[Theme music playing] [Playing "Duende"] Carlos Santana: The most valuable thing that I learned since I was young to where I am today is appreciation and valuing.

I learned to value my next breath.

Now I learned to, like, really, really savor and enjoy the note.

But there's so much that has to do with the quality of selection of your thoughts.

Claim back, accept, and own your own divinity.

It's not just for Jesus or Allah or Krishna and everybody else is chopped liver.

It ain't like that.

We are all part of something beyond words.

So let's sit back and join our host, Phil Cousineau, for another "Global Spirit" program.

Cousineau: The intensely contemplative mood expressed in Rodin's "The Thinker" reflects a concern that has baffled philosophers for centuries.

While the rational powers of thinking and reasoning have solved many of humankind's problems, philosophers and others have wondered if our intellectual powers alone are enough to comprehend the very meaning of existence, or is there something more?

The ancient Greeks believed there was another human capacity beyond reasoning, and they named it "sophia," Greek for wisdom.

"Wisdom is a beautiful thing," wrote Plato, which is why the Greeks and Romans personified wisdom as a beautiful young goddess.

In Eastern traditions, wisdom is often associated with an inner state available to those who learn to see beyond the illusory, the ephemeral, the ever-changing.

Siddhartha Gautama became known as the Buddha, or the Awakened One, following his realization of the law of impermanence and the connection between our attachments and our suffering.

While our modern world has been driven by great intellectual achievements, it has also been marked by many unwise decisions, from senseless wars to the destruction of our planet.

We are now at a point as a species where we must ask ourselves for how much longer we can afford to court catastrophe while disregarding centuries of our collective human wisdom.

To touch on this and other urgent questions, we've invited two authors and teachers, both originally trained as medical doctors and psychiatrists.

Jean Shinoda Bolen is a Jungian analyst and an activist who has written several books on the archetypal psyche of women and men in the development of human consciousness.

Roger Walsh is a professor of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology who recently edited a book on how wisdom can be understood and cultivated.

Welcome to "Global Spirit: The Call of Wisdom."

Welcome to "Global Spirit," Jean Shinoda Bolen.

Welcome, Roger Walsh.

Wonderful to have you here and help us explore the frontier of what might be called wisdom studies.

I'd like to begin the program by sharing two quotes with you.

One I found in your book, Roger, a passage from the book of "Proverbs"-- "Happy are those who find wisdom.

"She's more precious than jewels.

Nothing you can desire compares with her."

It's a gorgeous line, isn't it?

Jean: That is a gorgeous line.

It has a little bit of that French frisson in it.

And one of my favorites, because I've been studying a lot of Greek history and philosophy recently, and Socrates, I learned, had said that the only true wisdom is knowing how much you don't know, that the real life of wisdom begins in humility rather than arrogance.

Can we start there?

Well, one of my very favorite lines from T.S.

Eliot's "Four Quartets" is "the only wisdom we can hope to acquire "is the wisdom of humility.

Humility is endless."

That's one of my lessons that I keep getting, and I began getting it when I was kind of an inflated teenager and thought I was hot stuff then.

And then I had a wisdom experience that said everything that you have and you feel good about was a gift, really, and the only way you can say thank you is by giving back.

And that's actually what set me on my decision to be a doctor.

Roger?

Beautiful.

Um... Yeah, humility... certainly seems like there's a relationship with wisdom.

But, um, I think there's also another dimension to it, and that is that the more deeply we look into ourselves or into reality, the more we realize that at bottom, life is just this bottomless mystery.

And in the face of that mystery, of course, what else can we do but be humble and grateful?

Right.

I've read also in your work, Roger, a wonderful definition of wisdom, that it's a deep understanding plus a practical skill in the central issues of life, especially existential and spiritual issues.

And then you follow up with that by saying that wisdom is expertise in the conduct and the meaning of life.

What's the relationship between the search for meaning and the search for wisdom?

Well, I've wondered that myself.

They seem very closely related, and I think they... they very much overlap.

Uh...but I think the search for wisdom can be a little broader and perhaps deeper.

I don't know.

