What Makes Wisdom Timeless?

Come and get inspired by the early Upaniṣads

I’m reflecting on this question as I work on new writing. It also helps when teaching philosophy – ideas from old texts don’t always translate to contemporary contexts.

To take one example, yoga first developed as a way of escaping from cycles of birth – which isn’t often the reason that modern practitioners roll out a mat. Yet parts of the message can still sound appealing, as exemplified by Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back.

Yoda on transcending time and space

To quote the scholar Jeffery Long, there are many hidden links – the literal meaning of upaniṣad in texts – between the Star Wars series and Eastern traditions:

“Apart from his name sounding vaguely like ‘yoga’ (and being similar to yodha, or ‘warrior,’ in Sanskrit), Yoda, in many ways, fulfils the archetypal role of the eccentric teacher whose divine madness serves to uproot the limiting preconceptions of the student and open the student’s mind to higher spiritual realities.”

As Yoda tells Luke Skywalker, there are subtler forms of seeing that point beyond the limits of material existence. Expanding on the lines on the image above, Yoda says:

“Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm? Hmm. And well you should not. For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes.”

In Long’s view, “the most obvious comparison between the Force and something in Hindu philosophy is with the omnipresent Brahman” – a transcendent mix of being, consciousness and bliss that is an underlying theme of the early Upaniṣads.