The Secret

Join me on a journey of self-discovery. Walk beside me as we seek to learn many great lessons along the way. Join me in this quest to discover new insights about life and to write about them. We may not reach our destination. We may find that what we seek to find is not new and that it has all been said before, but we can at least enjoy the journey.

Some discoveries will sadden us while others will no doubt guide, inspire, inform and enlighten. At the end of the journey the ideal must be to gain greater understanding and greater wisdom. But there is no point in acquiring great knowledge merely for its own sake. There is also no point in having greater wisdom if our purpose is not to share it with others. Our intention must be to seek both knowledge and wisdom. And whatever we acquire along the way if it is to have any value must be used to guide and to ultimately benefit others, to inspire them to use the great gift of imagination. No one has all the answers nor should we trust people who profess that they offer us and humanity, quick, easy solutions with their ready answers. In this sense we need to ensure that people come before ideas.

Everyday this passion to cover new ground and to write about it becomes an obsession, sometimes a compulsion that torments and consumes me. It becomes a form of temporary madness and possession. But then in a drugged, numb, unfeeling state, devoid of pain, nothing of great consequence is achieved. There is no growth, no discovery, no exploration, no difficulty and no new ground. Even the finest swords in the course of their duty have to be broken, blunted and bent. The great composers, artists, writers, poets and actors all had to suffer for their calling. But it is infinitely better to deal with the pain of growth than face a life of regret. The ones that endured were able to rise above the pain and suffering, to draw lessons from its intensity and create something new and memorable.

The thing that feeds me also has the awful potential to devour me. In Marguerite Poland’s latest book, “Recessional from Grace” the following Zulu saying is quoted”If you were in my flesh, I could tear you out, but you are in my blood which cannot be divided.” Certain people and certain things are in my blood. Among them, words and writing. What kills me the most is that in our disposable and materialistic world nothing seems to last and even the written word is so ephemeral. That is why I have a problem with newspaper articles. So much effort goes into writing something yet today’s thought provoking article is tomorrow’s fish and chips wrapping paper.

Email too does not have the lasting power of letters. There was an initial hope that email would revive the lost art of letter writing. But sadly emails are now mostly cautious, curtailed and abbreviated communications. Emails are seen as weightless and lacking intellectual substance yet many great ideas are often exchanged using email. Then there is the deadly and very convenient “delete” button to ensure that our words do not survive and no lasting impression is created. Where would the dedicated biographers be without the correspondence of their great subjects to help them build a picture of their characters. How much poorer would our world be without the letters that Byron wrote to his friends, his mother and his wife; the letters between Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin; between Napoleon and Josephine; between Freud and Jung.

My biggest fear is that this troubled but intoxicating courtship, for it should never become a marriage, has been but a fleeting moment. That it has all been a brief lucid interval and a temporary awakening. I fear the possibility of this metaphorical death the most, the breath of death when inspiration fails me and hard as I try, I cannot resurrect my muse. Maybe like the great Gnostic Plotinus, it’s true to say that by dying for what we are not, we come to life as what we are. I do not fear the real physical death that comes to all mortal beings. When it comes my way that may even be a form of release. What torments me the most is the moment that is lost, never to return again.

I am comforted by the knowledge that these anxieties, fears and concerns are not something new. They have preoccupied thinkers from time immemorial and far greater minds than mine have grappled with these issues before me. Modern man has the advantage of being able to tap into a greater and much wider knowledge base than ever before. The ancients and the thinkers and philosophers of the Renaissance and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have had less knowledge about the world but they had greater wisdom and understanding.

Take the example of the US government. It knows more about its people than any government before it has ever known. The American people similarly know more about the present government than any electorate before them has ever known. But jointly they have failed to understand one another and on a broader global scale they have failed to understand the complexities of the world they live in. They have failed to understand that might is not always right. “Evil self-perpetuation” is not right, the relentless pursuit of profit is not always right. Not when it plays with and devastates human lives. This failure of understanding has become a much more sinister failure of the human imagination with the potential that we regress into a world driven only by fear and narrow self-preservation. A world that Hobbes called “nasty, brutish and short.”

Before we examine some of the issues that occupied and vexed the minds of great thinkers and writers through the ages, we need to make a critical distinction between knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes the two seem similar and at other times they are polar opposites. The secret is to get the two to merge.

We need to acquire both knowledge and wisdom if we are to lead a fuller more meaningful life. Without these two vital ingredients our life is based only on survival. Knowledge seeks to break down and dismantle while wisdom seeks to assemble things together to form a complete whole. Knowledge requires analysis and differentiation while wisdom synthesises and integrates. Wisdom lies in the verse: “the mind has a thousand eyes”. Wisdom is about unity, wholeness and experience. While knowledge relies on verification by the senses and is more wide ranging yet also more specific.

