from (excerpt)

Philosophy Is A Stress-Based Activity

talk, May 17, 1983

Adi Da:

Is there any need for philosophy whatsoever? Spiritual or otherwise? Is there really any need or use for philosophy? You might feel that there is a need for it based on some stress or problem-conception. But is philosophy of any use? {Laughs.) Is it of any use at all?

Student:

Master, are you using the word philosophy in the sense of something that is conforming or identical to Truth?

Adi Da:

 There is no philosophy that is identical to Truth. Philosophy is a process that may be associated with the Realization of Truth, but philosophy itself is a process. The word "philosophy" means "love of wisdom." It is usually associated with some mental or discriminative activity, a way of considering things as they are or as they seem to be and coming to conclusions about reality. There are high philosophies, low philosophies, false ones, true ones perhaps, great philosophy, lesser philosophy--but it is all philosophy. It is all the same enterprise. Is there any use for it?

Student:

 Well, I would say there is no use for it in and of itself.

Adi Da:

You might ask, "Is a leg of any use in and of itself?" And there is no use for a leg in and of itself, but if you are going to do any walking, then a leg comes in handy! Well, what I have to say, in and of itself, is just a pile of words. Does this philosophizing have any use as a leg has a use?

Student:

It helps to bring people here.

Adi Da:

We could just as well have sold them tickets to get them here! If that is the only purpose of it, then I am working awfully hard, If my purpose were just to get people to associate with me or enter our community, I could do all kinds of things, including selling tickets. That does not seem to be a very high purpose,

Student:

Master, maybe people have thoughts and opinions on all kinds of things that limit their perception of reality. Philosophy, in terms of your Teaching and your consideration of the Great Tradition, seems to be necessary to undermine all that.

Adi Da:

I myself have suggested on occasion that it is useful to study religion and spiritual philosophy in terms of the Great Tradition. The reason such critical study is useful is that you already have all kinds of inherited, thought-up, and propagandized ideas that correspond to ideas that can be found in the traditions. Thus, you can see how those ideas traditionally get elaborated as a way of life, and you can see their limitations. Doing philosophy in these terms, then, can be said to have a purpose. Doing philosophy is thus a way of undoing philosophy.

Student:

One of the ways by which you express the ultimate Truth is the statement :
"You do not know what a single thing Is."
(or One does not know what a single thing Is.)
That certainly contradicts the usual notions people have about philosophy and about the use of the thinking mind.

Adi Da:

You could say that philosophy is a very basic activity of human beings because they are mind-oriented. Almost any kind of mental process can be though of as a philosophical exercise. Therefore, the rigorous activity that we call philosophy is a species of something that is typical of human beings. And perhaps that typical activity which is specialized in the form of the rigorous work of philosophy is the basic activity of trying to account for everything.

Now, science is philosophy. Humanity in general is philosophizing. We are all trying to figure it out. We are trying to account for our existence, for everything that is appearing. Perhaps this is the basic reason why we think, why human beings started to think to begin with, and why they developed this specialized, functional process of thinking that is relatively unique, at least in terms of its extent in the human species on this planet. Perhaps the basic reason for thinking is the felt need to account for everything, to figure everything out.

You are always thinking, it seems. But if you examine the root of your perpetual thinking, there is a stress beneath it, a kind of emotion that is not itself a thought, but that motivates thought. That stress is associated with the feeling that you cannot account for things, that you have not figured them out and are therefore vulnerable. Then, feeling vulnerable, feeling threatened, you engage in thinking.

When thinking becomes rigorous, a profound exercise of insight, then we call it philosophy. When it is a little less rigorous, we call it philosophizing. Then there is all the rest of our thinking that is something like philosophy. But all our thought is basically built upon a stressful feeling or emotion that arises in every moment simply on the basis of our encounter with manifest existence.

It seems to be natural to us, we feel, to try to account for everything, to figure things out. We feel that if we could do that successfully and fully, then we would not be threatened. We would relieve ourselves of this stressful emotion, this stressful sense of existence. Thus, the origin of philosophy is this stressful feeling, associated with the rudimentary presumption, which is not even a concept in its root origins, that we cannot account for things, have not yet figured them out, are not in control of them, and therefore are obliged to seek to know. Philosophizing and the activities of philosophy are an effort to know, to figure things out, to account for things. We feel that if we do that, then we will relieve ourselves of stress.

The origin of philosophy, then, is not pure in some abstract sense. The origin of philosophy is the same as the origins of desire in general. It is the same as the origin of seeking altogether. It is the origin of the sexual motivation and of all kinds of pursuits. Perhaps in general we are activated by this stress, this need to gain control by figuring things out, accounting for everything, accomplishing control over everything.

This stress it seems to me, is a basic source of much of what we are doing. It certainly is the source of the complex emotion behind what we are doing typically, moment to moment. We could say that in every moment we are stressfully trying to account for everything. The history of human culture is filled with such accountings. And we could say that those accountings are the philosophical conclusions or answers that have been developed on the basis of this stress. Of course, most evidence of human activity apart from philosophy is not at all conclusive, not an answer, a philosophy, a fulfillment of any ultimate kind. Human beings, then, are always philosophizing, always seeking.

Student:

Master, you speak of theories that are just the mode of the acceptable understanding of the way things operate and of what can be understood about them at a given time. But it is always understood that such understanding is not the fulfillment of knowledge at any point. When a new theory is proposed, we always recognize that there is more to be understood about the matters it treats.

Adi Da:

Some people recognize that, but many others do not. Many people accept a scientific proposition, or a proposition coining from any other quarter, as an answer, and then they cling to that answer, that proposition, that theory, that description, and they defend it very emotionally, even irrationally. People frequently get involved in irrational defenses of apparently rational propositions.

Why? Because what we are seeking through philosophizing and science or philosophical effort in general is relief from the stress of not being able to account for everything, of not having, figured everything out, of not knowing, of not being in control. Human beings are motivated in a primary sense by the feeling that they are not in control of their existence. What we are doing in every domain of our living, then, is animating that stress, the feeling that we are not in control, through desire, through mental activity, through all kinds of activities. We are elaborating this stress, dramatizing it. We could say, then, that philosophy, even in its most sophisticated form, its most academic or scientific form, is a stress-based activity, a dramatization of the stressful acknowledgment that you are not in control of existence.

Something is controlling existence itself, and your existence in particular. Somehow it is all controlled, and human activity is basically devoted to finding out about that which is in control. If we find out about it, our discovery puts us in a position of apparent control. As soon as we put ourselves in a position to feel that we are somehow in control, we want to stay in that position. Therefore, people defend philosophical points of view, scientific theories, social structures, political systems, and unusual, strange, or conventional human arrangements, because they feel that, at least in some sense, that which they are defending represents their portion of control over existence. What we are seeking, then, is this control, the status of being in control over that which otherwise seems to be controlling us.

Science and philosophy are simply rather professionalized academic developments of a basic, stressful, neurotic impulse. But to be involved in these pursuits, to be seekers, has become a convention for human beings. We do not think of these activities as being fundamentally stress-based and neurotic. We think of them as necessary in fact, or ordinary, natural, normal. The whole human race is seeking, you see. We are called by various institutions and systems to believe certain propositions and to seek in certain ways in common. But then each of us has his or her own private domain of seeking founded on the same stress, the same need to gain control.