In his “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic, Plato presents us with his vision of the philosopher, and describes how the philosopher is regarded by others in the everyday world. The world we see, Plato tells us, is like an underground den or cave. On the far wall, cast by the light of a fire, shadows flicker and dart, and most people, chained where they sit and unable to look elsewhere, mistake these shadows for reality. The philosopher, however, drawn by a love for the truth, frees himself from his chains and wanders toward the fire, eventually ascending from the cave into the light of day, where he beholds the fiery source of light, the brilliant sun. In Platonic thought, this means that he sees for himself that the ultimate truth of things behind all appearances is Goodness. Making his way back into the cave, the philosopher tries to tell others about the light he has just seen, that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all but only the merest reflection of reality cast by the light of a higher truth. But he has been blinded by the light, and stumbles around the world of shadows now like one lost in what should be a familiar place.“Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes.” He tries to express to others something of the higher reality of which they know nothing, but he appears to them to be more than a little crazy—out of touch with the reality of the cave and its shadows, the only reality they know.

In philosophical self-work, we continually awaken from the dreams of unexamined beliefs and assumptions and shift into ever greater awareness. This means that, the more deeply we are willing to know ourselves, to become transparent to ourselves, the more awake we are, and the more joyful, gratifying, beautiful, creative, expressive, and fulfilling life becomes. This applies conversely, as well: If the dream of life is joyless, ugly, stagnant, boring, or disappointing, the problem is not with the dream but the dreamer. “The fault…is not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Western philosophy begins with the Delphic mandate, “Know thyself,” which implies that identity is key to wisdom and the good life. We come to know ourselves by taking responsibility for our conclusions, examining our beliefs and assumptions, and questioning those things that at first may seem to us to be so evidently true that we might not think to question them if we were not following the compass heading of self-knowledge. As an example, let’s say that you learned, perhaps early, that winning is everything, and further, that it never occurred to you to question it. Winning is a feature of your self-definition. ”You win, period. No matter what. Against incredible odds. In fact, the belief only really proves itself worthy when the odds are incredible. What does the belief require for its fulfillment? A contest! Something working against you. What can it mean to win if there’s no losing? So, someone will ask you “How are you?” and in your reality, a shadow flickers—something about which of the two of you is doing better. The question is an invitation to compete, to win. It has to be. It’s who you are.

If we could understand that the world is operating as an obedient servant, and that what it’s serving up is the complement of our self-definition, we would have much more compassion for the world, for each other, and for ourselves. Instead of running to the rain forest or India or a guru or a new romantic relationship or whatever to find what’s missing, we’d look at our world as it is right here, right now, and wake up to the realization that the self is all we ever see, dancing like firelight on the walls of time and space, because we are always looking out through our own eyes. So, if we’re not complacent, if we apply the first principle of awakening to our experience as a construct and question the obvious, those things we’ve taken for granted, then a world of self-knowledge opens up to us. Let’s step outside the cave, and see where we stand in light of all this.

Suppose your employer, a co-worker, and your lover all begin withholding from you. In the same week, your promotion is stalled, the co-worker isn’t giving you a promised and now overdue memo, and your lover seems to have lost all interest in making love. The same shadows are flickering in so many areas of your life, you wonder if some weird karmic debt didn’t come due during the night. For some reason, up till now, it hasn’t occurred to you that you’re the common denominator.

Then, you remember philosophy. You remember self-work and allow your attention to turn in the direction of self-knowing. You remember that the world outpictures your self-definition, your beliefs, your assumptions, the things you haven’t questioned. And you ask yourself the most important question we can ask, the question the answer to which has the power to resolve any difficulty: What am I believing here that requires this situation? Asking this question is self-retrieval. You’re retrieving yourself. From what? From the dream of the world. From the shadows of fact and evidence that seem, so convincingly, to be the cause and the culprit.

You ask yourself this pivotal question, and it strikes you that the withholding of others “fits” your unwillingness to receive. When “I am the one who does not receive,” the world appears, must appear, withholding. You held your identity up before the light of consciousness, and it cast its corresponding shadow. Of course, the belief may be different while fitting the facts no less, for example: “I am the one who is denied what she has earned,” or “I am the one who remains sad so others can be happy.” You can’t consult a book of dream symbols to grasp the meaning of a symbol in your waking dream. We have to look within. This isn’t something one can “figure out.” One has to be still and let it come.

