Anybody who has ever spent time in the halls of academia can see what happens when powerful ideas are reduced to useless chatter—a verbose game for nerds who seriously need to get out more often. By missing the spirit and focusing exclusively on the letter, most scholars become masters of empty philosophizing—pushers of useless knowledge for knowledge's sake. Rather than working to expand joy in our lives, the sterile, overly rational knowledge peddled in academic circles is rarely more than a way to fill our heads with too many notions. This type of knowledge is a heavy burden on the hunched shoulders of scholars. It does little more than inhibit creativity and age the soul.
The knowledge we are after is not to be found among the very rational but very boring intellectuals. But at the same time, I am certainly not preaching the anti-intellectualism popular among fundamentalists, who pride themselves on avoiding the “corrupting” influences of education. What we need is something entirely different. Zen and Taoism tell us that there are three stages to knowledge: The first stage is ignorance, which is where fundamentalism typically finds a home. The second stage is intellectual knowledge, which comes at the price of losing spontaneity and simplicity. Although it is certainly preferable to ignorance, this stage is often too dry, removed from reality, and overly analytical. It teaches us how to dissect and scrutinize existence, but not how to live it. Most people
are stuck in one of these two stages. But it's at the third stage that things get interesting. Here, we let go of the excessive mental baggage accumulated during the second stage and retain only what we need to improve the quality of our lives. This is exactly what Thoreau meant when he wrote, “If you would be wise, learn science and then forget it.”
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Learn it all, let go of the superfluous, and retain the essential. By acquiring knowledge and moving beyond it, we transform knowledge into wisdom. Whereas knowledge is a heavy weight we carry in the head, wisdom is energy dancing in our muscles and keeping us warm at night.
Even though we are limited in what can be communicated through words, the problem with pure reason goes deeper than that. Those who reject the preeminence of faith can rarely do more than put reason on a pedestal. The cult of reason can often become its own faith, leading its followers to reject anything that is not logical, sober, and rationally explained. It buys into the advice given by one of reason's paladin, French philosopher René Descartes, who argued against our fascination with mystery and sense of wonder as primitive emotions to be rejected by a truly civilized man.
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Thanks for this pearl of stupidity, Descartes. Now you can crawl back to your grave. Banish mystery and sense of wonder?!? We may as well banish excitement and joy, and put a bullet in our very rational heads. Logic and reason are extremely valuable—and certainly preferable to most alternatives—but if we dismiss everything that is not perfectly rational, life would be horribly boring. If everyone followed logic, nobody would ever fall in love. Reason is too serious
and restrained. It doesn't have a twinkle in its eye. Being unmoved by irrational impulses, it doesn't know how to dance, how to lighten up, how to roar with laughter. It thrives when it's time for examinations and careful explanations, but it is completely unfamiliar with ecstasy and wild abandon. Being dependent on words and concepts, reason too often stops at the letter of things but can never quite capture their spirit.
If earlier we had ringside seats to the tag team match between Loyola and Luther versus Jefferson and Galileo, we now get to see the championship bout between two of the giants of Greek philosophy. In the blue corner, wearing striped trunks, we have “The father of Western thought,” the reigning champ, the one and only
Aaariiistoootleeeee!
And in the red corner, wearing Yin-Yang trunks, here is “The Riddling,” “The Dark,” “The Paradox Assassin,” our challenger,
Heeeraaaacliiitusssss!
Aristotle, being the strict rationalist that he was, viewed Heraclitus with disdain. Heraclitus, in fact, was a Greek version of Lao Tzu. His writings are the most Taoist ever produced outside of China. Heraclitus' love for paradoxes drove Aristotle crazy. Paradoxes—in Aristotle's very logical mind—are nothing but contradictions. The notion that opposites can go hand in hand makes no sense to him. In Aristotle's thinking, opposites are opposites, and that's the end of it. His philosophy, being perfectly rational, has become the foundation of Western science for over two thousand years. And yet, the discoveries of modern physics demonstrate that Heraclitus was onto something that Aristotle's rigid logic was unable to grasp. Physics tells us that everything, including apparently unchanging solid matter, is in constant movement. Even science today is beginning to see that the essence of life is paradoxical. It turns out that mystics have sometimes gained insights about the nature of the universe that have escaped scientists until now.
This, in my book, is reason's greatest limitation: the inability to deal with life's paradoxical character.
Ultimately, the human soul craves much more than reason alone can deliver. Life's mysteries are too deep and too many for reason to solve them all. This does not mean I'm advocating getting rid of science in favor of trying to fix our problems by meditating under a tree. The scientific method and rational thought can be some of our best allies in discovering how to live in harmony with the world. But like all methods, they can turn into dogmatic perversions if taken too rigidly. When science and reason begin advocating that they are the
only
true, reliable way to gain knowledge, they turn into what Huston Smith calls scientism: an arrogant form of secular fundamentalism that—much like religious fundamentalism—seeks to squash any alternative way of looking at things. As Paul Feyerabend beautifully explained, once a method begins to lose its flexibility and becomes unwilling to admit the possibility of insight coming from other modes of knowledge, it turns into an obstacle to true science. This is true even for the best of methods.
When Europeans first met members of the Iroquois Confederacy, they heard a legend about three sisters who during a time of famine volunteered to shapeshift into plants (namely, corn, squash, and beans) to provide food for the people. In exchange, the tribe would always have to plant the sisters together. At the time, no European thought this story carried any deep scientific meaning. Sisters who shapeshift into plants to feed humans?!? These weird Indians sure do believe in the strangest superstitions! And so Europeans continued planting corn, squash, and beans separately, as they had always done, thereby exhausting the soil very quickly. It was only at a much later date that Western scientists began to understand the nitrogen cycle, and learned that corn, squash, and beans have a symbiotic
relationship helping each plant grow without overtaxing the soil. Just because an insight is not expressed in the language of science does not mean it lacks value.
