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Wisdom and Wizards

Lefty, my child within, will believe anything. Magic, Jesus, Buddha, Quantum Mechanics, Epigenesis, the Moirae, Geometry, DeBono all sit easy with him - or maybe her. Lefty is nuts. Or wise. I can't figure out which.

Edwin DeBono, who has thought more about thinking than anyone, says, in his book Parallel Thinking, cleverness is like a close-up lens, wisdom is like a wide angle lens. Cleverness is the ability to quickly find the answer to a problem. Wisdom is knowing there may be many answers.

Says Edwin,

• Wisdom has a rich mental stock of possibilities, models, metaphors, concepts and ways of looking at things. Because of this richer stock of "patterns", you can see the world in different ways. Instead of proceeding step by step, as in traditional thinking, there is, from the beginning, a broad view of the whole situation.

• Wisdom is concerned with context and circumstances.

• Wisdom looks at interconnections and interplay.

• Wisdom looks at possibilities and alternatives.

• Wisdom holds different possibilities in mind and has no need to choose one and throw out the others.

• Wisdom considers the behavior of non-linear systems instead of forcing everything into linear models.

• Wisdom involves doubts and guesses and some risk-taking.

• Wisdom does not set out to "prove" things but to follow possibilities.

• Wisdom is pragmatic, not authoritarian. There is a willingness to accept and adapt to the world rather than change the world. Sometimes this involves changing yourself rather than the world around.

• Wisdom has no gatekeeper judgement of true/false; the field of possibilities can be large.

Edwin says, "Every possibility provides a 'hypothesis' through which to look at the world. If you always consider the purpose of your thinking, the factors involved, the people involved, your priorities and a range of alternatives then you are going to be a great deal wiser than if you do not."

So maybe lefty, who believes anything at all, is wise. I don't know.