The search for meaning is what... what resonates with us, what...what calls us, what gives significance to our lives and enables us to give... give to the lives of others, as Jean was saying.

But in addition, it feels like the search for wisdom requires something extra or some things extra.

One is deep insight and understanding of ourselves and of insight into the nature of life, particularly, as you said, the central existential issues, the issues and challenges that all of us face just by being human, the mortality, sickness, death, aloneness, how to navigate friendships and relationships, Those kind of... those kind of issues seem to be the core of what wisdom focuses on.

But then, as you said, there's something more.

Yes, it's wonderful to have those insights, but wise people seem to be able to express them in ways that are beneficial to everyone, that create win-win situations, and that... so it seems like wisdom has these multiple facets, and when they come together, then we... then we nod our head and say, "Yeah, that... that's a wise person."

Well, I think it's also interesting that wisdom and meaning are related and they sort of overlap some, but for me it becomes a spiritual underpinning, and that I remember thinking about how the word "psyche" means "soul" in Greece, and so really psychology should be the study of the soul.

And the thing about soul is that everybody, ordinary people for thousands of years, human beings believe we have a soul.

So it seems to be an innate, archetypal sort of deeper... unprovable, but we come into the world with a sense that we have a soul.

Consequently, what are we doing here?

What is this human life business about that's so short, always full of suffering, always full of questions, and yet we navigate because we came into this world with something to do here.

And meaning and wisdom may have to do with what we individually have to do here and whether we live authentically from what we know in our bones, what we know at a soul level, or what we do with what other people tell us we should do with our... Mary Oliver's poem, "Our One... "Our One Wild and Precious Life."

Ha ha ha!

Are we suffering from a wisdom deficit in contemporary society?

Oh... Oh, yes.

I think we're in a race between wisdom and catastrophe.

Uh...we...we have... We're at a unique time in human history, as so many people have pointed out, but... and there are many dimensions to that uniqueness, but one of them is this imbalance between the extraordinary technological power that we have to change the face of the planet, not to mention our civilization and put our civilization at risk, and the relative underdevelopment of our inner life, our...our wisdom, our intuitive depths.

To me, it seems like we're like the sorcerer's apprentice, with enormous power and very little wisdom.

How does this play out in ordinary life?

For example, many fields, from medicine to law to the war department, have a wisdom dimension, it would seem to me, but it's simply not taught.

I agree with... with Roger's comment that we individually and as humanity are often at this crossroad between wisdom and catastrophe-- which one, which way to go?

And we're catastrophically headed toward climate change, nuclear winter, all kinds of things, overpopulation, unless we kick in to the wisdom side.

And that has to do with what really matters.

And each of us has... have moments of truth-- this way or that way?

Go with the crowd, be one of the "in" group, or, um...do what feels right from an inner place and then be scapegoated?

There's a price often to pay for wisdom.

We used to call that a voice of conscience.

Oh, yeah.

Socrates referred to it as his "daimon," that there was an inner voice that helped keep him on track.

But if you've never heard of that, if it wasn't taught to you by your parents or a school, is that voice still there?

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

It's something that we have innately as a source of something in ourselves.

Babies seem to come into the world with a sense-- For example, research on the psychology of babies who can seem to... or toddlers who see someone treating someone else badly and then they avoid that person, too.

There's something about how we seem to come into the world with some lack of language and concept but some innate feeling about what is right or what is wrong.

I mean, for example, I think that... that soldiers have to be taught to override a human dimension that says, "Thou shalt not kill," you know...whatever that is that is in us that says we don't kill each other.

Well, that seemed to be built in at the factory at some level, and then it gets overridden.

In his master work "Ulysses," James Joyce coins this marvelous old phrase-- "The agenbite of inwit," the again bite of conscience.

When you do the wrong thing, it's actually physically painful.

And I think we've all had that experience, a little bit of a wince because you've made a wrong decision, immoral, unethical.

So is it reducing this too much to say that wisdom is a capacity to do the right thing in the hardest circumstances?

I'd say that's certainly a part of wisdom.

Uh...and it's also...

But I think wisdom is more than that.

And also, doing the right thing at those challenging choice points requires more than wisdom.

It requires courage.

It requires integrity.

