The Story of Sophia and Melanthea: Wisdom, Love, and Laughter

The Story of Sophia and Melanthea

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Today we begin with a story:

Once upon a time, two young women, Sophia and Melanthea, became hungry for Wisdom, Love, and Beauty. They experienced something we might call an existential crisis—a crisis of sufficient intensity to motivate them into action. We can imagine it as a search for an answer to the question, “Who am I, and how shall I live, how shall I make use of this precious life?”

We can imagine some experience of suffering in their lives, and a desire to understand and alleviate that suffering. Perhaps Melanthea’s family had arranged for her to marry a man old enough to be her father. Perhaps Sophia faced a life of poverty and menial labor. Or perhaps they enjoyed relatively comfortable circumstances, and yet they felt some affinity for LoveWisdom, a calling, a yearning, a sense of lack, a sense of emptiness—even a sense of dread.

At some level, in some way, these young women experienced dissatisfaction with the way they lived their lives, a clear or vague sense of discomfort or dissatisfaction related to their experience of life, and they decided to go looking for a philosopher who might set them on the right path.

Many philosophical schools thrived at that time, and the women didn’t find it easy to choose one. They knew of a school which taught its students that motion is an illusion, and that all is one. They knew of a school which taught that stillness is an illusion, and all is in flux. They knew of schools based in various kinds of sacred mathematics. They had heard about dozens of schools, but couldn’t see one as standing out definitively from the rest.

They picked one that seemed sensible enough, but after staying for almost a year, they became convinced that the head of the school wasn’t really someone who had gotten past the kinds of problems that brought these two women to seek a path of LoveWisdom. In short, the head of the school did not seem very wise, compassionate, graceful, or in any significant way liberated. While he claimed that ordinary people were asleep in their lives, he didn’t seem very awake (Sophia and Melanthea weren’t sure what that all meant exactly, but somehow they felt this guy didn’t embody it).

Sophia and Melanthea agreed it would do no good to remain in this school, but they also realized that, at the rate they were going, it might take them years and years just to sift through teachers in order to find one who seemed genuinely wise, compassionate, and somehow free. They thought it best to split up, vowing to one another that if either of them found someone who seemed genuinely “sagely,” they would seek out the other and bring her to this teacher.

They went off in separate directions, both with seemingly reliable leads as to the location of good philosophers. Sophia had over a monthlong journey ahead of her to get to the teacher she had decided to seek. As she neared her destination, she passed through a small city. There she saw a young woman of exceptional bearing. The woman looked so peaceful, so present, that it attracted Sophia’s gaze. The woman’s face exuded warmth and joy, and she remained undistracted by all the commotion of the town.

Sophia watched her with great curiosity. She had a bowl in her hands, and she seemed to be going door to door, begging for food. This woman did not even have food, and yet she seemed happy and at ease, poised and graceful in her every movement.

Sophia thought, “What luck! I may have found the teacher I sought by sheer coincidence!”

She approached the woman and said, “Excuse me, dear lady. I couldn’t help noticing you. You look like a woman at peace with herself and the world. Are you a philosopher?”

The young woman replied, “No, sister. I am only a student of LoveWisdom, but I am fortunate to have met a true teacher.”

“What is this philosopher’s teaching?” asked Sophia.

“Dear sister, I am new in the practice of this path of LoveWisdom. I cannot really explain the teachings, but I can perhaps try to give you some sense of it in brief.”

Sophia said, “Well, friend, I am not one who takes delight in chatter. I would like to hear whatever you can share.”

The woman smiled and responded to Sophia, “One may say it like this:

Of things arising from a cause

the philosopher teaches.

The philosopher also teaches their transformation.

Such is this wondrous LoveWisdom from the master of meditation.”

At these words, Sophia experienced a profound epiphany. She stood breathless for a moment, and she said to the young woman, “If it arises from a cause, then it cannot be permanent!”

The young woman smiled and said that Sophia should come and receive further instruction from the philosopher. Sophia agreed but said that first she had to go and get her friend.

She felt so excited that it never occurred to her how stupid this teaching sounded. She simply gave herself over to the epiphany it produced, feeling that somehow she just couldn’t be the same as she had been.

