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So how do we get from where we are right now --- fretful, sometimes happy, sometimes not, worried, angry more than we want to admit, scared by everything from our own deaths to where the earth is headed ---to a life of quiet wisdom? One place to start is with the stories of the ancient heroes. Their journeys always offer insights into discovering real wisdom and, for the juicy ones, wild entertainment also pops up along the way. My vote is that we start with the first hero, Gilgamesh. He fought his way out of arrogance into wisdom some 2740 years ago. Nobody even knew his story until about a hundred and fifty years ago, when a young British adventurer found a bunch of clay slabs with his story on them. Rumor has it that the British curator who first translated the stories was so excited that he stripped and danced around his museum completely nude in an explosion of emotion.
It is a great story.
Gilgamesh is an arrogant young king who has everything he could possibly want. Women. Men. A huge plasma television. But he is lonely. Happily, through a series of fights he meets a sweet character named Enkidu who becomes his best friend in the whole world. Together they get into all kinds of mischief, much of it hilarious. Gradually their skirmishes build up to where they fight a monster. They kill him but shortly after the fight Enkidu gets sick and dies.
Gilgamesh is insane with grief, in his words mourning his friend as a mother would mourn the loss of her only child. Finally he decides to search for the secret of immortality and along the way becomes wise. And his wisdom has particular characteristics, characteristics that are the test of genuine wisdom.
Gilgamesh discovers that wisdom isn't an object, that it can't be grasped. He also discovers that it can't be passed on. My mother can't make me wise as much as she wants to. I can't make you wise. You can't make anyone you love wise either. In Zen we have a saying, that a teacher can only point to the moon. I means that you and I have to do our own work. But when we do, wisdom happens. Gilgamesh also learns that sometimes a path isn't clear. In those times, which these days is all the time, all he can do---all we can do--- is to keep taking the next step. Along the same lines, we can't control reality. Ever. In his wonderful rendition of the story of Gilgamesh, Stephen Mitchell offer a poignant quote about this truth: "When I argue with reality I lose only 100% of the time." Yes.
When we have the courage to see our own lives as heroes' journeys, we discover that there is great joy in these attributes of wisdom. And we learn to fuel the transformation from being utterly driven by our egos to living in our reality, whatever it offers. We fuel the journey through our courage to question; our drive to find out who we really are underneath all our neurotic tendencies; and our growing compassion for everyone and everything that share our space and time. Ultimately this journey leads us into a boundary free spaciousness, if you will, of wisdom that is: impartial, humorous, civilized, energy filled, irreverent, skeptical of moral absolutes, delighted with reality and, lastly, sane in an insane world.
