SAINT SOCRATES

There’s a rumor going around, after my Warwick’s Reading on January 20, that I am a wise woman. I feel compelled to dispel it for several reasons, the most powerful and life-changing of which is the Socrates Story that follows. There may be some hubris involved in comparing myself to Socrates, but I mention him only for the lesson the story has offered to me time and time again when I have fallen into the delusion of thinking myself wise.
So, here’s the Socrates story I meant to tell many sentences, thoughts and ideas ago. The fact that it is still a relevant entry is evidence that I try to keep it close to my heart at all times. It is from another of my favorite books, so favorite that I have two copies of it, one in India and one here in the US. The latter copy I inherited from my late husband, Donald Dean Powell, who turned me on to Plato: THE COLLECTED DIALOGUES OF PLATO, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 1966 (Bollingen Series).
A friend of Socrates, Chaerephon, had gone to the God of Delphi, and asked whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, and the priestess had replied, “None.” When Chaerephon told this to Socrates, he was nonplussed and confused. “How,” Socrates asked him, “can this be? I am very conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small. And yet the God at Delphi never tells a lie.”
So, being the bulldog (and gadfly) in the service of truth, Socrates decided to check it out for himself by undertaking a pilgrimage of sorts. Socrates intention was to prove that the oracle was mistaken. He wanted to find a wise man, and tell the priestess, ‘here is a man wiser than I.’
Socrates examined three men with the highest reputations for wisdom and found all of them wanting. When Socrates tried to show them, through his impeccable reasoning, that they were not as wise as they thought themselves to be, he was resented by them. Socrates knew that they were not wise for the simple reason that they thought they knew something they didn’t know. Socrates, on the other hand, was very conscious of his own ignorance. To the small extent that he did not think he knew what he did not know, he was wiser than they were.
These so called wise men of Athens trumped up charges against Socrates and condemned him to die. But Socrates went to death joyfully knowing that since he did not know anything about death – whether it was in fact an end or a beginning — there was no cause for despair.
So, Socrates’ definition of a wise person is someone who knows s/he doesn’t know. This knowing that one does not know seems to me to be the essence and acme of wisdom and joy. This definition of wisdom is so intimately tied to humility that I think my next entry will have to be a story from the BE HUMBLE section of RUMI’S TALES FROM THE SILK ROAD (or PILGRIMAGE TO PARADISE, if you are in India).
I’ll end by being confessional. I count myself an utter and total fool. In big ways and small I forget I do not know and get trapped in my certainties, and suffer for them. I think a great deal of suffering is caused by our thinking that we know the ultimate answers about the why and wherefore of our lives and of people in them. We rarely have the humility for those “Ah Ha!” moments in which our own folly becomes painfully evident. Most fights with the people in our lives spring from our certainties that our point of view is the only right one. In some ways we are so hard wired to survive aggressively that we don’t see how these very skills, appropriate in some situations, are totally inimical to happiness in others. I know this is true of me, and all I can do is remember to stay in that soft place of not knowing where all I know is the raging mystery that is life; remember to not get sucked in by those who think I am wise and get too inflated for my own boots. This has to be watched assiduously, for as the Sufis say, “more invisible than the footprints of an ant on a black rock on the darkest night of the year are the workings of the ego.”
I also want to add that being a fool gives me a lot of latitude and freedom that ‘being wise’ would not. It’s also – when it doesn’t cause suffering – a lot more fun!
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November 8^th 2009

No sooner than I posted my last entry on Rumi’s story titled YOU NEVER KNOW WHY, my Mr. Skeptic said, “It’s good to make up stories and arguments that serve your point of view and make you feel better, but are they true? What about death? Is that a good thing, too? Does Rumi’s story really explain suffering? Can suffering be explained away? You can cite the afterlife, etc, but who knows? Perhaps life is a bitch and then we die.

I say Mr. Skeptic is good and has a purpose in the evolution of our spirits. “Spirit?” says he, “what spirit?