So to live one's life fully and authentically requires a panoply of virtues, and of course, that's our lifelong challenge, to cultivate those qualities.

And there's an awful lot in our culture which is aimed at seducing us away from it.

Yes.

You have a wonderful list of sources of wisdom.

Can you give us a few of those?

I can try.

Ha ha!

It's been a long time since I've read my book.

[Laughter] I think of "wellspring" when I think of that phrase of yours, a source of wisdom, a place that you can go back to that's inexhaustible.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Well, and of course, the supreme wellspring is...is our own depths, uh, the recognition that within us there are depths of wisdom waiting to be honored, accessed, and expressed that are beyond anything our little ego is aware of.

So one source is within.

Another is within our relationships.

Another is in nature.

Countless sages have advised us to return to nature, that there in...in the stillness of nature somehow washes us clean of the trivia that usually consumes our lives.

So those are some of the sources.

Don't our parents come into this at some point, seeking wisdom from our mothers, seeking wisdom from our fathers?

We have a film clip we'd like to get your response to.

It's from the marvelous film about Gurdjieff, "Meetings With Remarkable Men."

And there's a scene that we've chosen where the young seeker of truth, Gurdjieff, accepts the wisdom of the moment in an encounter with his father.

So your family wants you to become a priest?

Yes, but I am interested in science.

Then study medicine as well.

Body and soul depend on one another.

Become yourself.

Then God and the devil don't matter.

[Snake hisses] Pick it up.

In the film clip, it seems that the father recognizes a great teaching moment with his son, that he's old enough now to be tested to see if he's a man, I suppose, in the traditional way.

And they by extension, the question I'd like to raise here is is there always a test, a trial when it comes to becoming wiser?

It always involves a choice, but whether it's an ordeal or not is... hopefully optional, because you can learn that you made the wrong choice and suffer afterwards and then learn from that the next time around.

And unfortunately, our journey is very labyrinthine, and we have many opportunities to be tested to choose the right path or not, and we learn through the experience of...of what we did, what happened.

Roger, what think you?

Uh...well... certainly life gives us all challenges.

It's not a question of whether we're going to be challenged, although there is a great question of how much.

Some of us are clearly challenged more than others.

Uh...but learning from challenges, as you were saying, Jean, is optional.

But there's a saying that, uh, most people learn from suffering, wise people learn from the suffering of others and thereby avoid some of their own suffering.

That is an interesting observation.

Jean, in your marvelous book "Goddesses In Every Woman," I'm struck with this mystery that traditionally wisdom has been associated with the female.

Why?

Have you come up with a theory about this over the years?

I've certainly observed it.

I think it's amazing that in a patriarchal culture, where women do... are disempowered, why is it, how is it that the major figures of wisdom are female from Sophia in the Bible to Medeia, Athena, Hestia, Hecate in Greek mythology to Saraswati in India, wisdom is personified by women figures?

So wisdom is feminine.

I've often wondered why, in "The Odyssey," Odysseus, often considered the cleverest, the greatest strategic hero in the ancient stories, is constantly accompanied by Athena, and she appears to him and whispers in his ear as a kind of voice of conscience at every moment when he has to make a moral decision.

Is this the embodiment of an inner female, the sophia wisdom pouring into him at that moment?

It has that kind of a quality of... of listening to...

In fact, some young men especially, when they're tempted to do what all the guys are doing, to hear the voice of inner mother saying, uh, you know, "be kind and don't be mean," inner mother that says, uh, "watch out."

I mean, it could also be as simple as that, or usually it sort of comes together that one's personal experience of a wisdom that says look out for each other, look out for yourself, speaks for some value that the culture of the gang or the boys or the soldiers are not listening to.

So maybe that's another reason why wisdom is personified by the feminine.

That's a... an opportune moment to segue to our film clip.

It comes from "The Power of Myth," with Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, who, in the last couple years of his life, filmed a series with Bill Moyers called "The Power of Myth" in which he really revived a number of what used to be called "wisdom stories."

Let's look at that clip now.

So, there have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more, um... immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother, and then the first experience of any infant is the mother.

So that the image of woman is the image of the world.

