Knowledge can be Conveyed, but not Wisdom
How do you relate to the notion that anything that can be thought with thoughts and said with words is one-sided? Can you share a personal experience of a time you realized that the opposite of a truth was also just as true? What helps you value living wisdom over knowledge transfer?
Knowledge is what we gather from the outside. For Wisdom you have to go within.
Until my grandsons reached an age of reason I thought that I was giving them something useful, imparting wisdom. But now I realize that all my efforts were an attempt only to impart knowledge, which from me they discount. How can I help them to find wisdom? Silence is not the answer, because the roar of others is so loud, often with evil and banal content. Perhaps by exemplary conduct? Look at me, I can say. But will they see, hear, speak? Only in dialog does new truth, new insight emerge. And perhaps wisdom.
Reality in our minds is the result of a cognitive process, and when people talk about objective facts, they are only talking about the commonly accepted. The reality out there is so deep in its nature that we can dive for a lifetime in a minute particle of matter and still not now it in all its extension and complexity.
Knowledge in this respect is the road that we have covered in the process of discovering reality.
Wisdom is the result of travelling this road and accepting that the road never ends. The wiser discover this sooner, the foolish never realize.
Most of us come to grips with this "reality" as we age.
I write a lot and never cared to share it unless it was pried out of me by invitation or otherwise, mostly because as soon as it was written, it felt worthless to me. Sometimes I wrote just because I needed to get myself to the otherside of where I was and writing helped me get there. I am getting better at sharing what I write for pronouncing it worthless is also a judgment that I am ready to let go of. Let it flow - as is. One sided or Duality. Words or Silence in between words that renders them intelligible.
We live in a reality that is dualistic. Our thoughts and words are part of that dualistic reality and we think and talk in terms of either-or, this or that, which is one-sided. We don't live in a unitive reality in which we would think and talk wholistically. Multi-sided full reality is experienced wholistically, which is more than thought with thoughts and said with words. A wise man once told me that the opposite of a truth was also just as true, and I've been growing into that truth ever since. I've learned to look in the opposite direction, which is the other side or the rest of the whole, and when I do it opens up more of the truth to me. I also remind myself of Oscar Wilde's wisdom that nothing worth knowing can be taught. Wisdom is learned, and it's learned through lived experience, not through intellectual instruction. Knowing that helps me value wisdom through living over knowledge through cognitive transfer.
