The road to wisdom

Is it wise to give a description of wisdom? And is it possible to know something about wisdom if you are not already wise? Maybe not. But the search for wisdom is perhaps in itself a sign of growing wisdom. Our personal experience of life is of course only a description of this road to that spot where we are just now. But it could well be that walking the road to wisdom really is the core of wisdom.

On the other hand there is perhaps no road and everything takes place exactly where we are in the moment. Wisdom would then be the totality of all separate moments in life. If so, it would of course be important to be conscious of every moment we live, know where we are and what this moment contains. If our feelings and thoughts often are in another place than our body, wisdom may evade us. This is a situation which seems to be quite common among us humans. So what does it really mean to search for wisdom and how do we know what the goal looks like?

The question is therefore: what is wisdom? A quick look in the dictionary shows that the word wisdom can be translated to ”sense, reason, wits, experience, knowledge” and so on. From this we may get an impression that a child which is intelligent enough, has good memory and sensible parents and teachers, cannot avoid to become wise. If this is the whole basis of wisdom, the Earth should be overcrowded by wise people. But it is not, that seems to be quite clear. Still it would be very unwise to claim that we generally are unintelligent and that our parents and teachers were ignorant and ill- advised.

So it seems that everyone has to search for wisdom in their own life. Many may be searching. Still an impression prevails that not very many reach this goal, in spite of intellect, experience and knowledge. Then, what is missing? Do we use the wrong definition of this concept? I have mentioned intellect and logic reasoning based on experience. But this alone can never provide us with a deeper wisdom of life. Experience the wisdom of the heart must be included if a person wants to mature towards a more balanced, and therefore less painful, life .

With such a description it is perhaps possible to close in on how we can understand the concept of wisdom. We can define it as a conscious ambition to link intellect with feeling and experience in order to generate harmony in ourselves and in relation to the world around us. Experience of self, of life and of living will in this way blend and become a single whole. Wisdom will emerge from the fully conscious endeavor to care for myself and for the world surrounding me, irrespective of my capability to recognize all its different parts. In this ambition I cannot deny or withhold any part of myself. Not my body, not my mind, not my soul, nor my spirit. All parts have to be recognised in order to create a harmonic unity. Out of these efforts a mature human being will eventually emerge.

Someone said that such a human being has to be a synthesis of engineer, poet and priest, being able to think logically, act practically and respond with her heart. She has to be anchored in a view of life that allows her to see and accept a greater wholeness, a coherence of all things. We can understand that such a human being leaves traces in this world which are quite different from traces left by them who only live for logic and intellect but deny the vast significance of emotions in our life. The same applies of course to those who only wallow in their emotions and belittle logic thought and well-reasoned action.

The world around us is constantly moving, often in unpredictable ways. So we cannot avoid to try practical approaches which may help us to keep our balance in this never ending motion. We can choose activity in hope to change things to our advantage. But we can also choose passivity trying to adapt to the situation. Which option we choose will often depend on the level of harmony or disharmony which for the moment acts as our inner reality. But the consequences of our actions, or non-actions, will of course always retroact on our own experience and interpretation of life. Which leads to the conclusion that conscious and active efforts to increase our knowledge of self, life and living, in order to create and retain balance and harmony, is not only the road to wisdom. It is wisdom.

Humans are able to aim for this because they have a gift which other animals seem to possess to a much lesser degree. And that gift is consciousness. A human being can observe herself, her thoughts, her emotions and her actions. She can observe her pain and her suffering and she can consciously strive for something else. This makes it possible for her to focus her will on changing her inner world, as well as the outer world.

