Finding Your Wisdom Voice
About the Creator
Bill Redfield is a Wisdom Mentor, Clinical Social Worker, and Episcopal Priest who focuses on creating community to deepen spiritual growth and transformation. Through programs and practices he has developed, he seeks to deepen experiential wisdom.
Journey Description
All of us have lived through those occasions on which someone has asked us about our pursuit of, and interest in, Wisdom. Instead of giving a comprehensive and articulate explanation of Wisdom and our involvement in it, we struggled with how to convey our experience. Why, we have wondered, is this so hard to explain…?
Wisdom is like nothing else we have ever studied or encountered. From our first exposure, we all intuited its life-changing possibilities. And rather than a learning of some completely new field or discipline, our exposure to Wisdom’s teachings has mostly been a recognition of something we had already deeply known, but which we couldn’t ourselves bring forth or quite articulate.
There is no Wisdom curriculum that can learned and then parroted. Wisdom’s way of knowing must necessarily be experientially taken into the whole of our being and lived as our own. But in this process, it is the articulation of this truth and the sharing of this experience that actually feeds and furthers the integration itself.
We must remember that in order for Wisdom to have its full weight and heft, it must be worked through the integrity and authenticity of our complete personhood—including our bodies, our blood, and our being. In this sense, then, it must be fully ingested and metabolized, in order to be meaningfully shared. Regardless of this challenge or maybe because of it, I do think it is important that this dynamic and other related processes be shared within our Wisdom community. And that is precisely why I am offering this program.
Ultimately the purpose of having a teacher is not for us to stay forever a student ourselves. The purpose of having a teacher is for us to find and encourage our own inner teacher. That doesn’t mean that we will cease being students or, perish the thought, stop learning; but it does mean that there is a time for listening and learning, and there is a time for us to step forward, to find our Wisdom voice, and to express this truth through the words and actions of our lives. That is what this virtual program seeks to assist us to do.
Using the teaching points of “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran as a launching point, we will cover the topics and issues raised there from a Wisdom perspective. Written in 1923 and since translated into more than one hundred different languages, “The Prophet” is a book that many of us grew up with.
This program was recorded in the fall of 2020, when we were very much in the uncertainty of the pandemic. At the time, I myself was going through some important transitions that are alluded to in this material. Although some of the topics discussed in this program touch on events, both global and personal, that were currently happening, my hope is that the reflections will not be limited or constrained by this lens.
There are 21 sequential recordings in this journey. I am grateful to be traveling it with you!
Journey Tracks
Introduction
We get our bearings for this extensive journey.
Preface
A preliminary understanding of the journey in finding our own Wisdom voice is that it will take courage; that it will require “not-knowing” as well as knowing; that it will require the suspension of self-judgment; and that it will be stimulated by our own experience. Your power comes from some great reservoir of spiritual life else it could not be so universal and so potent; but the majesty and beauty of the language with which you will clothe it, will be all your own.
Coming Of The Ship
You have read many, many books, but now it is the time to read the book of your body, the book of your heart, and the book of your life. They can tell you truths that are closer to home than any book you might buy.
On Love
This is an unconventional inquiry into the depths and implications of mystical love.
On Marriage
Surprisingly and quite paradoxically, it is that giving that deeply gifts us and allows us to fulfill the fullness of our own unique individuality. It is, then, the daily practice of laying down oneself for the other—exchanging self for other—that a deeper channel is carved in the heart. And by this deeper heart-knowing we know that we belong to the world and that the world belongs to us.
On Children
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you, but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
On Giving
When we live in conscious awareness of this dynamic of exchange, we more fully live in concert with this fluid movement and more deeply participate in it. Because the locus of our identity is both broader and deeper than the smaller “me” enclosed within my skin, we can see ourselves as part of this exchange.
On Work
Work is love made visible.
You can only experience joy to the extent to which you have allowed yourself to feel sorrow and grief. Similarly, you can only experience sorrow to the extent to which you have allowed yourself to feel joy. Two sides of the same coin, both are essential in living into the fullness and wholeness of life.