You might say that mythology is simply a translation of the world into a mother image.

We talk of Mother Earth and so forth.

But what happened along the way, Joe, to this reverence that, in primitive societies, was directed toward the goddess figure, the great goddess, the Mother Earth?

What happened to that?

That comes in primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies.

Fertility and all of that?

It has to do with the Earth.

The human woman does give birth as the Earth gives birth to the plants.

She gives nourishment, as the plants do.

So woman magic and Earth magic are the same, they are related.

And the personification then of this energy which gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is probably female.

And so it is in the agricultural world of ancient, uh, Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile, but also in the earlier planting-culture systems that the...the goddess is the mythic form that is dominant.

It's the female wisdom.

It's the female as the giver of forms.

She is the one who gave the forms, and she knows where they came from.

I wonder what it would have meant to us if somewhere along the way we had begun the prayer "Our Mother" instead of "Our Father."

Why psychological difference would it have made?

Well, it makes a psychological difference in the...in the character of the cultures.

You have the basic birth of civilization in the Near East with the great river valleys then as the... the main source areas, the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and then over in India, the Indus Valley and later the Ganges.

This is the world of the goddess.

All of these rivers have goddess names finally.

Then there come the invasions.

These fighting people are herding people.

The Semites are herders of goats and sheep, and the Indo-Europeans of cattle.

They were formerly the hunters.

They translate a hunting mythology into a herding mythology, but it's animal-oriented, and when you have hunters, you have killers, and when you have herders, you have killers, because they're always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people, and they have to conquer the area they move into.

This comes into the Near East, and this brings in the warrior gods, like Zeus, like Yahweh.

The sword and death instead of fertility.

Right.

Particularly the Hebrews.

They really wipe out the goddess.

The term for the goddess, the Canaanite goddess, that's used in the Old Testament is "the abomination," and, uh, so many of the Hebrew kings are condemned in the Old Testament for having worshipped on the mountaintops.

That's the goddess.

And, uh...there was a very strong accent against the goddess in the Hebrew, which you do not find in the Indo-European.

There you have Zeus marrying the goddess, and then the two play together.

I think it's an extreme case that we have in the Bible, and our own Western subjugation of the female is really, I think, a function of... of Biblical thinking.

So, Jean, something tells me you have a strong response to this clip.

Ha ha ha.

Let's...

I really did, because... the whole culture that we are in and the catastrophe that we are getting to is all about patriarchy, it's all about the absence of the feminine.

I really, really see how it is that once monotheism came in as it did and we have the three great religions that are now at war in the Middle East, and it's fratricidal, beginning with Cain and Abel, with a Yahweh that favors one and disparages another, and the feminine that becomes nothing, that what happens is that, then for thousands of years, women as a gender are not educated, are treated as possessions, and it's the catastrophe versus wisdom will have something to do with bringing feminine wisdom into the culture again.

And feminine wisdom begins with valuing raising children.

As a mother, I would want for other children in the world to have what I would want for my own child-- freedom from violence, freedom from domestic violence, freedom from war violence, um, that they would be wanted, that they could be fed, that they could have, um, immunizations, that... And as soon as women have the power to help governance, things change.

What about you, Roger?

Is...is gender an aspect of the wisdom exploration?

Well, it certainly seems to be, from the... from the mythology, from the archetypes we've been given.

And one... one quality or skill that may play into that is traditionally women-- and contemporarily, too-- women are thought of as having more skill in terms of relationship-- greater focus, greater emphasis on that-- and more relational skills, and there's some research that backs that up.

And certainly relationship skills have traditionally been seen as a very core element of wisdom.

But it's interesting that most of the wisdom teachings that are put into words are associated with wise men.

One theory would be that that is the feminine aspect of men and women, that the knowledge that is not logical, that is not rational or scientific, but is really known as an inner experience, that that happens to be associated with the right half of the brain, with knowing things in your body, in your soul, in your heart, and it could be that men, who are the carriers of liter...the literate model, could not put it in a male figure, because it is a feminine wisdom in which both men and women connect with it.

You cite the famous T.S.

