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Contact us Purchases Home Teachers and Contributors Books and Reviews Audio and Video News and Articles Discussion Section Literature, Prose, Poetry and Thought Resources and Events Browse by Category Search the Site What is the David Library? Newsletter The Wisdom Eaters by Ptolemy Tompkins (Reprinted with permission of Lapis Magazine) In our culture... the elders are missing. – Louise Cards Mahdi Recently I watched a video called "Timothy Leary's Last Trip," a documentary by A. J. Caroline and O. B. Babbs, the son of Merry Prankster Ken Babbs. The film covered the usual territory, from Learys days at Harvard, to the house at Millbrook, New York, weaving in the Merry Pranksters and the Further Bus Along the Way. The climax of the video was a "final meeting" between Leary and Kesey "on a new plane of existence—a place their wildest trips in the '60s never imagined ...cyberspace." The cyberspace meeting, when it finally arrived, was a fascinating disappointment. Leary and Kesey, flanked by their supporters, camera crew, and assorted hangers-on, stared at each other's image in their computer screens and traded weak congratulations at having brought the event off. Leary was close to death—he would die just three weeks later—and clearly not as sanguine about this fact as his confident talk about Ultimate Trips and such not tried to suggest. Kesey's bright spirits, meanwhile, seemed equally forced. The event, advertised so hopefully by the film's narrator as a meeting at the wild fringes of psyche and science, had at moments the flavor of a phone conversation between two legionnaires no longer healthy enough to meet up and reminisce in person. When Leary, at a certain point in the proceedings, uttered his familiar cry of "further further further," the words had a painfully empty ring to them. In A Guide for the Perplexed, E. F. Schumacher's great attempt at summarizing the collective wisdom of the pre-modern world and making its imperatives intelligible to modern readers, he wrote that "it may conceivably be possible to live without churches; but it is not possible to live without religion, that is, without systematic work to keep in contact with, and develop toward, Higher Levels than those of ‘ordinary life’ with all its pleasure or pain, sensation, gratification, refinement or crudity—whatever it may be. The modern experiment to live without religion has failed and once we have understood this, we know what our `post modern' tasks really are." News http://seriousseekers.com/News%20and%20Articles/article_tompkins... 1 of 6 10/13/2009 11:19 AM The first among those tasks, Schumacher made clear, is to recover a series of genuine maps-for- transformed-living: maps which allow people today—especially young people—to change themselves in deep and lasting ways and attain to those "further" dimensions of human experience that Leary showed himself to be so keenly if ineffectually concerned with. Schumacher wrote A Guide for the Perplexed in the late 70s, and since then the maps have been coming in hard and heavy. In fact, there are more of them floating around now than perhaps at any other single point in history. Not only are modern—if questionable masters of transformation like Leary and Kesey in anything but short supply, but revamped versions of the transformative maps of times past are on hand in equal, and perhaps even greater, quantities. From Nag Hammadi to Tikal, on tomb walls, parchment rolls, and codices bound in jaguar-skin, the deep, difficult, and often very obscure musings of long-vanished cultures on the true shape and purpose of human life have been coming back into the light and back into circulation at an unprecedented rate. Dug up, dusted off, and passed to scholars for initial translation and interpretation, these materials eventually find their way into the hands of writers with an eye for the popular market. Finally, when sufficiently trimmed of offensive or confusing archaisms and trapped out with an eye-pleasing design, these refurbished wisdom documents are ready for the journey to Borders or Barnes & Noble, and the wisdom-hungry public. Harvested like honey from the scattered flower fields of history and packaged to sell, these ancient materials are from a distance scarcely distinguishable from the offerings of contemporary sages, both real and self-proclaimed, with which they share shelf space. From Tibetan tantra to Iranian Sufism to Japanese Zen to Amerindian shamanism, from Leary to Da Free John to Ken Wilber to James Redfield, countless schemes for making sense of that vague feeling of insufficiency that is part and parcel of the human condition are now available in paperback, at a superstore near you, for around $18.95 plus tax. Yet for all the wild profusion of these maps and all the talk about using them to blaze new trails into new dimensions of understanding (and for all the genuine merit of many of them), the essential promise at the heart of all the world's wisdom traditions is often moribund today in away that it never was in ages past. For all that we may seem to possess it in quantity, real wisdom, the kind that once held entire cultures together and told the members of those cultures who they were and what they might perhaps become sometimes seems to be retreating from us at precisely the speed that so many people suggest it is approaching. Periods of syncretistic confusion are nothing new of course, but the sheer size and extent of the confusion at work today it new, and it is producing new results as well. Perhaps never before has the profusion and availability of wisdom materials been matched by such a frequent inability to make genuine use of the materials being offered. With the world's primordial and traditional wisdom traditions in disarray and the hunger for wisdom being fed by this burst of market-driven material, the News http://seriousseekers.com/News%20and%20Articles/article_tompkins... 2 of 6 10/13/2009 11:19 AM situation is much like that of an old growth forest that has been leveled overnight. On the ground, newly exposed to the sunlight, a rich profusion of growth is springing up. But unlike the trees that it replaces, this growth is fragile, its roots tentative, and its nutritional content sometimes questionable in the extreme. Though we seem to be living in the Golden Age of it right now, America's love affair with packaged, easy-access wisdom is not entirely new. The essential religiosity of Americans, in combination with their love of novelty, has long made books of home-spun or repackaged ancient and exotic wisdom popular here; and sales-conscious mystics have been around at least as long as Walt Whitman. But the first truly large‑scale burst of such material did not occur until the early '60s, right around the time I was born. In the late '70s when I was in my teens, the process was in full gear, and I was part of the first generation of confused teenagers to have this remarkable supermarket of exotic and domestic insights glistening out there, ready to be of help to me if I wanted it. And want it I did. Anyone who read as many wisdom books as I did as a teenager noticed that there was a certain character who appeared in many of them: a person unlike other people. This person could be either a man or a woman, but let's say for the moment that he is a man. Things fall into place for this man in a way that they don't for others. Doors open and shut for him as if they had known just when he was coming. Trains and buses pull up when he needs them to. Even the weather changes to suit his needs—though, due to his extraordinary and inexplicable contentedness, those needs tend to be modest in the extreme. Unlike most people, who struggle and chafe against a world that is all too often at odds with their desires, this individual seems to have struck up a secret agreement with life when no one was looking, as a result of which events just seem to go his way. Wanting next to nothing, he receives everything. For a good part of my young adult life, I nurtured a private hope of actually bumping into one of these magical figures. The way I imagined it, I would be going along about my business on a day seemingly just like any other, when I would suddenly find myself face-to-face with him. Perhaps I would be in a bus station, like Carlos Castaneda was when he first met don Juan. Or perhaps, like the writers of some other narratives I'd read, I would be in a cafe, looking absently out the window, when I would notice a mysterious man at a table across from mine—a man who I had never seen before, but who I felt like I had known all my life. Somehow or other we would get to talking, and this man would explain things to me: things I had always wanted and needed to know, but that no one had ever offered to tell me about before. Not that I spent much time either uploads/Geographie/ guide-for-the-perplexed 1 .pdf