Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
November 11, 2024
The great problems are to be encountered in the street.
–Nietzsche
Wisdom is not just for elite thinkers on the peaks of mountains or secluded in august halls of learning. To remain relevant and vital, wisdom must get dirty, go outside, and bring us together. It must be engaged with the struggles of the day.
The Castalia Crisis
There is a passage in Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game, that always pains me to read. It is Joseph Knecht’s circular letter to the Board of Educators of Castalia, a future institute of researchers, contemplatives, and philosophers. Cloistered from the hurly-burly of ordinary life, Castalians have dedicated themselves to the preservation of the fruits of Mind as distilled into a great synthesis they call the Glass Bead Game. Only the brightest lights can gain admittance to Castalia, and only the brightest of the bright can play the Game.
One of these is Joseph Knecht, who after many years of training and self-cultivation becomes Castalia's leader.
One day, Knecht—whose name means "knight" and connotes service—begins to think about how thoroughly Castalia has cut itself off from the world around it. Castalians are too busy to dirty their hands with politics, finance, economics, social justice, or even history, which to them means Jesus and Bach, Pascal and Plato, not the unending generals, bloodbaths, and upheavals no Castalian could bother himself with thinking about.
Nor did Castalia have any aims beyond "egotistic enjoyment of its own overbred faculties." The heights and the depths, the pinnacles of spirit, were what concerned Castalia, not boorish tamperings with the here and now. What did the crass outside world have to do with the arts, thought, meditation, reflection, research, or self-development?
In this aloofness Knecht recognized the vulnerability and ultimate transience of a beloved institution. So he wrote down his worries:
Every Magister is required to inform the Board of any hindrances or danger to his conducting his office in keeping with the Rule. Although I have endeavored to serve with all my strength, the conduct of my office is (or seems to me to be) threatened by a danger which resides in my own person, although that is probably not its sole origin.
And why is this? “I have begun to doubt my ability to officiate satisfactorily because I consider the Glass Bead Game itself to be in a state of crisis.” He then compares Castalia to a school whose roof is on fire, and himself to a resident scholar calling out a warning.
If, now, we regard our Order as a nobility and try to examine ourselves to see to what extent we earn our special position by our conduct toward the whole of the people and toward the world, to what extent we have already been infected by the characteristic disease of nobility—hubris, conceit, class arrogance, self-righteousness, exploitativeness—if we conduct such a self-examination, we may be seized by a good many doubts...The average Castalian may regard the man of the outside world, the man who is not a scholar, without contempt, envy or malice, but he does not regard him as a brother, does not see him as his employer, does not in the least feel that he shares responsibility for what is going on outside in the world.
It is not that the specialized studies and reflective practices shouldn't be done or aren't valuable. They are, even essential. It's that how they are done distracts from concerns on every side. Also, they are performed with a certain arrogance.
....This Castalian culture of ours, sublime and aristocratic though it certainly is, and to which I am profoundly grateful, is for most of those associated with it not an instrument they play on like a great organ, not active and directed toward goals, not consciously serving something greater or profounder than itself. Rather, it tends somewhat toward smugness and self-praise, toward the cultivation and elaboration of intellectual specialism.
Citing the Castalian teachers sent into the world as the only exceptions to this, Knecht continues:
Above all, we forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility...
Knecht points out that although Castalia arose in part as a counter-reaction to days in which things of the Mind served only political or propagandistic ends and rightly safeguards higher learnings against any such mass sellouts of the past, Castalia has come to represent the other extreme: truth, spirit, and culture so detached from the ordinary crudities of life that Castalia has become "ripe for dismantling" by historical forces it does not deign to examine.
He goes on:
A Board of Educators can function without a Magister Ludi. But although we havealmost forgotten it, "Magister Ludi" of course originally meant not the office we havein mind when we use the word, but simply schoolmaster. And the more endangered Castalia is, the more its treasures stale and crumble away, the more our country will need its schoolmasters, its brave and good schoolmasters. Teachers are more essential than anything else...That is where the basis for the cultural life of the country is to be found, not in the seminars or in the Glass Bead Game.
