On Wise Men

Reformatted from original post here: minds.com/newsfeed/674872134639558665

There are no longer any gurus, any sages, any contemplatives sealed away in the wilderness to return to divulge its secrets; we have only pretenders, who have borrowed their manners, conclusions and aesthetics, and sell them to us as if they were genuine. We have no teachers, only messiahs. What few men are left who know of the old things, the things which used to lay within the temples and between the shifting dunes, they will not leave them, too wise to convey them to the profane minds of worldly men. They stay in the quiet places, eyes shut as Sodom burns.

The thought of the average man will never go deeper than two or three levels of abstraction, enough to muse on this situation or that which confronts him, to attain a certain level of remove that allows a modicum of longer-scale thought, but not to change his overall course. They will learn of an idea or two that seems profound, insightful, and they will hold this like a talisman separate from its greater context, half-blind and half-content to neglect the rest around it. Some will take drugs to compensate for their superficiality, believing the temporary phantasms of chemically-induced delusions to be indicative of some deeper mental transformation, an effortless and passive enlightenment, but so soon as they are sober they lose every affect and trace of their temporary euphoria, and behave just as simply as anyone else. Some put on great airs, and present themselves with this image or that image, a book here or a book there, to convince passers-by that they are wise, without realizing how self-contradictory this behavior is. A very small amount will put in significant, serious effort, and in all due humility attempt to learn something of exceptional substance, and of these about half will succeed in grasping it, and the majority of those will be unable to apply what they have learned and become perplexed by this disconnect, and wander back to convention in a half-daze. The remainder, infinitesimal, will apprehend this disconnect, and understand what it means, and never return fully to their former state of affairs, the ins-and-outs of the day-to-day. And this will be the makeup of the average men, which is nearly all men; average. Those that are not average in this respect will be at the best of times less than ten percent, and at the worst less than half of a single percent.

These if they are to be anything must be two things: intelligent enough to hew worthwhile yields from thought, and weak enough to be a failure, to be chronically insufficient so as to be rejected, isolated, and sent off to the monastic professions of reflection. Too successful with his wits, too charming or too beautiful, and he will have things easy, and all will come to him as fitting, and his life will be rich without ever having to realize a greater portion of his potential. A wise man must be to a certain extent impotent, broken, in order to be lost and forced to seek other things. He must endure pain and tragedy enough to distance himself from his peers, estrange himself from the world about him, and gain the removed vantage necessary to see it as it is. No man can understand something without leaving it, without being outside of it; else his understanding should be purely practical, within the domain. And foremost if a man wishes to be wise in the way of men, he must not spend his time consorting with men, but instead reflecting upon his previous dealings and experiences from afar. He cannot do this if he has friends to comfort him, or a woman to warm his bed, and all of these persons to build up attachments and emotional obligations to that would restrict his thought; no he must be unburdened of connections as much as possible. There is no greater recipe for profound thought than to be wildly intelligent and to be an untouchable. Frustrated, denied, shut-out, the mental potential must turn somewhere, and often enough it is to spool out into the void and taste of its black fruits. This man, ridden with agony and hopelessly lost, and this man only will have the sufficient drives and the sufficient space to find the old things, unearth them and inspect them as the ancients did. No man from comfort and security has cause to seek truths, but to a misbegotten and broken man there is no other path to redemption, to meaning and fulfillment in a world that's denied him. If you really wish to learn, seek out those most difficult to find and unwilling to talk, especially of larger things, those whose past is most heavy with pain and future most dim, those who are not celebrated nor given talks or position. The nameless wanders of wastes and empty places, these men. They, they who pretend to know nothing, know the only things worth knowing, I guarantee you this.

So do not, as I often urge you, believe anyone who sells you a rosy picture of contemplation, one which is aesthetic and comfortable, fit for hanging on a wall or as a conversation piece. You may respect them and adore them for all their worldly opinions, but this does not make them transcendentally wise, exalted in the least measure, and if they try to pass themselves off as such then you have the sheerest possible proof of the superficiality of their own thought. Believe no-one in fact, on matters of wisdom, unless they come to you without titles, without ornaments, without graven images, and coverings on neither hands nor feet. He who passes himself off as a nothing is the only one who will speak honestly, without concern for his appearance; will tell you unpleasant things, for you cannot take anything from him; will be able to render a truth aptly, for he does not make a craft or profit of them. Men in shallow waters may perform many nimble tricks indeed, and exercise all manner of cunning and intelligence in the execution of their art, and become quite adept at watching the waves of their harbour, learning its contours and its nature. But only the man who looks most attentively to the stars, absolute points fixed above, will be able to ford the wide ocean.