What is wisdom?

     Wisdom is knowing how to act. Knowing how to act well Knowing how to support and sustain life. This is wisdom. Seeing through delusion. Seeing through the many layers of life and knowing how these layers work. Not just by themselves, but how they work interdependently with one another. This is wisdom. Ability to see and work well with the complex, multi-dimensional interdependent nature of life. To see through common misperceptions, to see the folly in common strategies and to arrive at the destination in the most efficient and wholesome way given the circumstances. It has to do with the way we orient ourselves in life.
Generally, I think wisdom means wisdom in contrast to foolishness The fool is oblivious to the nature of the world they live in. They will run absent mindedly into obstacles most avoid in, "common sense". The wise man will not only avoid the obstacle, but he will avoid the obstacle while doing something else, while achieving something else. One who is wise possess, within their own circle of activity, excellent self-control, excellent self-awareness, excellent environmental awareness, and excellent understanding of all these dimensions. He who is wise, is wise only compared to his peers.
     The degree that someone is wise is relative to their fundamental level of operation. Relative to their arena of life. One may be wise as a child and a fool as an adult, just as one may be a foolish child who becomes a wise adult. It's even more stratified than this. Our wisdom is really determined by our ability, or lack of ability, to skillfully navigate within the scope of our visions. This is how wisdom is determined subjectively and socially. What we may individually perceive or believe is wise may differ from what is socially considered wise. Yet in both of these perspectives wisdom is defined by the skill in which one navigates the world as it is perceived. Both of these are examples of relative wisdom. Wisdom relative to depth and breadth of perception. This wisdom fluctuates with the expansion of one's worldview. With the expansion of consciousness and awareness. The wise child becomes a foolish adult when they grow up into a wider world with a wider new set of responsibilities and they perform very poorly. Here, they are considered foolish by their peers, by general society. This consideration may not match up with the foolish adults own worldview: their own consideration of their own intelligence.
     As both the individual perspective and common social perspective of wisdom are relative to depth and breadth of awareness, or consciousness, they are incorrect to the degree to which they are not deep or specific enough. They are incorrect to the degree to which they are not objective fact. Thus the wisdom they suppose is, in a way, not objective wisdom, but believed and temporary wisdom. They are not absolutely true perceptions of wisdom. What wisdom truly is, is the feeling of wisdom that remains intact even as our consciousness continues to expand and the content of what we believe changes. Everyone has different opinions/views of what is wise, but every one has the same basic feeling and experience of wisdom. It's like an inner arrow pointing to, what we perceive is, the best action we can take. When we feel wisdom, we get a signal, or physiological response,, from within our bodies that what was said, suggested, read, or thought was wise. Our bodies are like, "excrete dopamine, high probability of survival". We probably feel a little calmer, centered and confident in some way. (It's important to not that we rarely, if not never, feel one feeling at at time, or respond to stimulus wholly one way. We are always, or nearly always, split in our feelings and our response to ideas. Our body is thus complicated in its chemical/emotional response. We may feel slightly calm by a new idea, but also worried by it. These feelings have chemical responses that effect different parts of our bodies simultaneously. A new thought could at first lighten the tenseness of our fore-brain as it fives us the, "Aha", feeling of clarity, then gives us anxiety, in our gut which leads to stress in our back and shoulders, because of how this clarity has revealed a serious blind spot in our attention that is going to put us in a tight and uncomfortable position with someone, or many people, that we are close with or deal extensively with on a regular basis. The process of our total psychology is many times more complicated that what  I mentioned in this example. We experience a  vast matrix of feelings consciously, subconsciously,  and unconsciously that all together create an incredibly complex cocktail of chemical/physiological response. Chemicals/physiology generate feelings and feelings generate chemical/physiological response. All this is happening simultaneously and is a ambi-directional positive feedback loop. You can't separate feelings from bodily chemicals from cellular, tissue, organ, organ system, and overall motor response. It's all one bowl of soup.) Wisdom described on it's own is a specific feeling that was a specific physiological response. I would call this overall experience the heart of wisdom, or just plain and simple wisdom. Even if what we do following our thoughts that occur with this feeling of wisdom leads us into trouble, the feeling of wisdom in our chests is still wise. It is still wisdom and tuning into this feeling is apart of the process in which we become wiser.
     Throughout our life, and over lifetimes, this feeling grows until it consumes us entirely. It consumes all other feelings. It opens, sharpens, and unites all perspectives within itself, as itself. It is the God seed that becomes God through the natural unfolding of life. Wisdom, enlightenment, is the eventuality of all people.  In a way it is the single reality of all people right now, one that we only experience as an isolated splinter in our chest and consciousness until we wake up from the dream of duality.
