Recently, Michael H. in comments suggested that I look into the ideas of Sydney Banks. I visited Banks’s Web site and also checked out a Web video he produced. The video, a self-promotional piece titled "Letter to Oprah," left me distinctly unmoved; it seems to be nothing but an attempt to get the author booked on the popular talk show. Some of the material on the Web site, however, was interesting, so I ordered — and read — Banks’s book The Enlightened Gardener.
The Enlightened Gardener is a series of conversations between an English gardener and four American psychologists visiting the United Kingdom for a professional conference. The idea is that the psychologists end up learning more from this apparently simple gardener than they do from their credentialed colleagues.
I have to say that some aspects of the book left me cold, especially the repeated device of having the American characters react with amazement to even the most seemingly banal statements made by the gardener. At one point, for instance, the gardener remarks that mind and brain are different — that the mind has to do with the spirit while the brain has to do with the body. One of the psychologists responds in astonishment that he’s never heard an idea like that before. Really? Where has this guy been living? In a cave?
There are a lot of moments like that. I began to feel a certain amount of sympathy with Tom, the most cynical of the psychologists, who is constantly making sarcastic put-downs of the gardener’s wisdom (though of course he comes around in the end).
Despite the book’s defects, there is something intriguing about The Enlightened Gardener — a hint of larger and more transformative ideas hidden behind the title character’s sometimes trite pronouncements. The book itself alludes to this possibility when one of the characters observes that the gardener’s remarks are analogous to shorthand, and that to appreciate the full meaning of his philosophy, one has to look beyond the symbols.
The dominant idea seems to be that thought profoundly affects who we are, how we behave, and how we see the world. Now, this seems like the most obvious truism imaginable, ripe for one of Tom’s knee-jerk retorts. But as the book gradually makes clear, what the gardener means by "thought" is not simply the particular thoughts that we happen to hold in our minds at any given time. Instead, he is talking about the process or phenomenon of thought itself.
At one point, there is a brief discussion about emptiness and its relation to being. The gardener compares emptiness to formlessness, while being is form. Form emerges out of formlessness. Similarly, what the gardener calls Universal Thought is formless thought, contentless thought, and it is out of this formless thought that our particular, specific thoughts (or thought-forms) emerge.
To me, this is an intriguing and meaningful idea — though I grant that it may seem pointless and meaningless to others. It’s useful to me if I see my own personal thoughts as arising out of a formless background, somewhat like ripples arising on the surface of a lake or, to take a more "scientific" analogy, like virtual particles emerging from the quantum vacuum. (This is only an analogy; I’m not saying that there is necessarily any connection between thoughts and quantum phenomena.)
Universal Thought is one aspect of the gardener’s holy Trinity; the other two aspects are Universal Consciousness and Universal Mind. Clearly, these are three different ways of looking at the same thing. There can be no thought without consciousness, and there can be no consciousness without mind. Again, what’s useful is the idea of formless consciousness preceding and giving rise to the form of our particular consciousness; or formless mind preceding and grounding our particular form-specific minds. If we strip away forms and penetrate to formlessness, we encounter "wisdom," or "original thought," "uncontaminated" by the forms we impose. We can then see our particular thoughts, consciousness, and minds as what they are: constructions or fabrications, which may be helpful to us or detrimental, but which are not, in either case, the ultimate or true reality. And once we see them for what they are, we need not be imprisoned by their constraints.
This is, I admit, rather vague, and I’m not sure these revelations would have the life-changing effects that the book seems to grant them. But I think there’s something here … though I could be wrong. The Enlightened Gardener has the strange effect of suggesting the answers to great mysteries but not quite unveiling them. Maybe there are no answers and the whole thing is an exercise in self-delusion. Or maybe there are answers, but, like snowflakes, they melt away when you try to catch them in your hand.
I don’t know what to think. And maybe that’s the point.