Trumping the Ace

"Our thinking is mere content. Never be fooled by content! Our wisdom is there all the time, yet we are often fooled and seduced by content."

The emergence of wisdom, of insight, never comes from a search designed to elicit. It comes in an effortless, uncontrived way, when all trying has been put to one side. 

When we’ve lost our keys – or when the answer to that clue is right there on the tip of our tongue – we are encouraged, either by ourselves or others, to be methodical in searching for the answer or the outcome.
Then someone jokingly says, “It’ll be in the last place you look,” which of course is true since we would look no further once we had found what we are looking for – would we?

There are times when we look for inspiration – and then there are times when inspiration flows forth in an almost undirected, uncontrolled and endless stream.

The Little Grey Cells

Watching or reading crime mysteries is something I have done for most of my life. I admire the craft and diligence of my favourite detectives plus the mental dexterity and artifice they bring to their solving abilities. 

Yet on many occasions within the narrative it seems they have solved the case although the amount of unlapsed film time, or unread pages, reveal that there is much more to come.
And so I discover, as the detective follows some gut feeling, some inner disquiet, that tells them that the case has not been concluded satisfactorily - whilst their colleagues are off down the to the pub to celebrate a seemingly satisfactory and straightforward outcome, and a job well done.

Always it is their gut feeling they are following.
They have not been fooled by the mere content of the case.
They are trusting of their instincts.
They are not content with the solution brought about through diligence and applied hard work involving the outward and apparent content of the case. They are not comfortable with how things appear.

Wisdom is Ace

Wisdom always comes out on top, whether for the ace ‘tec – or ourselves.
And we never question it once we realise that that is what it is. Wisdom is an innate sense of what is right, and because it is in our nature – is natural to us – we have a deep and unquestioned understanding of it, whatever form it has taken.

When we don’t trust our wisdom – the ace we are holding in our hand – then, without knowing, we are looking to trump our own ace. And what is the trump we always use? None other than our logical, diligent and hard-worked for thought-based conclusion! We’ve worked it out in our mind. Or – more to the point – we’ve worked it out in a particular part of our mind where our intellect holds sway.

Remember the intellect is defined as our ability to learn and reason.

Relying upon Knowledge rather than Understanding

However, just because we have learned something and think we know it, should that be the basis of all our understanding?
Of course not – except we grow up believing that knowledge IS understanding. We start out knowing nothing and learn loads of things which we then characterise as our knowledge. Something we don’t yet know is beyond the present limits of our knowledge.
So do we say:
“I must learn about this, so I can Understand it better.”
or do we say:
“I must learn about this, so I can Know more about it.”

Ask yourself this: Are these two sentences alike? Do they mean the same thing?

Well I’d contend that the pivotal word here is LEARN.

I want to learn about it to add to my Knowledge.
If I already had an innate Understanding of it then I would not need to LEARN any more about it – although I might discover more about it to broaden and or deepen my Understanding of it.

Understanding is something that grows on a never-ending scale and therefore is something we always have at any given point in time. We never lose it.
Knowledge is a bank of information that we grow by our learning. We either have it or we do not have it. We can lose it, however, through loss of the memory of what we have learned.

Quantum Leaps

Insights are little quantum leaps in our Understanding. It is very important that we notice them, for if we did not then we would probably continue to run our lives based upon our Knowledge rather than our Understanding.

Our Insights are flashes, glimpses of Wisdom, that get presented to our conscious awareness in a way that is totally unlike any form of LEARNING. 

It is interesting to note that we do not consciously process Insights in the way that we do Learning. Learning goes to our memory, our bank of Knowledge. Insights just go straight into our Understanding. We might question our Learning – yet we never question our Insights. We have a sureness, a trusted certainty about our Insights that is never replicated with our Learning.
We are assured when we Go with our Gut Instinct.

Now the flashes, the glimpses, the Insights are coming up often, yet if our conscious mind is full of content then we won’t notice them - we won’t have an awareness of them amongst the swirling hurly-burly of our busy-ness, and we certainly won’t see the wood for the trees!

If we have a time when we can quieten down the fervent activity of all our thinking, then this might come into alignment with some emerging Insights - or it might not. It can seem very much like pot-luck, and certainly nothing that can be relied upon.
So, we’ll most likely return to something feels that it IS reliable – our logical and self-directed thinking. 

This is what I would describe as Content. 

As we get older we get very good at Content, and at our ability to present it to our conscious awareness. And through this very reliable ability we will grow our trust and our sense of reliance as to how to best run our lives.

And we’ll run our lives on Content and Knowledge rather than Wisdom and Understanding.

I’m not saying that Content and Knowledge are not useful for us in our daily lives, for they are. You could say they are the nuts and bolts of many of the structures in our daily lives.

However, take the car. There are many nuts and bolts within the wheel structure, many nuts and bolts within the engine and the transmission. If you paid more attention to the nuts and bolts, rather than your Understanding of the purpose and the principles behind what makes the engine work and the wheels turn, then you’d never be able to use the car to transport you anywhere. You would walk instead.

If you paid more attention to the nuts and bolts of walking, the biomechanics of walking let’s say, than you did to the integrated and innate bodily understanding of how to get from here to there, then you’d never move. 

When teaching a baby to walk we don’t go and get the manual of How to Walk Properly. We just encourage the baby to become more familiar with – to grow his Understanding of – his innate Sense of Balance and Movement.

When we are older and if, by some misfortune, need to re-learn how to walk, then we are confronted with the Barrier of Mental Content on our way to being able to walk again. If it was just down to tapping into our innate Understanding then we’d get to where we wanted to go much quicker. But we are slowed down by our having to conquer that Barrier. In terms of our mind, we would be getting in our own way.

And getting in our own way – like that – is something we are doing all the time, every day of our lives.  It still happens to us even when we know we are doing it – although in these instances we are quicker and better at getting out of our own way once we notice what’s going on.

The key is to recognise Content for what it really IS. Then we will rely upon the Ace of our Wisdom.