Recently someone asked me about the building blocks of wisdom. This short overview is an attempt to address that excellent question. It is far from exhaustive. But I hope it helps you think about the big picture of wisdom – and even more importantly, help us all move more deeply into living this wisdom.

Take a look at the following graphic and keep it in mind as you read what follows, coming back to look at this as needed.

THE GOAL

Wisdom is the fruit of transformation. Sometimes this is described as seeing through the eyes of our awakened hearts. In Buddhism it is usually referred to as enlightenment (bodhi in Indian Buddhism, or satori in Zen Buddhism) while in the Christian tradition it has usually been described as acquiring the mind of Christ or Christ consciousness (this later term also being used by some from other faith traditions). Or, to use slightly more psychological language, we might speak of it as the transformation and expansion of both consciousness and identity. 

However, regardless of the language we use to describe this awakening and transformation the important thing to note is that it involves something much more profound than acquiring information. It also transcends maturation, healing, and integration. It involves a quantum shift in our inner world that leads to a fundamentally new way of seeing and relating to everything in existence. This is the basis of wisdom.

THE PROCESS

The process of awakening and transformation is far from linear. Graphically I like to represent it as a cone-shaped spiraling movement from the body as the primary level of organizing consciousness and identity, through the mind, soul and ultimately to the spirit. But while this might capture some of the inner dimension of the process it vastly oversimplifies the journey which always involves looping back through earlier developmental levels to mature developmentally delayed dimensions of our self. It also involves the life-long commitment to three things: growth and maturation, healing, and the integration of all the diverse members of the family-of-self.

1. Growth and Maturation

Neither growth or maturation is an automatic by-product of aging or experience. But they cannot take place without the passage of time and processing of life experiences. Lots of old people lack maturity of inner psychological structures but no one accomplishes this without a lot of intentional hard work over a long period of time. 

Rather than being something that happens globally to the totality of our inner self, growth (or maturation) happens within specific dimensions of development. The following chart summarizes some of the most important dimensions of development that are involved in human maturation. 

Growth is our life-long task. But it is not as individual as we often think. It is something that it always facilitated by growing with others - something we build into the foundation of everything we do at Cascadia.

2. Healing

The healing of ever-deepening dimensions of our brokenness is also a life-long task. We all die with this work incomplete. That is an inevitable part of being human. But life will give us continuous invitations to take this further as we notice and respond to stuckness, inordinate attachments, absences of inner freedom, disproportionate reactions, and other similar things. This process of healing is not linear. Like the unfolding of the self depicted in the spiraling movement from the body-self to the spirit-self (see the Accessing Wisdom graphic above), healing spirals around the same axis of self as it moves ever deeper. Healing involves hard work. Sometimes it must be done with others (often, those professionally trained being able to offer things that friends can never offer) although there is also always an important place for the inner work that only we can do on our own.  

3. Integration of the Lost Parts of Self within the Family-Of-Self

Integration must precede transcendence. In order for us to move beyond the places in our lives where we are developmentally stuck, it is essential that all the members of the family-of-self be welcomed back within the self. The whole self must always include all the excluded parts of self that we judge inferior, weak, and shameful, or in some other way, unacceptable. Only when they are embraced and owned will we be free to stop projecting them onto others. Only then can we transcend the platforms of development that most of us spend most of our adult lives inhabiting.

This also includes the integration of the most important dimensions of our personal unconscious with our personal consciousness. This happens as we attend to our depths and the messages arising from them. This is a crucial part of the inner life-long work of becoming a healthy, mature, fully-alive human being. To ignore this work is to compromise the extent to which we can access wisdom and experience wholeness.

2020 © Dr. David G. Benner