She had travelled for many days, and it so happened that Melanthea saw her from a distance. She rushed up to Sophia, both in joy at seeing her friend again, and also out of excited curiosity.

“Sophia, you look refreshed. Your face shines with happiness. Have you found a true teacher of LoveWisdom?”

“It seems I have, dear friend.”

“What does this philosopher teach.”

Sophia gave a brief account of her journey to Melanthea. She said, “Now you understand that, strictly speaking, I haven’t even met this philosopher yet. Nevertheless, here is the gist of the teaching:

Of things arising from a cause

the philosopher teaches.

The philosopher also teaches their transformation.

Such is this wondrous LoveWisdom from the master of meditation.”

Hearing these words, Melanthea experienced an unexpected epiphany. She looked her friend in the eyes and said, “Oh my goodness! If it arises from a cause . . .”

Sophia looked and her and smiled. They both laughed, out of the joy of sharing this epiphany. Then they laughed even harder, from the mutual realization of how stupid this teaching might sound to others. The epiphany yielded profundity, while cursory analysis seemed to yield banality.

They wanted to further analyze the teaching itself, and receive more detailed instruction. Still, they also noted a sense of intimacy, subtlety, and great depth—a feeling that this insight involved a freeing up in their way of being. With this sense of freedom, they went off to learn from this philosopher.

We might note here that the metaphysical commitments of this philosophy amount to the same basic commitments many scientists would take as necessary to engage in experimental science. Such a philosophy seems to have a rational footing. We will want to hear a story about these causes and conditions and their transformation, but something about even this primitive statement seems to have the capacity to relieve suffering. This school of philosophy seems to offer the potential of some kind of liberating effect, and it seems to involve a rational commitment to basic cause and effect thinking that can actually help people suffer less and enjoy greater well-being. Such a philosophy seems worth considering.

Was there anything like this in ancient Greece, or have I made the whole thing up? It seems to me that most of the schools of philosophy in the Ancient and Hellenic periods aimed to help people live well, and they must have thought their foundations reasonable. Most of the schools we now study seem to share some core commitment to reasonableness and rationality, even if they don’t always strike our modern ear as fully reasonable or rational.

Of course, even in times past, what might strike members of one school as reasonable could strike members of another as metaphysical fancy. However, we don’t expect a school of philosophy to demand circumcision or faith in things that sound superstitious (at least not in the context in which they originally arise . . . one could think of the Pythagorean prohibition against eating beans, for instance).

As for the tale of Sophia and Melanthea, there was indeed a school of LoveWisdom that had at its heart a story pretty much like theirs. In the original version the women were, unsurprisingly, men. However, there were many women involved in this school of LoveWisdom, including two very much revered, named Khema and Uppalavanna.

Moreover, one of the earliest collections of women’s writing (perhaps the earliest collection) comes from this school. It’s a collection of verse written by various women who describe their experiences of transformation brought about by the practice of this philosophy.

Here is one by a woman named Punna:

Punna, grow full with good qualities

like the moon on the fifteenth day.

With discernment at total fullness, burst

the mass

of darkness.

Here is a poem from a woman known only as Sumangala’s Mother:

So freed! So freed!

So thoroughly freed am I —

from my pestle,

my shameless husband

& his sun-shade making,

my moldy old pot

with its water-snake smell.

Aversion & passion

I cut with a chop.

Having come to the foot of a tree,

I meditate, absorbed in the bliss:

“What bliss!”

Finally, here is an imaginary dialogue between a woman named Soma and the personification of ignorance (appropriately male)—the latter speaking first:

“It is hard to get to the place that sages want to reach,

it’s not possible for a woman,

especially not one with only two fingers’ worth of wisdom.”

Soma replies:

“What does being a woman have to do with it?

What counts is that the heart is settled

and that one sees what really is.

What you take as pleasures are not for me,

the mass of mental darkness is split open.

Know this, evil one, you are defeated, you are finished.”

We don’t often hear about such verses in an introductory course in philosophy. We wouldn’t want to imagine LoveWisdom making women happy, would we? We wouldn’t want women thinking they could leave behind their pots and their husbands, and tell off a male personification of ignorance, would we?

