The Benefits of Confusion

Clarity often emerges on the far side of confusion. We have to go through the tangle to find the thread.

The ancient philosophers had a fascinating idea that few things in the world are intrinsically good or bad, but rather have their value residing in how we use them. How do they function in our lives? This can be true of confusion. Since the time of Socrates, people have wondered why Plato’s Dialogues portray him as questioning people about important concepts they thought they understood—like courage, or piety, or justice—and shaking them up, demolishing their felt certainties, and leaving them in confusion without a positive resolution or a “right answer” at the end of the conversation. It may be because Socrates thought of the confusion he left them in as having a power that a simple certainty could never possess. It might goad them into wrestling with ideas they’d taken for granted, and in the process they might not only find the truth themselves but be transformed by the search, something an easy answer could never provide.

In the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus wants to know whether his father Odysseus is still alive, years after the Trojan War. The man has not yet returned home. The young man asks the goddess Athena, who knows the answer. But rather than just telling him and giving us a much shorter book, she suggests that he travel to a distant land to seek the answer, knowing that what he really needs more than information is the transformation that only such a risky journey can provide, if he is one day to be the properly strong partner for his father to help save their land from arrogant and rapacious enemies.

We like to think of questions as simple transactions. I give you a question, you give me an answer. Loop closed. Transaction complete. But the best questions aren’t like that at all. They take us on an adventure of search and understanding that’s much deeper than simply finding a true sentence at the end of the road. We become seasoned travelers in pursuing our concern. Like Telemachus, we get stronger. And we may be led through various stages of bewilderment and confusion along the way that cause us to rethink, reimagine, and discover what we might otherwise never have been able to think. It may all cause us to become what we otherwise might not have been able to be.

There are obviously some bad forms of confusion, for example, a drug or dementia induced mental fog, a terribly troubled state of mind that can produce a fight or flight panic, or a fervent wish to just shut down thought altogether. But there may be many good kinds of confusion as well and we need to appreciate them for what they’re worth.

Jean Paul Sartre once said of boredom that it’s a state of simultaneously too much and too little. We might say the same about many forms of confusion. It’s perhaps a state of mind that involves both too much and too little. Too much information, not enough knowledge; too much knowledge; not enough understanding; too much understanding but not enough wisdom; too much peripheral complexity, but not enough grasp of the essentially simple core.

Don’t fear the confusion that comes from real adventure, from grappling with new things. Don’t let it tie you in a knot. Take a breath, center yourself, and live into the adventure. Great clarity may eventually result.

Deep Wisdom

As Socrates suspected and Plato saw well, hardly anything is exactly what it seems. Wisdom often turns things upside down, insight out, and rightside forward. We philosophers continue to be counter-cultural voices seeking to speak the unexpected truth. Admittedly, a lot of what passes for great insight in our time is just enhanced common sense, what anyone who has lived alertly and thought a bit might see and grasp. And of course, there is a lot of counterfeit wisdom that purports to be profound but is merely pandering. But then there are depths available in real philosophical thought that can put anything, and even sometimes everything, into a different frame, a context in which much is reversed and astonishment leads to peace.

This is the uber theme of the epic novel series described at www.TheOasisWithin.com.

A Cluster of Thoughts to Ponder

As Rome burns, I refuse to be a fiddler and insist on being a fireman. Grab a bucket, won't you? Join me in rushing to the calamity. Let's do what we can.

Words you never want to hear the dentist say to his assistant while he's in your mouth: "Get me the saw." Yeah. It's from personal experience.

Lesson from the dental chair: Almost nothing is quite as bad as it seems, or as good. So stay calm.

My job is to respect and nurture Truth, Beauty, Goodness and Unity—cultivating the intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual sides of life. And, yeah, it’s your job, too.

Justice is everybody's business, in the small details of life. Fairness. Kindness. Evenhandedness. And then mercy can take its proper place.

When we lose sight of the best in us, we tend to manifest the worse in us. That's a key to personal life, and to national politics as well.

Every difficulty, every challenge, every disappointment tells me something about myself, and provides me an opportunity for transformation.

Nothing's really ours. Everything's given to us for a time. We're stewards meant to care for all the outer and inner blessings of life, and share them.

How hard is it to listen? Just listen. Really listen. Quietly. Attentively. Compassionately. Imaginatively. As an act of love. Courageously.

