Wisdom, according to what I'm learning in Tergar's Joy of Living 3, is our awareness of reality. That includes our awareness of how reality can be distorted and shaped by our perceptions. In JOL 1 the meditative practice focussed on thoughts and using our awareness to calm the mind. JOL 2 focussed on compassion and lovingkindness and increasing the power of the heart. JOL 3 is about bringing awareness fo our perceptual level.
Perceptions are different from thoughts in that they are beliefs about the world that we see, rather than just mental vocalizations, pictures and feeling.
I discovered a good example of the difference after doing a simple wisdom meditation that started first with a meditation on basic goodness. There might be many thought that could arise on a meditation of basic goodness, but the perceptions are somewhat different. For instance I might become aware of a perception that basic goodness doesn't feel good enough.
Yesterday after this meditation, I did the dishes and noticed that in relaxing and resting in my basic goodness, my perception of the mundane task transformed form something I resisted to something I could deeply enjoy and appreciate.
Last night I had a powerful meditative experience. I woke up in the middle of the night gripped with my all too familiar financial anxiety. It seemed so solid, disaster seemed so inevitable. Slowly after about twenty minutes these anxieties began to dissolve and I began to feel my chi ebbing its way into my being slowly dissolving all the suffering. At that point I began to feel that my natural intelligence was far stronger than any of the misperceptions that had led me into these financial challenges. I could go to sleep feeling comforted and assured in my ability to find a way out of that particular prison.
One of the central themes of this course is that whatever prison of suffering we have created, we have created it and thus we can un-create it.
The first step is understanding that this perceptual level exists.
