The Wisdom Eaters 

by Ptolemy Tompkins

(Reprinted with permission of Lapis Magazine)

In our culture... the elders are missing. – Louise Cards Mahdi

Recently I watched a video called "Timothy Leary's Last Trip," a documentary by A. J. Caroline and O. B. Babbs, the son of Merry Prankster Ken Babbs. The film covered the usual territory, from Learys days at Harvard, to the house at Millbrook, New York, weaving in the Merry Pranksters and the Further Bus Along the Way. The climax of the video was a "final meeting" between Leary and Kesey "on a new plane of existence—a place their wildest trips in the '60s never imagined ...cyberspace." The cyberspace meeting, when it finally arrived, was a fascinating disappointment. Leary and Kesey, flanked by their supporters, camera crew, and assorted hangers-on, stared at each other's image in their computer screens and traded weak congratulations at having brought the event off. Leary was close to death—he would die just three weeks later—and clearly not as sanguine about this fact as his confident talk about Ultimate Trips and such not tried to suggest. Kesey's bright spirits, meanwhile, seemed equally forced. The event, advertised so hopefully by the film's narrator as a meeting at the wild fringes of psyche and science, had at moments the flavor of a phone conversation between two legionnaires no longer healthy enough to meet up and reminisce in person. When Leary, at a certain point in the proceedings, uttered his familiar cry of "further further further," the words had a painfully empty ring to them.

In A Guide for the Perplexed, E. F. Schumacher's great attempt at summarizing the collective wisdom of the pre-modern world and making its imperatives intelligible to modern readers, he wrote that "it may conceivably be possible to live without churches; but it is not possible to live without religion, that is, without systematic work to keep in contact with, and develop toward, Higher Levels than those of ‘ordinary life’ with all its pleasure or pain, sensation, gratification, refinement or crudity—whatever it may be. The modern experiment to live without religion has failed and once we have understood this, we know what our `post modern' tasks really are."

The first among those tasks, Schumacher made clear, is to recover a series of genuine maps-for-transformed-living: maps which allow people today—especially young people—to change themselves in deep and lasting ways and attain to those "further" dimensions of human experience that Leary showed himself to be so keenly if ineffectually concerned with. Schumacher wrote A Guide for the Perplexed in the late 70s, and since then the maps have been coming in hard and heavy. In fact, there are more of them floating around now than perhaps at any other single point in history. Not only are modern—if questionable masters of transformation like Leary and Kesey in anything but short supply, but revamped versions of the transformative maps of times past are on hand in equal, and perhaps even greater, quantities.

From Nag Hammadi to Tikal, on tomb walls, parchment rolls, and codices bound in jaguar-skin, the deep, difficult, and often very obscure musings of long-vanished cultures on the true shape and purpose of human life have been coming back into the light and back into circulation at an unprecedented rate. Dug up, dusted off, and passed to scholars for initial translation and interpretation, these materials eventually find their way into the hands of writers with an eye for the popular market. Finally, when sufficiently trimmed of offensive or confusing archaisms and trapped out with an eye-pleasing design, these refurbished wisdom documents are ready for the journey to Borders or Barnes & Noble, and the wisdom-hungry public. Harvested like honey from the scattered flower fields of history and packaged to sell, these ancient materials are from a distance scarcely distinguishable from the offerings of contemporary sages, both real and self-proclaimed, with which they share shelf space. From Tibetan tantra to Iranian Sufism to Japanese Zen to Amerindian shamanism, from Leary to Da Free John to Ken Wilber to James Redfield, countless schemes for making sense of that vague feeling of insufficiency that is part and parcel of the human condition are now available in paperback, at a superstore near you, for around $18.95 plus tax.

Yet for all the wild profusion of these maps and all the talk about using them to blaze new trails into new dimensions of understanding (and for all the genuine merit of many of them), the essential promise at the heart of all the world's wisdom traditions is often moribund today in away that it never was in ages past. For all that we may seem to possess it in quantity, real wisdom, the kind that once held entire cultures together and told the members of those cultures who they were and what they might perhaps become sometimes seems to be retreating from us at precisely the speed that so many people suggest it is approaching.