We can't overstate the power of humility in life, to be like the humus, the soil of the earth, open and ready to grow what you're given.

When we seek to love more than to be loved, to appreciate more than to be appreciated, to encourage more than to be encouraged, we get it.

In times of high emotion and deep division, we're to love our neighbors as ourselves, and even our "enemies" - valuing their true good.

Too many people live lives of illusion. And that's a great tragedy of the human condition. Refuse illusion. Seek truth. Have courage.

Plato's insistence: Never let appearances blind you to realities. And that may be one of the hardest tasks in life.

Aristotle's formula for the highest human good was simple: People in Partnership for a shared Purpose. There's nothing solitary about it.

Never let adversarial thinking be your baseline or default mode of thought, outside the bounds of a real battle with bullets and bombs.

Dreams are the engine of achievement. But the gas in the tank is hard work.

Self Examination

In a talk I gave this week to the 160 top executives in a great company, I began with some drawings I had done of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle And William of Ockham. I mentioned what I think of as their greatest gifts to us, gifts we would use in our hour together.

Socrates called us to self examination and self knowledge. He even went as far as to claim that "The unexamined life is not worth living." He taught me that we should examine our beliefs, assumptions, values, emotions, and attitudes on a regular basis, and relentlessly.

Plato clearly expressed the difference between appearance and reality, and pointed out that most of us live our lives in bondage to illusions that constrain us and hold us back, distorting what we're able to know and do in this world.

Aristotle called us to dig deep in order to rise high, and base our lives on the virtues, or strengths, that we can ideally bring to any challenging situation, the chief of which is courage.

Ockham helped us to understand the importance of simplicity. In any complex situation, however complicated, there is a simple core. If we can grasp that essence, we can deal more properly with all the other issues.

For the first time in a talk, I suggested that we could all heed these pieces of advice in an interesting way. We should at some point take some time and do a personal inventory of the general beliefs and assumptions we have about life and work that we may never have examined before and that just might be among those illusions that Plato suggested affect us all. What have I been assuming or taking for granted? Is it really true? Or is it a mere illusion I need to shake free of? This sort of self examination, testing appearances and pursuing realities, will require a dose of Aristotelian courage and may bring us to some simple truths that might be liberating.

It's worth pondering.

Fit to Rule

Plato's on book tour. He's at Google for a talk and book signing.

From the recent book of philosophy and fiction, Plato at the GooglePlex, page 73, by Rebecca Goldstein:

<<You know, Plato said, still surveying the room, I spent the better part of my life trying to figure out how to ensure that those who are most fit to rule are the ones who end up ruling. I gave much thought to the question of how to educate rulers so that they wouldn’t fall in love with their own power.>>

Footnote from Republic 521. Socrates: “But what we require, I said, is that those who take office should not be lovers of rule.”

Governance. Leadership. Rule. Those fit for it should not be lovers of it, for its own sake, or for its power, or status, or remuneration, or celebrity, or any other potentially ego-boosting side effect. We need servants who have been arduously prepared throughout their lives to serve at the highest levels. We need philosopher-kings, in Plato's words—meaning wise leaders, intelligent and discerning and empathetic representatives who are willing to take on the duties at the head of the state to protect freedom, enact justice, inspire noble purpose, and help steer the ship properly forward. 

But too many of us don't know what we need.

Just a thought.

Philosophy's Bad Rap and a Slightly Better One

Philosophy has a bad reputation as remote from the world—arcane, esoteric and impractical. And you can certainly philosophize in that way. But I don't recommend it. In my view, the best philosophy searches out and embraces the deepest wisdom for living and working in the world.

My new philosophy friend Ryan Stelzer, co-founder of the Boston based philosophical consulting firm Strategy of Mind, just posted a nice piece on LinkedIn about how the top fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli uses philosophy and great literature to enhance the life of his business, by sparking the lives of his associates. Cucinelli started his firm with an investment equal to about $550 US dollars and now has a personal wealth of over a billion. And he does things the right way. His success displays the wisdom of good philosophy, well applied. In fact, he often cites the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as among his favorite philosophy books.

