In today's episode, I want to discuss where wisdom and why wisdom should be the number one thing that we are prioritising in our journeys, personally, and also collectively, I think that wisdom is really the thing that the world needs more of right now. And I would absolutely love to be part of a movement, where we each commit and are accountable for developing our own wisdom, and see that
trickling out into the world. I feel so strongly about wisdom and developing wisdom that I've recently rebranded even the podcast and created a website to share as many wisdom tools as I can. So if you are interested in being part of that journey, and being part of that movement, please sign up, I promise, I'm not a spammer, you won't be flooded with lots of sales type of materials and anything like
that. It's just a place for us to come together as like minded individuals, and to really work on bringing these ripples of wisdom out into the world. But really, the reason that I've become so passionate about wisdom, other than having studied Wisdom Teachings now for two decades, and teaching and working with people in the space is because, really, wisdom is the thing that is so
absent from our world today. And I think we can all easily see this and relate to this, you know, we just need to look around at what's happening in the world, we need to look at things like social media, and there's this very fake bubble that we've created. And I think in today's world, we very often confuse knowledge with wisdom, they're very, a lot of very, very knowledgeable people, there's a lot of information. And we perhaps think of that as wisdom. That's a modern day
wisdom is knowledge. But in fact, if we look historically, throughout all the ages, in great cultures of the world, wisdom always had a very profound and unique place as almost the highest pinnacle that a society could, could aspire to. And, you know, we even see this in the famous archetypes of the wise elder and the sage, you know, the Wisdom, the wise person was really a leader in a
society. But today, unfortunately, our leaders most of them are definitely anything but wise, and half of them aren't even very knowledgeable. So we are living in very confused and ignorant times. Now, I recently actually had a discussion with my mom about this. And we were saying, you
know, it's very hard. In some ways, the world can be so overwhelming, there's so many problems and troubles, and it almost is easier sometimes to bury our heads in the sand and to maybe live in a bubble and not be super conscious or super aware around of what's going on
around us. But what we were discussing is that, although, you know, that is obviously one choice that many people make to live their lives, even if you choose not to live in that way, even if you choose to pull your head out the sand and to really
see what's going on around. We don't need to become involved in every single cause we don't need to become emotionally drawn into and engaged in every single problem in the world, there is a still an ability to maintain balance and emotional balance, even in the midst of what seems like complete chaos. And that in itself is a practice of practice of wisdom, the ability to say stay still, despite what is going on around
us. So really, ignorance and confusion and delusion, or the different forms of ignorance is
really so prevalent. And what is it that wisdom brings us that we are Howard, you know, how would How would wisdom kind of help us and it's interesting because although wisdom is something that is very much comes at an individual level, you need to commit to being accountable, you need to commit to being responsible, it is also something that is very much tied into the collective into this idea of community and the
communities that we live in. And that is why I think that if we look at religion and all spiritual teachings, and they call all religions and spiritual teachings, teach us about wisdom about the development of wisdom and living in within a wise society. But I think unfortunately, in most of most of these religions and teachings, we have taken all the knowledge and we have put our own, like, manmade or or created systems in place, which is kind of the opposite to how wisdom
works. And we've said, Well, within a religious setting, only certain people are ordained to be in charge and the end, but only they are the special wise ones that we should listen to. And we have. So we've we've sort of created or fabricated systems. In some religions, we've even taken away in most, I think, in all religions, we've taken away the power of woman to be that voice of, of wisdom within the structures, there's, there's so many rules and systems and that is, again, the
antithesis of wisdom. It's in fact, it's, it's taking wisdom out of the hands of every person. And it is, you know, subcontracting it to somebody else. And another thing that often religions do is they delay wisdom, they say, Well, you know, when, after the coming of some future Messiah or prophet, then we'll be living in a wise golden age, or perhaps after you die, you'll go to heaven, and they will live in this kind of
wisdom realm. But that is just taking it away from the person, and disempowering each of us to, in fact, become wise. And if we think back to the masters and the saints of the past, the very individuals that that the religions teach us about those people didn't wait. They didn't live their life waiting for permission to become wise. But rather, they found that wisdom within themselves. And that's where I think there's a great difference between developing self esteem or self reliance,
versus just having confidence. I think in today's world, a lot of us will have confidence, but we, we lack that inherent self esteem, to trust ourselves to know that, yes, I too, am wise and I too, can, can develop my wisdom and really use that as my most efficient vehicle to make a ripple or change in my own personal life, but also in the
community. And that is why I absolutely love studying Buddha's teachings about wisdom and even predating Buddhism, we have the Zog, Chen teachings, which originally came from the bun tradition in Tibet. And they have so, so much to share on wisdom. And they make the teachings just very accessible to each of us on an individual level, they don't take wisdom away from the individual. In fact, in the teachings, it is said that wisdom is your truest nature, your highest nature is
that of wisdom. And it's not something that you have to aspire to become. As often as thought, you know, we talk about enlightenment, it's often thought that we are an enlightened and one day will become enlightened. In fact, the teachings say that we already have all of that wisdom within us. But it is just clouded up, it's, it's covered over by our
