Wisdom, Incorporated

What is Wisdom?

Wisdom isn’t an idea. It isn’t a doctrine or a belief. It isn’t a theory or an ideology calling for our consent.

            Wisdom isn’t a product to be bought or sold. You can’t possess it or hold it.

            Philosophy, religion, and art point to it, but they cannot contain it.

            Wisdom lies outside all ideological boundaries and conceptual frameworks. It can never be conveyed with words or teachings. Yet words and teachings point the way.

Like water, wisdom is impossible to hold. Like air it is impossible to see. And like water and air, we can’t live without it.

            How can something so elusive be so essential?

            The good news is this – wisdom is not mysterious. It is not distant, arcane, or esoteric. It is nearer to us than the blood in our veins.

            Wisdom is simple as sunrise and rich as rain.

Wisdom is a way of being in the world.

Wisdom belongs to the body, to the wholeness of what we are. It rolls through our bones like a seismic wave. It brightens our sight from the inside. It lifts our feet when the path is true. We do not gain wisdom, learn wisdom, or understand wisdom – we embody wisdom. We incorporate it into the very fiber of our being. We become wisdom.

Wisdom is what we are when we finally learn how to let go of our illusions.

The tree of wisdom has many fruits – humility, simplicity, love, willingness, and freedom. One taste is proof enough that it is real.

Parting the Curtain

Immersion in the world’s wisdom traditions takes you on a surprising trajectory. What at first seemed convoluted and contrived becomes simple and innocent. What at first seemed dry and doctrinaire becomes limber and poetic. Rules and creeds give way to the immediacy of wordless knowing. More and more you come out of thinking and into being. You finally start to see through the curtain and realize that wisdom is vast, formless, and unlike ordinary knowledge.

Knowledge is full of concepts, analogies, propositions, and finite rational sequences. Wisdom is empty and infinite.

Knowledge is the weather. Wisdom is the sky.

Closing the Gap

If wisdom is the content-free awareness of how to live well, then how do we gain wisdom? How can we close the gap between our messy, chaotic life and the promise wisdom offers? How do we move out of these clouds of confusion, suffering, and dysfunction and into the clearing of joy, freedom, and wellness? The journey begins and ends in humility.

We must first admit our ignorance. We must first admit that all of our ideas about everything are second-hand. After a great house cleaning of belief, superstition, unexamined assumptions, and self-serving delusions we stand empty handed at the edge of a great wilderness. We respect the past and the well-intentioned teachers we’ve known. But we start fresh.

We start walking.

And if we are willing enough the entire universe conspires in our favor. The right books, the right people, and the right situations show up just when we need them most. They shine light on the tender shoots of our budding insights, nurture our dawning realizations, encourage our virtues, and embolden our convictions. Sometimes this divine assistance manifests as loss and destruction. Old forms are torn asunder to release the energy and raw materials necessary for the miracles ahead.

Wisdom knows a lot about letting go. Soon enough, we do too. As our old understandings (which were just opinions anyway) turn to ash, we are freed to see anew. The world opens up to us as a beautiful, grace-filled place of abundance and healing. Even our sorrow slips into its rightful place in the grand unfolding. We stop craving pleasure and distraction. It is enough to breathe, and be a part of it all. How could we ask for more? We come to gradually know, not in our minds, but in our bones, that we are O.K., and that this is enough.

Wisdom Incorporated

We had it wrong all along. We mistakenly believed that wisdom was a kind of knowledge, a cadre of secrets that would solve our riddles and cure our confusions. We can be forgiven for this naiveté. How can the unwise know what wisdom is?

            Through direct experience we come to know the simple truth – wisdom is not advice, or rules, or someone else’s idea of the good life. Wisdom is a lived realization that defies expression. We can sing about it, dance about it, point at it with painting, film, poetry, and music. But whatever “it” is, it eludes our conceptual grasp. We cannot think wisdom, we can only be wisdom.