The modern Western emphasis has been on knowledge as seen in the great scientific and technological advances and discoveries. In this pursuit of technological excellence wisdom has been sorely neglected. The Eastern thinkers on the other hand focussed more on wisdom. The Ancient Greeks realised that symbiosis between the two was essential. That knowledge and wisdom had to co-exist in a well-balanced union to allow us to master the art of harmonious living, and to lead a life free of excess as proposed by Aristotle.

Acquiring wisdom for its own sake is not enough. Also knowledge based on facts alone is not enough. This is the domain of lawyers, policemen and scientists. Our need for emotional and intellectual nourishment requires that we feast our senses and our minds on music, art, literature, poetry, theatre, film, sculpture and dance.

Einstein admitted that the dry facts alone were not enough. They had to be combined with a belief in mysticism to become the new religion of the twentieth century. He believed that man had to make several intuitive leaps forward into the unknown, and then to work backwards towards the comfort of the hard facts. These leaps that Einstein was referring to were leaps into the realm of the imagination, which he considered more important than knowledge and facts. Consider this statement he made: “The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

The thinkers and philosophers from previous centuries enjoyed distinct several enviable advantages. They faced fewer distractions and they had more time to think, to develop ideas and to write. None of today’s constant stream of scrambled and disjointed media generated messages. We live in a big confusing amusement park with an endless assault on our ever-shrinking concentration spans. The mindless and mind numbing barrage of soap operas and talk shows that insult our intelligence. The incessant need “to amuse ourselves to death,” often without the need for human interaction. Our predecessors did not have to contend with the cacophony of the flashing, mesmerising images of the electronic age to hypnotise them and to fry their brains. As David Hancock put it, in today’s world time is the devil and speed is the new God. In their time speed was the devil and time was God. They also lived in violent and uncertain times but they had more time for reflection and contemplation.

No better place to start our quest than with Aristotle, the founder of Western Philosophy. He was a realist who sought to generalise the ideal life. In his works on ethics he conceived of a virtuous character, which seeks to avoid excess in fulfilling life’s purpose, this was his Golden Mean.

Then we have Plato who founded much of metaphysics, aesthetics, moral and political philosophy. His moral theory featured reason as a means of controlling the passions through wisdom to bring harmony to the various components of the soul. He believed that man contained within him innate ideas, hence the belief in the inspiring role of intuition.

Descartes the French philosopher and father of modern philosophy, who in order to reconstruct a true view of reality doubted everything except his own existence. Hence the origin of: “Cogito ergo sum - I think therefore I am.” Descartes, the melancholy genius, believed that man intuitively possessed knowledge and that this intuition was more dependable than empirical facts.

Voltaire like Plato believed that man in his quest for a more meaningful life could perfect himself through the pursuit of reason and science. Voltaire used his formidable wit and mighty quill to fight against injustice, the excesses of authority, intolerance and fanaticism while he actively promoted intellectual freedom at a time when one could lose ones head for less.

The Anglo Saxon tradition of Hume, Hobbes and Locke and the empirical school of thinking on the other hand shunned the role of intuition and believed in verification only by the powers of observation, our own experiences and experimentation.

Yet many more great thinkers through the ages have believed that man’s “stored information”, is not limited to his own memories, past experiences and learnt facts. There is “one mind” common to all individuals, Emerson said. Ideas are not only innate in the Platonic sense but also out there often from sources we least expect, and they come to us from sources outside ourselves.

From Chaucer to Shakespeare, Homer, Balzac, Dante, Byron, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Freud, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Durrell, Kazantzakis and Graham Greene, these great minds to name but a few, explored every facet of human weakness: lust, hypocrisy, greed, stupidity, jealousy, cunning and priestly corruption. The existential struggles of memorable characters, from political and historical dramas to light hearted romances and frivolous comedies. They explored vast expanses of the human condition from the rationality of the Age of Reason, to the realism of the eighteenth century sociological novel. Some like Balzac surveyed every aspect of middle-class life. Others like Dickens focussed their social criticism on the injustices of the industrialized world and its devastating effects on the poor and especially on children.

They gave us vividly drawn characters and sprawling sentences and made our lives richer for it. They examined the psychology of man, our repressed unconscious instincts, our dreams, our fears, our emotional and sexual problems, the nature of morality and Christianity. The underlying political intrigues, the pursuit of power and riches. They looked at the moral dilemmas of complex, conflicted and flawed characters, their faith, their failings, their triumphs and their redemption. They created protagonists equally capable of good and evil deeds. They explored the problems of contemporary culture and society.

They probed our existential concerns regarding the most basic institutions of life, such as marriage, fidelity, friendship, family and the meaning of life. They wrote about the human heart in conflict with itself and about the universal themes of love, obligation to family, honour, pity, pride, prejudice, compassion, sacrifice and the meaning of human suffering. They consoled us with their humanity and their grace.

