Episode 52 - Angeles Arrien: Co-Creating New Evolutionary Elders

Transcript

Female Announcer: This program is brought to you by personallifemedia.com

[Music]

Duncan Campbell: I just have to say, Angeles, your book is such a treasure trove, and your whole life has been truly a gift. And I want to honor that and say again what a deep pleasure it is to have these opportunities to be together.

[Intro music]

Angeles Arrien: Likewise for me, Duncan, and thank you for your extraordinary contribution to radio and to media and really consistently offering a standard of excellence that's rarely found in the field.

You know that's why I also love and look forward to when we have conversations together because they're so rich in dialogue. The experience of time is that we can get a lot of information and dialogue between each other and take everyone to many different places but at the same time people say, "Oh that was so vast, and there was so much to it" or "Oh I remember this" because it also slows down. There's something in your interviews that I always experience is that there's a timeless quality about it. That the hour is over before you know it, and also that we've explored many different threads and I think that's one of the deep richnesses, that life becomes much more textured.

Duncan Campbell: From time immemorial, beginning with indigenous councils and ancient wisdom traditions, through the work of western visionaries such as Plato, Galileo, and quantum physicist David Bowen, mutually participatory dialogue has been seen as the key to evolving and transforming consciousness, evoking a flow of meaning. A dia, flow, of logos, meaning, beyond what any one individual can bring through alone. So join us now as together with you the active, deep listener, we evoke and engage in living dialogues.

Duncan Campbell: Welcome to the program. I'm your host Duncan Campbell, and my guest today is my great friend, Angeles Arrien, author of numerous books, and one of the great leading cross-cultural anthropologists in the world. And the book we're going to be talking about is "The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom." So, Angie, what a treat it is to have you here on the program.

Angeles Arrien: My honor and privilege Duncan. Thank you so much.

Duncan Campbell: So Angie, there are many things that could be said about you, you have such an accomplished life - your first half of life and your second half of life. I just want to give people some highlights here: that you are an anthropologist, an educator, and award-winning author; you're a consultant to many organizations and businesses including the Fetzer Institute. You lecture nationally and internationally and conduct workshops that bridge cultural anthropology, psychology, and meditation skills; requests for your expertise have taken you to Bali, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Spain, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, Canada, and beyond. Your work with multicultural issues mediation and conflict resolution has been used with the International Rights Commission and the World Indigenous Council. And you've also presented your material on CNN and other media in the mainstream culture. And I have to say since we first met twenty years ago, you have been just a real great friend and teacher and I must say that you're very well loved by the people in the communities that you work in with very good reason because your personal qualities and your abilities to teach from the heart and your vast vast reservoir of knowledge and very original insights I think just put you in a realm that is so enticing for people to share with you. So I want to begin just by acknowledging that Angie and saying what a treat it really always is to have these conversations together.

Angeles Arrien: For me too Duncan it's been wonderful to come in today for this interview because I too have really enjoyed watching the unfoldment of your own career and gifts and talents. And you're just exceptional in your interview capacity and what you have to offer for the radio audiences. It's really high quality and for me I see it as such an honor to be able to come on to your program.

Duncan Campbell: And we should let people know that one of the great inspirations that came to me just before I met you was that it was time in human consciousness to move, we might say, into the second half of life of the planetary species all together. That it was time to move not only beyond adolescence but even beyond early maturity as a species into a kind of elderhood where we could create a real world wisdom culture. And to do that it was shown to me that we needed to go beyond what you and I have referred to in the old terminology as the interview culture, where as with Moses on the mountain a given individual goes up to the metaphorical mountain and connects with god creator, spirit, the logos, whatever we might call it, and gets the direct download and comes back, comes back the mountain and essentially distributes or franchises the material to a willing but not adventuresome audience.

And so that's where, really, the planet has come to and it's time as we see in the last twenty years, at the cusp of this millennium, where people are now realizing that the ability for them and us, each of us, to find purpose, meaning, and fulfillment in the internal mythology of our own lives and to tap into our own inner wisdom is what makes an elder and an elder culture. Not just simply growing older. And this is a critical insight I think.

And an insight in your book because we're now realizing that to go forward, we have to have a series of real dialogues, like you and I are having right now, and those dialogues could be elder to elder, they could be elder to youth, between men and women, between generations, between ethnicities, between cultures, all over the world. It's time for everyone to give their fire together. And the people who are going to hold that space are going to be people who have explored the riches of the second half of life.