You know, it’s an old, old argument between faith and reason. It is the argument between what William James defines as the Tender Hearted and the Tough Minded. FBS, fortunately, makes it hard for me to carry on this argument. Perhaps, says Mr. Skeptic, you are just intellectually lazy and use FBS as an excuse?

I find relief in concurring. I will let him, and myself, be, knowing in my heart (I have no desire or energy to convince another) that my experience is as true of me as his is to him. As Einstein says, what is true of A is not true of B. And who is correct? Both, according to our Scientist Saint. Mr. Skeptic does not share my e/motion, nor I his. We can let it rest at that. Mr. Skeptic is too young for me, too impassioned about reason, and moving too fast for me at 61. At my age, I am entitled to my way of thinking and being. I have done my battling with him, and now am entitled to my peace and my subjective knowing that I am right for me. I don’t need to be right for him or everyone else.

It wasn’t always so. Mr. Skeptic had won several times and I had lain, wounded and dying in the battlefield. Conscious choice had become my nurse and ministered me back to health. I had to choose the imaginary over the material, the emotional over the logical, feeling over reason, the unseen over verifiable facts. It was Johannes Kepler, the 16^th century scientist, hero of my play, Kepler Dreams, who taught me imagination’s unerring instinct to discover and uncover the truth. That character birthed me, too, and I made a conscious decision to take the leap of faith, leaving reason, alone, behind. I didn’t then know that reason and imagination, too, are the two seeming dualities which are two sides of the same coin. Where would we be without reason? But it must stay in its place and not take over our entire beings.

I must add as an aside that the play was never produced. For every success there are a thousand failures. Look at how many billions of sperm cells fail before one succeeds. Vanity makes me add that Kepler Dreams was, however, stage read at the Gaslamp Quarter theatre in San Diego, directed by Mark Hofflund, who was then director of the Play Discovery Program at the Old Globe Theatre. This again, is a an embarrassing, ‘not now’ story).

Where was I? What thread do I need to pick up in this tapestry and reweave? None. I am done with that thought and Mr. Skeptic and must carry on in a different, but related, direction. I think I will speak of Mr. Socrates instead.  I have 500 words to do it in. I didn’t explain that my blags have been picked up by Sahara Time who wants me to do a 1000 word essay as frequently as I can for them. I am limited.

No, Socrates too must wait. I feel like musing on ‘limitation,’ instead, as far as FBS will allow. Actually, FBS, I am realizing, thanks to Mr. Skeptic’s pointing it out, is a great boon. I don’t have to overtax my poor, overworked brain. Like an old mare, she only wants some rest, and a restful way of being and thinking.  She is retired, like Black Beauty at the end of his days, chomping the cud of thought and dreams on a grassy meadow by a lake.

So, just a brief abstract on limitation. Ah abstraction! I love it, together with limitation. If there were no limitations to this essay my blag would go on and on like long and tangled spaghetti, into the far reaches of space and be lost in it; All matter, all life, is limitation. Bodies are bodies because they spread this far and no further. Houses, plants, thumbnails, stars, ice cream are what they are because of limitation.  Limitation is what unites us all. If a flower did not know its limitations, would we have flowers? Would we have music? All life is rhythm, and what is rhythm if not music?

I will end this essay by pointing to a marvelous book that I found in Payson’s library: The Power of Limits (Shambhala, 1981), by Gyorgy Doczi. Payson is so jealous of it he watches me carefully when I touch it. I have a habit of not reading, but eating books. I make them entirely mine, underlining words and sentences, leaving pencils in them that Payson has never tired of telling me, break the bindings. It is not an easy book to read, full of mathematics that are hard on my fuzzed brain. But I read those parts I can and understand, and skip the rest. Here are a few quotes from him:

“In our fascinations with our powers of invention and achievement, we have lost sight of the power of limits. Yet now we are forced to confront the limits of the earth’s resources, and the need to limit overpopulation, big government, big business and big labor. In all our realms of our experience, we are finding the need to rediscover proper proportions. The proportions of nature, art and architecture . . .  They teach us that limitations are not just restrictive, but they are also creative.” And one last quote, which I simply adore: “The limitless emerges from limits.”

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