The Accelerating Wisdom Series
Ten years in the making, the 8 part Accelerating Wisdom Series is a synthesis of transformational ideas and practices. It is not a paid course, but rather a FREE introduction to The Leading Edge’s mission to deliberately evolve our consciousness.
Why is this worth your attention?
We are being inundated by headlines about how Artificial Intelligence will amplify or eliminate our "left hemispheric" skills. Yet we seem to be paying almost no attention to the ways we can systematically evolve our uniquely human advantages. This series will directly address this problem.
Modern culture tends to be left-brain locked, and that can keep us stuck and disconnected from the world.
Balanced hemisphere function leads to knowing the right thing to pay attention to, and when.
This is an excellent definition of wisdom. Why is wisdom important?
A recent study found that “Wisdom is the best predictor of life satisfaction in both men and women and can offset the influence of negative age on life satisfaction. Wisdom has a greater influence on life satisfaction in older adulthood than health, socioeconomic status, financial situation, environment, or social engagement.”
Thirty years of wisdom research has shown that it correlates with hedonic wellbeing (how good you feel) and eudaimonic wellbeing (how much you’re growing). Wisdom means always knowing what’s most important, what to focus on in every different situation. This means the pursuit of wisdom both reduces your anxiety and increases your sense of purpose. In short; wisdom is the ability to pursue what you love and ignore what you don't.
Surprisingly, wisdom doesn’t correlate that strongly with either age or intelligence. While our intelligence tends to peak in our early 20s, the pursuit of wisdom has no upper limits. If we choose to focus on it, wisdom can even be accelerated.
It’s obvious that the pursuit of wisdom can meaningfully improve your life, yet very few people undertake it in a deliberate way. This series and The Leading Edge network is here to meet that need.
This series will not be focused on abstract ideas or philosophy (that has been done excellently elsewhere). Instead we will aim to focus solely on ideas that have immediate practical applications. In keeping with Dr. Iain McGilchrist's revelatory work, the primary focus will be on means of rebalancing our brain's hemispheres back towards the right.
What to expect:
The FREE series comprises 8 episodes. Each has a summary article with the key insights and an interview or lecture with the expert in each area. Each episode has an optional experiment and a commitment related to the content. This is to make sure we bring the benefits of these ideas and practices into our daily lives.
Episode 1: Accelerating Your Expertise
Expertise is domain-specific wisdom, wisdom is expertise applied to your entire life. Cedric Chin is one of the world's best writers on the topic of accelerating expertise. In a new lecture specifically for this project, he taught us the foundations of Cognitive Flexibility Theory. This shows us how we can accelerate expert intuition, learn fast in the real world and stay mentally agile as we get older.
Episode 2: Revealing Attractors
While wisdom doesn’t necessarily correlate with age or intelligence, it does correlate with openness. But wise people aren’t open to everything; they are open to the right thing. This requires a deep understanding of arguably the most important and neglected accelerant of wisdom: “attractors.” I’ve spent a decade researching this subject, with a focus on curiosity. Neuroscientist and curiosity expert Anne-Laure Le Cunff discusses the different types of curiosity, as well as the practicalities of running personal experiments to pursue our own attractors.
Episode 3: Embodying Wisdom
John Vervaeke is one of the world’s foremost experts on wisdom. In our recent conversation he stressed the paramount importance of an ecology of wisdom practices within a supportive community. Expert intuition and sensitivity to attractors both require embodied intuition: a right-hemispheric trait. Led by River Kenna, episode 3 introduced a series of wisdom practices aimed at rebalancing the brain's hemispheres and improving our overall cognition.
Episode 4: Mapping Your Transformation
It is an unspoken truth that life transitions in pursuit of wisdom can be unusually difficult. Devin Martin is a world-class transformational coach who specializes in managing personal transitions. He guided us through multiple frameworks and tools honed through more than 10,000 hours of work with high-performing individuals. His focus is around decision making, stages of life and living in integrity with yourself. We compared and contrasted different frameworks of consciousness evolution, as well as specific tools and practices.
Episode 5: Myth's Hidden Wisdom
Myth is wisdom hidden in plain sight. It reveals patterns extracted from millions of years of human evolution. This episode discussed what specifically the study of myth can do to accelerate the acquisition of wisdom. We focused on the Hero’s Journey as a model for the evolution of consciousness. Psychotherapist, author, mythologist and close associate of the legendary Joseph Campbell, Dr. Stephen Larsen joined us to share his understanding of the secrets revealed by human myth.
Episode 6: Love, Parenting and Relationships
Rather than mastery of abstract concepts, wisdom is ideally reflected in a deepening of our personal relationships. In this episode, neuroscientist and founder Allison Paradise introduced her moving work on the neglected role of intuition in raising children and teens. She specifically addressed the role of nurturing another human and what it means to help each of us come more fully alive together.
Episode 7: Dreams and Synchonicity
One of the most desirable outcomes from the pursuit of wisdom is that you find your place in the world. This episode will discuss how we use the ideas and practices taken from the rest of the series to help locate our own unique niches. Dan Lawrence is a Jungian psychotherapist and depth psychologist with an abundant wealth of experience in individuation, synchronicity and dreamwork. These are all critical steps to finding the place where what only you can do meets what the world needs.
Episode 8: New Frontiers
Wisdom requires openness to ideas beyond the existing paradigm. Led by pioneering author and neuroscientist Dr. Mona Sobhani, this final episode will discuss alternate theories of the evolution of consciousness. Rather than an abstract examination of fringe theories, we will only explore topics that have strong scientific grounding and practical applications. It quickly becomes clear that the pursuit of wisdom, and the evolution of consciousness, may be the purpose of our individual existence.
The Surprising Secret to Wisdom
A wrap-up piece reflecting on the key theme from the series. This was that the ability to detect subtlety is the hallmark of expertise and wisdom. My conversation with Roshni Daya helped me understand that cultivating deep presence is the key to discerning subtlety and therefore the pursuit of wisdom.
Eleven Wisdom Tools
This article is a quick summary of the tools and practices that emerged throughout the series.
Our role in this project is not as self-appointed wisdom experts, but as an open node in a network of rich resources.