Socrates or Buddha?Existentially, this feels like a process of letting go. Active doubt-
ing is like shedding layers or peeling off skins. Often meditation
teachers will talk about that discarding in relation to emotional
perceptions: something upsets you in life, say, and rather than
obsessing about the pain of the experience, as is easy to do, you
should treat it like a wave that dissolves back into the sea and
passes. There’s value in that. But I think this might be equally
true of our cognitive perceptions. Meditation seeks to draw atten-
tion to what you think you know, and then asks whether that’s
right. It can be a tough process, as witnessed to by the life of
Socrates, the man who said, ‘One thing I know, that I know
I know nothing.’ The key to wisdom is not how much you know,
but is understanding the limits of what you know – an under-
standing that he failed to fi nd in the politicians and poets of his
day. If Plato is right, Socrates devised a method of questioning,
now called the elenchus, that brought people to a position where
they realised the profundity of their not knowing: it’s what his
relentless questioning called individuals to do, leading them to
an existential precipice. It was a kind of meditation that would
ask what something is – say courage, or friendship, or charm –
and then would show that everything that might be said about
the matter, or any experience that might be brought to bear
upon it, failed at some point. There’s always more.
For some this was too much, and they turned away stung.
They called him the gadfl y. For others, though, it revealed a
deeper sense of what it is to be human, what it is to be uncer-
tain and conscious of that ignorance. You might say that he
developed a verbalised version of mindfulness, and took it out
of the meditation hall and into the marketplace. There, in the
public square, he found some fellow spirits, though among the
powerful, he found himself in trouble too.
Selfl ess or selfi sh?
Mindfulness is not envisaged in such a form today, at least in
the West. It’s not a Socratic encounter of careful unsettling. It’s