Awakening To Wisdom: Practical Steps Towards Spiritual Growth

By JC Bretto

Where do we find wisdom? In great books? In difficult ascetic practice? In some cases, yes. But wisdom lies too in a heightened awareness of ourselves, of others and of the world around us. This book offers "practical steps to spiritual growth", essays and exercise to lead you, not away from the world, but deeper into it and yourself.

Says J. C. Bretto, "This book is not a book of wisdom; that is, it is not a book of sayings, of declarations, of definitive statements. It is a book of questions, of investigations, of attempts. It is meant, not to teach you, but to take you down roads where you may teach yourself."

Six chapters - "Letting Go", "Who You Are", "Shadows", "Welcome to the Present", "Opening to Others" and "Act" - invite you to look more closely at yourself and the world and people around you and how you interact with them. To awake, step by step, thought by thought, the capacity for wisdom and spiritual growth within yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JC Bretto
• Release date: Mar 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458062871

Book preview

Wisdom

What is wisdom? And do we need it?

It's easy to see wisdom as an imposing, oversized concept, the province of old men with long gray beards; beautiful enough in theory, yet irrelevant to most of us and, worse yet, difficult. The truly wise meditate, don't they, and read large, preferably ancient, books? They are thinkers, not doers, and often alone. Why, too, would the young need wisdom, when their lives are so centered on action?

The image is not completely invalid. After all, if wisdom comes with experience, perhaps those who have lived longer have more of it. And certainly over the millenniums, many of those who have gained it have put down their thoughts in works which today seem ancient and impenetrable (the more impenetrable, the better, some would say). It might be argued too that for the young, action, and the mistakes one inevitably makes in taking it, is itself a kind of text, a way of learning what others have set down in books.

At the same time, bear in mind that Zen, for instance, that somber, difficult approach to self-knowledge, was practiced by the samurai, consummate men of action. Many martial arts incorporate paradoxes – Weakness is strength, etc. – which are the soul of wisdom. Even the hardy knights of medieval times lived in a religious context where prayer, meditation and readings of Biblical books like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were an integral part of their lives.

Wisdom is in one sense simply finding lessons in Life. To find such lessons, one has to both live and to ponder living. To use a musical analogy, a musician who plays for years will begin to understand something about structure that someone who has studied musical theory may know far sooner, but if the latter has not sat down and played as well, they will lack a fundamental understanding which the performing musician has unconsciously acquired.

Wisdom then results from a kind of dialogue between action and pondering action. A famous saying in Zen has it that Those who know, do not say; those who say, do not know. In practice, this is something of an over-simplification – there would be no teaching if those who knew did not also, in some manner, say – but this does highlight the fact that one can have all the words of the world's greatest wisdom at one's fingertips and yet in fact have no wisdom at all. The greatest wisdom becomes bloated rhetoric if it has no impact on practice and a person who has not learned wisdom, at least in part, from their own experience arguably has not learned it at all.

Wisdom can indeed come from beautiful, harmonious words; it can also come from painful, awkward errors. We must be brave enough to make, and to get past, these errors if we want to earn the kind of wisdom that is not just in our minds and our mouths, but in our bones and our skins.

Which still leaves open the question: why do we need wisdom?

To live Life better? This seems as good a reason as any. To have more understanding of lived moments, to discard pointless and petty worries, to find what is truly important to us (to us personally, not necessarily to the world) so that we can move towards it with more grace and assurance and waste less time on side trips and distractions; to profit – whatever our beliefs about an afterlife or the origin of the one we live now – from the little time we have here in the best way possible; in a more altruistic sense, to make the world better, not only for ourselves, but for those around us. Still, in practice, most human behavior is driven by self-interest and few people will do such work unless they understand it in some way to be better for their own well-being.

What this often means is taking the larger view; that is, to see the mountains and oceans of Life at least as often as we see the sand and muck and twigs and other details which distract us along the way. Few people can – or even want to – abandon all the messy details of daily life. There are lessons and even beauties in even the most tawdry trivia of immediate experience. Real world wisdom – as opposed to the wisdom of the ascetic or the saint – is not a matter of abandoning or avoiding these, any more than playing scales or studying theory is a matter, for a musician, of abandoning the simple joy of performance. It is rather a matter of being able to pull back from time to time and see the larger shapes that underlay the quotidian so that when we return to the fray we understand more cleraly what is in fact on our chosen road and what is a minor distraction.

Recently some archaeologists found a way to use lasers to cut through all the thick cover of the jungle and find the outlines of old settlements and roads. Suddenly from the sky all these were obvious and visible. But the archaeologists then needed to slog through that same jungle to see what they had located from above.

That is not a bad metaphor for wisdom: finding a way to take the larger view, a view that cuts through the clutter, before returning to that very clutter, knowing now where the landmarks are.

And its practical uses? They are numerous. You've lost a job and you're having trouble finding another. It feels like you never will. You can't sleep, you toss and turn. It's the first time you've lost a job and it feels like the end of the world. Or.... You've lost a few jobs over the years (these days, that's a reality for a lot of people). But now you know you'll find another one, in fact, ultimately, a better one. Maybe, too, you've learned to save more money now, so that these crises are less worrisome. Etc. No, it's no fun being out of work, but it's not a devastating crisis either.

That's not deep. It's not a lesson recited in sonorous tones. But it's wisdom. Simple daily wisdom.

Think of still more painful crises, such as breaking up with someone or even losing them tragically. These can feel even more final. Yet, if you have survived any such experience, you probably (hopefully) know that Life went on, even became joyous again. And, perhaps too, that you became a larger person for having lived through these hard moments. Kahlil Gibran wrote: The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. For some, these are merely pretty words; for someone whose sorrow has expanded their own sense of