The importance of this in practice cannot be overstated: The self is retrieved from the dream-world through being still. Corollaries here would include: Being still wakes us up, and being still brings us into the light of who we are. Putting this to use means that if you find yourself facing any situation in the world that you don’t like, you remember that the situation complements something you’ve agreed to—wittingly or unwittingly. Then, you can allow yourself to be deeply still. Simply that. You can sit in the sunlight of willingness, open to acknowledging what you’ve believed about yourself up to this moment. It will show itself. All it was waiting for was the light of your attention. Then you can choose, either to continue to believe this, or to believe something else, something better. If you’re willing to let go of the old belief, then you see the cave flooded with light, and when the acceptance is wholehearted and natural, you ascend to a new world, the one that corresponds to the new vision, as it must.

Questioning the obvious, looking within for the cause, and taking creative responsibility are the philosopher’s best allies for waking up. In their company, we can leave the world of shadows long enough to step into the light of a truer version of self. Returning to the world against which we may have struggled desperately, even for years, we see in a flash that it was on our side all along.

The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
| Proust

The drive south from Gainesville to Ocala over U.S. Highway 441 is an idyllic, meditative run of some 30 miles that takes one across the sprawling Paynes Prairie savanna, and over a gently rolling, divided highway lined with Florida’s rich forestland. Most of it is 65 mph, except for the towns of Micanopy and McIntosh where the speed limit drops suddenly to 45 mph, and the police along that stretch keep a keen eye out for interstate visitors who, unfamiliar with the area, get caught in these “speed traps” well known among the locals.

There’s another kind of speed trap that we see in philosophical counseling sessions, one also characterized by going too fast with a particular kind of unawareness. This “going too fast” may be regarded as racing ahead of the truth, or even simply as a kind of habitual agitation that leads the client to miss important details of his or her experience. Much of this comes down to immersion in unfriendly assumptions about life, oneself, the world, or other people that seem so obviously true to the client that he or she might never think to question them, and it is this invaluable self-questioning that philosophical counseling brings to the conversation. The relevant assumptions, taken together, inform the client’s mythos or paradigm, which is the fundamental stance that the client has assumed. Paradigms tend to be immersive, and it takes an exceptional kind of person to be willing to challenge this immersion and “surface” into the light of a more expansive, richer, friendlier stance that takes more into account than did the old one. The difficulty inherent in this sort of self-work lies in the fact that paradigms get us moving at a certain speed, one almost designed to prevent the relevant self-examination, so that in this sense, the stances we assume tend to be self-perpetuating, We don’t adopt them without good reason, but the payoffs they serve may be obsolete, such that persisting in them takes a toll on us and works against our happiness, our peace of mind, our clarity, our best interests now, and our efficiency in the world and in our associations with others. Caught in the trap of a stance that one has long outgrown is like persisting in fighting a war that one does not know has ended. It is always remarkable to see someone pressing on in this self-justifying, self-perpetuating cycle of self-combat. Why, after all, would we expend so much of our energy and resources in the service of something that works against us? Yet we know that our psyches are not driven primarily by logic but by beliefs, assumptions, conclusions, the stories we keep telling ourselves, and by constructs that have authority in our lives simply because it does not occur to us to question them.

One of the ways that our mythos may blind us to self-questioning is by inducing a kind of speed—in our thinking, our reaction time, our way of being. We can understand this in terms of a simple model demonstrating centrifugal force. Imagine an iron ball secured to the end of a rope. Swing the rope in a circle over your head and the ball moves out to an orbit determined by the length of the rope. If you don’t impart enough force, the ball won’t be able to achieve this orbit, but get it going fast enough, and the effort required to sustain the orbit becomes minimal. In a similar way, a stance is sustainable only because we move within it at a certain speed. Often a great deal can be accomplished in a philosophical counseling session simply by inviting the client to slow down, take a breath and a step back, ease his or her foot off the gas of a problematic assumption and coast for a few minutes. Some clients find this startling, as they haven’t slowed down in many years. Suddenly, they see things differently. They notice things that had been there all along, hiding in plain sight. And even this much can open up a new direction, a new choice, a new world. Things that were stuck, that seemed immoveable a moment before, begin to move.

