Toward Wisdom

Community.

Preface

This book is about wisdom and the process of becoming wise. It has its roots in two major turning points in my life. The first dates back 25 years, to a time when I was just leaving my 20s and entering my 30s. I was, in those days, a corporate design engineer and engineering manager with a very narrow outlook on life. I cringe as I recall my self-assured smugness, the absolute confidence I had that technology was the centre of all that mattered. I saw everything else as some kind of frill, as some variety of missing the mark. Kenneth Rexroth recognized me and my kind; he called us the technical intelligentsia. He also called us Neanderthals with slide rules.

A corporate management seminar was the unlikely place where the first seeds of change were planted. It was there that I was introduced to Abraham Maslow’s theory of motivation and psychological growth. I found Maslows concept of self-actualization exciting, and for the next decade the idea of becoming all I’m capable of becoming was the focus of my life.

I spent that decade, my 30s, discovering, adventuring, and watching my outlook broaden. I began with a year of intensive reading (Camus, Sartre, Kazantzakis, Hesse, Maslow, and others) and then began a series of outward-oriented adventures. Electronic art was the first exploration; that was followed by three years in Manhattan as Director of Research for a small electronics company. Next came a 13-month backpack trip around the world. During that trip the foreignness of other places and people vanished, and I developed concerns about third world problems and the well-being of our planet. These concerns led to involvement in the alternatives movement of the ’70s, writing magazine articles and columns, and changing countries. At the end of the decade I heeded the advice of both feminism and brain-hemisphere theory and took steps to develop the nurturing side of myself. I worked awhile as a hospital orderly, and then with the elderly.

The second turning point came at age 41 when I attended a 12-day meditation retreat and my mind became still and quiet for the first time in my adult life. When I left that retreat the world was the same old world, but my way of looking at it had changed profoundly. I had begun an inward-oriented adventure. The investigation prompted by that first retreat occupied much of the next 15 years – and still continues. During those years I read hundreds of books and scientific articles, and spent several thousand hours doing various types of meditative practice. The goal of both endeavors was to arrive at satisfying answers to some fundamental questions: What is going on? What’s it all about? and What am I to do about it? The search was always for explanations that rang true both intuitively and intellectually. In a sense, this book is a status report on the investigation to date.

The book began to take form when I started to see my quarter century of adventure, experience, and insight in the context of wisdom and the growth of wisdom. For one thing, I realized that whole-person development was one of the keys to becoming wise: development of both intellect and intuition, analysis and synthesis, left brain hemisphere and right. For another, I realized that many facets of the world problematique – biosphere degradation, resource depletion, and the continuing follies of war and terrorism – could be attributed to a serious lack of wisdom on the part of both power-wielders and ordinary folk.

Many of us are knowledgeable, but few of us are wise. During this century, industrial society helped us become the most knowledgeable populace in history. Some of us applied our knowledge to the creation of powerful technologies. All of us have used those technologies to create comfortable lives for ourselves. Our intentions were usually honourable in all this, but our actions much of the time were not guided by that holistic, value-connected kind of understanding called wisdom.

The situation the world faces today is incredibly complex. Long-cherished values have begun to conflict with each other: material comfort vs. an uncontaminated world; economic growth now vs. economic well-being for our grandchildren. And things just seem to get worse. Toward Wisdom takes the position that applied wisdom is the only effective way to deal with our personal/global problematique. Wisdom is no longer an option or a frill. We, and the world, need wisdom-based analyses of our problems followed by wisdom-based action. Before wisdom can take control of the situation, however, large numbers of people must become wise. Can this be brought about? How?

In the past, becoming wise was left to chance; a few people became wise before they died, but most did not. If wisdom really is the only way out of our global mess, then this lackadaisical approach will no longer do. Fortunately, today we know more than ever before about what wisdom is and what prevents people from becoming wise. We also know that just as we can become knowledgeable by going through a sometimes arduous but well-defined process, so we can become wise by going through a different kind of arduous process.

On the bright side, we see the amazing power of individual wise people to change things for the better. Their accomplishments are all out of proportion to their numbers. Consider the best of each year’s nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize, for instance. What would our world be like if there were millions more with their dedication, skills, and wise perspectives on life? Yes, becoming wise is likely to take as much effort as becoming knowledgeable – but is there anything more worthwhile? Do we, in fact, have any other choice?

The first chapter of Toward Wisdom explores the nature of wisdom. The next three examine impediments to wisdom – those things that make it difficult to adopt wise ways of seeing and functioning. We look at what those obstacles are, how they work, and how they came to be. Chapter 5 points out that we’ve been mucking up our world, and makes the case that we need to get past those impediments and become wise. The next five chapters (six through 10) discuss practical ways of doing just that. Chapter 11 is about freedom, choice, and responsibility; 12 deals with wisdom in relationships; and 13 with creating a wisdom-based culture. In the final chapter I comment on books that I have found particularly helpful, and tell how to access other wisdom-fostering resources.

