How to Achieve Wisdom in Life?

One of the problems that everyone seems to have is that they can’t remember what they learned. They learned something a week ago, but they don’t remember what it is. It never got written down, and so it can’t be reviewed. And since life is so bombarding us with new experiences and sensations and information, our screens, our mental screens, are always filled with the present and often with the distant past.

But the learning becomes lost because learning in this sense is aggregate. It’s not like you have a big learning experience and it all falls into place. It’s more like brick-laying. You’re piling bricks on top of bricks. You’re accumulating a body of wisdom that you can draw upon, but unfortunately, most of it is forgotten.

It’s as if you went to the store and bought a lot of food, but somehow you just forgot to eat most of it and it went bad. Or maybe it never got out of the car; it’s still in the bag, the shopping bag in the back of your car.

You went to all this trouble and expense. You had real learning experiences, but you can’t remember what they are. And with life being as fast as it is and becoming ever faster, with our faster computers and our faster internet service and our faster lifestyle, more and more of this memory is lost.

Most people when they become much older in life, begin to lose their short-term memory. They can remember things that happened forty years ago, but they cannot recall what happened yesterday. And this process, which is biological in nature largely, also is correlated to the loss of the ability to learn because without memory you can’t learn.

You had an experience, but if you can’t recall the experience or what it yielded for you, then basically it’s lost. It’s as if it never happened—except you may still be paying the price of it, but you can’t quite remember what happened.

And long-term memory is notoriously inaccurate. What you think happened twenty years ago—highly inaccurate or incomplete, not reliable. Unless you recorded the event objectively and recorded your experience objectively, all you have is impressions and associations, which may have little to do with what actually happened.

So I’m mentioning this tonight because I feel that New Year’s Eve is a time to recall what the year that’s about to end has yielded for you in your wisdom training. It’s not like it’s all just water under the bridge and all these things happened, and some you liked and some you didn’t like, and some were good and some weren’t. What has been the aggregate effect of your wisdom training in this past year?

Now sitting here, you won’t be able to remember. Even if you kept notes, it’s too much. You may recall some generalizations. Well, maybe you relocated. Maybe something major happened in your circumstances, but that’s not wisdom training. Changing your circumstances, changing your style, changing your surroundings is not wisdom training.

We’re talking about gaining wisdom from your experience—wisdom that can be used and applied, mistakes that you learned from so you can prevent those mistakes or offset them in the future and also assist others in offsetting those mistakes as well.

For example, if you ate something two weeks ago and it made you sick, well maybe you remember what it is and maybe you don’t. But a month from now you may be eating it again and getting sick again—oops! Haven’t I been here before? Or you’re saying something and doing something that’s not right and you can feel it. Have I been here before?

Because wisdom training allows you to look ahead and bring into this looking the wisdom that you’ve accumulated. People who do not have much wisdom don’t look ahead. And when they do, they have very little to apply to what they think is coming, or even what is obviously coming.

And so they’re extremely accident-prone, extremely error-prone and they pay huge costs for their experience. They don’t get the bargain learning. They have to learn the painful, learning-by-experience, which is not very intelligent if you’re learning the same thing over and over again. You already paid toll the first time, you don’t want to have to pay toll every time you revisit this place.

So the question then for you, that I’m proposing for you, is: How are you going to keep track of your wisdom learning in an objective manner, knowing that memory is highly incomplete and inaccurate? You can’t just rely upon an impression. It’s not really giving you what the experience rendered. What are other people teaching you about relationships, for example? You can’t answer that question if you haven’t kept track of what you’ve seen and learned.

Now unless you have a superhuman memory and can recall experiences in detail going way, way back, and you can recall what you learned from those experiences specifically, and what you need to remember from those experiences specifically unless you have that ability, how are you going to keep track of these important experiences?

Now in your job, you may have to remember certain things, or you pay real big consequences because you’re accountable to other people. You have people watching you. And if you don’t remember what to do, then it’s very consequential in the moment. But beyond that, your whole life can look like just a subjective soup.

You don’t really know where you are. You don’t know how you got there. And of course, when we think about these things in light of the New Message and the image it creates of climbing the mountain—you’re on this gigantic mountain and wherever you are on this mountain, the scenery changes, and sometimes you’re in the trees and you can’t see anything, and sometimes you come out into the open and you can see things, and sometimes you want to keep going, and sometimes you don’t want to keep going. Well, this image is really valuable because it’s really important on this mountain to know where you are and to know where you’ve been or you’re going to lose your way.

So it’s a really important image, I think, for supporting this wisdom training because I’ve often wondered: Do people really ever change at all? Or is the change that they claim to have gone through really just circumstantial and cosmetic?

I mean, certainly, if something extremely traumatic happens to you, it can change your life, but often for the worse. Most people who have these experiences are broken down by trauma of this nature and are rarely redeemed from it.

