Ervin Laszlo - The Wisdom Principles: A Handbook of Timeless Truths and Timely Wisdom

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If you stand back for a moment, you will see that we are living now on a shaky twig branching off from the tree of wisdom. Modern people naturally dont generally see it that way. The word wisdom is loosely used without investing it with the importance it deserves. In this regard Ervin Laszlo comes at a pivotal point, rescuing the honor of wisdom by revealing what it actually is.

Wisdom isnt the same as education, learning, expertise, skill, long experience, or any other synonym. The best way to describe it is through direct experience. You touch the core of wisdom when you act on intuition and insight, when you have an aha moment, and when you suddenly know, without a doubt, what is true. Imagine that the active mind is like the surface of a river tossed by the wind into waves and eddies. Beneath the surface the currents grow calmer, and at the rivers lowest depth, the water is almost still. This is the level where wisdom is encountered.

To put it simply, knowledge is the product of thinking, but wisdom is a state of awareness. The reason we live on a shaky twig today is that the secular world recklessly tossed out wisdom as somehow undesirable. It became superficially identified with tired, old, sententious talkers, self-styled sages expending hot air. (Perhaps it took the decline of sermonizing to clear the way for renewing what wisdom really is.)

There are distilled gems of wisdom in this book, the fruit of the authors decades of reflection, with the underlying purpose of reaching a vision of life. In this vision, wisdom is the best use of the human mind, and the guidance of wisdom creates the best life anyone could lead. I am writing this foreword during the dire days of the coronavirus pandemic, when two movements have sprung up around the world. One is the movement fueled by fear and panic. The other is fueled by wanting to create a new and better world.

Ervin Laszlo is speaking here and has spoken on behalf of the movement for renewal in all of his books. What sets his vision apart is that it isnt based on issues. Crises face us on all sides, and all have been subjected to the knowledge of experts, vast pressure for change, and the glaring need for such change. Yet so far, all the understanding, outcries, goodwill, and the rightness of a cause have been ineffectual. If we ask ourselves why, the mind answers at the three levels of the river mentioned above.

The restless active mind struggles against obstacles, blames the bad faith of reactionaries, prays for the good to prevail, and forever laments that the problems are too overwhelming to solve. Beneath the surface, the calmer mind sets about with diligence and sobriety to find solutions and act on them. At the very depth of the mind, however, wisdom has a different response. It recognizes that the world is going through an identity crisis. Until we ask Who am I? and come up with a better answer, the same old stories will be recycled between victim and oppressor, the forces of light and dark, the lost battle of the powerless against the powerful.

Who am I? is the critical wisdom question that determines your state of being. The wisest answer, based on the highest level of your being, is this: I am a finite field of pure consciousness, unbounded, eternal, blissful, and self-fulfilling. The words that issue from this state of being are not divine, unworldly, impossibly pure, or suitable only for a saint or yogi. Because every mind is fundamentally wise once you reach the right level. Wisdom is a universal condition, and by far the most joyful one to live in.

The fact that we are perched on a shaky twig right now will change when we stop identifying with the restless active mind. One way to grasp the meaning of this comes from reading this book, because the writing takes you to the level where your own wisdom exists. You are put into contact with yourself. You will experience Who am I? differently almost at once.

I am reminded of a lovely anecdote from the life of a modern Indian guru in Mumbai. He led a simple life above a shop, and although he was revered by his devotees, the same devotees felt free to vent their resentments and complaints. One day the guru was entertaining a devotee who became impatient, because their lunch hadnt been brought up yet. I dont see why you and I are so different, the devotee grumbled. Were just two hungry old men sitting above a shop wanting our lunch.

Here is the difference, the guru calmly replied. You are just a hungry old man waiting for your lunch. Your world is bounded by your moods and whims, your ever-shifting desires and dissatisfactions. Your world is private, and no one else can enter it.

But my world is unbounded. I see openness and light in all directions. My being is the Being of all living things, of existence itself. All are welcome in my world, and when they enter, they experience the bliss of pure awareness.

I find it hard not to shed tears reading this story, as I have done dozens of times. Bliss can touch us like heartache, because it must push aside the sorrows created by the ego. But the story is beautiful at the same time. Weve all heard it said, What you dont know cant hurt you, but in the case of wisdom, the saying should be What you dont know can change your life. Wisdom is that precious thing inside us that we dont know until we touch it, and then it changes us completely.

In that spirit, I invite you to read Ervin Laszlos new book The Wisdom Principles in a particular way. Relish the writers thoughts and words but at the same time be open and willing to meet yourself. Wisdom can inspire you when it belongs to someone else; it can transform you only through direct experience. By opening this Handbook of Timeless Truths and Timely Wisdom, you open the door to your new identity, because across the threshold there is only the lightness of Being, and infinity in all directions.

What you are about to experience is a deep look at how we might meet some of the biggest challenges and solve some of the major problems facing humanity today. Because this could have a major impact on your own personal daily experience, not just the world at large, I hope you will jump into this exploration immediately.

You will find more than wisdom here. You will find a way out of the maze, a pathway from the box canyon in which we seem to have marched ourselves.

I wrote in a book that I published several years ago that 98 percent of the worlds people are spending 98 percent of their time on things that dont matter. The book you are now reading reminds us in wonderfully direct ways of what does matter, and how we can step into the living of that.

Let me put this all into context, if I may. The challenge we are now facing on Earth is that nothing is working. Im sure youre seeing this. The worlds presently-in-place political systems, economic systems, social systems, and even our spiritual systems are failing us right and left. None of them have been successful in producing for the largest number of us the outcomes they were intended to produce. And yet the people in power within those systems continue to seek support for their systems