Francis Vaughn and Roger Walsh, “Technology of Transcendence,” in Inner Knowing, ed. Helen Palmer. New York: Tarcher, 1998, p.
The sixth quality cultivated by the technology of transcendence is wisdom, which is something significantly more than knowledge. Whereas knowledge is something we have, wisdom is something we become. Developing it requires self-transformation. This transformation is fostered by opening defenselessly to the reality of “things as they are,” including the enormous extent of suffering in the world. In the words of the psalms, this is the recognition that we are “as dust . . . our lives are but toil and trouble, they are soon gone, they come to an end like a sigh’ (Psalm 90); “what man can live and never see death?” (Psalm 89)
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A woman I knew who taught children to write poetry once said to me, “I didn’t teach them by what I knew, I taught them by how I am.” That is the essence of this kind of wisdom, a kind of quiet confidence, not in what one has achieved by doing, but in what one has become by following one’s own intuition of what is real and important. But it is not the kind of confidence that allows one to feel above it all, looking down. “Opening defenselessly to the reality of things as they are, including the enormous extent of suffering in the world” can be very painful. I would like to be in control, to feel better than other people, but in this wisdom of opening defenselessly, I am more likely to feel like a fool. The suffering to which I have to open includes my own suffering.
This reading reminds me of the mandalas that Tibetan monks make from sand, painstakingly creating beautiful art for stretches at a time. Then when it's finished, they ceremoniously dump the sandy creation into a body of water, calling to mind the impermanence of all things, including ourselves.
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