So for climbing this mountain, we need to learn more about this mountain and what wisdom we’ve gained so far that can help us navigate what’s up ahead. And if any of you looking from the Watchtower, in the whole Watchtower experience we just had together, saw something important on the horizon, felt something important, heard something important, sensed something important, and it’s something you felt you had to be prepared for, how are you going to prepare for it?

Because to say “I’m going to prepare” is not going to get you very far if you can’t bring this aggregate wisdom to what you’re seeing.

This year, realizing this problem with memory, I went back through my journals. I’ve been keeping journals since 1987, every day. I miss a few days here and there, but pretty much every day.

I do it very objectively. And part of this journal is my insights: things I’m seeing, sometimes shockingly, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes intuitively, sometimes as a result of painful experiences or embarrassing experiences. And I realize I’m not remembering this, and I’m reliving some of these difficult learning situations.

So on my computer, I made an insight folder, and I put it into different categories: all my insights about food, all my insights about being out in nature, all my insights about communicating with people, all this aggregate learning. And I went back. I only went back a couple of years. And it was incredible.

You couldn’t buy wisdom like this, and there it all is. And of course, when you see it, the memory returns, right? That’s the day that this happened. Oh yes, I remember that. Well, until I did this, I wouldn’t remember that; therefore, I could not call into service to me the wisdom that I had gained.

And this is a very long list. There’s probably 300, 400 entries in here. When I review this, it’s the best wisdom training in the world because it’s all based on experience. There’s no shoulds or good ideas here—this is really…I paid something for this experience, or it was a real thing that happened to me and I’ve got it. OK?

It’s all available to me. Travel. You know I travel—airplanes, accommodations, everything. When I go to this place, everything I learned about this place, if I go back there, well, now I know how to deal with this place because I don’t have to think, “Now, how did this work for me three years ago?” I’m not going to remember it all. OK?

So if you’re going to make any resolutions for this New Year—and I recommend if you do make any resolutions that you not tell anybody about them, no grand proclamations: “This year I’m going to do things differently.” Just do things differently. And then you can tell people afterwards. Show them what you did. It’s much, much better.

Think about how you’re going to remember the important things that you’re learning on a daily basis. Otherwise, you’re losing. It’s like groceries left in the car—forgot to bring them in the house, paid real money for them, went out of my way to get them.

Then when you see something that you have to prepare for, this is going to be your resource for dealing with it. Otherwise, you’re just going to drop the ball and want it to go away and go back into denial, which is what people sort of automatically do. When they sense something that is going to be too disruptive or upsetting or incomprehensible, they just basically circuit-break and shut down and it’s there, but they don’t see it because they can’t bring enough wisdom—part of the reason for this—they can’t bring enough wisdom to be able to look at it. They don’t have the resources to look at it.

And this is this wisdom training, this aggregate learning that particularly as students of Knowledge we must be engaged in. We must have a way of recording and maintaining this wisdom, or we’re going to feel just as helpless as everyone else will feel when they can see what’s coming, and will certainly feel when it arrives.

Looking to somebody else to make a difference, looking for somebody else to fix the problem, blaming others, always blaming others for what’s occurring—that’s a hopeless situation. So you don’t want to be there.

And you know the interesting thing about the wisdom training, it deals with very little things, you know? It deals with very practical, specific things. And if you can’t remember those, how are you going to remember the really big things, which require much more content, require a lot more memory?

So it’s important when we come to these sort of milestones in our life, and I often think of New Year’s as kind of a milestone—birthdays can be like that too—OK, what has transpired? And what can I do? What have I learned from this? And how can I make a difference?

How can I call forth what this year has shown me and the years previously, that I can plot a new course? And if I can bring these things forward, I can plot a new course. I have the resources. I have the insight. I have the understanding to equip me to do that. Without these resources, it’s grand resolutions, and life just plods on as it always has, and nothing new can get established.

So we take a little tiny step and we think, “Wow! I’ve really gone through some important change in my life.” But in the larger scheme of things, you kind of went this far—a little tiny step—when you need to be leaping, to bring your life into the kind of harmony and order it needs to be in, and also to prepare for the future.

The New Message is revealing to us that the future’s going to be extremely difficult and that we must prepare. And to me, that means that anyone who has been able to receive this New Message and study it should feel especially cognizant of this should make it their business to know what’s coming over the horizon and not live in a bubble.

And this is also part of our wisdom training, this willingness to look, to face whatever it may be.

So in the process that we did tonight, I had you look at this and I had you look at that and had you go up in the Watchtower, and I said, “Remember, remember, remember.” How are you going to remember, even ten minutes later? That’s how important this is. We don’t have the time to remember. We don’t have the time to consider our own experience, to contemplate what it’s telling us, what it means, what value it might have.

There’s no time—busy, busy, busy—no time. And this New Year there has to be time. So we have to build: build the Pillars, build our foundation, build our strength, build our relationships, build our wisdom, so we can bring it into being.

Nasi Novare Coram.