Schopenhauer's "On Style": the Do List of Suggestions for Writers

I just read Schopenhauer's essay on style. And while it is a lovely sort of a rant, good for a blog entry, it tends to focus mostly on the Don'ts and very little on the Dos. So I thought I would record all of Schopenhauer's Do List.

Schopenhauer says the source of the best writing is epigraphic and monumental. I had to look up epigraphic in the dictionary, on google, and in the encyclopaedia before I got insight into what Schopenhauer means by this.

Before paper, all the most important statements a nation used to make were written painstakingly on stone. Throughout the ancient world, then, the style used was spare, grand, round, full, rich, right and true, and it is this Schopenhauer means when he says "epigraphic" style.

Next: "An author should have sometime to say; no, this is in itself almost all that is necessary. Ah, how much it means!" This is his key piece of advice.

"Le Style Empese" means to pour out words like a flood, according to Schopenhauer - again, no hint of this from a google search - and this he contrasts with a prim polite style, both of which are deviations from the epigraphic ideal.

I like Schopenhauer's nice taste, derived from the French, where he says after Hesiod that the half is more than the whole. I learn the same lesson from Gide as a child when I read in his journals that the problem with the English is that they do not know what to leave out. Knowing what to leave out, however, remains the great problem of style.

Style must be objective - that is, directly forcing the reader to think the same thought as the author.

Always write with care, as if the words are to remain forever.

Always write one thought at a time, then link thoughts logically together into paragraphs, rather than interrupting a sentence with parentheses.

Write like an architect builds, sketching out the plan, and thinking it over down the smallest detail.

That's the sum of Schopenhauer's positive advice. There's much negative advice to of great use, and the essay is well worth a read.

Now, I wish I could only apply all this to my writing retrospectively!

A middle path between gradual reform and revolution in Australian politics.

Gradual reform is not working. Australia can manage her finances prudently by backing into a corner whereby corporations globalize or vanish into backwaters, but she cannot manage her politics that way. The only way is to turn around and take the bull by the horns. Australians need to come to grips with reforming capitalist democracy.

But the commonest middle path between reform and revolution is based on evolution. This posits a blind force which selects for advantage in the moment, thereby giving rise to advantage for the greater whole. But trusting nature leads to winners and losers. Nature to be compelled must be understood, and we can see through the eyes of evolution that change proceeds through disaster, stochastically by chaos, if we take the evolutionary route. This ought not be allowed to happen.

I want to suggest that evolution is not the mean between reform and revolution. I want to suggest evolution is a false friend, and a mimic of the true change we are seeking for. It is by asking for a new way to change we find it, because open questions reduce us to first principles. At the level of first principles we are equals, and that is where I propose to search.

Aristotle proposes an ethics as the basis of a politics. His Nichomachean Ethics follows directly before the Politics, and one echoes the other substantively. Putting aside the theory for a moment, the form itself teaches us that before we can presume on political reforms, we must be clear on what ethical reforms we might want to make to ourselves.

Confucius makes this point explicit when he states that in order to have a good country we most need to be a good child to our parents, a good parent to our children, a good spouse to our partner, a good worker to our business, and a good leader to our community. Practical politics starts and ends in every day ethics.

So the form of political reform must reflect real world and actual ethical reforms. Practical politics advances from hypocrisy to hypocrisy - we tolerate less the more civilized we become, and we must refine our brutal measures of control the more sophisticated we become. I should say, practical politics advances from brutal hypocrisy to cruel hypocrisy to invisible hypocrisy. There is nothing wrong with being a hypocrite - we all fall short, are only human, and can be trusted to let ourselves and others down sometimes. The ill is in failing to try.

Without ethical reform there can be no political reform - is this true?

If so, then ethical reform is the path of choice for capitalist democracy to move forwards.

On Reading the Gospel of Matthew.

I set myself the task of reading the gospel of Matthew as if I had never read it before.

This failed completely: I know so much about the gospel that the best I can hope for is a clear-eyed look at my own complete emmersion in Christian culture and society. The operative work here is "clear-eyed"; it yielded some fine stuff.

Let me say first up that the same uncanny mix of humor, myth, legend, epic, folk story, teaching, poem, and inspired visionary text that one finds in Genesis, one also encounters immediately in the first gospel - the book of Matthew. The form is the same, but everything is different.

Chapter One. The opening echoes the kingly lists of Chronicles, detailing distinguished lineage but this time in the utterly revolutionary context of the prophet Jesus. But already we are on strange land, because Jesus is a kingly prophet. It is as if Isaiah and Solomon were born in the one man. Nothing quite like it existed before. And then comes the divine omens.

Chapter Two. The gorgeous myth of the birth of Jesus is so mediaeval in its telling that one almost forgets it is not a stained glass window. How are we supposed to take this tall tale? The middle ages has colonized our imagining of the gospel. We cannot see beyond the images of those centuries to the true tale.

One thing we can say: this is not the normal style to be reading a miraculous birth-of-a-son-god type of tale; not at all; the tone around it is historical, factual, realistic even. The interpolation of the ooh and ahh of the miracle birth is surely not calculated to blemish the historical record; rather, the simplest explanation is that it is to stun the unquestioning pre-rational audience into acquiescence.

Augustine tacitly acknowledges this difficulty with the gospels in his autobiography when he confesses that the gospels must be read in a very simple and uncomplicated spirit. I agree. They are not addressed to a reasonable, scientifically educated, and literate middleclass. They belong to everyone.

But because of their universal quality we find ourselves in the deep time of human consciousness, looking through the pristine simplicity of Matthew's eyes at the unaccountable astonishment that was Jesus. Is it any wonder Matthew invented fancies to compel his bovine audience to some faint sense of the incredible nature of these events? It is no wonder that the out-wondering wonder of Jesus should attract the ornaments of myth?

Chapters Three and Four. The tale of John the Baptist and the temptation in the wilderness suddenly moves into fact from fancy. John's tale is so remarkable that it must be true, and yet it validates the prophetic angle of Jesus' ministry so perfectly that it simply piles up more compelling evidence of the man.

The three temptations of Christ clearly delineates, in a visual format, the actual advanced spiritual work that have been researched, described and corroborated in modern times by Doctor David R. Hawkins. This is simply how it is; one can question the visual images, but not the content which is pristine to the universal nature of advanced inner spiritual work.

