Skip to main content

Wisdom



“Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism is the madness of wisdom,” said Bergen Evans.  Both stoicism and cynicism are stances that spill over the borders of the normal; hence the nuances of madness.  Can’t one be normal and yet be wise?

Psychologist Erik Erikson described wisdom as “detached concern with life.”  Detachment implies a transcendence of emotions while concern involves a certain degree of emotions.  If the stoic and cynic in ourselves can come together in a rational understanding, we will be sanely wise.

Life inevitably takes us through a multitude of experiences.  Some are good experiences while the others may be bad.  Joys and sorrows are intermingled in life.  There are both successes and failures.  A time may come in our life when we learn to rise above the urge to celebrate joys and successes and lament sorrows and failures.  That’s when we have become wise.

As we grow older we should acquire greater integrity of being.  Integrity is a psychological state in which the external factors don’t unsettle us much: neither positively nor negatively.  In other words, we don’t rejoice much over good things happening, nor do we weep over bad things.  We have learnt to accept them all as integral part of life.  

Integrity is a unique personal style.  It is a particular way of facing the external realities.  With a fair degree of equanimity. 

Integrity and wisdom are two sides of the same coin.  They are not much different from each other.  One cannot be found without the other.


It may be much easier to come across stoics and cynics than people possessing integrity and wisdom.  It is easier to suffer injustices stoically than to understand them wisely.  It is easier to look around cynically for a coffin when you smell flowers than to absorb the pain of the realisation that the fragrance of flowers is as ephemeral as the innocence of children.
Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 2, 2014 at 10:29 PM

    I really agree with the part where you said "it is easier to come across stoic and cynics thant people possessing integrity and wisdom". You've given me a thought for the day and now Its actually making me think about a lot of things.

    Great post.
    http://nomadfashionista.wordpress.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 3, 2014 at 4:36 PM

    I support only the goals of Stoics and Cynics but it's better if a person gets wise gradually with his own experiences with life, (As you said that life takes us through various good and bad experiences) rather than by a deliberate attempt (by giving up worldly comforts and disregarding things of passion).
    I even fail to understand every time that how does a person feel an urge to turn into someone's disciple. As an individual I find myself unable to follow a person or any of the doctrines completely. Wisdom comes from within, by our own experiences, and not by the external impositions, that's what I believe in till now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 3, 2014 at 6:35 PM

      Namrata, I like your comment especially since it is very much in tune with the psychologist I cited. Erikson is of the view that real wisdom comes with age. In fact, it is the developmental goal of the last stage of life, according to his division of life into 7 stages. At each stage we go through certain crises.

      In infancy it is basic trust vs basic mistrust.
      Toddlerhood: autonomy vs shame and doubt
      Early childhood: initiative vs guilt
      middle childhood: industry vs inferiority
      Adolescence: identity vs role confusion
      Early adulthood: intimacy vs isolation
      Middle adulthood: generativity vs stagnation
      Late adulthood (old age): integrity vs despair

      I worked on that last concept in this blog. For more, just google Erikson. You'll find an amazing lot of information on this issue.

      Delete
    2. UnknownApril 3, 2014 at 9:51 PM

      Oh yes. I found Wikipedia's article upon the stages of life as explained by Erikson. I am amazed to see how I can relate with it. Presently I am going through a phase of life where intimacy with a person and a persistent feeling of isolation accompany me always. Brilliant like anything. :) Would be reading more about it.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af
9 comments
Read more