Even outside a counseling session, we can do a great deal to help ourselves simply by slowing down. On the inner highway, the speed traps are set by our own unwitting and outworn commitments, but they are no less enforced than they are on Highway 441. Taking a moment to slow down, to let in some stillness, to set aside our conclusions and question our assumptions—this alone can free us from the traps of the unexamined life and return us again to the open road.

The life we see around us reflects our self-talk, the silent inner dialogue that each of us literally embodies. We are beings who must return this inner dialogue, question its assumptions, and begin to participate in it consciously if we are to stay on good terms with ourselves. As Hannah Arendt states in The Life of the Mind: “The guiding experience in these matters is, of course, friendship.” This self-friendship is the basis of the wholeness we often seek in worldly conditions, which can do nothing more than outpicture the inner state. Simplistically, the self asks and the self answers. More precisely, since this two is also a one, the self can only receive in accordance with how the self asks. So we may learn a great deal about our life by paying attention not so much to what we‘re saying inwardly, but to how we’re saying it. Some of us beg, others demand; some ask expecting to realize fulfillment; others expect to be disappointed. In some inner conversation, there is a throughline of joy; in others, victimhood or persecution. One of the most important things we can do as students of philosophical self-work is pay mindful and honest attention to the tone of our inner conversation throughout the day, for it is the true logos, or creative word, no matter what words we may speak aloud.

To the extent that we choose to befriend the self in this inner dialogue, something remarkable happens: The world, to use Einstein’s phrase, becomes a friendly place. We see that everyone is in conversation with the self, finding his or her way, more or less self-aware at any given time of the causal role of inwardness but in any case inevitably reaping the outer fruits of the inner labors—and this can open us up to the realization that we’re not alone but always in the company of ourselves and each other, and that life stands ready to enrich and instruct us, extending to us the same accommodations of friendship that we extend consistently to ourselves.

The world is the self-relation writ large. As Anaïs Nin writes, “We see things as they are; we see them as we are.” No amount of rhetoric, no justification, no evasion or denial or rationalization will exempt us from the outer consequences of our inner stance. All we have to offer the world is rooted in the tone of our inner speaking. Muktananda, instructing us in how to be in proper self-relation, says simply, “Love the Self, honor the Self.” Imagine if each of us chose to put an end to the terrorism in our hearts and see the world and others and ourselves for what we are: the miraculous expression of life’s longing for friendship.

Considerations of Self and World as Dependently Arising

The classic philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no perceiver, does it make a sound?” is a trick question, because the answer hinges on how we define the word sound. If sound means a certain kind of perception, clearly it makes no sense to talk about sound if there’s no perceiver around to have the perception. If, however, we mean by sound a set of vibrating airwaves that could be heard if there were a perceiver around, then it seems to make sense to grant that the falling tree produces such a set of waves, and so, makes a sound. This is usually where the question is thought to end. A more considered look, however, reveals that it’s just the beginning. If we push the question a bit further, we realize that, like the word sound, the phrase “tree falling in the forest” also describes a perception; we can picture it in our mind’s eye just as we can imagine the sound the falling tree might make. Taking this into account, the question becomes: “If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no perceiver, can a tree—as a word that stands for a certain kind of perception—be said to have fallen (another kind of perception)?” Even hypothetical or imagined experience presupposes some perceiver from whose point of view the experience is an experience, and if we remove this presupposed point of view, we’re left with nothing to talk about! This reveals that there can be no object without a subject—each implies the other. A world without consciousness, then, is a fiction. Reality is rooted in who we are.