We wouldn’t want to let too many people know about a LoveWisdom that offers a path to bliss, right? We wouldn’t want to invite people to make a break, a rupture with the incoherent conventions of their society, would we?

Returning to the teaching Sophia received from the young woman in our story, this very episode became an archetypal moment in the school of philosophy in question. In the original story, taken as historical fact, the teaching was pretty much the same one we discussed eaerlier, and it became one of the most widely memorized verses in the parts of the world where this philosophy arose. It goes like this:

Ye dhamma hetuppa bhava

tesam hetum tathagato aha

tesanca yo nirodho

evam vadi maha samano.

One translator renders that as follows: “Whatever phenomena arise from a cause, the Tathagata teaches, and their cessation he teaches as well. Such is the teaching of the great contemplative.”

“Tathagata” signifies the sagehood, the communally recognized embodiment of wisdom, compassion, and grace that this philosopher’s followers saw in him.

These lines refer to Siddhartha, and if this verse does in fact get at the heart of Siddhartha’s teaching, it makes the philosophy rational and verifiable—though the verification may demand that we put our whole body and mind on the line, in the sense that we may have to engage with the teachings in a way that allows us to arrive at the realization that Sophia and Melanthea experienced (it seems unlikely that very many listeners currently find themselves basking in the glow of a good hard laugh, erupting from a profound epiphany triggered by this verse—and we should inquire into that as well, though we cannot go very far into it at the moment; suffice it for now to say that, in general, big insights require time and effort).

This verse sounds distinctly unreligious—surprising for a philosophical tradition we generally classify as religious. And yet, these lines characterized early Buddhist philosophy the way the cross now characterizes Christianity.

The bodhi tree, which naturally goes together with Buddha and his awakening, thankfully remains in our mind, but this verse, and the teaching of interwovenness that goes with it, might help clarify the nature of Buddhist philosophy in such a way as to avoid some of the confusions about it that persist.

We may ask whether other philosophers also have students with such epiphanies. Is it not because students have epiphanies that they follow a philosophical school? Perhaps so, but we also need to inquire into the nature of those epiphanies.

We may feel almost “converted” if we suddenly find ourselves agreeing with an argument made by a philosopher. We may find their explanation of something so convincing that we think of it as somehow, in some way, more or less “right”.

Or, we may feel that, at the very least, we can’t think of any convincing reasons for disagreeing. We may keep ourselves open to alternative ways of seeing the matter, but we may still, on balance, find ourselves at a moment of insight that indicates the philosopher in question seems to be on to something, so to speak.

Alternatively, we may have an insight into some very difficult problem of interpretation or understanding with respect to a challenging thinker. When we suddenly “get” what a philosopher might be trying to say, it can feel like an epiphany.

Neither of these kinds of insights seems to fit the case of Sophia and Melanthea. The latter doesn’t fit, given the simplistic nature of the suggestion.

“Things have causes.” That doesn’t take intellectual effort the way understanding the equivalence of Humanity, Autonomy, and the Categorical Imperative in Kant’s moral philosophy does, or the way trying to make sense of some aspect of Nietzsche, Hegel, or Aristotle would. There certainly are things in Siddhartha’s philosophy that require a good deal of effort and wrangling, but we can set them aside for now, on the grounds that, in some way, the verse above does seem to get at something crucial to his philosophy.

The simplicity of the formulation also presents difficulty for equating some level of agreement with a philosopher to the experience of Sophia and Melanthea—it’s not a very controversial or exciting statement, at least not on the surface.

Moreover, in both ways of understanding epiphany, we face an additional challenge: Sophia and Melanthea seem to feel some “intimacy” in the experience . . . the insight seems to relate to the rather intimate questions that brought them to philosophy, and it seems to get at the “core” of their being in some sense, such that they feel changed in some important way.

We might go so far as to call their insight “transformative” (assuming, at the very least, that the transformation has some measurable traction in their lives, something that today we would verify empirically by means of social scientific and psychophysiological data such as questionnaires administered to Sophia, Melanthea, and their friends, as well as brain scans, blood work, and genetic profiling done on the two women).

