Is there wisdom?

I'm posting a post made by Pete on our blog.  I thought it was really interesting to read... my comments follow his original post...

Why do I seek to silently justify my antisocial tendencies by thinking of Thoreau and his 'deliberate' marrow-sucking of life? Was he wiser than others, was he wiser than I? Or was he just, like me, a natural recluse with a distaste for large groups and a self-loathing streak that happened to throw down some of his rantings on paper?

Perhaps there is no wisdom, but only men regurgitating various combinations of limitation, potential, dreams, delusions and ideologies, each man with his own terrifically lonely experience, his own style of perceiving, interpreting, assimilating, analyzing, and elaborating on what he believes is truth for all but ultimately applies only to his own mind. The world is, in a sense, actually solipsistic; each man lives irreducibly in his own head; our heroes, masters and shepherds are merely those who had the charisma to make their own particular learning, personality and communication styles (often fraught with psychoses and emotional derangements) accessible to masses with similar ones to their own; perhaps this be wisdom for some---the insight of one's life might make another of his specific makeup say "gee, that might be useful for my own life" and it may well actually be---but there it ends. May we hold Thoreau, Emerson, Trungpa, Rilke, Lao Tzu, the sages, the saints, the gurus, the poets, the philosophers, the artists as peers: like us, struggling, flawed, often deluded, mistaken and self-centered, and perhaps only occasionally and coincidentally helpful to what is otherwise our own lonely and fantastic condition.

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own commonsense."-- Some Guy*

(*Buddha)

(p)

One of the things I was thinking about as I read this was that wisdom is often couched in words; a sentence, a paragraph, a book - when we read or hear something inspirational or revealing, we value it as "wise" and which we call "wisdom." Interesting though (and this next thought popped into my head as I read "...who had the charisma to make their own particular learning, personality and communication styles [...] accessible to masses with similar ones to their own), that what we are reading is merely a way of describing the world; we act as if our minds and reality (i.e., the world) is as palpable as words. I like how you say "but there it ends." And it's true to a sense, as if once we've consumed our sentence, we continue reading for more, as if we are hoping that wisdom must be discovered only by reading, rather than reflection. 

h

More thoughts to come. This is good to think about for a while.

h