Welcome to the conversation!

Um, wow! Thanks, toramenor, so much to interact with here, and much of it stuff I've ruminated over myself.

I tried to isolate a series of questions from your narrative, and while I don't have time right now to adequately address these, I did want to begin to respond in a few general areas.

First, I have noticed, as you have, that indigenous people often seem to be speaking from a place of far greater wisdom than that of their (mainly European/western) conquerors, and that it has taken several hundred years for "us" (Europeans and their descendants) to begin to give our heads a shake and be willing let alone able to hear what they were saying then, and what the few who remain continue to say now when they can. I'd have to go back in our discussion to see how much of this I may have already expressed here, but there are quotes from elders in the North American First Nations during the initial stages of contact with the Europeans that seems to indicate that they knew the invaders were "mad" in some way, that the invasion would bring ruin to the indigenous people, culture and wisdom, but that in time, the white/European people would begin to awaken out of their mad dream and come back to what remained of the indigenous people to sit at their feet and learn. We seem to be seeing a movement like this starting now, although it has far to go.

Those Europeans who arrived on the shores of North America saw only "savages" and were blind and deaf to the culture, wisdom and technology of the people already living here. They saw small tribes facing the hardships of weather, privation when food was scarce, and without the technology of guns and medicine and a codified religion, and they thought they had no technology at all, not realizing that for a people who follow the migrations of salmon and game and the ripening of berries and other food sources, the technology of the tipi is formidable indeed. My ancestors thought this land was empty because it wasn't settled in the European agrarian fashion, and so it could be taken. Ever seen Eddie Izzard's routine about how to steal a country by the cunning use of flags?



But I digress ...

I do hope we are returning to the wisdom of people who knew how to walk humbly with their God and their environment and fellow creatures. We have become so distracted by our technology and the myth of continual growth ... my hope is that we will have the wisdom to recognize our own madness and begin to remedy it, SOON. I think Mother Earth will probably slap us silly until we do.

So it doesn't look like we have progressed any in wisdom, but only in technology, doesn't it? And yet, perhaps we have, and perhaps what we have gone through, all the complexity and beauty and futility and waste, was necessary for a breakthrough into simplicity -- much as it seems with physics, the theories and complexity proliferate until we break through into some single unifying idea. Perhaps we needed the ability to cross-pollinate ideas among cultures and eons that the internet has given us ... I keep thinking that one of the glorious places to be in history would have been Alexandria in the first and second centuries CE, with the Egyptian and North African tradition there plus the incursions from the Greek and then Roman empires, some influence coming up from India and then the successive Jewish and then early Christian diasporas -- until now, there has never been such a melting pot of cultures and ideas, and it produced some amazing thinking and writing. The internet has recreated that potential now, if we choose to use it -- well, wisely.

As for wisdom and intelligence, I don't think there's much connection. In my own experience, in the long run all high intelligence allows you to do is run in mental circles faster than anybody else, and rationalize things that a sensible person would know were nonsense. Rarely is intelligence in the service of wisdom because intelligence seems always to be hijacked by ego. On the other hand, truly wise people seem to have solved or resolved that ego problem in some way, allowing them to dissolve dualism, see and feel that we're all one and we have to live from love and compassion (heaven) or stay in the hell of isolation, competition and futility that ego demands.

--> by the way, if we didn't have enough to chew on here, another tangent is the whole idea of individualism versus collectivism ... ancient cultures were very collective in nature, where the sacrifice of the one was always justified to serve the many. Western individualism was, I think, a necessary step, and the whole Reformation insistence on working out one's salvation oneself rather than inheriting it, but we have gone way too far in thinking that what happens to me individually matters as much or more than what happens to our whole community, species and ecosystem.  So I think we are also headed back toward more collectivism, hopefully a more enlightened one.

Back to wisdom ... I suppose it would help if we could define it, eh? Because I'm thinking that I've often seen what looks and feels very much like wisdom to me in people with developmental delays -- Down's Syndrome and autism in particular. Which underlines the separation between intellect and wisdom in the case of Down's. The autistic people I know are very high-functioning and intelligent, but have divergent ways of looking at the world because they are not as trapped as the rest of us in thinking that the norms are always right, or that appearances matter, etc. It makes things difficult for them socially but there is often a deep loveliness and egalitarianism about what I can only describe as their souls or their worldview.

And see, there's another kettle of fish:  wisdom seems, to me, to have more to do with the soul than with the mind. But what is the soul? Why do we distinguish soul from spirit, for another thing? There is a wonderful theologian I've read named Robert Farrar Capon who says that whenever we talk about God or soul or spirit we should parenthetically add that we don't know what we're talking about, really. So he begins his own paraphrase of the Lord's prayer this way:  "our Father (whatever that means) who art in Heaven (whatever that means), hallowed (whatever that means) be Thy name (whatever that means)." This is not to say that he is dismissing any of what is in the Lord's Prayer, only making the point that it might do us good to be more aware of how much we don't know, how much mystery and awe we're handling when we say words like that.

Can wisdom be taught? My gut says only by experience, but one can situate oneself in such a way that the experience is more likely to be edifying. Does one have to be wise even to know one needs to find a wise teacher? Yes, but it's very likely the kind of wisdom that one "acquires" with a wound or a breaking. "All of us to love will come, but like a refugee," says Saint Leonard. "The fear of freedom is deep within us all," says someone I can't currently track down -- Erich Fromm? We all resist, or part of us, our egos resist, the humiliation that seems to be part of letting go of our little, false selves and our big ol' egos. We must be broken, wounded, opened up by something in order to want to walk in that direction.

By the way, I slagged the European tradition above but of course there have always been many Europeans who were walking a humble, mystical path (I guess I associate this with wisdom) ... I've been reading a lot about St. Francis lately and much of what he was about resonates with me (although I am a bear of too much brain and very little wisdom, to misquote Pooh).

Phew! Okay, better go -- thanks for a thoughtful start to the day!