evasion rather than an engagement of life as we experience it. The Mystery Religions. These were generally associated with 'super' gods or goddesses— deities constructed from a

variety of local religions, yes, but these super-deities were conceived as significantly more satisfying to the alienated Hellenistic cosmopolitan than earlier religious. And they were more satisfying because they had power, specifically the power of salvation: they could save their adherents from the pain and death so palpably part of human life. Among these mystery religions were the cult of Isis, the cult of Mithras, and later, the one that proved to be the most successful of the salvation-oriented mystery religions, the cult of Christ. But Epicurus did not teach salvation; he taught self-knowledge. To eliminate suffering, he taught, one must come to know one's own nature; and to accomplish that, one needed to know about the nature of reality. For Epicurus, it can be said, psychology and physics are two aspects of a single discipline. Neither is pursued for its own sake, or merely out of intellectual curiosity. Knowledge of

both is needed to eliminate suffering— and that is the sole purpose for studying them. Here's how he puts in the Principle Doctrines: "A man cannot dispel his fear about the most important matters if he does not know what is the nature of the universe but suspects the truth of some mythical story. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure." P.D.xii What exactly do we need to know about the nature of the universe? Nothing that is not revealed to us in experience. Again: like the Buddha, Epicurus grounds all his theories squarely in human experience. And of nature, he says: "...The whole of reality consists of bodies and space (that is, of atoms and the void, or empty space). For the existence of bodies is everywhere attested by sense itself, and it is upon sensation that reason

must rely when it attempts to infer the unknown from the known. And if there were no space (which we call also void and place and intangible nature), bodies would have nothing in which to be and through which to move, as they are plainly seen to move. Beyond bodies and space there is nothing which by mental apprehension or on its analogy we can conceive to exist." (Letter to Herodotus; 2nd paragraph) "The atoms are in continual motion through all eternity. Some of them rebound to a considerable distance from each other, while others merely oscillate in one place when they chance to have got entangled or to be enclosed by a mass of other atoms shaped for entangling." (Letter to Herodotus; 4th paragraph) There are two realities: atoms and the empty space through which atoms move; atoms and the void. The word "atom" is based on the Greek tomon, "to split." Everything we

experience can be reduced to smaller parts; everything we experience is tomon— splitable. Atoms were conceived by Epicurus as tiny, elemental building blocks (as it were) of the physical world, building blocks that cannot be reduced, that are unsplitable— that are atomon, atoms. What about gods— divine beings? Interestingly, Epicurus asserts that they exist, but he reminds us of Rhett Butler as he does so: “Frankly, my dear, they don't give a damn.” Here's the way Epicurus puts it: "there are gods, and the knowledge of them is manifest; but they are not such as the multitude believe . . . the utterances of the multitude about the gods are not true preconceptions but false assumptions; for example, that the gods can be moved to do our bidding through prayers and sacrifices. Care for humans would compromise the blessedness of the gods, whose perfection includes absolute

serenity." (Letter to Menoeceus; 2nd paragraph) No divine help is needed; human resources are sufficient. Epicurus holds that the gods exist because people experience them— he does not call into question the veracity of that experience. The gods serve Epicurus as models of the blessed life— a blessedness rooted in their indifference to humanity. So don't worry: the gods will not be intrusive busy-bodies in your life. And don't embrace foolish hopes that the gods will ride to the rescue in your life like the Lone Ranger: they really just don't care about you. To repeat now: atoms and void tell the whole story of reality. But what then about the human mind, what about consciousness? Like Plato, Epicurus speaks of a soul (=psyche), and holds that the soul is different from the body. Unlike Plato, he insists that both the body and the soul are material. The soul, like

everything else that is real, is comprised of atoms. Of the atomic, material soul, we read: "...we must recognize generally that the soul is a material thing, composed of fine particles (i.e., atoms), dispersed all over the frame, most nearly resembling wind with an admixture of heat, in some respects like wind, in others like heat." (Letter to Herodotus; middle) The human reality, including the human mind, human consciousness, is not separate from nature, but part of it. And like nature, the human mind is material, comprised of atoms. But where is the pleasure in this understanding? Remember, we seen that Epicurus recommends the study of nature because "without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure." (P.D.xii) This brings us to Epicurus's unique conception of pleasure:

"By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinkingbouts and of revelry, not sexual lust, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance...." (Letter to Menoeceus; 3rd paragraph from the end) Pleasure is the supreme human good for Epicurus: pleasure, hedone— the root of our modern word hedonism. Hedonism is in low repute today, for it suggests mindless selfindulgence. But for Epicurus, hedonism is not an "If it feels good, do it" approach to life. Hedonism is a rational and deeply religious life commitment. He says: "And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but will often pass over many pleasures when a greater

annoyance ensues from them. And often we consider pains superior to pleasures when submission to the pains for a long time brings us as a consequence a greater pleasure." (Letter to Menoeceus; middle) Let's go back to your Mom for a second. Her wisdom, recall, was that you let yourself get all worked up over nothing. Now what's the thing that we humans get most worked up about? For the majority, it's death. And in regard to death, Epicurus has some good news: it's nothing. Just like your Mom said, only probably not in exactly the way she meant it. Epicurus: "Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the

yearning after immortality." (Letter to Menoeceus, 3rd paragraph) What impedes our happiness, our pleasure in life, says Epicurus, is fret and bother about an afterlife in which we might be tormented, and a nagging hope for the impossible, for immortality. You will die, and death is annihilation: the atoms that constitute your mind will, upon your death, disperse like smoke in the wind. So while alive you have every reason to live life with pleasure. From the Vatican Sayings: "Remember that your are mortal and have a limited time to live." (#3) "Don't worry, be happy." Shallow advice? Or profound philosophy? What do YOU think?