Sages Among Us

Every age has had its sages.

What is a sage?

A sage is a person who practices wisdom and has reached a certain level of competency.

The wisdom tradition in the West tracks its lineage back to Moses, Solomon, Socrates.

The East gave us Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha.

We in the West knew little of eastern wisdom for hundreds of years.

Schopenhauer is one of the first western “philosophers” to espouse theories more typical of India, but he was not popular in his day, and he remains largely unknown despite his notoriety as a “great philosopher.”

We have the Beats to thank for the Americanization of eastern wisdom, specifically Jack Kerouac and Alan Watts.

Gary Snyder deserves at least honorable mention, as does the colorful Madame Blavatsky.

How delusional does one have to be to call herself “Madame Blavatsky?”

The Beats passed their torches, legal and otherwise, to folkies, who adopted electric guitars and LSD and became hippies and student radicals of the 60s and 70s.

Ram Dass continued the importation of eastern wisdom, as did Huston Smith and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, promulgator of TM, the Weight Watchers of the mediation movement.

Then, along came George Harrison.

Unfortunately, George invested heavily in finger cymbals and incense.

The incense did ok, but we still have over 165,000 finger cymbals in a warehouse in New Delhi.

His estate still pays the storage.

You’re not buying this. Right?

Gary Snyder and Ram Dass are still with us, still among us, increasingly still.

Snyder is only 11 months older than Ram Dass, and yet Snyder is usually associated with the Beats, and Ram Dass with hippies.

From Beat to Hip was a short step with some overlap: from Jack Kerouac, Alan Watts, and Buckminster Fuller to The Moody Blues; then from the Dalai Lama, Don Miguel Ruiz, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Arianna Huffington, Thomas Merton, and Robert Sternberg to Oprah.

Perhaps they are the gray ones, DNA differing from the rest of us just enough to allow them to see more clearly, to intuit connections the rest of us miss, the sages among us.