            When we incorporate wisdom, that is, hold it in our corporeal form, we embody it and feel its thrum in all of our energy systems – the wisdom of digestion, the wisdom of perception, the wisdom of cognition, the wisdom of emotion, the wisdom of intuition, the wisdom of loving-kindness, the wisdom of willingness, the wisdom of pain, the wisdom of healing, the wisdom of action, the wisdom of reciprocity – in short, the wisdom of our inter-being. For we are not alone. Our being is everything’s being. We exist in a continuum of causation that entwines all consciousness, matter, and energy – what the theistic religions call God. But no matter what your faith-family of origin or current belief system, the fruit of wisdom is the same – a well-lived life.

            Wisdom doesn’t mean you have all the answers. But you move more graciously through the questions. Wisdom doesn’t set you free from the pain of being alive. But it teaches you that suffering is optional. Wisdom doesn’t set you above anyone else, in fact, it destroys all hierarchies. Wisdom doesn’t make you rich. But it shifts your understanding of wealth and success. Wisdom doesn’t make you clever and powerful. But it sharpens your mastery in the midst of a deep acceptance of the messiness of life.

            Letting go of the notion that wisdom is a thing to be coveted and grasped, we are free to move into its influence, the way a sailboat finds favorable wind when it heads in the right direction. Loose hand on the tiller, eyes on the horizon, and joy in the heart – this is the wisdom incorporated.        

The Nature of Fear

Fear is good. It keeps us alive. It keeps us from falling off cliffs, touching fire and kissing rattlesnakes. But fear is also our greatest liability. It keeps us from taking the risks necessary to develop our unrealized potential. If we let it, fear has the power to keep us from becoming who we really are. Fear is a thief that steals our joy.

The daily work of every thinking man and woman is to practice careful discernment in the assessment of their fear. A life of pointless risk-taking is dangerous and foolish while a life devoted to the avoidance of all risk is doomed to frustration, stagnation and incompletion.  Fear is neither good nor evil; it is a message from our psyche that must be read with great care. Cultivating the skill to interpret fear accurately is an essential task in the creation of the well-lived and fully-realized life. When fear arises, ask yourself these seven questions.

1. If I do this frightening thing, will it bring real quality and beauty into my life?

2. If I do this frightening thing, will it move me further toward the fullest expression of my innate potentialities?

3. Am I respecting my health and life, and the health and life of others?

4. Is this fear really just a misguided attempt to protect my fragile and limiting self-image?

5. Is this apprehension and anxiety simply the death-throes of my outmoded ways of acting, thinking and being in the world?

6. If I took these risks and let go of my old ways of acting, thinking and being in the world, would I be closer to my highest good?

7. Is the larger purpose of my life the realization of my highest good as opposed to being comfortable?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your fear is telling you something important. You should probably listen. It’s difficult to reach your highest potential if you are maimed or dead, and it’s difficult to manifest your fullest happiness if your actions harm others. But if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, then you should override your fear and take action. And by the way, if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, you are implicitly answering yes to all of them.

Helpful research from the field of psychology shows that our thinking is stuck in two important and debilitating ways. The first is negative thinking. We tend to exaggerate the scale and frequency of negative situations and minimize or overlook positive situations or circumstances. Through tens of thousands of years of evolution, human consciousness has grown highly adept at scanning the horizon, both literally and figuratively, for problems and potential disasters. The individual who most rapidly perceives the impending problem – the crouching Saber toothed tiger, the lethally poisonous snake, the toxic forest mushroom – has a far better chance of survival and passing on his genes. Natural selection rewards caution.

If negative thinking isn’t successfully challenged, the mistaken notion that fearful living equals wisdom takes hold, hindering the necessary risk required in any process of growth or advancement.

The second prevalent mode of consciousness that seems to have grown beyond the bounds of its usefulness is confirmation bias. We exaggerate evidence that supports our preconceived positions and ignore or denigrate evidence that challenges our preconceived positions. The positive aspect of confirmation bias is that in enables us to bond tightly with an in-group that shares our perspective, a dynamic that helps us form close families and tribes. The negative aspect of confirmation bias is that it locks us into a worldview in which accurate and wide-ranging critical thinking is no longer possible. Our fears become dogma – unquestionable truths closed to inquiry and investigation.  

