Wisdom-Seeking

The other face of information-seeking is wisdom-seeking. There are many ways to define wisdom. I find it useful to contrast it with information.

Information is pointed, discrete. It is “a difference that makes a difference,” something standing out against a background. As such it tends to be a binary—a one or a zero. Something specific separates itself from the amorphous. The book is distinct from the room behind it, the letters from the page, from each other, and so on. When we seek information, we hone in and eliminate possibilities until we’ve defined something in enough detail that we can take meaning. It can be a phone number, a color, the answer to a question.

Wisdom as I define it is structural. It isn’t the fact, but the context of understanding in which the fact exists, and to which it relates. It’s the sense of the need that led to seeking the phone number, the process by which to find it, the means of contact and of inquiry. It is all the colors in contrast, which give the one color its border. It’s the questions that remain unasked and unanswered, hovering around the simple answer, hinting at a landscape yet to be explored.

If information is the node, or the data point, wisdom is the connections between nodes and the overall structure. We use it to make meaning of the information we encounter, and while further information also allows our wisdom to grow, it might be more accurate to say that the act of making meaning is what gets refined as we wise-up.

I seek some piece of information, then I examine it within all the other things I know, my own previous experiences, advice and rumors, culture, language, and human consciousness, and make some determination. That becomes my map of the territory. When I act the next time, I act differently. If it goes well, my wisdom was useful, and I might keep it. If not, I have to change the way I made meaning.

You can see that there is hardly a border between seeking information and seeking wisdom. As soon as I do one, the other follows naturally. It’s a dance of instance and context.

When I fail to think, feel, and act for myself, I am forcing the information I find to match my preconceived models, reinforcing those models, and using them to structure my experience in a way that carves the world again and again into the shapes I prefer.

A Third Member

We tend to think of information as facts, or data, and wisdom as the equations and arguments that interpret those points. Inasmuch, we prioritize the signs of thirdness: words and theories and tight aphorisms. Those have their place, but it’s this bias towards thirdness that makes us ignore earlier signs, sand down individual differences into abstract universals, and force the next thing we meet into one of these ready categories.

I want to propose another way of looking at this sequence.

Information-seeking belongs to the signs of firstness. It’s the initial sense and impression, the first things that stand out here and now, before words get involved.

Wisdom-seeking belongs to secondness. It indexes those impressions, relates them to others in the past, and locates them in a context. That suggests that there must be one more phase, resolving this binary into a ternary.

The signs of thirdness are not information, nor are they wisdom. They belong to meaning-seeking. Our judgments, theories, warnings, and five-star reviews attempt to add another layer of structure to the other two that give us the ability to predict the future, and more importantly, to share. We can’t hand our bare senses or our memories to another person. We have to wrap them in language, and hope that it’s good enough that what they take from it is something like the thing we meant to give. This third phase allows us to pass down years of experience within minutes. Of course, a clever aphorism can then be an impression in firstness, that we catalog in secondness, make a decision on in thirdness, and test against the real world (in firstness once again). That’s the healthy model, the one that flows and re-flows through every stage, in all directions.

When we read philosophy or caution virtue, we have already departed wisdom into meaning. No meaning is right or wrong, only more or less useful in certain situations. It’s dangerous to confuse meaning with wisdom, because another’s meaning may not work for us, or they simply may not be very good at communicating it. Wisdom is something we sense very clearly, and struggle to speak about.

The Felt Sense

Luckily, our wisdom is always with us. We make use of it without recognizing it, and with a little practice, can consciously tap into it at any time. I’m referring to what psychologist Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense in his book Focusing.

Wherever else it may reside, wisdom is best found in the body. It would probably be reductionist of me to call it a sign of secondness, although to the extent that that’s true, it must be a very broad one, involving multiple signs at multiple levels working at once. Just as we find our emotions in bodily feeling, so too we find our wisdom. But where an emotion may be rather narrow and intense, a felt sense is larger and much more vague.

We know much more about things than we can say. Take a friend, for example. Think of someone you love to spend time with. Imagine they walk into the room right now, and notice what feelings arise in the body. How do you know it’s them? How should you behave? You don’t need to run through a litany of facts: their physical traits, every word you’ve ever exchanged, everything you’ve ever done together, every story you’ve heard of them, or comparisons with other people you know. As soon as that person appears, you have an instant awareness not only of your entire history together, but your potential future, as well as where you are now and what you might be doing here. None of this has to pass through words and thirdness. There’s a twinge, a tingle, a luminous glow…something. Something very vague, that you could never describe in as much detail to convey the whole nuance of your knowledge of that person to someone else. It’s a Gestalt image, a whole that is updated with every encounter, even every sentence.

Now think of someone you dread having to run into, for whatever reason. What do you feel when you imagine them walking into a room? It’s different for each and every person, each and every location, and in fact it shifts with every momentary change in our lives. This vague, inclusive awareness is a felt sense.

The felt sense is broader than an emotion, and in fact when emotions run strong, I see this as being “zoomed-in” too close to recognize the felt sense. If emotions and memories are the trees of a forest, the felt sense is the view from a bird flying well over the treetops—the whole vast canopy taken at a glance.

You can find your wisdom, your felt sense, regarding any person, situation, or topic by turning your attention to it, and sitting quietly. Resist the temptation to think or speak in words. If emotions come up to whack you like a branch in the face, fly higher over the trees until you see the whole forest. At this point you may have any kind of bodily sensations, or seemingly random images coming up. These are not the felt sense, but they are part of it. The whole of them, taken together—that’s the felt sense. It may feel like a word on the tip of your tongue that you just can’t remember, but which you know that you know.

This is your wisdom as far as that object goes. It’s the structure of all your experiences with it, and it may warn you of danger, ease your tension, or any number of things. It’s literally impossible for me to describe it in words, but it will tell you exactly how you currently feel about the thing.

Our wisdom isn’t right or wrong, it’s highly individual. And it isn’t always comprehensive or useful. We can have very skewed notions, or too little experience. Gendlin’s work suggests that trauma or unpleasantness can cause certain sensations to predominate. It’s as if our wisdom gets stuck, unable to take in new information, and make new meaning. We become mired in our own dogma. Gendlin’s method involves locating a felt sense and sitting with it until it moves. Essentially, we look upon our wisdom without judgment and accept it, which allows it to move again, to rejoin the cycle of growth.

I won’t go through the whole process, since it can be found easily in Gendlin’s book Focusing, but it’s as simple as it is powerful. However, we will practice locating our wisdom in this week’s exercise. Sometimes, that alone is enough to make meaningful changes.

Exercise

10. Sit comfortably. Quiet your thoughts with a minute or so of relaxed breathing. Then ask yourself, “What do I know about my current situation? What does it feel like?” Allow up to one minute of silence for a felt sense to develop. Notice how it feels, accept it, and let it go.

Brush aside stray thoughts, and pull up if strong emotions flare. You are looking for the space between thought and emotion, where you can feel a sense of a vague whole, difficult to describe. Once you have the hang of it, notice your felt sense at least once a day. You may be able to drop the sitting and breathing at some point. In that case, you can begin to notice your wisdom in a wide variety of situations, within seconds. You can also call up people, events, problems, etc., that are not present and notice a shifting wisdom about them.

If the feeling changes, this is both normal and beneficial. Allow it to metamorphose into something else, note that next feeling, and continue as long as you like. You may realize you’ve had this experience many times in your life, without a formal name for it. This is the process by which our wisdom evolves, and places where we feel “stuck” are excellent topics of focus.

There are few exercises in this series more useful than this one. Troubleshooting and many more details can be found in Gendlin’s book, with which I have no affiliation.