Wisdom Whore

I remember a story I heard about Trungpa Rinpoche's first trip to NYC. He got the airport and due to some miscommunication, missed the gentleman who was sent there to greet him. Having escaped Tibet from the marauding Chicoms, Trungpa was far from a timid man so he jumped in a cab and went into Manhattan searching for the Institute where he was supposed to teach. When he got into Manhattan, he saw that people were eating dirty water dogs from a vendor and enjoying them immensely. So Trungpa, being an adaptable sort goes to the vendor and buys a dog. He eats it, finds it delicious and orders another eating that one too. A little while later he finds the Institute and walks in to a throng of a very worried people terrified that they had lost the Great Trungpa Rinpoche to the jungles of New York. When they had calmed down, one of them asked Trungpa if he was hungry. Trungpa replied that we wasn't because he had ate something from a street vendor. Further investigation yielded the fact that the food stuff in question was a hot dog which mortifiedd all the Buddhists in earshot, Trungpa included. He excused himself to the restroom and prompty threw up the contents of his stomach. Upon returning into the main hall, Trungpa came to a realization. Without saying a word, he waslked outside and found another street vendor. He then purchased another hot dog and proceeded to eat it. When he came back the the Institute, the students who had witnessed this were beyond shocked. One of the students asked if it wasn't against doctrine to eat the flesh of an animal. Trungpa replied, "Yes it is. But an aversion is just as bad as an addiction."

I am a wisdom whore. In this proclamation, I ask for no allowances. I hold no allegiance to any intellectual tradition or methodology. My preferences solely have to do with what works. I am beholden to nothing. I will accept and test anything. I am not a pragmatist. I don't simply adopt practices that serve me in the short term. I am actively and constantly searching for anything that might add to my understanding of the world and the people who inhabit it. I have some vague delusion of grandeur that I might someday add to the body of wisdom writing in the library of Man. But I care far less about posterity than I do understanding reality around me. As Rabbi Tarphon said, "You are not required to finish the work, nor are you free to desist from it." I find that strangely comforting.

I am a admirer of Spinoza. He posits, correctly, that for a person to truly understand something, he must first believe it to be true. Only then can he test its validity. That itself is a tremendously loaded statement about the nature of the human mind. For any idea, there are three sections. Belief, understanding and validity. What this means is that achieving any sense of wisdom requires faith and heartbreak. You must have faith to achieve true understanding. And despite that leap of faith and the work to comprehend, the idea still may be invalid. To do this again honestly requires that you harden your heart to a certain degree.

I first learned of this phenomenon in the martial arts where it appears I have learned all the truths of my life. Go to any training hall and the question you will most often hear is whether or not a technique will work. The first cut you have to make intellectually is not whether or not someone can make the technique work but if you can. If someone can, you know it is in the realm of possibility and often you just have to take it on faith and anecdotal evidence (which I hate.) If you belief the technique to be valid, you practice it thousands of times until you master it. You pour everything you have into making this technique perfect. Only then can you test its validity in the ring or on the street. There you may find that all your work meant nothing and that you simply cannot make the technique work. In which case, you abandon it and adopt another. This can just as easily be applied to styles. This is a gross oversimplification of a long, complex process but hopefully, the broad idea comes through.

People, smart and dumb alike, have great difficulty adopting different beliefs structures even if it's only for a moment. Belief becomes fixed instead of a transitory place to inhabit. In the very worst cases, belief and validity become interchangeable. Aristotle said that the mark of an educated mind was the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. I wish to take it one step further. In order to truly and honestly test the validity of any idea, you must first truly believe it so that you may understand all of its nuances.

I didn't really begin to understand the nature of martial arts until I mastered my 3rd. Now that I've achieved rank in a dozen, I realize that the structure of learning each individual art in its pure form allowed me to understand a different aspect of my body and mind. I now understand that all that structure existed to eventually free the body to move as it might free from any emotional attachment or habit. That's not to say I don't feel emotion. Just that I'm not controlled by it.

It wasn't until I raced my 3rd race that I understood what riding a motorcycle was really about. It wasn't until I could speak my 3rd language did I begin to understand how the brain processes different types of speech.

I have some vague notion that this is a lampost to freeing my mind. I believe that the body is a great teacher for our thoughts and that opportunities for new modes of thinking start in new action, not the other way around. (See "The Tree of Knowlege" Dr. Humberto Maturana) I hope that I am tough enough to subject myself to the heartbreak of an invalid belief over and over in search of the validity that can set my mind free. Free from an addiction to praise and being "right." Free from the aversion of beling thought a fool. Perhaps then, I might have something to contribute. But then again, maybe not.