What is Wisdom & how can one gain more of it?
The journey to finding real wisdom is mired with traps and pitfalls that can distract, deter, and mislead the earnest seeker. It is all too easy to get into scholastic discussions of a highly philosophical nature, researching great thinkers and their treatises from ancient Greece, or Rome, which history has credited as pioneering and pushing the boundaries of our human understanding of what timeless wisdom is. It is also all too tempting to give in to the intrigue and mystery of searching for wisdom within more occult traditions, sensing that there is knowledge there too that goes beyond what one could possibly learn from our modern, institutionalized educational system. And while some wisdom could be gleaned from these inquisitive but meandering forays, the optimal path to understanding what wisdom is, and how to develop more of it, is really much simpler than such futile searches in the dark.
Wisdom is a profound knowing that cannot be learned from books, or collected from esoteric ritual traditions and practices. The ultimate way to cultivate true wisdom is through quieting the egoic mind in meditation – quieting it long enough that one has a chance to merge with a transcendent wisdom that illuminates one’s very being. This heightened state of meditative awareness has many names throughout different parts of the world – rapture, flow, sanmai, samadhi… It is, in its essence, a state of ecstasy in which your mind is one and the same with the Universal mind. It is only when you learn to stop thought completely, for extended periods of time, that you start your journey towards establishing the unshakeable wisdom that you seek.
Wisdom is the quality that affords one the awareness and ability to be both totally engaged and absorbed in this physical, four-dimensional world, and at the same time, to exist in a plane of super-conscious awareness beyond all that is known to our simple physical senses.
What wisdom is not
It is different than knowledge. When you go into samadhi (perfect meditation) you go into dimensions of light, and find truth and happiness. It’s not just an idea, it’s a profound spiritual connection. Wisdom is very practical – it’s how to make good decisions, how to manage your life well, and much more, with common sense it walk hand in hand. There is no magical insight that throws out practicality, or the need for it. The more Enlightened you are, the more practical you are. Another aspect of wisdom is seeing/knowing – what will work for you. A lot of people confuse it with knowledge. For example, they suppose that how to fix a motorcycle is knowledge. An Enlightened person may not know how to with physical knowledge, but wisdom is understanding the nature of life. Wisdom is knowing the essential truth of life. How to be at peace, how to be happy, where to direct your energy, mind, attention, and power, how to still your mind. It isn’t just about being able to know what some manual says.
Wisdom and Ego
There’s a great wisdom in the Zen Buddhist observance of proper etiquette. It touts that there are no rules, there’s only etiquette. And etiquette is borne of wisdom. There is this belief that there is an appropriate action for every different situation – the action that is effective while expending the least amount of effort, thus conserving your precious energy. In the west, people push forth with “My way or the highway,” which is egotistical. In the east, to be powerful, one is a follower instead of a leader, observing the ways of nature. We can look to the example of wanting to build a structure on a particular building site, yet not observing, and in turn not adhering to nature and to the land and feng shui (natural energy flow) of the building site. It’s not standard practice to step back and pose the question, is the structure even meant to be there. One illustration of this would be building a Victorian-style double story house in Santa Fe because one likes the way it looks, when really the materials and natural fit for Santa Fe lend themselves to a simple adobe structure. There’s a better flow with the place, when form follows nature. This is Buddhist etiquette and wisdom – to see how life really is and then to act appropriately, intelligently, and wholeheartedly. When you take an action wholeheartedly you get wonderful results – and when your heart’s not in it, you’re much less effective.
The late singer/songwriter Jimi Hendrix once said, “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” In the Western world, the wise among us are presumed to be leaders. But in the Far East, there exists a different sensibility – one in which the wise are acknowledged as good followers. That is, they allow themselves to take a step back, reflect deeply, meditate, and humble themselves in order to not be led by ego, but rather to follow life’s guideposts for appropriate action. There are templates and signposts in the Universe that most people can’t fathom or see, because in order to be aware of them, one has to make their mind very quiet and unperturbed. You have to bring your spirit into a sense of greater and greater peace, otherwise all you can see is what’s left that is not yet obscured by your own restlessness and agitation. It’s like a lake with stirred up sediment that prohibits you from seeing into its depths to the very bottom. When the lake is tranquil and still however, you’re able to see and appreciate all that’s down there under the surface. So too can the removal of turbidity in your mind allow for ever greater perception and awareness.
When you come out of immersion in samadhi, you come back out of it with True wisdom. It’s not something you can really describe. There’s no more you left. It transforms you. It’s that peak experience that yields Enlightenment, which is the ultimate wisdom. Direct your power with wisdom. Tremendous power and momentum without wisdom can be counterproductive, harmful, and a waste of time and energy and your other resources. Even a heart-focused hippy without wisdom can only get so far in spiritual understanding. With wisdom, they could see that they really do need to develop personal power to achieve better balance for their life and better support their spiritual advancement.
About letting go
Being able to let go and surrender is a kind of wisdom. Being absorbed in play, as most children do, is very much this wisdom of surrender. Children can teach us much about how to be devoid of strong attachments, to be more fluid, and less vested with ideations of ourselves. Child-like innocence is a great model for wisdom seekers to observe.
This may strike some readers as counterintuitive, as we are conditioned to think that greater wisdom automatically comes with the territory of growing old and wrinkled. Life experience can lead to greater wisdom than one had when they were younger. But there is also a kind of wisdom in the freedom and surrender one has very early on, as a child.
“True wisdom is freedom. True wisdom is enlightenment.”
Dr. Frederick Lenz, Rama, respected teacher of American Zen Buddhism
Wisdom has a cumulative quality to it in that it seeks itself out. The more you wisen up, the more you want to wisen up. While there is wisdom to being successful by society’s standard, it also comes from maintaining a level of inaccessibility. When you put yourself out there, on social media or any other form of defining yourself for the world around you, people develop a fixed impression of you. When you’re viewed in a certain light, that can actually make it harder to grow, evolve, reinvent yourself. It’s really not necessary to air your opinions, thoughts, feelings, and desires in public. Keeping your truth for yourself allows them to maintain a kind of purity, and there is a sort of wisdom to that.