The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom
One of the very odd things that begins to happen as you study differences is that you see similarities. When you expose yourself to a wide variety of philosophies and cultures, you begin to see how much is strangely similar. In The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom, Peter Bolland shares seven key ideas that lead to lasting wisdom. His seven ideas are acceptance, surrender, engagement, allowance, enjoyment, love, and integration.
What is Wisdom?
Before we can start to understand the path towards wisdom, we need to understand what wisdom is. Bolland’s definition is “the art of living well” and includes a life of purpose, love, effectiveness, freedom, and joy. He shares the Buddhist perspective that wisdom requires letting go.
Nothing is permanent, and we don’t have control of the world outside ourselves (and sometimes not even then). Interwoven with wisdom is this sense of humility. (I highly recommend Humilitas for more about humility.)
While reading The Seven Stone Path, I couldn’t help but hear echoes of Matthieu Ricard’s Happiness, Mark Epstein’s Advice Not Given, and Edward Slingerland’s Trying Not to Try. In part, I’m sure it’s due to the goals being similar, if not identical. In part, I’m also sure it’s this sense of trying to integrate other views of wisdom into our overall sense of what it means to be wise.
Acceptance
“Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as he did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it,” is a part of Reinhold Niebuhr’s poem that was taken up as the serenity prayer. The Buddha believed that life was suffering because of our attachment – and that acceptance is letting go of attachment. The first step to wisdom – and happiness – is learning to accept the world as it is. It’s letting go of our expectations.
Often while teaching conflict resolution, I’ll explain that anger is disappointment directed, that disappointment is failure to meet a judgement, and finally that our judgement is built on our expectations. Many of the painful things that we live with are derived from lack of acceptance.
David Richo in How to Be an Adult in Relationships shares his five principles: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, and allowing. His perspective includes accepting that other people’s realities are theirs, and you don’t need to agree with them to accept them.
In Happiness, Ricard describes the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths as:
- Suffering
- Craving as the cause of suffering
- Suffering can end
- There is a path to end suffering
Craving is the desire for something that isn’t currently real – either because it has not yet come or because it has been lost.
Surrender
“Acceptance means acknowledging there is a river. Surrender means falling in,” starts the chapter on surrender, and it an apt analogy. I often explain that surrender, in our Western world, is often interpreted as “surrender defeat” but properly considered should be “surrender accept.” That is, we’ve given up the fight against what we know to be the truth. Thomas Gilovich in How We Know What Isn’t So explains that we’ll believe what we believe until we can no longer deny the truth. Surrender is the acceptance of that truth.
Playground rings teach us what we need to know about life. These rings are hung such that one must swing out and grasp the next one while letting go of the previous one. Like the child version of trapeze, there are two keys. First is reaching out to grasp the next ring, but the second, equally important, aspect is to let go of the previous ring before it pulls you back. When speaking of change initiatives, we often share William Bridges’ wisdom that during the transition there is uncertainty. (See Managing Transitions.)
Waves crashing our heads can be disorienting. They can cause us to fall, tumble, and lose our way. If we fight, we’ll lose. If we relax and wait, the wave will pass. They always do.
Engagement
Finding wisdom may be a calm and peaceful path, but it is one of appropriate action. We must have an intention to be on the journey. In Extreme Productivity, Bob Pozen explains his focus on productivity – and how his life journey was shaped by external forces. Our intention provides direction without destination.
The embodiment of engagement, from my perspective, is wu wei as described in Trying Not to Try. It’s finding the place where you’re accepting external reality and trying to move in harmony with it – rather than fighting it.
It’s important to recognize that information isn’t enough for engagement. It requires a kind of doing that goes beyond knowledge. In Motivational Interviewing, Miller and Rollnick describe how change is accomplished through commitment, actuation, and taking steps. It’s not enough to have desire, ability, reasons, or need. In Change or Die, Alan Deutschman explains how 80% of people don’t change their behavior after a heart attack and how two-thirds of criminals will return to prison. Clearly, knowledge isn’t enough.
