Wisdom

I found the inspiration for this week’s blog while cleaning my teeth this morning.

I have one solitary wisdom tooth, but it still resides within my gum. Every few weeks, within the last year or so, it moves around a bit, enough for me to think that it might be about to make its way to the surface. Then it becomes dormant again for another few weeks, before it starts again. As I write this, I am 58 years old. I figure by the time I get to 60, I may finally have a little bit of wisdom. But even then, I will only have about one quarter of the wisdom that most people have, because most people have four wisdom teeth. Having more wisdom teeth should make a person more wise, don’t you think?

I started to think about where our wisdom really comes from.

I have heard from some spiritual teachers that we have, within us, all of the wisdom we will ever need. I believe that this is true, but that it is like the wisdom tooth lying beneath the surface of the gum – it’s not much good to anybody until it finds a way to reach the surface.

For us to have awareness of any information, it needs to reach our brains. Most of the information which reaches our brains comes through our senses. We hear something on the radio, watch something on the TV; we read a book; someone tells us a story. These days, we see something on facebook or on the internet.

But we all know that you can’t believe everything you see or hear, especially on facebook. (That picture of the flying saucer with the extraterrestrials nearby did look real though, don’t you think?)

With so much information coming our way these days, and not all of it true, how can we work out what information we need to take on board, and what information we need to reject? This is where our internal wisdom comes in.

Your higher self knows the answers to every question that you are ever likely to ask, and it communicates these answers to you in two ways: through your feelings and through meditation.

The problem is that we have never learned to understand what our feelings are trying to tell us. Instead, we have been educated to disregard our feelings and only take any notice of proven facts. The problem with this attitude is that, as far as our senses and rational brains are concerned, these days there are a lot of facts that are proven to us, which really aren’t true. The truth of the facts, with which we are presented, always depends on our point of view.

I try not to watch too much news these days, because I find it too depressing. However, I did see the news that the Ukraine was in crisis, and that Russia was implicated as being the cause of the crisis. However, a friend pointed out to me the Russian point of view, which gave a totally different perspective of the crisis, as Russia defended its only warm-water ports in Crimea which were being threatened by US influenced Ukraine.

I don’t claim to be an expert on this issue (or any other for that matter), but my point is that if we take everything that we hear and see as gospel, we can easily become the victim of biased propaganda or even complete untruths.

I once saw a documentary about the London terrorist bombings, in which a conspiracy theory was being proposed by certain British Muslims, such that it was not really Muslims who were responsible for the bombing but a government conspiracy. When I asked, during meditation, how people could be sucked in by such conspiracy theories and accept as truth those things which are clearly untrue, I received the following response:

“There are many reasons that people accept untruth as truth. Usually it involves fear. In the case of the Muslims who wish to believe that it is not possible that there are people within their religion who would kill innocent civilians, it is less fearful to believe that the government lies to them, when they already have evidence of that, with weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist and such, than it is to believe that their sweet and wonderful religion, which has given them such strength, can cause others to kill themselves and many others. If they were to listen to their higher selves, they would learn the truth of the situation, and if they listened to and accepted the feelings they get when they hear about these conspiracy theories, in conjunction with thinking love, they would come to understand the truth.

The truth is that no religion, theory, sect, or group, which wishes to divide people from each other, can offer the complete truth for any person. For, as you have learned, we are all one. All people are united by God’s love. This is the truth that your higher self would reveal to you, if you let it.”

However, in order to start to understand the feelings that our higher self is using to communicate the truth, we first have to start paying attention to those feelings. Rather than completely ignoring our feelings, we have to firstly acknowledge that we have them. Once we acknowledge our feelings, instead of stuffing them down or ignoring them, we then have to look at them with love.

Most people don’t understand, for instance, that anger, like all other negative emotions, is a way for your higher self to let you know that you are looking at things differently than it would. Most people think that anger is caused by something that another person has done to you, whereas anger is caused by the fact that you are not looking at that person and that situation with the same love with which your higher self would view that person or situation.

So, in order to fully understand our emotions, we have to go back to school – not to learn facts, but to learn how to understand what our higher selves are trying to communicate to us using our emotions. This is something that should be taught in schools, but for now, we can start by going to the source, or the Source, depending on your point of view.

That source can be found during meditation, when we are in contact with our higher selves. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” (Matt. 7:7) Start your meditation session with a question, and the answers will come. If they don’t come during that meditation session, they may come by the next song on the radio, or something that your husband or child says to you over dinner. You may see the answer on a billboard, or it may just come to you out of the blue.

A regular meditation practice gives us a greater rapport with our higher self, and we are then more likely to be able to understand what it is trying to communicate to us through our emotions.

Once we are paying attention to our emotions, and understand what our higher self is trying to tell us, we are in a better position to discern its attitude to the facts with which we are presented. If certain facts resonate with us, we may need to take these facts on board, as they may be useful later in our lives. If we are still uncertain of the veracity of any facts, we can always ask during meditation, and we are sure to find the answer.

If we still have difficulty understanding how our source would view any issue, the best way to proceed is with love, to ask “what would love do now?”, to be love, think love, and act with love in all that we do. For in the end, we will understand that love is the Source of all wisdom.

Love is the answer to all questions.

Image courtesy of Theeradech Sanin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net