“A lot of thinking without wisdom will lead to suffering.” This Buddhist wisdom cuts right to the heart of life.  Yes, “thinking” or “reasoning” are Divine gifts but they are dangerous without some wisdom.  Let me put this in personal terms.  I have spent my life in the category of humans that W. H. Auden described as “logical lunatic..”  With this spiritual imbalance, I’ve had the illusion that I could “figger” things out with my mind.  This did not include the belief that I knew more than anyone else, that others were “stupid”, this was more of a personal matter.  I now realize that in the depths of my soul I had the illusion that with my mind I could “assess” most situations and know how to respond appropriately.  This stemmed from a hyper-vigilance attitude I took very early in life, having realized that I was born into a “crazy” reality that skewed reality to fit its own unquestioned premises.  With the intuition, and wisdom that comes with age, I realize that I made the conclusion that the pain that was my reality could be mitigated if I would pay close attention to what was going on and learn what the rules were.  Then, I could make sure that I was doing “the right thing” which simultaneously became “thinking” the right thing.  But I was keenly sensitive even then and realized that it was impossible to remember all the rules as the rules were always changing.  But, with that hypervigilance I must have assured myself that I was better off making the effort and could then at least lessen the blows (emotional/psychological) when they came. Thus my early life put me on a course of “seeing” and categorizing (diagnosing), life, eventually leading to a career in the social sciences…history and psychology…as I adopted the stance of Emily Dickinson, saying, “Life is over there, on a shelf.”  And, this has done me well in life…but certainly with a significant price as far as authenticity.

Just today I discovered the Buddhist wisdom displayed above and immediately had a light bulb turn on in my soul.  Somehow, this quality of “wisdom” is slowly sinking into my thick skull, allowing me to see…and feel…the limitations of rationality and understand even further that, “we see through a glass darkly”; my rational grasp of this world is limited.  This understanding is introducing me to my finitude and the humility that comes with it.  Wisdom is to realize that you might “know” a whole lot, but that bank of knowledge is always self-serving and thus destructive to self and others. And yes, as noted above, suffering is accompanying this wisdom.  To understand and “feel” finitude always brings one to his knees; there we have the opportunity to appreciate what one poet noted about this moment, that there we can, “glory, bow, and tremble” as we face the Otherness that we have avoided. If we don’t at least hunger for this wisdom, and realize that we will never “own” it, our thinking will produce great suffering, the pain of which is usually avoided with distractions, one of which is,“them.”