A Message from Sage-ing International Circle

On behalf of the Executive Committee of Sage-ing International, I give great thanks to the editors and contributors who made possible this terrific issue of Sage-ing Times dedicated to the Inner Journey.  For this issue I was invited to reflect on how Sage-ing International encourages the exploration of the Inner Journey in its offerings, so I would like to tell you how I see that taking place from my own personal point of view.

For over two years now, it has been my honor to serve on the Executive Committee of Sage-ing International.  I came to SI out of my interest in conscious eldering and rites of passage.  For many years I taught Psychology and Spirituality classes in a Liberal Studies program for adult students and led Vision Quests into the wilderness for mid-life seekers.   Our educational model was based on “whole person, self-directed, life-long learning” and I was fascinated to see how these learning principles manifested in my students and mentees, not to mention myself.

I quickly came to understand that, as lofty as those learning goals are, they rarely happened in a smooth arc of development.  Instead, the learning path was rocky, tenuous, and full of reversals and failures.  And yet, as time passed, with self-directed diligence and courage, students often went on an inner journey to discover new resources within themselves that they had not previously recognized.  They would burst out of their straight-jacketed, self-imposed confines into some kind of new awareness that, like a butterfly bursting from a cocoon, led to a new life for themselves.  Witnessing these rites of passages – and the courage, sweat and tears it took to navigate those inner journeys – was a great blessing.  And I knew that in this pattern of death and rebirth, I was witnessing the archetypal pattern of all human development, indeed, of all development across the Cosmos.

From a psycho-spiritual perspective, what is true for the individual is true for the collective, and I began to apply principles of rites of passage to our species as a whole, claiming that humanity was itself going through an inner journey, an archetypal death and rebirth process, a dark night of the species soul.  It made sense:  things are bad right now because we humans are part of a dramatic cosmic initiation process leading to an evolution of consciousness that intends to re-frame humanity’s relationship to a planet in distress. This insight gave meaning to the craziness and the suffering I was seeing in the world.  And, as the great psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Victor Frankl taught us, even concentration camps are bearable if one can find a meaning in the suffering and death.

So when I turned 70 and first read in Reb Zalman’s book, From Age-ing the Sage-ing, that there was an evolutionary significance to humans living longer, I discovered a deeper meaning to my own aging process.  What if part of my calling as an elder was to assist the evolutionary process Reb Zalman wrote about by joining other co-leaders in facilitating elder learning communities based on the principles of “whole-person, self-directed, life-long learning”?   My calling seemed perfectly aligned with the mission of Sage-ing International.

We see it in the formation of Wisdom Circles designed to create the possibility of personal transformation, providing both instruction and companionship for the inner journey.

We see it in the co-creative learning communities that form whenever SI offers a class on a topic of importance to late-life seekers.  We see it in the MultiGen Project that reaches respectfully across the lifespan for the kind of wisdom that can only emerge when there is a true ‘partnership of generations’.  And we see it whenever two or three elder friends gather informally to discuss the latest exciting idea or image that has touched them with the power of revelation.  I believe that out of such learning moments, in small groups and large, in love and companionship, conscious elders at Sage-ing International are leading the way to a new story, a new myth, that seeks to create a human presence on Earth in alignment with the dynamic forces of a living planet.