We can bring this back to the world of our experience to explore its practical implications. What we call reality is what we call reality. The past, for example, is a construct of consciousness now. Each of us holds to a version of the past consistent with current belief. Shift the belief in the present, and the past shifts accordingly as it is revised by the revised present. As a rule, the elegant efficiency of this process preserves continuity in the recollection of personal history, so this recreating of the past doesn’t seem abrupt. Rather, the self that has revised its past has the sense of waking from a previous view that now shows itself never to have been true. This typically takes the form of, “Oh, I see now, that’s how I thought it was (referring to the former reality), but really it was like this all along (referring to the new, revised reality).”

The new physics recognizes this mutuality of so-called subject and object, that self and world arise dependently, ever implying each other. Beyond this, philosophical considerations suggest that the subjective side of this coin has a causal reach. Change any relevant belief now, in the present, and its dependent conditions change accordingly, whether these are showing up as present, past, or future constructs. The unlimited point of creativity is the living present. We aren’t hostages to past causes unless we believe we are, and in such a case, it’s our present belief, not the past experience, that makes it so. We aren’t doomed to repeat patterns that no longer serve us in the best way we can imagine. Alternative reality tracks that correspond to alternative versions of the self are always available, and always available right now, in the living present, as near as a deep breath and a new choice.

When I was a boy, I spent countless afternoons practicing coin magic in front of a small, antique mirror that my mother let me use, so that I could watch my hands as they created the illusion of coins appearing and disappearing, or passing through solid objects, or migrating invisibly from one place to another. As I got older, my love for the “secret” behind the appearances grew into a formal study of philosophy at the university, but underlying this was still the child’s fascination with the modus operandi, the behind-the-scenes operations that each moment bring forth the world ex nihilo.

The child watches the magician pull a coin out of thin air and is amazed, while the adult smiles. Why does the adult smile? He may not know the method, but he knows it is a trick, that coins don’t just appear out of thin air. How innocent, how beautiful, and in a way, how sad that the adult doesn’t realize that the magician, like the coin, is appearing out of thin air each moment, for even a glimpse of this would return the adult to the reality of the magical, the wondrous, the mysterious that seems native to us as children before we learn that the world is something to take for granted and exploit and move against.

Physics is the hardest of sciences, the most akin to mathematics; it has always been regarded as the keeper of the empirical standard to which other sciences aspire. In the early 1900s, however, something odd began to happen. Physics began to soften. As it turned out, something incredible was taking place; physics was converging with metaphysics, discovering in the laboratory at the most intimate levels of the Creation, truths that had been unambiguously expressed thousands of years earlier in the world’s great body of spiritual literature. Some scientists went off in the direction of biology, applying a mechanistic model, even to such rarified areas of study as psychology. So, behaviorism appeared on the scene; philosophy spawned logical positivism, and so on. An entire intellectual generation stepped forward steeped in the belief that what is real ultimately is physical, that all causes are material, that only that which can be quantified is valid. If there is a “soul,” it is a product or by-product of cerebral function. The mind is nothing more, in this view, than the brain’s neurons firing. Meanwhile, physics reached a conclusion so staggering, it would erase the mechanistic, materialist view forever—namely, that even the physical is not physical.

At the level of the quanta and subquanta, there is more space than stuff. The more minutely we examine this gossamer matrix of the physical world, the less stuff we see. Finally, past the quarks and neutrinos, the muons and tachyons and lychons, there is no-thing at all. There is no-thing, but this no-thing is not nothing. It is a vast, living, holographic presence overflowing with an innate and unimaginably prolific creativity into unlimited expression. It is literally in-forming all that is, becoming the rich and varied manifestations that we hardly notice anymore, and doing so with exquisite precision and unfailing dedication, every instant there is. This force is intelligent and resourceful beyond measure; the greatest human genius is only the tiniest fraction of it. This No-Thing is somehow manifesting all of the stars and planets and solar systems, every cell in the body of every living thing, every microphysical particle, every galaxy, every circumstance and condition, every fact scientific or otherwise, and it is doing this everywhere, all at once, naturally and spontaneously and gracefully, like a consummate magician—except that it is not a trick. The magic is real.

