These words have been hidden in the depth of my laptop for years. I thought I'd get a few of them out and see what you think.
Chapter 1: Why Wisdom
In 2016, the world was captivated by a historic game of Go and its two players. The more famous player was the reigning world champion, Lee Sedol, widely considered one of the greatest Go players ever. Sedol, in quiet battle mode, studied the 36 black and white stones on the board as he waited for his opponent's next move.
Go is an ancient Chinese board game. The rules of Go are relatively simple, the game itself is exceptionally complex due to the magnitude of possible moves. After the first two moves in Go, there are 130,000 possible next moves. For comparison, in Chess, that number is 400. The total number of legal moves in Go is an astounding 10170, more than twice as many atoms in the observable universe.
People were stunned when Lee's opponent placed the next stone. The move was unlike any seen before. The experts called it "very strange," and the commentators declared it a mistake. As the game progressed, however, the move looked nothing short of brilliant, the beginning of Sedol's defeat.
Another Champion Go player, Fan Hui, called the move beautiful. Hui had played against the same opponent a year earlier and had this to say after losing 0-5. "I know AlphaGo is a computer, but if no one told me, maybe I would think the player was.. a real person."
Lee Sedol would win only one of five games against the AI machine, AlphaGo, but that one win was celebrated by humans worldwide. Even the creators of AlphaGo cheered. With his penetrating yet gentle style, Sedol observed, "I heard people shouting in joy, and I think it is clear why. It seems like we humans are so weak and fragile, and this victory means we could still hold our own."
AlphaGo needed only three years to beat the best minds humans had to offer. It started with everything humans had learned from playing Go for over 2,500 years, then used vast computing power and sophisticated algorithms to beat us. But reading between the lines, we can say that while AlphaGo's win was impressive, it still depended on humans.
Its successor, AlphaZero, has a much different story. It was only given the game's basic rules, then learned by playing against itself. As both the student and the teacher, it invented strategies unconstrained by the limits of human knowledge. Then, after 72 hours of this independent learning, it beat AlphaGo.
Since then, humans have invited machines with artificial intelligence into our lives. We talk to them, calling them by names like Alexa and Siri, and in turn, they respond to our voices and learn the rhythms of our daily routines.
And as they become more human-like, they challenge us to determine what makes us uniquely human. And as they become more powerful, they challenge us to define how best to use that power. Stephan Hawking gave humanity this advice in the years before his death. "Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins."...
Chapter 2 What is wisdom?
What is wisdom? This simple question is deceptively difficult to answer, and many thoughtful people have given vastly different answers.
Buddha said that meditation brings wisdom. Socrates believed wisdom begins in wonder. Einstein wrote, “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”
In our modern society, we often describe wisdom as the ability to decide the best course of action, and indeed, that's a workable description, until we try to apply it and then, almost immediately, we run into devilish details. Does wisdom apply to the process, the decision, the action, or the person? Who is qualified to judge whether they are "best" or "wise"?
We must also solve the mystery of why "wise" people do dumb things—people like King Solomon and Bill Clinton. Similarly, we must also decide whether people with significant mental or emotional challenges can be wise. Consider John Nash, the subject of the movie, A Beautiful Mind. How can we decide whether to call his Nobel-Prize winning work "wise" when his mind careened back and forth between brilliance and acute paranoid delusions?
To side-step these hurdles, let’s start our discussion on wisdom in an unusual way.
Imagine hearing a powerful symphony entitled Ode to Wisdom. As the music unfolds, you realize parts were played to you by teachers, grandparents, coaches, and mentors, and quite likely, the same music was played to them by their elders. As the sound fills your mind, you identify its recurring melody, which moves through the symphony like a current and binds it all together. The melody is beautiful and powerful and communicates a message that when translated into words sounds like this:
Wisdom flows from a deep and accurate understanding of reality.
The melody is in fact ancient and elemental, embedded in the fabric of the universe itself. It has been played in one form or another since the beginning of time, and many different traditions and cultures have used it to make their own music.
Below are definitions of wisdom from some well-known traditions. Pick a few of interest to you, and notice how they communicate the same basic message: wisdom flows from a deep and accurate understanding of reality.
