The Surprising Secret to Wisdom

I’ve spent the whole of this year working on the Accelerating Wisdom Series that concluded a couple of weeks ago.

I am now absolutely certain that the deliberate pursuit of wisdom is the most important thing that we pay virtually no attention to.1

As I reflected on the core themes that had emerged from the writing, lectures, interviews and practices, a single word unexpectedly appeared almost everywhere.

The Subtle Secret

That word was Subtle.

In the first episode, Cedric Chin talked about how true expertise was being able to notice the subtleties the novice can’t. Veteran racehorse trainer Franck Mourier persistently beat the bookies’ betting odds by picking winners after briefly watching the horses warm up. But his expertise was so subtle, not only could he not explain how he was doing it, any attempt to put a framework around his process made it worse.

In the episode on attractors, I noticed the word Ervin Laszlo used to describe the holotropic attractor that drives us all towards wisdom and wholeness as a “subtle spiritual insight.” I was even lucky enough to sit down with him to explore the idea in person.2 Then I realized the core message coming out of both Devin Martin and River Kenna’s insights on wisdom practices was the importance of refining your subtle senses. You clean up your diet, meditate, engage in breathwork and somatic practices so you can be better guided by these subtle pulls and signals. You can watch the precise moment the penny dropped for me in this two minute clip from my conversation with Devin Martin from Episode 4.

Allison Paradise’s interview made me understand the importance of deep observation in our relationships in order to notice these tiny cues. She noticed more about my son in the first twenty minutes with him than I’d recognised in his first five years.

Then yet again, in Stephen Larsen and Dan Lawrence’s lectures on mythology and dreamwork I realised that the symbolism in our stories and dreams was often nuanced, metaphorical and subtle. Synchronicities, and the prods and nudges of our responsive reality, are also mostly subtle. And finally, the larger point that came out Mona Sobhani’s work was that our thoughts can influence reality, but mostly in small subtle ways.

Subtlety is clearly the hallmark of expertise, wisdom and real mastery. As David R. Hawkins writes in Power vs. Force:

The skillful are not obvious
They appear to be simple-minded
Those who know this know the patterns of the Absolute
To know the patterns is the Subtle Power
The Subtle Power moves all things and has no name.”

The Thinking-Feeling Flip

The greatest pleasure of starting The Leading Edge has been building a loving community of truly exceptional people. But I have also been compassionately shown the risks and dangers of starting a community like this. The Leading Edge is a network of unusually high-agency, intelligent and spiritually curious people. This presents incredible opportunities, but also equally significant problems. I have come to believe the primary risk for me as a person, the bulk of our community and my readers, is intellectual hijack of the spiritual process.

The most dangerous dynamic is somebody with an intellectual understanding of spiritual concepts, but who doesn’t actually embody them. Reading a book about ten years of spiritual practice is not the same as embodying the results. You can’t read yourself to a black belt in jiu-jitsu. This should seem obvious, and yet our spiritual industrial complex is still riddled with these kinds of bypassing traps. Short cuts can take you into bad neighbourhoods.3

After the end of my interview with Dr. Stephen Larsen in Episode 5, he casually remarked that Emanuel Swedenborg was among the finest visionaries of all time. Coming from a man who spent his life rubbing shoulders with giants like Joseph Campbell and Stan Grof, this was a huge signpost to me! And yet I’d never heard of him.

It turns out that Swedenborg was a savant inventor and scientist who lived between 1688 and 1772.4 Once he felt his intellect had mastered the understanding of the external world, he turned his attention inwards. The result of his work was an elaborate and esoteric mapping of the spiritual landscape. Swedenborg utilised the period of time between sleeping and waking as critical to receiving new insights.5 New ideas would be presented to him in the form of symbols or emotions. He came to regard the source of these insights as sacred and divine.

As arguably the dominant intellectual of his entire era, this shift from external to internal exploration led to a complete reversal in the way Swedenborg perceived the world. He came to believe that subtle feeling and emotion was prior and superior to the blunt intellect. The resonance with placing the emotional and symbolic right hemisphere over the verbal left is immediately obvious. As Earth Elder Mindahi Bastida put it to me recently: we need to move from “thinking-feeling” to “feeling-thinking.”6

So how do we do that?

Presence is the path

“It turns out that bliss; a second-by-second joy & gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious, lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.”

-David Foster Wallace

Thanks to a kind introduction from another Leading Edge member, I have spent the last few months working with Roshni Daya. She describes herself as a “teacher of presence.” She would usually be well outside my price range, so this was generous of her! We recorded a fantastic conversation you can watch or listen to here (Apple Podcasts & Spotify).

Over the course of our sessions it struck me that “presence” might just be the most desirable outcome of the pursuit of wisdom. We all know Blaise Pascal’s famous quote “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”7 The alternative is being effortlessly present in the moment while giving full attention to everything we love the most. By far the best measure of success I’ve found is how pleasant the passage of time feels to you.

Rather than chasing fleeting peak states, I think constant, stable presence is ultimately what we’re seeking more of.