We might better liken this kind of transformative insight to something that certain people seek when they go to a psychotherapist. In such a situation, the person experiences some level of “existential questioning,” a phrase we might use to characterize the experience of wondering who one is and how one should live, including the kinds of anxiety and depression such questioning can produce, and the kinds of suffering in one’s life that can accompany and even provoke such questioning.

A person may go to a therapist because something seems wrong in their life, perhaps painfully so, and they want to understand the situation. The symptoms could range from anxiety and depression to a sense of meaninglessness or lack of fulfillment, and maybe a deep sense of dissatisfaction or dread. In the best cases, assuming no “biological” cause, the therapist may help their client arrive at an insight or a series of insights into the nature of their situation. Perhaps the client has really only come for a limited case of existential questioning, or to feel less stuck and less anxious.

For instance, maybe a young man goes to a therapist because he has just ended the third in a series of painful relationships. Over the course of a few weeks or months, the therapist helps the man to see that he has been dating people who resemble his father in some way, and he further sees that he has some deep, unresolved issues around his father.

He may not solve all those issues, but let us grant that he has had a significant insight into himself at the moment he sees that these relationship partners all resembled his father in some important ways (we can also grant that he did not have any conscious awareness of this before therapy). The young man may feel very happy. Maybe he hasn’t resolved all of his psychological “issues,” and maybe he has a lot more to learn about himself, but perhaps he can at least bring a richer awareness to his next relationship.

Similarly, an alcoholic may have a “moment of clarity” in which they understand some kind of meaning in their drinking. For instance, that they drink as an act of self-medication because they actually need to quit their job, or because of childhood trauma.

In this comparison, we must leave aside a lot of major issues. For instance, we may hear tales of people staying in psychotherapy for years, arriving at many seemingly important insights, but not experiencing lasting transformation.

We may also have questions about where we should search for these kinds of insights, and what the interventions must include if the insights can gain significant traction in our life. Do we look in childhood, in current narratives, in current ways of thinking, in behaviors, in relationship dynamics, in dreams, in our way of reasoning, in the assumptions guiding our reasoning, in the ways we use our attention, in our relationship to our values?

We will want to go into those questions elsewhere, and we will circle back to them as concretely as possible later on, with an invitation for you to gain some intimacy in your own experience.

But for now we can note a similarity between the cases of therapy mentioned above (and similar ones we might discover in the literature of psychotherapy) on the one hand, and the case of Sophia and Melanthea on the other: The insights don’t seem to offer something conceptually challenging on their surface, but they seem to still involve a level of complexity and profundity arising from intimate and subtle causal interactions.

Somehow our childhood, for instance, can influence us in such deep ways that patterns of behavior emerge which subsequently affect seemingly unrelated decisions and actions far into adulthood and even old age. Though the suggestion that our life circumstances can affect our behavior seems trivial in one sense, seeing how these actions manifest can make for such a surprising challenge that when we catch some of them in action it comes as a tremendous insight.

In the case of a breakthrough like the one Sophia and Melanthea experienced, we have there something even more personal, more intimate, and more thoroughgoing in an “inward” way, and also more global and comprehensive in an “outward” way, such that it strikes them with even greater force as an insight. We might liken it to suddenly realizing we had spent our whole life pursuing the “wrong” beloved or a series of “wrong” beloveds—in every detail of our thinking, speaking, and action—or that we had spent our whole lives medicating ourselves, numbing our senses and our awareness, altering our thinking.

Suddenly, all of this drops away. And, instead of feeling disappointed or angry that we have deluded ourselves, we find the whole situation tremendously funny. We feel elated in and through and as this insight, because it frees us from this global sort of bondage or delusion we had ourselves caught up in—but even more so because this insight itself is a sense of peace and joy, a sense of freedom, compassion, true wisdom and wonder. The insight somehow cobines the obvious and the totally inconceivable.

If we were addicted to heroin, we would feel much better in body and mind if we broke the addiction. But that would not compare to breaking the addiction by means of a life of vitality, inner calm, self-understanding, and an experience of falling in love with our lives, falling in love with the world, including the friends and other beloved ones who helped us through the dark night of our soul.

But, perhaps the most important point here has to do with the incredible nature of the experience of insight shared by Sophia and Melanthea. We make a huge mistake when we fail to appreciate the depth of this experience, and an equally huge mistake if we think Sophia and Melanthea became totally enlightened, even if they experienced a transformative and healing insight.

