What is Wisdom?

What is wisdom? To me, it’s the ability to be able to project outcomes. It is being able to size up a situation and know what course of action will lead to what results.

Is wisdom a talent?  I sometimes have a hard time distinguishing wisdom from the combination of intelligence and information. I mean that if a person is smart and has information about a situation, doesn’t that make him wise?

There is a problem with this concept though. I have known smart people who were aware but who made stupid mistakes. I have observed that when we are acting through a security, pleasure or power centre of consciousness, we do not tend to act wisely. See https://gordonfeil.blogspot.ca/2016/11/why-dont-we-love.html. It isn’t until we move into a love centre of consciousness that we can stop filtering what we see about our here and now through the desires of security, sensation and power. A smart person may have the experience to know what is the best decision, but if he is off kilter because of an issue of security, pleasure or power, he may find himself confused, or thinking he is not confused but making bad decisions anyway.

A brother of Jesus, named James and known in his society as James the Just, wrote in a book to his Jewish countrymen that if you lack wisdom you can ask God for it and he will give it to you freely provided you believe that he will (James 1:5). So it appears you can be given wisdom even if you aren’t very bright. How is that possible? Maybe wisdom has more to do with being informed than it does with being smart. And we get informed by our own experiences and by learning of the experiences of others. Yet some people have experiences but don’t learn from them. Is that because they aren’t smart? Does wisdom need intelligence after all? Maybe it’s because they are too distracted by their own security, sensation and power addictions to learn from these experiences.

I observe that wisdom is about noticing patterns and tendencies, and being able to recognize in a situation patterns and tendencies with which one is familiar, so that one can extrapolate likely outcomes. I can envision that this can be a gift.  It seems to me that a dull person could be inspired to notice patterns he might not otherwise have noticed. You plus God are a very wise combination methinks.

However wisdom works, it is clear to me that some have it and some don’t.