The Voice of Wisdom

It’s interesting to notice the buzz words in the circles we walk. An essential part of my practice is to become intimate with the language I use. I like to explore how words respond and resonate in myself and other people. Lately I’ve been hanging out with the feeling, sentiment, expression, and presence of the word wisdom. Recently I asked here:

What is your experience when in the presence of wisdom?
How do you recognize wisdom’s presence?

Thomas:

Wisdom always expands my felt sense… The felt sense of life emerging. We know we are in the presence of wisdom when our whole being experiences an intensification of Life. I experience wisdom as a deep, quiet, powerful, slow-moving current. Wisdom is ever humble.

Chris:

It goes right through me, and activates some energetic source of engagement. When I am in the presence of wisdom I can feel it animate my mind and spirit and most importantly, I can feel teachings arising within me. It’s amazing really.”

Mike:

I recognize wisdom both in my head and in my heart. Two or more seemingly very different things weaved into a new “third” thing.

I’ve been noticing how and when wisdom arises in groups. It percolates up from the cauldron of energy swirming together… A voice gives rise to words or other types of expression that burst within my being as an opening of Yes!, reverberating with a sense of gratitude, joy and awe. Possibilities immediately expand, space is freed, light twinkles.

What fascinates me in this wisdom exploration is how unpredictable it is when and where wisdom will show up. I am always learning from others, new information informing my being through interacting and engaging. There are some people whom I regularly experience as sharing wisdom; I honor these teachers, grateful for the flow of learning that pours forth in our interactions. With some others I don’t often find myself in a state of deep learning, but when wisdom shows up through them I feel a sense of reverence in my expanding understanding. Dissonant interactions often offer me jewels of awareness if I simply pay attention. I absolutely LOVE how nuggets of wisdom can fall from anywhere in the sky.

And I am especially coming to appreciate the unpredictability of wisdom surfacing in groups and the need for each person to honor the wisdom that is present in each other person. It is only from this place of deep mutual respect and willingness to accept whatever arises that collective wisdom will really find its voice.

Empathy, Evolution and Social Systems

I am reading an article by Evan Thompson, Empathy and Consciousness, found in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. A few passages have gripped my curiosity and invited my attention to wander off with their content:

“According to John Morgan Allman (1999), it was the formation of the extended family as a social support structure for the nurturing of slowly developing offspring that drove the evolution of large brains in apes and humans: ‘the development of the brain to the level of complexity we enjoy– and that makes our lives so rich– depended on the establishment of the human family as a social and reproductive unit’ (Allman, 1999, p.2).”

Inquiries that continue to surface in circles in which I participate are: What is the evolutionary edge of social systems? How are we evolving? How do we effectively and consciously engage in collective leadership?

And the phrase that keeps resurfacing for me in response to these questions: A collective consciously birthing itself for the greatest good.

Circling back to Thompson and Allman’s thoughts, I think about the deliberate and intentional attention and energy being channeled into the establishment of collective groups as conscious and creative social and reproductive units. The immediate human family and its reproductive capacities are extending to include increasingly conscious local and global collaborates of individuals and groups connected to one another through expanding means of technology and communication. As I see it, as we are returning to and embracing the wisdom of villages and tribes that depend upon one another for survival, integrating that wisdom, and becoming conscious of its place in connecting fragmented and isolated configurations of communities and groups. (Obviously my words are brief and leaving out a lot here… feel free to fill in any holes that are screaming at you!)

From my perspective, the success of collectives coming to consciously birth their experience is completely contingent upon the strength of interpersonal and relational bonds within the system. Just as an individual’s awareness of their own subjectivity is directly correlated with the depth and span of their influence for good, so also is the collective’s to the degree it commits itself to a practice of awareness of its own intersubjective dynamic. Becoming “self-aware” as a collective necessitates first coming to know one another – coming into comfort and expertise in the vulnerable terrain of authentically showing up with one another, and exploring the unknown and uncharted pathways of our intersubjectivity.

Returning to Thompson:

The intersubjective openness of consciousness and empathy are the preconditions for our experience of inhabiting a common, intersubjective, spatial world. Empathy… provides a viewpoint in which one’s centre of orientation becomes one among others…

And Thompson quotes Dan Zahavi as saying:

“Even if consciousness could turn its attention so completely toward itself that everything else were excluded, it would not escape the confrontation with Otherness”(Zahavi, 1999, p.125).

As I conclude this exercise in wandering through the forest of curiosity and intellectual language, the yearning that remains with me finds expression in these closing words:

May we continue to embrace the confrontation and connection with Other
that gives rise to expanding expressions of togetherness and oneness.