So the opening 4 chapters work to present Jesus as an authority. Chapter one presents his kingly status. Two presents him as a prophet. Three presents his inner qualifications, for those in the know, as an spiritual entity of surpassing purity, having refused the temptations of power and personal gain. The masses are suitably stunned by the first two yarns, and the spiritual students ought to be suitably sobered by the third. Then come the teachings.

And what teachings they are!

Hawkins calibrates the level of consciousness of humanity at Jesus' time as 100. I would argue that Jesus, being a teacher of all humanity, addressed humanity at exactly the level we were at. In other words, imagine Jesus speaking directly and lovingly to a very very scared entity called "humanity". Imagine Jesus speaking to a frightened being, a being lost in terror and darkness of fright and horror, a being run like a robot on its own wishes to avoid further pain. That is the level of consciousness Jesus addresses in his first teaching. And what he says corroborates this presumption: he speaks of the poor, of the meek, of the grieving - all levels of consciousness below 100. On the Hawkins scale, he is speaking about the apathetic and the grief-stricken - those who have been shattered by life and cannot have any illusions about the human hell of that age. Jesus is speaking about those who have broken down denial about the frightening reality of human nature in his age. He is speaking TO the fearful, reminding them of their brothers and sisters who are lost IN grief and apathy. His words, so strange at first hearing, are simply an outpouring of compassion and well-wishing for those who have seen the terrible truth about human nature being hopelessly stuck.

Jesus reminds his listeners of those less fortunate than themselves, who also have less illusions about reality. He blesses people who are free of illusion, but also bereft of hope. Then he turns to integrity. And what does he say?

He blesses those who desire for integrity. Now desire is the level immediately above fear. Jesus is consciously contextualizing human consciousness within the levels below and above it. The entire field of potential for human consciousness receives his attention. Next he blesses those who are merciful, in other words those who give up anger, the level of consciousness above desire; next he blesses the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted. What do all these have in common? They are all social expressions of integrity - making peace, being persecuted. Jesus is talking about being at the level of pride, the level of looking good rather than being good, the level of hypocrisy.

In one dazzling passage, Jesus has recontextualized human consciousness in a totally new light. The grieving and apathetic have seen the truth. Those stuck in desire are really hungry and thirtsy for truth. Those stuck in anger are really seeking mercy. Those stuck in pride and hypocrisy are really only after a pure heart, peacemaking and feeling justified in their victimhood. Notice how Jesus does not condemn these negative energy fields - he simply sees them as love, love in action, love in intention, love in expression. He sees love in human consciousness, and thus it is.

Versus 11 to 16 describe the world of level of consciousness 200, which Jesus calls heaven. It is hard to imagine that human consciousness today, here and now, is at the remarkable level of consciousness overall of 206. That means that we the living of the modern world are in a world which to the humans of Jesus time would seem like heaven. One can hardly underestimate the shocking difference between human nature in Jesus' time and human nature in our time. It is like night and day.

Versus 17 to 37 seems to me like sound traditional morality. Was it anything new in Jesus time. No; Jesus say it is the law of the prophets. Is it just me, or has Jesus just finished with the carrot and now is applying the stick? Certainly he shows sound motivational psychology with his warnings. But let's take a close look at the rhetorical intention.

The opening verses of the sermon from the start to 16 recontextualize human consciousness as love in the process of unfoldment. Then the moralistic verses from 17 to 37 warn about being very moral using fear as a motivating tool. The level of consciousness of the listeners is Fear, level 100 on the map of consciousness. So first Jesus recontextualizes all the levels of consciousness AROUND fear, and second Jesus leans quite heavily on the fear stick and makes a big impact, no doubt, on his fearful audience. He first loosens up the field around fear, then he uses fear to stimulate moral behavior. Or so it seems. But look at what he does next:

"Love your enemies". "Turn the other cheek". This is the value of unconditional love. Where on earth does this come from? Suddenly we have moved from instilling fear of ethical failure to instilling a visionary economic program, without any warning. I think a few of the links in Jesus chain of thought are missing at this point personally. Where is the link between conventional moral scrupulosity motivated by the animal fear of hell, and the humanistic ethos of universal brotherhood, other than in Matthew's torrid ethical imagination?

Chapter Six begins with Jesus teaching his frightened cattle-humans the principle of anonymity. Don't do good acts to be seen in public, he says. Small words for clear images of real things - no further evidence that Jesus is talking to men of little brain is needed than this remarkably lucid explanation of the power of personal anonymity. If no human notices me doing a good act, Jesus explains, then God sees it. A toddler could comprehend this.

The principle of anonymous prayer brings up the basic Christian teachings on prayer: don't try to program God to give you stuff, just ask for what you need today, make sure you stay straight with your fellow humans, and remember to ask God to lead you into a positive energy field because you can't find your way there on your own. Which is all simply factual if you are open to the research on prayer by Doctor Hawkins.

6:14 and 6:15 describe the right relationship between me, God and others. If I'm good with others, then God will be good with me. Real simple. But if I'm not good with others, then God won't be good with me. Karma in one easy lesson!

6:19 to 6:23 I don't understand. Are they esoteric references to light bodies? What are "treasures in heaven" precisely? I am going to assume, from the discussion preceding it directly, that Jesus is talking about karma still. Treasures in heaven means karmic merit. The light of the eye is referring to consciousness itself: literally if I do ill, my consciousness becomes dark and I cannot understand spiritual matters automatically, and if I do good my consciousness is lit up, again literally. I don't think they are esoteric references: I think Jesus is being dead literal about spiritual and karmic fundamentals.

6:24 to the end of chapter six I have often read as anti- or non-materialistic references by Jesus, and in the light of Jesus' status as a wandering mendicant faith healer, this is easy to assume. But I think by putting these references in the context of his audience a different picture becomes clear.

Jesus' audience is at the level of fear. With the addition of the energy field of Jesus himself, as well as Jesus' recontextualizations and inspiration and teachings, they will quickly ascend to the higher energy field above fear of desire. And in that precise instant the downside of desire, greed and lust for gain, will take hold. So Jesus is, as it were, heading them off at the pass. He is trying his best to block off any excuse or evasion of integrity in his audience.

