The cliff wisdom

I wish wisdom could be shared. I am afraid it does not work that way, we all know it. Yes, we listen to our favorite guru every now and then, but most of the time, we do not really understand what they are saying. Sometimes it doesn’t even touch us, no matter how profound it is. You see, it’s not the wisdom that is lacking, it is us.

Let’s say I were your guru who asked you to jump off a cliff, would you do it? If you have any wit on you, the answer would be no. But why not? The reason being is that you have been around a block or two by now, you know the lay of the lands, you’ve seen things and learnt that cliffs are dangerous. They can hurt you. So to, the knowledge the prevents you from getting hurt, is also the knowledge that prevents you from hearing wisdom in the words. True wisdom is backwards like that, it’s not apparent to the naked eye. Not commonly available to the common folk. For if you had learnt it on your own, it would not be all that wise, now would it? At least to you it wouldn’t.

Some masters would argue that wisdom does not need to be complicated. It can be deep, but it should make sense on the most simplest of levels. I wonder if there is a balance like that? Can wisdom be simple and at the same time touching? Something one could hold on to, long enough to uncover its depths. Such persistence is rarely seen though, with an impatient generation on the rise this would be a less than ideal approach.

Either way, this is just a hard problem to solve. The generations now do not want to learn from the generations before. Think about your upbringing, was it easy to convince you? Even when you were just a teen, thinking that you knew when you really didn’t. Up to a certain point we learn from another, afterwards, it’s just a grind uphill.