The source of wisdom? What is it? I’ve wondered about it since messages first came to me, clear and easy, out of the blue, years ago. Like art, I know it when I see it, but I still don’t know what it really is. Or where it comes from… Or why.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

By David Stone

Assorted Ideas, Large & Small

…some kind of cosmic river flowing…

October 3rd, 1977, a filler in my local newspaper, insight so perfect it fit like a missing piece in a puzzle. I clipped it, and kept it for over forty years. Last week, packing up for a move, I found it again among things I can’t let go.

Some news just never grows old.

Not much later, another incident that just sort of happened, one much more intimate.

The source of wisdom in the dark…

So much was unclear, I sometimes sat alone in the dark and let my mind feel its way around. Relaxing, like meditation is for me now, a release into a broader field.

I was getting close to 30. I was out of work with no realistic idea of what I could do without hating getting out of bed in the morning. My first wife and I split, and it was dawning on me that she’d use my beloved son, then four, to get at me.

And for atmosphere, I was in a spare room belonging to a friend who shared the rest of the place with his girlfriend.

Editors still had no trouble bouncing my submissions right back at me. Sometimes, they came back so fast, it was like they opened the envelopes only long enough to re-stuff my work in the dreaded SASE.

Self-addresses stamped envelopes were the one thing I hated about freelancing. You pre-financed your rejection.

And so, I had good reasons for feeling miserable, but for some reason, I didn’t.

Rather, I couldn’t. Something kept telling me, in spite of appearances, that things were working in my favor. Made no sense at all, of course, but what else had I to go on?

And then, they actually did start going my way.

First, a light came on.

Then, the source of wisdom opened a window and let me see and feel the fresh air.

Why wasn’t the world completely different…?

Reality isn’t all that solid. I always sensed it, but now, I knew it.

That word — reality — is no more nor anything less than the total of what we all dream up every day and welcome in. It’s a goulash of likes and dislikes, prejudices and sharing, a jumble of imagination.

Most important, it could change, and the pace of that was in our control. But change is usually gradual because so many of us make up the pack, it takes time to get onboard.

Much later, reading Robert Lanza on biocentrism, I saw how it worked with scientific clarity, and by then, it was poetry. A surprise gift from the source of wisdom.

Back in the Seventies, I sat in the dark. I smoked a cigarette, and I looked out the window.

My view was down an alley between two-story apartment buildings in Buffalo. In the center was a street lamp over Elmwood Avenue. This was winter, and it was cold and hard. Maybe that helped it bloom.

Some light, nothing to it snow flurries slanted down the street, swirling with passing cars and trucks.

Then, a message scrolling into view, I saw how we all got here. These hard cities, the pollution and noise, the neighborhoods, the schools, the jobs, the mass transit… All this, the sum of our collective imaginations.

We’d done amazing things. Nothing was broken, just in progress, and we could do even better.

I imagined morning rush accompanied by Mozart and open carriages, a sort of daily celebration. The frustrations and congestion were only a consequence, not an unfixable result.

We built firm for security, but we also built soft for joy.

How else could we get this world…?

No other way.

Reality isn’t given to us. Nobody plants us here. There’s no deity acting as stage director. We made reality what it is, and for good reasons. Good at the time, and always ready for change, better and better.

Some things we hate now, like war and violence, we created in making our lives safer and longer. We don’t need them so much anymore, and that’s why they’re fading.

That was as true in a wheat field in Kansas as it was under a glacier in Norway.

We had — have — astonishing tools at our disposal, and really, we’ve barely started figuring out what we can do with them..

And some still think the world happens to them, not by them.

Out of the flat colorless void comes art, tugged ahead by sprees of expression. From the void comes cars and trucks and tractors. Out comes modular homes, McMansions and New York City high rises.

Out of the void of infinite possibility comes every possible thing, and we share it all. We combine it, mix and match, and there really is no other viable possibility.