Knowledge and Wisdom

I speak with two voices and to no one in particular, save those who care to hear or read for that matter.

That which seeks only expression, created in the movement stirred only by that which is within each of us, is that of my pen name, Abel Ryan.

I also speak much more candidly in my own voice and often this is more difficult. For to put thoughts into words what it is that stands outside of language and common understanding itself is a task much greater minds and authors than myself have attempted and found success primarily in artistic expression, although to the more intellectually persistent this also is achieved in plain speech. I will attempt both, only because that is how truth, wisdom and knowledge have always come to me. In the form of inspiration, imagination and faith. And that of my reading interests in science, philosophy and general knowledge as we are all so many entrained from grade school and some of us such as myself, in religious studies from Sunday School to formal religious instruction.

My religion is no longer my anchor. It is in Christ and with the worldview he brings from a new kind of vision, an understanding rather. In this I have found a true faith. And it is here I begin this entry truly with a passage from Northrop Frye's literary analysis of the life and work of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry:

Knowledge is not by deduction, but Immediate by Perception or Sense at once. Christ addresses himself to the Man, not to his Reason.
Christ brought no new doctrines: he brought new stories. He did not save souls; he saved bodies, healing the blind and deaf that they might hear his parables and see his imagery. He stands outside the history of general thought; he stands in the center of individual wisdom.
Wisdom is the application of the imaginative vision taught us by art. We conquer knowledge by forced marches, learning more and more as we continually press on. Wisdom is the unhurried expanding organic health of the powerful and well-knit imagination, and it depends on a combination of practice and relaxation. It is difficult for a man who has knowledge without wisdom to relax his mind into receptivity in front of a picture or poem. [...]
In art we learn as the child learns, through the concrete illustration of stories and pictures, and without that childlike desire to listen to stories and see pictures art could not exist. We acquire greater control over abstract ideas as we grow older: if that is part of the expanding child's vision, well and good: if it replaces that vision, maturity is only degeneration. The wise man has a pattern or image of reality in his mind into which everything he knows fits, and into which everything he does not know could fit, and therefore his approach to knowledge is something that the dung-beetles of unorganized learning cannot even grasp. "More! More" is the cry of a mistaken soul," said Blake: "less than All cannot satisfy Man." 
There are two ways of learning that I can distinguish. There is the purposeful and intentional, and the passive and receptive. Both are useful and both have their limits. One is the way of knowledge and the other of wisdom. One taken too far without advancing in the other is imbalanced, disproportionate. And so we find that we have two camps within our society, those who claim to hold wisdom in the form of preserved values and morality: the Religious. And those who hold to the testament of the body of accumulated knowledge deduced and reduced to a form that can be programmed and taught to each generation so that the body of knowledge may continue to grow:the Reasoners, or as we know them scientists and atheists for the most part.

The way of learning by rote memory, study and practice is known well to us all by now. I would like to introduce a different way of learning. I would call it aspirational learning. When you read something and it speaks to you. When you feel a stirring in a poem or a passage of a book. Do you underline it? Make a note in the margin? Do you share your thoughts about what this moved in you with a friend or partner? There is power in this and it is our inner voice, the spirit speaking through us and heeding us to attend to what the stimulus provoked within us. It teaches, instructs in a way that cannot be explicit, for the entire conversation, the whole of the experience is within you. It is a beautiful and necessary experience and conducive to the growth of wisdom. Both methods of learning must be practiced in order to attain a greater awareness. And awareness is the message of Christ in it's most simple adjective. He came to teach us as children, for we are merely cosmic children. Groping with five senses for truth and understanding that always seem to lie without but that is only a half truth. So much of our understanding, our potential as human beings lies untapped within. Our fulfillment awaits in how we interact with the world and with that self whom is the core of our being. That being which is beloved by our Creator.