According to the Pali canon, the oldest know layers of Buddhist philosophy, Siddhartha, shortly after awakening (enlightenment), became vexed. After an inconceivably profound and transformative series of insights, he said something like this: “if I taught the Dhamma others would not understand me . . .” After thus reflecting, he spontaneously composed a verse, “stanzas never before heard”:

Enough of teaching the Dhamma

That even I found hard to reach;

For it will never be perceived

By those who live in lust and hate.

Men dyed in lust, and whom a cloud

Of darkness laps, will never see

What goes against the stream, is subtle,

Deep and hard to see, abstruse. (Nanamoli, 37-8)

The dhamma is the teaching, the philosophy, which also means the reality that transformed Siddhartha into the Buddha, the awakened one. Old Sid just wants to say that trying to teach this philosophy seems an impossible task. Who’s going to understand it?

That may seem crazy. Here, a philosopher has experienced something like an Archimedean moment. Sitting in his bathtub, Archimedes had an insight into specific gravity. It was a good one. He felt so joyful, he ran through the streets naked, shouting, “Eureka!” We all know the story. And even to this day, if you want to know what Archimedes discovered, someone or other can give an account of it to you. It can be told, explained in crystal clear detail.

Let’s set aside inconceivability and focus on the joke. Old Sid suddenly got a joke that no one had told. After enjoying the humor and the exquisite beauty, it dawned on him: No one is going to get this. The most important thing he ever saw, and no one is going to get it. It cannot be told.

It’s like a great bit you might have heard at a stand-up comedy show. The comedian does, let’s say, a 20-minute set. As they deliver their last bit, the whole set falls magically into place. The comedian nails everything: Tone of voice, timing, facial expression. The bit builds and builds, and in its momentum it picks up something from earlier in the comedian’s set, and it even picks up something a previous comedian said, as well as something significant in the culture and in human experience.

By the end of the bit, you’re doubled over in laughter. You want to fall to the floor. It’s the funniest material you’ve heard in years, and it’s like your very soul has longed to laugh like this. It’s cathartic.

When you see a friend of yours the next day, you want desperately to give them the great joy of this laughter, this great letting go, this grand appreciation of some aspect of the human condition. You try. Your friend responds with a vague smile. “How funny,” they say, in a manner you hear distinctly as, “Sounds kinda silly.” You say, “Really, it was soooo funny. I mean . . . best material I’ve heard in years. You had to be there.” They nod, but look at you in a way that seems to say, “No . . . I’m sure I did not have to be there. I hear what you’re saying. It’s just not that funny.”

You might not find yourself vexed. You might shrug your shoulders and move on. Then again, you didn’t discover the specific gravity of the human condition. You didn’t experience an insight so transformative that you are, in a deep sense, no longer the same person as the one who innocently entered the comedy venue. In fact, if you thought there were some deeply significant ethical, existential, and Cosmic insights offered by this comedian, if you truly felt this joke could make your friend suffer less and enjoy their life more, you might get a little more vexed.

Let’s emphasize again the simultaneously mundane and provocative nature of what we find ourselves considering here. We need to keep in mind how perfectly ordinary it is to say that contextualized experience matters with regard to something like a joke (or even a glass of wine, which we must taste for ourselves in order to know it), and how perfectly radical it is to say that with respect to a philosophy of life.

Somehow, we can behave as if we have the same level of skill at philosophizing as anyone else in the history of Earth, anyone else from any other context. If we grew up in a household in which everyone spoke only fluent Spanish, we would naturally learn to speak Spanish—with native fluency. And if no one in our household spoke fluent Spanish, we would have to get an education to learn it, and it might take a good bit of time and effort to achieve fluency. None of that comes as any surprise.

Yet, if we grow up in a household in which no one speaks, thinks, and acts with fluency in wisdom, love, and beauty, we may still consider ourselves as wise as the ancient sages. Of course, if someone directly asked us if we thought ourselves as wise as the ancient sages, we might sincerely demur. We might say, “Well, of course I’m not as wise as Socrates or the Buddha!”