ignorance. And they almost take a very analytical, or quite a logical approach to looking at, well, if the opposite of wisdom is ignorance, how do we then remove that ignorance. So it may seem really simple. But that is, ultimately what all the teachings and the Buddha's teachings on wisdom, tell us is that, if we want to become wise, we simply need to clear and remove our ignorance and confusion and delusion. And underlying all of that is the wisdom that each of us already
have and possess. It's not that we lack wisdom and need to go on a quest to find wisdom. But rather, we just need to peel off the layers like take off the layers of the onion to really reach the core of who it is that that we are. So however, in saying that, if that was that simple, that the complete antidote to ignorance was wisdom, and therefore just remove ignorance. And you'd be
wise. Why would it be then that you would still have somebody say a very person, very learned person who had had gone through many years of training and had looked at all of these issues, but would still be tripped up by certain things, such as emotions. So they logically looked at this and developed this teaching even further and they said, well, we can't be too simplistic about Wisdom and ignorance, we need to really study all the various facets of wisdom and ignorance.
And they said that we will look at the emotions that stand in our way, and cloud over wisdom for us. And what they've done is taken all the, the range of emotion, of course, there are probably hundreds or 1000s of different emotions, and put them into five main kind of categories. And these are the five categories of what what sometimes called poisons mind poisonous, or obscurations, that would cloud over a particular face or
facet of wisdom. So these different categories are, firstly would be ignorance would be the main one that we would need to remove in order to be wise. But then they are the categories surrounding surrounding pride and ego. There's envy and jealousy, there's anger and everything to do with anger. And then there's lust and desire. So these are the five categories of mind poisons or conflicting emotions or obscurations. That cloud over our innate wisdom.
And so, if we look then at removing these mind poisons, and this is what you know, much of the teachings are really there to do through awareness and, and, and so forth, we learn to not be attached to them, we learn to step out of that normal programming and be able to let them go. And through this act of of letting be in a sense, we allow the underlying wisdom to shine through.
So they then give a lot of study about the five different types of wisdoms, the five wisdom families or the five awarenesses, as they also called. And those are all pervasive wisdom, which is basically the ultimate wisdom that would be like akin to enlightenment, but there's also the wisdom of equality, all accomplishing wisdom, discriminating wisdom and
marillac wisdom. Now, as somebody who studied this for a very long time and have also given talks on this and listened to and received many teachings on this, for me, personally, these words sound very sophisticated, you know, what is discriminating wisdom mean? What does equalising wisdom mean? It seems something that is non attainable or, or not something that I can commonly
relate to in my daily life. And so what I've done is used words that for me represent the energy of that wisdom, but in a more day to day language. And I think of those as the five what I call them the five wisdom superpowers because once you are able to activate those five wisdoms, you are able to embody those characteristics that will allow you to have the greatest impact in the world and within your
life and in your community. So I'll kind of share my language around these different five wisdoms now. So firstly, if we look at the equalising wisdom, this would be someone who really has the gift of connection, it's knowing that everything is connected, it's knowing that everything is
equal. And this is a person who is very able to make other people feel seen and heard and loved, you've got the gift of connecting, bringing things together, seeing connections, making connection, the next would be the wisdom of activation, action, the ability to motivate and also to get stuff done. Some people just have that ability to take something on and get it done. And that is definitely a quality that a lot of people lack, or some people have, but are, don't exercise it in in the
right way. The next one, which sometimes it's called discriminating wisdom can be hard for us to understand. I like to think of that as strategic wisdom, it is the ability to look at a situation and to figure out the right solution found the right path. There's a lot of creativity involved with this particular wisdom, quality. And then with marillac wisdom, it is the ability to
store and reflect knowledge. And this is somebody who's really able to deeply listen, has the gift of being able to deeply listen, and then just to share it back or reflected back to others, but without judgement, and you know, you often hear of the great like a great psychologist or counsellor or friend who is able to listen but then gently suggest things back to you that help you see it in a
different way. But merely reflecting what it is that that you've said, it's and this is connected to the the water element and water definitely has that ability, water can store so much information and it can also reflect. So there's when we see the wisdoms in the small day to day way, we can see how it is possible for us to develop these different attributes of wisdom
within ourself. They already there, it's just about bringing them forward, but not in a, in a fake way we can't decide to do today I'm going to be strategic and kind of go out there and try and do what we can to be strategic. So then how do we actually work with these with these different wisdom
superpowers. So the best way to do this is to actually look at the categories or the poisons that are associated with each of the wisdoms and to analyse and see where, which of those are the ones that really hold you back the most, were so so for example, maybe you're very jealous person, maybe you're really struggled to be happy for others, or, you know, when you see somebody somebody else doing well, you can't help but feel jealous, then, you know, you would be working with the energy
of, of envy. And you would then look at the associated wisdom, which is all accomplishing wisdom, or the superpower, which is the activator superpower. Whereas you've got the ability to get stuff done, it's actually the same, the energy of the the mind poison, and the wisdom is the same energy. Because if you are ignorant about your ability to accomplish, whatever it is that you want, you will be jealous of anyone else who is able to accomplish things that you want.