Periods of syncretistic confusion are nothing new of course, but the sheer size and extent of the confusion at work today it new, and it is producing new results as well. Perhaps never before has the profusion and availability of wisdom materials been matched by such a frequent inability to make genuine use of the materials being offered. With the world's primordial and traditional wisdom traditions in disarray and the hunger for wisdom being fed by this burst of market-driven material, the situation is much like that of an old growth forest that has been leveled overnight. On the ground, newly exposed to the sunlight, a rich profusion of growth is springing up. But unlike the trees that it replaces, this growth is fragile, its roots tentative, and its nutritional content sometimes questionable in the extreme.

Though we seem to be living in the Golden Age of it right now, America's love affair with packaged, easy-access wisdom is not entirely new. The essential religiosity of Americans, in combination with their love of novelty, has long made books of home-spun or repackaged ancient and exotic wisdom popular here; and sales-conscious mystics have been around at least as long as Walt Whitman. But the first truly large‑scale burst of such material did not occur until the early '60s, right around the time I was born. In the late '70s when I was in my teens, the process was in full gear, and I was part of the first generation of confused teenagers to have this remarkable supermarket of exotic and domestic insights glistening out there, ready to be of help to me if I wanted it.

And want it I did.

Anyone who read as many wisdom books as I did as a teenager noticed that there was a certain character who appeared in many of them: a person unlike other people. This person could be either a man or a woman, but let's say for the moment that he is a man. Things fall into place for this man in a way that they don't for others. Doors open and shut for him as if they had known just when he was coming. Trains and buses pull up when he needs them to. Even the weather changes to suit his needs—though, due to his extraordinary and inexplicable contentedness, those needs tend to be modest in the extreme. Unlike most people, who struggle and chafe against a world that is all too often at odds with their desires, this individual seems to have struck up a secret agreement with life when no one was looking, as a result of which events just seem to go his way. Wanting next to nothing, he receives everything.

For a good part of my young adult life, I nurtured a private hope of actually bumping into one of these magical figures. The way I imagined it, I would be going along about my business on a day seemingly just like any other, when I would suddenly find myself face-to-face with him. Perhaps I would be in a bus station, like Carlos Castaneda was when he first met don Juan. Or perhaps, like the writers of some other narratives I'd read, I would be in a cafe, looking absently out the window, when I would notice a mysterious man at a table across from mine—a man who I had never seen before, but who I felt like I had known all my life. Somehow or other we would get to talking, and this man would explain things to me: things I had always wanted and needed to know, but that no one had ever offered to tell me about before.

Not that I spent much time either in bus stations or cafes as a teenager, but that didn't matter because I knew this man could show up anywhere. The longer I waited to bump into this figure, the more important he grew. He became the absent center, the missing piece from the puzzle of my life. Once I found him, and once he had taught me the things I needed to know—the things I really needed to know, as opposed to what the majority of other adults around wanted to teach me—everything else would slide into place. My life, formerly so frustrating and formless and vague, would begin to make real sense at last.

Caught up by the heady promise of this individual and the little wisdom books which featured his words and exploits, I became, at about age 17, a full-fledged member of the cult of the popular wisdom manual—the slim, straight-talking paperback whose pages offered to tell me how to attain true and lasting escape from ordinary adulthood and all the humdrum disappointments that went along with it. From wisdom-manual masters like Alan Watts I learned that my ego was "neither a spiritual, psychological, or biological reality but a social institution of the same order as the monogamous family, the calendar, the clock, the metric system, and the agreement to drive on the right side of the road." From Aldous Huxley I learned that the mind had a "reducing valve"--the product of its evolution in the harsh realities of day-to-day survival--which acted automatically to filter out all the fabulous, super-luminescent suchness of the world as it truly was, leaving instead the bleached, boring, and all-too-ordinary one that I was more than used to. Arm in arm with Castaneda I followed along behind wise, inscrutable old don Juan as he made his way into the otherworldly sands of the Sonora desert in search of the separate reality of the sorcerer's understanding. Along with thousands of other gratefully mystified teenagers hidden away in their own bedrooms across America, I learned from him about the luminous egg that humans look like to the eyes of a sorcerer, about getting spun by the Ally, about the difference between seeing and mere looking, and about making friends with my death. I learned that most human beings were stuck in the tonal—Cataneda’s term for the ordinary, everyday world and the ordinary, everyday sort of consciousness that went along with it. And I nodded with satisfaction as don Juan explained to Carlos that this ordinary world that seemed to be all and everything was really only a little island, at the shores of which lapped the uncanny waters of the nagual, the place where draperies glowed like living hieroglyphs, flower vases became pulsating matrices of Buddhalike suchness, anthropology students flew like crows, and people turned into the giant luminous eggs that they had, in fact, been all along.