But in practice, we behave as if we have no need of these sages. We don’t study their teachings and actively seek fluency in wisdom, love, and beauty. We just kind of keep ourselves going along. Every day we affirm an entire philosophy of life, as if we really knew what we were doing, as if the whole world could rely on us to do things in the wisest, most loving, most beautiful ways. But we can look at the state of the world, look at all the suffering beings and collapsing ecologies, and we know the world cannot actually rely on us.

And the trouble is, we usually need more than the recitation of a philosophical verse. The story of Sophia and Melanthea gives us an indication that these women needed contact with something. Sophia had already spent time trying to learn wisdom, love, and beauty. Then she went on a physically demanding pilgrimage. Then she stood in the presence of someone with a radically different quality of being.

This too forms part of the ecology or context. It’s sort of like the way we can feel very free around certain people, and feel rather tense around others. We might make a joke with an old college friend that we would never make with our own mother, and we might laugh hard at that joke. Maybe it has nothing to do with the lewdness of the joke as much as it has to do with a shared framework of experience.

But we find something more subtle and profound here than we may at first realize. When Siddhartha set out to find the meaning of life, he studied with various teachers and spiritual friends. At one point, he had starved and tortured himself nearly to death.

He may have been on the verge of suicide, but at the very least he seems to have come to a place of nearly giving up. He really didn’t know how to proceed.

And what happened? A little girl appears and gives Siddhartha a bowl of milk and rice. This is the divine feminine, Sophia Herself in Her ever-youthful aspect. I don’t mean the Sophia from our story, but the divine Sophia, the Primordial Goddess of Wisdom. She has an ever-youthful aspect, and this appears to Siddhartha and offers him nourishment.

Siddhartha has the openness of mind and heart to receive this nourishment, and to recognize that he has to let go of self-torture. In his palace life, he had indulged in self-pleasure, and in his spiritual life he indulged in self-torture. Neither one will function for healing, insight, and liberation.

That serves as an important image for us all: Each of us and all of us will keep torturing ourselves and pleasuring ourselves until we decide we’ve had enough.

Buddha then wades into the Neranjara River. It’s a ritual bathing. He slips into the flow of that river, and crosses into the liminal space of the wild forest.

What does he do? He sits down, and somehow musters up the passion to decide he will not get up again until he dispels his own ignorance. He’s looking for an end to all self-deception, an end to all bondage and suffering.

And how will he arrive at it?

He recalls a time when he was a child. Sophia had just appeared to him in Her ever-youthful aspect. She appeared as a little girl. And now Siddhartha remembers being a little boy. He went to a festival, and while sitting under a rose apple tree, he spontaneously entered into a meditative state.

At the time, as a little boy, he didn’t understand what had happened. All he knew was that he experienced incredible joy while sitting under that tree. Now, as a man who had studied meditation, he recognized it as a meditative state. And he said to himself, “Could it be that joy is the path that will lead me to what I seek?”

Joy.

The guy is ready for a Cosmic laugh—and not just any Cosmic laugh, but the biggest one we could possibly experience.

So, he sits there under the Bodhi tree, and his mind becomes exceptionally clear, exceptionally well-put-together. He describes his mind as completely unperturbable, and yet pliant, malleable, exquisitely sensitive, alive, and alove. He realizes a mind of exceptional beauty.

And some really crazy stuff happens. He has to face fear and craving, and he has to ask Earth herself to bear witness for him. And because of the exceptional mind he has allowed to blossom, he transcends fear and craving, and Earth herself—Nature herself—bears witness to the actions of this and other lifetimes.

Then his exceptional mind reveals to him all of his past lives, as well as the nature of life and death and the causes of suffering.

Then he experiences supreme awakening, and this is what he says:

House-builder, you are seen!

You will not build a house again.

All your rafters broken,

the ridge pole destroyed,

gone to the Unformed,

the mind has come to the end of craving.

This is a funny situation. Enlightenment involves seeing the house-builder. The house-builder, in some sense, is the architect of our self-deception. And it’s really funny to see how we have deceived ourselves.

After Buddha experiences this, he then sits under the Bodhi tree for seven days. He’s in bliss. And after seven days, he examines reality carefully, and sees the interdependence of all things. He looks, and he says,

This is like this, because that is like that.

When this is, that is.