In a fun reply to Stelzer's nice essay, I did a quick rap recommending philosophy. And just now, I augmented my silliness to make it clear that I'm not puffing just any philosophy, but only the good stuff. I've blogged poems, essays, book reviews, quotes and tweets before. So here's my first rap. Do this in the voice of Wyclif Jean or your favorite kindred performer, for full effect. So Ok then. Turn up the speakers, and go:

Cucinelli style philosophy is, you know, a part of me, even more than luxury, a necessity in complexity if you see the humanity of a wisdom trip, better than a cool sip of bubbly Moet down in hot San Tropez, live another day with the insights of the ages and the thoughts of all the sages, if you look in the book that has the right hook you can throw out the crook who might have shook you and be shocking you and blocking you with his big Mercedes—go and tell the ladies that the tonic is Platonic and you can please with Socrates every day that you play with philosophy to make the rules and leave the fools who think it’s all just numbers don’t you ever wonder what kind of thunder will come from going deep with thoughts that keep coming at us all these years, overcoming fears, wiping tears, and making for careers—whatever you’re selling, whether grape jelly or Brunello Cucinelli.

Word. When I plug philosophy it’s the best and not the rest I use to feather up my nest but it’s sad how the bad sometime gets prime whether you’re a penny or a dime and takes the heart outa you and what you do since it got a wrong start with old Descartes who put that horse before the cart and laid it all on me, but with him it was he, the ego don’t you know that cogito where it then ergo starts to blow the whole thing up, and ‘sup with that, I smell a rat and take it to the mat cause that ego ain’t no amigo, just be free go back to Plato and a full throttle OG my man Aristotle—you got to bottle that stuff and be tough with true blue virtue and I’ll just geek and give the Greek, ARATAY is the word for the day and that’s how you say it, live it, give it, play it for Rene and we can see a better way and you know, hey, ditch the Yugo and gimme dubs I’m a Maserati hero wrapped up in Cucinelli. Yo.

The Empty Tomb and Plato's Cave

Today I came across a vivid Easter Sunday representation of the Empty Tomb of Jesus, as described in the Gospels. In this depiction, as viewers, we’re inside the tomb and can see that it’s essentially underground and dark, and yet an attractive bright light draws our attention beyond the now open door. Right away some thoughts came to me.

The Christian diagnosis of the human condition turns on a Greek word, hamartia, that’s most often translated as “sin” but that in the original language meant “falling short” or “missing the mark,” as in the case of an arrow shot toward a bullseye failing to make it to the target, falling short, and thus missing the mark.

The Christian claim is that we all naturally fall short of our proper ideal. We fall short of what we’re shooting for as human beings who deep down want a good, meaningful, successful, fulfilling and loving life that makes its best potential impact on the world. We’re all somehow metaphorically buried in a tomb of mistakes and illusions, and the gospel claim is that there is one who has escaped that tomb, leaving it empty, and has invited us all out of it as well, while actually also empowering us to leave it and move into the light that awaits us.

Plato had this image of a cave. He suggested that we’re all like men chained in an underground cave, watching shadows dance across its wall and mistaking those shadows as realities. We fear them or we desire them. We want to chase them or run from them. They monopolize our attention and define our lives. But they aren’t the realities among which we’re meant to live.

The philosopher, Plato tells us, is the person who breaks his chains and leaves the cave, ascending into the light of the true sun outside, to see the realities within which we’re ideally meant to live. But then, this philosopher descends back into the cave to spread the word to the other captives that they, too, can escape these illusions and the darkness that envelopes their lives. The light awaits them all.

The tomb from which Jesus escaped can be viewed as symbolically representing that same cave, where we're cut off from the true light and life that we’re meant to have. The Easter message is that the one who left that tomb empty invites us all to leave the realm of illusion and get out where we can hit the intended mark, following him into the light.

The Philosophical Sensibility in Pursuit of Wisdom

Wonder. Curiosity. Openness. Adventurousness. Creative thinking. Questioning. Analysis. An insistence on precision. A desire to go deep. Empathy. A quest to link the theoretical and the practical. Suspicion of the superficial. Even-handedness. Caution. Boldness. Even courage. A patience for digging endlessly for the true gold that can only be found by persistent effort. A desire for guidance. A desire to be a guide. An optimism about intellectual effort. Hope.

Plato's Gym

At the Sports Center gym where I workout every day, there's a cafe or deli. One day this week, when I was walking by the counter, the young lady who works there making sandwiches and ladling out soups, putting together salads, and handing out sports drinks, called out to me. "Mr. Morris, can you help me with something?"