Eliot quote from 1936-- "Where's the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

If the current mythology is that technology and information alone will save us, there's a kind of salvational aura around the accumulation of technology.

Wisdom is pushed into the background.

What do we do then?

Well, that... that's clearly one of the...the great challenges of our time, that because of the informational explosion and the technological powers that are available, wisdom has been eclipsed, and we've seen this in the last few centuries in the West, that wisdom has basically faded from Western awareness.

So how do we bring wisdom back into our individual and collective lives?

And how do we even build it into our educational system?

Is it helpful, Jean, to make a distinction from early on in our schools that there is a difference between inner and outer development?

Well, partly it's also whether we help, um... develop our two sides of the brain, because as technology and information overload and these sort of super-rational either-or choices that don't involve right or wrong, it is very much a left-brain dominant kind of a thing, and whether you get advanced in the school system depends on how you do on your SAT's or something, and nobody asks you about what makes life meaningful, what's beauty, what really... How you do really choose what you are going to do when you're up against a choice that will either set you on a course that sort of is a role that other people may think this is good for you but it doesn't seem to resonate at all with something deeper in yourself?

I mean, as a Jungian analyst, what comes in about midlife is that people who did it the way everybody expected them to do and did all right often have a sense of low-lying anxiety, depression.

"Is this all there is?"

Then is cultivating the inner life a way of cultivating wisdom?

I think it certainly can be and usually is.

If you look across the world's different cultures and the different spiritual traditions, the different world philosophies, you find that all of them are essentially dedicated to the cultivation of virtues.

The contemplative...

The world's contemplative practices and the corresponding philosophies have as their central goal the cultivation of virtues.

And one of the... one of the great virtues is wisdom.

Wisdom and love are often mentioned as the two great virtues.

Is wisdom cross-cultural then?

Is it the same from culture to culture?

Well, there seem to be different emphases.

That is, if we look across different cultures-- For example, the... the great religious scholar Huston Smith, who you know so well, pointed out that in Chinese tradition, the primary emphasis and the cultivation of wisdom is centered towards relationship, family, community, and the... in Indian culture, it's more about... the wisdom as focuses particularly on turning inward, accessing our inner depths, these resources and wisdom and... and virtues that reside within us.

And in the West, he suggests that our primary focus has been external, which has led to our development of technology and, many would argue, a deficit or inattention to both our inner and relational dimensions.

We keep circling around the issue of religion.

What is the relationship between wisdom and religion, religion and wisdom?

Well, traditionally there's been a very close relationship, and religions have been the carriers of wisdom.

Of course, they've also carried a lot of nonsense, too, but at their best, they've really been the... the major human institutions which have both carried, transmitted, taught, and shown us how to cultivate wisdom, and so it's been an enormous gift.

And one of the great challenges of our time is to winnow the wisdom from the considerable amount of chaff that religion has because religion is the one human institution that speaks to all levels of human development, from magic to... to primitive mythic to sophisticated myth to rational to trans-rational, mystical.

And unfortunately, our culture only knows about the somewhat primitive mythic kind of religion and doesn't have any appreciation that there are higher kinds of religion.

Conventional religion focuses on believing a story, and if you believe the story, you're saved.

Trans-conventional religion focuses on a kind of spiritual practice, a way of directly cultivating the very virtues the great sages embodied and transmitted to us, and those are very, very different kinds of religion, but unfortunately, our culture doesn't know that.

Jean, what's the relationship between age and wisdom?

Are we supposed to get wiser as we get older?

Ramdas has a marvelous movement now called Aging Into Saging...

I like that.

Where he is suggesting that you... it's not enough just to grow old.

Maybe you can grow older in a more wise way.

Is he taking it on in a wise way?

Ha ha ha!

Would that we... Would that we all did that.

Ha ha ha!

Because we all know people who get older but definitely not wiser.

In fact, as they fear getting older, the kinds of decisions that they make are far from wise.

So it doesn't come automatically.

It is...it is really something that is a kind of achievement of the psyche, to get wiser over time.

Right.

It's very interesting, if you look at some of the sages across history, they have emphasized that one of the main requirements for developing wisdom-- We think of Confucius or Socrates or the Buddha.