We revisit the classics so that we know that whatever crisis we face in life, we are not alone. We read them to make our load bearable. Whether it is Tolstoy’s landscape of the grand passions or Trollope’s “chronicle of those little daily lacerations upon the spirit”, they remind us that we are all made of the same bruised flesh. They remind us that none of us are spared from tragedy and despair. Nobody is immune to life’s disappointments, frustrations and idiotic expectations. We read them so that we can accept that there is a great hurt that everyone has to endure. We read them to know that not everything is driven by narrow self-interest and the bottom line. We read them to gain some depth, perspective, solace and some time-tested wisdom. We read them to continue our dialogue with the wisdom of the ages. And if as Diogenes said, “The foundation of every state is the education of its youth”, then we owe it to our children to introduce them to the works of the classical thinkers and writers and to encourage them not only to read them, but to understand them.

And what is the secret to life? Consider the haunting words of “The Secret” written by Wang Wei, the Chinese sage, 1300 years ago:

“No it is not enough to despise the world. It is not enough to live ones life as though riches and power were nothing. They are not.
But to grasp the world, to grasp and feel it grow great in ones grasp is likewise not enough. The secret is to grasp it and let it go.”

Let it go! Easier said than done. Why? Because of our vanity, the vanity of power, wealth, beauty, even the vanity of authorship. Nikos Kazantzakis the Cretan author of Zorba the Greek and the Last Temptation of Christ explored in his novels topics such as disillusionment with contemporary society, the fight against temptation and weakness and the relationship between man and God. Every writer has to also deal with and write about death as well. If at all possible to deal with tragedy with a sense of humour otherwise I couldn’t bear it. Kazantzakis chose the following words as his final epitaph:
“I fear nothing. I expect nothing. I am free.”

The final words of Leon Tolstoy, the Great Russian novelist were:
“I care a great deal.”

The secret as Dickens and Kazantzakis knew is not to have great expectations but rather to look forward to the small everyday miracles like fresh air and clean running water. The secret lies in what Ghandi said: “We must live simply so that others may simply live.” The secret is in the wisdom of Socrates: ”He is richest who is content with the least! For being content is the wealth of nature.” The secret is to embrace both knowledge and wisdom even if the process is painful.

The secret too, as my mother has known all along, is to endure. To endure in the Russian sense of the word. Even a larger than life figure like Prince Potemkin in moments of introspection, was sometimes disgusted by the sheer overwhelming excess inherent in his extremely successful life. He believed that the greatness of the Russian character lay in its capacity to endure and in its capacity for boundless suffering and self-abasement. For other beings success lies in being able to put bread on the table every day.

In a world where we are fed a diet of conformity and mediocrity and conditioned not to ask questions. In a world that discourages us from asking ourselves, and others, uncomfortable and troubling questions, the secret is to question everything. To revive the ancient Greek spirit of free and fearless inquiry, because where there is doubt there is freedom. And even if what we do is deemed insignificant by others, to do it all the same, and to the best of our abilities, because every job counts to the hilt. The secret lies in being tolerant and open-minded. The secret too is to keep the things we cherish in our hearts and in our minds and in this way to find what the Quakers call “peace at the centre.”

The secret is to accept the paradox of life, the complex and the simple. To understand that it took the genius of Einstein to explain the complexity of the universe in a simple way and in the end to concede that reality is after all nothing but a very persistent illusion. What is real then? The American Indians believed that our dreams are real and life is only a dream. Fellini said that everyone lives in his own fantasy world, but most people don’t understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private personal fantasies the truth.

Either way, whatever we believe to be real or the truth, the real tragedy is that we do not use the full potential of our minds. Our minds have the power to conceive, to hypothesise and to imagine anything and everything, from distant galaxies to parallel universes, to the interconnectivity between space; time and individual beings.

For Tolstoy, the changes in our life had to come, not only from our mental resolution to try a new form of life, but also from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience. Whether we prefer the words of Tolstoy or Kazantzakis is immaterial. The secret, as they both knew, is that the significant changes in our lives come from an altered state of mind. So that like Shakespeare’s Henry V we can say to the world: “Presume not that I am the thing I was.” The deepest secret is that life is not only a voyage of discovery, but also a process of creation. We must not only discover ourselves, but also create ourselves anew.

Seek therefore not to find out who you are, seek rather to determine who you want to be. Ghandi said we must become the change that we seek. This is how we reinvent ourselves, through another noble act of creation. Therein lies our hope and our salvation. Because ultimately the only nobility there is, resides in one place only and that is in our minds.

The secret dear friends, is whatever you want it to be.

Costa Ayiotis
Hout Bay
13 June 2003