When this isn’t, that isn’t.

When this ends, that ends.

The tricky aspect of this comes to the fact that we cannot strictly limit this insight into something inner or outer. When Buddha said, “This is like this, because that is like that,” he could have been observing his own psycho-physical processes, or he could have been looking at a tree in the forest.

Buddhist philosophy makes it clear that there is no non-relational entity. Everything arises as radical interwovenness.

That’s not the same as oneness in the most simplistic sense. This interwovenness transcends the duality of the one and the many.

And it’s funny. It’s as funny as the discovery of the architect of our self-deception.

Laughter that makes our belly sore often comes on the heels of, or simply altogether with, ego-bursting insights. Spiritual traditions around the world agree: Once we start getting the Cosmic Jokes, we start to lighten up. That’s what enlightenment means, and it’s why Buddha gets depicted so often with a smile.

The Buddha shows us that the Path of LoveWisdom is the Path of Joy. When we get in touch with the basic feel of life, it makes us smile . . . And when we smile, we draw close to the basic feel of life. If we properly ready the mind, we might find our smile breaking us through into insight. At that point, the smile might have already given way to laughter, or tears—or laughtears.

A moment of laughter can create a temporary rift in our habitual mind, a rift in what the Buddhist philosophers call samsara, which is our overarching habit of actively misknowing the nature of self and reality. Samsara is self-deception and self-distraction.

Meditation practices allow us to calm the mind enough to be able to see the nature of mind and the nature of reality. Meditation creates a rift in our habitual mind. And the comedy comes from seeing that the habitual mind is an artificial rift in reality. The joke is on us.

After seeing all his past lives, and after seeing the whole play of life and death, and after seeing the house-builder, and after seeing the total interwovenness of the Cosmos, a thought arises in Buddha’s awareness. The thought says, “It’s no good to dwell without reverence. But to whom could I direct true reverence?”

He’s thinking about how life itself is learning, and how life itself demands reverence and deference to that which transcends the ego. And Buddha realizes he can’t have reverence for any human being as a teacher any more. He has fully awakened the highest wisdom, love, and beauty possible for a human being.

Nevertheless, he still wants to live in reverence, as a way of presencing wisdom, love, and beauty. And he directly sees that he must now live in reverence for the very nature of reality he has discovered. He has discovered the essence of the wild. So Buddha will live in reverence for the wild, in reverence for Nature, in reverence for reality in its essence and manifestations.

This presents a profound image. First, let’s acknowledge that Buddha spent seven days under the Bodhi tree, the world tree, the Cosmic axis. And then he looked at the interwovenness of all things.

That part of the mythopoetic image tells us that the interwovenness goes far, far, far beyond our habitual consciousness. When Buddha sat under that tree, he had already cultivated an exceptional mind, a mind of peace, a mind of clarity and luminosity, a mind of love and compassion, a mind of incredible well-put-togetherness, and also a mind of profound joy and even bliss.

And even that mind didn’t suffice to reveal the nature of reality. He had to sit through a wonderstanding of his past lives and the whole play of life and death. Then he had to see the house-builder, and exit once and for all the well-built fabrication of delusion.

And then he sat for seven days, in total freedom and bliss. He opened his eyes, and he saw the interwovenness with absolute clarity. He realized the nonduality of Wisdom and Wildness.

These days, we hear about the interconnectedness of all things, and we imagine that we understand it. But this image of Buddha tells us that we don’t. To fully wonderstand the interwovenness of all things would mean enlightenment, and freedom from all suffering. Unless we feel confident enough to assert ourselves as world-turning sages, we have to acknowledge that we don’t understand interwovenness well enough, and that we need an attitude of great humility.

Human beings need to pause, and Earth herself bears witness to that fact. Earth herself says to us that she must bear witness to our ignorance, and she knows very well that human beings aren’t sitting under the Tree of Life with a mind of exceptional beauty. Earth bears witness to the fact that we very much need to renounce our ignorance, and seek the true nature of self and reality.

Buddha made it clear that what he realized when he entered fully and completely into the great mystery is something subtle and profound, and that we must take the utmost care not to fool ourselves into thinking we truly understand it, and that we must also have the courage to face the consequences of our ignorance and begin to make things right.