This creates an important difference between us and all other animals. We have the possibility and the ability to change our attitudes and learn to act in ways that bring more happiness and harmony to ourselves and others. Like other mammals we are genetically programmed to react quickly and automatically on threats and dangers. These are ancient survival programs focusing on fight or flight and they take over our feelings and actions very quickly. But these survival reactions, which we normally are unaware of, rarely lead to more harmony in our lives. Instead they place us in unpleasant and embarassing mental and social situations which consume much of our energy. Experiencing this we try to excuse ourselves by projecting our feelings of guilt on to other persons and situations. This doesn’t improve the chances for harmony. Eventually we may became aware of our survival reflexes and try to get some influence over them. We do usually not wish to live with anxiety, frustration and anger but prefer a life based on balance and good feelings. This helps us to feel good, which in turn will help our benign capacities to be reflected in our actions.

This is the road to wisdom. It implies to live and let live, to understand that everything is connected and cannot be disassembled – and to be grateful for all this. Such a goal for our life breeds meaning and and grants purpose. I bestows worth and value to our-selves, increases our respect of others and allows us to experience love, happiness and peace more often. Wisdom is then to conduct my own life in such a manner that I in every moment can live it, and leave it, with atoning and gratitude. For those who want to approach such an attitude to life emotional insight and understanding is no less important than theoretic knowledge.

Becoming a true, whole and mature human being, who understands to live in harmony and peace, may appear as a totally impossible task to realize in an often difficult and burdensome life. We have heard of people who seemed to have reached this enviable state, but we have rarely met them personally. By contrast we are fed with lots of theories and concepts which claim to make us strong and perfect if we embrace every-thing these theories and practices demand. But this is usually not very easy if we want to keep some measure of inner freedom. Neither do those who enthusiastically offer their special doctrine on salvation always appear as noticeable examples of their message. That is an easy observation to make.

Nevertheless do leading world religions look upon the value and dignity of the human individual as an important part of their credo. Many great political ideologies and philosophical concepts do the same. But reflecting on how these doctrines have been used, division and fight is often the first thing we can see. This is the opposite to what we seek. Our basic need is not fight but peace, within us and in our world.

The word ”religion” has its root in the Latin word ”religio” which can be translated to ”reestablish”. The word ”yoga” in Sanskrit has about the same meaning. There really is a need to reestablish connections to the innermost, as well as to the utmost.  In the very materialistic and practicality-focused culture that we live in we need to reestablish harmonic relations to life, to death and to everything we interact with or are parts of, visible or invisible.

The teaching of great masters of old times represented mostly a doctrine of the heart which almost always gave practical clues to find healing, harmony and wholeness – not to mention holiness – in the middle of everyday life with all its worries and troubles. Messages of this kind will die from too heavy constructions of the logical mind. The gift of thought can certainly lift us up to higher human levels, but theories and logic concepts create truth only for the reasoning mind. And that leads to another question: ”What is truth?”. Is there an objective verifiable truth? The problem here is that no human being perceives or interpretes anything in exactly the same way as any other, irrespective of her wish to understand. ”Truth” will stand against ”truth”, disagreement increases and so we start to fight and defend the ”truth” we think we are familiar with. We may spend a long time keeping ourselves busy with an intellectual defence of our territory, alone or in groups, without taking one step closer towards the core of the teachings of the old masters. Neither do we come closer to wisdom.

So what can an ordinary human being do? A being whose life more often brings feelings of chaos than of harmony. A being longing for harmony and wholeness, for self-worth and dignity. The zen-poet Basho wrote once: ”Do not seek in the footprints of others. Seek what they sought”. This is practical action. It provides a possibility to rediscover the basis of one’s own life. Great human souls have always tried to show how we can strive to reach a trustworthy understanding of the fact that we ourselves, and everything we can see and experience, are parts of a greater wholeness. This wholeness is good just because it is wholeness. If we manage to mirror our life in this way, we will acquire a greater sense of harmony and wholeness.