When you put negative thinking and confirmation bias together, you have a serious problem. All manner of evils begin to take shape – racism, xenophobia, nationalism, bigotry, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. In other words, fear becomes the idol before which all must kneel. To move beyond fear means to correct the imbalance and empirical inaccuracy of negative thinking and confirmation bias. An honest assessment of the environment shows that the universe is not a hostile, dangerous field of impending disasters. Yes there are dangers, but the fact remains that we are supported and nourished continually by an uninterrupted flow of abundance. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the light and beauty and love of the world and its myriad creatures hold us aloft in an unbreakable web of being. This isn’t some hippie dream. It’s a measurable fact.

And when we begin to awaken from the illusion of individual and tribal superiority, our natural humility is restored and we begin to recognize that our ideologies and arguments are not universally authoritative – there are other, equally valid ways of understanding the complexities before us and there are other, equally viable ways of organizing society, determining justice and supporting what is best in us. In other words, we move from fearful self-obsession to loving-kindness. A broad and generous smile replaces the narrow, guarded squint through which we had been viewing the world.

And when we begin to view the world differently, the world changes. As the Talmud reminds us, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

Breaking free of the debilitating effects of fear is an inside job.

Maybe the first step is to recognize that uncertainty is a necessary precondition for all growth and emergence. How could a seed know what lay above the surface of the soil? Yet it pushes upward anyway. How could a mother know what lay ahead for her and her baby? But she gives birth anyway. How could a guitar player know if this solo is going to be great or an awkward failure? But he throws himself into it with finesse, skill and abandon anyway, trusting the truth that there is no beauty without risk. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an essential component of any creative process, especially the creation of a magnificent life.

It was early in the year 1933. America was in the abyss of the Great Depression and genuine hardship was tearing apart the fabric of this once great nation. In the opening lines of his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the immortal words, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Ten million Americans heard his voice crackling through their radios, and many more read his words in the next morning’s paper. His simple truth struck a chord and sparked a shift in consciousness. The radical notion that fear itself was the enemy – not external conditions no matter how dire – was a message that brought hope into a hopeless world. How powerful it is to consider the possibility that fear, an important ally when carefully and critically managed, can become the most crippling hindrance.  

The Five Lies

There are five lies that stand between you and the life you deserve. They block your view, stall your progress and steal your resolve. Don’t bother looking for anyone else to blame. You are their author, their advocate, and their most loyal defender. You need them. They help you stay stuck in the familiar world of incompletion, frustration and unrealized dreams – the only world you’ve ever known. It’s hard to leave home. But it’s time.

Lie # 1: I’m not ready.

You’re not a kid anymore. You’ve been around the block. You have a dream and a clue. You’ve written lists, searched the web and talked to people – lots of people. You’ve even paid for a few workshops and have pages and pages of notes to show for it. Yet you’re stuck. It’s so difficult to know when the groundwork is laid and it’s time to fly.  It’s so easy to imagine that you’re not ready yet, that you can’t possibly begin until everything’s perfect – whatever that is. This is when a trusted friend or life coach can be invaluable. By bringing a fresh pair of eyes and an objective perspective a mentor can help free you from this paralyzing lie. The truth is you are ready, and you’ve been ready for a while.  What you need now is trust. You’ve mistaken fear for caution. As Emerson said, “Once you make a decision the universe conspires to make it happen.” In your bones you know this is true – you’ve felt it many times before. It’s imbedded in your own experience and verified by your own authority. Make a decision – say, I’m ready – and it will be true. Then watch everything fall into place.

Lie # 2: I’m just not good enough to compete at the highest levels.

