Socrates is my favourite philosopher because he believed philosophy should be lived, not just spoken about. I’ve often thought that he must have been a Nirvanean, my preferred word for “Enlightened”. In this short excerpt from my book, The Nirvaneans, the arguments for this notion are discussed:

The love of wisdom (Sophia), or philosophia in Greek, began in Ionian Greece in Homeric times. It was a deliberate increase of consciousness on the part of a small number of people who lived close to the land but who recognized that the mind of man had a structuring and ordering facility which seemed to be above the processes of nature. Their often puzzled cogitations gave birth to philosophy which, in turn, spawned science, metaphysics, mathematics and all the other systems of pure thought that bedevil students to this day.

Philosophers were known to be otherworldly and lost in thought. They dressed in simple robes and lived frugally — rich living, they thought, degraded the mind. Such a life would inevitably produce more than its share of Nirvaneans — Plotinus and Plato are two other examples.

The Greek philosopher Socrates is almost the perfect exemplar of the Nirvanean qualities of simplicity and ethics. I believe him to have been a Nirvanean, for a number of reasons. He spent his entire lifetime, as far as we know, engaging others in conversations about the need to be good. That was the sum total of his life. Moreover, he was completely unworldly, careless of his appearance, and had no visible means of financial support. In Plato’s Georgias, one listener complains that, if Socrates is right, life would need to be turned upside down! — we have observed elsewhere that the Nirvanic viewpoint literally turns our normal conceptions of reality upside down.

Guardian Spirit

Furthermore, Socrates claimed to have a “guardian spirit” who frequently advised him not to follow certain courses of action. All this suggests to me that he had tasted Nirvanic experience and everything that goes with it. Nothing else adequately explains his extraordinary behaviour.

Socrates lived a simple life — it could not have been simpler — and an ethical one. His simplicity was that of a philosopher. He cared little for material goods and was frequently fed at other people’s tables, where he demonstrated the philosophic rules of argument and inquiry, no doubt as the evening’s star turn.

Ethically, Socrates believed that to do good conferred happiness, while wickedness — which arose in every case from ignorance, not evil — led to misery. He spent his 70 years of life perfecting the craft of living well, making the rather large claim that “nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death”. He seemed to subscribe to a kind of karmic reckoning, as well as the continuation of life after death. When he faced his executioners without fear, he demonstrated these virtues in the toughest of arenas.

Socrates’s proclaimed virtues were courage, moderation, justice, piety and wisdom. Wisdom indeed was the Queen of virtues since it conferred the others by default. The soul, he thought, was “mutilated by wrong actions and benefited by right ones.”

How much then does Nirvanic experience depend on simplicity and an ethical lifestyle? Nirvana is a suprapersonal state beyond the body’s compass. Although the body is “swimmimng” in Nirvana at all times, it fails to register the fact because of its self-partiality. It follows that extrapersonal values — an ethical life — will more easily align one’s being with the Nirvanic viewpoint than will a self-interested frame of thought.

Similarly, a frugal life will free up psychic energies for a more concerted intention towards the ultimate goal of seeing into one’s own self-nature. Nirvana requires a total commitment.

Socrates exemplified the qualities of simplicity and ethical living to a remarkable degree. His life in the so-called Axial Age seemed to anticipate some of the ideas of the Buddha, and of Christianity more than 400 years later. I would be puzzled indeed if he were not a full-blown Nirvanean.