One of the hardest parts about engagement is summed up in the statement: “A wise person acts without attachment to the outcomes of their actions, good or bad.” We engage not knowing whether we’ll ever be successful or whether our efforts, no matter how well intended, will cause negative outcomes we couldn’t predict. Diffusion of Innovations explains how the introduction of steel axe heads into Aboriginal Australia created unanticipated consequences. We can, and should, seek to create better outcomes with our engagement, but we don’t control the outcomes that come from our interventions.
Allowance
If acceptance is accepting things as they are, allowance is moving in harmony with the things around you. In the Western world, we have a bias towards action. Inaction is seen as laziness rather than strategic waiting. However, a broader view of cultures allows us to see how harmony is a better goal than action.
After all, “Healing isn’t something we do; it’s something we allow.” That is, we don’t consciously take action to heal. We must create the right conditions for healing to occur rather than directing action towards it specifically. Like David Bohm explains in On Dialogue, an acorn is the aperture through which the oak tree emerges – with the right conditions.
We can see, catalog, and classify the things that are in front of us. It’s rare for us to be able to see the forces that are driving changes. We fail to see the wave in the water. We fail to see the forces that drive a fire. (See Sources of Power for how fire captains “see” the forces in a fire.) We fail to recognize the psychic forces that move people from one state to another. (See Principles of Topological Psychology.)
Enjoyment
“Joy has nothing to do with outer conditions. Joy is an inside job,” separates happiness and joy. In The Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu share their perspectives of joy from two different religious traditions. They both assert that while happiness is somewhat dependent upon external circumstances, joy is not. However, we cannot ignore that enjoyment encompasses both terms. Even where happiness is somewhat dependent on external circumstances, that doesn’t mean it’s completely dependent upon external circumstances. In Hardwiring Happiness, Rick Hanson explains how you can change the way you experience happiness by changing your focus. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert emphasizes the inability to predict happiness and the need to accept things has they are.
It’s important to note that enjoyment here is intended to encompass both value-based happiness and hedonistic happiness. (See The Time Paradox and The Happiness Hypothesis.) We need both in our lives.
We cannot view our lives as all service or suffering. It’s not all struggles. We need to find ways to “stop and smell the roses” along with planting the roses.
Love
“Love changes everything” is true. However, there are so many definitions and variations for love that it’s hard to understand what we’re talking about when we say love. English in this regard is an impoverished language that has one word where most other languages have multiple. In my review for Platonic, I review some of the words that Greek has for love. Eros, which we call love but might be more aptly be called lust, is well explained in Anatomy of Love. Philos, or brotherly love, is addressed in the context of C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves. Agape is probably most aptly described as compassion and is the focus of the Dalai Lama’s life. He explains his journey and the importance of compassion in My Spiritual Journey. There are even studies of the neurology of love, including How Dogs Love Us – and they must to put up with the time in an fMRI machine.
In the context of love, we find rituals to mark that love. (See The Rites of Passage for more on their importance.) Bolland shares how his parents had a simple ritual at the table that allowed them to connect in their busy world. These simple rituals matter. My wife and I sit on the floor and pet our dog together nearly every morning. We call it “puppy love” because we’re loving on the “puppy,” but it’s also a time for us to orient before we start our day.
Integration
A friend and mentor of mine who taught high school and college drew two circles on the chalkboard. The first circle was small, and the second circle was large. Inside the circles, he wrote “knowledge.” He then explained that the line of the circle was how much you could see of what you didn’t know. He encouraged us to be constantly growing our circles – and being aware that the more we’d learn, the less sure we’d become. It was valuable feedback that I’ve carried with me. Like many teenagers, I thought I knew more than I did.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” This is why paradoxes are so challenging. Paradoxes are two truths that at least appear incompatible. Only by holding the two thoughts together can we see how they can fit together.
When we arrive together at a place called wisdom, we’ll have no need to ask which way that we came. It doesn’t matter how we arrived, simply that we have arrived. We can just be happy that we’re all here together. One of the ways to get there is The Seven Stone Path.