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.

The work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) is still revered by many who refuse to subscribe to a mechanistic view of the universe and human life. But who was he?

The Himalayan ice-roof of the world has produced many of the great sages of the East. Numbered among them are the Indian rishis of the Upanishads, the lama-savants of Tibet, and even Gautama Buddha, in nearby Nepal. By a curious symmetry, the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps were the setting for the life of arguably the West’s most enlightened man of the 20th Century — a claim, it has to be said, much disputed recently by some in the psychotherapy establishment..

C. G. Jung is often described as a psychiatrist and physician. In fact his work matured into an all-embracing vision of human life and its relations with all there is (the Absolute). His phenomenal intuition constantly came up against the numinous in everyday affairs and, being the man he was, he courageously based his post-Freudian work on the god in Man and the man in God. Born of Swiss Protestant stock, he became a bridge between western and eastern psychologies that will surely prove seminal for the future.

In his long and fruitful life, Jung trod a careful path between the crusty scientific establishment of his day and the more adventurous thinkers on the fringes of eastern mysticism and religion. He went to enormous lengths to avoid being classed as a Theosophist, a group he regarded as having swung irremediably towards psychological extremism. His published works are always models of empirical analysis, drawing living structures from a mass of precise medical observations. And yet he is never statistically arid like many scientists today. There is a life in his work that can only be described as religious, in the best sense of the word. His main “problem” was that the inevitable conclusions arising from these tireless investigations applied just as much to so-called normal people as to his pathologically disturbed patients.

The basis of Jung’s work was the process he called individuation, a naturally occurring progression in everyone, leading to psychological integration. Individuation, as expounded by Jung, is clearly related to Buddhist enlightenment, in that though his ostensible concern was with empirical psychology, Jung went beyond Freud’s shallow personal subconscious (a repository of repressed mental contents), to what he called the “collective unconscious”, which took in the whole of the psyche, a term he used in the same sense as Buddhists use “Buddha-mind”.

Jung believed that nothing in the cosmos is incapable of psychological inclusion given the necessary insight and balanced vision. Thus he sometimes seemed to scorn the notion of the metaphysical with its transcendental exclusivity, a notable characteristic of many in the psychotherapy movement of his day.

The balance then between what is psychological and what is metaphysical is dangerously subject to all the vagaries of definition, making comparisons between viewpoints all the more perilous.

“One cannot grasp anything metaphysically, but it can be done psychologically. Therefore I strip things of their metaphysical wrappings in order to make them objects of psychology … if finally there should still be an ineffable metaphysical element, it would have the best opportunity of revealing itself.”

How would it reveal itself? Is the viewpoint arising from the non-working of the senses (which includes “thinking” in Buddhism) in the state called “nirvana” to be called psychological?

Jung always uses “psyche” to embrace all experience, normal and trancendental.

The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it… I can resist everything but temptation. Oscar Wilde

Research has shown that our ability to resist impulse purchases goes down if we are exercising self-control in some other area, such as dieting.

But it isn’t just in shopping that we sometimes experience a moment of weakness or act contrary to our intentions. When our self-regulatory ability is being expended in one area, we can lose that ability in another. Dealing with stresses at work might leave you depleted and unable to resist that hot-fudge sundae.

Researchers have found a physical indicator of when people may be working hard at self-control and therefore, vulnerable in some other area by measuring heart rate variability (HRV).

HRV is higher when people are trying to resist temptation. The researchers noted that brain structures involved in self-regulation overlap with the structures that control HRV.

The article, Heart Rate Variability Reflects Self-Regulatory Strength, Effort, and Fatigue appears in the journal Psychological Science.

It’s well known that the shooters at Columbine were avid players of the computer video game Doom. That the first-person shooter game enhanced their feelings of aggression has been proposed as one of the reasons for the attack by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold upon their fellow students.

German psychologists have completed some research that leads them to believe that virtual racing games may also increase aggression and risk-taking in real-life driving situations.

Researchers at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians University and the Allianz Center for Technology found that of 198 men and women, those who play more virtual car-racing games were more likely to report that they drive aggressively and get in accidents. Less frequent virtual racing was associated with more cautious driving.

When 83 men were assigned to play either virtual racing games or neutral games, those that played the racing games reported a higher accessibility to thoughts about risk-taking. The researchers state that this could lead to high-risk behavior on the road.

Because children also play these games, the concern is that they will be conditioned to higher rates of risk-taking when it is their turn to get behind the wheel.

American Psychological Association