Then he resigns, leaves Castalia, and becomes a teacher to the outside world.
For two decades, I have had the privilege of offering deep education, a term I coined to describe this kind of learning, teaching, and practice: depth psychology, archetypal theory, ecopsychology, terrapsychology, dream studies, mythology, qualitative research, consciousness studies, inner work, symbols of transformation, alchemy as a wisdom path. I’ve designed and taught more than forty-five new graduate courses, launched certificates and specializations, mentored doctoral students through dissertation, chaired departments, co-led academic conferences.
At the same time, I’ve kept one foot planted in the soil outside higher ed: workshops, study groups, public programs, public lectures and discussions, civic and business presentations, corporate consulting, retreat center offerings, continuing ed, outreach to activists, volunteering, podcasts, panels, and interviews. I’ve spoken to organizations as far apart on the political spectrum as Harvard Radcliffe and Modern Day Riflemen. Neither of my PhDs included any instruction on how to bring what I had learned into the world. I had to figure it out.
As I’ve done all this, publishing books and chapters along the way, I’ve watched the schools and programs I worked in succumb to bureaucracy, political infighting, overregulation, and self-justification. Most transformative programs lie along the political left of the spectrum, and the left’s knee-jerk response to being attacked by anti-intellectual bigots is to contract into defensiveness: more rubrics, more evidence, more stringency, all to convince people who won’t ever be convinced of the value of what we do because it frightens them.
I have even had to fight for my faculty to use books more than five years old. There are courses we can’t teach—and wisdom we can’t offer—because certain books were never published as e-texts. In one of them, the great Sufi philosopher Ibn 'Arabi is quoted as saying that hardened doctrines are a form of idolatry.
Many of these transformative programs have fallen into the same trap that damaged the Human Potential Movement: overfocus on individual enlightenment and simultaneous underfocus on the collective concerns of the day. As though journaling and meditation could heal the world all by themselves. This smacks of an omnipotent fantasy mixed with denial and more than a dollop of narcissism.
And so programs that could be radically transmutative—and are at the individual level—die off one by one.
Engaged Wisdom
Fortunately, there is plenty of wisdom beyond the ivory towers. Its teacher-practitioners are legion. A few names that come to mind are Kwame Scruggs, Amanda Leetch, Kathy Stanley, Matthew Cochran, Kimmy Johnson, Lali Mitchell, Michael Meade, Jeanine Canty, Betsy Perluss, Joanna Macy, Victoria Loorz, Corrine London, Sandy Hessler, Linda Buzzell, Kelly Carlin, Boston Blake, Kelly Moore, Shmee Giarratana, Minerva Arias, Jun Wang, Melinda Coles, Ryan Hurd, Charles Burack, Bruce Alderman, Amy Logan, Britt Wray, Akila Rayapuraju, Jan Edl Stein, Garret Barnwell, Jurgen Kremer, Sigmar Schwarz, Lisa-Marie Persaud, and so many others. Some do work in academia, but not only there.
Engaged wisdom is when we foster mutually transformative encounters between wisdom and public concerns in service to enlightenment, community, justice, healing, and humaneness. Inner and outer are not split. The ultimate goal is to become fuller and more mature human beings in our dealings with ourselves, each other, and our troubled homeworld. But what is wisdom?
It’s easier to recognize it than to define it. We can all think of people we consider wise, but what makes them so? They seem to have an extra dimension to them, a depth of knowledge beyond the technical or academic. We might define wisdom as insightful, holistic, and deep knowing: true understanding in contrast to avidya, or ignorance, which is different from simply not having been taught something. Avidya rather is more like clinging to biases we won’t let go of, or persisting in illusions, or refusing to be mentally flexible enough to change our minds.
Robert McDermott’s definition links wisdom to ethics: “Wisdom is deep or uncommon knowledge essential for living and a foundation for right action” (Philo-Sophia). It requires no wisdom to build an atomic bomb or let loose AI on an unsuspecting public. Wisdom asks, “But why? What might be the consequences?”
