Seeking wisdom

By Ross Freake

My karate sensei and training partner were discussing wisdom when I walked into the dojo.

They asked me to play Solomon and slice through the impasse they were having on whether integrity is learned or innate.

Proving how little wisdom I have attained in almost 75 years of stumbling through this life, I accepted the challenge.

I don’t recall what I said — and neither can they — but it must have been psycho-babble because they haven’t included me in their philosophical musings since.

In spite of their lack of faith in my insights, I have aspired to wisdom and gravitas much longer than my 25 years on the dojo floor.

“For wisdom is more precious than rubies, and nothing you desire can compare with her,” it is written In Proverbs.

Since my chances of finding rubies are unlikely, I focused on wisdom, which, I concede, might suggest I have very little.

In tandem with karate, I endeavour to study and practise Stoicism. While karate was fashioned in Okinawa — a fusion of local self-defence and Chinese kung-fu — a mental self-defence system evolved in Greece a few thousand years earlier.

Stoicism is mental karate, and was started in Athens in 300 BCE by Zeno, a Cretan merchant who had just lost everything when his ship sank and he staggered into Athens dishevelled and broke. After many years studying with the philosophical descendants of Socrates, he started Stoicism, named for the Stoa on when he often taught off the marketplace where Socrates harangued anyone who would listen and where he made enemies while illuminating their lack of wisdom.

Like karate, Stoicism has its kata, in which the essence of the art is contained, formed mostly around the four virtues — practical wisdom, justice, temperance and courage — and a few other concepts that are learned so deeply that when obstacles and adversity attack, which they will, we have armour to keep us safe. 

The Stoics, greatly influenced by Socrates, proclaimed that only virtue — arête, excellence — can ensure we live a life of flow, accepting, rather than fighting, what is with grace and gratitude.

While I have practised — long and often — the kata of both arts, I am still a rank beginner where skill is concerned. I thought if I acquired sufficient knowledge, it would morph into wisdom after marinating for a few decades.

That didn’t happen, but I did learn one thing: knowledge can be an impediment to wisdom. 

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us,” French novelist Marcel Proust wrote.

It took me longer than Proust to figure that out, but did appreciate the insights of an earlier writer, Aeschylus, the Greek playwright called the father of tragedy, who wrote shortly before the time of Socrates that “man must suffer to be wise.” 

If we persevere in our suffering, he said, “man grows wise beyond his will.”

English essayist and philosopher William Hazlitt echoed Aeschylus’ words 2,000 or so years later:

“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.”

While his stiff-upper-lip approach can sound more like fatalism than Stoicism, we all know life is pain and loss; we lose everything, including ourselves. 

But accepting that can add a shine to whatever we already have.

If we know we only have something for a limited time — including our children and our lives — with a little wisdom we can learn to appreciate them and our time, short or long, in this vale of tears (better description).

“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle: Some things are within your control and some are not,” Epictetus, the Roman slave who became a philosopher, wrote in the Manual. 

“When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude; you can either accept it or resent it.” 

Unfortunately, there isn’t any of Epictetus’ or Socrates’ wisdom in my circle. I have sought out people I thought would be wise, but found they not only had feet of clay, but a mind and body without wisdom.

Perhaps it's because Epictetus and Socrates were my models that everyone else seemed lesser, with the exception of mythologist Joseph Campbell and Jungian analyst James Hollis. No doubt there are many others, but they are lost in the avalanche of information that threatens to bury us.

As you probably remember from high school history, the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi proclaimed that Socrates was the wisest man alive. The founder of ethical philosophy was skeptical and set out to prove that Apollo, the god of truth, was wrong or had lied.

After much research, using the method that bears his name, Socrates concluded that he was wise because he was aware of his ignorance, but those he had considered wise were not.

Wisdom is similar to a game or a dance — and no one dances to get to the other side of the room. While those of us who aspire to wisdom are primarily more foolish than wise, we start hoping to learn a few tricks to make our lives easier and less painful, but eventually we seek it for its own sake — not to improve or get better, but simply for the sheer enjoyment of it. 

But it’s a game where the rules aren’t obvious and no one can teach them; we have to learn on our own, mostly through making mistakes, a lot of mistakes, the mental equivalent of bruises, black eyes and broken bones.

Studying the insights of people who have already walked or stumbled along the path can be helpful although it takes time to get that knowledge from the brain to the body. Karate and Stoicism have a few people who tuned their bruises into bread crumbs for us to follow.

Most of the Stoic literature has been lost except for Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, the last of the five good emperors, and Seneca, writer, adviser to the mad emperor Nero, and the richest man in the world at that time.

But there are a number of modern Stoics who have followed in their footsteps.

“Our time is wasted if we're not acting in the service of our fundamental goal. For Stoics, that goal is defined by our nature – it's the pursuit of wisdom and virtue,” modern Stoic philosopher Donald Robertson wrote in How To Live Like a Roman Emperor.

I am older than Socrates when he drank the hemlock, but, alas, still have the ignorance and have not been able to transmute it into wisdom. I excuse that with the now too-worn phrase of “too many years of karate and hockey without a helmet.”

Maybe I ask why far too often, because I believe if I can understand what happened, I can gain some control, which brings a feeling of safety and certainty, often why we glom onto beliefs that do not serve us and defy logic and the imagination.

“Why anything?” the alien Tralfamadorians asked Billy Pilgrim in the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse Five. “Because this moment simply is. Here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

No why. We just flow with what is with as much ease, tranquility and wisdom as we can muster in every amber moment.

When we strip everything away, all the rules, all the guidelines, all thou shalts, maybe wisdom is nothing more that what the Stoics taught, and many others have as well, is to simply live a life of love and reason, and to address life as thou.

“You can address anything as a thou, and you can feel the change in your psychology as you do it,” said Joseph Campbell. “The ego that sees a thou is not the same ego that sees it. Your whole psychology changes when you address things as an it.”

We desperately want a purpose, a reason, to understand.

On the day I turned 75, I grabbed a cup of tea, hot and black, got comfortable in my rocking chair, and waited. 

I hoped, maybe prayed, or had convinced myself, that the clouds would part and maturity would descend like a dove. I wasn’t expecting voices. But, alas, nothing happened.

I opened one eye, sneaked a look at the heavens, well, the ceiling, and said: “I’m ready. I’m waiting.” 

I’m still waiting.

But back to the karate dojo: Next morning, after I tried to play Solomon, I pulled Tim Schroeder, then a pastor at Trinity Baptist, into the conversation. When you’re standing in your birthday suit in the change room, it tends to reduce the superfluous.

Schroeder, who has travelled the world as a keynote speaker and teacher of ministers, and has a black belt in Shito-ryu karate, is lucky enough to have three mentors he considers wise, older men who were polished by the rock tumbler of life.

It is fitting to end this kata of words with some humility, definitely an aspect of wisdom, from two people who have trained at karate most of their lives.

Akamine, an Okinawan master, who after 60 years of training could, with great humility, say, "I am not there yet.” Tom Mah, my sensei, who has been training and teaching for more almost 50 years, added “that goes with the realization ‘that the more I learn, the less I know.’”

The journey continues — in the dojo and out.

Ross Freake initiated at Chilliwack in 2018.