Modalities of Wisdom Practices
Dispatch # 4 from the Respond event at MAPLE
[There is an interregnum in my dispatches here. In order to make the stories coherent, I had to slice up the actual narrative time into sections. What follows actually occurred in between my storm-brewing walk in the woods and the conversation around the two-stories we had while sitting in the grass before the movement exercises.]
I came back from my walk and sat next to Layman Pascal, on te front porch of the main residential building, watching the sky above the mountains grow sunlight. We shared a common sense, a kind of worrisome sense, that the tone of the event would linger, or get stalled in ways of speaking we are all familiar with at “conferences” that bring smart people together. We spoke of urgency and gravitas, of subtle energy and meaning-making, of common traps of the will and mind. I said that the problem is we are such pro-social beings,1 that we will accommodate simulated thinking for the purposes of being kind and enjoying each others’ company. Furthermore, from the day before, I knew that we could not have a generative conversation without some kind of heuristic that would help with semantic mapping. We needed to somehow diagram and track the different meanings (contextualized by different mental models) of “wisdom” in order to make progress. When people are talking past each other because of sliding contexts, no progress can be made. If people could contextualize the kind of wisdom they were speaking about, we could populate the features of various sorts of wisdom along a wisdom spectrum. As I sat with Layman we generated a heuristic of the kinds of wisdom people seemed to be intuitively holding. Here is a cleaned up version of the heuristic we generated.2