And I tried, in my haphazard teenage manner, to apply the whole mass of this material to my daily life. During study period at school, I practiced "sitting in oblivion," the ancient Taoist practice of allowing one's mind to become empty so that only the pure white static of the universe would flow through it, like the snow on a television screen after sands of other gratefully mystified all the programs have left the air. Doing the dishes after dinner at home, I would ponder again and again Watts's admonitions, borrowed from the Taoists and Zen masters of old and slightly reformulated, to be the dishes—to surrender to the revolutionary assertion that, at bottom, dish and self were not different but one and the same.

To my surprise and disappointment, however, I never did actually change into one of those larger, wiser beings that my little wisdom books described. Instead, I simply grew into someone with an insatiable appetite for more such books. Like many, many others, I became a consumer of wisdom recipes rather than an eater of the genuine, transformatory foods that those recipes spoke of with such eloquence. In love with a genre of literature that promised to change me into a genuinely out-of-the-ordinary adult, I ended up becoming so sidetracked by that promise that it took me an extra-long time to grow even into an ordinary one.

Why was this? If that long-promised transformation into someone other and better than the person I was never came along as I expected it to, was this the fault of the books I read, of my way of reading them, or perhaps some other, more mysterious third factor?

I have come to suspect that the botched encounter with wisdom I experienced as a teenager was in fact part of a larger trend—the same trend I see at work today as more and more wisdom maps pile up around us and we know ever less what to do with them. I have also come to suspect that the key problem created by this contemporary wisdom glut centers around the issue of risk and sacrifice: of what we are prepared to give to wisdom in order to receive something back from it. All the circumcisions and subincisions, the enforced starvation and exhaustion, the piercings and tattooings, the blood and broken teeth that accompanied so many primitive wisdom-getting rituals are nothing if not an illustration of the fact that if we are to approach wisdom effectively it is we who must tailor ourselves to it, and not the other way around. It is that call to total and unqualified investment—of commitment to the full course of the wisdom-getting project—that has been lost in the modern wisdom smorgasbord.

Twenty years after I first learned how to consume wisdom rather than actually engaging with it on a deep and consequential level, this is more the case than ever. Watts, Castaneda, and their kin have been replaced by a new battery of wisdom voices, and the message these voices offer is increasingly one in which the hard, transformatory words of the genuine wisdom traditions have given way to a soft, consoling purr—the lullabies of wisdom-as-product. Like Leary, who in his later years tried so hard to pretend that it was possible to go beyond himself without having to fork over that very self as the price of admission, the wisdom voices who most enchant today are those who reassure and soothe rather than disturb and provoke.

This process is not without its interesting side effects. As wisdom manuals turn more and more into salves designed to soothe the delicate skin of our selfhood rather than irritants designed to drive us out of it, the urge toward deep and genuinely consequential change is showing up elsewhere, in unexpected places and sometimes quite unpleasant ways. Once again, this is the case most consequentially for those on the brink of adulthood-- the young people who for the first time in their lives are dreaming that old dream of the Adult-Unlike-Other-Adults and the truly transformed world from which he beckons. If young people now devour blunt-edged wisdom books that tell them everything is okay just as it is, they are also hard on the lookout for messages with a sharper edge to them. When not lining up to see films like Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street, they are over at the other end of the mall having their flesh pierced in incoherent imitation of all those genuinely consequential initiatory destructions that accompanied the getting of wisdom for the young peoples of times past.

If young people seek on one level to be comforted and told that everything is okay just as it is, at the same time they long to be scared out of their wits--to be altered so fundamentally and radically that they actually turn into different beings than they were before. Those dark, hooded, knife-wielding characters who fill so many of the movies young people love to watch today stand for the figure of the lost initiator in its dark mode--the adult from the farther fringes of the mundane world who arrives with the much longed-for news that the life the grown-ups are living really isn’t complete after all; and the unnerving but crucial additional news that getting to that other, hidden side of life might ask more of us than we had ever bargained for. For the young as well as for the not-so-young, the message that the Adult-Unlike-Other-Adults holds out is one of uncompromising singularity and seriousness. The more we tailor that message to suit our tastes, or multiply and manipulate it to suit our desperate need for novelty, the more we risk missing the promise of genuine wisdom altogether, and getting lost among all the countless versions of it that we have done such a good job of collecting.