All of them emphasized you have to have a real commitment to learning and growing in life and to reflecting on experience.

So, wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age and certainly doesn't necessarily lead to fame.

In fact, uh... a wise life may be one which runs against cultural conventions, which grows beyond them, not just countercultural, but transcultural, a more mature looking at, examining the conventions and realizing, well, some of these aren't really so skillful.

And so there's the idea of the crazy... of crazy wisdom in some cultures.

There's the idea of the sage as someone who's very disruptive to culture, and historically, some of our greatest sages have end up... ended up on funeral pyres or crucified.

Can it be cultivated then?

Can it be developed?

Are there methods and exercises?

I think crisises lead a lot of people to wisdom.

I think that, for example, cancer used to be called "the wisdom disease" because when you got the diagnosis, you knew that you could die from this and it would take a while, and in the time that it takes between the diagnosis and either remission or you die, you have a life review, you have a chance to wonder about what are you going to do with the time you have remaining, and you...and one of the wisdom teachings is to become aware that we don't live forever.

And at that point, it's possible to tap into a deeper wisdom.

At that point, you do care what wise people have said.

And there is a seeking for some help then.

So I think the need is for...for one's attention to be grabbed by some often crisis that...that translates into danger and opportunity.

And is the next factor there going into that experience, that crisis, that struggle and asking what it means ultimately?

Oh, I would so agree that there's something always about what might this mean, what does this mean, uh...what can... what can I come to know, uh... about really what matters to me and my soul in this moment of crisis?

And at that point, you don't count on someone outside of you telling you that, by the way.

It's very much an inner kind of... what you know in your bones.

In your bones.

Do you feel that?

Indeed.

I think Jean's making-- You're making such an important point, that there are certain experiences that break through our conventional trance, that call us to look more deeply at "what the hell am I doing with my life?

"What really matters?

My God, I'm gonna die, and I don't know when."

But--And then there's a question of, "Ok.

I need to do something.

How do I do it?"

And one thing is clearly reflection, looking at our own experience, our sense of purpose and meaning.

But there are other things as well.

Traditionally, one of the most important has been relationship, finding a teacher, a wise person we can learn from, finding a community of people committed to learning instead of the conventional trivia that distract us day by day.

Uh, then some sort of practice or discipline, some sort of systematic inner searching and looking at life.

In our contemporary world, it may be psychotherapy.

Traditionally, it's been the contemplative practices, the world's meditations, yogas, living life ethically, compassionately, as fully as one possibly can, but also with these practices which train us to train our own hearts and minds and to cultivate the very qualities we want.

And more generally, because of this idea, an ancient idea across many cultures that virtues come to... come in a... come in a group, if... that ethics cultivates wisdom, and wisdom helps ethics and compassion and so forth.

So the...the helpful thing there is that anything we do to cultivate virtues will tend to support the growth of wisdom.

And that's... that's good news.

I like what you said, that it has to be woken up, and that's a spiritual teaching that crosses so many different traditions.

Human beings fall asleep, and it's the function of poetry, art, soul therapy, "therapia" in the Greek sense to wake us up.

Ah, yes.

Ah, yes.

Ha ha!

There's this recurrent theme across cultures pointing to... pointing to the fact that we need to be jolted to be woken up and that what we call normality is this form of collective trance and that we... we need not to just cultivate wisdom, we literally need to wake up in some way and recognize how unwise we are, how...how limited, how distorted, how dreamlike our ordinary state of mind and way of being is.

I think wisdom is generated often in circles where one really talks about what's truly going on, and it's similar to psychotherapy that has a spiritual dimension, but a circle of people who trust one another with one's own story.

Fortunately, we have a film clip that illustrates your point beautifully.

It's a documentary film called "For the Next Seven Generations," and it follows a group of 13 indigenous grandmothers around the world as they are gathering their aggregate wisdom and trying to change the world into a better place.

I'd like to know if each one of the grandmothers sitting here at the table have decided to formalize this group, to become a formalized organization.

Translator: I think that it's important that we have an organization that speaks for peace and for the well-being of all, that the grandmothers are able to pass along these teachings to the next generation.