Taoist – a profound attunement to the world and our own nature, from which springs egoless, effortless spontaneity and actions that are in harmony with one’s Self and the cosmos
Native American – knowing how to relate honorably and harmoniously with everything in the Circle of Life, which weaves together all things in the cosmos including humans
Hinduism – the witnessing of the entire creation in all its facets and forms, and then, through right conduct and living over time, realizing one’s true relationship with it
Jewish – the ability to judge correctly and make right choices, based on knowledge of the divinely created system of rules that governs the fiber of the universe
Christian – the perfect human understanding of the ultimate causes and valid truths, which then guides our will and the rules of conduct (Augustine)
Egyptian – acting with truth and honor to promote harmony and right order in a cosmos where all things are bound together in an indestructible unity
Nahua (Aztec) – walking safely upon the slippery surface of earth, participating in the oneness of things, because one has learned to be well–rooted, authentic and true
Inuit – a mode of being respectful and well–balanced toward all that one encounters, applying the knowledge that interacting with the surround affects that surround
Buddhist –a profound understanding of reality that helps us see ourselves and the world around us accurately, making clear how to act skillfully
Atheist - a most profound insight of seeking to live in accord with reality while assisting humanity
These are all beautiful ways to convey that when humans understand all of reality, we know how to be authentic, respectful, and effective agents within it. Sounds simple enough, except for this one teeny, tiny problem: Can anyone understand all of reality? Can we know the fiber of the universe, everything in the Circle of Life, or the cosmos? Does anyone have a perfect understanding or profound insight?
The answer for us mere mortals is no.
How can we cultivate wisdom if reality is beyond our ability to understand? Well, answering that question is the goal of this book, and we'll start by creating a framework for wisdom.
…
Chapter 3 - A Peek into Reality
The process of human perception happens mainly without our conscious thought and therefore seems straightforward. But perception could be more accurately described as a battle of epic proportions. On one side of the field is Reality, which effortlessly launches billions of stimuli at us each and every second. On the other side is our human body, which fights valiantly to meet this challenge without any real chance of winning. How could it? Our body is one small part of that much bigger Reality and is therefore outnumbered and outmaneuvered when trying to see the Big Picture of Reality.
Here's how an expert on perceptional characterizes our predicament. "The world presented to us by our senses and perceptions is nothing like reality." There are two terrifying truths embedded in that statement. First, we believe we see the world accurately. Second, we are utterly unaware that belief is wrong.
Thousands of years ago, Plato described this plight in his Allegory of the Cave, a tale of prisoners held captive since birth, chained down and unable to look anywhere but straight ahead. Behind the prisoners are objects sitting on a ledge, and behind that is a fire that throws shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of them. These shadows are the only things they can see, and therefore the only things they know except for the sound of their fellow prisoner's voices, but they all describe the shadows in the same way, convincing them they all see "real" objects.
Plato was making quite a statement about our misperception of Reality and our unwillingness to see the truth. Let's prove him wrong by learning how we come to perceive our world to understand it better….
…..Step 2 - Simplify
Our human senses might not detect all Reality, but they detect a surprisingly large amount of information. Our eyes alone see 40 million signals per second. Put yourself in Times Square or a moving car, and that number increases.
Here’s the problem. While our eyes can take in 40 million signals, the part of our brain which makes sense of those signals, our working memory, only juggles around 4, though the exact number is unknown. The math doesn’t look good, does it? Therefore, our brain’s first task is to simplify that data to a manageable amount.
One of the elegant strategies the brain employs is the use of contrasts. Let’s say you're standing in the middle of a field, mesmerized by thousands of grass blades swaying beautifully in the wind. Suddenly, out of the very corner of your eye, you see a disturbance, which you almost immediately identify as a spotted leopard bounding toward you.
Your brain is to the shiny objects. It disregards the common in favor of the unique. It looks for edges, ignoring middles. It prioritizes movement over stillness. Historically, such tradeoffs made very good sense. Did we need to prioritize the blades of grass when we know danger might lurk underneath them? The answer is no. We honed our ability to see the unique.