Wisdom for Aristotle is a fuller kind of knowing that includes prudent practicality (phronesis). In the Bhagavad Gita, wisdom is a precious space of refuge to be sought. In the Katha Upanishad, wisdom is a seeing through to the forms and forces below appearances. In the Quran, wisdom is a seed in the heart that needs nourishing, as when wise humans align with the essential nature of humanity (al-fitra). The word “sage” shares etymology roots with the “sap” of living trees. In the Book of Proverbs, wisdom (Chochmah) is the “master builder” of everything.
The world’s folklore contains many wisdom figures, usually depicted as goddesses and wise feminine beings. A mythic definition of wisdom would be having a conscious relationship with Sophia. “You don’t believe in Wisdom,” says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, “you engage with her.” She has many archetypal sisters: Ma’at, Hellenistic Isis, Pronoia, Athena, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Star Woman, Saraswati, Amaterasu, Fatima, Nuwa, Nzambi…
Jung spoke of a Wise Old Man archetype, but the imaginal wisdom-giving figures he writes about in his journals identified themselves as wizards. In Islam, God’s essence (al-Daht) is a feminine term.
Why do we need wisdom in the streets and outside the hallowed halls? So entire misled populations don’t elect dictators. So people can be empowered to demand limitations on industries that harm the planet and its creatures, including us. So we can get at the underlying factors and motivations for our worst choices and make changes instead of relying on easy explanations that go nowhere. (“Fathom” originally meant “embrace,” then “depth”: getting to the bottom of things.)
So we can educate wise leaders. Unwise leadership is killing us.
So politics, religion, finance, industry, medicine, agriculture, education, technology, and other contemporary institutions and forms of organized power can serve us and the world instead of reducing us to the distracted parts of a machinery of disheartening soullessness.
So we can raise boys to respect women, women to reject abuse, and everyone to respect the fluidity and diversity of gender and sex and ways to love.
So we can be free of the forces that oppress us from the inside out.
There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn’t a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood. Anyone who has been able to break from the grip of a controlling, crippling belief or bigotry or enforced ignorance knows the sense of coming out into the light and air, of release, being set free to fly, to transcend.
–Afterword from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu
Beyond the Castalian Walls
To accomplish all this, wisdom must go outside.
Yes, inner work is necessary. So are all our special depth studies. Now, however, given the state of the declining world, we must apply those learnings where they can do the most good.
The traditional Jungian side of the wisdom house (to use them as one of many examples), has been particularly resistant to doing this. Fights about who belongs in Jung’s lineage, who doesn’t, and who trained with whom. Condemnation of any kind of advocacy or activism as inflated rescuing or acting out. Self-development as a panacea for cultural change. I had to teach Gnosticism privately to analyst candidates because their institute wouldn’t allow it from anyone who wasn’t a Jungian analyst. In a depth psychology program that eventually went under, I was replaced by an analyst who didn’t know how to teach. More recently, I was told that discussing American politics during my Jungian online course was too political. None of this was personal: other depth instructors have similar tales to tell.
Separating inner from outer, surrendering to unconscious forces, succumbing to elitism, getting stuck in archaic imagery to the exclusion of new possibilities, and keeping deep wisdom out of public view aren’t wise. They exhibit splitting, denial, a “narcissism of small differences” as Freud put it, shortsightedness, and sheer lack of realism. As a result, Jungian programs wither while the work of evolving Jung’s thought instead of enshrining it goes on elsewhere: in bold Friends of Jung circles, in artists’ studios, in film, in literary circles, in dance, in innovative therapies.
All these creatives are dancing with Pronoia, goddess of foresight and sister to Sophia. Her name means “before mind,” just as her archetypal sister Sri Lalita preceded and created Triumurti, the three big gods that run the cosmos, in some Hindu tales. Her name means “She who plays.”
Engaged wisdom dances with them.
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