Wisdom

Wisdom is insight (looking inwards) not outsight (regarding the world). Wisdom is self-reliant, not dependant on authority or revelation. Opening yourself to wisdom is opening yourself to change. How to understand the difference between wisdom and knowledge.

Transcript

Hello, Everybody. Welcome back to mindfulness live. This is the start of a new week. We're in January 2022. And this week, We're talking about wisdom. Wisdom, As opposed to knowledge. It's a big deal. And it's, It's widely misunderstood. For example, We make this association, All people are wise. But sorry, No guarantee. It depends how they lived, Their wives or not, You know, Just get it by being old. So we're going to be looking at that, How do we live in a way that will grow our wisdom? Simple as that. So first of all, Make yourselves comfortable. Take a nice long breath and let it out. And if you want to take a couple more long deep breaths, Helps to get you in the zone. And now you're just feeling around inside your body, Inside yourself, Just to become familiar with how you're doing this morning. All this is, All that we're doing is simply checking in with ourselves. But we're doing it in a way which is particularly honest. Not trying to avoid discomfort. Not trying to please everybody, Not even trying to please ourselves. We're bringing a nice, Clear vision of ourselves and what's going on around us. And to understand what's going on around us, We start by looking inside. You're looking at the receiving mechanism, At your senses and your feelings and your thoughts. And they all together determine your experience, How they feel, How things work for you. So staying with the breath and allowing the breath to come and go by itself. So no forcing and no forcing it to relax either. You just want to see how the breath comes, How it goes and how that reflects your state of mind. However you feel right now, We're not trying to change it or fix it. So feeling your chest and feeling the force in your chest that enables you to breathe. And it involves the ability of your body to continue breathing in and out, Carefully regulating what comes in and what goes out, Keeping up momentum, Keeping you alive and never asking, How should I do this? How to breathe, How to keep balance. So there we begin to see the wisdom of the body. Your body knows how to breathe, How to regulate itself more or less. It can get out of balance, On the whole it manages by itself and lulls us into a state of complacency, As if everything is always all right, All the time, Or at least it should be. So you're wary of this, Watching out for this mistake of letting down your guard and staying with the breath, Always aware of the uncertainty of how the next breath will happen. Will it be smooth or rough, Deep or shallow? You don't know. You never really know. Staying with the breath. And taking three more breaths, Open your eyes. So we're talking about wisdom, Cultivating wisdom and how to do it. And in my research this morning, I was looking up, I found all sorts of definitions of wisdom, But this is the one that I like the best. Acting with knowledge while doubting what one does. Sounds tricky right? Well it is. So how do you trust yourself and doubt yourself at the same time? That's what it comes down to. Okay. What you're basically trusting is your ability to deal with your decisions. So if you make a bad decision, You're trusting your ability to handle it, To correct it. Well first of all, Of course, To see it. And that sort of trust doesn't come easy. It comes from experience. You have to know that yes, I am good in these situations or you know, Perhaps no, I'm not good in this situation. This is one I have to really watch out for. So wisdom begins with self-knowledge. It's very simple. Knowing yourself. Which is a very loaded phrase to know yourself. What does that mean? I know for me, It caused me all sorts of doubt and confusion for many years. It's eventually why I ran off to join a monastery because I thought it was so, So difficult and so hidden that I would need all this esoteric secret practice in order to get in touch with it. But in fact, Knowing yourself, As you know, Is very simple. It's almost horribly simple. Knowing yourself comes down to being in touch with what's going on from minute to minute. That's what it is. Okay. Knowing yourself. You know, When you say, Oh, You know, You know, John Lennon. Okay. And we all sort of know, Yeah, I know who John Lennon is. So what we're thinking of is the story. We I know who is to what is. So who are you? Do you know you? Well, I know my story, But do I know me in that intimate way? That takes practice. And it's not just a matter of practice until you get it. And then, You know, It's not that sort of knowledge. It's got to keep doing it because you are changing. Who you are is changing every minute, Every, Every time you see yourself, That knowledge informs you and causes you to change. So it's always compounding. And opening yourself to wisdom is opening yourself to change. That's really what it comes down to. So the first question which people tend to ask about this, What's the difference in wisdom and knowledge? Well, Knowledge is just sort of obvious. It's not that difficult. Knowledge is simply having access to certain facts. You know, I know that John Lennon was the founder of the Beatles. Okay. So what is that wisdom? Not in any particular way at all? No. So how do we judge if a piece of knowledge is wisdom? You know what? I don't know. It's intuitive. I can't give you a standard answer to that. You know as you go along, And as I've said before, And this can be a little frustrating, Sometimes we don't really understand ourselves or what we've done until afterwards, Until we have a chance to let a little time pass, To look back on it. That looking back already is a sort of objectivity that we don't have in that moment when we're acting, When we're reacting. So giving ourselves time, Looking back, And becoming familiar with our behavior in certain ways so that the next time it happens we may not have to look back with quite the same intensity that we're familiar now with that sort of behavior. So this is now, In addition to the knowledge, Wisdom is coming in to help it out. Okay. So wisdom is the ability to predict the outcome of your behavior as well, Based on experience. Now you can do that based on logic or based on belief. If I'm a good boy I'll go to heaven. That's not really wisdom, That's a belief, It's completely different. Okay. I'm hoping that that's so, I'm investing myself in that, And I'm holding my breath and I'm sort of trying to push all the negatives out of the way. So it's exactly the opposite really of mindfulness and wisdom. Mindfulness and wisdom go hand in hand because they're both about opening yourself to experience and to reality. So it's that opening which makes