I thought she needed help lifting and carrying something heavy. So I said, "Sure," and turned around to go heft whatever burden she had been struggling with. But she didn't move as if to show me what big box or sack she needed to have repositioned.

Instead, she said, "Can you explain to me virtue ethics?"

That gave me pause. It's not a request for help you often hear in a gym. "Yeah, no problem," I replied, before figuring out how the heavy lifting was going to be done on this one. What angle did I need to take? What leverage could help?

So I explained that Aristotle and a bunch of other ancient philosophers believed that we bring into any situation various personal strengths and weaknesses of character. The strengths, they thought of as virtues. Our word 'virtue' comes from the latin 'virtu' which meant strength or prowess. And that in turn came from 'vir' which meant man. The Greek word was 'arete' which itself could mean excellence or virtue. Aristotle thought it was worth figuring out what strengths or excellences would be universally good to have, and built his conception of ethics (from the Greek word 'ethos' or character) around these virtues.

He identified as virtues such things as honesty - a strong inclination toward truth - and liberality, a habit of giving to those in need what they could well use, and courage - an ability to do what's right rather than what's easy, even if it's quite challenging. He then came to see courage as perhaps the most crucial of the virtues, since you probably won't exercise any of the others in difficult circumstances without courage.

Modern approaches to ethics have focused on rules. Perhaps inspired by scientific laws, or the civic rules and legal regulations that make civilized society possible, philosophers began to hunt for the rules that ought to govern our conduct. The ten commandments are a start. But as important as rules are, you can never have enough, and paradoxically you quickly get too many. Something more is needed. Rules need interpreting. Every rule is general. Any situation is specific. We need discernment. We need wisdom and the habit of acting in accordance with wisdom, which may even be another nice general definition of virtue.

One of my colleagues during my days at Notre Dame decades ago, Alastair McIntyre, almost singlehandedly revived the ancient tradition of virtue ethics, a focus on character more than rules, as being what's at the heard of ethics. For a masterful and difficult account of it all, you might want to consult his book After Virtue.

There are now many qualities you can call virtues. I read an article today about positive passion as perhaps being one. The author mentioned also patience. And that got me thinking. Positive passion is a hot virtue. Patience is a cool one. Passion gets you started. Patience keeps you going. Passion can fuel a journey. Patience can keep it on track. Passion is a youthful virtue. Patience is a mature one. You have to wait for it, appropriately. If your passions bring you too much success too quickly in life, you often never develop the virtue of patience.

My friend at the gym cafe seemed to be sincerely pleased by our discussion. And I was equally pleased at the vigorous workout with weights that followed.

Whenever you're confused by anything, that means it's time to get out of Plato's Cave and get yourself to Plato's Gym. Give yourself the mental workout of thinking things through, carefully and clearly. Or if the issue seems too heavy, just elicit the help of a workout partner of the mind.

Can The Deepest Secret Be Spoken?

There is perhaps no insight of philosophy more important than this. 

In all my years of teaching, I had just one student get really mad at me. We were two weeks into a month-long daily seminar on "Faith, Reason, and The Meaning of Life." The National Endowment for the Humanities had brought together a group of amazing teachers from around the country, remarkable individuals who taught in grades K-12, for a summer enrichment program. I was the sole professor. And I was pretty young, in my early thirties. The seminar itself, after eight years of teaching and learning, eventually became the book Making Sense of It All.

The student, an experienced teacher, was irate. His wonderful, fairy-tale, story-book marriage had just come to an end, days before he was to travel to South Bend for my seminar. His wife had left him a message on the kitchen table that she was gone and would not be coming back. Their life together was over. He was stunned, and crushed, and in emotional free-fall. He was desperate to find some sort of meaning and how to make sense of this shock, and of life itself, amidst the craziness, the disappointment, the despair, and the unexpected suffering that can assail us in this world. We had been reading and talking for two weeks, and he was at the end of his rope. He wanted to know the meaning of life, and he wanted to know it right then. That day. No more delay, no more waiting. Why did we keep beating around the bush? We'd been reading stuff and philosophizing for hours at the time, and there was no clear answer! 

I went by his dorm room and talked with him for two hours. I quickly came to realize that he was suffering under an assumption that a lot of us naturally make.