Interestingly enough, in our adolescent culture, in our consumer oriented culture where the people who consume the most are the ones that the culture targets most of its media toward, this effectively pushes people in the second half of life to the margins. When they're on the margins as James Hillman pointed out, they can be very reflective and notice the lack of aesthetic beauty in the culture. They have a great resource of, we might say, wisdom, accumulated experience, and perception and the key is for them to not allow themselves to be marginalized in the negative sense and disconnected from the larger culture but to discover, as you put it, that this is the actual richest part of one's life, where you really come to your own true authenticity and fulfillment.

So I'm giving that introduction to say how unique your book is in my view. Because there is a lot of literature out there where people are wanting to say, well it's ok to get older, I just saw Cher the other day on Oprah with Tina Turner, one of the great entertainment idols, you might say, was on with her. Tina was saying she was really grooving on getting older, and Cher was saying what a drag it was. And it was just so interesting because that's the two aspects of how we can look at getting older. Nora Ephron has a new book out.

Angeles Arrien: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: "I Feel Bad About My Neck" she says with her New York humor. It's kind of sad to be over sixty. So we have this culture where we try to make fun of and make an accommodation of getting older but why don't you dive in right now and just tell us why, in your own experience, and in your beautiful book, you feel the second half of life is really the fulfillment for each of us on our life journey.

Angeles Arrien: Like a three act play, the first act is really the beginning of our life and as we move into young adulthood, and the second half is like a young adulthood through the fifties. And who would want to miss the third act? Because the third act is really from our sixties to the end of life. The third act like in every play brings extraordinary resolution and harvest and we have the ability to create and tie up all of the different characters, and themes, and maybe our life will turn out to be a comedy or history, a fantastic novella, but that's the opportunity, in the second half of life, that's so rich and textured from our fifties on there's a huge shift in ambition to meaning from acquisition to divestiture, from doing to being, from work to service, from me to we, and wisdom is never age bound. There are many people in their twenties and their thirties and their forties and their teens and their fifties who are quite wise. After fifty, if we're not demonstrating some kind of wisdom, it's less than becoming.

Duncan Campbell: [laughter] Pun intended.

Angeles Arrien: Really?

Duncan Campbell: It is less than becoming.

Angeles Arrien: It's less than becoming.

Duncan Campbell: Yeah I love that phrase, it's like being stuck in your old life as you gradually watch it run down. This kind of entropy, well I'm just waiting for the end. You know it's like being in a basketball game and playing it safe at the end. Kind of coasting to the end and not engaging. Whether you're on the losing side or the winning side, a wealthy house and you're just sort of letting it all play out, or you're kind of anxious about social security or any place in between, there are ways to cut out, if you will. And to drop out, and that's encouraged by the culture. And when Michael Meade and I were talking, our great mutual friend who is a great mythologist, and storyteller and bard of our time, he was in town just a couple of days ago.

Angeles Arrien: Oh, wonderful.[laughter]

Duncan Campbell: And we had a lengthy dialogue and we did a wonderful benefit for the watershed school, which is a school here in boulder that is very very pioneering in terms of how children can learn in a very adventuresome way. Outside the box. Just the kind of education that we really need to break up the cultural ice flow. And really allow this dialogue and mentoring to happen between the older and the younger, starting right there, in sixth, fifth, seventh, eighth grade. And having them travel around the world to various places- South America, England, so on, and so, it is a great school here- Watershed School. And Michael was here for a benefit just three nights ago. And we were talking about our mutual insight. Arrived at independently, as is increasingly the case, I think, in the world, and has been a scientific paradigm for a long time. Darwin and others began to see the same thing at the same time but Darwin was the one who really brought it to fruition. And so on. And what we saw was that in our culture when the seniors get sort of pushed to the margins and segregated and senior housing and that sort of thing, they get less and less interactive with the main culture and the generational flow, just because of how our extended families in America don't tend to live in the same locality, the grandchildren may be a thousand miles away. This is directly, we feel, a cause of Alzheimer's. That when the elders have been forgotten, then they kind of forget, exactly.

Angeles Arrien: Well one of the reasons that I was really motivated to write this book is that I was just stunned by horrific statistics that America holds is that we have the highest suicide rate between our teens and our elders, than any other culture in the world.

Duncan Campbell: Among those two cohorts. Yes.