You can experience that skill by seeing how long it takes you to count the 3s in the table below? As you do so, notice how your brain solves the problem.
If you scroll down a bit, you'll see a similar graphic. I'd like you to try the challenge again, once again noting how your brain meets the challenge. When you’re ready, come on back here.
If you found the second challenge easier, it’s because your brain served up the red numbers on a silver platter. They were judged to be unique, and therefore, likely of value, and the copious amount of black numbers were filtered out. This talent is hard-wired into our brains, but like every strength, it has its weakness.
Look back over the first set of all-black numbers, but this time try to find the 5s. Now look for them in the second set of numbers with the red. Did the 3s act like shiny objects, attracting your eye and attention? Judging the world by its contrasts has tradeoffs. It requires that we oversimplify the world. Black or white. Movement or stillness. Up or down. But reality is rich and resists simple classifications.
Looking at the black-and-white image to your right, you’ll immediately notice the contrasting lines. First focus on the lines running up and down. You’ll likely see something resembling door panels. Now consciously attend to the horizontal lines. Where once there were only rectangles and straight lines, 16 circles should magically appear.
While our brain must simplify our world to an amount it can manage, we must remember that there’s more to reality than what we first see. As we did in the image above, we can see more of reality’s richness with some practice. In the next three chapters, we will practice shifting our attention between aspects of reality, which hopefully, will become part of your wisdom practice. ….
Chapter 4 - Who am I? The Search for Me
"Who am I?" is an innocuous-sounding but ultimately enormous question that we answer daily. Today I am a mother and writer who is happy and well-intentioned but distractible. Tomorrow I’ll answer differently because like every human, I am many things, a complex concoction of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But one thing is sure: every answer I give will impact how I view the world and my place within it.
So, who are you? Or alternatively, who or what are you NOT? Here's a thought experiment to help you with that answer. Imagine the oxygen molecules right before you are visible to the naked eye. Now pick one of them sitting right in front of your mouth. Over the next few seconds, I want you to follow it and tell me when it ceases to be a separate entity and becomes an integral part of YOU.
Does it happen when it rushes into your mouth due to the vacuum created by your diaphragm? Or maybe when it plummets like a rollercoaster down your windpipe? On second thought, that's hardly different from when it was a separate entity outside your mouth.
Perhaps it becomes you when passing through the branching tubes of the bronchioles or resting alongside the tiny capillaries bordering your blood. To be safe, you could wait until it crosses the capillary membrane and is swept away in your bloodstream. On second thought, how is that oxygen molecule any different from the penny swallowed by a child? We don't consider it to BE the child just because it's passing through.
Indeed, you must see the difficulty of declaring at which point the oxygen becomes you.
But we can all agree it becomes you when it combines chemically with the glucose from your food to create energy – ATP - because at that point, it's made a home in your body and is essential for its functioning. The trillions of microbial organisms living in your body would vehemently disagree with that reasoning.
Like the oxygen molecule, they began life outside you, but now are inside of and integral to you. You are home to some of the densest populations of microbes on the planet. Some of them serve functions you can't do alone, like the making of specific vitamins. Some of them influence your DNA, which is amazing when you think about that. These outside invaders contribute to what makes you uniquely you. Furthermore, there are more of them in your body than there are human cells. In other words, the OTHERS inside of you outnumber YOU. Should you think of them as you?
Now, back to the oxygen molecule. Did you decide when it becomes you? If you find it difficult to draw a clear line between yourself and the oxygen molecule, lean into that grey area, for we're all better served marveling at the interdependent relationship we have with that oxygen, and for that matter, the world around us.
But this symbiotic relationship requires us to think differently. Take those invading microbes. We've labeled them foreign invaders and battled them with antibiotics and disinfectants. While antibiotics have saved millions of lives, they’ve also created killer bacteria that is resistant to drugs. In addition, we’ve also killed “good” bugs, like the friends in our microbiome, while killing "bad" bugs. Those are unintended consequences that happened because we underappreciated our relationship with microbes and frankly, with everything else around us.
