“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
– Eleanor Roosevelt.
I spent many years looking for gurus, and it is a rare day someone doesn’t contact me and implore me to study the wisdom of one deep thinker or another – writers, philosophers, priests, poets, chiefs and shamans.
In the human and animal worlds, people are obsessed with the wisdom of others, convinced there is someone outside of themselves who holds the key to wisdom and understanding, who has the answers to life’s dilemmas.
In our political culture, this has become a poison, I think. Many people have stopped thinking at all for themselves and turning to the “left” or the “right,” dividing the spectrum of human understanding into two warring ideas.
I can’t recall one time when anyone has ever told me to depend instead upon the wisdom inside of me, or has ever told me that I have always had the answers I needed, that I was always wise about me. Tap your shoes three times, Dorothy, you could always go home.
I love gurus and quote them all the time. But in a different way. I am working at being my own guru now, my own priest and Chief, my own wise man. I am turning to the inside, not the outside, on the question of wisdom. I am learning to value it in myself. If you think about it, few people will ever tell you to do that. You are taught that you are not important, that you are not as wise and deep as others, you are too dumb to have the answers to your own life.
I think they need us to feel dumb, otherwise we would not spend so much money trying to buy wisdom.
I do not believe that you are dumb, or that I am. Your stories are important, as are mine. So is the wisdom often locked up inside of you. And me.
This idea has put me in conflict with many people I love and respect. People love their wise men and women, they are afraid to lose them. They want me to join the cult, too, to share the faith. I think sometimes that if I don’t embrace their gurus, they fear losing faith in them. Then, they will have to trust themselves.
That will never work for me. I think it is perhaps my destiny to be in conflict with people I love and respect, I believe it is how I keep my independence and identity. Some of us just belong on the outside. But this idea about wisdom is an important issue for me.
In the end, wisdom is truth, and truth is strength.
A dear friend is always urging me to follow the life advice of the wise men she loves and depends on, I once told her that perhaps she ought to be her own wise woman, and turn inward for the answers she seeks. She was angered by the suggestion, that is the dark side of dogma, it cuts us off from ourselves, it becomes dependent on the advice and wisdom of others. The gurus have become a barrier between us, an obstacle to our listening to one another.
After many years of searching, I decided a year or so ago to be my own guru, to search for the wisdom inside of me. Our culture sometimes seems bereft of wisdom – just watch cable news for a few minutes. We are led to believe that the true wisdom lies in cultures outside of ourselves – the Native-American culture, Asian practice, Chinese remedies, ancient texts. I suppose when our own cup is empty, we fill it up any way we can.
The fool thinks he is wise, wrote Shakespeare, but the wise man knows he is a fool.
Wisdom, after all, is not so complex that it can only live in the minds of others. It is, according to the dictionary, the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgement; the quality of being wise. Most of us qualify.
A good friend urged me to read the works of a prominent Native-American Chief, and I did. I could neither understand it fully or grasp it’s relevance to me. This is a culture I admire and respect, yet it is not a place I look for my truth and guidance. It is not my culture, the wise Chiefs are not my spiritual leaders.
I know people who spent a fortune and many hours pouring through training books to help them understand their dogs, they don’t know that they do understand their dogs, that no one will ever understand their animals more than the people who they depend on and live with. They are never told that, because that kind of wisdom free, and the wisdom business is big and growing.
I don’t read the growing library of wisdom and self-help books and videos people send me on Facebook and beg me so strongly to read. Inwardly, I sometimes bristle at the suggestion that I don’t have wisdom within me, or cannot find it.
Why do they think I need the wisdom of others, why do they assume I don’t have my own? I suppose when you grow up around people who make you feel stupid, and think you are stupid, the question of wisdom takes on a special significance.
In my own life, and after years of therapy and co-dependence, a gifted analyst , a disciple of Freud, finally broke through my own psychological wall of China and persuaded me to look inside of myself, for wisdom, not only outside. You are as wise about yourself as anyone, she said. Look inside, not outside. It is wonderful to read the ideas of others, she said, but until you unlock the wisdom inside of you, you will never find the answers you seek.
You will never know who you are, she said, unless you know yourself. She was right. I tell my friends: share all of the good ideas you find with me, but don’t tell me to always look outside of myself, and I will not tell you that. No one can make you feel inferior t without your consent.
I love walking in the deep woods, I have always felt the woods are a Cathedral for me, it is there that the wisdom inside of me rises to the surface, helps me to see. I think the trees help me. There is something so simple and sacred about a tree, yet trees also teach me about the wisdom inside of myself. Thomas Merton, one of my favorite gurus, wrote that a tree imitates God by being a tree, and I do understand what he meant.
No two trees are alike. Their individuality is no imperfection or flaw. Trees are a celebration of individual identity, the thing I seek the most in my life. Trees mirror the search for interior wisdom: The tree gives glory to life by spreading out its roots in earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. Every human being does the same.
That is the story of the wisdom inside of us. Each being, in his or her own individuality, experience, emotion and soul, with all of their own very individual characteristics and private and personal qualities, their own holy and inviolate identity, gives birth to wisdom by being precisely what he or she wants to be, here and now, in this life and in this world.
Within the structure of the tree are the leaves, each one with its own texture and pattern of veins and particular shape. These leaves speak to me of ideas, ideas feed off of the soul, as leaves feed from the tree.
For me, to be wise means to be myself, no more or no less. The search for wisdom is, to me, nothing more than finding out who I am, discovering my true self, standing my my search for love and truth. When we understand that no one has more wisdom to offer ourselves than we do, then we begin walking on the path to wisdom.
And if I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, or what others tell me I should be or must be. I will spend my life in darkness contradicting myself by being at the same thing something and nothing, a life that yearns to live but is already dead.