Angeles Arrien: And so I thought as I read that, well, why is that? And then I thought, well, it's so interesting because America is the youngest culture in the world, and it's the most diverse and creative. We have great experiments in diversity and creativity and freedom, and yet it's the only culture in the world that hasn't retained its inter-generational bridges. Where every other culture of the world you have strong intergenerational bridges where you're calling on the creativity and the vision and the vitality of our youth to be engaged in our communities and actively engaged in problem solving. Calling on the wisdom and the experience of our elders, and I love when Nelson Mandela in the truth and reconciliation commission, he said, he absolutely asked the townships of South Africa to save his three line invocation all the way through that. Which was let us take care of the children, for they have a long way to go. Let us take care of the elders, for they have come a long way. And let us take care of those in between for they are doing the work. And we have a culture here where the in between is doing the work but we're just beginning in the last decade to really pay attention to getting our youth re-engaged again. The Alzheimer's thing is really interesting because we do hold the highest statistic of Alzheimer's. If I'm not valued, or if I feel I'm going to be a burden, or if I feel I'm not needed or wanted, in my experience and wisdom, I'll go somewhere where I might be, which might be in another altered space.

Duncan Campbell: And here's where the cultural shift is so critical from a passive going along with authority for our leaders, who are going to either give you information or work on your behalf to sort of help your position I will fight for you I will teach you, into a real co creative we might say, community development together paradigm. And when we look at our election that's happening right now in the Democratic Party, you see the two poles starkly contrasted. The young people are swelling, in unprecedented numbers, coming back to the political and the civic arena. Because they're excited about the expression that Barack Obama is making of a call to let us do this together. If you will stand with me then together we will stand and we will, yes we can, yes we we we.

And the youth are very engaged in that. And then we find that the elderly are responding passive to this call "I will fight for you" remaining as a kind of victimized, marginalized cohort in the electoral body, that needs someone to do something for them. This is very very different than an elder culture, where people who are in the latter stage of life are looked to for engaged dialogue, and leadership with all sections of the society, including, particularly the great affinity that elders and teens and youth have for each other because they are on the two ends of the spectrum, you know, one is a life yet to open up, and to come forward, and the other is a rich celebration of a life well lived, and mentoring in association with those in the middle that as you put it, are doing the work. And that particular paradigm we have a really healthy society. That's what Erikson, the great sociological historian who wrote the great book on Gandhi, in another book he wrote, it was "Identity: Youth and Crisis." He said that every culture and civilization, in order for it to be healthy and survive and realize itself, needs to have an ongoing ethical dialogue about values between elders and youth. And by elders he meant those people who are older than youth that had made some kind of connection with their own inner knowing.

And if we switch now to see our crisis of Alzheimer's, and it's such a tragedy, it's a pain throughout all of the generations, of tremendous burden, of psychic pain, physical and economic dislocation and so on, but what could have. What could happen, if we can make this cultural shift, is we can help people ourselves, if we are in the second half of life as well, to find the thread of purpose and meaning. It's like the people with Alzheimer's have lost the thread. And the culture, by isolating them, has in a sense, enabled that loss, but if we can draw ourselves back together, and start, as Michael Mead would say, tugging on the we to discover our own personal myth and meaning as you suggest in your book, to take the hero's journey, and the heroines journey in the second half of life, that elders can reclaim their own lives. That's not going to happen by somebody doing it for them.

That's the tragedy of this sort of electoral landscape. Elders have to be encouraged to assert their own reality and their own myth and their own meaning. And I'll just lead into this, now we get right into the practicality in your brilliant book of how to do this. The great philosopher Schopenhauer said in the 19th century that our lives are like an intricately plotted novel. That as we look back on them, we can see that all of the intricate plots and subplots perfectly lead to the gradual unfoldment of our talents and our skills of our heart, of our relationship abilities, and we would not really want to go back and change anything. Even though at various moments, let's say a divorce or a debt, we might have felt it was very painful and had gone off track, addiction perhaps, none the less we marvel at how it has provided us with exactly the opportunities we needed for our souls unfoldment. And we wonder who could the author of this brilliant narrative have been.

Angeles Arrien: That's a beautiful quote.

Duncan Campbell: Well lived, looking back, and as Michael and I were talking the other day, the trick is we don't have to wait to the end of our life to see in reverse, as is often done, what our life was really about. If we engage and take the steps that you recommend in your book to cross the various thresholds and find our authentic self, then we actually bring the end into the beginning and we can move forward in full dialogue of engagement, with other generations, other cultures with nature itself, with an alive universe and so on so I think now is the time to introduce the core theme of your book Angeles where you talk about the meaning of the word threshold and what threshing is all about and about the eight gates that we need to pass through. And the eight thresholds to really fully engage our life in the second half of life. So let's begin with that notion of gate and thresholds.