The Story of You…and Everything Else
Let’s look at the intimate relationship between yourSELF and OTHERS by looking at the story of you. You began your life’s journey as a unique SELF when two OTHER people united, each sharing pieces of their individual selves to create a new OTHER – your little SELF. Already in utero, you were entranced by the voices of others, and once born you were fascinated by the other faces in your new world. Even as you imitated their expressions you learned from them. Before you walked or talked, you were listening, pointing, and following directions because those were essential skills for living with others.
And then it happened, somewhere around 18–24 months, your self-awareness took a giant leap forward when you realized that others were separate from you. You had the tools to determine what makes you unique. With your first-person perspective, social exchanges became opportunities to identify the similarities and differences between yourself and others.
The intimate, interdependent parent-child relationship was especially fertile ground for your personal development, but the development did not happen in only one direction. Your parents learned about themselves through you. What parent doesn’t see the world anew through their child’s eyes, or wonder about their own childhood while creating another childhood for their child? The dance of the SELF/OTHER yin yang unlocks treasures for both parties.
One of those treasures is a sense of belonging, an essential ingredient to self-understanding. Because of shared experiences, beliefs, values, and genetic material, you learned you were physically and emotionally connected to others. The experience of living in proximity to them made it clear that your actions affected them, and theirs affected you. Now you had an incentive to work together with others to ensure the family unit, as a whole, ran smoothly.
From the safety of this group, you could more confidently interact with new people who would offer you additional perspectives on your unique self and your actions, expanding your worldview. In every way and at every point, human development is a reciprocal, two-way street.
Consider that statement in light of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you. That wording is found in the Bible, but the maxim appears in every major religion and ethical philosophy. It is the most ancient and universally applauded moral principle on earth. Some traditions frame the maxim in the positive, as what you should do, and some in the negative, as what you should not do. In other traditions, it is simply a reminder that we are interconnected.
The maxim is ingenious because it addresses a weakness of the human condition – our first-person point of view. Everything we know about reality, we learned through our senses. Our SELF-perspective looms large in our thinking. The Golden Rule harnesses that knowledge in the service of the big picture and our connection to it.
When we lived in small, intimate, and self-sustaining communities, that connection was obvious. Individuals flourished when the whole group flourished. If the group was troubled, so was each member. Protecting the common good was synonymous with protecting oneself.
But in our day and age, where we buy food from grocery stores and interact with others through devices, that connection is not apparent. More than ever we must remind ourselves that we are an essential, infinitesimal, and integral piece of a much bigger reality.
That is our goal for this chapter…
CHAPTER 5 -Where and When am I? Our place in space and time
Take a deep breath…I mean that literally… and hold it.
Now, with your lungs filled, ask yourself how close you are to Julius Caesar. Since he lived in Italy 2065 years ago, he likely feels far away, and indeed, in some ways that’s true, but he's also closer than you think. Okay, you can exhale.
There's a 98.2% chance you breathed in and out molecules from the last breath taken by Julius Caesar before he died. Initially, the molecules floated around Rome before being swept further away on jet streams, ocean storms, and rain clouds. Over 2065 years, Caesar's molecules dispersed themselves around the globe, and a few of them are at your doorstep.
That long-ago, far-away event miraculously crossed both space and time, arriving here, and as you read the words above, you were breathing in and out others who lived a long time ago as well.
Cleopatra. Moses. Buddha. Confucius. Jesus.
Perhaps more remarkably, others will inhale YOU a thousand years from now. You are intimately and powerfully linked to people, places, and things you will never know or see. Every action you take in space and time has a significant impact, more than you can imagine. We are each tiny yet powerful agents in the course of history.
Let me give you a concrete example with a story of a town in Connecticut that experienced the horror of a school shooting. It’s a story told by Dale Herzog, a logistics and supply chain engineer for the UPS Foundation….
Human Perception Meets Space and Time
I’ve got a few questions for you about space and time. The first one is this: Do you see a 2-D or 3-D world? The answer is significant because it impacts your beliefs and actions.
Most people think we see in 3-D, but we do not.