1

What Is Wisdom?

Wisdom is not one thing; it is a whole array of better-than-ordinary ways of being, and living, and dealing with the world. Because of this, and because individual wise people express wisdom’s characteristics in different ways and to different degrees, this chapter’s question has no brief answer.

Short statements about wisdom can be helpful as long as we realize that each expresses only part of the truth. We could say, for example, that wisdom involves:

seeing things clearly; seeing things as they are

acting in prudent and effective ways

acting with the well-being of the whole in mind

deeply understanding the human/cosmic situation

knowing when to act and when not to act

being able to handle whatever arises with peace of mind and an effective, compassionate, holistic response

being able to anticipate potential problems and avoid them

Each statement helps clarify some aspect of wisdom, but none tells the whole story.

The self-actualizing and ego-transcending people that Abraham Maslow studied were wise people, and Maslow’s writings tell us much about the nature of wisdom. Maslow’s self-actualizers focused on concerns outside of themselves; they liked solitude and privacy more than the average person, and they tended to be more detached than ordinary from the dictates and expectations of their culture. They were inner-directed people. They were creative, too, and appreciated the world around them with a sense of awe and wonder. In love relationships they respected the other’s individuality and felt joy at the other’s successes. They gave more love than most people, and needed less. Central to their lives was a set of values that Maslow called the Being-Values, or B-Values: wholeness, perfection, completion, justice, aliveness, richness, simplicity, beauty, goodness, uniqueness, effortlessness, playfulness, truth, honesty, reality, self-sufficiency.¹

The inner directedness that Maslow noted is a key feature of wisdom. It arises, in part, from acquiring new, more helpful perspectives. We live today in a swirl of information, and we need some of this raw data to arrive at the answers we seek. Knowledge, however, is interpreted data. If the perspective or conceptual model through which we interpret our data is inappropriate, or flawed, then our knowledge is flawed and will lead us astray. For many people, the task of becoming wise is not one of absorbing more information, more raw facts; it is to put the significant facts they already have into appropriate contexts, to view them from more helpful perspectives.

In later chapters I will attempt to show that we human beings acquired certain perspectives from evolution and culture which are, in fact, flawed perspectives – perspectives that limit and distort our understanding of reality. Certain biology-based perspectives, for example, arose to aid personal and species survival in more trying, more primitive times. Today they impede our movement toward a global kind of understanding; they impede our movement toward wisdom.

Certain culture-based perspectives also stand in our way. Our industrial culture – in actualizing its values, in looking out for its interests – has indoctrinated us with interpretive frameworks that reflect and promote those values and interests. It has passed on to us a set of approved ways of looking at things and has said, Look at the data of life from these vantage points; interpret your facts according to these guidelines. There is nothing unusual about this; all cultures do it. But cultural institutions that prompt us to see the world from a having, desiring, possessing, consuming perspective aren’t leading us in the direction of wisdom, inner peace, and deeply-felt contentment. Becoming wise requires that we adopt other perspectives, other interpretive frameworks – ones that do reveal truth and encourage movement toward holistic understanding and widespread well-being.

The words of the great spiritual teachers have added much to our understanding of wisdom. So have the writing and thinking of the wisest of the world’s leaders: Jefferson, Lincoln, and Gandhi, for example, and more recently, Gro Bruntland and Vaclav Havel. Writers of serious literature helped by giving us literary role models – wise people, and people in the process of becoming wise – Lawrence Durrell’s Clea, for example, Herman Hesses Demian, Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba – and Kazantzakis himself in Report to Greco. Reading books by and about wise people can help us grasp the multi-faceted nature of wisdom. Here, however, let us focus on a few specifics. Let’s look at five frequently-encountered attributes of wisdom – five characteristics that appear to have special importance to us, the people of earth, in this last decade of the twentieth century.

A reality-seeking attitude

Wisdom, maturity, and happiness seem to go hand in hand with figuring out how life and the world work – with discovering the nature of the rules, laws, and programming that dictate what will happen under what conditions. Wise people know that the more deeply and accurately they come to understand key processes within and without, the better able they are to live their personal lives in harmony with what is happening moment-to-moment. Wise people want to find out. Wise people are reality seekers.

Developing an accurate, comprehensive picture of reality does not happen easily. We arrive on earth having to play the game of existence but not knowing the rules or even the object of the game. Then, gradually, each of us builds a worldview – a mental map of how it all is and what it’s all about. The maps made by wise people are in many respects more complete and more accurate than the maps made by others, but for even the wisest, their picture of how it all is never becomes much more than a rough sketch. Despite talk about fully enlightened beings, I strongly suspect that no one has ever been completely out of the dark.

