Eckhart Tolle explores Socrates' claim that true wisdom begins with acknowledging ignorance. He contrasts Socrates' actual method, rooted in creative thinking, with how Plato later portrayed it, and examines what lies beyond rational thought.
Most humans go through life only knowing themselves and knowing the world in one dimension. There was a man that many of you have heard of. Some of you read some of the teachings. So pretese he lived 2,000, roughly 2,005, 2,400 years ago in Greece. He never wrote anything. His disciples later wrote down what they remembered, and its main disciple was Plato. And Plato then wrote the Socratic dialogues. We don't know, of course, whether what Plato wrote was exactly what Socrates taught. In a way, what Plato wrote. In Plato's writing, Socrates is a literary character. So the characteristic of Platonic dialogues is that Socrates asks questions, his people who come to him for teaching. He doesn't seem to immediately have the answer. He asks questions and then the person answers, and he gradually leads the person to the answer. Now, in the dialogues, which some of you may have read, some of them not, perhaps many people these days read Plato. In the dialogues, the impression is given that Socrates kind of manipulates a little bit the people who come to him. Then the impression is given that he already knows the answer. He just pretends not to know the answer. That's what comes across in the dialogues. And I think that is the character that Plato created. But I believe, and I have evidence for this belief that that's not actually what happened. I believe, and I'll tell you in a minute why that, that Plato actually started every teaching session from a place of not knowing the answer. And so unlike the impression we get if you read, if we read the Platonic dialogues, he already knows. He's just pretending not to know. No. How do I know this? Plato said, sorry. Socrates said, they call me the wisest of all men. And the reason why they call me the wisest of all men is that I'm the only one who knows that he knows nothing. And again, when we read it retrospectively after having read the Platonic dialogues, we think, oh, he's just. Again, it's some kind of affectation. He's saying, I know nothing. No, I believe that his genuine starting point was the ability to go into that state of not knowing, rather than coming from already having accumulated knowledge just waiting to come out of his head. And this is why he was able to think creatively. He actually taught, one could say almost he taught humanity how to think for the first time, to think rationally. But his thinking is creative. It's fresh and new. And it was a process between him and the people who came to him. There was an energy field that arose, and out of this energy field the answers came. Sometimes they came through him. Sometimes they came through the people who came to him. Another interesting thing he said, that's not reported in Plato, but written by another disciple of his called Xenophon. And he said that Socrates frequently pointed out that he received counsel from a divine voice. And again, that's something that the Western rationalists try to ignore. To them, Plato is the absolutely clear, rational, analytical, conceptual thinker. And they don't see, because they don't know that dimension within themselves, they don't see the depth out of which his thinking actually came. So he said frequently, as reported by Xenophon, that he received guidance from a divine voice. Socrates, not in the sense one doesn't get, the sense that some entity spoke through him, but obviously he was referring to inspiration from a dimension within him that was beyond thinking, beyond conceptualization, beyond the rational thought. So the impression we get of Socrates is really we see half the story. We see only the upper half of the iceberg. Well, the iceberg, actually you see far less than half of it. You see only a tiny fraction of it. And that was when these things are taught at universities and so on. The, the more important dimension is actually completely missed. They only look at the upper. What's he saying? But where did all that come from? What was the state of consciousness out of which such a creative teaching, such creative thinking could arise? And so it is that most these dimensions, the dimension of conceptualization, of thinking is in everyone, but the dimension of non conceptual intelligence is also in everyone. But in the same way that we only see one half of the whole, or less than one half of the whole. When we look at Socrates through the eyes of Plato and through the eyes of Western interpreters, in the same way most humans go through life only knowing themselves and knowing the world in one dimension. And that's the. We could call that the dimension of form. And so let's bring it now, after having gone to Greece, let's bring it to a very immediately verifiable place here. And now, as you sit here, you are aware of yourself as a form identity, obviously, because you are aware of your body, which is a physical form you are aware of. Although you may not remember your past, you have vaguely, you know that you have a past, you have a name, you have an address, and you have a life situation that may not be happening right here, now, unless you're thinking about it, but you have a life situation, your whole personal past is there, and you have thoughts going through your head, perhaps. And this is what most people identify with and know that's all they know. They know themselves as that form based entity. And what else is there? There is that in you which is continuously overlooked. Because the world of form, which includes thinking thoughts that continuously arise, the world of form has such an hypnotic pull, it's so seductive that you follow it. First you have the senses, the outer senses. But more importantly, you have the seduction of continuously arising interpretations of what the sense is the sensory input. If you look at your consciousness, your state of consciousness, the sensory input plays a relatively small part in what goes on in your mind. A much greater part of what goes in on your mind is either an interpretation of the sensory input that's immediately interpreted through the conditioning of your mind, the filter, or it is ignored completely and you are totally absorbed in the stream of thinking. In other words, totally unaware of your surroundings. Because you're absorbed in the seduction of thoughts arising and drawing in the totality of your attention, your consciousness. And so you have the. You become an entity that is entirely consists entirely of thought, the me. And you know no other dimension in you. It's all and anybody. If you are totally identified with that. Even the suggestion that there may be another dimension would immediately be ridiculed. Or the mind made entity feel threatened by.
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