Thanks to River Kenna’s recommendation, I’ve been experimenting with Somatic Descent to take me out of my head into my body.8 And it’s been really fantastic! But one key thing I took away from my time with Roshni is that presence is also about how we respond in uncomfortable everyday environments we can’t control. Wisdom is expertise in chaotic, real life circumstances. Presence leads to the essential, embodied ability to “do exactly the right thing at the right time.”

In our interview, Roshni tells the story of how sitting with her young son as he suffered with the skin pigmentation condition vitiligo slowly attuned her to the vibrations within her own body. There wasn’t a great deal she could do to help her son, so she was forced to confront the unbearable mental anguish his distress was generating in her. Rather than focus on trying to change her external circumstances, she flipped to examining her the response in her internal world. Her relationship to discomfort in the moment shifted from resistance to curiously examining and accepting it. After a long diligent commitment, she says the results have been magical.

We don't need to travel at all. There's an entire universe inside of us. And I started to get very curious about what is this, and what am I feeling, and realizing that I was learning how to sense vibrational frequencies; energy. I was learning how to attune my attention and presence to energy frequencies. So what began to happen is in my psychology practice, I was still working as a psychologist then, someone would sit with me in my office. And because I was developing such a strong capacity to be inside of myself, in that place of stillness, I could sense what was happening in their bodies, where they were holding tension, how they were holding tension. Because it's all energy frequencies and all the information is available right here. We just don't know how to be with it because we're so busy in our minds.

The crux of her work is that whenever most of us encounter an uncomfortable experience in our body generated by something outside of us, we immediately seek to numb the inner discomfort. We reach for our phones, eat or drink something or simply retreat back into our heads. This is also one of the primary risks of spiritual practice. True growth is mostly long and uncomfortable, there’s a constant temptation to intellectualise the experience instead of actually doing the painful work of embodying it.

Even in the moment, I still find myself rushing to analyse a sensation or impulse. Is that twinge in my back a legacy of childhood trauma? Roshni’s resonant advice was to suspend your retreat back into the head for as long as possible. The explanation you receive far later on is likely to be superior than anything you conjur in the moment. This was also precisely the advice offered by Dan Lawrence on how we should treat the symbolism in our dreams: stay with the symbol for as long as possible before you try to analyze it.9 As Swedenborg realised: subtle sensation, emotion and feeling needs to lead the blunt intellect with its words and concepts.

Paradoxically, I have now found it easier to remain present in a difficult conversation or situation if I focus on the uncomfortable sensations in my own body. For my whole life I’ve bitten my nails when I was bored. It was a distraction from the discomfort of boredom. After working with Roshni, I’ve stopped. If we can remain present with the pain, our capacity to tolerate it also increases. This then leads to genuine presence, and that seems to be an intrinsic good. A central conclusion from the entire series is that reality itself is likely more intelligent and responsive than we think, but its feedback is also subtle and symbolic. Presence cultivates attunement to these essential subtleties that only true experts and sages can detect. This “subtle power” can then actively guide us along the path to wisdom and flourishing.

“The reason you aren’t living in the present, when all is said and done, is because you don’t feel the present living in you.”

- Philip Shepherd10

1 Thirty years of wisdom research has shown that it correlates with how good you feel and how much you’re growing. A recent study found that wisdom is the best predictor of life satisfaction in both men and women, and can offset the negative influences of aging.⁴ We focus on having enough saved for retirement, but wisdom has a greater influence on life satisfaction in older adulthood than health, socioeconomic status, financial situation, environment, or social engagement.

2 Over the course of this series I was fortunate enough to interview the father of attractor theory, Ervin Laszlo and the author of Syntropy, Ulisse Di Corpo.

3 As Devin Martin put it- “psychedelics can show you the work, not do the work.”

4 I enjored the book “The Presence of Other Worlds, The Psychological and Spiritual Findings of Emanuel Swedenborg” by Wilson Van Dusen

5 Author Cormac McCarthy called it “The Night Shift” and wrote a magical piece on this. “So the question is, well, if the unconscious figured that out, why couldn't it just say, ‘it's a ring.’ … One day I was dumping the trash and I thought, ‘oh I know the answer.’ … The answer is simply language is very recent, a hundred thousand years maybe. It's a blink. But the unconscious has been there instructing you and helping you along for a million years or more. It's just not used to it. … it had to show you pictures.”

6 This flip, and the reunion of science and spirituality, is central to their urgent Eagle and Condor prophecy.

7 I was struck by this passage in an recent Astral Codex review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. “Wallace suggests that boredom, far from being something to avoid, might point the way to deeper self-knowledge. “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.” Boredom might even gesture towards enlightenment: “It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”

8 I listened to the Somatic Descent audiobook.

9 Dan’s lecture on dreamwork in Episode 7 has been blowing minds ever since.

10 Philip Shepherd has always felt like a spiritual successor to McGilchrist in terms of his focus on embodiment. This recent article was nothing short of spectacular.