His audience is to avoid showing off (thus dismantling Pride, 175); they are to forgive everyone (thus processing out Anger, 150), and they are to avoid greed (thus minimizing the downside of Desire at 125). His audience are at 100. If they take on board everything he has just said and apply it, they cannot but end up over 200, the crucial line of integrity. Another way of putting this is that if someone in fear takes to heart these few lines, he or she can move into courage by simply applying them to their situation. This is a pretty remarkable claim, an enormous leap by any standards in consciousness from fear to integrity, and Jesus accomplishes it in fewer words than most people take to share dinner with their family.

Chapter Seven consists of various legendary admonishments. Jesus warns people who fail to apply his teachings with the "house built on sand". He warns against occult gyrations with those who cast out demons but don't have integrity so are not recognized by God in Heaven - ie, as integrous. He warns against fake spiritual teachers in a beautiful phrase "wolves in sheep's clothing". Jesus is obviously really trying to make sure his hearer get what he is saying. Integrity, Jesus is saying, integrity integrity integrity. And his audience is responding "Baa-aaa!"

Chapters 8 and 9 are sundry miracles. In these chapters the ooh and ahh factor of the miraculous birth is intermingled with sage titbits from the Master. It functions kind of like an integration of the miraculous and the historical. Then in 10 the real ministry begins. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples. They are extraordinary, bizarre instructions.

Jesus might as well have suggested his disciples go forth wearing fruitbowl hats and dancing traditional Hawaiian dances as suggest what he actually says. Is this guy for real? A life of poverty, dirty clothes, faith healing and testimony is in store for the 12. No wonder the harvest was great but the laborers few: Jesus was a tough boss!

I also find it remarkable that none of the disciples puts up his hands and asks for some exemption from the rules. Either we are to suppose Matthew was portraying Jesus as far more hard-arse than he actually was, OR we must assume that Jesus selected the 12 out of a prior organisation that they were already part of. Given the political implications of John's ministry and Jesus' birth, the possibility one considers is that the 12 arose out of the political organization of which Jesus was the focus. But Jesus tells the 12 to heal and teach, not organize sit-ins and sign petitions. So what Jesus is explicitly doing with this ministry is, it would seem, taking people from a political organization around him and putting them into a spiritual order. Clearly the disciples are, well, disciplined. Were they from a paramilitary political order? I am not thinking of the Essenes here; I am willing to assume perhaps that Jesus' influences arose from the Essene tradition, but one must also concede that the disciples did not arise out of nothing. They didn't pop into existence as a miracle. Jesus recruited them from some prior organization, probably political in nature.

I resist attempts to politicize Jesus' message, personally. I think he arose from a political context into the universal ethical and spiritual contexts of his teaching and healing ministry. But the incredible fortitude of the disciples revealed in chapter ten indicates they likely had a military origin of some kind.

Chapter 11 shows Matthew's poor logical organization. It consists of Jesus giving a kind stream of consciousness impression of how things are all going. It's sort of like Jesus as us are watching the disciples go out doing their think and ruminating about how things are progressing. But it's loose and baggy and mercifully a short chapter. It has various legendary sayings in it, of course, that any civilized person would commit to memory and use in their right place.

Then suddenly in chapter 12 the disciples are back, or these are different disciples maybe. And Jesus is bickering about the Law with some conservatives. The conservatives, no doubt somewhat arch about faith healing and the taint of revolutionary politics inevitably attached to some of Jesus' more vociferous disciples, beat up the issue of the Sabbath. But this is the old left and right, conservative and liberal opposition all over again - this is not about Jesus but about the culture of the time.

Chapter 13 begins the parables. 14 is miracles with food. 15 and 16 are Jesus bickering with the conservatives again, ending with a foreshadowing of his death at their hands.

Chapter 17 is an exact match for chapter 3, which describes in concrete images some advanced spiritual work done with James, John and Peter. The interesting thing here is how the four men 'see' Moses and Elijah. I take this to mean the statement that at the highest levels of consciousness one experiences what the sages who passed through that condition also experienced, experiencing it as oneself at the same time as the individual. So I think Peter, James and John experience what Moses experienced, and become that which Moses had become also. Which would be a condition on the map of consciousness in the mid 700s. I think chapter 17 describes the enlightenment experience of James, John and Peter.

Chapter 18 addresses spiritual egotism and the problem of specialness - both common issues for spiritual students. How does one deal with ego and pride at spiritual attainment? And, how does one deal with the glamour of being special?

Chapter 19 would be more kvetching with the conservatives only, were it now for the final lines of this chapter making some remarkable statements. Jesus says, in Matthew 19:26-30, that man needs a savior to be saved, and cannot be saved on his own efforts, but he adds a statement which seems to imply in a veiled way that the conservative factions addicted to legalism will be judged by the spiritually advanced disciples. This is very interesting indeed. It is as if Jesus' twelve disciplines are set up as an alternative for the hopelessly-mired-in-negativity twelve tribes of Israel. Individuals replace tribes, Jesus seems to be suggesting here. All very interesting ideas, and very relevant for the Roman world and for our world today.

20, 21, 22, 23 represent a melange of 3 elements: parables, miracles, and Jesus putting up patiently with the conservatives' bitching. But in 23 Jesus really loses his cool and starts cussing up a storm against his enemies. They have finally and officially pissed off the son of God, and it's not pretty.

24 and 25 are fascinating chapters for us precisely because they describe the modern world. We live in a world where integrity matters. We live, then, in a world where the kingdom of heaven, integrity, is here and now; a world where one is taken up into integrity while another remains, unable to see or even know the different dimension the integrous occupy.

The traditional interpolation of doomsday occult visions from the book of Relevations is unfortunate. According to consciousness research, the end of the world scenario in that book is simply flat out false. So what Jesus must be talking about in Matthew 24 and 25 is not some imaginary apocalypse, but rather a real world emergence of integrity as a practical way of being in the world for most people. In other words, Jesus is talking about ordinary life in the West every day. Another day in paradise.

26 to 28 tell the tale, in choice few words, of Jesus' arrest and death at the hands of the conservatives. We all know the ending; what is remarkable for me is how brief the story is in Matthew.

Why did Matthew write this way? We have perhaps a quarter of a book of Jesus speaking, as it were, straight into Matthew's microphone. We get the raw feed on Jesus' instructions to his disciplines, Jesus' rant against the conservatives, and even a little chapter where Jesus is sort of rambling to himself somewhat loosely while his disciples are off discipling. The rest of the book, shorn of its mythic opening and tragic ending, is endless bickering and miracles of healing and feeding. Jesus mostly seems to have brought health and food and moral guidance in this book.

