While contemplating the universe, life, reality, the meaning of existence and other things of that nature, I found myself reading a collection of philosophical notes which included a beautiful summary of Daylight by Rumi. Aside from the delectable stylings of many great thinkers linked in these cherished notes, I found myself hanging off the beautifully poetic words shared by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his brilliant essay Self-Reliance.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
To be great is to be misunderstood.”
He goes on to say that our minds turn us from one feeling to another so that we may have two wings to fly and not one, as you experience the often disorienting sensation that comes with clarifying your own values, it can be very powerful to use imagery of the mind rather than giving into confusion. In this example the suggestion is creating an image of beautiful wings extending from your soul that lift your consciousness higher and higher, giving you incredible vision and perspective over the sprawling landscape of your active mind, and ultimately an awe inspiring view of your own existence.
This is a poetically imaginative way of saying don’t beat yourself up when you find yourself exploring different perspectives, it is absolutely fine to challenge your own beliefs daily, change perspective, be your harshest critic and rethink your position based on new information, greater wisdom and a better sense of self that may not have been available to you yesterday. Great accomplishment, personal growth and the continual development of our minds, along with the advancement of wider society by creating brighter better futures for humanity, is surely not to be found in linear thinking without exploration of what is possible?
Personally I often find in an ever more challenging world and when engaged in contemplation about the complexities of modern life, it is in no way simple to find a clear chain of thought free of differing perspectives and radically opposing positions generated within the mind.
While it is an interesting challenge to distil it all down into a structured meaningful position, I am pretty certain I find the process of reading, learning and writing about the great thinkers and their amazing minds so interesting, precisely because it is so complex and it fuels a process of learning with no end to the incredible insights gained and applied to life. I sense for me this all finds basis in a deeply held emotional state formed through having been denied what I consider today to be a quality education.
Rumi, one of the greatest Sufi philosophers born in modern day Afghanistan in the 13th century and the inspiration for Sema, the “universal movement” practiced by the Whirling Dervishes, waded in and simplified all this with “The sword of reality is the saint’s protection.”
A good way to think on that would be to suggest Aldous Huxley brilliant comment:
“Facts do not cease to exist simply because they are ignored.”
And so to my point that conventional opinion is the ruin of our souls. It is far better and vastly more enlightening to take up the mantle of seeking great wisdom, working through all the complexities that come with that challenge, then applying it to our lives in a way that does not give us the luxury of falling foul to the collective illusions of society as it is today.
As Einstein says: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Our belief that our deepest selves can ever die, that we are separate from one another and all other life is, as Einstein so eloquently says, an illusion. Thus rolling us all nicely back to the words of our friend Rumi and "The sword of reality protects the enlightened saint from these illusions."
Further weight can be provided by this little gem from Robert Fritz’ who's thinking from The Path of Least Resistance outlining the need to be honest about where we’re at in our lives in the process of holding the creative tension between our desired outcome and our current reality. He stresses the fact that if we don’t have the courage to be honest about the complexities of our current reality and carefully consider all positions and how those positions can and should change frequently, it’s "impossible" to create and live in our ideals.
As a final throw of the dice on all this taking us across the theological, philosophical and scientific spectrum to thoughts concerning the deeper “reality” of our existence, we should consider the position of Buddhism when it comes to the nature of reality, what we think, why we think it, and how we think about thinking itself.
The Buddha had this to say:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumoured by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Yet after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
To be misunderstood is to powerfully engage in seeking to understand what lies beneath the mind dulling resonance of collective group think and conventional opinion, while curiously, boldly and unapologetically seeking out the beautiful poetic notes in the wisdom of our great thinkers, those whose incredible minds unfortunately seem to now be confined to a road less travelled by most of the worlds population, in favour of brain numbing engagement with Chat GPT, media dross, reality TV and an endless stream of ways for human beings to give away there own power to mindless pursuits of no consequence, other than the end of humanity.
Personally I remind myself every day “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society," Jiddu Krishnamurti.
In doing so I ask the question of my own life. "To what right do I have to be breathing today and to what positive steps can I make toward changing one mind, and changing one life. Brighter better futures are not somebody else's problem, they are mine. And they are yours.
So as I return to Ralph Waldo Emerson to give us a beautiful end to this note from his thoughts at the beginning, my hopes for the future of humanity are that more of us will find our way to wisdom from great minds of history with a willingness to be misunderstood.
Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.
To be great is to be misunderstood.”
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