The Torch of Wisdom

Wisdom is something you have to make time to time.

Fire is always everywhere but to get the flames of your own, you have to make it where you need it with some firewood, sticks and a match.

Wisdom is just like the fire and constantly present as the law of nature. To have a flame of wisdom, you have to make it where you need it. With knowledge, experience and skills that make a man wise, that wise man can make a flame of wisdom when he needs.

A wise man collects knowledge as ingredients for conscience. By knowledge, he strengthens his common sense. With his common sense, he leads a life within ‘the law of the natural morals’ that applies to all mankind and living things. With moral practices, he gains self-control. With self-controls, he develops confidence in his views and concepts as he gradually straightens and tunes up his ideas to align with ‘the laws of nature’. Confidence is energy that can be changed into will power or determination. A weak determination can grow into a stronger determination with more knowledge, more skill, more awareness and more understanding. Once his views are tuned in to the nature or the way of the Existence, he can see the right things amongst the wrong ones.

That is the first stage of the law of wisdom.

As he gradually understands, the law of nature, he can make the flame of wisdom when he needs.

The second stage of wisdom is the harder one. Not all wise men were able to reach this. That is the state of one is being the way one knows.

To have wisdom is quite easy. Tuning up one’s views and concepts with the laws of nature is a lot easier. It can be done as a hobby; and with a habit, one can gain some skill for judgement as making the flame of wisdom. This first stage indeed needs lots of learning and practices.

The second stage - to make oneself into a flame of wisdom is hard. To conquer own ‘natural resistance of fixed egoism lost in complications of misperception’ against the law of nature is hard. An actual wise man tries to achieve just that – to be the way of the law of nature – to overcome the obstacles of unskilled condition. With gradual practice, one may become the skill itself.

The skill is the state in which one doesn’t need judgement anymore; but just like reciting a book, one can know exactly what is right and wrong. That is how one may be the flame of wisdom or the torch of wisdom.

In this state, the flame of wisdom doesn’t make a wrong statement ever again.





Notes:
1. The law of natural morals is part of the law of nature based on the concept that
a. The nature is mixed with sets and singles. A set is made of two opposing conditions and two neutral conditions to be known as both and either. For examples, ‘right, wrong and neither’, ‘good, bad and neither’, ‘pain, pleasure and neither’, ‘punishment, reward and neither’, etc.; the singles are things (e.g. man, head, finger, toe, tree, fruit, flower), names, etc.
b. The nature is the same to every living being that it is fair and just.
c. The nature is a set of laws that composed the Existence; they determine what are wrong and what are right for the living beings.
d. Moral is the right things in the law of nature. As the nature is just and fair, morals are the same and unchanging.
e. There is a set of morals that is clear and obvious. They are applied to all living beings that belong to the Existence.
f. Most importantly, the law of moral is not the views or concepts. Moral must lead to happiness that doesn’t need to hurt anything that has its own ego.
2. Ego is self identification made of a set of the fixed mental faculties exist on the physical body; however, ego is the body and the mind felt as oneness. An individual being has ego as it cannot distinguish the body and the mind completely. Superficially, an intelligent being can understand the mind and the body and can describe which is which. But as the body and the mind are combined as one, in certain deep levels, an ordinary intelligent being cannot reach to realize the way they are (science is improving to understand this).
3. Misperception: if the eye is not right, one may not see right. Ideological misperception is caused by the same knowledge we may have and the different views of different people which one uses as one’s own eyes in thoughts. Misperception is the cause of Misunderstanding. Mistakes are made very often and that provides a concept how we have misperception. I think misperception is a significant thing in the development of wisdom; by trying to correct the mistakes, we can have the right understandings that become the right knowledge as the ingredients or fuel to make a flame of wisdom.
4. Natural resistance of fixed egoism lost in complications of misperception: natural resistance is caused by pride, unbendable pride, bias, misperception and ignorance which can be understood as ego.

Reference:
Encyclopaedia Britannica CD ROM, 2005


Acknowledgement:
Above essay is mainly based on Buddhist concept of wisdom. Other different terms are from different sources of philosophy. The essay was written just as I see. I think I’m somewhere at the first stage. And I expect the readers to accept my thoughts cautiously.

Wish:
May I be able to achieve such state with the merit from writing this essay!