As a good introduction to Richard's work and his thinking, here is a statement he wrote regarding his views on wisdom and his life-long study of this esteemed virtue and capacity.

"How could wisdom not have many different definitions? How precisely can words define anything? If God himself should appear on Oprah and clearly state, "Do not kill," and humans all took him seriously, there would still be endless debate about what was meant: Do not kill a fly? An attacker? Eat meat? Fight a just war? What exactly did God mean by what he said? We're not going to reach a universally agreed-on conclusion by going down this path.

One thing that is not wise, I maintain, is to believe that all of reality is material, as materialist/physicalist teaching of the past three centuries insists. Humans do not have enough data to make that claim with a high probability of certainty. This is such an important claim that Carl Sagan's rule should be applied, that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." At least those who make a monist materialist claim should include the level of certainty with which the claim is made, providing evidence that it rises to that level.

Perhaps almost everyone can agree that it is wise to value wisdom, as it refers to an optimal or peak level of human development and human living. So to desire it, pursue and love it, to discuss it, debate, and ponder each others' understanding seems certainly one of the more worthwhile ways to pass our time on this plane.

Words cannot define wisdom adequately any more than they can define love adequately. Actually, wisdom is more difficult to define than love. Probably almost all people have some experience of love; but not so many have experience of wisdom.

What about the etymology of the word? Douglas Harper's Online Etymology Dictionary traces the term to Old English, from  wis + - dom.  Wisdom in various spellings is a common Germanic compound, - dom or - tum being a suffix indicating something like "the state of", and  wis in Old English means learned, sagacious, prudent; deriving from Proto-Germanic * wissaz (cf. German  weise = wise). This, in turn, is from the Proto IndoEuropean * weid "to see" and hence, "to know". It is related to the source of O.E.  witan "to know, wit."

The word wisdom is related to the  Sanskrit word " veda", literally "knowledge, understanding." Harper reports the etymology of Veda as "from root vid- "to know," from Proto-Indo European base * weid- "to see" (related to wit, and the Latin  videre "to see").

Self-knowledge is a very good definition for wisdom, as far as it goes. It has the authority of tradition in Europe from at least the time of Aeschylus ( Prometheus v. 309 γίγνωσκε σαυτὸν), and "to know one's self" is often expounded on by Socrates in Plato. This definition of wisdom persists to the present. It also expresses well the great statement of the sage Uddilaka in the Chandogya Upanishad (6.8.7), when he tells his son "In the subtile essence (the root of all), all that exists has its self. It is the True. It is the Self. And thou, O Svetaketu, art that." etc., etc. And a strong case can be made for the claim that until a person knows who she or he truly is, it will not be possible for hir to know how E should live, what she or he should properly do.

Then again, interpretation of the words 'self-knowledge' changes over the centuries with the progress and fads of the human spirit - not to mention the changes of understanding that occur in the course of a single lifetime for any of us.

For me, the definition of 'wisdom' is something I rarely think about. I get a kick out of studying the history of wisdom, although I gave away my copy of Leo G. Perdue's excellent and irreplaceable  Wisdom Literature: A Theological History after reading only a portion of it. Just too much. I'm too old to go through that now. More's the pity, but vita brevis and all that jazz. I rarely think about whether I believe in God either. Or rather, although I do believe in God (or even would concur with Jung who said he didn't have faith, he had experience), I've never thought a lot about what that means to me. It seems to me I have been guided throughout life, and to deny that would be extremely dangerous. It is as if I'm being told, "We are giving you this (i.e., any of the wonderful gifts I have received). In turn, you must do your part." If I don't, They will probably just let me go my own way and stop wasting their time.

Within me is an inner striving that has motivated me for at least the past sixty years, when I first realized what the course of my life would be. That striving is to "get to the bottom" of what is impelling me. What actually is it that I'm getting at? What am I trying to achieve? Working without cease, without many days off over the past 60 years (I never had a profession, working part-time most of my life in entry-level jobs; living in poverty or near poverty, and never a wife and children) to reach that answer led to centering on wisdom. At first - for a long time - it led to centering on literature, with the assumption - O foolish youth - that the people who really understood reality would be the great authors, from Homer, Plato, Vergil, to Hemingway, Solzhenitsyn, etc., etc.

"How well did that work out, Rick?"

Anyway, it evolved to the study of Buddhism (Soto zen at the New York Zen Center, Mahayana, etc.), advaita Hinduism a little bit, etc., Christian mysticism and Neoplatonism, the psychological research on wisdom, and back to Thomas Aquinas, Charles de Bovelles, Dionysius the Areopagite, Yadda Yadda. I taught wisdom, its history and cultivation, for ten years at learning-in-retirement centers, until five years ago when I came to the conclusion that if after ten years I still wasn't sure of what I was talking about it would be a good idea to go somewhere far away from everyone I knew and work through this puzzle.

Then - hold on, the train's pulling into the station - to focus on personal practice, specifically working out by trial and error the method that will be exhaustively presented on The Wisdom Page for attaining self-control of the mind and distinguishing clearly between awareness and thought, and training concentration to focus on awareness before awareness is turned into thought: direct, unmediated, intuitive perception of the mind itself as the path to clear perception of the world, undistorted by translating experience into concepts and language, undistorted by enculturation and the limits of the external senses. 

Thanks, God, for a wonderful life. I've enjoyed it immeasurably and hope to yet accomplish something to, at least, convey my gratitude, if not quite succeeding to
build JERUSALEM in England's green and pleasant land.

Richard Hawley T.

This last week I did a new podcast interview with Greg Moffitt of Legalize Freedom on the same general theme but highlighting the topics of utopias versus dystopias, commonalities between science fiction disaster stories and zombie movies, evolutionary versus static perspectives on life, and the importance of self-responsibility regarding our future. The podcast can be accessed at: Coronapocalypse: When Science Fiction Becomes Fact.

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Weaving together wisdom, utopian thinking, purposeful evolution, motherhood, and science fiction, this last week I also published a new essay in the World Futures Studies Federation online magazine Human Futures . The essay is titled: "Herland: A Classic Utopia from a Woman's Point of View" (See Pages 18-21). Given the preponderance of dystopian and disaster scenarios and narratives inundating our collective consciousness, Charlotte Gilman's uplifting vision of an evolved human society provides a thoughtful and inspiring balance to all the dark and fearful images circulating around and dominating our feelings and thinking. This essay is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future -- Volume Two: The Time Machine to Metropolis.