My core personal philosophical collection, though, consists in three books: the Tao Te Ching, the Wisdom of the Idiots (Idries Shah), and my Kum Nye books.
The Tao Te Ching has influenced me since I first read the first line “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao”.
Kum Nye, of course, I have spoken of often. It is not a philosophy, but what I might term a means to the approximation of one.
But I wanted to comment on The Wisdom of the Idiots. It is not the book itself which is so important, but what it represents to me.
I wanted to buy it for my daughter, but she said “no, I want to study philosophy”. And this–like nearly everything I see every day–got me to thinking.
There is no philosophy in this book, not in a traditional sense. It is a collection of stories, some of which are quite difficult to “unpack” and grasp, and “grok”. I am, I am quite certain, far from understanding most of them, even if I have from time to time talked about some of them.
What it is is a thousand shards of meaning, of contingent, partial perceptions. It is a cloud of possibilities. It is shimmering, moving, evolving, changing, both there, and not there.
The way of the Sufi, as I understand it, is breaking all our meanings into a thousand pieces, and allowing them to reassemble in a self organizing way directed by our deepest consciousness, our deepest intuitive awareness, on a level far, far deeper than anything possible for the conscious mind, but directly in connection with our spirit, our soul, our deepest possibilities.
Your way is your own way. Far too few people want to grasp this. They want to be told “do this, believe that, adhere to the teaching of this person or that person, and the way will be laid out in front of you.” Even though the Buddha–or one of his disciples–said something like “if you meet me on the path, kill me”, far too few people are willing to do this. There is a Buddha Dharma. There is a sangha. There are doctrinal teachings. There are mantras to be said obsessively across decades.
Philosophy is broken. As I have noted from time to time, one of my favorite saying from any book ever is the quote I wrote down when I was 18 from Moby Dick. Here is the quote in full, which is worth reading:
“I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is–which was the only way he could get there–thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should no be conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such and such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.”
It is the last line I loved so much. There is no path but the path you make. Even the Existentialists teach this, but they wind up being Communists. One extreme breeds the other, if no wisdom intervenes.
There is no safe path, no path free from the continual risk of delusion, self deception, grandiosity, unwarranted self satisfaction, obsession. My mind wants to add “freedom” to this list, where it does not seem to belong, but as I contemplate, yes, it does belong there. Freedom, true freedom, is also a risk. How can you go where no one has gone before, truly? It is scary, frightening. To go your own way, you do need to become accustomed to fear. You must make it your friend. You must learn to allow it to recede, even in the unknown, and unknowable.
I do not think it unreasonable to call myself a Sufi. I admit I am an idiot. I am an idealistic, stubborn idiot. Fully grasping the extent of your own futility, the extent of your failures and imbecilities, the vast ocean of things you can’t begin to say you understand, the impossibility of ever reaching in this world anything approaching a complete understanding: all of these constitute the BEGINNING of the path. It becomes possible then to BEGIN the process of learning, of seeing, of perceiving with your own eyes and ears, your own body, your own tongue and nose. And it is a path which winds off into a horizon which never gets any closer. The path is your home, here. It can never be any more. But that is the point of life. It is the purpose for being here. And it can be a home. It can be happy and fulfilling, when you let go of all the things which seek to keep you rooted, frozen, immobile, hopeless, and lost.
I mentioned this some years ago, but I was in fact annointed a Sufi in a dream once. I was told by a group of wise men that I was to be crowned a Sufi. There was a majestic ceremony, fit for a king. And when the great moment came to place the crown on my head, it was 6″ too big on every side, and fell immediately on my shoulders. We all laughed. It was the laughter that completed the ceremony.