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For Poppy, little and wise
INTRODUCTION
When I was thirteen years old, my father died. He’d developed lung cancer in his fifties, which left him bedridden for a year before it finally killed him. He was a humble and decent man, who encouraged me to think more deeply about life.
I was totally unprepared for his death, and I coped with it badly. I became angry and depressed. I’d stay out all night, playing cat and mouse with the local cops, breaking into buildings and waiting for them to arrive so I could run into gardens and dive over hedges and fences to lose them. I was always in trouble, either for skipping lessons at school, arguing with my teachers, or getting in fights with my classmates. As soon as my sixteenth birthday came around, I was marched briskly down to the headmaster’s office and given two choices: either leave voluntarily or be expelled. So I left, and I was subsequently placed in a special program for troubled kids. I felt that my life was spiraling rapidly out of control. I’d been labeled a “write-off” by school and social services. I didn’t really see any point trying to prove them wrong.
Each evening my father would come home from his work as a digger driver on building sites and collapse exhausted in an armchair, hands covered in grease and dirt. The job didn’t pay well, and he hadn’t two pennies to rub together, but he never complained. When he was a young man, his best friend had passed away, leaving my father a farm in his will, to everyone’s surprise. He refused the bequest, returning the land to the other man’s family. He used to say, “Money won’t bring you happiness,” and he really believed that. He showed me that there are more important things in life and that true wealth comes from being contented with whatever you have rather than desiring to have more and more.
After my father’s funeral, my mother placed his old leather wallet on the dining room table and told me to take it. I opened it slowly; I think my hands were shaking but I’m not sure why. Inside there was nothing except a badly worn scrap of paper. It turned out to be a passage he’d torn from the Book of Exodus: “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” I was desperate to understand what on earth those words could possibly have meant to him. My own philosophical journey began precisely at that moment, as I stood there perplexed, with that piece of paper in my hand.
When I learned many years later that Marcus Aurelius had lost his father at an early age, I wondered if he’d been left searching in the same way I had for a sense of direction. After my father’s death, I was left with religious and philosophical questions that troubled me very deeply. I remember being terrified of dying. I would lie in bed at night unable to sleep, trying to solve the riddle of existence and find some consolation. It was as though I had an itch at the back of my brain that I needed to scratch but couldn’t quite reach. I didn’t know it at the time, but that sort of existential anxiety is a common experience that drives people to the study of philosophy. The philosopher Spinoza, for example, wrote:
I thus perceived that I was in a state of great peril, and I compelled myself to seek with all my strength for a remedy, however uncertain it might be; as a sick man struggling with a deadly disease, when he sees that death will surely be upon him unless a remedy be found, is compelled to seek such a remedy with all his strength, inasmuch as his whole hope lies therein.1
I took the phrase “I am that I am” to refer to the pure awareness of existence itself, which at first seemed like something deeply mystical or metaphysical to me: “I am the consciousness of my own existence.” It reminded me of the famous inscription from the Delphic Oracle’s shrine: Know Thyself. That became one of my maxims. I grew quite obsessed with the pursuit of self-knowledge, through meditation and all forms of contemplative exercises.
I found out later that the passage my father carried with him all those years plays an important role in the rites of a Masonic chapter called the “Royal Arch.” During initiation the candidate is asked, “Are you a Royal Arch Mason?” to which he replies, “I—AM—THAT—I—AM.” Freemasonry has a long history in Scotland, going back at least four centuries, and it has deep roots in my hometown of Ayr. My father and many of my friends’ fathers were members of the local lodge. Most Freemasons are Christians, but they employ nondenominational language, referring to God as “the Great Architect of the Universe.” According to the legend presented in some of their texts, a set of spiritual teachings originating with the builders of King Solomon’s temple was brought to the West by the philosopher Pythagoras and further disseminated by Plato and Euclid. This ancient wisdom was reputedly handed down through the centuries by medieval Masonic lodges. They used esoteric rituals, geometric symbols such as the square, and compasses to convey their spiritual doctrines. Freemasonry also celebrates the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, which correspond symbolically with the four corners of the lodge: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. (Wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation, if you prefer more modern terms.) My father took these ethical teachings seriously, and they shaped his character in a way that left a lasting impression on me. Freemasonry, at least for sincere practitioners like my father, didn’t represent the bookish sort of philosophy taught in the ivory towers of universities, but rather something derived from a much older conception of Western philosophy as a spiritual way of life.
As it happened, I wasn’t old enough to become a Freemason, and with my reputation around town I wouldn’t have been invited to join anyway. So, with negligible formal education behind me, I began reading everything I could about philosophy and religion. I’m not sure I would have even been able to articulate exactly what I was looking for at that time, except that it would have to somehow combine my interests in philosophy, meditation, and psychotherapy. I needed a more rational, philosophical guide to life, but nothing seemed to fit the bill. Then I had the good fortune to encounter Socrates.
I had been studying the collection of ancient Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, which are inflected with Greek philosophy. This led me to begin reading the Platonic dialogues, which portray Socrates, the quintessential Greek philosopher, questioning his friends and other interlocutors about their deepest values. He tended to focus on the cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, later adopted by Freemasons. Socrates didn’t write any books on philosophy—we know about him only through the works of others, mainly dialogues written by two of his most famous students, Plato and Xenophon. According to legend, Socrates was the first person to apply the philosophical method to ethical questions. He particularly wanted to help others to live wisely, in accord with reason. For Socrates, philosophy was not only a moral guide but also a kind of psychological therapy. Doing philosophy, he said, can help us overcome our fear of death, improve our character, and even find a genuine sense of fulfillment.