He was assuming that the deepest secret for living in this world, the most profound insight, the key to a meaningful, happy, fulfilling life, can somehow be captured in the content of a sentence, or statement, or proposition. And he thought that I was stubbornly refusing to utter that statement, choosing instead to tease the class with roundabout hints and elusive suggestions, but never saying the one thing that most needed to be said.

I had to challenge him and ask him how he knew that what he was searching for could be said at all. What gave him to believe that there were some magic words that would change everything in an instant? 

Now, admittedly, this was years before I wrote a book called If Aristotle Ran General Motors, and in a chapter on "Business and the Meaning of Life," I did actually manage to convey what I consider to be the single deepest truth that can be stated on this issue, a truth I had to discover for myself, from hints and clues spread throughout the wisdom traditions of the world. So, in that book, and in the subsequent big yellow tome, Philosophy for Dummies, I did write a sentence providing what I think is the one and only definitive answer to the question "What Is the Meaning of Life?" And I've had people tell me that it's the most important sentence they've ever read, which makes me glad. But even then, once it was said, once the crucial statement on life's meaning was communicated, there was still something else, something crucial that, perhaps, cannot be said, and that, it seems, may be even more important.

The deepest secret may not be a statement, or a proposition, at all.

Wait. What?

There is an inevitable elusiveness to enlightenment, to salvation, to the ultimate mindset of transformed wisdom. In a book I just read for the third time this week and twice already wrote about here, Siddhartha, the title character comes to exactly the realization that, maybe, the most important and deepest secret to living well in this world can never be said or taught in simple declarative statements. He meets Gautama the Buddha, and says to him:

I think, O Illustrious One, that nobody finds salvation through teachings. To nobody, O Illustrious One, can you communicate in words and teachings what happened to you in your enlightenment. 

He admires greatly the message that the Buddha is conveying in his words, as he teaches his disciples, and yet says this about it, as a whole teaching:

But there is one thing that this clear, worthy instruction does not contain; it does not contain the secret of what the Illustrious One experienced - he alone among hundreds of thousands.

The deepest secret is perhaps too big, and deep, and transformative to be caught like a bird and caged up into language, into words. But it can be discovered. It can be encountered. One who has experienced it can introduce it, in a way, to another. And then, it can do its work. 

Even Plato, writing in his Seventh Letter, says about his own deepest wisdom that:

It is not something that can be put into words like other branches of learning; only after long partnership in a common life devoted to this very thing does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once it is born there it nourishes itself thereafter.

In the third chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus tries to explain to the scholar Nicodemus that, in the case of our Ultimate Quest, the name of the game is not discovering the right true sentences, but undergoing a radical transformation. Siddhartha's own eventual Guide to understanding and metamorphosis, the simple ferryman Vasudeva, basically has to help his new friend see that there is no shortcut to the deepest secret. We each have to make our mistakes, commit sins and errors, take wrong paths, try things that don't seem to help, live through adventures, and maybe, as a result of being in the right frame of mind at the right time, the light from the most elusive flame will be sparked in us. There will be a dawn. We'll then see anew. But this will happen, in some sense, and in every case, beyond words.

And that's what all the mystics have been trying to tell us, with many words, for a very long time.

Oh, and my one angry man, my irate student: He calmed down as a result of our many words together and my efforts to push him that day beyond words. He seemed to understand. I couldn't be blamed for not doing the impossible. And yet. And yet.

I know now more than I did then. And I could have been more helpful, I think, if I had lived through and learned all that I've subsequently lived through and learned, but, as Plato says, not like in other branches of learning. This tree grows in a distinctive way. And perhaps it speaks its deepest secrets almost as faintly as as the sound of a light breeze blowing through its branches. And if there is a spark, that breeze may fan it into the flame that's needed to provide the light that's desired.

Socrates and The Two Big Strengths

Socrates had two famous students: Plato, of course, but also Xenophon (pronounced as if started with a 'Z'). Plato was more theoretical and literary. Xenophon was more practical, and was actually a pretty amazing leader. In fact, the great management guru Peter Drucker once said that one of Xenophon's books, The Education of Cyrus, was the greatest book on leadership ever written. And having read it now three times, I think he was probably right. But I have a different concern today. And so, let me get to it.

Xenophon explained that what made Socrates such an impressive person was, first, his amazing degree of self-control. Xenophon actually thought of that quality as the basis for all the other many virtues, or strengths, that Socrates displayed. Then, he said, the second most important quality his teacher exhibited was consistency - that he was always thoroughly himself, genuinely and authentically.

