The English Victorian novelist George Eliot was famous for her ability to hit the psychological nail on the head with an apposite sentence. Here’s one of them :

We walk about “well-wadded with stupidity. … If we had but keen vision and feeling … it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence”.

A very happy New Year to all our readers.

When we talk about “realization” or “enlightenment” we find ourselves right in the heart of religion with all its political and cultural baggage. Really, though, we should be thinking psychology and practical philosophy. Here’s why.

Religions tend to follow a recognized cycle of development : a parabolic curve of usefulness and decay. Shakyamuni Buddha knew this and forecast that his Dharma (teachings) would last for 500 years, no more. Sure enough, at the 500 mark, “Buddhism” became “Mahayanaism”, and changed out of all recognition … though to be fair, the Mahayana did have many remarkable insights of its own.

The pattern of change is always relentless. The initial spark by an Enlightened individual is taken over by a conservative elite who wish to preserve it in all its literal aspects. Invariably this movement is led by a group of disciples who claim apostolic succession from the now deified founder.

Meanwhile a more adventurous group of young bloods want to adapt the message and make it relevant to changing circumstances … as they see it. This polarization results in a political auction of claim and counter claim, while truth suffers almost grotesque inflation from both sides. The newish “religion” reverses itself and adopts the very infrastructure and corruptive practices that the original movement sought to replace.

All our instituional religions have gone through this disheartening process and are looking distinctly threadbare and careworn in the 21st century.

It seems to me that what most Westerners are seeking today is not an alien culture imposed on them through an ancient apostolic religion, but a simple process of spiritualization : a technology of realization, or “extended mind” in the language of biologist Dr Rupert Sheldrake. The aim would be nothing less than the widening and deepening of our individual consciousness.

By “technology” I mean the artful implementation of a principle that has been proved workable under specific conditions. So it would utilize both art and science — mind and spirit — by acting on empirical data from productive fields of practice. If this sounds rather technical, it’s not. It’s just a way of creating a general definition of something like the Buddha’s “mindfulness” program of recollection. Other types of insight meditation (vipassana) are equally valid as Mind Technology.

Such a technology of realization, without the pressing burden of belief in human-made creeds and ensacredized worship, would remove the pedantry and inherent violence from our religious lives by concentrating our minds on actionable areas for the integration of our divided being.

The love of wisdom (Sophia), or philosophia in Greek, began in Ionian Greece in Homeric times. It was a deliberate increase of consciousness on the part of a small number of people who lived close to the land but who recognized that the mind of man had a structuring and ordering facility which seemed to be above the processes of nature. Their often puzzled cogitations gave birth to philosophy which, in turn, spawned science, metaphysics, mathematics and all the other systems of pure thought that bedevil students to this day.

Philosophers were known to be otherworldly and lost in thought. They dressed in simple robes and lived frugally – rich living degraded the mind. Such a life would inevitably produce more than its share of what Buddhists call the enlightened – Plotinus and possibly Plato are two examples.

The Greek philosopher Socrates is almost the perfect exemplar of the enlightenment qualities of simplicity and ethics. He spent his entire lifetime, as far as we know, engaging others in conversations about the need to be good. That was the sum total of his life. Moreover, he was completely unworldly, careless of his appearance, and had no visible means of financial support. In Plato’s Georgias, one listener complains that, if Socrates is right, life would need to be turned upside down. – the enlightenened viewpoint is said to turn our normal conceptions of reality “upside down”.

Furthermore, Socrates claimed to have a “guardian spirit” who frequently advised him not to follow certain courses of action. All this suggests to me that he had tasted “Nirvanic” experience and everything that goes with it. Nothing else adequately explains his extraordinary behaviour.

Socrates lived a simple life – it could not have been simpler – and an ethical one. His simplicity was that of a philosopher. He cared little for material goods and was frequently fed at other people’s tables, where he demonstrated the philosophic rules of argument and inquiry, no doubt as the evening’s star turn.

Ethically, Socrates believed that to do good conferred happiness, while wickedness – which arose in every case from ignorance, not evil – led to misery. He spent his 70 years of life perfecting the craft of living well, making the rather large claim that “nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death”. He seemed to subscribe to a kind of karmic reckoning, as well as the continuation of life after death. When he faced his executioners without fear, he demonstrated these virtues in the toughest of arenas.

Socrates’s proclaimed virtues were courage, moderation, justice, piety and wisdom. Wisdom indeed was the Queen of virtues since it conferred the others by default. The soul, he thought, was “mutilated by wrong actions and benefited by right ones.”

How much then does enlightenment depend on simplicity and an ethical lifestyle? A frugal life will free up psychic energies for a more concerted intention towards the ultimate goal of seeing into one’s own self-nature.

Socrates exemplified the qualities of simplicity and ethical living to a remarkable degree. His life in the so-called Axial Age seemed to anticipate some of the ideas of the Buddha, and of Christianity more than 400 years later.

All cultures have theories — or myths — which attempt to cross the barrier between mind and spirit. The ancient shamanic tradition of the Toltecs in Mexico is an interesting example.

We each have a personal myth, a story which builds gradually from our parent’s stories, our cultural myth, and many other factors. In this story, we are the main character, other people are secondary characters. They, however, have their own stories, which are usually radically different from ours.

Society is built on resolving the clash of these personal myths. Civilizations are constructed to preserve collective and national myths. When powerful people’s inner stories meet in dissent, whole continents can dissolve into war.

Such is the power of our personal story. Most people are not in command of their story because it’s formed from a ragbag of inherited ideas, and pressures from all manner of influences. This leads us to devalue ourselves and splits us from our essential authenticity. Instead of living in a heavenly realm at peace with ourselves and the world, we create our own hell on earth.

That is the thesis of Don Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican medical doctor and surgeon, who grew up in the ancient shamanic tradition of the Toltecs. A near-death experience in a car accident led him back to his ancestral roots to try to explain what happened. The result is a quite wonderful synthesis of 21st-century psychology and perennial wisdom.

In his book, The Voice of Knowledge, Don Miguel, distils the entire tradition of his people into four principles, or agreements, as he prefers to call them. At first sight, they could be taken for a boy scout’s creed : tell the truth, don’t take things personally, don’t jump to conclusions, and do your best. But this would be to miss the point. Used as talismans of action, the Four Agreements become a powerfully transformative path to happiness.

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

The crux of this philosophy is that everybody’s story is a tissue of lies which undermines our authentic heart. It distorts our lives into grotesque defence mechanisms against perceived enemies “out there”. There is no need for this. By using the four agreements to connect with our authenticity, we become the creators of our lives. We transform ourselves into artists of our very existence.

Don Miguel Ruiz has produced a classic of transformative literature.

The Voice of Knowledge — A Practical Guide to Inner Peace, by Don Miguel Ruiz.