Angeles Arrien: One of the things just as a loose end. Alzheimers. One of the truths of brain research, they found that we're also the most stressed culture because of our being out of rhythm with nature's rhythm, which is medium to slow. Nothing in nature moves in the fast lane, unless its really in danger, and then it will move very very quickly and get out of danger. Many of us with the emails and technology and internet and the pressures of delivery very quickly and there's a lot we can do in the fast lane. We can create and produce.

There are two things we can not do in the fast lane, which is to integrate our experience or to deepen our experience. Recent research shows that a lot of the impact on the brain around stress also has been a great contributor to Alzheimer’s as well, a sort of crude stress of being out of our natural rhythm. And it's interesting that as we go into the second half of life, because we are an ageist culture in that we also segregate out our experiences in very large age groups. The elderly live in ageing communities young adults are really socialized in high school or college. It's not until there's a little intergenerational experience that begins on the first job, and the beginning of some kind of mentoring.

And it's interesting to me that the threshold that huge threshold at fifty because the cross culturally youth is from ages to one to thirty five and mid life is from thirty five to fifty. And the decade of the fifties is really called the decade of reassessment, integration of our youth and our midlife. It's often referred to as our diving discontent. It's the place where we begin to ready ourselves for the wisdom years. Sixty is like the youth of our wisdom years seventies is like the midlife of our wisdom years our eighties to one hundred really are our wisdom years where we come in to eldering.

But in our culture we're just not there because we equate the threshold of entering our wisdom years with the four d's. It's like it's going to be decline, despair or depression, disease and death. So there's a huge threshold a place where like threshing wheat we begin to separate the grain from the chaff. So there' s a threshing that occurs in our fifties. Then as we move into the wisdom years we're really required to go through the 8 gates of wisdom. These gates we've been through at other times in our lives but we're actually required to come in through dropping our allegiance through fear and pride into a deeper allegiance of personhood and character development and authenticity and meaning and work and creativity that has fire. And meaning. Otherwise we won't do it. Been there done that. And a gate, as many of us do warm ups or drive bys at an initiatory gate. But once we go through the gate we really can't go back. And I really see that the wisdom years are really taking a look and integrating really deeply in a meaningful way, the experiences of my life and a reconnecting to a deeper fire that takes no wood. So it's just a thrilling time.

I loved Dr. Gene Cohen's book, he’s an MD in Washington DC. The book is called " The Creative Age" where he couldn't believe how many 50 year olds were coming to him sure that they were getting a disease, he took a sabbatical and decided to take a look globally to see if it was over at 50, because with increased longevity, and a more optimum health, he wondered if there were more people who absolutely became more creative in the second half of life than they did the first half of life. And he found enormous examples from all over the world and historically that became much more engaged with the creativity and the second half of life that it became more meaningful.

Usually in the first half of life we really live out what is culturally expected or expected from the family but once we've done that and been accepted on cultural terms, there's a de haunting, or a diving restlessness that comes into place where really those dreams that I put on the back burner come forward in the second half of life to be revisited or actually doing what I really wanted to do that I set aside saying I'll do it when I have time or when I have enough money. I know that's a long around the world story but it's such a thrilling opportunity in the second half of life. In 90 percent of the cultures of the world where elders are engaged, there's a significant difference in the quality of life. And meaning and purpose.

Duncan Campbell: And I think that's crucial. Where elders are engaged, there's a significant difference in the fulfillment of their lives and of the culture itself. As Coleman Barks, our mutual friend on the great translator Rumi, said, we are in an adolescent culture, as I have taught for many years here on living dialogues. And in that culture, we are a culture without elders and we are trying to bring forward a civilization without elders which has never been tried before and is not going to be successful unfortunately. But the big difference is in the past, elders have in the sense gotten their authority in part from the fact that the world of tomorrow was very much like the world of today and they had been through a life journey and could actually point out with great confident the literal markers as well as the metaphorical to the younger generation about the shift this paradigm leap of consciousness. When young people come in I feel they come in literally wired into the modern world.

Angeles Arrien: Oh absolutely.

Duncan Campbell: Their invisible wiring is tuned into the internet the computers and so on so you can get a two year old intuitively relating to a computer. And here you have a 60 year old having difficulty with it because when we came in our wiring was different. What it means is that people who are younger have a wisdom and a knowingness that Julia Butterfly Hill referred to as "Youth Elders." They know something are in tune with something like the people who are flooding to Barack Obama, they know something that their elders don't know they can feel that we're crossing a threshold of planetary consciousness. They can feel the breath of invitation of the 21st century whereas the older generation sadly is holding back and holding on to 20th century models. It's simply not in touch or in dialogue with this shift in consciousness that's happening and so when elders reclaim their own elderhood, older people, and can enter into a dialogue with younger people there is a mutually fruitful exchange based on mutual respect and mutual gifting as Erikson put it in this ethical dialogue and the people in between which would include someone at the stage of life like Barack Obama himself basically have to be in tune with that exchange as well.

