Tigers by un-perfekt in Pixabay
When one speaks of wise men, one usually thinks of scholars, and one thing does not always have to do with the other. There is a lot of wisdom in nature, much of it in old people who never studied, as well as in prepared people who use knowledge as tools to reach deeper and more philosophical truths, combining it with intuition and empathy, among other things.
In this opportunity, @ecotrain invites us to think about what we would ask a wise person, an old man or a grandfather.
If you were to meet with a wise person/sage what sort of questions would you ask? If you were meeting with an elder or folks that had lived for decades, like your grandparents what would you want to know from them?
You know if you don't have the questions you won't get the answers!
Specifically, this week's QOTW is "Meeting with a Wise Person What Sort of Questions Would You Ask?"
I feel that having correct questions can manage correct answers and it will not always be a "wise man" who answers them. In every living being, there is a teacher if we know how to be students and grasp their silent teaching. Because I think it is very true and timely the "wise" sentence that says "When the student is ready, the teacher appears".
Who do we call wise?
Since I was a child, I liked to engage in long conversations with old men and women, but more with old women; I don't know if it was out of empathy or gender solidarity. The fact is that I enjoyed listening to their life stories, their tales told by their mothers, fathers or grandparents, their beliefs and everything that an old man searches for in his long-term memory because their life is centered on their memories and they living to them remembering them because it is as if they were living again.
I learned so much about human nature in those times, about emotions, madness, passions, laughter, and tears for reasons that were alien to me, but which accompanied the stories I heard. I learned from them and, as they told me, they learned from me too because my opinions about what they were telling or my own stories about what I had learned in school generated very pleasant feedback. I, with what I didn't know because I belonged to another era in which it didn't exist yet and they, because they didn't know some things about science or health, more than anything else, that they teach in school, but in their times there were no schools in rural areas.
That you don't learn in other people's heads is relative, because there are many subliminal teachings that slip into the psyche of a child or an impressionable person, capable of valuing the experiences of another. This does not mean that you live someone else's life, but that you appropriate the experiences of others to jump over predictable events and advance along other paths, which in turn does not mean that you stop living, but that you will live what you consider valuable for your dreams and goal-seeking. This is living "consciously", although it does not always work, at least it is a driving force towards what one wants and seeks.
What do I ask a wise?
I think and think about what I would ask a wise person and I am not assailed by any transcendental concerns. One, because I think that inside each person and living being there is a superior wise man who many times is not appreciated, but he is there 24 hours a day, talking, alerting, teaching. And, another, because I feel that this divinity that inhabits us connects with everything that lives, feeds back and doesn't stop teaching and learning as long as there is an apex of interaction with oneself and with the other beings that inhabit the planet.
My most heartfelt question, I don't think there is anyone alive who can answer it, because no one has come back from the dead to tell us the story. But if there were, I would ask what happens to us when the heart stops beating and the brain stops working? Because, although I believe, that I believe in reincarnation and the immortality of the soul; sometimes, there are seconds when the vision of the end of the road assails me like a blind street, a very high wall, like a television that is turned off and nothing else. Which would be a waste and in the universe, nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, only changed.
We're just a cocoon?
So, we can properly think that this physical body is a cocoon that houses what survives and evolves. But where "it" goes after leaving this life, I'm intrigued. There are times when I feel that the DNA chain is what learns, stores information and carries it to each subsequent family member so that the work can continue and so we contain the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors. But doesn't that leave us with no return? Doesn't it save the step of dying and being reborn to simply die and leave our witness in our descendants?
Thoughts like these flit through my mind like birds looking for a nest, but there are no certainties to support them. And I fall into old paradoxes like "we are born to live by dying", which disarticulate all the lucubrations I create and leave me with the same old doubts, with the suspicion that we are nothing more than an eternal and at the same time ephemeral sigh that expires and is transformed into another form of life, that there is no return, that this is all, that there is no resurrection or rebirth, only evolution. This would seem to fall into a kind of nihilism, but it is nothing more than a rebellious attitude, skeptical and disenchanted with traditional ideas that only unleash biased interests, but do not give convincing answers.
Flowers by Larisa-K in Pixabay
The butterfly is LOVE
In any case, there are different ways of dealing with uncertainty, imagination is one, faith and hope placed at the service of the only thing that truly saves us: LOVE with capital letters and it is wise to cultivate it because the seed of wisdom is inside every being.
For your kind reading, THANK YOU
21/03/2020
In response to @ecotrain on eco train QOTW JOIN US! "Meeting with a Wise Person What Sort of Questions Would You Ask?". If you are interested, find out here
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