“Changing our way of looking at things and our lives requires placing ourselves in an inner disposition of calm and rest” Pierre Hadot. Spiritual exercises and ancient philosophy. Siruela Editions.
“Before healing someone, you have to ask them if they are willing to give up what makes them sick.” Hippocrates
The human is not a fixed state, but a constant training, a continuous self-formation process for which school education is not enough; The self, the true self, is the individuality fertilized and produced through vital experiences, mainly those that have to do with affections and their transmutation into passions. However, the process of constructing one’s own uniqueness normally collides with the enormous blocks of suffering, economic and social inequality that disrupt the formation of an emotional personality. It is known, in existential terms, that poverty, illness, lack of material goods, pain, helplessness, denial of freedom, unsatisfied desires and other destructive feelings are not contingencies of human existence nor the responsibility of those who suffer from them, specifically, a necessary consequence of the system, especially neoliberalism and its current and final stage, technofeudalism that, with the lure of greater access to consumption, forces individuals to maximize their productivity and performance. to exhaustion, under the illusion that they are their own bosses and act freely without apparent coercion, when in reality they are victims of a coercive and unjust system based on the self-annihilation of the exploited.
These individuals formatted by consumerism can hardly identify with a free spirituality capable of opposing the logic of a system that artificially produces individuals tailored to their needs, whom it makes believe that they act rationally, that they are autonomous, free by nature, entrepreneurs with their own initiative and abilities, and their success depends on the use they make of the aforementioned qualities; Unfortunately, in most cases, these people will end up, sooner or later, disintegrating their life project.
We all want to live well; hence, the need to defend ourselves from these threats. Peter Sloterdijk writes in his book You have to change your life. Editorial Siruela (which also inspired the title of this article): “human beings have always created psychic protection systems to defend themselves against existential threats and the vulnerability inherent to life” and, based on this thesis, the philosopher invites us to reflect on self-education and personal progress to escape the “society of performance”; For that matter, he proposes a series of practices and exercises that he calls “anthropotechniques for the improvement of the world and oneself” which, he affirms, are essential to eliminate the tensions and pressures that constantly affect society and lead people to exhaustion, depression and stress. His proposal begins with a severe criticism of those who propose a return to religions and metaphysical explanations, mainly those that inculcate supposed “gurus” who call themselves “teachers” or “spiritual guides”; In reality, individuals who exploit the naivety of their followers by posing as spiritual “priests” when in reality they are doctrinaire administrators of a thought that offers painkillers in exchange for money.
The criticism of this type of offering requires a severe critical-genealogical analysis of its proposals and at the same time rescue the origin and foundations of philosophies and religions as valuable as Buddhism, Taoism and classical philosophy that can provide our lives with precious teachings to live in harmony with the natural order, mainly in environments as complex as the current one that daily damages so many lives and, its victims in the desire to find relief for their problems fall into the hands of opportunistic deceitful fools. A timely and correct criticism, as Walter Benjamín says in his text one way street. Alfaguara Publishing House. 1987, “it is a question of correct distance. Criticism is at ease in a world in which everything depends on perspective… The naivety of the free gaze is a lie, if not a totally naive expression of a declared incompetence” (page, 95); Therefore, where there are situations such as those indicated that touch us so closely, it is necessary that the guilty parties receive appropriate criticism.
The practices and exercises to which we will refer have been present in the development and constitution of human beings for six millennia and must be read not from our concerns, but rather try to understand them according to the meaning of each era, that is, read and reread them as ancient truths intended for the education of oneself with problems totally different from ours; The modification of ourselves must obey other treatments and not a simple exegesis or interpretation that any “spiritual guide” makes of those ancient texts. For the moment let us try to know these doctrines as they were conceived, with the warning that no spiritual tradition is compatible with the intellectual demands and contemporary thoughts because the philosophical intentions of the past were different from ours; They have formative intentions, not the pragmatic purposes that are attributed, for example, to classical philosophy today reduced to informative purposes in academic teaching, hence we have philosophy teachers, but not philosophers; In ancient times, authors transmitted to their readers guides for the formation of a spirit; today, the “official of philosophy” responds to the interests of the system; Before, people were educated with the intention of practicing a way of life and an art of living, today they want to be original by inventing new concepts or dealing with trivialities, banalities and nonsense.
From a genealogical perspective, that is, in the search for the roots and origin of those philosophies understood as tools for intellectual and spiritual transformation, the teachings of Sidharta Gautama, called the Buddha, in the 4th century BC, who proposed meditation, ethics and wisdom for the liberation of human suffering, can be considered historically as a starting point and principle; His ideas have the purpose of allowing people to achieve what the Buddha calls mindfulness (a concept that neuroscience adopted to also express self-control, knowing how to stay calm in extreme situations and the development of resilience); Buddhist mindfulness consists of a series of processes and transformations that improve and enhance the spiritual essence of individuals; It consists of observing the present moment without passing judgment to open the way to understanding oneself, regulating emotions and reducing emotions and passions to give way to a balanced mental state.
Two hundred years later, in the 6th century, Taoism emerged in China, a philosophy created by Lao Tzu, characterized by the search for a life lived in communion with the Tao through practices that lead to the profound improvement of the self; The process as a whole is called “the path” or “the beginning”, it consists of following a set of ideas and practices in a natural and spontaneous way, letting yourself be carried away by the flow of life until you learn to live in harmony with the universe and with yourself.
Classical antiquity (Greece and Rome) calls these practices spiritual exercises; It is not a mere teaching of abstract theories, but activities aimed at personal and spiritual transformation through philosophical wisdom: it is developed in the following way: the subject recognizes that his perception of the world, his beliefs and way of life damage his existence with adverse results for his emotional well-being and, consequently, he opts for a radical change. This limit point consequently requires a conversion that profoundly transforms the person and existence itself; The convert must start from the desire to recover his original nature lost due to having deprived himself of the love of wisdom and begin the intimate and personal construction of a beautiful individuality.
If we assume that the true self is purely spiritual and the current product of experiences that gave rise to a false consciousness, then and from now on, the individual must direct his spiritual activity to the formation of a new self; It must begin with the shedding of one’s own passions, vanity, the itch that surrounds one and fleeing from slander, as well as freeing oneself from all pain or hatred to love “free men,” Nietzsche would say; This revolutionary act of self-appropriation will be molded in small doses until the conquest of an authentic self, that is, what we really know and makes us who we are.
In short, if our perception of the world is not healthy or correct, if the harmony between body and world is disturbed by desires that are impossible to satisfy, illusions, fantasies, unbridled imagination of greatness, fame, riches, concerns that unconsciously distance us from reality and inner life, if we recognize that there was no spirituality in us and we manage to eliminate the causes of these sufferings, disorders and unconsciousness thanks to the anthropotechnics of spiritual exercises, if we now feel that we belong to ourselves entirely because we have acquired qualities that we considered desirable and valuable, if we achieve the consciousness of having truly become what we wanted to be, then, from now on, enjoy a poetic life (Edgar Morin. Ethics) and the art of living. To learn about dozens of useful philosophical exercises for this purpose, I recommend reading Pierre Hadot’s book: Spiritual exercises and ancient philosophy by Editorial Siruela.