Perhaps we will evoke the sympathy of the empiricist or the rationalist this much: that he or she will grant that there is something wondrous and even magical about how the ubiquitous quanta keep emerging out of the great No-Thing, assembling themselves dutifully into atoms that somehow know to team up as molecules that in turn construct the tables and chairs and assorted furniture of our physical world. There is magic of a sort, they may allow—but this is the stuff of metaphysics, and we cannot be concerned with that, or so they will claim. “We may not understand for now the inner workings of Being, the modus operandi of the Master Magician, but eventually we will. We will develop the technology and work the grand equations, and the secret will be bared open to human will like a dissected frog in a high school biology class. It is only a matter of time.”

You can see what’s happening. It is exactly what happened to the mechanistic view of things over the past half century. Slowly, undone by the shocking discoveries of the new physics, the old biases were left with nowhere to stand. The burden of proof shifted. How, when we have tested and witnessed and scientifically established the immateriality of the material, when even the traditionally hardest science has put down new roots in mystical concepts and visions, when we have even scientifically proven that the world is much more like a great dream than a great machine and that the consciousness dreaming it is nonlocal, not limited to the bodies it dreams into being—how and on what grounds could we continue to insist that this magic that we see all around us somehow is not central and decisive to our individual and collective life? To acknowledge the magic of existence only to turn one’s back on it, as it were, and blithely go about one’s business, is to overlook the most important reality of all. For to catch the universe in the act of appearing and then act as though nothing happened is a lie and worse. We may have missed the magic simply because it is so everywhere, and in our blind allegiance to old models, to a self-opaque rationalism or dogmatic empiricism, we have been sitting in the best seats and missing the show.

Our knowledge, as William James writes in “The Will to Believe,” is relative. We can know, but we cannot know that we know—that is, our knowing is not something certain. Tomorrow may change everything, showing us that what we thought we knew, we only thought we knew. This deeply honest and rightly humble self-understanding can take us to a renewed sense of the magical hiding in the everyday, and science is especially qualified to take up this cause. The best scientists, like Einstein and de Broglie, Heisenberg, and others, have always had this sense, and embodied the humility that their work can inspire. Beyond the childish naïveté and New Age manipulations of “magical thinking” is something so profoundly useful that it may turn out to be saving: the willingness see with new eyes, to acknowledge that the world belongs to something greater than us and is subject to an inexplicable authority greater than our will, and if the old model has to be revised, overhauled, even discarded in favor of this new and sorely needed vision, then so be it. In the 21st century, each of us can fulfill what the last half of the 20th century foreshadowed—that seeing cannot be limited to reason and evidence alone, because these models discount or dismiss or deny the magical foundations that we must acknowledge and honor if we are to have a future. As we take up the direction implicit in the willingness simply to see what is right before our eyes, we may find that the magic, the wonder, the miracle of the everyday was not left behind in childhood. It was standing beside us, biding its time, waiting patiently, all along.

Once I heard a man describing how someone had smashed into his parked Corvette. “The guy just hit me right in my rear end,” he said. And he grimaced in just the correct way for someone who had experienced actually getting hit in his rear end (not the car’s). There was identification with the vehicle; it was an extension of his body. In a similar way, lovers appropriate each other’s mannerisms and style. A person may suffer powerful physical symptoms upon receiving news of a financial catastrophe. Our anger can fill a room or a house, or a life. So can our compassion. The body of our experience is not different in any essential way from the body that demonstrates illness or health, commensurately with our beliefs, assumptions, and expectations. We can experience healthy relationships, healthy finances, sick situations, and so on. Whether the dream-body, the physical body of daily life, or the extended body of our worldly experience, we’re dealing with constructs that express and outpicture the most intimate holdings of our consciousness.

This means that there is potentially great value in looking upon the sick body as a living metaphor. Instead of trying to banish the illness, we can be still with it, sit willingly beside it, and open ourselves to the deeper acceptance of responsibility that will reveal to us what, exactly, is being expressed by the particular set of symptoms we’re presenting. One powerful way to use this technique is to ask yourself where else in your life you’re feeling whatever the main complaint is about the health condition. For example, if you’re suffering from something doctors call “chronic fatigue syndrome,” ask yourself what’s the worst thing about it. It may surprise you to know that different people will give different answers to this. Suppose the main complaint is, “All my energy is gone.” It feels as though somebody pulled your power plug. Now, for the purposes of the exercise, you accept responsibility—at this point this may be theoretical—and consider that somehow, you pulled the power plug on yourself. So, you ask yourself where you’ve been giving away your power. The answer may be so eye-opening, it will leave you feeling like you just woke up from a dream. Within that dream, the sick body was in-formed, and the experience of it was real enough. From the more expanded awareness, however, having awakened from the dream, you may opt to take your power back and discover that that version of you has a different body. You weren’t trying to get rid of the illness; you were listening to the language of the body and hearing what it had to say. Once you heard that, you didn’t need the illness anymore. You outgrew it. This is how healing operates.