Self-Control. Think about it for a second. It's the action or habit of resisting any pressures not to be or do what we know to be right. It's the quality we need to exercise in order to stay consistent with our beliefs, values, and sense of self. It's the ability to stand up to the pull of pleasure or the push of pain when either of these factors threatens to diminish our lives.

Pain and pleasure play big roles in our lives. Most people fight serious battles, accordingly, with fear and desire. Self-control is what it takes to win those battles. Some pains are properly to be feared and avoided. Some pleasures are rightly to be desired and sought. Self-control keeps us safely on our path, helping us to face what we should and reject what would be inconsistent to embrace. It prevents the damage that could happen if we were to act in improper and self-defeating ways, outside the borders of what's right for us, as the individuals we are.

I'm not sure that there is any such thing as perfect self-control in an imperfect world. But I've learned that the more of it we have, the better and stronger we are as we face the challenges and opportunities of life, and as we continue to create ourselves through our choices.

Plato's student Aristotle, who spent a lot of time analyzing human strengths, seemed to think that the chief virtue or strength we have is courage, without which none of the other virtues will ever be exercised in difficult circumstances. And how does courage function? It aids us in self-control, in doing what we know to be right, regardless of the difficulties and dangers that might face us. And that, in turn, yields consistency. But then, when you're a generally consistent person in your habits and history, that aids you greatly in exercising self-control. Again, perfection isn't the goal. But practice is the key.

So, according to Xenophon, the two chief qualities of Socrates, the basis building blocks of his greatness, were self-control and consistency. Properly understood, they can be such building blocks for us, as well.

Who Do You Spark? Who Sparks You?

Socrates taught Plato. Plato Taught Aristotle. Aristotle taught someone pretty important, too - Alexander the Great, but back when he was just Alexander the Average, a teenager needing guidance. Greatness sparks greatness. And it always has.

I had an amazing phone call yesterday with an old friend who is three years into building a business that will help change the world for the better. Yeah, it's in tech. But its all about sparking great things through connecting people well. And she reminded me of something interesting. All new business builders need investment money at the outset, and along the way. But what they need most of all is connections - mentors, people to spark them, and guide them, and hook them up them to others who can reveal what it will take to get to the next level, and maybe make that crucial introduction that will change things like magic. Did you ever read Keith Ferrazzi's book Never Eat Alone? It's a great one on the crucial importance of relationships in business.

Who do you spark? Who do you guide? Sometimes, an act of mentoring takes just minutes, or even seconds, to shoot off a quick email with exactly what your friend or young acquaintance needed to hear, or know. Even the dreamers who are great doers need help.

In 1814, Miss Mary Shelley, only 18 years old, was traveling with a group of friends. They challenged each other to a competition. They'd each write a scary story for their mutual entertainment. She pondered for days what she'd write about, and then had a dream that brought together elements of things that they had all been talking over in their time together. She woke up and wrote it down, a great cautionary tale about setting goals without thinking through their consequences, the novel Frankenstein, that offers wisdom on so many levels. It payed off to be hanging out with the likes of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. And it payed off for them to be with the likes of her.

Who are your traveling mates? Who do you hang out with? When I left Notre Dame years ago, a lady said to me, "Tom, I'm 50 years old, and I always try to have at least one friend much older than I am, and one much younger. The older friend shows me the way forward. The younger one gives me the energy to get there." And I'm sure the sparks flew back and forth among them all.

Wise words. Who do you spark? Who sparks you? Spark on.

My Million Dollar Mystical Experience

This week, as I mentioned two days ago on this blog, I had a mystical experience. And I want to recommend that you go and do likewise. I think it will be great for business.

A recap: I had just worked for two weeks to launch this new website and blog, and my head was buzzing with technical details, as well as the normal philosophy of life stuff that provides my own inner elevator music every day. I was taking an afternoon exercise walk, when, suddenly the grass and dirt beside my feet came alive in a new way. It was as if a firmly established mask slipped from the face of normal reality, and I caught a glimpse of what was behind it all. A thought came into my head, forcefully. As I recounted in that earlier blog post, I heard myself saying: "It's just so weird to be alive, and conscious, and walking like this on the earth." In that otherwise ordinary moment, the sheer unexpected strangeness of existence washed over me. 