Our heroes inspire us. They also scare the crap out of us. When you finally meet your hero at a conference or a book signing or backstage or in a crowded elevator you hardly know what to say even though you’ve rehearsed this moment for years. You babble incoherently, painfully aware that ten minutes from now, long after they’re gone, the perfect words will appear. We mistakenly believe that our heroes are higher order beings, mystically endowed with superpowers that will forever elude us. Not true. When they started out they felt exactly like you feel right now – full of doubt and scared to death. But they took one step, and then another, and soon, with the passage of time, they were well on their way. The trick is to stop comparing yourself to anyone else, especially your heroes. You’re right – you could never do what they do. And they could never do what you do either. And that’s that. Stop thinking about them. Take in the inspiration but leave behind the intimidation. The reason they became so great and powerful is because they were fierce and uncompromising in the pursuit of their own personal greatness. They stopped comparing themselves to anyone else. They didn’t say, Where’s the path so that I may follow. They said, The only path is the one behind me, formed by the footsteps of my own artful meandering.

Lie # 3: If I fail, it means I’m a worthless fraud.

The ego mind has a curious knack for exaggerating our weaknesses and overlooking our strengths. This is easily remedied. Come out of your ego mind and see with the unbiased eyes of pure awareness. In this light our so-called failures are simply missteps corrected long ago and eclipsed by all the right moves we’ve made since then. It’s really true that there are no mistakes – every turn in the road revealed new wonders and cultivated new strengths and connections that are now indispensable – we can’t imagine our lives without them. Why will your next so-called mistake be any different? Gifts come in many forms. Accept them all.

Perfectionism is ego attachment plain and simple. Learn to play the fool. When you’re laughing, you’re learning. Mistakes are what growth looks like. Don’t be defined by your mistakes – define them. 

Lie # 4: There’s no more room at the top.

The world is full of self-appointed prophets of doom with bulging briefcases and flashy websites full of evidence that your plan isn’t going to work. And you believe them. In fact, you’ve internalized and blended their voices into one – your very own inner prophet of doom – the master of excuses, the prince of procrastination and the minister of fear. But the truth is far simpler than all of that. The truth is that this thing called the future is unformed, fluid and highly malleable, forged by the mettle of intention and action, shaped by the vision of visionaries and dreamers who have the guts to love what they love and detractors be damned. Henry David Thoreau said it best. “If one advances confidently in the direction of their dreams, and endeavors to live the life they have imagined, they will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Leave the common hours to the prophets of doom. Dare to speak a deeper truth. Of course there is room at the top. But it’s even crazier than that. There’s no such thing as “the top.” There are just excellent people doing masterful work all over the place, and being rewarded for it. Bring your gifts, without fear and without apology. Never doubt that they will be willingly received by a world hungry for what is brought forth in love.

Lie # 5: Success isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

This is perhaps the most insidious lie of all. We delight in the foibles of the rich and famous. We mock the successful and ascribe nefarious motives to the most gifted and generous of change-agents. We fear wealth because we crave it so pathologically and unconsciously. Our animosity toward the rich is little more than a childish projection of our own self-loathing. We misread and misunderstand success. Success has nothing to do with wealth and power. Success is mastery in our given craft and the well-being that arises when we learn to live authentically. When we follow our bliss, hone our skills and perfect our capacity to give the world what it needs, when we become a powerful agent of the healing of the world, the world will in turn fulfill our every need. Giving and receiving are two names for one circle. When you chase money from the consciousness of scarcity, wealth eludes you. When in your humility you learn how to serve, abundance rains down. This is an unimpeachable law. Stop thinking of success or wealth as a goal, a salve for your self-inflicted wounds. Instead, realize that abundance is the natural state of the universe, and by opening up the circuits you become a conduit for the circulation of love-energy. That’s how we keep what we give away. The fearful never understand this paradox. But you do.

The five lies stand between you and your fullest realization. The longing you feel is the longing of the universe to manifest itself in you, through you and as you. It’s not personal, it’s universal.  The universe is trying to do something amazing. Let it. Stop believing in these five lies. They have no power over you anymore. You’re free to be who you really are. That’s what your soul is asking for. Get out of your own way.

The Question of Happiness

[A version of this article originally appeared in the May/June 2013 edition of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.]

Self-Actualization, Spiritual Enlightenment and Maslow’s

Hierarchy of Needs 

Sixty years ago, Abraham Maslow broke ground in the field of psychology when his “Hierarchy of Needs” suggested that there was a stepwise approach to realizing well-being. But does it conflict with the spiritual perspective that the “kingdom of heaven” is already within us?

