The Architecture of Human Misfortune & The Path to Living Wholeness: A Philosophical Octave

I. Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC)

The Diagnosis

Men draw upon themselves their own misfortunes voluntarily, and of their own free choice. Unhappy that they are! They neither see nor understand that their good is near them. Few know how to deliver themselves out of their misfortunes. Such is the fate that blinds mankind, and takes away his senses. Like huge cylinders they roll to and fro, and always oppressed with ills innumerable. For fatal strife, innate, pursues them everywhere, tossing them up and down.

II. Seneca (c. 4 BC – 65 AD)

The Trap

If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich. Natural desires are limited; those born of false opinion have nowhere to stop, because the false has no limits. When you travel a road, there’s an end; but wandering off it, you wander without end. So pull your steps back from pointless things. And when you want to know whether what you’re after springs from a natural desire or a misleading one, ask whether it can come to rest at any fixed point. If you find that, however far you’ve gone, the goal keeps receding into the distance, you can be sure the thing is contrary to nature.

III. Daniel Quinn (1935 – 2018 AD)

The System

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

IV. Lao Tzu (c. 6th century BC)

The Cosmic Warning

Do you want to improve the world? I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred. It cannot be improved. If you tamper with it, you will ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you will lose it. There is a time for being ahead, a time for being behind; a time for being in motion, a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous, a time for being exhausted. Therefore the sage avoids excess, extravagance, and arrogance.

V. Alan Watts (1915 – 1973 AD)

The Psychological Illusion

We living in the twentieth century are making a strange experiment: we are trying to see if we can live completely separated from nature, and treat the world purely as an object to be exploited. But the trouble is, when you treat the world as an object, you eventually treat yourself as an object. You become a cog in your own machine. We are suffering from a hallucination, a radical misconception of who we are. The hallucination is that you are a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin, facing a world that is alien and outside of you. But you are not a stranger here. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it, the way a wave comes out of the ocean. You are not a flash-in-the-pan creature who is here today and gone tomorrow; you are the universe experiencing itself.

VI. David Bohm (1917 – 1992 AD)

The Scientific Proof

The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is what has led to the very widespread general crisis of the course of civilization. Man has always been seeking wholeness—mental, physical, social, and individual. Yet he is clearly corrupting the very ground from which he grew, in the name of a fragmented ideology.

VII. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986 AD)

The Experiential Awakening

You can feed a hungry man with actual food, but you cannot feed a spiritually starved humanity with concepts. The description is not the described; the word is not the thing. We have filled our minds with ideas, with philosophies, with the opinions of others, and we think we understand. But understanding comes only when the mind is completely still, when there is no observer separate from the observed. The division between the 'me' and the 'world' is the root of all sorrow. When you see this—not as an intellectual theory, but as an absolute, immediate reality—the conflict of centuries comes to an end. You do not try to change the world; you are the world.

VIII. Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965 AD)

The Active Return

True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, which is: 'I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live.' This is not an intellectual theory, but an undeniable reality. When a man experiences this mystical union, he can no longer live for himself alone. He enters into a spiritual relation with the world. He becomes completely ethical. A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy, nor whether it is capable of feeling. To him, life itself is sacred. He knows that humanity must rise to this reverence, or perish in its own cleverness.

IX. My Own Credo

To pursue deep sustainable joy in a living world.

To treat the world as a community of someones, not a warehouse of somethings.

To know the best pleasures are the ones that make everything more alive.