Knowledge … and Wisdom

As we go through school and acquire knowledge, knowledge of facts, knowledge of ideas, knowledge of principles, knowledge of methodologies, knowledge of trained skills, we gain in our ability to act in the world and succeed in our external life. We learn how to employ the faculty of reasoning and we are able to classify, organize, name and assemble things and ideas in a logical step-by-step fashion. But all this knowledge does not reach to the core issues of why it is we are alive, what our role in the world is meant to be, and what the entire manifested universe is about. We do not recognise our own deepest selves. We have ‘knowledge’ but do not yet have ‘wisdom’.

Knowledge has its real value in the world. Yet it can also mislead us when it takes us away from the deeper values of life and existence. When we use knowledge to create powers of action in the world while failing to appreciate the imbalances we are creating at the same time. We burn hydrocarbon fuels without consideration of the pollution, health issues, and climate change that these fuels create. We have knowledge, but not wisdom. We use our knowledge to create incredible powers of destruction, atomic bombs that can annihilate entire populations and disrupt the world with the threat of ‘nuclear winter’ if we go too far. We have knowledge, but not wisdom.

We set up economic systems that create a small number of extremely wealthy individuals by handing them control of the levers of our economic life, while at the same time, literally billions of people in the world are excluded from the basics of food, clean water, shelter, health care and freedom from the fear that comes with the disruption of the basics of existence. We have knowledge, but not wisdom.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother do not denigrate ‘knowledge’. They simply want to see it put to the service of the larger unity and oneness of which we all are a part. They want wisdom to guide our use of knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo writes in his Thoughts and Aphorisms: ‘Late, I learned that when reason died Wisdom was born; before that liberation, I had only knowledge.”

The Mother observes: “Once again I must repeat that the form of these aphorisms is purposely paradoxical in order to give the mind a little shock and awaken it enough for it to make an effort to understand. One must not take this aphorism literally. Some people seem worried by the idea that reason must disappear for one to become wise. It is not that, it is not that at all.”

“Reason must no longer be the summit and the master. … For a very long time in life, until one possesses anything resembling Knowledge, it is indispensable that reason be the master, otherwise one is the plaything of one’s impulses, one’s fancies, one’s more or less disordered emotional imaginings, and one is in danger of being very far removed not merely from wisdom but even from the knowledge needed for conducting oneself acceptably. But when one has managed to control all the lower parts of the being with the help of reason, which is the apex of ordinary human intelligence, then if one wants to go beyond this point, if one wants to liberate oneself from ordinary life, from ordinary thought, from the ordinary vision of things, one must, if I may say so, stand upon the head of reason, not trampling it down disdainfully, but using it as a stepping stone to something higher, something beyond it, to attain to something which concerns itself very little with the decrees of reason; something which can allow itself to be irrational because it is a higher irrationality, with a higher light; something which is beyond ordinary knowledge and which receives its inspirations from above, from high above, from the divine Wisdom. This is what this means.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 43-44