the difference. Just getting old, Going through experience. If you're shoveling it aside, If you're trying to ignore the pain and if you're just trying to focus on what's good in your life and to multiply that, And you're not paying attention to how things went wrong, Why they went wrong, What's actually going on in your mind, What part you played in a particular situation of joy or misery, Then you're not really developing wisdom at all. You're living on hope and faith. And we've spoken about hope and faith just last week, And clearly they're necessary, But you've got to watch how you use them. You can't just rely completely on hope and faith, Especially faith in outside things or people or deities. So the trust that you need in yourself is the trust that I might screw this up but I'll figure it out. Okay, And I won't do it twice. I'll do it, I'll learn, And the next time it'll be different. I hope so anyway. I'm going to try, Knowing at the same time that I might not keep my promise to myself, That I might, You know, Slip, I might behave in exactly the same way. Who? I might even behave worse. It's happened before. So this is it. It's like wisdom comes out of the daring to trust and distrust yourself at the same time. You know what you're trusting, And you know what you're distrusting. You're trusting your ability to figure it out if you go wrong, And you're distrusting the fact that, Oh, I must be right. This is the way to do it. I know I'm right. This is what it says in the book, The book that I follow, The beliefs that I follow say it's like this, Therefore. . . So that's, That is faith and hope which is completely different. So what we're actually doing, Let's look at what we're actually doing. We're getting in touch with the day-to-day running of the body. Okay. So if you were a building inspector, You'd be going into a building and looking at the temperature controls, You'd be looking at the plumbing, The electricity, All that stuff, You'd be checking it out, And you'd go in on Monday and everything checks out fine, And the next Monday you go in, You're not going to assume that everything's fine. You're going to hope that everything's fine, But you're going to assume that something might have changed. Some wire might have come loose, Some pipe might have burst. So you've got to check your building and you've got to look through it all again. That's what we're doing. Think of your body as a building that's continually trying to fall down, Continually trying to keep it up. It's sort of actually what we do. And laugh at it. You want to laugh at this stuff. I mean, Mindfulness should be fun. When you get it right, It is fun. When it's that perfect balance of being relaxed and being aware and sort of distrusting yourself and trusting yourself and knowing that this is good, This is the way to live, This is what I'm doing. It's not exactly the most glorious, Spectacular experience of all. I'm just sitting here watching my breath. But this is good. It's wholesome and it's nourishing. So from that you get a sense of peace and a sense of calm and a sense of ease. So I'm going to say something now which you probably won't like, But I want you to remember it. Mindfulness is easy. When you find it easy, You're doing it right. When you find it the easiest, You're doing it the best. So when mindfulness is a struggle, Look for what you're doing and look what you want to let go of in order to find that ease again. What is it that's troubling you? What is it that's hanging you down? This, What you discover from that is not the wisdom. The wisdom is the willingness and the habit, For want of a better word, Of doing that. The tendency to look, To second guess, To check up, To not take things at face value, To know that the world is not the way it looks. Okay. Make yourselves comfortable. Take a nice breath. Let go. That was very heartwarming. So stay in with your breath. And feeling the breath at the very top of your lungs, In your throat, The shallowest part of the breath. Sometimes when we're nervous, When we're tense, We do all our breathing right up here. And it's okay, Keeps you alive, But it doesn't deliver, You know. Now take a nice, Slow, Long, Deep breath, Coming all the way down through your chest and stomach, Into your abdomen, Reaching down all the way, As far as you can go, And letting it out slowly. So the difference between that shallow breath and this deep breath, Is attention. When you bring your attention to the breath, When you breathe mindfully, When you gain so much more, You experience so much more, You know, And you learn more, And it feels good. You can never lose by taking a deep conscious breath, You can only gain. And the contrast between that shallow breath and that deep breath tells you everything you need to know about yourself right now. How much did you let go? How much better do you feel? How much more focused? Aware? So staying with the breath, Feeling your chest rise and fall, The breath come and go. Your mind paying attention, Perhaps relaxed, At peace, But most importantly awake, Alert, And watching out for wishful thinking. Oh I feel great, I must feel great because I'm meditating, I'm going to be fine, I'll be all right, Nothing's really wrong, This tightness in my stomach, I can massage that away. Look out for all those thoughts that fix you and tell you what you want to hear. And look at why you're telling yourself that. Why do you need to fix anything? Why can't you just see what is? Accept reality. When you can't accept reality, When you have to spin it, Try and put a good face on it, Try and repair it, Then you know you're close to something important, Insight, Wisdom, You're almost there, You just have to break through that obstacle, That objection, That spin, And see what is. See what hurts, See what scares you, See what makes you doubt, What makes you afraid, Defensive. All of these triggers are at the very point where wisdom potentially grows. It's at those moments of crisis and stress that mindfulness can help you break through. Not react. Not expect and not judge. Wisdom is unsentimental. It's clear. It's clear. It sees through illusions, Through pretense, Shows you your breath, Which shows you your state of stress or relaxation, Which shows you how you're engaging with things, How you're doing, And it also suggests what you need to do, Or more likely what you need to stop doing, Like hanging on to illusions and judging, And trying to see things the way you want them to be. We all do it. We're all looking for confirmation, Validation, And we need it. And yet that need can take us down treacherous pathways of self-doubt, Peacekeeping, All those things that hold us back, Prevent us from being ourselves. And taking three more breaths, Open your eyes.

Reviews

Wonderful deep dive into an exploration of what wisdom is, and how to cultivate it, with ease. TY🙏🏽