Encouragement: Wisdom — Creating Personal Meaning with All That Knowledge!

Wisdom occupies a significant percentage of religious, self-improvement, and ethical or moral dialogues. No, I don’t know even an approximate percentage.
Why is it so important? We all want to be smart, don’t we? Maybe, but being smart is not necessarily the same as being wise. Being smart often equates to knowing lots of facts. That is not wisdom. Many have said that wisdom is the correct use of knowledge. That, to me, is a vague, limiting, and relatively meaningless definition. People express wisdom, are considered wise, when they innovate and use old knowledge, collected knowledge, connected knowledge to create new knowledge.
Wisdom emanates from within us. It’s extremely personal. That’s not the way many think about wisdom. They like to read it from others and quote it, and I do, too. However, at that point it’s knowledge being collected. It becomes wisdom when we make connections to our own mind and soul through Heart-energy and create something useful and meaningful and that applies to our daily lives.
Of course, that implies that if we are going to convert knowledge to wisdom, spiritual awakening, coming to a knowledge of Heart, core Self, fronts that. Oh, I’m not wise enough, degreed enough to make such a statement? Okay, how does this quote grab you? What do you make of this bit of knowledge, or is it wisdom? “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” For Aristotle, that was wisdom. For us, it’s knowledge. How do you process that into wisdom?
In this day and age, knowledge proliferates. Wisdom, however, not so much. Our cognitive processes and emotions are ours, are human; we don’t add new ones and haven’t since our advent here. While individual expression varies, no new cognitive processes or emotions have been added to the repertoire of humanity.
Knowledge, though, is another issue, an exponential growth challenging our cognition and emotions. Every new encounter with knowledge requires us to either use it according to Heart-energy to create wisdom or let it become part of an Ego-collection that will probably end up confusing, discouraging, inflating, or deflating us emotionally. Socrates, years before Aristotle, said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” In a sense, he claims that the only universally applicable wisdom is that we know nothing — until we do something with the facts.
That leads to the point that my personal wisdom becomes my personal truth. Since true wisdom emanates from knowing Self, Heart, that means what is wisdom and truth for me may not be for others. You shouldn’t discount my wisdom, not should I discount yours. We need to live true to Heart.
Until we take knowledge and process it into wisdom, bit by bit, that knowledge is relatively worthless. Knowledge is clutter unless we allow Heart to instigate wonder, marvel, curiosity — enough that we personalize, internalize it. Remembering it to impress others, even our own Ego, means little. Albert Einstein seems to agree with me (I wish!): “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” Understanding is wisdom in this use.
Wisdom, then, is seen in action in daily life: applied knowledge. Everything else is trivia. Now, I’m pretty good at remembering things, and it’s fun. But that does not make me wise. If you knew me personally, you would probably be laughing in agreement with me right now. But since most people who read this don’t know me, allow me to provide some proof. I know a lot about health, the human body, physiology. I know what exercise does for us, what foods are most beneficial and give us the greatest nutrient density per gram. Do I exercise every day? Do I eat those best foods every day? Do I avoid all substances that might do cellular damage? No, I don’t.
But at least I know enough to know that. I know enough and, therefore, am wise enough to know we each have our own truth and wisdom and I do not know anything until I process it cognitively and emotionally through Heart-energy, impetus.
And I shall leave this here for tonight, because that idea leads me to consider controllers, serious, oligarchical types, those who think they know what is best and wise and wisdom for everyone else. They don’t. Such folks, whether religious, political, or ethical, are Ego-driven and probably Ego-self deceived.
In the meantime, blessings on becoming a wise soul. Do something with all that knowledge you hold in your amazing head and soul!