Philosophy is Useless for Self-Actualization

Thinking too much is not important for spiritual life and advancement. As our thoughts matter in directing self-awareness this is especially true when we want to eliminate thoughts and foster observation and bring about a meditative state. This is more to do with directing our thoughts or the lack of and focusing, awareness.

When you dabble in philosophy you automatically think that you can achieve something, but, like peeling the layers of an onion it is utter futility. Philosophizing leads you to a new layer; eventually the layers disappear but in the core you will find nothing of use and your eyes will tear up.

You should try to know, not to think. True knowledge comes from within and not from thinking or reading books.

There are going to be defenders of philosophy and I am not saying philosophy has no use or redeeming values. Philosophy is good and nice but in terms of actual self-realization and transformation it’s as useful as a tit on a board…
Consider from the time of Plato and Socrates what meaningful human transformation have we achieved? Society changed, technology and science have changed, but we have wars now more devastating and potentially earth changing. Someone asked Gurdjieff if mankind would ever evolve beyond wars and do you know what had said? “No”, he said, “Men as is now incapable of not fighting wars in the name of something. It is because men’s level of consciousness individually and in groups had not reached its potential”.
Of course there are exceptions but far and few in between. So while philosophy and Plato’s cave allegory is nice it has not gotten us any further in human consciousness and awareness.

We are capable of killing fighters and innocents in the name of, you have guessed it, Democracy(!), what  philosophers bestowed on us…Now what is the difference of killing in the name of Allah, or Jesus or democracy?
What tangible gain have we gotten from all the philosophers and great thinkers, in terms of getting us to the point of no more killing of each other? Greed and human suffering are all the consequence of this lack of development and ignoring or denying it is as good as putting a lipstick on a pig….

This Universal Knowledge, the ultimate Truth, is already within you, you just have to discover it by dismantling the scaffolds to see the structure. You need to adjust your being to be able to see the Truth and awaken from the dream.

Paradoxically, certain actions, activism and art can often bring about self-transformation. When you discard your self and ego, and embark on expression that elevates and illuminates, you are acting in the public good. You do not act for money or fame; you act for the common good of men. Many artists who were worth anything were starving as commercially their craft and art was not accepted, they were ahead of their time.

These types of acts will not only illuminate the public but foster self-actualization in the artist. Selfless acts in defending the weak and feeble is also acting in the public good and can help in the spiritual transformation. Escaping into the ivory tower and thinking about lofty goals will not gain the same. We must each do what we are put here for. Our dharma is what we are incarnated for and finding, this amounts to finding your happiness and bliss.

The Power of Myth

I am a great fan of Joseph Campbell. He spent his lifetime deciphering and understanding the legends and lore of men. Some of these legends had started when primitive men still lived in caves or sat around the fire that protected and kept him warm.  There were creatures that lurked around in the darkness. Primitive men were not on the top of the food chain back then.

I propose that most (if not all) myths ARE based on some, however remote facts in history. This may seem far-fetched to some but if you use open mind and not look for the exceptions you see the power of this statement. The lore that survived and managed to get documented after hundreds of thousands of years surely must have had some factual basis? Of course, the facts were altered and re-altered multiple times over.

For example giants in the bible are based on facts, this is impossible to prove but at one point in human history men were much larger than now. There are some archeological evidences of humanoid fossils, see web site (paper).

Dracula and some other legends were also historical. It is now a medical fact that there are people who shun the daylight and drink blood as some bizarre medical condition. Last time I went to Transylvania we almost managed to visit Vlad’s castle that is still there.

The legend of Atlantis is important because it shows the temporary nature of civilizations and collective knowledge of men.

“PLATO has preserved for us the history of Atlantis. If our views are correct, it is one of the most valuable records which have come down to us from antiquity.

Plato lived 400 years before the birth of Christ. His ancestor, Solon, was the great law-giver of Athens 600 years before the Christian era. Solon visited Egypt. Plutarch says, “Solon attempted in verse a large description, or rather fabulous account of the Atlantic Island, which he had learned from the wise men of Sais, and which particularly concerned the Athenians; but by reason of his age, not want of leisure (as Plato would have it), he was apprehensive the work would be too much for him, and therefore did not go through with it.” from the book “Atlantis the Antediluvian World” by Ignatius Donnelly

Donnelly claimed that Atlantis was in the Atlantic, which at least makes logical sense if you take Plato at his word.

Donnelly interprets Plato’s account of Atlantis literary. He also ties the legend of Atlantis into the global flood myth-complex. These, until recently, have been two of the most compelling unsolved puzzles of history. What was Plato writing about when he described the prehistoric civilization of Atlantis, which disappeared overnight in a great catastrophe? Was this an actual historical account, or a philosophical fable? And why do widely separated cultures on every continent, Australia, the Americas, Europe and Asia all have a similar myth of a great flood from which only a few humans survived to restart civilization?

The global flood myth could be a recollection of the rapid sea-level changes at the end of the Ice Age, when the sea rose 300 feet within a few hundred years. The rise in sea levels 11,500 years ago has been verified recently by radio-isotope studies of ice cores taken deep from the Greenland ice sheet. Incidentally, this global flooding occurred fairly close to the time which Plato cited for the destruction of Atlantis (i.e., about 9,500 B.C.).

This rapid flooding appears to have overwhelmed a widespread Neolithic culture living in its basin in an extremely short time. The survivors might have migrated south to the Nile Delta and Mesopotamia, and the memory of the disaster evolved into the Biblical flood story.

The reason myths are important because they transcend men’s experiences of the supernatural and clear away all the technical, petty and dogmatic distractions of religion, back to the fundamental experiences of living as part of the bigger and timeless universe.