Almost by definition, reality seekers remain open-minded, flexible, and receptive. They know that all explanations, models, and metaphors are just pointers to truth and crude maps of reality. All are approximate and partial. Further refinement of the maps is always in order. And since wise people are not ego-attached to their present views, when they do get new data, or flip to a new perspective, their worldviews and explanatory words change.

Spiritual teachers have created cosmologies, psychologies, and ethical systems. Many of their psychologies are similar. So-called mystical experiences are largely independent of specific information; thus, they tend to be similar for everyone who has them. It is because of this that the perennial philosophy is perennial, and independent of culture and geography. People who have seen the world from a perennial philosophy perspective recognize the reports of others who have done so. There is agreement.

Cosmologies, on the other hand, tend to differ widely – leading me to suspect that they are based, at least in part, on culturally-acquired information. If Gautama the Buddha lived today I suspect that his psychology would not be much different, but that his cosmology would be.

Imagine that the great reality seekers of ancient times – people like Jesus and Gautama – had continued to live on through the centuries. Do you share my guess that they would have made the transition into the present smoothly and organically – excited about each breakthrough in knowledge along the way, each widening and refining of their views? The Great Ones had to be open-minded reality-seekers. It is their followers who have sometimes become closed and rigid – true believers – guardians of temple and church who took each word of their leaders to be absolute truth. Words aren’t truth. Wise people recognize this; they remain seekers rather than becoming believers.

A reality-seeking attitude can also help us find ethical and moral truth. Many wise people of the past – spiritual leaders, philosophers, and great writers – observed what works in human society, and what doesn’t. Over the centuries their observations have been shared with an ever larger audience, yet their advice is largely ignored by each new generation. Moses was one of those wise people. Now, at this point in my life, I think that his Ten Commandments are a pretty good set of guidelines for living. Nevertheless, since first hearing about them at age five or six I have lied, stolen, dishonoured my father and my mother, committed adultery, and more. We seem to find it very difficult to take someone else’s word on ethical matters. We feel the need to explore life’s limits for ourselves and come to our own conclusions.

I don’t think our distrust of do-what-I-say ethics will fundamentally change, and that’s okay. We don’t need new lists of do’s and don’ts. We don’t need new codes of conduct. They wouldn’t really help. What does help is a reality-seeking attitude toward our own experience. Why do my relationships fall apart? Why do I keep getting myself into this kind of mess? What is reality telling me? What is the lesson in this? Is there a general rule of the Game that I’ve missed up to now? Wise people ask themselves these kinds of questions, and when they do, the answers come. Wise people are attentive people, and their attention to what is not working well eventually leads to greater harmony. They know that the solution to a problem almost always lies in a clear understanding of the problem itself.

Staying open is often uncomfortable. The pain of uncertainty, of growing, comes with the territory of human existence. A certain directivity toward perfection may well be built into the cosmic process and, as Maslow’s research indicated, into each person. But the means to actualize perfection are not ideal. Some degree of discomfort appears to be the price of continual transcendence, continual replacement of old ways of seeing with new ways.

Non-reactive acceptance

As we will see in Chapter 2, part of evolution’s legacy to the human species is the mammalian brain structure called the limbic system and the palette of intense, reactive emotions associated with it. These strong emotions – fear, anger, lust, hatred, greed, craving, jealousy, envy, etc. – are the cause of much human suffering. The person experiencing these forms of emotional reactivity suffers, and if reactive emotions take control of our behaviour, others are often made to suffer too.

Wise people have learned how to deal with reactive impulses so they don’t become prolonged reactive states of mind, and so they don’t result in reactive behaviour. Wise people don’t rail against the present moment’s informational content. They know that by the time we become aware of this moment’s event, it has already taken place. Accepting it is therefore the only sane, rational response. It’s not that wise people avoid acting. In the moment that follows they may very well choose to act. But their actions are almost always guided by wiser centres of control; their actions are not knee-jerk responses to impulses from the limbic brain.

For the most part, wise people live non-reactively. They live the present moment from a centre of awareness, acceptance, energy, basic goodness, and quiet joy. They know that when fear is dropped, courage fills the mind. They know that when anger and hate are dropped, compassion is there. They know that when wanting and greed are dropped, mental peace, primal happiness, and equanimity will be present.

Holistic seeing

The attention and energy of most people is focused on their immediate situation. The intensity of their concern about other situations, people, and events drops rapidly as those things become more distant in space, time, and relationship. The concerns of wise people, on the other hand, go far beyond the immediate and the personal. They have acquired a variety of perspectives that I lump together under the umbrella phrase holistic seeing.

Many of these holistic perspectives are intellectual ones. An understanding of concepts like system, evolution, and problematique, for instance, can help us