Background:
Brian O'Driscoll is a former Rugby player. In an interview, back in 2009 when asked to give his view on former Lions teammate and current England manager, Martin Johnson ahead of Ireland's Six Nations Championship match against England on 28 February he quoted
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to use it in a fruit salad"
As you can see this is an example to illustrate the fact that wisdom is superior to knowledge. And it seems wisdom comes with some experience. And for wisdom, to occur multiple sources of knowledge, needs to appear together. As the above example, although tomato is a fruit, it doesn't taste like some fruit. Hence, putting it in a fruit salad is a disaster. But this also can be a relative truth as there can be sweet tomatoes genetically engineered, which obviously can go in a fruit salad. So, we can assume, more knowledgeable a person or a system is, more wisdom it will have. Similarly, we can see this in our AIs nowadays. More and more time experimented with an idea, and more raw data it has, AI can come up with surprisingly new answers nowadays. So, the question remains what is wisdom exactly, and how can we improve this?
I can remember the time when I wrote How to program ourselves, I did not know exactly where this fits into the broad topic of mindfulness, wisdom and philosophy. Hence if you read the article now, there would be no links to any of the mentioned above. Now after so many articles, when the lattice of knowledge improves within myself, I can see where exactly it fits in. In the article I discuss why we cannot program our brain, simply because we do not know how the brain works, or the programming language of brain. However, we can assume it functions, same as an artificial neural network in current AI software, as we can see, as the time goes by and new knowledge accumulates, outputs it produces seems to be advanced in nature. Hence, as a conclusion I mentioned that only thing we can do is put in better and better inputs (or pieces of knowledge) hoping that somehow, the AI within us will improve. Now, imagine where to put the wisdom in here. We can put the wisdom as a upgrade in the software, which happens automatically when we put more and more data into the system. And this will generate even better outcomes over time. Just like AI over time.
What is wisdom?
I would say wisdom is a change in ourselves which alters way we look at the world. Which itself is dependent on correct knowledge that we put into our brain program.
When considering mindfulness practice wisdom is the ability to identify errors in our normal routine perceptions. As mindfulness feeds the brain with correct data, and wisdom helps to correct errors in our perception, these are helping each other to shine over time. Let me give an example. Let us look at the fruit salad again.
mindfulness <==> wisdom (helping each other)
Making a fruit salad.
Thats easy, you get some ripe fruit, different kinds of them, cut them into small pieces and put them into a bowel. Imagine you used two mangoes, oranges, apple, banana, pineapple and some other fruit. After making the fruit salad, If I asked you where the apple in it is, you may say, well, I can't show you the whole apple, it is in pieces now. If I ask you where the banana is the answer would be same. But even just before mixing them up. there was not fruit salad, but only pieces of fruit in different bowls. After mixing, suddenly it became the fruit salad. So, the fruit salad is not something which is really there, and it is just a name for the presentation of 'Mixed up pieces of fruit'. If you look carefully at the fact, you will see, everything which is there can be presented as a combination of the others. Hence, this is a fundamental error in our perception, a relative truth. And wisdom is the one which helps us to apply this in different scenarios.
What is wisdom? -in a fruit salad
Not only the fruit salad is a combination. If you have read the article how to eat a mango mindfully. You would see that the taste of the fruit salad is also not something in a fruit salad itself. It is a combination of the tongue and the perception mechanism. Similarly, color of the fruit salad is not something in the fruit salad inherently. This fact is obvious, as if we change an artificial light instead of sunlight, a fruit salad will appear either purple or green. If you close your eyes, or for a blind person, fruit salad is just a smell a feel and a taste. And everything which we earlier thought about a fruit salad seems to be disappearing, when we analyze them in our wisdom mind. So, once proper information given wisdom can start analyzing many more. And it will even analyze even itself. Hence, have the ability to generate new knowledge, by breaking illusion. These are not the only ways, you can see the truths in a fruit salad, really speaking, there is no depth to these relative truths. As each truth we observe can be broken with another argument. How many have you seen today?
So, after all, Brian O'Driscoll is true, there is wisdom is really there in a fruit salad. But that is also a relative truth, relative to this mind. How far will you go in wisdom path? Let's start our journey today.
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