Saturday, March 26, 2016

Wisdom is the Full Learning Cycle

Wisdom has something to do with making a sound judgment.


We are moving to the deep, deep digital dynamic, hopefully, we are also moving from a knowledge economy to the digital age with the abundance of wisdom slowly and steadily. If knowledge is concrete, intelligence is contextual, and then wisdom is abstract, like the light to guide us through. What is the enriched content of wisdom?


Wisdom is the full learning cycle: Learning, unlearning and relearning. Wisdom is not knowledge; one cannot have wisdom without knowledge, but one cannot substitute wisdom for knowledge as well. More often, learning knowledge is focused on one track, knowing more and more about less and less; but wisdom is multidimensional, open and circular. There is a hidden and growing imbalance in the human mind that results from the contrasting nature of the progressing intellect and stagnant instincts. If knowledge is gained from learning, insight is captured from re-learning, and then wisdom is a full set of learning, unlearning and relearning. Wisdom is a full awareness of the situation and applying it right. Wisdom mainly consists of having experience and yet knowing when to discard that experience, when you come across new knowledge,  new frontiers of existing knowledge. Plus an open mind. Wisdom is a function of knowing what you don't know and keeps curiosity to know more. Knowledge tends to be linear, but wisdom is multidimensional.


Wisdom is wider and intelligence is narrow: Wisdom comes through the result of life experience or knowledge transcendence. Knowledge helps you figure out “HOW” - the practices, and wisdom guides you through “WHY” - the principles. Wisdom is the ultimate human intelligence -timeless and wordless, to unify and harmonize. Wisdom is something gained through experience, people around, self-seeking, environment, etc. Intelligence has to do with the ability to learn and retain knowledge, wisdom has to do with the ability to apply what has been learned. Wisdom overtakes intelligence. Knowledge pertains to knowing and to intelligence while wisdom has to do with the soundness of judgment. Many people do the wrong things, not because of ignorance, but because of poor judgment. It is imperative to identify what causes manifestly intelligent people so frequently make such poor decisions. Wisdom is to be understood within this context, wisdom is the ability to learn from every experience, to be able to gather small bits of information from all sources, and apply that to current or future challenges.


The ultimate aim of learning knowledge is to gain wisdom: There is known known, known unknown and unknown unknown. To know what we don’t know is knowledge. We become intelligent or informative by knowing what we don’t know, and then we capture insight from the static knowledge and apply it to varying disciplines. Every bit of knowledge we acquire should either increase our confidence or better our judgment or then do both. We have limited bandwidth and hence choose to pursue knowledge that will benefit us in some way - an eminently logical choice. However, being knowledgeable shouldn’t become an obstacle to stop you from continuous learning, unlearning and relearning; or make your brain too saturated to be free or flexible; or only boost your ego, not grow your character. Ultimately the knowledge and insight can be abstracted into human wisdom which can be shared broadly and timelessly, also makes one humble enough to admit known unknown and unknown unknown.

Wisdom is about independent thinking and creativity; putting aside all the trained thoughts, systems, and boxes, let the open possibility come to connect naturally. Mastering what instincts are, how they function and how they interact with human intellect and jointly command everything we do would enable one to consciously manage this subconscious mental trend, defuse this constant and subtle inner conflict to free their intelligence from the tight grip of their instincts and allow their intelligence to become fully functional and fruitful, and transcendent into wisdom.

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