Hi Abner. Big fan of the handmade network and conferences!
And likewise. Would love to hear your thoughts. Below is a summary of my point of view, and it is not novel, but the continuation of a few decades long process. If you find it valuable and wish to continue the conversation I'm reachable directly at jesse DOT r DOT meyer AT me DOT com. And this invitation extends to others -- just include the title of this HN post. I've discussed my experiences with mindfulness / meditation and its effect on my life in a previous comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24186942 . That may be a good place to begin to get a sense of whether my more philosophical take below will resonate.
'The map is not the territory.'
Wisdom begins with a perception of the world, which includes a perception of our-self. But immediately we seem to run into an issue. The world as represented to us by our brains is subject to, well, features of subjectivity. By thoughts and conventions of thinking and feeling which are not our own, but a heritage of society reaming with subtle assumptions, and by the general pressures and rewards of life, which are so normal to us that we are only dimly conscious of. My hope here is to uproot and expose light on some of our ways of thinking and feeling about ourselves and our relation to the world. The way I go about this is by removing as many conceptual layers as I can, while retaining the ability to articulate ideas. After all, discussion is difficult without categories or ideas. Maybe this is analogous to the software engineering practice of removing layers of abstraction in order to see what exact transform is necessary for the computation. Once the desired computation is understood, only then can we reason about improvements. That is to say, before we can be wise, a clear perception of the world is required. But people have different conceptions of what clear means.
Our culture has taken a restricted view of knowledge. We feel that we can only know something if it can be represented or conceptualized in a symbolic form and manipulated according to an abstract system of rules. This can lead to the false impression that books, words, and ideas are in some sense a final destination but I maintain they are points of departure. Anyone who has taken a few minutes to self-observe (mindfulness meditation) will quickly come to realize without any outside interference that there are other forms of knowledge, which are immediate and non-linguistic, non-symbolic, and vitally, non-categorical in of itself.
I labor on this point because so much of our lives as thinking people is spent thinking -- manipulating symbols in our minds. In seeking wisdom, then, we would feel natural and quite at home at searching for the wisest set of symbols and rules governing them, and how they reform our thinking. A worthwhile activity surely. But the world itself is not composed of thoughts, or symbols. Rather, the mind is, and so it composes the world in thoughts. And I think a good place to establish some baseline is somehow coming to see that. A strict exercise in 'building first principles from first principles'. This is essentially what the notion of 'the void' or 'emptiness' means from Indian / far eastern philosophies. It's not the emptiness of atheism. It's just that the world as it is, is 'thoughtless', or 'mindless', a 'void'. And as it is is an unspeakable beauty of great transformative power.
Non-sarcastically, the best resource is your own life. Every moment is an new opportunity to deepen our sensitivities. And the basic technique could not be any simpler. Breathe, watch, and listen, and feel. The thinking will come all on its own. But return to your breath, your eyes and ears and body.