I have been hotly challenged on several philosophical forums by young whippersnappers regarding my claim that only age and experience brings on wisdom.
The immature challengers have fallen into the pseudo-intellectual trap of thinking that natural or book-learned smarts, in mechanics or the arts, embellished by a modicum of practical experience, equates with the holistic view of life and the ability to penetrate its enigmas that I am referring to when I talk about the wisdom that comes with sagehood.
I have been at pains to inform them that all they know only forms the fount from which wisdom is distilled; that only when the promise of death becomes a constant factor in the psyche, does the summation of all their life experiences bring on the enlightenment of true wisdom.
They have cried in response the age does not guarantee wisdom, which is true.
Naturally, there are degrees of wisdom attained by the elderly, but no natural smarts or any amount of book learning or practical experience can even begin to equate with the inner realizations that death brings to the table of even the most uneducated psyche.
Mercifully, for those elderly who have led ineffectual lives and have not learned to come to terms with themselves, senility sets in with age and screens them from dealing with the frightful aspect of the grim-reaper.
The blinders of religious Faiths, who’s artificial Scriptures promise an after-life, have served to save many from confronting the finality of death head on. Though Faith may comfort the heart of the devout when one is in the cold Shadow, it does not keep enlightening the enquiring mind, and so religious dogma severely narrows the macroscopic view that the Cosmos really offers.
For those old-timers who manage to keep one eye open and embrace Death as a learned companion, the enlightening boon of sagehood arrives to keep the surprise of new discoveries eternally alive.
True sages are Seers with clear hindsight. Summation of the past places them squarely in the present, which in turns gives them endless visions of future possibilities.
Only when Time and Space are fused as a singularity, is wisdom evident.
Accepting the reality of one’s mortality completes the beginning with the naturally following ending.
Only when we get closer to living at the edge of the end do we, sans addictions, more realistically envision what is to be our complete picture.
Then, if we are lucky, we may become terrified enough to start evaluating our entire portrait with respect to meaning … and we thereby begin to become wise.
The trick with wisdom is not to become too wise too soon.
I have lifted the above objections from another forum in which the same topic is being discussed. Hopefully the answer gives more clarification
Of course everybody is born with a degree of wisdomness and keeps improving upon it as they grow up. Most people do not realize that we all experience seven distinct stages of wisdom as we age.
Infancy 0 - 4years
Childhood 4 - 11 years
Puberty 11 - 14 years
Teenhood 14 - 21 years
Stewardship 21 - 42 years
Mastership 42 - 63 years
7 Sagehood. 63 - 84 years.
None opf those time periods are set in stone of course, but they give a reasonably close approximation of graduated development. In normal circumstances every graduation leads to increasing states of self and social awareness.
What is vitally important and the criteria I use by which to value wisdom, is that each stage of growth is closely linked to our perceptions of the relativity of the Space/Time consortium.
An infant lives in a naive state of relativity. Everything exists in the moment.
After weaning, from about four years onwards, we begin to increasingly artificialize the here and now as we start to factor past and future states of expectation into our consciousness. This sense of separation from the here and now cycles outwards and peaks at menopause before it begins to shrink back again.
Ideally, in sagehood, a state of sagacious perception of the relativity of space and time becomes part of the consciousness. (ie, all distances are very far if you are old and tired and times passes quickly if you are having fun) At extreme age, Past; Present and Future begin to accelerate the fuse towards a singularity, which is experienced during the Death Moment, when the here and now is starkly present and fully loaded with everthing that ever happened and everything that ever will. If the psyche has freed itself of guilt, this timeless moment is the ultimate state of wisdom (enlightebment if you will) and is the fruit of human evolution.
How these individual stages of conscious development came about is out-lined in my book on Psyche-Genetics, which directly correlates each individual stage to correspomnding Ages of learning. ie. Infancy equates with the naivette of the Stone Age, childhood with the agricultural measurements of the Bronze Age, and so on.
Hopefull the above makes you realize that i am not trying to be bigotted about the distinctions between age and youth, but am very conscious of the differences and how important the development of each stage is in arriving at the final moment of realization.
It seems to me that most people fail in that they reach a certain point where they believe they have acquired wisdom already, and remain content in their ways.
The path to sagehood, it would seem, only comes with the added realization that the acquisition of wisdom is a process only ending when we are six feet deep, if we allow it.
The sage who has learned absolute wisdom cannot communicate it because its purity would be lost in translation. The monk, guru or hermit who claims knowledge of what is inifinte can, therefore, only keep silent or tell us that what he knows is ineffable.
A child prodigy, such as Mozart, can outdistance my senile longings for creative expression.
Wisdom comes in all sizes and in all ages. Widom is communicable!!! Death is an unbearable prognosis only for those who doubt their right to exist as they are in the first place.
Thats a recent idea and not even scientific. There is no such place as oblivion. Atoms cannot cease to exist and disappear into nothing. Some form of consciousness, which had to originate from the atomic association that created your state of awareness to begin with, must therefore always remain.
The thousands who have had NDE’S will tend to disagree with you anyway.
I have to disagree with you MagnetMan! Death is not a recent idea but one as old as the hills. Whether it’s “scientific,†or not is irrelevant!
I never said there was any such, “place,†as oblivion. The whole point about oblivion is that it’s a state of non-existence, a state of death, of extinction, of annihilation, of nothingness.
As far as my temporal phenomenal human state is concerned death is final and absolute. I concede that there may well be an underlying noumenal condition to my being, but that is part of the One and undifferentiated anyway. I as ego, as identifiable individual, exist, in my mind, but without mind I cease to exist. Death is a human invention. There is no such a thing. It exists only in the human consciousness, the human mind!
