Wise people don’t operate in an individualistic vacuum. Always the community and the tradition are cared about. There are two wellsprings of wisdom involved together or alternately in their inward processing of things. One well spring is the heart itself, and the other is the living wisdom tradition which the elder is carrying forward in addressing the current issue or problem.
These individuals are very rooted in a wisdom tradition, whether it be that of tribe or a spiritual tradition within a large social milieu of a nation. In the indigenous Americas, an Elder has mandala-like symbolic form, his medicine wheel, and the whole rich tradition of accumulated values and insights which it symbolizes to support his or her ongoing inward inquiry and life process.
This is no mere adaptation or blind going along with a tradition. A living tradition is kept alive by using it, consulting it, but not in a rote way. It is kept alive by finding how it can throw light on a new situation in the present. The elder’s own experiencing can add new meaning so as to expand and enrich the tradition’s resource on the current issue or problem.
Each culture has its tradition[s] rich with heroes which can be authentically chosen as a models, or ‘mythoi’ around which to pattern one’s value system and life aspirations. These figures can serve as experiential dialogue partners with whom to check one’s own feelings, inclinations, and intentions against.
The resources of any wisdom tradition are available to the wise person, carried as an implicit part of his or her own inward experiencing, but there are times when it is explicitly consulted. A Christian might ask, what would the Psalmist or Jesus say about this thing. A Hassidic Jew might consult a pithy saying from Baal Shem Tov, just as a Lakota Sioux elder might recall the vision or words of Black Elk as a second wisdom source or touchstone for processing the subject matter at hand. Similarly some to day use the image of Mother Theresa, or Ghandi, or Malcom X, or Eleanor Roosevelt.
As part of the wise person’s inwardly arising process there can be a back and forth between the individual’s own felt sense of the issue, and the tradition’s resourceful perspective on the issue. The decision or insight arrived at can be a fresh response to both sources, as felt organismically right from within. It is a living co-creative process, and not mere submission to the forms of the past. We live in a creatively evolving Cosmos, and we are co-creators with that process.