     We may think we need to tune into this apparent separate feeling of wisdom within our chest and minds(conscience) and avoid what we believe is not wise to become enlightened or simply a better person. As much as this may be a true path to enlightenment, enlightenment is also an organic effortless process. A process that unfolds the same way blossoms unfold in the Spring. It is the natural evolution of a human being to blossom through life(lives) into wisdom. Wisdom that in its barest sense is enlightenment. I say this, because enlightenment is not limited to the sphere of the intentional individual. It is more appropriately described as a larger sphere that encompasses individuality. Individuality is not separate from it, it is one and seamless with it. They are the same, but to say that enlightenment is limited to the personal sphere is not true. The process of intentionally seeking enlightenment through tuning into our conscience is apart of the natural unfolding of human consciousness. We call it seeking enlightenment, or bettering ourselves, a process that "we" undergo, but it is also a process that life undergoes, a process that does not entirely belong to us as a "separate" individual. Everything evolves interdependently regardless of how the ego perceives it. Life just happens. It is happening. Enlightenment is just happening. Here and now. Exactly as you and I are right now.
     I call this feeling of wisdom, this warm ember within our hearts and minds, enlightenment because when you perceive it without any filters in the mind it is not different than unbounded awareness. As we tune into wisdom, our hearts, feelings, and conscience, the forms it takes change. It evolves, blossoms, deepens in complexity, and broadens in character. When we wake up we realize that this ember was not what we thought it was. It was never our compass to god, our separate heart and soul. It was always God. Only in our subjective visions and subjective experience was it anything else. It is our heart and soul, but our heart and soul are the full embodiment of God. Wisdom is God.
     What does this mean for us? What function does wisdom have in our own lives as it speaks to us from within? Wisdom calls us to awaken. To open our hearts to a greater world. To expand our minds. to go further. To reach out and take the hand of another. It is not limited to what we may commonly perceive of as good, it is limited to the realm of growth. When we wholesomely embody it, it does lead to Goodness, but life is messy and this often isn't the case. This is actually rarely if never at all the case. A part of our growth is egoic. It is mean, violent and engenders suffering. We grow into and through a mean selfishness that does not lie outside of wisdom. The heart of wisdom is compassion, but it's flesh is full of thorns. The face of the Earth is torn, rough, rude and real. Wisdom is wise orientation, that for living beings who compete for resources means violence, death and selfishness. In clarity it means what is Whole. As an organism it means survival. to someone who is awake, it still means survival. It still means food, it still means me.
     If there are different dimensions of life, then we can be wise or foolish in any of them. And what makes us wise in one may not make us wise in another. The degree to which one is wise is the degree to which one can manage these dimensions simultaneously, handling each one with unique and appropriate care.
     So much of what makes us wise is how wise we appear or are to ourselves. For we can only do what we can imagine we can do. We can only be wise with what we have, which is what we perceive we have. The key to wisdom is perception then. If we cannot perceive the various dimensions of life, then in no way can we deal with them intelligently. Part of perceiving them is perceiving their subtle qualities and how they differ from other dimensions. To be wise is to deal with each dimensions of life appropriately. Each dimensions has unique qualities that require unique attention. If we want to be wise we need to (in some way) understand how each part of a process works so that we can appropriately manage each part. In managing each part simultaneously, we take care of the whole process. Ya! In this way we can be wise at any given task. Here wisdom is interchangeable with skill. A wise, or skilled carpenter knows how to use his tools to work with materials. He knows how to combine/alter the materials in a way to create something appreciated by other enough to sustain a living. I think it is more appropriate in the example of a carpenter to say that a wise carpenter is not just skilled, but very skilled. Wisdom suggests excellent attention and ability. It also generally applies more to an individual in a overall sense than in describing their specific abilities. The process I above described is generally considered to be life as a whole when discussing wisdom.
