Why do we cover-up the ceaseless alternation of connection and estrangement? Because we do not like not knowing where we stand. We love mystery and authority. Precisely through the constancy of the feeling of love we assure ourselves of the stability of the underlying bond, a stability sure to be interrupted by death if by nothing else -- a realization of which we are only too aware. This emotional constancy, which is gilded with spiritual values and becomes the basis of spiritual love, functions just like the illusion of constant identity, which is also papered over by a false sense of personal strength and durance. It covers-up the unsettling shifts in our personality centers that linger in the penumbra of consciousness.
As with love, so too with wisdom. The phenomenology of it is less elevated than the philosophical arguments supporting it. Real wisdom has gain and loss in it, and terror and solitude. It fights against and stands opposed to mystery and authority: to ending in vague unknowability, to doing what the ancients or the holy texts or the clan leader or the priests or the government tell us to do. Real wisdom is full of sacrifice, repeated self-sacrifice of course, but principally the sacrifice of wisdom itself: of wisdom once gained to new wisdoms coming in. But the solace of having eternal beliefs is so crucial to us that we have to make them very general in order to persuade ourselves of their eternal and universal relevance. This makes our eternal wisdoms so general as to reduce their meaning, accuracy and usefulness in the individual case. As we live, we are thrown back upon ourselves to jettison our eternal wisdoms, to develop smaller transient wisdoms that rise and pass, Sufi fashion, impermanent in the world. We change and even our changings change, so we must leave behind us a trailing refuse of small wisdoms as the price we pay to be present at our turnings.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)