The most remarkable part of the book of Matthew is the sermon on the mount. Once it is put into the context of the listeners to whom Jesus is addressing his comments, it brilliantly illuminates Jesus' model for teaching and inspiring others. Jesus makes himself accessible as a savior through this sermon.

I suppose the other value in the book of Matthew is for convincing the credulous to follow Jesus. There are no appeals to reason to be found here, and many appeals indeed for the sheep to follow the Shepherd.

So, that's my clear-eyed take on the book of Matthew. It has taken me two hours to re-read it and keep running notes on it as I go, and I am glad I did. It is a wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone. Get a copy and underline all the cool statements in it and commit them to memory. Try out Jesus' views on prayer. Read the sermon and pursuade yourself that only integrity is worth living for, even if you already 'know' the sermon' and its purport. It's a fine piece of work, worth many readings. I certainly enjoyed the chance to share it with you.

On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

Crikey - It's Proust!

Reading Montaigne on the train today I came upon this:

"The men whose society and intimacy I seek are those who are called well-bred and talented men; and the thought of these gives me a distaste for others. Their kind is, rightly considered, the rarest that we have, a kind that owes almost everything to nature. The purpose of our intercourse is simply intimacy, familiarity, and talk; the exercise of the mind is our sole gain. In our conversations all subjects are alike to me. I do not care if there is no depth or weight in them; they always possess charm, and they always keep to the point. All is colored by a ripe and steady judgment, blended with kindness, candor, gaiety, and friendship... I know my kind even by their silences and their smiles... Hippomachus said truly he that he knew a good wrestler simply by seeing him walk in the street."

I read this with a shock of recognition. Crikey, I said to myself, he's talking about Proust!

It is no good telling me that Proust and Montaigne live three centuries apart. Just imagine Montaigne and Proust in conversation! (I consider myself humbly fortunate to have friends who can follow my conversation at all.)

Neither it is any use telling me that Gide or Saint-Beuve could fit the bill. They do not. Saint-Beuve is Montaigne's disciple, not his mate; and Gide - his diminution.

How to Be A Great Friend: The Great Books of the Western World on Great Friendship.

These are the basic readings on friendship. If you want to be a great friend, here is how.

1. Start with Lysis. This is supposed to be about friendship but actually Socrates is just teasing. Listen in on how Socrates uses the passion for Lysis to direct him to a wise end? This is one aspect of being a great friend: direct your friend to their own greatness. The Lysis of Plato is the single best instruction manual on making friends with young people, because it shows intead of tells you how.

2. Next, read Cicero On Friendship. If the Lysis is the best guide to young friends, the dialog On Friendship by Cicero is the best instructions on how to make friends with elders. Notice how wonderfully Gaius and Quintus draw Laelius out; can you see how they manipulate him with words to show his best qualities? Since it is no deceit to bring out good qualities in your friends, the text of this short dialog really shows another great lesson in friendship: use words to draw out the best qualities in your friend.

3. Finally, we come to a crucial parting point in the lessons on friendship: whether to follow the heart or the head? Francis Bacon is a friend of the head variety, whereas Michel de Montaigne is a friend of the heart. Both have essays entitled ¨On Friendship¨. Between them you must choose your lesson. Which is more important to you? Which is more important to your friend? And, are you aware of the consequences of either path? Among friends with worldly goals and practical concerns, this is the essential thing to know. So the lesson these two men suggest is: Be aware of what kind of friendship you are in, heart or head, and what consequences flow from that.

4. Last but not least are the ethical analyses of Aristotle, the reasoning of Epictetus, and the essay of Seneca. These mordant analysts cover the same material as Cicero with less charm. And they instruct me in the finest lesson of friendship, which is: Be friends only with people who make you happy and who you love to make happy. Because anything that lasts must make the effort to be charming. This

There they are: my four lessons of friendship:
1. Direct your friend to their own greatness. (Especially in young friends)
2. Use words to draw out the best qualities in your friend. (Especially in elder friends)
3. Be aware of what kind of friendship you are in, and what consequences flow from that. (Especially in peers)
4. Be friends only with people who make you happy and who you love to make happy.

On the Lysis of Plato: "All will be your friend if you are wise."

If you are wise, Socrates says, all men will be your friends and kindred because you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, mother or kindred or anyone else will be your friend.

This is Socrates' juicy snare for the friendship of Lysis.

Just as for Aristotle the chief good is reason and the sum of all goods happiness, so also for Socrates wisdom is the chief good and love between friends the sum of all goods.

How to account for the paradoxes of friend and enemy Socrates lays out in the Lysis? I think he draws the paradox from the biological and spiritual meanings of friendship. A friend may be useful to practical ends but a bad person ideally speaking. Socrates is being sophistic.

Prudent friendships, as Aristotle reveals, combine usefulness, mutual affection, and pleasure in one anothers' character by doing kind services. And even Aristotle fails to observe the developmental curve: friendships evolve from being mostly useful to being mostly pleasant then to being mostly based in affection. A sound friendship has all three aspects, but at any one time only one aspect is dominant: pleasure, utility, or affection. But all three belong, because we are physical beings as well as spiritual.

(Taking the Aristotle cap off...)

Socrates says "God draws like to like" as friends. True enough. But like in what sense? Clearly what makes friends like one another are questions at the core of human nature. Why are we the way we are? To what extent are we like angels and like animals? In the answers to these questions a view of friendship can arise. But again it is between the animal and the angel that human friendships become possible.

I challenged myself to come up with my own view of friendship. Here it is:

"There is no cause of friendship: all friendships arise in accordance to the field of consciousness as expressions of their own self-nature. Different loves arise from different self-natures. Each kind of friendship is incommensurate to another.

"Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of friendship: horizontal alignment, vertical alignments, and mixed horizontal-vertical alignments. Horizontal alignment friends are mostly based in affection and supportive development of one anothers' full potential; they are heart-based. Vertical alignments are mostly based in utility and issues of control, power, exploitation and predation; they are solar plexus based. Mixed horizontal-vertical alignments are mostly based in pleasure.