     To be wise in it's most common understanding is to be wise in the way in which one handles life as a whole. Life with all it's dimensions is the process which we must be able to pick apart and understand piece by piece if we are to be considered wise. We separate the whole of life into thoughts, beliefs and judgments. We do this because it helps us organize and prioritize our experiences. It's how we process what we experience into conscious awareness (also understanding).We don't do this perfectly though. We always leave information out that we deem non-essential. We can only process so much at one time and it's important that we choose carefully because what we process is what we use to survive and get what we want. We possess incomplete data or incomplete perspective all of the time. We only assume that we fully know how something works, we are are often wrong. We feel that we see the complete picture, but I think most people, if not all people, are very often deluded in their judgments to some degree. We compartmentalize life into incomplete perspectives. This is what thoughts essentially are, incomplete reflections of sense , or incomplete data. They are the pixels on the screen of our mental interpretation of the world. They are not the world, no matter how high our resolution is. We say, "Who's in control?", and have a feeling and a lot of incomplete data. We put the two together and then say, "Of course, God is in control. He's a man too. A man in the sky." This is partially true, but totally incomplete. It's a synthesis of imagination and real sense data. Direct sense of the universe overlayed with this mental synthesis. It's really a mental projection or mental hologram that we perhaps always are immersed in. Hinduism calls it maya, the veil of illusion. Buddhism, samsara. Same deals. Mental holographic synthesis of sensory input and imagination. The Matrix. Lol. This is what we wake up from. Not that it entirely goes away when we wake up.
     We live in the matrix of our thoughts. Each though a compartmentalization of the world in a incomplete and inaccurate way. Each thought incomplete data. We see the world through the matrix of this interwoven data. This data, this matrix, is literally a 3-D real time holographic projection in our minds. We think this projection is the world. it is not. Not that it is wholly false or entirely dangerous. Most of us possess enough sense, enough instinct, to take reasonably good care of ourselves as we walk around looking at the world through photoshop filters. We see the world as our mind believes/thinks it is. We see, "enemy", in another race or religion whether or not that person, or those people, pose us any threat. We see them and our mind sees lethal intent and obvious danger, when there may be none at all. This is a hallucination. Really. it's a complete and total fantasy. It's assuming the incomplete data of an impossibly compartmentalized world is the world. This is insanity, mass accepted insanity. Most of us don't even know that we are insane. This is just the typical consciousness of humanity. We believe things. We live in our beliefs, our assumptions, perhaps necessary assumptions. We live in maya. We live in the matrix. We live in a conceptual mental perception. Zen is to see the world as it is. God is a sign pointing towards direct sensory awareness. This is why Obi-Wan tells Luke to let go of his conscious self, to reach out with his feelings. Totally Zen. Our feelings are the gateways to truth: to direct awareness. The Jedi are based off of (or heavily influenced by) the samurai who were heavily influenced by Zen. George Lucas, director of the original Star Wars, originally wanted Toshiro Mifune, a Japanese man from Akira Kurasawa's "Seven Samurai", to play Obi-Wan. Star wars was even majorly inspired by Kurosawa's "Hidden Fortress", also starring Mifune who played a samurai general in the film. Couldn't get much better than this..The force is obviously chi or ki. Sooo legit.
      What makes one wise is their ability to sift through all of this personal and social incomplete mind data, and get to the real gems: the truth, direct sensory awareness. A wise person has a good understanding of, and a good hold on, the non-sense in their mind. They are rooted in the rough complexity of the Earth and the Sky. They incinerate hoopla (non-sense) if it gets too close. They have cut through the matrix hologram with the sword of their intellect. They have gathered their senses that once sprawled in reckless abandon, tamed them, and released them onto green pastures. Perhaps they have opened up their mind and their heart to something other than this and have found that this is all that they are.
     A wise person intuits the unity of all forms and seeks to integrate their thoughts into one working model. They sense the limited nature of their thinking. They know their data is incomplete and they have turned inward to the source, which is the Wholeness and non-dividedness of life, for the fulfillment of their conscious self. To fulfill the conscious self, thoughts must become the world. Their data and conscious interpretation of life, must become wholly conscious of life. Wholly, and undivided from, it. What an amazing realization and endeavor. They wish to completely enlighten their mind to a fully conscious realization of the Universe. They wish to process 100% of the data from their senses into conscious awareness. I think this is the most basic intention and desire of all human beings. Of all life really, Everything seeks fulfillment of itself. Everything intuits it's Wholeness. Everything has a wise heart, a divine ember.
     We must live life to approach wisdom and enlightenment. We must develop our incomplete thoughts through continual processing of the input from our senses. We must first separate life into compartmentalized conceptions and then deepen these conceptions until they become direct sensory awareness in their own dissolution. We cannot skip maya, or the Matrix. Samsara, or insanity. We must create it and we must grow through it and shed it like a butterfly sheds it's cocoon. Only through this process can we escape it. We must go in to go out. Wisdom is the knowledge of this subtle and confusing process of transformation that is life. It is knowledge of it and groundedness in it. It is awareness of where a self lies on the path towards greater wisdom and deepening enlightenment. A path that may never end. It is acceptance of this position and abandonment of what cannot be. It is knowing who oneself is and in the words of Alan Watts, "becoming what you are." Becoming what you already are. And once becoming yourself, being yourself.