Wisdom Perspective, and Love

You can be clever and intelligent, you can be shrewd and cunning, but you can never be wise until you are courageous to the point of being nearly fearless. You cannot be wise without courage because you will always shy away from looking honestly at life, and without an honest appreciation of what is real, you will never have anything truly meaningful to say. Martin Luther King Jr. was wise, Mahatma Gandhi was wise, and they were wise because they put no prize above their desire to see life as it is. In their pursuit of wisdom, they did not place the barriers so many of us do of personal safety or profit. Wisdom requires a transcendence of self, requires not seeing through your own eyes merely but through every possible set of eyes one can imagine: through the eyes of your family and friends, your neighbors, and strangers you pass on the street. You cannot restrict your viewpoint to those with whom you agree but also must seek to understand those who call themselves your enemy.

The courage that permits wisdom demands you relinquish all of your biases, which act as defenses. You must abandon not only self but your larger affiliations, which, after all, are merely larger sorts of self. You must attempt to see reality through God’s eyes. And in doing so, you must not limit God to what you believe him to be or what your larger group tells you God is. Again, you must see through the eyes of others. You must attempt to see God through the eyes of those who call him Allah, must see him through the eyes of those who call him Vishnu, those who do not call him by any name and yet seek him though they know it not.

You can only hope to achieve wisdom through humility. A man with one eye is a fool if he claims he has good perspective. A man with two eyes is a fool if he believes himself imparted with wisdom. Wisdom cannot begin to emerge until you have seen life from the perspective of a thousand eyes, from every corner of the globe, from various points of history, from various points along the economic ladder. A farmer has wisdom, but it is not Wisdom. A professor has wisdom, but if he has no dirt under his fingernails, it is not Wisdom.

Seek the wisdom of the young, who see life through unbiased eyes. Seek the wisdom of the old, who at last have seen through the many stages of life. Though their eyes be weak, their vision blurry, their knowledge of what to look for is unsurpassed.

Lastly, look through the eyes of animals. Perhaps they have more to tell us than any human. Certainly they are more free from human bias. Certainly they can teach us how to live in the moment. They can teach us too in their foibles, their inability to comprehend the things we do. Because though our brains may be more complex, our limitations—in the grand scale—are far closer to theirs than to the unlimited universe.

Look through the eyes of all of them and you might achieve the greatest wisdom achievable to man: love. After all, perhaps that’s what love is, the ability to see life through the eyes of another. When we love another, we seek to make them happy. To truly make another happy, we must first ask what it is that makes them happy. To do so, we must place ourselves in their situation, look through their eyes. It is only when we can do this that we can fully express love, only then will our actions be a blessing to those we love.

The greatest courage we can attain is to step out of our own little shells, to leave self and ego behind and float, selfless and vulnerable, through all the life we encounter. In leaving our home, we find everywhere to be home. In leaving ourselves, we find everybody and everything to be us.

Once wisdom is attained, courage is no longer required.