Wisdom Versus Knowledge – The Difference Between the Mind and the Brain
To understand wisdom versus knowledge and the difference between the mind and the brain, I’d love to share some blended teachings I’ve received over the years. In indigenous cultures and mystical traditions all over the world they look at the brain and the mind in many different and faceted ways. Today I’d like to bring into your awareness a few of these teachings that I find to be of great benefit. For this article, I’m going to morph these sacred teachings into two parts so as not to get overwhelmed by the thousands of different ways we can view these. Let’s start with the brain.
The brain thinks only from the data you’ve received in this life nothing new and we’re not talking about cellular memory just data. It dissects and segments out all of the data you've received into a logical and somewhat limited viewpoint (your personality) in order to understand the information. Your mind is the creative, outside of the box, beyond personal experience connected to the very center of creation itself. This is pure intellect and we can access this pure intellect through deep meditation, creativity and experiencing ourselves as that brilliant state of love and joy that is our true nature.
When we have to understand and identify everything from a logical standpoint, we take out the magic of the great mystery, Source, and we create and identify ourselves with something that we are not. Our job, our challenges, even something we may view as positive that really isn’t our true nature and that is where we can become miserable, that is where we dive deep into the abyss of suffering. Our mind is fully connected to the pure intelligence, to Source, to our true nature of light and love, and when we are centered in our true nature we automatically know how to be with everything and interact with everything free from suffering. This full integration gives us the ability to be the observer in our lives while experiencing it at the same time. For me this living in an awakened state, it is living in grace. Ask yourself, “How different would my life be right now if I chose to identify with my true nature?”
When we get confused and plunge into suffering we are living our life from diving deep into the data of the brain, having to break down and dissect every part of our lives. We’ll do this with basic things like our personal identity, creating this from what we identify ourselves with. Even our way of connecting to Source can come from this, basing Source off of what we felt we have most been deprived of in this lifetime. A simple example: you didn’t feel love from your mother so you may be drawn to looking for a connection with Mother God as Father God wouldn’t have as much of a draw for you. We have so much attention focused in on acquiring information that we are not balanced in taking this information into experience. This takes the joy out of fully living. This gives us a false sense of experience and throws off the body’s ability to go into higher frequencies of awareness through actual personal experience. Thinking you truly know something when you have not received the integration of the experience can create depression. This is the difference of knowledge versus wisdom. Knowledge = information only, Wisdom - information applied in your life through personal experience. And without wisdom, we wind up objectifying life instead of fully living it.
You can do an autopsy on a person and you will know how they’re body functioned, tremendous amounts of data including what may have killed them, but you wouldn’t know their hearts desire, what they’re favorite color was, or how amazingly their smile lit up an entire room. You wouldn’t know their life. You would have objectified them and destroyed the simple awareness of who they really were versus how they functioned. This is what we do to ourselves and our connection to our own true nature having so much focus on the brain and getting every piece of info without fully living and embracing our true nature. It is a gift to have both, the mind and the brain, yet they must be in balance. So if you find you are reading a ton of info and not participating in life then you know some mind time is needed. And if you find that you are out playing and just being, you may want to add an hour of reading to go even further into new territory in your state of bliss. Remember, you can make something a conscious process and you don’t have to be enslaved to any particular thought, habit, or identity. If you’d like a healthy practice on shifting into conscious choice to bring you into a more balanced state, read my last blog “What to Think During Meditation – Do We Need to Master our Mental Chatter?” This will help reduce unwanted resonance and help you create experiences for all of that amazing knowledge.
