The Future of Wisdom and Intelligence

This new series of webinars follows up on our 2022 collaboration, with the Scientific and Medical Network, on the theme of The Future of Wisdom and Intelligence. Consistent with E. F. Schumacher’s observation above, the need for wisdom to balance our cleverness is now more apparent than ever. As far back as 1975, the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘Technology gives us material power – the greater our material power, the greater our need for the spiritual insight and virtue to use power for good and not for evil. The ‘morality gap’ means that, since we first became human, we have never been adequate spiritually for handling our material power. Today it is greater than ever.’ His ‘today’ was nearly 50 years ago!

Wisdom in Latin is sapientia, whose root is sapere, meaning to taste. This means that wisdom is derived from direct experience, ultimately of the Divine Ground within, as mystics throughout the ages have attested. Such gnosis is the deepest form of knowing by identity where we realise that the I Am in you is the same as the I Am in myself. We are ultimately expressions of the One Life, the One Mind, the One Love. This insight forms the living ethical basis of a harmonious and integrated culture and intelligence, a word whose roots show us that it means to ‘read between’ (inter-legere).

When we look at the symptoms of the present crisis it is hard not to say “how foolish we can be in wasting our intelligence and our opportunities.”​ The fear is lurking in many minds that we may be becoming little more than consumers controlled by algorithms derived from artificial intelligence. But there is a way forward through this impasse: a new integrated intelligence. We hope that the stimulating conversations with the major minds we will meet in this series will awaken this insight and elaborate its practical implications.

In this series of round table dialogues, we will explore this integral intelligence: the several balanced and unified forms of intelligence that humanity is endowed with. We will begin with a session on the topical issue of AI, moving on to embodied intelligence, heart intelligence and finally ethical intelligence. This integration of intelligences is needed to co-create a humane, heart-centred and ethical world for future generations. We look forward to your participation in these reflective sessions.