On the Map of Consciousness, then, horizontal alignment friendships begin above level of consciousness 500; vertical alignment friendships begin below 199; and between 200 and 499 levels of consciousness of the Hawkins Map of Consciousness are mixed friendships, featuring aspects of both horizontal and vertical alignments."

How Reflection Creates the Past: On Reading Conrad's 'Youth'.

Joseph Conrad writes with great style and heart!

I just read aloud 'Youth'. Into this little book which Conrad wrote as a youth of 24 years he poured all the experience of aliveness and joy from his formative years.

Reciting 'Youth' disclosed the breath and the silence and the difficult play of words in the author's throat. So when the narrator, old Marlow, asks his listeners to pass the bottle of claret, I reached over and sipped my cup of peppermint tea, and mindfully breathed a moment. Conrad means you to rest when Marlow rests, because he requires you to work when Marlow remembers. If you do not rest when Conrad/Marlow rest, you will probably miss much of the meaning of the story, which is encoded in the emotion and style. This kind of reading is great fun, too!

"...the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colassal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet."

See how Marlow piles up the three clauses on one another? He uses this technique for three quarters of the text. It happens whenever young Marlow, the hero of the story, is powerfully moved. The effect when recited is rhapsodic - it builds complex waves of feeling and image - it crests and foams into the last quarter of the story, which is written very simply. If you do not follow the waves, you probably will not feel the impact of the simply written last scenes. That is why recital is best for this story. But it also expresses the emotional rollercoaster of being young so very well!

If being young is like being asleep, or like being in a dream, then becoming an adult is like waking up and remembering the dream even as it fades from memory's lips and leaves a faint bitterness. Likewise, I didn't understand 'Youth' until I had slept on it. When I woke up all of a sudden the mind cleanly took hold of the whole story as a single object, and I understood what Conrad is up to.

This is not a coming of age story at all. This is a dream of youth and age, as mythical as the sport of the gods, and as golden. The sweetness of immortality and the bitterness of age come together and heighten one another. The authentic taste of the passing of time is here in these pages, intangible and subtle.

"Allegory" is a dead word for a living form. According to wikipedia it comes from αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public". Wiktionary tells us that allegory is "the representation of abstract principles by characters or figures". I see many problems with the use and meaning of the word (too many to go into here), because it presupposes a break between presentation and representation, between the abstract principle and the concrete image.

In my experience, sometimes the abstraction IS the character - these is no difference between Achilles and vengeful wrath, is there? Likewise, in Conrad's 'Youth', there is gap between abstract and real, presentation and representation. The thing is the idea is the thing.

And in this case the thing is Youth and Age. The story shows the essence of both so well, so powerfully, that is is almost jejune of me to speak of it with ordinary words. It is a very powerful presentation of poetic truth!

The entire story of 'Youth' is an allegory for the nature of youth, complete with invocations to Jove, the god of juveniles. The moments when Marlow uses the triple repetition signal the efforts to hold back the unconscious contents of the actual event - the twining repetitions of threefold horrors are gorgonic snakes of words that ward off the actual experience of youth from Marlow's weather-beaten consciousness.

Marlow's story, with its rhetorical flourishes, is old Marlow's defense against the authentic experience of youthfulness. The story is not just about a sea adventure, but about the life Marlow has lived since then. That is why the first three quarters of the story are charged with such sorrow and sagacity.

And what about the actually young Marlow? We remember pumping water til the cook goes mad, waiting in dry dock til the rats abandon ship, and sailing til the ship burns and sinks. But what do we feel about all this stuff we see of the young Marlow?

We feel the moody turbulence of adolescence in the constant rain and water pumping. We feel the sense of waiting to become an adult in the social embarrassment of dry dock. We feel the fiery concupisnce of puberty in the smouldering invisible fire beneath the vessel which bears a freight of fragile human lives to a new unknown world in the East.

Conrad's 'Youth' is a precise allegory for adolescence! Every detail provides an exact imagining-forth of the essence of being juvenile. So 'Youth' is immortal. And so what? Every adult of character has been through the same transformation in her or his own way.

Old Marlow's perspicacious warding-off of genuine feeling breaks down at the end of 'Youth'. This is signalled by the loss of complex language when young Marlow wakes to see the faces of the East, loses the repetitions altogether. It is simply written. The faces of the East are an image out of dreamtime; consciousness has been broken down by the storms of adolescence, but in being broken, has become adult.

And so what? We wouldn't want to repeat the ordeal of losing these sweet illusions so bitterly, nor would we want to forget the pleasure that the delusions of youth brought us.

For old Marlow in his drink youth is a bitter illusion, until the moment when he breaks through to the direct experience of young Marlow once again, and for a moment the old man is soft and vulnerable once again.

But Conrad seems to be saying also that as adolescence dreams of the man he is to become, so the adult who reflects on her adolescent dreams can always take the opportunity to make them real... reflection is the work of a well lived life.

This is the greater attainment of 'Youth': Conrad through the voice of Marlow realizes his own adult self through reflexively investigating, probing, testing and deepening his perceptions of his own youth.

'Mind Your Own Business' - How We Are All Living In a J.S. Mill World

John Stuart Mill wrote in 'On Liberty': "All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the action of other people." This striking quote is a good entry point to Mill's consideration of freedom as a choice of what kind of coercion we submit to.

In Mill's life, I see that there are two forms of opinion:

1. Reasoned Judgments with evidence supporting,

OR

2. Love and passion backed with experience, true motive and practice.

JS Mill has both forms. But here is a man who lived a virtual world, feeling false passions, loving what he was always taught to love, and praciting his father's will until he fell in love. That he didn't abandon intellectual life altogether is a pretty grand drama to me.

The question which Mill seems to have lived is: what does theory look like in practice? What role does idea play in forming motive passions that infuse powerful opinions? From these questions arises the theory of representation and his (in my opinion) extreme views on liberty.

Mill's first principle: the only good motive for coercion is self-protection.

This is flat out useless as a practical standard of political power. The 'self' that is protected of a gang of thieves is not the same 'self' that is protected within a cloister of monks. 'Self' is a moving target, dependent on context for validity. So this rational ideal of coercion is only valid for rational agents. And, to be honest, rational agency is a little thin on the ground in human history so far.

Mill qualifies this standard by limiting it to those who can be convinced or pursuaded, but again... this is a hopelessly idealistic burden for reason to carry alone. Mill quite overrates the power of reason to effect pursuasion in my opinion - but this comes back to my enquiry on theory and practice, reason and passion.