And I've had some new thoughts on it this morning. Plato had an image for our everyday consciousness. He believed that we're all like men in a cave, deep below ground, chained to the floor, and watching shadows parade across a wall, illusions that we take for realities, having known nothing different. The philosopher, he says, is anyone who manages to break his chains and get out of the cave into the bright light of the sun and see things as they really are out in the world. He then returns to the cave and shares the remarkable news with his former fellow captives, urging them to liberate themselves as well, and join him in the light. Many scoff. A few respond. And those are the ones who become philosophers, too.

Plato's ideal of a leader was what he called "a philosopher king” – a person with position and authority who, by virtue of his own personal liberation from the deceptions of appearances, shadows, and illusions, would be able to use that authority powerfully well.

I've been in and out of Plato’s Cave a lot in my life. I have to admit that, on some of my trips back into the realm of illusions, I stay too long, entertained, mesmerized, and sometimes forgetting what I've seen and learned outside it all.

My little mystical experience this week reminded me of all that. When ordinariness unexpectedly peels off the face of your day, and you glimpse, for even a moment, the utter strangeness and wonder underneath it all, you can't help but pause, and take note, and reorient yourself. And I'm convinced that such a reorientation can have huge implications for business.

There are two largely unconscious models for business in our time. One, that it's all a game, with its own rules and referees, cheaters and winners and fans. We play it. We watch it. We keep score. 

The other model for business is that it's really supposed to be a work of art, a creative endeavor productive of real beauty, across many dimensions. This is the model I argued for in a 1997 book called If Aristotle Ran General Motors: The New Soul of Business. The book had a surprising impact in its day, among a certain group of business leaders, but not widely enough, although there are signs that this is changing. But, in the meantime, gamesmanship certainly rules in our day, down here in the cave, where speculative spelunkers are richly rewarded and widely applauded for playing their games shrewdly and making their killings in the market, regardless of the other implications of their actions. 

The vast majority of the people who merely play the game do so, I suspect, at least in part, unaware of the fact that this is how they're approaching their work. But others are different. They engage in what I call Existential Gamesmanship. They consciously, self-reflectively think of it all as a game, signifying nothing beyond itself. They then choose to play it as they like. They keep score with every metric that strikes them as appropriate. And, so, they fill their lives.

A mystical experience such as the small one I underwent this week can, oddly, have either of two results. When you’re struck, really powerfully smacked awake, with the utter strangeness of existence, perhaps meditating as a consequence on the unimaginable size of the cosmos, the seeming eternity of time, or the fragile contingency of your own life on this small planet, precariously hurtling through space, you're often brought up short to reflect on what you're doing with your life, and what, if anything, it all means.

There are certainly those who conclude that there is no meaning, or, to put it another way, that everything is meaningless in the vast indifference of the cosmos, and that anything in life is just, at most, a game. These are the Existential Gamesmen. They often seem to operate in a void of values, except, of course, what's required for any good PR that might help with the game.

But there's an entirely different reaction to the realization of the strangeness of existence, one captured by Rudolph Otto in his famous book Our Idea of the Holy. It's the response of deep and abiding awe. Existence can be considered as an amazing, unmerited gift. Life is a gift. What then will we do with it? This response to the extraordinariness of reality moves people in a very different direction.

This second group of people in business and the professions and, actually, doing any form of work, often think of themselves as something like artists. Life is a vast studio for creativity and love.

Nobody really knows the full story of why we're here, despite many revelations and intimations, but many of the wisest people ever to walk the earth have suspected, or even felt sure, that it's all about creative love, or loving creativity. The bold among them suggest that there is no other reason a universe, or multiverse of universes, could or should exist at all. But, whether we're the unanticipated products of an immense blind process who appear for a blink in this tight, radiant bubble, or rather are intended agents of innovation lured into existence by the ultimate creative love, we can choose to treat anything we do as art. We can think of ourselves as artists.

And that choice can make the mystical glimpse of realization, that quick peek out of the cave, into a million dollar moment, or much more. As our current experience of business start-ups that blend design, service, and sometimes wonder, is revealing anew, it’s oddly the artists, more than the gamesmen, who win in the end.

Business is art. And it isn't just art for art's sake. It's art for our sake. Anyone who is still chained down in the cave and doesn't see that has failed to grasp what could be one of the most beautiful forms of strangeness of all.