Now, we’re not claiming here that all illness is psychogenic (it may be), but there’s no doubt that a contradiction deeply charged and held for many years becomes a weak link in the chain of our health, eventually causing a physical breakdown of one sort or another. The body is phenomenally resilient. It can take decades of abuse of all sorts, and keep right on going. Get on its side even a little, and it will work wonders for you. Getting on the body’s side means moving into deeper release, acceptance, and self-friendship in areas where we’ve been holding on to contradictions. This takes listening and willingness. But it’s essential that, at some point, we move beyond merely wanting to be rid of what’s uncomfortable or painful and take up the work. Discomfort and pain can be powerful teachers, especially when the student has repeatedly refused to learn any other way.

If you’re sick, regardless of the condition or its severity, consider that something important is trying like anything to get your attention, something that, if acknowledged and honored, can lead you to something wonderful. The paradox of healing, its indirectness, is that it occurs as naturally as did the illness, once we listen, accept responsibility, and make the better choice. If you’ve been giving away your power, and you insist on doing this, say, to a lover or a boss year after year, perhaps feeling awful about it but never taking responsibility, you’ll likely get sick eventually, and the illness will, among other things, leave you exhausted. Then, you get to see what you’ve been creating. We can’t heal a health condition directly, because the health condition isn’t about the health condition. It’s a living metaphor, a call to greater selfhood and a doorway to greater life—if we can only sit with it, listen, and accept responsibility. An illness then becomes a rare opportunity to evolve, Expressing this idea, the gifted poet Kahlil Gibran, in his best known work, The Prophet, writes:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding…. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

It takes a little gumption to remove our mesmerized gaze from the body’s symptoms, accept things as they are for now, and tune in to the living poetry that in-forms all things. In a way that may sound fantastic, the illness is irrelevant, a by-product, the construct of a contradiction. Identify the chief complaint about the illness, and ask where else this has been true in your life, with the willingness to be a student of your condition. You’re accepting a measure of responsibility here, but there’s no blame in this; on the contrary, it returns you to your natural power as a creative and self-directed being.

Each of us is the authority in this listening. There are spiritual writers and teachers forever ready to tell us what our symptoms mean: “Coronary disease? Ah, then you must not be letting love into your heart.” “A broken leg? Well, why won’t you stand up for yourself?” Such pat “readings” are disrespectful and misleading oversimplifications. The listening that illness calls us to must be deep and original. When we get it, however, we have the sense of waking up from a dream, and may wonder how we could have missed the now obvious truth as long as we did. Keep in mind that the instruction of the illness may be subtle or indirect, as metaphors can be. It may involve a symbolism, memory associations, word play—but the truth of it, even while being metaphoric, will be precise and obvious, and often literal, as well.

I’ve had several serious illnesses in my life. Every one of them was a messenger. As soon as I got the message, accepted it, and lived up to it, the condition vanished—in some cases against all the odds that were being predicted by doctors and specialists. I’m not sharing with you anything that I haven’t proven in my life repeatedly.

Philosophy at its best is ever practical, calling us to do what’s before us to do. That may mean going to the doctor, taking medicine, or having a recommended procedure. We can do all of this in willingness; the doctor, the medicine, the procedure can be part of our story. But we are wise to remember the profound influence exerted by our psyche—by our beliefs, assumptions, values, by the stories in which we’re so immersed it may not occur to us to question them. When we forget the illness and get interested in what the illness is begging to tell us, we can respond at a much deeper level to our situation, bringing about an unexpected and often long overdue healing whether that healing involves the spirit, the body, or both.