Forget what you’ve learned. Our knowledge often prevents us from growing authentically. Wisdom is one’s ability to be free from their knowledge and be able to use knowledge as a tool for understanding, rather than a defense mechanism. When my attention, which is energy, is closed to my knowledge I’ve lost freedom; therefore I’ve lost energy. My mind favors my knowledge and becomes comfortable in the known thought. Knowledge is the ground of my understanding. Space is the opportunity for new understanding. The ground gives us relevance. Space gives us creation. The more attached I become to my knowledge the more I shrink in my understanding. The duller I become. An imbalance begins to shape in the capacity of my mind. My mind becomes tired and bored or stressed and anxious when it’s personally challenged. I become attached to the ground, I don’t want to lift off the ground. The child who keeps getting off the ground from crawling to walking stops getting off the ground. A child has little knowledge, therefore their mind tends to be wide open for understanding despite little experience to rely on. Although the child can be easily deceived because of their lack of knowledge, this is not viewed as a threat in the child’s mind. So how do you balance knowledge with no knowledge? Humility is the courage to forgo my knowledge. Wisdom appears through the separation. The separation or space between known and unknown. When I can observe from that space between the known and the unknown, I can start to discover connections in subtle detail. Wisdom isn’t forced or memorized. Most people have a lot of knowledge, but little wisdom because we are so busy filling our minds with knowledge. We must forget preconceived ideas and be open to seeing in a new way. There’s a term used in Zen Buddhism called a ‘beginners mind’. This is what we mean to be a beginner. “In a beginner’s mind the possibilities are endless, in an expert’s few. This is a skill we can improve with practice. Often people rely on external objects, their relationship with their spouse, their career, maybe a hobby or their sport to learn and grow. The practice of spirituality is reliance on no – thing. Even if you call it “God” that is still not an object. God is indescribable. The self, the ego, is something always relating to something else. Spirituality is nothing. If learning is science, unlearning is religion. Unlearning is like taking off your clothes, in a psychological sense. Your mind is stripped of all ideas, images and words and you are acting in accordance with the world as it is. This exposes our soul-an area where most of us are unfamiliar, and quite frankly uncomfortable. But it is impossible and irrelevant to strictly operate from the soul. Our ego gives us some superficial relevance, which should be used to complement our soul. However in many cases it dominates or suffocates our soul. For example, our names, our job titles, our race, our culture, our gender, our community, our home; all that exists in the material world which in a superficial and obvious sense is more relatable. It’s safer and easier to chit chat about. Besides, you can’t actually talk about your soul. If you did you’d just become that phony, far-off, disconnected hippie chick / dude. People that are in love, have no need to talk about their love. Yet you can feel it emanate from them. Others talk about love all the time, but you don’t feel it from them. What is the soul? Can we identify the soul? You can use words to describe the soul, but that becomes external and material once again.
