HOW TO GROW WISE

To pose this topic assumes

• that we are not born wise yet may become wise
• that wisdom is a kind of maturation, a ripening arrived at through development over time and through experience
• that before one arrives at wisdom or grows wiser, one lacks wisdom and acts contrarily, which would be: foolishly, stupidly, ineptly, or in other ways that lead to unwanted ends.

Thus to act wisely or prudently entails foreseeing desirable ends and managing to achieve them as happily as possible for all concerned.

Thus wisdom, rather than implying the serene sagacity of passive contemplation, implies making decisions and taking actions that lead to good ends.

Serene contemplation of a problem may well bring insights that guide wise actions, but wisdom is finally practical, entails right choices, and produces valuable effects.

Which is why we hope and work to grow wiser.

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THE MOST ENDURING QUESTION

What could be a more enduring and essential question for a member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens to ask than how to grow wise?

Having already dubbed ourselves “doubly wise” (or conscious of our consciousness), we owe it to our self-esteem to develop that wisdom of which we assume we are capable, to investigate what we have meant and now mean by being wise or acting wisely, and to learn how to grow into the highest consciousness we can.

From The Wisdom of Solomon and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Shakespeare’s King Lear and Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, the minds of Westerners have canvassed this question of our potential for wisdom and our penchant for folly, of our seeking for the light of higher awareness and our stumbling blindly in the dark woods of error.

Furthermore, the esoteric insights of seers and sages in more ancient and exotic cultures around the globe are now more accessible to our examination than ever before. What, then, do shamans from Central Africa, South America, or Indonesia, as well as the wisdom traditions of India, Persia, China, and Japan have to show us to enhance our sagacity today?

We are “the people of the parenthesis,” says Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human, poised, she hopes, for a major breakthrough to a higher level of collective consciousness before the impending breakdown of our endangered ecosystems collapses our hopes of advancement into a wisdom culture capable of securing and sustaining the matrix of our civilization.

What is that Wisdom Culture we might inhabit that will allow illuminated intelligence to flourish on this planet, prevailing over the dim stupidities of unenlightened minds, too sleepy to see what it means to be awake?

That is the most important question I can think to ask.

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ENDURING QUESTIONS

Why are some questions “enduring” questions, while others are “settled” questions?

Is it that enduring questions can never be settled, or just haven’t yet been settled?

Are there some questions we can raise that are impossible to answer, yet we persist in trying, however futilely?

Are some questions durable because they are very hard, and no one has yet succeeded in cracking them to everyone’s satisfaction?

Or do enduring questions endure because, over time, their answers change? If this is so then perhaps enduring questions are questions to live with and grow into, as Rilke advised: “Live the questions.”

Or are they abiding and perennial questions that all inquisitive people encounter in due time and wrestle with, perhaps for all their lives, which makes their course of life not merely a course but a quest?

This last perspective is, I think, the most useful—that of abiding, perennial, recurrent questions fundamental to our concerns as human beings, concerns of various kinds: personal, societal, cultural, natural (scientific), cosmological, philosophical, spiritual, and sapiental (we being, after all, Homo sapiens sapiens).

Each person, each generation, gets to grow up to and into these kinds of questions, asked afresh and maybe answered anew, since each generation, standing on the shoulders of their fathers and mothers, sees from a different vantage and sees some things, perhaps, more clearly.

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THE TRANSCENDENT GENERATION

I grew up in a generation of Americans seeking ways to expand their consciousness beyond the constricting conventions of the materialistic, upwardly-mobile economic culture of the Post-Depression, Post-War era. We were seeking transcendence.

We were seeking something spiritually liberating: ways to get directly, transcendentally to a Higher Consciousness of holiness, wholeness, health and well-being. We aimed to be authentically High, even though we fell for sordid surrogates and just got loaded and blasted instead.

But some of our gurus proved genuine and inducted some of us to commune with our Higher Selves and to find spiritual salvation through techniques of meditation and mind control, opening us to wider realms of consciousness, grander vistas of awareness, awakenings to the numinous.

Now that the gates of Heaven stand ajar, more souls can take the way to the Eternal Now of mystical bliss and to direct knowledge of the spirit of wholeness, the Holy Spirit.

Transcendence beckons.

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THE JOURNEY HOME

Over and again, even though we catch repeated glimpses of the light that points our way to go, we lose the way, we miss the path, we wander into the ferocious forests, we fall asleep, and we forget our mission to come home. We are lost souls.

Where then is home? And what is there?

Home is joy and bliss and love and care.

Home is warmth and comfort, rest and respite, Heaven on Earth. It’s where we deeply yearn to be—
a place, a state, a way of being, in and beyond the world of turmoil and confusion, strife and contention, anger and frustration—a place of harmony and peace.

That’s the home we all long for, deep in our hearts and souls, even if we’ve never been there. That’s the habitat we’re made to inhabit, the condition we’re conditioned to, the life we’re meant to live—a life of blessed bliss.

See you there.

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THE FRONTIERS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Breaking through barriers and exploring new territories is a motive inherent to human beings above all other species, since we can be pioneers in so many different ways, given the multiplicity of our potentials, the foremost of which is thought.

Human mentality, flawed and limited though it is, still shines beyond our co-inhabitants on Earth in ways that let us change and develop self-consciously and intentionally as no other species can.

Possessing languages as the building blocks of our elaborate and variegated cultures, we have diversified the kinds of thought processes we can explore to explain ever more widely the Earth, the Cosmos, and even our own consciousness—which earns us our title as Homo sapiens sapiens, the introspective human, conscious of our own consciousness.

And human consciousness itself is our ultimate frontier, for after all our sophisticated technologies have probed the depths and intricacies of Earth and outer space, we still have inner space to voyage through. We still have the elusive mysteries of consciousness to unlock, perhaps to find (as some have long declared) that consciousness pervades and constitutes the Cosmos.

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THE BEST COSMOLOGY EVER

Somewhere out there is the best-ever story to tell us what’s really going on in the cosmos—The Story of Everything.

But since I don’t know where that story is out there, I’ll just look in here, in my mind, in my imagination, in some inner sanctum of my consciousness where just that story is hidden—hidden in plain sight, should I look aright to find it.

Though I have no text to investigate, I have a heart and soul to intimate.

So let my intimations begin . . .

It’s all connected. Nothing is loose or isolated. All of Being (and All is Being) is one endless web of intelligent energy, energy informed with consciousness, the Ultimate Brain of Infinite and Eternal Being.

We are not separate, we are not distinct, we exist in perfect communication with the entire cosmic Metaverse, even though, for purposes we’ve hidden from ourselves, we pretend that we're discrete particles, mere perceptual illusions.

We’re playing Hide-and-Seek with our True Selves, or Self itself, until the All-y-All-y-In-Come-Free when we take a time-out from Time to rejoin eternity, right here, right now.

. . . So much for now, and here.

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