Why most intellectuals avoid the inner life

I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about consciousness and wisdom, whilst engaging in practices that help me clarify my own experience.

I also have a strong intellectual bent. I love ideas. Elegant ones, controversial ones, ones with big explanatory power. I like to put them next to each other to see where they overlap and diverge.

These two interests don’t often go together. At least in this culture, to be an intellectual is to be dismissive of inner exploration.

Our culture values the measurable, the falsifiable and the tangible. Everything about the inner life slips through its fingers. We write it off as “subjective” as if this explains anything. The culmination of this cultural standpoint was the declaration of consciousness as nothing more than an illusion; an own goal for the times.

What I care about—and what I write so much about—is the merger of these two areas: the intellectual and the inner. There have been cultures where the two were not separate. This is philosophy as it was originally conceived, demonstrated by thinkers like Plato, Plotinus and Augustine.

Wisdom requires an acceptance of ambiguity—something inherently at odds with the clarity and precision that intellectual culture typically celebrates. This appears as navel-gazing to the modern intellectual. It’s uncomfortable, and even worse, unproductive. What is vital in one realm looks regressive in the other.

And yet, this ambiguity is exactly what meditation and contemplation reveal: the more you look inward, the less you find anything solid to hold onto. Instead, you uncover paradox and mystery.

Immersing yourself in inner work is not to abandon rigour. It’s a different kind of rigour—one rooted in direct experience, sensitive to thought, affect and perception, and willing to inquire into all apparent boundaries.

Ultimately it’s about approaching all of life with curiosity. Deciding that all truth will arrive in measurable and repeatable form is a way of announcing the answer before you’ve asked the question.

We have to follow the truth, wherever it leads.¹