As for those who claim to have died and come back! Well, really, do you honestly expect me to listen to the assorted fairy-tales of cranks and weirdoes? Pretty soon I’ll be listening to stories about UFO’s too and then there’ll be those crazies who want to tell me how they can remember being Tutankhamen in a previous life!!
I was refering to your statement that death equals oblivion, as a recent idea. Before the rise of scientific argument all men during the Iron Age of religious indoctrination, without exception, believed implicitly in some form of consciousness existing after death. I list Aristotle as the initiator of the scientific challenge. I personally believe that Aristotle was wrong in relying totally on the five sense to prove the reality of existence, and that his teacher Plato, as well as, Socrates, Pythagorus, Buddha, Loa Tse, Confucius and Christ were intrinsically right in insisting that metaphsyics had to be included in our investigation of the Cosmos.
I repeat. there is no such place as " oblivion/nothingness" other than the vacuum that exists between atoms. No atom can become vacuum - none can ever be annihilated - only transformed. So the question is: what happens to the residual consciousness of your atoms when you die? How can you be sure that it all becomes zero? That is unscientific, for you have no evidence of this. To paraphrase Kant, until such stage as we have proved there is no God, we must continue to live and die as if He did exist.
Ego is a phantom invention of the human mind. Infants for instance have yet to build one. It is a necessary state that allows the ONE to see itself and experience the illusion of creation and its evolution of consciousness. When you die, it can be said that ego is dissolved, but, seeing as it has individually contributed towards the increased bliss of the One, all its life experience is, I presume, remembered eternally and affectionaltely.
Until such stage as you can definately prove that they are either lying or self-deluded, it behoves upon you, out of basic social ettiquette, to believe that your fellow citizens are sincere in their claims. If you prefer to disbelieve, then you should remain silent.
I’m sorry, Stuart, I’m going to have to take exception to your understanding once more.
And I repeat that the idea that death, oblivion, extinction, etc., is not a new one.
I’m not sure what you mean here but, be that as it may, I’m afraid, “implicitly,†is not really sufficient verification.
Whatever your personal beliefs, Stuart, concerning Aristotle being wrong, I’m not going to conduct a lengthy examination of these personages you mention. Suffice to say, the afterlife, the future life, the underworld, the next world—take your choice—refer not literally to some nether region or actual place you go to after the life in your body is extinguished but, allegorically, to a state that exists here and now in this world and one that one might aspire to and enter through some form of moral understanding. The doctrine of Jesus, (and, I suspect, the others you name,) deals with things eternal, unwritten, moral, using similitude to illustrate but not to be literally describe.
I do recall reading some work on the, Dead Sea Scrolls, (or some such thing) which made mention of a hallucinogenic drug that, when taken, caused the user to have visions in which the ground before him appeared to open up into another world, and that this might have brought about, or, at least, conditioned, (perhaps,) the idea or belief in another world parallel to this one, and thus the birth of immortality, but an actual world where human consciousness goes after the death of the body is a ludicrous suggestion, and has much more to do with wishful thinking than with any science I ever heard of!
On another tack: - when Socrates says, “Meletus and Anytus can kill me but they cannot harm me,†he is distinguishing between, respectively, his body and his moral being, i.e., his faculty of choice, etc., thus, they, can kill my body but they cannot kill my moral purpose.
That which is called the eternal is also called the imperishable – but, and here’s the rub, if you’re of a dogmatic materialist bent and take this literally you’re also in a place—(by, “place,†I mean condition,)—called, also, error. This can only be taken literally by idealists!
Nature may well abhor a vacuum but there is no proof, I mean, no-one knows what exists between atoms. We’re talking about pure theory here and such talk is always is merely conjectural and metaphorically consistent at best.
I can accept the gist of this statement. However, when I was a boy, a young lad, there was such and such a theory about atoms and molecules, as I got older it was replaced with a different theory! Now, verging on my dotage and there are yet further theories, and thus it will be and I am happy to have understood the nature of such change.
But now we get onto the distinctly, with respect, weird stuff, (sorry, there is no other appropriate word for it) -
The, “residual consciousness of your atoms†? ? ?
I cannot be sure of anything, finally and absolutely, not even relatively, but I smell a rat, there is such a thing as basic common sense. By the way, was it Kant who said that – I thought it was Pascal? Whatever!
I could argue with much of this, but, again, I simply want to say that these things can be understood materialistically or spiritualistically. To say, for example, the ego is dissolved is to speak metaphorically.
I did not say anyone was telling lies and I’m certain most—if not all—of my fellows are sincere; it’s just that they are also totally misguided, vain, and living in a condition of error and un-enlightened ignorance, (bliss)!
Correct me if I’m wrong, by all means, but I don’t think it is up to you to tell me when I can and cannot speak.
We have gone away from the subject somewhat. My original insertion of the quote from Violet was, I thought, interesting and worthy of consideration and serious thought. I was obviously mistaken.
Regards,
Peter
Peter. explain to me as simply as you can, what is it in Violet’s statement, that you find so profound and mine so profane.
My question to myself has always been, if death be nothing but oblivion, then what is the pupose of life?
When I was a teenager I believed in oblivion. I argued that formal religion was nothing more than a social exploitation of death-bed fears. (I was into Marx then) I am old now and I do not fear death. In the meanwhile the Soviet has collapsed, primarily in my opinion, because it moved away from an absolute standard of Goodness - or God - and placed the faith of its children in a corruptable state. I no longer buy into my earlier oblivion theory, for both personal and social reasons.