In our fragmented society which is stratified as you say even in terms of where people live, young people have their place, people in middle age have their place, and in fact if you pick up a real estate brochure, it talks about starter home, move up home, luxury home, retirement home. And this is basically where people live, the boxes that we live in but there all stratified in different areas of the community and they're not inter penetrating. This is part of the modern mind and its fragmentation and specialization that we need to call back these old stories and these old initiatory models these ancient initiatory structures that you're talking about in your book of the eight gates and the eight thresholds are supremely relevant today because we can pour the new wine into the old bottles and make a real elixir that can be rejuvenating for all of us and its not just restricted to the elders. So having said that-

Angeles Arrien: And that's great great metaphor.

Duncan Campbell: I want to now just remind our audience that I'm your host Duncan Campbell and I'm talking to our guest Angeles Arrien one of the truly great cross cultural anthropologists of our time. I must say Angie I put you in the same class as Claude Levi- Strauss.

Angeles Arrien: Oh my god. [Laughter]

Duncan Campbell: I know, you've done just incredible work that people should know about your work on your own upbringing, your book on the four ways of being. Where you've taken the time in your great vast research as well as your travel all over the world to describe the fourfold way where you've distilled the indigenous knowledge and oceanic culture's knowledge into a fourfold process of show up, be present. Tune into what has heart and meaning, number two. Number three, gets a little harder, express your truth without blame or judgment and number four, do not be attached to the outcome.

And this brilliant fourfold path that I've just summarized is the fruit of distilling the wisdom of indigenous and oceanic cultures over the world. That's why I say I put you in that same realm because we can then open up each one of those four stages and with tremendous richness, that's really a starting point for dialogue. As is your new book, the second half of life with the eightfold path that we're talking about in this book and so I think I'd like to begin this second part of our program by picking up on a theme you mentioned earlier about how elderly people, and by this we mean the second half of life, begin to slow down that business of the in between state.

And the Indian from India model we have the first part of life is youth where you area student and learning. The second part of life you're a parent, you're working in the professional, in some kind of exchange in the earth that brings in the support to create a family and support it and to bring up your children in the third stage of life, beautifully they say you start to turn face to the forest. You have one eye on your children and your grandchildren and another eye on your deep fulfillment as you move toward the next great threshold. That of death and passing into the next life. In our fourth stage, that of eighty to one hundred years in your model, you actually go into the forest. You develop your deep wisdom, and you're available for people to come and drink from that well. Or you go back like Milleripa [sp?] the poet saint, and you teach in the villages with the people in the middle and the young people.

So that paradigm, one of the things I want to call to people's attention is just this Monday in the New York Times there was an article by Jane Gross entitled "For the Elderly: Being Heard About Life's End." On this program people are familiar with for instance the slow food movement. We've talked about that with guests that I've had. It’s part of the renaissance of local food and local preparation and so on, but the notion of slowing down to literally not only smell the roses but to really taste the food and to be involved in the opportunity for a relaxed conversation and interaction so it's not just about junk food or fast food, where we come in the mode of business, we eat alone, we grab something on the run and we go back to work. The whole slow food movement is an expression of reclaiming all of our senses and our deep culture.

Similarly, Jane Gross introduces in this article in the New York Times the notion of slow medicine. She starts the article: Edie Grieg, eighty-five, strides ahead of people half her age and plays a fast paced game of tennis but when it comes to health care, she is a champion of "slow medicine" an approach that encourages less aggressive and less costly care at the end of life. Grounded in research, slow medicine encourages physicians to put on the breaks when considering care that may have high risks and limited rewards for the elderly. And it educates patients and families how to push back against emergency room trips and hospitalizations designed for those with treatable illnesses not the inevitable erosion of advanced age. And slow medicine which shares with hospice care the role of comfort rather than cure is increasingly available. Now this is so interesting because what it recognizes is that the people who are in the medical profession- doctors- are in that middle stage and they are often abuzz with the excitement and the pressure of emergency room medicine and they're also dedicated to cure and achievement. They're actually not in tune with this other aspect of what it means to grow old. They can pose a model as Jane Gross points out, that is appropriate for treatable illnesses, that is really inappropriate to have people really enjoy and lead a fulfilling end of life journey.

For full transcript, please contact Duncan Campbell