True science needs to be smarter than this. It needs to be open-minded and employ a variety of methodologies, occasionally even choosing to embrace those that don't obey the dictates of reason. True science should be confident enough to not be afraid of appearing unscientific at times.
Most people are addicted to binary oppositions: good or bad, black or white, masculine or feminine. Driven by this mentality, anyone who rejects faith as a mode of knowledge usually jumps on the reason bandwagon, and vice versa. Even though I take reason over faith any day, I don't like being confined to a single path. What I'm advocating here is an approach to life that transcends all dualisms.
Lao Tzu refers to the Tao, the essence of everything that exists, as a “cosmic mystery,” and I couldn't agree more. Everywhere we turn, mystery surrounds us. For all our flaunted technological achievements, what we understand about the universe is still a drop in the ocean compared to what we don't understand. Our logic and our theoretical models only go so far. So it seems only natural, when faced with mysteries greater than us, that we should be open to any method that can potentially help us.
In ancient Greece, it was said that the Delphic oracle proclaimed Socrates the wisest of men. What made him so wise? Paradoxically, it was the fact that he didn't consider himself wise and was painfully aware of the limits of his knowledge. Lacking the arrogance of those who believe they know everything there's to know, Socrates had to
remain constantly open-minded, ready to experiment with many different paths, and willing to question everything—including his own conclusions.
The Tao Te Ching is in perfect agreement with the Delphic oracle: “Who knows that he does not know is the highest.”
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Doubt, according to them, is the root of all curiosity, all inquiry; and for this reason it is a precious source of wisdom. Dogma works against this. Dogma fears that if it doesn't make bold assertions of having monopoly over the truth, it will appear weak and indecisive. This applies to irrational, faith-based claims to knowing God's will as well as the scientific refusal to even acknowledge anything that can't be proven through the limited confines of a particular methodology. But being so quick to dismiss possible alternatives is not a sign of strength. It is a symptom of insecurity and fear. The truly strong don't have to hide behind a façade of absolute certainty in their ideas, and so are able to stay flexible.
We need to combine the strengths of as many paths to wisdom as possible, without depending on any one of them exclusively. Too often we divide knowledge into tiny compartments, believing that the more we narrow our focus, the better results we'll achieve. In order to reach this goal, we end up devoting all our time and energy to perfecting one particular trade at the expense of all others. This is how the expert is born, and the complete human being dies.
Now, clearly a level of expertise is necessary in any activity. If I am to have heart surgery, I don't care whether my surgeon is also a good poet. As much as I appreciate multitalented people, I want my surgeon to be the most capable expert I can find. But at the same time, some of the greatest advances in any field are often made by outsiders able to look at issues from many different angles. Einstein did some of his best scientific work when he wasn't yet a professional
scientist. Jimi Hendrix couldn't even read music since he had never formally studied it. This kind of genius had not been domesticated by too many rules. And this allowed these two men to experiment in daring ways—something that experts in any one field, being overspecialized, are usually unable to do.
The target of our quest is life, and nothing less. The point is not to dedicate our lives to one particular field of knowledge, but to utilize multiple fields to create better lives. One of the most important skills we can develop is the ability to draw connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, activities, and methodologies. Give me science
and
spirituality. I gladly enlist reason, but not without strong emotions. I want a vibrant mind along with a healthy, powerful body. The pinnacle of refinement needs to go hand in hand with sharp instincts and barbaric passion.
The reason I insist on taking the best from many different paths is because life itself doesn't speak a single language. Interconnectedness is the name of the game. Things are always much more intertwined than a simplistic, linear logic would have us think. Just look at nature and you'll see there are no sharp lines dividing it up into separate compartments. A linear logic, for example, would tell us that wolves have no impact on the fish population in a river. Wolves, after all, don't interact with fish. But they do hunt elk. Elk, in turn, eat shrubs and the bark of trees. In an ecosystem in which their jugulars are the constant targets of wolves, elk are not going to stop for a meal by a river crossing, where it is easier for wolves to attack. This means that the trees there will remain undisturbed, thereby reducing erosion, and helping to regulate the water temperature in ways that will favor fish reproduction and survival. But anyone looking at fish too narrowly would miss this chain of events, and fail to see the connections that are central to the fish's very existence.
This is why I don't reject anything if it holds even modest hopes of turning out useful. As Shakespeare put it, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
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In a similar vein, science tells us that we use only a tiny fraction of our brains. Who knows what possibilities are left to be explored? Intuition and dreams, for example, are typically not considered the most scientific approaches to problem solving, and yet in many cases they have helped where logic could not.
Despite my distrust for the fanaticism that often accompanies faith, prayer doesn't bother me a bit. Maybe there are gods or spirits who listen. Maybe there aren't, but prayer can affect reality anyway by helping someone focus their energy on a particular outcome. In the worst case, it serves as a placebo comforting the person praying and the one the prayer is for. None of these scenarios present a problem for me.
Ultimately, I'm not interested in anything but in what produces results. Even though I'm not a big fan of faith, if by any chance it can help somebody's life without causing harm to others, I have nothing against it.
I have no quarrel with whatever doesn't seek to restrict my range of choices. Actions mean much more to me than stated beliefs. As Thomas Paine wrote, “I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.”
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And this is why I bow to any method, any idea, any philosophy, any religion that encourages human beings to be kinder to each other and to all other living things.