You Are Not Book.indb - Stephen H. Wolinsky Ph. D.

“states of Consciousness” Philosophical Concepts and the Virtue Trap / 229
If the goal of “spirituality” is to “reach” or “get” or “attain”
Nirvana (as extinction), then nothing in the phenomenological
world, (a world with bodies, which have senses
and experiences) will do that. Why? Because Nirvana means
extinction: YOU ARE NOT. Therefore, there is nothing that
is “spiritual” or has anything to do with leading or having a
“spiritual life (style)”; there is only an illusion of a spiritual
life (style), which is part of the mirage and is not.
Next, where does this concept of a permanent state of
consciousness, like a virtue or spiritual quality, come from?
To appreciate this, it is paramount to go back to the western
origins of the concept of virtue, and its roots.
More than a hundred years before Socrates and Plato,
there was Pythagoras, the famous Greek mathematician. His
Pythagorean theorem states that for any right triangle, the
square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the
squares of the lengths of the other two sides (a 2 + b 2 = c 2 ).
Pythagoras believed that in this world (a world perceivable by
the senses), it is not possible to draw a right triangle because
it can never be exact, only an approximation. Hence, a “real”
right triangle can never actually exist in the physical world.
However, Pythagoras “believed” in the ideal—“somewhere”
(in “another” more subtle world) there is a right triangle;
there is a truth, a state of consciousness that is permanent
and changeless in all situations. In other words, this “truth”
exists as an “ideal” and the state of consciousness is always
true and permanent regardless of the situation.
This underlying understanding of an ideal, perfect, changeless,
and permanent “truth” was picked up by Socrates who,
through his inquiry, asked, “What is a virtue?” Socrates was
trying to capture a “virtue,” a “state of consciousness,” a way
of acting or being, or doing, which was ideal, which is something
to attain, aspire to or achieve, which was permanent
and always true. Socrates believed that this virtue could or
should, when focused upon, correct, transform, alter, and