In the history of humankind countless people have sought for keys to wisdom in order to construct a bridge between our longing for wholeness and harmony and the im-pression of chaos which the outer world so often seems to be a manifestation of. We are longing for this inner calm, for meaning and purpose in our lives. I do have this longing myself. As a physician I learned much about the functions of the body. This did not satisfy me in the long run. So I went on to seek knowledge in psychology and psychotherapi. This did not give me a trustworthy key to myself and life either. I searched in philosophical concepts and in spirituality based on esoteric grounds. I tried to understand the basics of three of our greatest religions. I have sought as well as I could and have tried to go as far as my abilities allowed me to reach. This has led me, like many others, to an insight. Our deepest longing and our searching is to a greater extend more based on the strange human ability of perceiving conscious emotional images and impressions in the depth of our mind, and being able to reflect on them. These inner perceptions may be vague and blurred but do, with more or less force, touch us and change how we look upon ourselves, our world and our life. But they can never be fully described in words.

Such deep inner contact with something which we can’t fully understand has in various cultures and times created systems of thoughts, concepts and programs which, seen on the surface, are not similar but on a deeper level don’t stand so very far from each other. Regardless of their names all of them seem to be based on some certainty that the biologic ”primitive” survival mechanisms of man can be reprogrammed in order to help us grow and mature and that this is possible by creating a harmonic interaction between body, mind and soul as well as between ourselves and the world around us, wether visible or invisible, material or transcendent. Philosophic and religious concepts have in this way and through all times contained rites, rituals and methods aimed at inner change and transformation. Rarely were they intended for meaningless excursions into feeling and fantasy. Instead they could be used as tools for better integration of self and life. Tools which could help the user pass from an agonizing life-experience over to ”life and more life”.

Practicing this inner work of change is in the religious context called mysticism. The word, and the idea it is based on, has in our current culture earned a negative reputation, perhaps because of the intellectual and logical difficulty to understand the innermost movements of the mind. Our inner reality is not easily accessible to statistics and objective evaluation. The only language that will allow communication between our deepest mind and our intellect are images and symbols that are connected to emotions and can only be presented with a persons own words and understanding. These are too blunt instruments for them who only believe in an objectively verifiable reality. Scientific analysis and clarification may be possible when it comes to functions of the brain but definitely not with the functions of the mind. Some humbleness and discretion is required when trying to observe and influence inner reality. That is why the old masters recommended to observe and train the mind only in secluded surroundings. They also meant that studying this in groups and only for a short time would be ineffective. Usually they conveyed their experience and knowledge, their wisdom, to one or very few disciples until the disciples became masters themselves. That objective scientific evaluations hardly can be made in such a context is self-evident. Nevertheless will the effects of this ancient kind of training be very clear to the student.

Our basic need of mental peace and peace in our world hasn’t decreased. Maybe it is even more pronounced than ever. We speak and debate a lot about creating and keeping peace between people and nations but seem to miss the fact that lack of peace in the outer world usually mirrors a lack of mental peace in individuals. So it would seem that there are always good reasons for knowledge of, and engagement in, methods aimed at personal development. This is true even for those methods which once were a part of religious mysticism and the traditions of our ancient forefathers. Much in this old material is of course outdated by now. Ways of thought and action based on the elders understanding of themselves and their world do not necessarily fit in with us and our world. But there is also much that we can use. A culture like ours, which for more than four centuries has payed homage to intellect and logic, has achieved unprecedented results when it comes to the material life of many people. But it has been sadly uninterested in knowledge of the innermost mechanisms of the human mind. And this has its repercussions on society and life in our time.

In the western world Sigmund Freud is recognized as the initiator of a new interest in the inner life of human individuals. Lots of new schools of thought have emerged in this field and with them a plentitude of methods and techniques aiming at develop-ment of the mind in order to achieve inner calm and harmony. Some of these schools strive for scientific status, others are closer to mysticism. But all of them claim that their goal is inner harmony and a more satisfying life-experience. Not all of them offer a clear-cut road to this. But if we do not choose any road we will always run the risk of going astray, no matter how much we engage in ideas and concepts. We have to be active and walk the road ourselves! The swedish poet Karin Boye wrote: ”There may be goal and purpose we can’t spoil – but it’s the road that justifies the toil”.