A belligerent Samurai, an old Japanese tale goes, once challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. But the monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout — I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!” His very honour attacked, the Samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from his scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence!”

“That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.” Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in his grip, the Samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.

“And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”

—Daniel Goleman

   Knowledge
+ Experience
   Wisdom

Power is how one utilises their roster of wisdoms to maintain their order and interpretation of reality held over any others.

A new creation in particular, the new Reich for instance, has more need of enemies than friends: only in opposition does it feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary … We adopt the same attitude towards the “enemy within.”

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From the exhibit “Fallen” © Toby Burrows

In many respects the formal, academic philosophy of the West has come to a dead end, having confined itself to a method of inquiry which compels it to move in a vicious circle. This is especially true in epistemology, which, because it involves the whole work of self-knowledge, is really the central problem of philosophy. As the West understands it, epistemology is really the task of trying to “think thought”—to construct words about words about words—since philosophical thinking is, for us, not a changing but a verbalisation of experience.

The inquiring mind is perennially fascinated with the problem of the mind’s own nature and origins—not only to know just by way of information what knowing is, but also to employ such information for the greater control of the knower, for is it not frequently said that the problem of modern man is to be able to control himself as effectively as he can control his environment.

But there is a basic contradiction in the attempt of reason to transcend itself. To know the knower, to control the controller, and to think thought implies a circular and impossible situation, like the effort to bite one’s own teeth. It is for this reason that modern logical philosophy tends to dismiss such inquiries as “metaphysical and meaningless” and to confine philosophy to the investigation of relatively pedestrian problems of logic and ethics. This situation has arisen in the West because, for us, “to know” really means “to control”; that is, to see how events may be fitted to consistent orders of words and symbols so that we may predict and govern their course. But this mania for control leads ultimately to a barren confusion, because we ourselves are by no means separated from the environment we are trying to control. Western man has been able to pursue this mania only so far because of his acute feeling of individual isolation, of the separation of his “I” from all else. Thus, in philosophy, in technology, and in the whole ordering of our society, we run into the ancient problem of Quis custodiet custodies?—who guards the guard, polices the policeman, plans the planner, and controls the controller? The logical end of all this is the totalitarian state of George Orwell’s 1984, the nightmare of mutual espionage.

On the other hand, such major Oriental philosophies as the Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism arise in cultures far less concerned with controlling the world, and in which the whole notion of the dominance of the universe by man (the conscious ego) seems palpably absurd. For all these philosophies it is a first principle that the seeming separateness of the ego from the world, so that it could be its own controller, is an illusion. Individual consciousness did not contrive itself and, not being sui generis (un-born, anutpanna), can never be the directive source of life.

Thus, for Oriental philosophy, knowledge is not control. It is rather the “sensation”—the vivid realisation—that “I” am not this individualised consciousness alone, but the matrix from which it arises. This knowledge consists, not in a verbal proposition, but in a psychological change, similar to that which occurs in the cure of psychosis. One in whom this change has come to pass does not attempt to control the world, or himself, by the efforts of his own will. He learns the art of “letting things happen.” Which is no mere passivity but, on the contrary, a creative technique familiar to the activity of many artists, musicians, and inventors in our own culture, whereby skill and insight are found to be the fruits of a certain “dynamic” relaxation.

It is obvious that a philosophy, a wisdom, which offers deliverance from the vicious circle of “controlling the controller” is of immense value to cultures, like our own, which are hopelessly confused by their schemes to organise themselves. However, it will be extraordinarily difficult for a wisdom of this kind to come within the scope of Western philosophy unless the latter can admit that philosophy is more than logic, more than verbalisation, to the point where philosophy can include the transformation of the very processes of the mind, and not simple of the words and symbols which the mind employs.