GENIUS FORUMS

Knowledge is holding information. It is held with highest regards in the lifeless realm of academia. Just knowing is enough, becoming is an after thought. Wisdom is becoming part of what we learn. It is personal, spiritual, and powerful. It is allowing the sum or our experiences and what we gain from them to transform our consciousness and expand our mind. One of the most fascinating things for me is to take a step back and see how my consciousness transforms and refines itself, becoming more and more alive, more and more in touch with the truth. I am wise. When this is not happening, when I am not learning, thinking, experiencing, and becoming, I am dying. The difference between knowledge and wisdom is life and death.

The epitome of open-mindedness is to become what we know.

Good post, Nick.

For me wisdom is simply your ability to recognize emptiness, be it conceptually/non-directly or non-conceptually/directly. Everything else is knowledge.

A statement of wisdom: "Life is transient".

A statement of knowledge: "Life is a chemical reaction".

The interesting thing about wisdom that it contains a timeless component. For example, the statement that life is transient have been true through many conceptual paradigms (like the magical age, the mythical age, the age of the enlightenment, the postmodern age, etc) while the statements of knowledge always shift and evolve as new conceptual paradigms emerge.

For example in the magical age they might have said: "Life is sustained by the forest spirits and ancestors". In the mythical age they say: "Life is breathed into us by the Almighty Creator". In the age of the enlightenment we say "Life is a chemical reaction". In the post-modern age we say: "Life is what you make of it". See, it changes. Yet, impermanence inexorably is a golden thread running through them all.

No wonder old people are usually considered the wise ones; they've seen so much pass away. They've witnessed impermanence first hand, and have often learned to accept this as an unavoidable fact of life. Recognizing this is the initial portal into wisdom.

I agree with the OP apart from the dying bit. Sometimes we just can't think of a new direction for awhile.

yeah, to put it in another way - wisdom involves a sort of applied knowledge, it is a knowledge that affects you at your core, a realization that you have thought about something incorrectly, or behaved in a way that was animal, irrational, and so on.

Academia likes to worship the ability to hold on to data as if it is the primary principle of intellectual behavior - That is to hide the fact that they are not authentic thinkers.

Basically, Humanity loves knowledge that is of no use in a spiritual sense. Whereas, a wise philosopher seeks out knowledge of the highest order, and it ends up mutating his consciousness in the process.

Like information is organized, linked or interrelated data, knowledge is organized information, no matter if applied or just properly, proportionally, embedded in some existing framework: when it's understood.

Science has been called organized knowledge. There's some truth to that although I think knowledge already implies a high level of organization and forged relation. Science could be just a consequence arising out of systems of knowledge, a practical way of handling the staggering amounts.

Knowledge could be seen as networks of information. The more dense and solid the network, the more interconnections it weaves with especially the boundaries, or other networks. This also opens up the possibility of a type of disconnected knowledge which only links to itself: an information bubble. Many belief systems operate that way but it's an actual danger to all systems of knowledge: becoming self-confined and close-ended.

Wisdom could be seen as a particular from of connection: any relation between one network and a significant larger one. For example I'm a wise leader if I can link the activities of the group I'm leading to the world at large. A smart leader could perhaps reach short term benefit for the group but without wise insights into how it relates to the future "at large" or encounters with other groups it will be a short-lived smartness and people will end up calling it stupid and short-sighted.

A special case of wisdom, "wise wisdom" or "wisdom of the wise" is working with the relation between the absolute, the "ultimately biggest context" and the world. It's the foundation of all knowledge as even the smallest bit of knowledge already implies acknowledging the absolute as context and at the same time its apex when it becomes more explicit through consciousness. The alpha and omega indeed.

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:A special case of wisdom, "wise wisdom" or "wisdom of the wise" is working with the relation between the absolute, the "ultimately biggest context" and the world. It's the foundation of all knowledge as even the smallest bit of knowledge already implies acknowledging the absolute as context and at the same time its apex when it becomes more explicit through consciousness. The alpha and omega indeed.

If more scientists understood this with clarity, I think we would see multiple "eureka moments" happening in all fields of study nearly at once.