This is new for her, but she thinks that if we're gonna be able to speak our voice and our voice is gonna be heard around the planet, our voice is gonna take wings then, she said she agreed with it.

When we say, "The moment is now, we have to put our voice," this is what we have to do, I believe.

[Speaking French] Translator: Please... let's try to create this alliance hand in hand.

I think the grandmothers that are gathered here, they're all thinking the same way.

There is no turning back.

And I hope the grandmothers all think that way.

And maybe we are a little late, but we're here... the grandmas from all four corners.

I'm from the North, and she's from the East, and she's from the South.

And she's from the West.

And we're all here... [Sniffles] For our generation, for our little ones.

[Sighs] Woman: We have been brought together by a common vision to form a new global alliance.

We are the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers.

Ours is an alliance of prayer, education, and healing for our Mother Earth, all her inhabitants, all the children, and for the next 7 generations to come.

That was a very moving sequence, Jean.

Can you tell us the origins of the ceremony?

Well, in the United States, the Iroquois Confederacy of the Seneca Nations had a system of governance.

At the very top was a council of grandmothers, or the council of wise women, and they were elected.

They were beyond the childbearing years, and they were concerned for the well-being of the tribe.

It was up to them to make the major decisions about priorities for the people, which included whether they would ever go to war.

It had to do with considering every decision made, the effect of it for 7 generations to come, and a listening to the past history of 7 generations to this point.

I think I hear something new in this discussion also.

What you're telling us is that it's something alive and vital, dynamic, it must keep moving.

If wisdom gets stagnant, then it dies, or no one can hear it anymore.

Wisdom is how you respond, drawing on virtues, to what is right now.

I think that's one of the hallmarks of wisdom, that wise people seem to look at the big picture, look way beyond their own egocentric desires and motives, look to the larger culture, even the globe and the civilization and future generations, and then ask the question which may be one of the... one of the core wisdom questions which all of us are called to ask-- what can I do?

And even beyond that, what's the most strategic contribution I can make given my gifts, my situation, my time, my talents, et cetera?

What can I do?

Because, you know, we look at the world and think, oh, well, they should do this, they should do that, et cetera.

Yeah, maybe so.

But it always comes down to what can I do?

Jean: This is critical-mass tipping point, and that was Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Fields Theory, which was the hundredth monkey story that energized through story the anti-nuclear activist movement.

But then we have Malcolm Gladwell who comes along and writes about that tipping point, and by geometrical progression, we realize we could change the world by geometrical progression, just a number of us infecting, influencing more of us, they doing that for more and more of us, and given that we are so actually one in this world, that most of us will find that we're one to, what, 5 degrees of separation from every other human being on this planet?

It used to be 6, then 5, then 4.

[Laughter] Get used to a lot of intimate company, right?

Do you hear any echoes here, Roger?

Oh, yes.

It's very hard to cultivate wisdom if you're hungry and your life is threatened.

Last year, 85 billionaires had the same net worth as the poorest half of the planet.

That's pretty mind-boggling.

Joan: That is.

And we have over a billion people living on $2.00 a day.

You know, you can't expect a lot of wisdom, free time for reflecting and developing wisdom with those kind of basic inequalities and deprivations.

So...so the...the... the challenge of how to bring wisdom is intimately tied to the larger social, global, economic, political issues of our time.

They're intimately connected.

Let's agree, wisdom really is, that at some level, the fate of all of us is one, that we are the fate of the planet.

What we do here now matters.

And that wisdom is something that needs to permeate everybody's psyche, but especially those at the top, who have the resources and the power now to make a difference.

It does seem to be that the... mostly men at the top, um, are likely to do the right thing when women as a gender and women close to them lean on them to do the right thing in sufficient numbers that they don't feel foolish because they're doing the right thing and the other guys are doing the "guy" thing.

In our next film clip, another clip from "Meetings With Remarkable Men," now a much older Gurdjieff is attempting to continue to cultivate his wisdom, as he's done since he was a young man, by spending time with an older man, a traveling Italian priest.

Father Giovanni, how can you stay here instead of returning to Italy and giving the people there something of the faith which you are now inspiring in me?

Ah, professor, you do not understand men's psyche as well as you know archaeology.

