In the second article of this series, The Awful Truth About the Truth: Redefining the Quest, we examined how humanity has dealt with the problem of identifying and discovering true and reliable knowledge. We will now explore some of the more esoteric ideas – those conceived by thinkers of an unconventional mindset. Like the previous two installations, this is not intended as an exhaustive treatise on the novel mutations in the history of human meta-thought, but merely a collection of interesting individuals and their ideas. Some of these will no doubt be familiar to the reader; each was novel indeed in the context of their own times and places, and each represents a step forward in the human journey towards an understanding of the truth.
Our account begins with Ur-Nammu, founder of the Sumerian Third Dynasty of Ur around the 21st century BCE. Ur-Nammu was a builder of empire and of monumental architecture, but his legacy is the Code of Ur-Nammu: the oldest surviving codified law. The prologue to the Code credits the king with standardizing weights and measures, and emphasizes his dedication to justice regardless of wealth or status:
“Then did Ur-Nammu the mighty warrior, king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, by the might of Nanna, [patron deity] of the city, and in accordance with the true word of Utu (aka Shamash, Babylonian solar god of justice, morality and truth), establish equity in the land; he banished malediction, violence and strife… the orphan was not delivered up to the rich man; the widow was not delivered up to the mighty man; the man of [few means] was not delivered up to the man of [greater means].”1
The idea of a single standard of justice applicable to all (and above all) seems basic, even self-evident, to us in the twenty-first century of the Common Era; but to our forebears at a separation of four thousand years, it was a revolutionary one. The Code of Ur-Nammu is the first step towards a single system of justice for all – an idea that has been around for a very long time, but is still only just coming into general practice. Although modern nations claim rule of law as a basic value, even the briefest of searches make it clear that, even today, the very wealthy routinely avoid any legal consequences for crimes far more serious than those for which the non-wealthy go to prison for decades. There remains much to be done for Justice to rule without prejudice, but we tip our hats to Ur-Nammu for starting the process. The idea that nobody is above the law was the first crack in the foundational belief in the divinity of rulers.
We look next to Akhenaten, a pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty in Egypt, ca. 14th century BCE. Despite popular perception, ancient people had much the same general view of religion as we do today. Masonic scholar Manly P. Hall explains with his somewhat long-winded eloquence:
“To the discerning few were revealed the esoteric, or spiritual, teachings, while the unqualified many received only the literal, or exoteric, interpretations. In order to make simple the great truths of Nature and the abstract principles of natural law, the vital forces of the universe were personified, becoming the gods and goddesses of the ancient mythologies. While the ignorant multitudes brought their offerings to the altars of Priapus and Pan (deities representing the procreative energies), the wise recognized in these marble statues only symbolic concretions of great abstract truths.”2
It is worth noting that Hall is not expressing disrespect here for ignorance in general, or for the deities of any religious tradition; he is somewhat bluntly distinguishing between symbols and the things they represent, and between those who see through the symbols and those who do not.
Akhenaten’s new religion declared the ultimate oneness of all things in terms that the general public could relate to. Although the Sun-God had previously been worshipped as the lord of creation and of the gods, Akhenaten banned the worship of any god except the Sun – and he alone was the connection between Aten, the Sun, and the people. This was more of a revolution than a reform of the old traditions, and was not well received. After Akhenaten’s death, his name was deleted from the royal lists, and his statues destroyed. The temples he built to Aten were torn down, and his immediate successors (whether from personal conviction or from political necessity) reverted to the traditional religious system. Some historians believe that the Abrahamic religions have their earliest roots in Akhenaten’s ideas, while others point out that the idea of a divine unity of all Being is found elsewhere and earlier than Akhenaten, most notably in the Hindu concept of Brahman. For all of the controversy and doubt surrounding Akhenaten’s life and legacy, his greatest contribution is certainly that he made it painfully, publicly obvious that priests and kings could be wrong – absolutely wrong – about the very things that were supposed to be beyond question.
Fast forward now to the turn of the 16th century of the Common Era. England is on the rise; Elizabeth I has dealt blow after humiliating blow to the former superpower, Spain. Her Attorney General – in the language of the day, the “Queen’s Counsel,” and also her Lord Chancellor, was Francis Bacon. Aside from his official duties, Bacon was a philosopher. His proposal that true knowledge can only be obtained through observation of natural events, followed by inductive reasoning, is the basis for what we now know as the scientific method. The development of this idea earns Francis Bacon the title of “father of empiricism.” At a time when the Church – Roman or English – held absolute power over Europe, Francis Bacon introduced the idea of deriving true knowledge from human reasoning based on human observation. It is nearly as impressive that he lived out his life without scandal and without being arrested for heresy, despite much evidence that he was an alchemist and a magician in the Rosicrucian tradition. Bacon will be remembered for being the first to deliver a theory of knowledge that does not depend upon religious tradition – indeed, for setting a precedent for many philosophers and scientists inventing frameworks generally referred to as “Theories of Everything”, attempting to unite disparate areas of knowledge in a single all-encompassing and coherent system.
