Paradox Wisdom is not a comment but in relationship to a buzz written that has inspired CityVP Manjit to think further.
A pearl is an intrusion (sand) within the shell of an oyster caused initially from the oysters attempts to smooth out the irritation and ultimately creating something that people value enormously. In the wild clams are killed, but in farms pearls can be extracted without killing. The pearl in the context used here is not wisdom. Wisdom is what makes the pearl.
In the metaphor of the pearl, we are not the oyster. The pearls we generate are based on complex variables and not a simple shell and sand relationship. Equate the birth of pearls as an intrusion, therefore Covid-19 is an intrusion.
Ali Anani asks in his buzz "Where is the Pearl?" but I ask in this buzz "Where is the Irritant?"
WHERE IS OUR IRRITANT?
It is Li Wenliang who first alerted the authorities about the irritant now called COVID-19. If the authorities in Wuhan had the smarts to listen to him, none of us would be aware today just how deadly this irritant is. He lost his life trying to save all of ours because he knew what the authorities did not. If COVID-19 is the irritant we all now know so well, the second irritant is ignorance. The expression "Pearls of Wisdom" is nonsense, the wisdom here is the making of a martyr.
From the first sign of the Coronavirus, the best face of humanity appeared, but it was suffocated by a third irritant called CONTROL. The Chinese government and our own governments are not free of that criticism created the irritant of control as well as the infection of fear. They gave orders that police followed and thus ignorance, control and fear were at work.
This is why we should be looking at our irritants through the lens of who we are as complex human beings and not as oysters, because we are not oysters. If in the course of dealing with an irritant we derive value, then the wisdom was built in the work of turning that irritant into a pearl.
So if the irritant creates the pearl, the irritant is the pearl. Here I will introduce a fourth irritant.
1. Pearls of Ignorance
2. Pearls of Control
3. Pearls of Fear
4. Pearls of Lies
Truth is best personal and at worst political. The pearls of lies abound and by the time we have dealt with the effects of the lies that confront us, including dealing with the lies we transmit into the world, then we find that there is no black and white scenario where we are not what we criticize. Whether we overcome the lies of these worlds, we smooth those lies with truth and eventually the wisdom of that effort transforms the irritant into value.
5. Pearls of Ego
The pearls made of ego include the spiritual. We tend to make the error of elevating the spiritual without seeing that the spiritual can also face an irritant. There is such a thing as spiritual ego and when we are not clear on that, the Pearls of Lies are our own self-made irritant. Now do you begin to see the how these pearls grow like metaphorical DNA. Spiritual ego has been a murderous cause of conflicts. No matter what culture we exist in there are remembrances of atrocities done in the name of G-d or in the name of religion. Which brings us to our sixth pearl
6. Pearls of Hypocrisy
If our spiritual anchor is spiritual ego, it is not much of anchor. So we have to find a way of smoothing this ego so that it irritates us less, but our own hypocrisy is always at work. Our lives are lived among the pearls of hypocrisy, until our awareness smooths it so much, we have turned that hypocrisy into authenticity. Normal functioning of our humanity returns. If we have worked to learn from our own hypocrisy we still face more the rise of more pearls.
7. Pearls of Judgement
We take the sand of hypocrisy and we add to our shell of humanity the pearl of value judgements. If we are wise it is because we have applied and developed wisdom as the smoothing agent of our complex array of irritants. We are beset with making judgements of others and then we wonder why live in an ugly world. It is a total contribution of the many and not the solitary flaw of an individual. We are not oysters.
The problem with pearls in the context of a human being is that there are so many pearls we can produce. It would be so much easier to remove the irritant to begin with. That is when spiritual teaching works because then the polishing and smoothing is done with the agent called humility. Humility itself has its own pearl which is false humility :
8. Pearls of Pride
The truth is we can create lots and lots of pearls but still not be any closer to understand the metaphor we are trying to think about. If our humility can smooth pride, the value of wisdom that arises is from the humility not the pearl.
9. Pearls of Greed
It is how we value pearls that we can be caught by the pearls of greed. Who says that a pearl has value enough to peel open oysters so we can extract that value. The world is not just a creation of inequalities but the swallowing of inequalities. Greed attains so much value and ascribed worth that we create a class of people who want to even strip us of our wisdom. All the other pearls I have talked about are still there, still in the process of continuous smoothing.
The rich may lose consciousness but history reminds them of complacency, and a few do start getting in touch with consciousness. The French Revolution is not a myth, it happened and it can happen again, even in France where the rich elite is no different to that which the French Revolution put to the guillotine.
One can hide only so long before there is a tipping point and the system produces revolutions, which accompany with them all the worst irritations imaginable. There is always a new cycle to life, that after the dark moment, there comes a moment where our wisdom shines. Not material things which is what pearls are but the wisdom that the effort of smoothing over all these irritations caused. Yet the worst pearl of all is always finding its way within us, which is :
10. The Pearls of Violence
Social media did not make us more human, it returned us to our origins as a social animal. This tribalism has an instinctive tendency towards violence. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out the "Global Village" is not a utopian idea but from his original formulation actually a dystopian reality. Within this village the cause of violence McLuhan says is one thing we think is central to us, our identity. In this tribalism McLuhan says violence is a quest for identity. Remember that spontaneity applies as much to violence as it does to childlike behaviour. What we describe as good is just a judgement about what good is and all the time we inject our identity into the world
THE PEARLS
Now as we look at these pearls as an irritant that entered us or our world, now we can look at the wisdom we waste because we seldom learn from history. We apt to make the same mistakes through one generation to the next. We mistake the value of pearls as an object and the value of pearls as a metaphor. As object it is a string of pearls, as a metaphor it is our very DNA. If my wisdom teaches me equanimity, then it is equanimity which becomes my shaping tool to allow me to generate more rather than less wisdom. This is our own ability to recreate ourselves into something greater. Yet that is why I question the existence of personal branding, which is our ability to recreate ourselves as an image. When image infects our identity we then wonder about the pearls we create, but still lose the wisdom.
Then we wonder what the physical value of our pearls are and we forget a simple lesson - why pearls were created in the first place. The Oyster without pearls lives a more safer life - if only because of our own desire to open oysters.
#14 & #13 note the context I am using Pearls of Wisdom here. The pearls I am describing here grew in the oyster as an outside infection. This is not the pearls of wisdom we normally ascribe to pearls. This is a literal look at pearls and then I ask myself whether from an oysters point of view these are pearls of wisdom. The way I look at it, for the oyster, what it did with the sand in turning it into a pearl, is the wisdom.
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CityVP Manjit
3 years ago #1
& #13 note the context I am using Pearls of Wisdom here. The pearls I am describing here grew in the oyster as an outside infection. This is not the pearls of wisdom we normally ascribe to pearls. This is a literal look at pearls and then I ask myself whether from an oysters point of view these are pearls of wisdom. The way I look at it, for the oyster, what it did with the sand in turning it into a pearl, is the wisdom.