Fragile Wisdom

Many spiritual belief systems are largely based on the premise that one can become wiser by doing certain practices, accumulating life experience, praying, being more open to God, more compassionate, or whatever it may be. Wisdom will allow us to better understand, accept, and perhaps even change, reality; it will give us inner peace and make us better persons. It is the highest goal we can aspire to. It is also a secure investment: all the time and effort you put into gaining wisdom will pay off in some way or another.

I myself implicitly operate on that premise. It's not that I've consciously set out to accumulate wisdom, as if it were some sort of commodity, but if I'm engaged in an existential/spiritual search it's in the hope, albeit flickering, that it is going to lead me somewhere. I might be going round in circles a lot of the time, but the hope of finding answers, or whatever there is to be found, is still there.

We tend to think of wisdom as a spiritual quality, meaning something beyond the physical and the psychological, something transcendent that cannot be taken away from us. But it can. All it takes is for something to go wrong in our brains. Some time ago I attended a meditation group in which a woman told us about a good friend of hers, very committed to her Buddhist practice, who had recently had a psychotic breakdown and, believing that everyone was out to get her, had gone missing. What happened to her wisdom? Was it still there in some way? Was she perhaps going about her psychotic breakdown in a more enlightened way as a result of her meditation practice? Was the whole episode perhaps part of a bigger plan that would eventually benefit her?

A few days ago I watched a clip on the internet where Ram Dass was interviewed about his then recently published book on aging and dying, Still Here. The interviewer said that, having read the book, he could see that the stroke Ram Dass had suffered some years earlier, which nearly killed him and left him with some degree of expressive aphasia and limited mobility, hadn't dimished his soul. That made me quite uncomfortable. What did he exactly mean by "soul"? Would he have said the same had Ram Dass's brain haemorrhage affected his cognitive function to the point that he couldn't speak or write, or remember who he was or what "God" meant? I'm not critizising the interviewer — if his use of the word "soul" made me uncomfortable it is becase it reflects my own thinking, or at least one of its many contradictory aspects.

I don't know whether we have anything we could call soul in other than a metaphorical sense, or whether our spiritual search can take us any further that what our brains will allow. It is painful to realise how fragile our existence is, and that's a realisation that can inspire us to turn to spirituality, to seek wisdom and compassion as the means to transcend the contingency of the world. But it is even more painful to realise that wisdom and compassion themselves are as fragile and contingent as the wounded world they seek to redeem. Still, I don't resign myself to believing that that is the last word on the matter. I sincerely hope there's something I'm missing, something I'm not yet wise enough to appreciate.