If you are ignorant about your about the fact that everything is connected, and everyone is equal, you will display the ignorance of that which would be feeling proud other thinking yourself better than or worse than somebody else, because you fail to recognise the fact that
all beings are equal. And so this is how the energy of the poison, and the wisdom actually carries the same energetic signature, it's just that when we stuck in ignorance, when your heads in the sand, we only can see the negative, we fail to see the truth. And therefore we display the conflicting emotion
or the mind poison. And so by actually working with the poisons, by identifying which poisons are prevalent for us, with ourselves, so it's time for self reflection, and being really honest with yourself, you know, nobody else is ever going to know about this, you don't need to share it publicly. You don't need to meditate to anybody else. But take a look at the list of the mind poisons and really think about where is it that you best fit in? Where is it that you need the most amount
of work. And sometimes you will fall into more than one category. Of course, we all have varying degrees of all of them. But there will be one or potentially two that really stand out for you. And I would invite you to have a look at that and then do the work of looking at the accompanying superpower or wisdom and see how when a situation arises that perhaps brings up your jealousy next, how can you rather change
that around? How can you exercise your choice to make a different decision to break the habitual pattern and to rather display the positive or the wisdom, quality that's associated with with that particular energy. And in doing this, we slowly do start to to break our habits. Personally as I was I've been working with this now for a long time. And it's honestly completely changed my outlook and on so so many
things in my life. I can't even explain how what an impact being very mindful about these different categories has helped me and definitely just bought so much more insight and wisdom into my own personal life. So this is just a real overview of of everything and they are also all related to the five elements I have fire a water space and
earth. So there's a correlation to the five elements, which, if you've listened to previous episodes, I have given previous episodes on the five wisdoms and the five elements, there is a lot of correlation between the two. And I would invite you to go back and maybe listen to those previous episodes. But they there is so much to this so much knowledge, information about the five the five elements and how they relate to the five wisdoms, and how we can use this amazing
tool in our day to day life. So I hope this overview has been helpful. I have made a one page like cheat sheet table of the five elements and the five poisons and the five superpowers, it's on the website, if you sign up on the website, it will automatically be sent to you. And you can then download it and save it on your desktop or print it out. And then you've got them in front of you at all times. And I have also included the five elements
within that table. So if you're interested, look at the wisdom toolbox.com. And you'll get that that download. I think sometimes there's a tendency to believe that spiritual work or personal development work has to be difficult. It has to be unattainable. It has to be something that takes us years of sitting on our meditation mats and really struggling through. But it doesn't have to be that way. That's a narrative that is so prevalent, but it isn't
necessarily true. So I find it really encouraging that there are these very clear tools available for us that we can use and quite quickly used to shift our habits into a new way of being. And this is really the most effective thing that we can
each do for the world today. My teacher Lama Yeshe Rinpoche, I once asked him, you know, what is what would be the most efficient or effective way for me to help other people and hope, the suffering of the planet and the animals and just everything that was going on. And he just simply looks at me and just says, just work on yourself, work on your awareness, work on your wisdom work on developing yourself, because the more of us that are accountable and responsible for ourselves.
It definitely changes things or changes the energy of maybe your relationships. While not maybe it definitely will change the energy of relationships or changes the patterns within families, it changes generational issues. It quite literally has an impact in the world. So sometimes it may feel like the problems are overwhelming. But by really committing to work on ourselves. It is just taking that one bit of action that we can each do to
make a difference. So I look forward to seeing you join me in this movement of wisdom. And yeah, look forward to more podcasts coming soon and other resources on line. Bye for now.