Freedom that matters, for Mill: the right to go chasing your own unharming good in your own unharming way. This is the liberal enlightenment view of freedom without an end (telos), or freedom as an end in itself.

What is the latest application of freethinking liberal philosophy for Mill? I can sum it in four words: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

From all this, I conclude that we are living in a John Stuart Mill kind of world. When I walk down the street and nobody says hello to me, that's because they are free not to. Courtesy and community are secondary or irrelevant. The key consideration of a liberal society is that you mind your own business.

This also accounts both for the intense sense of alienation in the West, on the one hand, and the strong sense of purpose and rational passion in Western liberal movements. All three of these qualities - the alienation, the passion, and the MYOB - are all essential traits of JS Mill's personality.

When I walk past a sloppy drunk, a glossy hiphopper, a neat businesswoman, a greasy mechanic, and more ethicities than i can name, with a perfect equanimity and complete indistraction from my own affairs - when I walk this way I see I live in the world of John Stuart Mill's imagining, from almost two centuries ago.

Some of the High Moments From Plato's Meno

The Meno seems to present the original Socratic formula in the most basic terms. But because it has distinctive and important ideas in the beginning, middle, and end, it somewhat defies clear cut analysis. It is too good a piece to analyze without some measure of arrogance. I think that if you are not honestly baffled by the end of this dialog, I must impute your intelligence with rude names.

Socrates deftly prises the definition of virtue free from commonsense and common practice in the opening. It starts bad and gets much worse: not only don't we know what the Good is, but we seem to imagine there are many different goods.

Then in the middle, Socrates neatly demolishes the easy commonplace that education educates people to be good. We finish hardly even sure how learning itself occurs. Education goes quantum in Plato's Meno - it seems as if we become virtuous by some kind of spooky action at a distance.

Then in the end we figure out that we can't define any of these terms without first defining the ultimate context in which these terms occur. That is, 'education', 'goodness' and 'virtue' all occur in the ultimate context of the reality of a divine maker. Like it or lump it. But the deux ex machina is no easy answer here. The discussion of opinion versus knowledge that crowns the dialog completely undercuts any easy certainty you might place in the guidance of religious faith.

I'm surprised Meno didn't take his life there and then from philosophical despair. But the fact is that Socrates is quite definite in his faith that these things are knowable. And that once you begin to listen to the Socrates, something in his faith gives you faith and you begin to respond with genuine feelings, from disquiet to outrage, against the easy certitudes that falsehoods parade as under the name of "common sense".

Socrates show how uncommon true commmon sense is, and the Meno is an indefatigable guide to demolishing falsehood in the search for truth.

New Insights on the Good Life of Aristotle and Adler

I've spent the afternoon in the state library reading Mortimer Adler's book 'Aristotle For Everybody'. I'm pretty excited about my reading: it demonstrates to me that I've discovered some new knowledge, something new under the sun.

Here's how: I informed Aristotle and Adler's views on the ethical and good life with the philosophical views of Vedanta, the teachings on skillful means in the Dhamma-Vinyana, and the basic view of not-self (Buddhist) or the non-linear Self (Hindu). The result is something new and pleasing, and to my mind a more accurate description of the constituents of the good life heretofore created. Sadly, it is not appropriate to go into it here. But I do love this stuff!

I also read two books on autodidacticism. From Adler's book on the topic (very slight!) I picked the following fruit: poetry and philosophy are the two transcendent Goods of life, because one has to do with making things to the ultimate degree (that is, poetry makes meaning), and the other has to do with knowing to the ultimate degree (that is, philosophy answers all valid questions, and refutes all invalid or pseudo-philosophical questions). Marvellous insight!

I found nothing new in Adler's 'Ten Philosophical Mistakes' beyond a moment of existential vertigo at reading the summary of the first philosophical error - the notion that the stuff of mind is a representation of mind, and mind is not accessible to consciousness. This staggered me for a second: I cannot know my own mind!

Then I remembered Freud, and Proust, and Jung, and I understood the need for this indirection, and the possibility of direct knowledge nevertheless through poetic means.

I learnt today that philosophy cannot disclose direct experience, but poetry can. Thus the great sages like Freud and Proust and Jung are best read as poet-shamans, conducing one into a realm which if not for their assistance would remain inaccessible - that is, into one's own self.

A Chance Meeting In Aristotle After Buying Plato's Gorgias

“Corgi-arse” seems to be the correct pronunciation. I don’t suppose the ancient Greeks had Corgi-like dogs.

I got it from Mary Martins for 13 dollars. I read Polus’ lovely sentence in Gorgias on the way home on the train about art and experience versus chance and inexperience. I had a chuckle at Socrates’ generally inquisitorial tone. I don’t think our friend Socrates was a very nice man.

As it happens, I contemplate Socrates’ key idea every day: “Every man does the good, the trouble is that they don’t know what the good is, therefore humbly accept that you don’t know anything and live from there.” This idea is a brilliant summary of Socrates, but no-where yet can I find the precise formulation of it. It is all in parts, scattered across the Gorgias and other texts.

To my delight, when I got home I read the first few pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics before falling asleep on the couch with it open on my chest. Aristotle happened to mention Polus’ speech. It was like running into a stranger who knows a mutual friend.

The pleasure of books is the acquaintance with the wise. The pleasure of thought is the acquaintance with your own self through mind. And the joy of philosophy is to go beyond thinking out of love of truth.

The Power of Primary Texts

If you want to learn philosophy, read Plato. If you want to learn metaphysics, rhetoric, politics, or psychology, read Aristotle. If you want to learn about reason and faith, read Thomas Aquinas.

Don’t settle for second best. Go to the source. Read the primary texts.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You will probably be able to rediscover a few things on your own, but you don’t have twenty six centuries to consider them. Only fools, rebels, narcissists and young people try to go it alone intellectually. You have one life to live and wasting years on reproducing a conclusion you can learn from Plato or Aristotle is not smart. Start at the start with Plato.

Can’t understand the primary texts? Neither can I. But in saying that, we need to draw a distinction between two kinds of difficulty with these texts.

There are difficulties in primary texts that should be avoided, and difficultiesin primary texts that should be embraced.