Our retinas are flat, like the lens of a camera, and can only capture “flat” images like the photos you print or the pictures you view on your 2-D phone screen. The sensation of seeing in 3-D is our clever brain at work, employing various cues to add a sense of depth.
One is due to the space between our eyes, which allows us to see the same object at slightly different angles. Those two pictures are compared by the brain to create depth. The second comes from the greyish colors that are found on and next to every object, the ones we call shadows. The various shades are created when light bounces off an object in different directions depending on its surfaces, in other words, its 3-D shape. An object’s movement also adds information, because the rotation causes light to bounce differently again.
Watch how the brain creates this miracle by holding out your hand in front of you. First notice how light and shadows create subtle but unique colors all across your skin due to the gently rounded surface of your fingers. Next, pick one fingertip then watch it closely while slowly rotating your hand. Notice how you see a new area of your fingertip only when you lose sight of another. What “looks” like a rounded 3-D fingertip in motion is simply your brain stitching many different 2-D pictures together, like a movie. The brain’s abilities allow us to walk comfortably around our 3-D world with only 2-D senses. Amazing, really.
Now for the second question: What is the smallest of the Great Lakes? Based on the map above, Ontario looks the smallest and has the smallest area at roughly 19,000 km2. (The superscript 2 after the “km” indicates two dimensions are being represented: length x width.)
The third question is the same except with a little tweak. What is the smallest of the Great Lakes in terms of volume? To measure volume we need to add a third dimension - depth. This second image shows the depth of each lake, and from this vantage point, Erie and Ontario look very different. After doing the math we learn that our answer to this question is different. Erie is the smallest lake. In fact, Ontario is almost 3 ½ times larger by volume than Erie, at 1,640 km3. (The superscript 3 represented the three different dimensions we considered.)
When I first asked which lake was the smallest, your brain was primed to think in terms of 2 dimensions because you learned about the Great Lakes from a topographical map, which represented them as seen from above. I added to that priming by showing you a topographical map, which highlights how the brain uses many cues as it attempts to represent reality.
For instance, your brain assumed my questions referred to a specific timeframe: the present day. The brain received no cues about the timeframe under consideration, so it assumed from experience that the question was referencing the hear and now. But when we’re cued to add a 4th dimension, time, we can change our perspective. Knowing that the lakes have been around a long time, it will not be a surprise that their current “size” is not the only size they’ve been. In fact, at one point in time, they didn’t exist. The first to arrive was Lake Algonquin, which appeared roughly 11,000 years ago after the Laurentide Ice Sheet retreated north. Lake Nipissing and Lake Chippewa formed next when more glaciers retreated, allowing the Earth’s crust to rebound from the crushing weight of the ice. In other words, questions about space and time are more complex than we see on the surface.
There’s a good reason we instinctively consider the Great Lakes in simple terms. Our brain has no energy storage mechanism like fat which requires it to use energy efficiently and make tradeoffs on what to process. From the brain’s point of view, using energy to consider all 4 dimensions of the Great Lakes makes absolutely no sense because most of the time we need to process the here and now.
Our brain faces another challenge when processing space and time: they are really, really big, and our personal experience of the world is too limited to process them. Let me give you an example that relates to space. The Great Lakes hold 6,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water. We can relate to two of the three aspects of that measurement. We know what water is, having been around it all our life, and we know the size of a gallon from experience purchasing milk and gas. But we cannot make sense of 6 quadrillion because it is outside our personal experience, and therefore we have no way to put that number in context.
Our ability to process space is dependent on our relatively limited human perspective.
The same principle impacts our understanding of time. Timeframes often experienced, like an hour or a day, are expertly interpreted by our brains. But longer timeframes, like a millennium, are harder to process because our bodies have never experienced them.
For this example, we’ll return to our discussion of Julius Caesar. When I first mentioned him, he seemed like someone from ancient history. That assessment is appropriate relative to our personal experience. He did live a long time ago in the context of a human lifetime.
The limits of a human lifetime become even more apparent when thinking of timeframes that include dinosaurs. We can plot it on a timeline for more context, but from the perspective of millions of years, the human race is just a pixel. How are we to make sense of that fact?