Faith cannot be given to men.

Faith is not the result of thinking.

It comes from direct knowledge.

For example, if my own brother were to entreat me to give him a tenth part of my understanding, I could not, as he has neither the knowledge nor the experience which I have acquired in my life.

This would be like wishing to fill someone with bread merely by looking at him.

There is the law-- the quality of what you understand depends upon the quality of the person speaking.

In our order, we have two very old brethren.

The one is called Brother Aryl, the other Brother Sez.

They constantly travel from one monastery to another, preaching there.

Once or twice a year, they come to us.

This is always... a very great event.

When Brother Sez speaks, it is like the song of the birds in paradise.

Brother Aryl's speech has almost the opposite effect.

He speaks badly and indistinctly.

The stronger the impression made by Brother Sez, the quicker it evaporates, until there is nothing left.

Brother Aryl makes almost no impression, but what he says penetrates into the heart and remains there.

So we all came to the conclusion that the sermons of Brother Sez came entirely from his mind and acted only on our minds, whereas those of Brother Aryl came directly from his being and acted on our being.

Yes, professor, thinking and knowing are quite different.

It seems that the poetic point of this clip from "Meetings With Remarkable Men" is about the importance of direct experience.

I'd like to add something, that the Greeks had two words for "knowledge, to know."

One is "logos," and the other was "gnosis."

And "logos" is what you know rationally, but "gnosis" is intuitive feeling, what it is you "gno," g-n-o-s-i-s.

So I think that direct knowledge for me is "gnosis," because when you have a sense there's something going on inside, lo and behold, there's an outer resonance with it that comes out of who knows where.

The "who knows where" turns out to be that... that we are all connected.

There is a mysterious oneness.

So it isn't just an idea.

Right.

Right.

The revered developmental psychologist Erik Erikson suggests that wisdom most readily emerges in life's final stage, probably because we're confronting mortality.

Then the question becomes why don't more people become wiser as they age?

Probably it's important for us to look at individual factors and collective factors and social factors.

Individually, it's clear, as, you know, Jean has spoken about in her therapeutic work.

We all have blocks and barriers to looking inside, to getting... facing our own experience, to looking at our mortality and the challenges we face.

Collectively, society functions in part as a kind of collective avoidance system, and that is fostered, particularly in our own time, by a great deal of advertising, seduction with tranquilization with the trivial, as the philosopher Kierkegaard spoke of.

And then globally, there are, of course, there are these great crises facing us, which can be overwhelming for any of us.

And I do truly think that it... that it is meaningful, what we do at this time, Roger, when you talk about that we are at a choice between wisdom or catastrophe, and here we all are, the most educated class, living longer, et cetera.

And maybe we have something to do with tilting it in one direction or the other.

I think we do actually.

I think it's a calling of this generation or the generation from millennials to post-boomers to make a difference.

Yeah.

And one of the... one of the callings of our time may be for us to make the wisest responses we can to these very novel and very enormous challenges that we face both as societies and as a... as a civilization.

And the fate of our civilization may depend on the wisdom of the choices we make.

Like that famous saying about he who does not learn from experience is doomed to relive it, something like that.

And certainly from a political standpoint, when governments make the same error, haven't we been this route before?

Didn't it end badly before?

Um...that's a kind of national wisdom, but then there's...it applies to us personally, too.

Do you know the story of the psychologist Robert Johnson in one of his few sessions with Dr. Jung, simply asked, "Are we going to make it as a... as the human race?"

and Robert says that Jung told him, "If enough people do the inner work, we'll make it."

[Laughter] Jean Shinoda Bolen, thank you very much for this wonderful exploration of wisdom with you.

Roger Walsh, it's been such an honor, a privilege.

I hope that we've given a few nudges to the people at home to believe that this is actually within our grasp, isn't it?

And thank you so much for this wonderful gift you give us all, bringing these deeper questions and discussions to our culture.

They're greatly needed.

Well, thank you.

Everywhere I go, people are hungry for meaning and hungry for good conversation.

Thank you both.

I am Carlos Santana, and I hope you connected and return to this series "Global Spirit," the first internal travel series.