The best way to show you this is give examples from my own experience:

In reading Plato’s Republic the first time I recognised that I wouldn’t be capable of understanding most of the middle books of the text without more effort than I was able to give the text this first reading. I learnt this from reading the introduction of the Penguin Classics version. This kind of difficulty is worth avoiding until I am more capable of comprehending them, and more motivated by a broader base of understanding. Had I ploughed through, I would have discouraged myself, then dispirited myself, then demoralized myself (had I kept going: I would have quit the moment I became dispirited rather than be demoralized).

Then there are difficulties with primary texts which are what Harold Bloom calls the “difficult pleasure” of a classic. Simply put, what some people might find a problem or a hassle, I find a stimulus and a challenge in these texts. The marvel of these texts is that on the other side of the difficulty is a stark simplicity that comes from their irreducible basic truth.

Intellectualism that does not respect and honour the past is snobbery and arrogance, and in fact fake or pseudo-intellectualism because it leads to circuitous ramblings which mainly appeal other to other poor people seduced by intellectual falsehood.

The basis for genuine intellectual ability is humility. Specifically, being humble enough to accept that most of the things you can usefully think have already been long since thunk by Mister Aristotle and Mister Plato!

How to Develop the Healing Power of Gratitude.

Love and gratitude are the most powerful healers on the planet. Gratitude is love in operation, so to speak. But many people when they try to practice gratitude find it difficult.

Gratitude is difficult because it develops over time. Most people are at the basic level of gratitude, and therefore cannot imagine it being an easy and natural way of life.

Just knowing that gratitude will develop and blossom eventually into something marvellous can be reassuring. It will get easier to practice gratitude. But knowing what stage you are at helps you understand what is ahead too.

I will describe four stages of the development of gratitude. They aren’t distinct phases, just points of reference along the way. Can you tell where you are on the scale of gratitude?

The four stages in developing gratitude are:
1. grudging gratitude
2. forced gratitude
3. balanced gratitude and
4. inspired gratitude.

Grudging gratitude is casual attention on things that are ok, or not significant problems in your life. It has little power to heal, and is centred around satisfaction of desires and appetites. The real power of grudging gratitude is in re-sensitizing you to the good aspects of every day life. For example, if you see a certain car you think is cool and remembering to grudgingly give thanks for having seen something you would like, then you will be now sensitised to seeing that kind of car more often, and more likely to enjoy your day as a result. Most grudging gratitude happens at the level of daily attention.

Forced gratitude is what you write a gratitude list because you want to feel grateful even though you don’t. You write the list, and some small degree of balance is evoked throughout your day, which feels pleasant or at least feels less unpleasant. It mostly deals with the senses and sensory ideas. It evokes excitement and emotional highs that don’t last, but they feel okay. Forced gratitude is more powerful than grudging gratitude, usually because it is written down or shared with a friend. It has the power to inspire. It takes effort, but the effort is worth it!

Balanced gratitude is when you see clearly with your mind how problems and opportunities both serve you. You ask and answer questions to yourself. You consciously seek the perfection not by positive thinking mood-making of yourself, but by looking at how an event serves and harms you, by seeing both sides at once.

When you see both sides of a thing, it is a relief from resentment and indulgent infatuation. You are free to see clearly. It feels wonderful, but in fact it is merely relief from the constant pressure of emotionalised perception. Balanced gratitude is how it feels to live in accord with reason and education. Balanced gratitude is normally done through a formal written process, and only gradually internalised with education, skill, and life experience, as well as formal repetition. Balanced gratitude is connect with our ability to be reasonable. This balanced gratitude has the power to bring peace and satisfaction, and is a powerful healing resource for caring professionals like doctors and nurses, but also a potent inner resource for anyone who wants to cope with life more effectively.

Inspired gratitude is itself a gift and a revelation. It discloses itself when conditions are right. If you are inspired you can say thankyou to problems as they arise; you can meet opportunities with equanimity and balance; you can swim upstream to the source.

The prerequisite for inspired gratitude is that the mind is balanced, because in inspired gratitude the heart is wide open and inspirational guidance streams through consciousness.

If this sounds like a bit of hard work, then consider how hard it is trying to force yourself to appreciate things with a closed heart and confused mind! It is so much less effort to simply balance your perceptions of a situation using your reason and education, and if you do that enough, inspiration is inevitable.

Gratitude, love, inspiration, compassion, reason and that gracious inner balance the world only knows under the word “charisma” are idle potentials unless shared. As the proverb says, a friend sharpens another friend like iron against iron. Likewise your friends can blunt you. In grudging and forced gratitude, exposure to the negativity of others must bring you down; in balanced gratitude, you get free of the negative of others.

How does balanced gratitude deal with negativity?

The hidden blessing of negative, irrational and limited people and experiences is that you can own their faults – somewhere, sometime in your own experience you have behaved the way you see negative people behaving. And when you can own it, you are paradoxically free of it. The saying goes, If you can spot it, you’ve got it.

Owning others’ negative qualities as your own returns you to gratitude and allows you to challenge those negative people to see the hidden blessing inherent in their difficulties. And because you have identified with them and “been there and done that”, they have no basis to reject your words because you are simply sharing your experience.

Real power inspires and heals through balanced gratitude. The kind of power that brings tears of compassion to your eyes can melt even the hardest heart and open even the most rigid mind to the balanced truth that we are all on the same journey to the wholeness and peace of gratitude, our true condition.

On the Timaeus of Plato

I love how Plato uses multiple frames of introductory ideas in his work.

The Timaeus is framed first by the fanciful gossip of Solon’s story of Atlantis, and second by the superb verbal-magical invocation of Timaeus himself, which is what I wish to quote here (segment three: prelude). Plato’s third frame in the Timaeus, introducing chance and free-will, alters this second frame significantly and is the subject for another post.

So here is the second frame, Timaeus’ invocation of the creation of the cosmos:

“We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that whichis always becoming and never is.”

This is the basis for the physical world for Timaeus, for the macrocosm. But it is important to note that Timaeus is coming out with substantially the same idea as Lao Tze, on the other side of Eurasia at roughly the same period. He here invokes the Tao with these words and those to come. Timaeus, fully aware that speech is a magical act, prefaces this quoted statement with an invocation both to the gods and to his own powers – that is, he wisely invokes the macrocosm and the microcosm before beginning to talk of first and last things.

“The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real.”

