“What is wisdom? What does it mean to be wise? This is a question we will speak to throughout this boook, but for now let us simply say that to be truly wise one has to understand experience. A high degree of transpersonal attainment is required to understand our relationship to the whole and our place in the world. Lacking that, most of us are conditioned by experience and do not understand it. At best, we have some sort of highly subjective external knowledge of it. Lost, confused and conflicted, we remain victims of the existential double break, removed from our Original Source and separate from the world. Our confusion expands to create the three primal dilemmas of identity, direction and meaning: we are doubtful as to who we are, where we are going, and, finally, the significance fo the things we perceive in the world”.
“Thus conventional understanding holds that wisdom implies three things: an identity, a decision and a meaning. These answer the questions Who am I? What am I doing and Where am I going?, and finally, What is out there, and does this or that particular aspect of social living have a meaning? We say a person is wise if he knows who he is, meaning that he has learned through experience that he is this or that collection of learned identities in the world. Second, we say a person makes a wise decision by choosing between this and that particular action. Finally, we say that a person is wise when he has formed a deep or meaningful concept that corresponds to a truth about some aspect of life or about life in general. But the fact that we accept these conventional, however deep, inclusive or universal they may be, only serves to reveal our insecurity as to who we are. what we are to do, and the significance of things in the world”.
“True Wisdom, or a deeper form of living intelligent, is achieved, however, not by attaining a social identity, deciding on a direction, or assigning meaning, but by our way of living and of understanding experience. It is a way of life, and as such requires training to develop an actual skill. In truth, Wisdom is meant to remedy these human predicaments, for philosophy in its original sense-the loving of wisdom, acted out through the process of ganing self-Knowledge-leads to the actual understanding of experience. Wisdom is a means of understanding oneself, so that we may not only live wisely, but be able to find the meaning in this human experience. The conventional identifiers of (social) identity, decision and significance can still be preserved; however, their true source lies in a deeper condition of the mind that can only be really understood by inquiring deeply into our “knowledge.”
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