{"id":490,"date":"2006-02-05T11:14:00","date_gmt":"2006-02-05T11:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2006\/02\/05\/490\/"},"modified":"2006-02-05T11:14:00","modified_gmt":"2006-02-05T11:14:00","slug":"490","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=490","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE:<\/span> I recently read an interesting quote from “Baba” Ram Dass, a holdover guru-dude from the Timothy Leary era. Because Baba Dass was into meditation more than drugs, he’s still alive today . . . . unlike many of the other children of the psychedelic 1960’s, i.e. the “turn on, tune in” \/ “peace, pot, microdot” days. (Being a computerish kind of guy, I’m tempted to call him “RAM DOS”; but that’s getting old too.) Anyway, here’s his quote:<\/p>\n

“We’re sitting under the tree of our thinking minds, wondering why we’re not getting any sunshine.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Heavy, man. But seriously, the good master here is talking about spiritual realization. He’s saying that too much intellectual life gets in the way. A lot of other spiritual avatars have said similar things. This idea may go all the way back to the Book of Genesis and the Adam and Eve story — recall how the first couple got into trouble with the tree of knowledge and the forbidden fruit. Nonetheless, I’d like to challenge the notion that thinking and intelligence isn’t such a great thing (despite all it’s done for our species, Adam and Eve not withstanding).<\/p>\n

Let’s go back to Plato and the Cave of the Forms. St. Paul said that we see through a glass darkly, and Plato said that we see the ultimate truths of the forms in roughly the same way. Instead of a dirty mirror, however, Plato imagines that we live in a cave and always keep our backs to the entrance, where the light of the sun comes in. The “sun” in this metaphor is the ultimate metaphysical power, something like what Christians and Jews call “God”. The “cave” is something like our Earth, a dirty place where things hardly ever go right. Despite its darkness and gloom, however, the light does illuminate some walls within the cave. When it does, we sometimes see shadows from the ultimate truths and principles that live outside in the higher realm (i.e., outside the cave, in the dazzling sunshine of truth). Plato makes it clear that we’re not able to go outside the cave and see these wonderful things for ourselves. The light of the “ultimate sun” is too bright for our eyes. Our eyes, being imperfect like everything else in the cave, could not work in such an intense condition.<\/p>\n

Moses basically said the same thing in the Old Testament, when going up to the mountain. The light of God is too bright, it will blind you. Many of the great Christian contemplatives have agreed with that notion. They report “seeing” or experiencing God in terms of “darkness” and not in light. The medium of that darkness is usually a contemplative mental state brought on by prayerful meditation.<\/p>\n

The 2nd Century neo-Pagan Plotinus (who influenced a lot of the early Christian writers including Augustine) basically said that thinking is also an approach to the greater truths, so long as the intellectual concepts are grasped at the highest level of the mind. In other words, you can think about math or physics or most any other scientific subject and fool around with it and get some results for a particular problem. But you don’t really become great at it until you have the “ah hah!” moments, until it merges into your highest planes of intuitive consciousness. That’s the Einstein level, where your mind “lives” and “breathes” things like matrix algebra and quantum chromodynamics. (Unfortunately, most of us reserve that level of our minds for things like whether Shop-Rite is going to have a sale on ground round next week). That’s where thinking and intellectual effort become spiritual acts in themselves, according to Plotinus; we then realize that we are part of a “Great Universal Mind”, a metaphysical entity that is not far from Plato’s “Ultimate Sun”. <\/p>\n

So, if this ultimate sunshine is too bright for us, maybe the tree of knowledge and cogitation is where we are supposed to be right now. Instead of cursing the darkness with the Baba, or forbidding the use of our minds in approaching the ultimate truths (as the great religions so often do, with their “pay, pray and obey” attitudes), let’s climb the tree of the intellect. Let’s reach for higher and higher levels where more and more light gets through the leaves and branches. Let’s hug the tree of our mind and intellect, not curse it. With all due respect to Ram Dass, I think I’m with Plotinus on this one.<\/p>\n

P.S. But I will admit that there is a dark side to the intellect. I’ve been reading “The Wizards of Armageddon” about the great old time that a bunch of eggheads had designing and planning the use of the H-Bomb back in the 1950s and 60s. Unfortunately, people are still having such a great time today in North Korea and Pakistan and Israel and Iran and India, maybe other places. I just pray that they will eventually start seeing the true light, as did American nuclear scientist Robert Oppenheimer<\/a> . . . . before the the Third World blows itself up (and probably takes a lot of Americans down in the process).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE: I recently read an interesting quote from “Baba” Ram Dass, a holdover guru-dude from the Timothy Leary era. Because Baba Dass was into meditation more than drugs, he’s still alive today . . . . unlike many of the other children of the psychedelic 1960’s, i.e. the “turn on, tune in” \/ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}