Wisdom for Dummies

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For much of my young adult life, I nurtured a private hope of actually bumping into one of these magical figures. The way I imagined it, I would be going about my business on a day like any other when I would suddenly find myself face to face with him. Somehow we would get to talking, and this man would explain things--things I had always wanted and needed to know, but that no one had ever offered to explain before.

The longer I waited to bump into this figure, the more important he grew. He became the absent center, the piece missing from the puzzle. Once I found him, and once he had taught me the things I really needed to know, my life, formerly so frustrating, formless, and vague, would begin to make sense at last.

I became, at about age 17, a full-fledged member of the cult of the popular wisdom manual--the slim, straight-talking paperback whose pages offered to tell me how to attain true, lasting escape from ordinary adulthood and all the humdrum disappointments that go along with it.

And I tried, in my haphazard teenage manner, to apply this material to my daily life. During study period, I practiced "sitting in oblivion," the ancient Taoist practice of allowing one's mind to become empty so that only the pure white static of the universe would flow through it, like snow on a television screen after the programs have left the air. Doing the dishes after dinner, I would ponder Alan Watts' admonitions, borrowed from the Taoists and Zen masters and slightly reformulated, to be the dishes--to surrender to the revolutionary assertion that, at bottom, dish and self were one and the same.

To my surprise and disappointment, however, I never did actually change into one of those larger, wiser beings. I simply grew into someone with an insatiable appetite for more such books. Like many others, I became a consumer of wisdom recipes rather than an eater of the genuine, transformative foods that those recipes described with such eloquence. In love with a genre that promised to change me into an out-of-the-ordinary adult, I ended up being so sidetracked by that promise that it took me an extra-long time to grow into an ordinary one.

Why was this? Was it the fault of the books I read, of my way of reading them, or perhaps of some mysterious third factor?

I have come to suspect that my botched encounter with wisdom was part of a larger trend--the same trend I see at work today. I also suspect that the key problem created by our contemporary wisdom glut centers around risk and sacrifice: what we are prepared to give to wisdom in order to receive something back from it. All the circumcisions and subincisions, the enforced starvation and exhaustion, the piercings and tattooing, the blood and broken teeth that accompanied so many primitive wisdom-getting rituals are nothing if not an illustration of the fact that if we are to approach wisdom effectively, it is we who must tailor ourselves to it, and not the other way around. It is that call to unqualified investment--commitment to the full course of the wisdom-getting project--that has been lost in the modern wisdom smorgasbord.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print