And so we should appreciate the luminous nature of the example he sets when he shows that enlightenment does not mean we have gone beyond the need for reverence—and thus, all the more so do we need reverence when we haven’t yet achieved enlightenment. On this side of enlightenment, we need reverence for excellent teachers, reverence for true friends, and reverence for holistic teachings. Taken together, this means we, too, must cultivate reverence for life, reverence for the great mystery, and reverence for the nonduality of wisdom and wildness.

The only thing Buddha didn’t need ordinary reverence for was teachers. But he understood that he could thereby have a fuller reverence for the wild, reverence for the teachings of reality as they manifest moment to moment.

He thus entered the most profound path of serenity and wonder, and he gives us an embodied example of enlightenment as the realization of reverence for life, and the realization of the sacredness of the Cosmos—not the intellectual understanding of these, but the fullest realization of them. In walking this holy path, Buddha shows us what it means to live a life of inconceivable intimacy.

We’ve taken quite a little journey. The point of all of this is not a sharp, singular point. Among other things, it has to do with a general appreciation of the strangeness of philosophical insight, how that insight depends on many subtle factors, and how the most profound insights prove challenging to explain.

But we should keep something very clearly in mind: Although Buddha felt that explaining his insight would challenge him, he nevertheless poured his love and creativity into teaching it.

He thus bequeathed to all of us an incredibly sophisticated and comprehensive philosophy of life, including a detailed psychology of liberation. He may have felt that people with little motivation would likely misunderstand it so deeply as to make it useless. But he knew very well that humble yet passionate seekers like Sophia and Melanthea would arrive at transformative healing and insight.

That road remains open for any of us with the passion and humility to let go of what we think we know, and enter the path of mystery, the path of wisdom, love, and beauty, the path of the wildness and wonder.

You can start on that path right now, by carrying with you the spirit of the verse that brought a spark of insight to Sophia and Melanthea.

Consider one of your most common experiences of suffering or limitation. Maybe you experience anxiety and worry. Maybe you experience a lot of reactivity and anger. Maybe you get caught up in a lot of manipulation and control, or a lot of craving and clinging.

Whatever the particular kind of suffering, can you look at its causes and conditions?

For instance, when craving arises, look at the nature of it. Look at the objects of your craving, and the kind of mind that gives rise to craving. What is that mind really like? What are those objects really like? How do the objects keep the craving going?

When you consider the causes and conditions of craving, what thoughts or beliefs go with the craving? What is the nature of those thoughts? Can you locate the thoughts? What color are those thoughts? What size are those thoughts? How do they arise?

When anxiety arises, for just a moment, let go of all the supposed external impulses that seem to explain why you feel anxious. Look at the essence of that anxiety. Where does it come from internally? What is its internal cause?

We can also apply this kind of inquiry to the state of the world. If we look around us and see any level of injustice, aggression, violence, intolerance, and ignorance, we can ask, What causes and conditions make this possible? We make the world by means of our activity. We keep making the kind of world that degrades the conditions of life we all depend on.

We don’t have to keep making capitalism. We could make a better world—a world of true democracy and freedom, a world of true wisdom and justice. And that begins by seeing the causes and conditions we currently keep in place.

In addition to this sort of inquiry, we can practice the reverence for life Buddha embodied, and we can practice the nonduality of wisdom and wildness. All the great sages invite us to seek initiation, to seek out excellent teachers, and to revere all good teachings.

Thankfully, this living, loving world abounds in teachings. Everything we perceive arises in total interwovenness, and if we look with care, we can sense everything that arises as a symbolic teaching. Everything. That’s an astonishing and wondrous way to relate with the world—sensing the causes and conditions of peace, love, healing, and joy, the causes and conditions of deep trust and great wonder that we can discover each moment.

And in the living, loving world, we can begin to slow down and sense the inconceivable interwovenness of each thing, such that no effect in our world has a single cause, and no cause has a single effect. Everything arises as a mystery the conscious mind can never contain, but which the soul can enter into—and bring to realization.

If you have questions, suggestions, or stories about your experiences of initiation into the mysteries of life, or insights into the causes and conditions of suffering and bondage, happiness and liberation, or all of the above, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org and we might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.