Discovering Something Old In The New
On the newfound ancient wisdom.
I recently came across something that might as well be the pinnacle of the last seven or so years in the quest for material for my book project. A friend pointed out to me a branch of philosophy that I never knew existed. But the funny thing is that the subject material found in this philosophy is not entirely new to me. It’s called Perennial Philosophy.
Whereas traditional philosophy is interested in the ever-changing updating of information both old and new, Perennial Philosophy is only concerned with universal truths and principles that have existed ever since we have had the ability to write things down.
And so it “reconfigures” the ancient wisdom into a modern paradigm through many philosophers in recent times, such as Alduous Huxley and Frithjof Schuon. And this wisdom isn’t restricted to specific traditions or schools of thought, as it is in the true sense of the word, universal. The people mentioned in this article are merely the “forwarders” of said wisdom.
This suggestion to me came about, when I mentioned to this friend of my search for commonalities in the various thinking patterns of the world, not restricting myself to any particular culture, but taking a holistic approach and as much of them as one person humanly could.
A Brief History of Searching
I started this whole journey by taking an interested in Buddhism in 2016, and that developed into a deeply spiritual thing, which at the same time ventured into Taoism and Zen. I noticed also thanks to Watts and other people, that all the major traditions of the East seem to resemble one another, in some core aspects and concepts.
For example the concept of Emptiness, is inherent both to India and China. In India it takes on the term Sunyata, and in China, Xu, both having the principle of relativity in their centre. Whereas Sunyata means the complete interdepedence of everything, that same interdepedence is present in the whole concept of the Tao, which is really the totality of everything in the universe.
So, fast-forwarding some years, I think I’ve recently nailed down more or less to what could be the key to understanding both Eastern and Western thinking in general. Most of the great cultures have had historically a concept imbedded in them, of recognition of the polarity of phenomena.
Wherein Egypt you have Causality found in Hermeticism, in India you have Interdependence found in Hinduism and Buddhism, and likewise in China, you have Yang and Yin found in Taoism. And they all share this basic principle: that for every and any points or forces, there exist their corresponding points and forces. That they are connected fundamentally.
And this has staggering implications, and near endless applications, to architecture, engineering, arts and crafts, computer science and so on. If you understand for example how waves in nature work, which are a miniature form of this principle, you will understand all kinds of relationships in life that are seemingly polar opposites to each other, see the wave-nature even in things you wouldn’t normally.
The Lesson In Polarity
But the real lesson is that the opposites are one underneath. When you take and apply this to the universe as a whole, you can see that it’s fundamentally a game of two. There is no way you can get a thing to be separate from anything else. Every phenomenon is continuous with every other phenomenon, by the sheer constitution of its relationship to its surrounding phenomena.
And this is not some strange outlandish idea even to our modern sciences. Ecology as a relatively new field, has long since understood that once you describe any living organism, you must include its environment within the description. So, what you are actually describing, is a unified field of behaviour. And that field reaches out into everything in the cosmos.
I find it curious however, that this comes out of the mystery schools more so than any other, and is indeed part of the esoteric teachings of them. Well anyway, polarity. The inseparable reality. And it is that reality that my main work focuses on.
The Problem of Free Will
Now, one might ask, how does cause and effect or the interconnectedness of things amount to Oneness? Well, it’s simply a matter of extension. It also doesn’t imply pure determinism necessarily. Because for example, the existence of free will doesn’t necessarily negate determinism; they can co-exist, as for example in the compatibilism view of free will.
This means that free will isn’t entirely an independently acting agent. This is just my interpretation but, I can make decisions freely doesn’t mean physical laws didn’t determine them. It’s simply being aware of those decisions at the time, and you can direct them. That’s called responsibility. Because event A causes event B, which in turn causes event C in which I dither between options, doesn’t invalidate either the deterministic underlying causes of B and A nor my ability to make a choice C.
In my view time is also not linear, and so this A -> B -> C is just an illusion of a timeline we create in our minds when we want the simplest explanation to happenings. It’s much more fluid than that, and that it being fluid enables free will ultimately to exist alongside with the causal chain.
The whole trick then is, to be aware at any moment, of one’s potential actions. Free will is obviously necessary for society to have any sort of course-correction. That doesn’t mean that it’s current state was not determined by a complex spider’s web of non-linear temporal events, where individual actions are as much as of those events than anything else.
Importance of Oneness
Second thing one might ask is, if our moral actions are not independent from the Oneness, what difference does it make to hold such a view? Well, one thing is that separation breeds alienation. Because separation means disconnection, at least on the political level. That might seem like an oversimplification, but hear me out.
It does it because when you separate something, you are dividing one thing into two or more things. And in the case of people, it is alienation because we start to feel distant from the thing it was divided from. A simple example being human relationships. Such as cutting a couple apart.
And I claim furthermore, that alienation or extreme distance from our environment is the reason why we’re busy destrying our planet. It’s not too big of a leap when we take into account how human psychology works. When you become disconnected from things, you start treating them as if they didn’t matter anymore. The almost sole reason for the antagonism towards nature as it stands, is because we assume that it is quite apart or disconnected from our immediate concerns. So that we can treat it however we want.
There’s a difference between utilising what the planet has to offer as opposed to hostility, because it does so in a way that is least harmful to it, that takes into account its subtle ecology, relationships with all kinds of creatures, and its influence on us.
Furthermore, the act of separating something means on the biological level at the very least, that some signal loss is has taken place. When a system loses a part, it strives to equilibrium in terms of repairing itself. And a system ALWAYS loses some signals when it is separated. That’s in the very meaning of the word divide, it comes from the Latin duo, which means two. To take apart.
So, this Oneness isn’t a diminshing principle that usurps the multiplicity of its capacity. Rather, it contains as a whole, all its parts. And the parts may think they are independent and quite separate from the totality, but it’s beginning to become increasingly clear even through our sciences, that the facts of nature, are in contradiction with the way we ordinary feel as a lonely ego lodged inside the confines of the epidermis.
And it is this what’s at the crux and centre of these ways of life and Perennial Philosophy, I think. The overcoming of the hallucination of the sense of being a separated individual, who feels distant from the stars under which it was born and came out. The recognition of the One in the many.
L.
P.S. I’m not saying all this as my final departure. I don’t think the free will as described here is even close to what I actually see it as. That will be saved for the “real thing.” I was merely playing the role of the comparative philosopher, such as my own teacher was. With the objective of nudging as it were, the reader to possibilities to think and play about. That’s all.
