Wisdom

It is often strange to see that some people do not learn despite being surrounded by the source of wisdom, while some learn even if they have to struggle for it. It all depends on the philosophy of life of different people. Our priorities are a product of our philosophy of life. Most people in today's world are followers of Charvak's philosophy which says that we should enjoy our life even if that is at the cost of taking loans. Most people are busy fulfilling the desires of their senses and they want to study and acquire knowledge to use that to get more money and powers to satisfy their senses. That is the reason that they conveniently ignore what they feel is not relevant to the satisfaction of their desires. 

Some are mad after information and knowledge because they have tagged their self-image to knowledge and like being regarded as intelligent. For them, knowledge is the tool to get that recognition from their peers and colleagues in particular and society in general. It looks like a great quality. However, if we go a little deeper, such a purpose-driven pursuit of knowledge soon gets converted into rigidity. These people are more concerned about proving themselves right rather than learning new things. Their self-image is the center of their existence and not the pursuit of truth. That is why whenever somebody confronts them, they become highly insecure and agitated and sometimes become aggressive in their approach to defend their viewpoint. The fixation on their self-image makes them blind to reality and their knowledge becomes limited and obsolete over a while. Insecurities about a dent in their self-image, on the one hand, make them restless to know more and more, and at the same time, since they have more fixation on demonstrating what they know rather than the curiosity to know the reality, they start becoming more and more confined around their viewpoint and slowly get cut off from the reality and develop behavioral eccentricities over a while. They become prisoners of their own minds.

For an aware person, knowledge is like exploration. He explores everything to know the truth. Since he is not fixated on any viewpoint, he likes to explore multiple viewpoints. It is because the center of his life is neither fulfillment of material desires nor getting social validation by way of appreciation of his knowledge by colleagues, peers, and society. He is just exploring everything around him for the sake of knowing the truth. Having explored truth from one viewpoint, he likes to move to the other viewpoint to examine the truth. Since he is aware that different viewpoints are just viewpoints, he does not get stuck on any of those. He understands that the elephant is big and different blind people have made some image of the elephant in their mind by touching one part of the elephant and therefore each one of us will have a different worldview and perspective. 

However, there is a majority of the people of the first and second types, and therefore people falling in the third category are often ridiculed. When Galelio tried to tell the people fixated on the idea of the Earth being flat that it is rather spherical, he was ridiculed and punished by society. The same thing happened with Jesus when he tried to address the orthodoxies in the society of that time. The same thing happened to Buddha when he tried to spread his realization in society. If a society or a person decides not to wake up, nobody can wake him up. I feel that life is constantly evolving. We evolve a little and then get fixated on that stage of evolution until somebody shakes us from our slumber. That is true for each individual being as well as the society as a whole. Intelligence demands that we understand that we are here to evolve and explore the truth and not get fixated on anything we explore during the journey, including knowledge,  even if that something is too tempting and dear to us, else we will stupidly deny ourselves all future opportunities to grow and explore in this world full of infinite possibilities. However, that confidence to let go of all fixations, including our self-image of being knowledgeable, can't come unless we connect to our inner selves and develop the wisdom to realize the temporariness of the whole of the material world.