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news.  The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be!  How much you can love!  What you can accomplish!  And what your potential is! 

~ Anne Frank

“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential – these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.”

 ~ Confucius

Psychologist Abraham Maslow wanted to know what happiness was.  Why do some people have it and others don’t? 

For Maslow, happiness is not a simple response to a favorable arrangement of external conditions.  Instead, it is innate and emerges as a by-product of a fully realized life.  Like Aristotle and Confucius before him, Maslow argued that our latent happiness occurs only when we cultivate and manifest our highest potential.  He wrapped his findings into a pyramid-shaped package known as Maslow’s hierarchy. 

            Maslow’s central claim is that human beings have five fundamental sets of needs stacked into a hierarchy.  We all begin at the bottom and work our way up – each tier of needs taking its turn in dominating our thoughts.  Many spiritual traditions teach that we become what we think about – that our thoughts construct our lives.  It’s only natural then that until each set of needs is satisfied, it’s difficult or impossible to think about anything else.  The needs of our current tier eclipse all other concerns.  Only when a set of needs is met does our attention turn to the next stage of development.   

At the base of the pyramid are the physiological needs required for survival – air, water, food, sex and sleep.  These needs form the foundation of the hierarchy. 

When these needs are met, the second stage of needs arise.  Here the focus shifts to security – keeping ourselves and our families safe. 

            With the first two sets of needs satisfied, a longing for deep and meaningful relationships emerges becoming the focus of our lives.  Our thoughts turn to love and intimacy as we cultivate authentic relationships with our friends, life partners and families. 

            The fourth need is healthy self-esteem.  Here we long to thrive in the world of achievement and accomplishment.  Our self confidence expands as our skills increase.  Proficiency blossoms into mastery.  We enjoy the honor and recognition of our peers taking our rightful place in a mutually supportive community. 

With the first four needs satisfied, the fifth and final need arises, the need for self-actualization.  Despite the high quality of our lives there is unfinished business.  Our deepest and most individually specific potentialities remain unrealized.  Here we heed the call to give expression to our innate excellence, performing the work that is uniquely ours to do.  We become self-authorizing, no longer beholden to the crowd for approval or praise.  We freely pursue the good and become autonomous moral agents, guided by deeply held principles, not group norms or the dictates of traditional authority.  We, in a word, become happy.  For Maslow, self-actualization is our highest purpose, the culmination of all the earlier stages of our development. 

Every human being carries within them this deep need for self-actualization.  Until this need is met, we will always feel vaguely restless, dissatisfied and incomplete.   As the Afghani saying goes, “What a shame, to die like a pomegranate with all of one’s seeds still locked up inside.” 

            By placing these needs in a hierarchy, Maslow makes physiological and social well-being a necessary precondition for self-actualization.  But is that true?  Might it be possible to achieve self-actualization while basic survival, security or love needs remain unsatisfied? 

             If, as many spiritual traditions claim, the kingdom of heaven is within us, what difference does it make if we’re rich or poor, loved or lonely, skillful or incompetent?  Are we not to seek first the kingdom and all else will be given to us?  Do we not find many examples of people in poverty or other hardships who nevertheless possess a remarkable measure of spiritual maturity?  If we put self-realization first, would that not re-order and re-cast all of our other so-called needs?

Two competing portraits emerge.  First, it seems reasonable to assert, with Maslow, that basic survival comes before the cultivation of our higher sensibilities.  If you have no air to breath or water to drink, it’s doubtful that spiritual growth would be your first order of business.  And until fundamental safety and security are assured, the pursuit of self-actualization seems a luxury we can ill afford.

Yet there are times when the indomitable human spirit shines brightest in times of crisis.  In the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps, Victor Frankl noted that the prisoners who chose to find meaning did.  Through sheer will power human beings can transcend the inhumanity of their conditions.

Still, it seems cavalier to claim from the safety and comfort of our middle class existence that anyone, anywhere, no matter the conditions of their lives, can realize self-actualization.  Sold into a brothel at the age of nine, becoming a heroin addict at the age of twelve and contracting AIDS at fourteen – it’s absurdly cruel to suggest that none of this impedes the fulfillment of a young girl’s potential.

