Sagehood: The Wisdom Stack

The previous post reintrepreted Sagehood’s central notion of wu-wei as the unfolding of the evolutionary processes of human-becoming-into-being. What might wu-wei mean to us today, and how can we re-invigorate the role of Sagehood into our lives?

In the following series of SEEDS article, I will present a model of Sagehood that includes three wisdoms, making Sagehood the sine qua non condition of combining them into a fully integrated “Wisdom-Stack” ¹

1. Awakening Wisdom - What is real?
2. Liberating Wisdom - Spacious Choice
3. Activating Wisdom - Wu-wei

You will notice that there each of these are rooted in an ontological prior - the endogenous root, as it were, of the wisdom. The three priors are: the real, spaciousness, and spontaneous action. These are ontologically embedded in nature as our original nature. Contrast this with the three verbs: awakening, liberating, and activating. They suggest a becoming, a process, a certain specific participation with the prior given. Awakening suggests pointing a light onto the real so it can be more perfectly seen, i.e. enlightening. Liberating suggests allowing what is actually there, to participate in the process, to release the space of possibility. Activating, suggest turning on or powering up a latent capacity. These are associated with the exogenous characteristics – the practices, methodologies, pedagogies, mentorships and apprenticeships that convene to awake, liberate, and activate the prior potentials.

This then, is the Wisdom stack model I am proposing for Sagehood.

---

Here is a visual meditation on the three wisdoms of Sagehood, I hope you find it both meaningful and useful.

Further Resources

• Original Content Material
• Wish-fulfilling gems - by Bonnitta Roy - The Pop-Up School
• Wisdom Series Conversations - Video Recordings
• Wisdom Series Conversations - Video Recordings

Footnotes

1. There is a corrollary here with the three jhana’s or vehicles in Buddhism: Hinayana (awakening perception), Mahayana (awakening compassion) and Vajrayana (enlightenend action) especially as articulated by Chogyam Trungpa in The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma (3 volumes). Trungpa emphasized that the three vehicles represent a continuous journey, wherein “advances toward” the Vajrayana requires returning again and again to the “earlier vehicles” in order to increase capacities for sustaining Vajra wisdom.

   In the hinayana we see reality in a factual, ordinary, but extremely wise way: as cause and effect, the manifestation of pain, the origin of pain, and so forth. In the Hinayana we look at the way things function in terms of interdependent origination … and trace things back to the origin of reality, or matter and mind. (vol. 3 p. 48)

   In the mahayana … the energy of reality is described in terms of …emptiness and compassion. … So the mahayana is about much more thn just seeing critically: it includes the experience of openness, warmth, and compassion. (vol. 3 p. 49)

   In the vajrayana we are finally coming back or returning to the world. The vajrayana is [about] executing the vision--- always. In fact, there is no vision in the vajrayana, because you do not need it. Vision is a futuristic experience, whereas execution is the present situation, so you only need execution. (vol. 3 p. 19)

   ~ Chogyam Trungpa The Profound Treasury of the Ocean of Dharma Vol 3. : The Tantric Path of Indestructable Wakefulness

   ↩