On Houses
And though of magnificence and splendor, your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing.
For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.
The Prophet, Kahil Gibran
On Laws
Almustafa seems to be pointing to a higher order of being that transcends these laws. Here we might say that this higher order is not written in law books but in the depths of the human heart.
With no small amount of guilt and responsibility, Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper…? The answer is, of course, “yes.”
On Freedom
The deeper freedom of which the Prophet points is the ability to find ourselves no matter what the container and no matter what the conditions. In my previous programs I have referred to this as the capacity to keep our hearts open, come what may.
On Pleasure
As we surrender the insistence of our acorn selves, as we submit ourselves to this alchemical Wisdom transformation, and as we come to see more consistently through the lens that can simultaneously see part and whole—besides our own pain, we come to experience the pain of the world. In the same way that pleasure is amplified through this kind of seeing, so too is pain.
On Self Knowledge
Rather than self-knowledge being separate or even oppositional to greater spiritual knowledge, it is an illuminating representation of the same. The accurate and truth-filled understanding of the personal self is an accurate representation of the greater spiritual universe—each piece reflects the fullness of the whole.
When the fullness of our development—and here I mean, psychological, emotional, kinesetic, sensory, and spiritual—is built on a foundation of accurate and coherent self-knowledge, the fullness of our humanity is expressed in a loving congruence. Specifically, for us Wisdom practitioners that means that the content of the Wisdom teaching we are espousing accurately lines up with means by which we are expressing it and living it out.
On Beauty
When we say that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, most people mean one of the following: that different people have different ideas about what is beautiful; that not all people have the same opinions as to what is attractive; or that the perception of beauty is subjective. Wisdom, though, points to something deeper—seeing beauty can be a decision and an intention. Beauty, in other words, can be a lens that we desire to see through.
Again, if beauty is so much more than a specific quality of an object when it is viewed as separate, then the seeing itself becomes a dynamic force in reality’s unfolding. Like the sunlight shining on a plant and encouraging it to flourish in its light, seeing through the lens of appreciative beauty helps to set the conditions such that what is seen will bloom into its best expression of itself.
Teaching
Rather than pour new information into the relatively empty heads of the student, the wise teacher uncovers and gives us access to that which we already know inside. That’s why we often react to a powerful teaching with a sense of recognition. Thus, the truest teaching is essentially the energetic dynamic by which we are connected (or re-connected) with the Wisdom which we already know and with which we have been born.
Time And Good & Evil
More than just a linear arrow than runs only in one direction, time in its fullness can run in all directions.
On Religion & On Prayer
Wisdom practitioners learn early on that that more traditional and conventional form of prayer can be replaced by more sophisticated forms of contemplative prayer and silence. But, lest we think we have risen above or moved beyond that category of prayer that I might term “beseechment,” let me remind you, even as I remind myself, that that prayer of desperate need is perfectly appropriate to certain moments of our lives. When falling on our knees in a crumpled ball of pain and defeat, we utter a desperate cry for help—that is the most accurate expression of prayer in that moment. As Wisdom practitioners, I think it is imperative for us to reclaim that beseechment prayer if we have abandoned it.
On Death
A conscious death is a dying for the sake of others. That’s it. It’s as simple and profound as that: A conscious death is a dying for the sake of others.
The Farewell
What is life but a constant series of departures, partings, and leave-takings…? It seems as if the very sum and substance of life is impermanence—things ending and people passing on. We need to find a meaningful way of facing into all of those things and people we must let go of.
Way Of Wisdom
We offer a concluding bookend to the introduction of Wisdom with which we started. We bring this program to its completion with a concluding Wisdom teaching.
Conclusion
Can love actually be transmitted between us over this distance…? Can we truly make a difference to and for each other…? What does your heart tell you…? Can we step beyond the strictures of our culture and all of the misunderstandings that swirl around the dynamic of love…? “Is Love Alive?”
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