Thoughtful piece from my buddy Rich Eskow about the selling of spirituality without wisdom:
The Wisdom 2.0 conference and its organizers were also promoting a technology-centered vision of mindfulness like that reflected in the Buddhist Geeks podcast and conference, websites like Indranet, and a growing cottage industry of techno-spirituality books, blogs, and software products. At their best, these sites and gatherings can represent a kind of democratic leveling of differences among participants. We saw this, for example, at the Buddhist Geeks conference, where, much as they do on the Internet itself, attendees mixed without regard to name recognition, status, sect, or practice. But at their worst, Buddhist technophiles confuse science with spirituality and information with insight, and in the process, they overlook their own best opportunities to make a real contribution to society.
The clinicalization of spirituality, which seems to reduce it to a matter of physical and mental health, is a common feature of these conferences. While there is some good data suggesting that mindfulness and meditation can have a beneficial impact on individual health, that shouldn’t be confused with wisdom. Too many of these conferences and speakers conflate wisdom with well-being, enlightenment with ease, and compassion with comfort. A quick review of history’s great spiritual figures—the Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad being among the best known— shows that they often rejected their own ease and comfort in pursuit of higher wisdom, or sacrificed themselves for a higher purpose once they found it. The journey from sacrifice to enlightenment is codified in religious traditions that range from Native American Sun Dance rituals to Tibetan practices of solitary meditation in caves.
If the subject is wisdom, those reams of blood pressure reports and magnetic resonance studies aren’t as meaningful as their champions claim. “The hours of folly are measured by the clock,” wrote the poet William Blake, “but of wisdom, no clock can measure.”
The whole of wisdom is the sum of its parts. “We do not ‘receive’ wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a voyage that no one can take for us,……….a voyage that no one can spare us.” Marcel Proust.