In the abstract we may argue that material things don’t matter – a position especially easy to take when we already possess them.  But few would argue that the basic requirements of life are inconsequential to human happiness.  Seeds may be storehouses of great potential, but without fertile soil and other external conditions conducive to cultivation, can fruition occur?  And herein lays the confusion.  By self-actualization Maslow did not mean spiritual enlightenment or awakening – he meant the realization of one’s own specific potential.  One cannot become a masterful concert pianist without access to a piano.  One cannot become a writer of profoundly important world literature if one has not had the privilege of an education.  And neither of those things is possible in a war-torn ghetto where families are ripped apart and violent death dogs your every step.

So I guess it just depends on what you mean by happiness.  For Maslow happiness is a by-product of self-actualization and self-actualization is not possible without certain specific environmental and psychological preconditions.  For others happiness is defined as a spiritual condition unmoored from the external world. 

As in the following Zen story, our spiritual traditions tend to emphasize this second perspective.

  Master Ryokan lived alone in a tiny hut.  One night while he was away a thief snuck into the hut only to discover that there was nothing in it worth stealing.  Ryokan returned home and caught the thief warming his hands by the fire.

            “You have come such a long way to visit me,” said Ryokan, “and you should not return empty handed.  Here, please take my clothes as a gift.”

            The thief looked bewildered, took the clothes and slunk away.

            Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. 

            “Poor fellow,” he mused, “I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

            In this Buddhist portrait of enlightened consciousness we certainly recognize a highly evolved being.  As in the teachings of Jesus, Ryokan’s residency in the kingdom of heaven is not dependent on the satiation of lower order needs.   Still, at its core, Buddhist spirituality seeks sublimation into oneness, not the actualization of one’s individual uniqueness.  We can imagine Ryokan enlightened, but we cannot imagine him fulfilled in the western sense.  Self-actualization requires a self.  With the eradication of the ego, there is no one left to fulfill.

            It turns out that self-actualization and spiritual enlightenment are two different goals with distinct pathways and methodologies.  Self-actualization requires the realization of our uniquely individual potentialities while spiritual enlightenment transcends individuality and draws us into a unitive state with the divine. 

            If by happiness we mean our own individual happiness, then Maslow offers a compelling path.  If by happiness we mean transcendence of the separate self and immersion into the One, then the world and its woes offer little resistance – in fact our hardships might even be a catalyst hastening our spiritual ascendency.   

Afterword: The Human Potential Movement

Maslow’s hierarchy is best understood in the context of the human potential movement, a label given to the work of a disparate group of twentieth century psychologists, writers and teachers like Aldous Huxley, Carl Rogers, Victor Frankl, Alan Watts, Michael Murphy, Werner Erhard, Jean Houston and Anthony Robbins, among others. 

In the seventies Erhard was best known as the founder of EST, (Erhard Seminars Training), an influential educational platform with ideological links to Scientology that now goes by the name Landmark Education. 

Murphy founded the Esalen Institute, a Big Sur bastion of the consciousness cognoscenti, hosting seminars by the likes of Joseph Campbell, Carlos Castaneda and Deepak Chopra.  Another frequent presence at Esalen was Abraham Maslow. 

Like other leaders of the human potential movement, Erhard and Murphy both worked hard to synthesize the insights of eastern spirituality and western psychology into a new understanding of humanity’s capacity to steer its own way out of ignorance and toward liberation.  Given the very different portraits of human nature in eastern and western philosophy, such a synthesis may not be possible.  In the west we are forever separate entities in relationship with a larger reality.  In the east we are that larger reality and our perceived individuality is one of the many illusions to be overcome. 

Still, what aligns Maslow with these other luminaries is their assertion that human beings, both collectively and individually, possess a largely untapped ability to lift themselves out of ignorance and claim their birthright as fully realized beings.  This portrait of conscious evolution – from the pursuit of basic needs to self-actualization – puts Maslow’s hierarchy front and center in the human potential movement.