This is a startling description of the quality of Yang and Yin, or Shiva and Shakti. The most modern concept of this is the particular and the wave. The wave is potential particulars, or a conceptual carrier for particulars, or in some way a not-quite-real concept which fills in all the explanatory gaps which the particle concept does not.

But Timaeus goes further, describing the subjective response to these macrocosmic forces. The basis of physical reality is implied to be the source of subjective activity: that is to say, our (microcosmic) awareness of changeless evokes reason and intellect, and the awareness of the always-changing evokes opinion, obscurity, sensation and irrationality. Thus the perrenial wisdom of getting our focus of changeable things, and putting attention of the changeless: by focusing on the changeless we submerge into quiescience our irrational and sensational qualities. The process of self-enquiry suggested by Ramana Maharshi recommends that as the classical direct path to truth.


But listen to what Timaeus says next:

“In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owning to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause.”

We can infer then that the unchanging, reasonable, and intellectual is self-caused or uncaused, arising from its own nature directly.

What follows next is THE key statement of classical thinking:

“Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.”

If that sentence doesn’t move you then how do you know you are still alive?

In one sentence Timaeus transmits the essence of classicism as method and means to the creation of art. The esoteric meaning of what Timaeus is saying is that the creation of a thing along classical lines is a recreation of the cosmos, and at the same time an emotional and energetic participation in the original creation. Each and every creative act invokes God into the person of the creator. Creative work is theurgy, and creation brings the reason into alignment with the Reason of the cosmos.

Think about that one for a while!

Gaiawriter's Top Ten Ways To Increase Intelligence.

1. Engage complex forms of art, science and culture with your feelings and thoughts, recording what you notice. Classical music, great novels, galleries, museums, scientific education, and above all, the fine art of intellectual conversation - these are time honored ways to increase intelligence. For most of human history conversation has been the main human art form.

2. Seek patterns. Seek the essence. Seek the edges. Seek the extremes. Seek the grey areas. Seek to understand rather than to simply know a fact.

3. Simplify what you learn by talking it through with yourself or someone else.

4. Look at the teachers of your teacher. Whatever field of interest brings tears to your eyes, or makes you heart leap, or makes your belly flutter, find the key personalities of that field and look up their influences. Read their bibliographies. Scan their indexes. Listen to whose names they drop. Understanding intellectual influence in a field is key to sophisticated insight.

5. Explore the limits of the intellect. Through human history, intelligence has consistently failed to provide a reliable guide to wise action. Philosophy has not found answers but only more questions. So the key to increasing intelligence is to learn what intellect can and cannot do: these fields are known as hermeneutics, epistemology, phenomenology and metaphysics, however most mature spirituality traditions also include strong and valuable critique of intellectualism.

6. Own your emotional bias. Don't fake a dispassion which only very few highly developed people have. Get emotional about your ideas and thinking. Define your biases and then test them out. If they fail, humbly accept the failure and move on to a new bias. Pretending you are above it all and have understood everything is a waste of precious time.

7. Honor tradition. Most intellectual rebels need therapy, not intelligence increase. The strongest and finest minds flower right in the heart of the great and unbroken intellectual traditions of the world. Whether you are Chinese or Peruvian, your tradition will include intelligent discourse somewhere. Find your tradition and honor it.

8. Settle for second best. We are all stupid in some areas and smart in others. The simplest approach is to embrace the fact that sometimes you are going to be dumb no matter how smart you are. The sight of a toddler educating a retired university professor about building blocks is always charming only so long as the professor does not strike a prententious pose of being above mere play.

9. Practice mental masturbation. The only difference between mental masturbation and genuine intellectual activity is that mental masturbation is done simply for the joy of it, not in service to some greater value. Mental masturbation is wonderful, inexpensive, harmless fun, and comes (sic) highly recommended by the greater thinkers of all time.

10. Study mathematics and Plato.

Why mathematics? Mathematics is the fundamental tool of science; knowing maths gives you new eyes to see thinking not as connections between physical qualities but as abstract living forms of reality.

Why Plato? Plato's dialogs are the heart of the entire Western intellectual tradition, the essence of the enterprise of philosophy, and the core of all ideas in politics, science, metaphysics, and many other fields. I suggest you start with the refined word-play of Protagoras or the fun sensuality of Symposium.

Warning! Reading Plato involves discovering for yourself that most of your thoughts are actually 23 centuries old and the fact that your deepest thoughts do not belong to you at all. You can expect from Plato nothing other than a profound intellectual shock. Time and again through history, Plato plants the acorns that later become oaks.

I admit now that I have deceived you, reader. In fact there is only one best method to increase intelligence, but most people are unable to apply that method for various reasons. I have broken the one method into nine suggestions, but the single key direct act of intelligence increase I have hidden from you.

Because the truth is that by applying the last of these ten ways to increase intelligence, you will automatically be applying the other nine. Studying mathematics and Plato has been the best way to increase intelligence for the last 23 centuries, and remains the pre-eminent way to increase intelligence today in spite of the Nintendo DS Brain Gym and Smart Drugs.

So, then:

1. Engage complexity with feelings and thoughts. The most complex cultural objects we possess remain Plato and Mathematics.

2. Seek patterns. The best expression of pattern is through number (mathematics) and dialog (Plato).

3. Simplify by talking things through. (Plato talks everything through; that's why they're dialogs and not essays.)

4. Look at who taught your teachers. The truth is that Plato taught your teachers. All of them? Find out for yourself.

5. Explore the limits of the intellect. The common experience has been that the limits of our intellects have been reached already and usually surpassed by others.

6. Own your emotional bias. If you react emotionally against the suggestion that Plato and mathematics are the best base possible for intelligence increase, then test your ideas out and come back to Plato and mathematics when you have failed enough.

7. Honor tradition. Traditionally Plato and mathematics are, along with the study of Latin, the main expressions of intellectal activity in the West. If something works better for you go for it.

8. Embrace being dumb. Few arenas of cultural activity are more humbling that Plato's philosophy, over which the generations have toiled, and mathematics, in which humankinds most abstract thoughts are expressed.

9. Practice mental masturbation. The greatest mental masturbator of all time, Socrates, lies within the pages of Plato. And, just for your own peace of mind, I do not recommend having sex with a mathematician; you might figure out why for yourself after studying the field.

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato.

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato.

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato.

Did you get that intelligence increase tip I mentioned before?

10. Above all, study mathematics and Plato!