Born only a decade after Bacon’s death, Baruch Spinoza was perhaps the most avant-garde thinker of the Enlightenment, which he played a significant part of establishing as a period of progressive social movement. His thought was challenging enough to earn him formal expulsion from the Amsterdam Jewish community (still in effect!); he was hated by the Christian followers of the Prince of Orange, who banned his Theological-Political Treatise for opposing a theocratic government, and his books appear on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. Whereas Bacon gave us a scientific method that did not depend on religious dogma, Spinoza went farther and delivered an entire philosophical framework – what we would today call a Theory of Everything – that needs no personal God at all. He practiced no religion and was accused of atheism, and is reported to have been a person of benevolence and tolerance, and indeed to have been an exemplary moral model. While Spinoza mentions God throughout his work, he is clear that by God he means the same as Nature, or the totality of the universe itself. This concept is, interestingly enough, identical to the idea of Brahman (referenced above in the section on Akhenaten). Nor was this the only instance of close similarity between Spinoza’s ideas and others far removed in time and space.
Spinoza envisioned the basic structure of the universe as consisting of an infinite number of mathematical points, each of which exists as a unit of spiritual essence (he might have called it “consciousness” if he were writing today). These “monads”, as Spinoza called them, assemble in configurations differing in size, function, and nature, thus yielding the diversity of mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and angelic entities that populate the universe. This idea bears uncanny similarities with several theories of the last 100 years in that it proposes a basic particle (the Standard Model of particle physics describes two elementary particles, fermions and bosons) which in different configurations gives rise to all forms of matter and energy. Visualizing the universe as an infinity of points has other strange implications: it would seem that in such a framework, all change would be wave functions propagating through the matrix of elementary points. This, too, somewhat resembles certain aspects of our current understanding of physics.
The influence of Baruch Spinoza on some of the stranger ideas of the last half millennium can hardly be overstated. There is a famous and often misrepresented quote by Albert Einstein in which he acknowledges a belief in God. The misrepresentation lies in that this quote is usually taken out of context and heavily edited so as to give the impression that Einstein was a “Bible-believing Christian” or something of the sort. The actual quote in its entirety reveals a different truth:
“I believe in Spinoza’s god, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”3
– Albert Einstein
G. I. Gurdjieff was a Russian mystic whose work synthesized the teachings of a variety of esoteric traditions from the Mediterranean region and Central Asia, enunciating his system in a peculiar jargon intended to force conceptual focus. Gurdjieff made a number of contributions to spiritual technology – what we might call the psychology of self-development – including subliminal work through dance and the idea of training for power using the same daily distractions that former mystery schools had always eschewed. His teachings provided the model for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship; the iconic architect considered him a prophet and wrote of him that “when the prejudice against him has cleared away, his vision of truth will be recognized as fundamental.” Wright was evidently somewhat of a prophet himself: Gurdjieff’s methods are used today in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and other psychotherapeutic frameworks, and his legacy is particularly interesting for being the first comprehensive system to express the goals and methods of religion without using any religious language or referring to any deity. His “Fourth Way” is a systematic approach to self-realization by arduous dedication to consciously transforming one’s own ways of processing material and perceptual input from the outside world.
The reader may wonder what the first three ways might be. Gurdjieff described three basic human types, corresponding roughly to William Sheldon’s somatotype theory (since discredited), and also similar to Freud’s model of the tripartite mind consisting of id, ego and superego. This similarity bears the important distinction that Gurdjieff’s three types represent physical, emotional and mental centers while Freud’s model describes the conscious self experiencing the conflict between genetically determined reflexes and impulses on the one hand, and socially imposed, unnatural restrictions on the other. According to Gurdjieff, the three human types exhibit distinct modes of spirituality based on physical, emotional and mental discipline respectively. His Fourth Way works on all three levels at once, using focused intention throughout the daily activities, stressors and distractions of life to bring about an expansion in consciousness. Practitioners are concerned primarily with “waking up” from the normal human state of relative unconsciousness, and to live as intentionally – and thus freely – as possible.
Among the many thinkers influenced by Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky looms large. Where Gurdjieff synthesized a secular methodology of self-development from esoteric religious traditions, Ouspensky went a step further and postulated a universe with higher physical dimensions of which we are normally unaware. He describes his system in Tertium Organum, so named in homage to the two previously conceived descriptions of reality that he considered to be the direct precursors to his own masterpiece: the Organon of Aristotle and Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. The titles all refer to the human intellect as the “organ” or instrument of Reason. In Tertium Organum, Ouspensky builds a theory of knowledge around the intersection of geometry and consciousness.
