Knowledge or Wisdom?

A few years ago I made a new years resolution to involve my passions in my professional work. Not here to share what happened with that aim of mine; instead, as I delved deeper into this mystery that we call life and into what a prominent Greek philosopher Seneca said, “Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die”, I recognised that what we consider as our strengths may be our own shortcomings. How? As we age into maturity, social demands on us require repetitions of certain patterns which we later identified as our “strengths” while the least repeated patterns are relegated in our esteem of ourselves. The patterns can comprise feelings, emotions, thoughts and actions. A simple example is as we become adults, our work becomes less and less playful. However, when we are young, our time involves more play than work. Regardless of what causes this shift or should I say schism, why can’t we imagine playful work?

This introduced me to the process of individuation as theorised by eminent psychologist Carl Jung. And it resonated with me very strongly that we as a society are living life wrong. In childhood, we are close to our true nature. Nearly everything we do is instinctual without false pretence to satisfy a social demand. This fact alone makes me think at times that the wisdom of life is already embedded in us but somehow we are led astray by a path of social progression which expects us to comply and oblige in ways that are oblivious to our true needs. We get entrapped into false knowledge that we are progressing and learning to live. Instead, we are, somehow, acquiring the knowledge to simply fit into moulds that society has made for us for smooth business.

I would admit that this false knowledge enables us to meet our base needs and desires. However, it later becomes a big hurdle to connect with our true selves. What we think of ourselves is, in fact, how others think of us. Again, I would admit that this constitutes a component of self-awareness but when it comes at the cost of disconnection from our truest nature, we are the ones to lose. Regardless of how ignored needs or desires stir trouble for our ego in terms of Jungian psychology, they should be accepted as part of ourselves.

Jung places a huge emphasis on living wholly by making the unconscious conscious. To strive for the whole being, we need to respond in ways that involve integrated multiplicity. We ought to respond to life events and circumstances wholly, for instance, not simply logically but emotionally as well and trust me we are always doing that unconsciously. The wisdom lies in creating windows of opportunities in our daily living where we complement the rational with the irrational, the executive with the creative, and the spiritual with the material. Let’s create virtuous cycles of growth.

Abandoning one side of personality in favour of the other is not creating strengths but creating weaknesses. Not always striving for the middle path is wise. For example, days of strenuous exercise are followed by interludes of rest. That’s avoiding extremes. But always sticking to an easy ambition means missing out on opportunities for growth.

This brings me to the realisation that how precious restorative periods of time are in one’s life. We are free to do as we please. We have our freedom. We can have our bone and gnaw at it too, as Thoreau had said. But how more precious our busyness would be if it were restorative? How much more meaningful our bonding would have been if it catered to our individuality?

The heart of the matter is we, all, have pondered on this matter time and again and yet sometimes we feel we are in a rut. We come back again and again to the same point and yet it eludes us. Maybe it’s Nature’s way to invite us to think deeply again and again and enthusiastically about it. How best to live our lives?

And there is no shortage of suggestions in this era of WWW and the Internet. What we need is a little playfulness with a little discipline, a little spontaneity with a little planning, a little extra-ordinary with a little mundane.