Tips to Learn the Seven Pillars of the Best Wisdom Practice

Creating a meaningful daily routine through Multiple Intelligences Theory

“These Lifehack newsletters serve a demographic of highly intelligent readers, deep thinkers, and spiritually oriented seekers of truth, especially those with a passion for ideas, critical thinking, and unknown possibilities.

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On a personal note: Please excuse grammatical errors, typos, repetition, and any general nonsense, and such in this post. I am getting a bit older now, and I have about 20,000 pages of information that must get published before I leave the mortal coil. I simply write and publish more than my humble editors are able to correct. If you find enough errors you are welcome to contact me about being an editor of my work.

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Q. Lewis, what is the foundation of your daily spiritual practice?

A. It is called the Seven Pillars of the Wisdom Practice. It is something I created from my studies of Zen, Mystic Taoism, Rumi the Sufi master, stories of the Bal Shem Tov, and other spiritual traditions.

Over Fifty years ago I wrote a letter to a spiritual teacher I had heard about. I was seriously self-medicating at the time, incredibly lost and lonely, and bordering on self-harm. Still, I was intensely focused on the spiritual life, though high most of the time.

He wrote me back a wonderful, compassionate letter that simply said…

“… pick a path and walk it. You can walk the path of sadness, materialism, confusion, self-loathing, self-medication (i.e. addiction), and slow degradation, or you can walk the path of joy, service to others, clarity of thought, emotional balance, self-love, and a lifestyle focused on healing body, mind, and spirit. You can’t walk both paths at the same time. It is not something you can negotiate with yourself or with ‘spirit’. One is wise to choose the latter path, because that is where love lives, and in the end, love is all that matters. This is what I call, the Wisdom Path.”

The core principles that define the Wisdom Path I created are based on seven routines, that I call the “Seven Pillars”. They are derived from an idea I first heard about through my Zen studies. These Seven Pillars are not rigid or dogmatic, yet they do create a framework for daily practice. These pillars are:

1.   Meditation, contemplation

2.   Introspection

3.   Exploring your cognitive biases, and logical fallacies*

4.   Doing what needs to be done

5.   Living through love while serving others

6.   Game-based thinking

7.   Singing, dancing, laughing communicating clearly and being silent.

Each of these pillars of the Wisdom Practice requires wakefulness and a sense of focus on the many subtle elements that comprise the human experience. This is a complete awareness of your surroundings and your relationship to those surroundings.

Then, there is the full understanding of many specific qualities such as love, empathy, morality, creativity, compassion, and intellect. The genesis of this aspect of the work was greatly influenced by Howard Earl Gardner, an American developmental psychologist, who created the idea of specific, specialized forms of intelligence.

Gardner listed them as eight primary “key” multiple intelligences including logic-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (social). I embraced and expanded these “intelligences” to include morality, sexuality, the existential, and pragmatism. I prefer to call what Gardner named intelligences as consciousness or “Understandings.” I name them in this way rather than intelligences as Gardner does, only because the word intelligence is often seen in relation specifically to the intellect, and in a Wisdom Practice to be aware or understand something means so much more than just an intellectual awareness. It is Beginners Mind.

Understanding What Needs to be Understood

Part of how you will grow as an individual is through understanding. When I speak of understanding, I am speaking of something very specific, not the way that the word “understanding” is often used. I am speaking of having  a complete integration of what “Is.”

Within my own spiritual wisdom practice, I have found certain forms of understanding to be core to the process of spiritual inquiry in the post-digital age.  Most of the Understandings are primarily sensory in nature and though an individual may be inclined towards one form of understanding over another, each form needs to be fully explored in relation to one’s daily Wisdom Practice. Doing what needs to be done in the way Zen teachers speak of “Chop Wood, Carry Water” requires that one understand what needs to be “Understood.”

With few exceptions, each of the “Understandings” relates to how we think. All of these Understandings involve various unique approaches to thought, and some Understandings have very weak connections to each other while others have very strong correlations.  These various connections form patterns. For example, a practitioner who is comfortable and skilled in creating friendly environments in social situations may not necessarily be more compassionate or empathetic than one who is shy and uncommunicative.  In the same way, the practitioner who takes time to master a skill like sweeping a floor may learn to solve a complex problem through a different way of thinking. Thus, an individual with a clear, profound, and fully developed Understanding in one area may appear to be slow in other forms of Understanding. The essential forms of Understanding for an individual on the Wisdom Path include logical-mathematical, music and sound (auditory), linguistic, space, bodily-kinesthetic, the laws of nature, interpersonal as well as intrapersonal relationships, and ethical, moral, existential, and pragmatic thought. A wise person will have the ability to leverage these understandings as needed just as they did with the nineteen core resources discussed in earlier talks. A visionary thinker in this concept of patterns is Christopher Alexander, an architect and urban planner who has written extensively on this “pattern language.”

The Takeaway

I would ask you at this point to ask yourself “What is it that I really need, rather than just what I think I want?”

The answer to this question will make your journey on the wisdom path that much easier and more fruitful.

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This newsletter is an excerpt from The Best Loving Spiritual Life Course

Learn more about this Taoist-influenced program by clicking below …

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Author: Lewis Harrison, is a natural healer, and the Founder and Administrator for the Mystic Taoism Community on Facebook is a practical philosopher, an Independent Scholar, and a Results-Oriented Taoism Coach. He has a passion for knowledge, personal development, applied game theory, self-improvement, creativity, innovation, problem-solving, and story-telling. He is a practitioner of Mystic Taoism. Lewis Harrison is also a speaker, best-selling author, and the creator of The Mystic Taoist “Best Loving Spiritual Life Course”

This newsletter is an excerpt from The Best Loving Spiritual Life Course

Click on the Meditator Graphic just below or go to the link below the smiley face  to learn more about the course …

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“It is very difficult to understand the more profound and subtle elements of personal healing especially emotional and inner healing without being mentored.

Are you looking for a mentor or a compassionate, Spiritually-oriented life coach? I’d love to work with you and help you to get to your “best and most spiritual life”.

”Let's schedule a 15-minute interview to determine how I can help you create a customized and personalized program study program concerning the Mystic Taoist Teachings. Email me at LewisCoaches@gmail.com

Lewis