Encylopædia Draconica

If you are, I'm not going to challenge that claim, it wouldn't be wise.

What makes people wise? We know that wisdom is not intelligence. That can be simulated by a machine. Artificial wisdom, though, now that ain't gonna happen, is it?

We know that old people are wise, at least that's what old people tell us. We know children are wise—well, sometimes. We know our friend who gave us an unexpected good advice was wise, because what they said didn't come from good logic, or private knowledge, or special experience; rather, it came out of nowhere. If intuition is the gut feeling, wisdom must be the gut knowing.

Why is it important to think about wisdom? Because it has the property of transcending our daily experience. Daily experience can be a bit like a maze full of mirrors. You sort of think you know where you're going, but you're also likely to fail to notice you're going in circles. The reality is constructed (don't believe in that? I will make a post about this later), and skillful construction of your own reality depends a lot on your ability to notice what's not in your construction. What doesn't fit in. What does fit, but hasn't been internalized. What has been internalized, but hasn't been put in practice. Sure, intelligence can do all of that, too, but at the cost of straining your imagination and creativity, and wisdom is just sort of there, and you reach for it and there you go.

How does one become wise? By non-attaching. By not believing you know everything. By removing filters and obstacles, by letting your gut think out loud. You get wiser as you let that guy do the job, because it's like a muscle, you let it work and it gets better. That's how you any quality, actually: practice it.

But how do I know all this?

You know, this is just what people tend to say on this topic, I'm not an expert…

Freedom! Do you love freedom, dear reader? Are you even free? Or are you a prisoner of your body, your situation, your environment, your mind, your happy delusions, your timid convictions, your flawless comprehension, your nice posture, your name, your language, the oxygen in the air?

We're all trapped, dear reader, we're the infinite prisoners of infinite jails. Life is defined by limitations, it's confined within them. The number of things you can't do is insurmountably larger than the number of things that we can.

But freedom isn't born from the lack of confinement. It's born from the act of choice. There are many things we can do any given moment, and that makes us free. In physics, the number of possible axes of movements is even called the degree of freedom. We're all free to a degree.

We're free to be mischievous, to do evil things. Nothing stops you from obtaining a gun, breaking in into someones' adobe and then having your way with those who live there. You may even end it all on the dark note for everyone to avoid any responsibility.

You possibly hated to read the last paragraph as much as I hated to type it. You're free to do so. Or maybe you weren't free to hate the last paragraph, maybe it was your automatic reaction, but at least you're free to suppress it and choose not to. Unless you're principled and wouldn't choose to suppress your feelings. If you're truly principled, that makes you less free.

Freedom is the dark matter. It has weight yet we can't see it. As we grasp it, it slips through our fingers, as the free choice of Now becomes a non-free consequence of Then. What is chosen once is then bound by the chains of the choice. We can break free from the chains, and this creates another set of chains. It's chains all the way down.

Freedom is like the good old rat poison. If your house is infested with rats, feel free to use it, otherwise proceed with caution.