Ouspensky comes close at times to proposing that esoteric development of the human mind can enable us to access higher physical dimensions – at least perceptually, if not actively. This theory is once again garnering interest with reference to the UAP/UFO phenomena, although we have not yet heard Ouspensky credited in the public forum; still, it cannot be denied that once again, a thinker from our past has proved unexpectedly prescient. Ouspensky’s Theory of Everything is unique in its emphasis on consciousness as something that can be measured, manipulated and expanded through procedural methods.
Karl Jaspers is perhaps best known for his significant influence on the philosophy of Frank Herbert, author of Dune. A psychiatrist turned philosopher, Jaspers’ work links philosophy to psychiatry; awareness of how psychopathology is to some extent a feature, not only of individual human minds, but of societies/cultures as aggregates of human consciousness. Yet again we are reminded that the real world is not binary, but a landscape of gradients. In his later work, Jaspers again placed philosophical arguments within a psychological context, emphasizing the importance of being aware that the functions and dysfunctions of the human mind restrict its capacity for clear perception and processing of information.
A systems thinker, Jaspers argued that psychological defense mechanisms (such as confirmation bias) are inescapably present in human thought; one might say that there are truths too awful for us to face with open eyes and minds. It follows that our rational frameworks, too, are of necessity corrupted by this defensive bias. In order to transcend the self-destructive tendency of our reasoning faculty, we must venture outside of our own experience and ideas. We do this by communicating openly and intensely with others whose experience and ideas differ from our own, synthesizing new and more accurately descriptive conceptual frameworks that become, in turn, the basis for a new cycle of expansion in consciousness.
Jaspers’ magnum opus, Philosophy, is comprised of three volumes, each of which describes an essential modality of the human condition: orientation, existence and transcendence. The work as a whole demonstrates the potential for human consciousness to evolve progressively and in a predictable fashion, when one modality becomes unsustainable through the discovery of conflicting knowledge, forcing the individual (or society) to build a new model. This evolution begins at the level of orientation, or the kind of knowledge that can be objectively verified (for example, scientific knowledge), leading through the process of synthesis described above to a practical understanding of facts through personal reflection – and beyond experience and reason to transcendental insight.
“[A]t the level of immediate objective knowledge—of orientation in the world—human consciousness raises subjective-existential questions about itself and the grounds of its truth which it cannot resolve at this level of consciousness, and it encounters antinomies which call it to reflect existentially upon itself and to elevate it to the level of existence or existentially committed self-reflection. At this higher level of consciousness, then, existence raises metaphysical questions about itself and its origin which it cannot begin to answer without an awareness that existence is, at an originary or authentic level, transcendent, and that its truth is metaphysical.”4
To Jaspers, transcendence is the result of persistent failure; this concept is central to the Dune books and to Herbert’s writing in general. Religion, in this model, hides that which it purports to reveal; it is the dogmatic structure built upon and around kernels of transcendent knowledge, for the purpose of obscuring this knowledge.
We have seen the focus of philosophy evolve from thinking about who defines Truth to recognizing that Truth is beyond any of us. We recognize that our understanding will always be incomplete – yet it is possible to transcend our current state of consciousness and free ourselves from successively less restrictive “soul cages” (Jaspers’ Gehäuse), becoming more truly ourselves than we were before.
It seems we are made to evolve, to continuously reinvent ourselves as we develop naturally – truly a participatory process. Embracing this may be as close to truth as we get: our truth as human beings is that we are continually discovering how little we know of All That Is.
The awful truth about the truth: it is lethal to the self-as-is. Truth is elusive, existing in successive iterations, all of which change the seeker forever. It is no single thing we find, but rather a gradient of dawning enlightenment. We cannot know – or even imagine – what will become of us if we embark upon this most perilous journey; the only certainty is that our present illusions will be swept away, and our own identities will dissolve, burn to ashes, precipitate and ferment before stabilizing once more to a new and different substance. This, too, in time will shatter and undergo transmutation. For those with the courage to risk themselves for an abstract ideal, an endless voyage of exploration awaits.
References
Code of Ur-Nammu, https://www.worldhistory.org/Ur-Nammu/
Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928
Albert Einstein Quotes Denying Belief in a Personal God, Austin Cline, June 25, 2019, learnreligions.com
Karl Jaspers, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mar. 7, 2022, (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/)
Suggested reading:
Code of Hammurabi, World History Encyclopedia
Akhenaten, Britannica
Francis Bacon, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Baruch Spinoza, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Gurdjieff Work, Kathleen Riordan Speeth, Jeremy P Tarcher/Putnam 1989
Tertium Organum, P. D. Ouspensky
The Santaroga Barrier, Frank Herbert