I’m going to change the timeline a little to add a different perspective: we’re kissing cousins with the T-Rex. On the left is a Stegosaur, representing one of the first known dinosaurs. The T-Rex is next, representing one of the last dinosaurs to evolve. Then finally, there’s a human on the left representing our history.
Now we can see that humans are closer in time to the T-Rex than the T-Rex is to its earliest brethren. We cannot appreciate this as a biological creature living in the 21st century because of the sheer magnitude of “millions of years.” Our finite, short-lived biological bodies make it difficult to appreciate this immense richness of time as we go about our daily lives.
Seeing the WHOLE Yin Yang of Spacetime
Hopefully, you’re seeing our conundrum. Wise decision-making requires a broad view of space and time, but the human body isn’t built for a broad view. We need tools to help us bridge the gap.
One is to place space and time on a human scale, one we experienced many times. For instance, to appreciate the history of our universe, we can relate it to the 24 hours in a day. From this perspective, we note that the origins of life happened at 4:00 am. Then comes a relatively boring part of the day, filled with “banded iron-formation” and “single-celled algae.” Around 6 pm sexual reproduction appears, which is likely of more interest because we can relate to it. Dinosaurs don’t appear until 10:56 pm, and humans, with only 17 seconds left in the day, make a brief appearance. It gives you a richer perspective on the sheer immensity of time, doesn’t it?
There are other tools we can use, including ones developed by the First Nation. Two of them are simple but powerful practices called Seven Generations and Seven Directions.
The first concept, often called Seven Generations, asks us to consider a longer time frame than we typically do when making decisions. When deliberating on a course of action, we are encouraged to consider the Seven Generations that came before us, and then consider the Seven Generations to follow and how our decision might impact them.
The number 7, rather than some other number like 5 or 10, is significant. Seven generations sits right at the edge of what we can or cannot relate personally. I’ll use myself as an example. The earliest generation I remember is my great-grandparents. The two I knew personally, Oma and Opa, were dairy farmers, and when they retired they moved from the front half of the farmhouse to the back half. This made room for my mother’s family who moved into the front half and then took over the farm. I heard much about Oma because she was my mom’s best friend. When you live on a big farm in the middle of other farms, (in other words, in the middle of nowhere) friends aren’t nearby, but patient and loving grandmas are.
The generation after that, my grandparents, and all four played very significant roles in my life. They gave birth to my parents, who in turn gave birth to me. Next are my five daughters, the fifth generation, who will eventually have the sixth generation of children.
Finally, should I remain healthy, I welcome great-grandkids, the seventh generation. At this point in my life, thinking of great-grandkids seems crazy until I remember Oma rocking in her chair by the window.
And there we have it - seven generations - each personally meaningful to me. Throughout those generations, I can imagine many hugs being shared because I’ve given and received them. I’ve experienced family and how that group grows and shrinks over time with birth and death. My body and brain can process the precious experience of living in a community, including its joys and hardships.
Every generation is a small but integral part of many generations, which weave together to create a much larger tapestry. Not only is my conscious awareness of this tapestry helpful when I make decisions, but it is also a source of comfort and strength.
The concept of seven generations has rich practices found in many different traditions, and with some research, you can find language and tools that are meaningful for you. This is a quote that resonates deeply with me.
“We are connected to a community, a community that transcends time…We're connected to the first Indians who walked on this earth, the very first ones, however long ago that was. But we're also connected to those Indians who aren't even born yet, who are going to walk this earth. And our job in the middle is to bridge that gap. You take the inheritance from the past, you add to it, your ideas and your thinking, and you bundle it up and shoot it to the future." Rick Hill Sr., Tuscarora of the Beaver clan, Haudenosaunee
The other tool I mentioned earlier is the Seven Directions. Imagine yourself as a point in 3D space that has six arrows moving out from it. The first four go out toward the horizon and are the cardinal directions of North, East, South, and West. The 5th direction heads up, towards the sky, and the 6th goes down. You are the seventh direction, the point in the center, representing how you are connected to everything in all directions and how everything else in the universe is connected to you….
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