IS: Wisdom is Real
Upcoming events:
- Friday July 25: public IS Connection Call
- Sunday July 27: Community Hub Call 19.4 for members
- Tuesday July 29: Oasis special event: Experiments in Spiritual Spaceholding
Last week's newsletter was "The huge payoff from Noticing & Naming" and the Community Hub session was titled "Emergent Open Space".
I sit here tonight with a humming vibrating gravitational paradoxical sensation, like floating close to the tuning fork of the universe, like a giant subwoofer shaking your heart with the waves of bass, like a spiritual resonance that connects your body with something deeper. That energy won't go into written words — trying to compress it that way comes out sounding rather manic IMHO, looking at my and others' attempts.
But tonight that conducting wire from full-system integrity out to the tuning-fork-transmitter has something to express about wisdom, simply: Wisdom is real for humans. (And this connection leads me to finally make friends with the word.)
I hope I can find a useful expression, at least. So often the vibe of the thing gets lost in the translation attempt — and that's part of the difficulty that makes wisdom seem unreal! The feeling of epiphany dissolves in the reduction into our concrete practical ways of knowing, for ourselves even, let alone telling others.
What seems novel here? Well, there's a sense in which I've been regarding "wisdom" as just a fuzzy pointer to an arbitrary category of "personal knowledge that is especially hard to obtain" that has a fakeness that comes from substituting for "real" explanations. As in, "that person is so wise, no I can't tell you how exactly, because that's the nature of wisdom, but just trust me bro."
That kind of unverifiable "wisdom" still seems fake to me — and that's the key word I want to focus on, verifiable. I use the word "real" to point at being useful, useful outside of a personal context. Basically, your wisdom is real if it can be useful to me, and my wisdom is real if it can be used by you. But if the "wise gurus" of the "wisdom traditions" couldn't help anyone, then obviously that would be fake.
Given enough (still, I think) cultural experience of wisdom, intuitively we generally do believe that there's something like "wisdom" that can and has been transmitted in spiritual traditions and via wise elders for millennia. But the unverifiability seemingly baked into the concept has put me off using the word much. It just hasn't seemed very helpful if it's so subjective and personal that using it doesn't predict much for the person reading/hearing it.
But... this is the modernist mindset smuggling in the claim that "if it's not universal, it's not valid" and throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Oops! Then we can point ourselves back toward the contextual in the postmodern mindset, and realize that the metamodern integration points at a balance point of "wisdom is neither universal nor completely personal". Wisdom is contextual, and we can make object these contexts and work with the sweet spots.
How do I make friends with this wisdom thing, though? Why is this not just linguistic pedantry and intellectual wankery? Again I'll circle back around to verification. I have (today, and frequently enough that I recognize the sensation) a feel for the kind of "deep recognition" or "click" where some pattern finds a match (or "lands") through what my graduate school research calls "analogical reasoning" — though perhaps "intuition" is actually a more useful word to distinguish it from logical reasoning. Because, because this pattern-matching is very much the same as Vervaeke's "recursive relevance realization" as far as I can tell.
This means that the transmission of wisdom is not found in the cliche (the simplicity on the other side of complexity) nor in the propositional knowing of the complexity itself, but the participatory mapping of the complexity to the simplicity. And this is exactly what I intuit to be true with this same kind of analogical (structural-relational) intuition-reasoning.
To see the deep truth of a pattern (that is useful and applicable toward "right action") is to gain wisdom. To express a pattern in a way that can be relevance-verified by the receiver is wisdom transmission. To be attuned to one's wise knowing ability, to know when and how to trust one's pattern-sense (which also maps strongly to "IFS Self vs Part energy"), that meta-skill is the essence of "being" wise as a person.
Alright, I'm 700 words in and my intuition here re this newsletter issue is that it contains enough signal for some pattern-matching recognition by at least a few folks, and has the seeds of an excellent essay but also would need some unjumbling work to really make that essay sing. My deadline has arrived, so here we are.
There's an IS Connection Call tomorrow (Friday), see you there if you want to connect.
Cheers,
James