APPRECIATION:

Duncan Campbell: Ijust 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.

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 dialogue 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.

SUMMARY:

In my preceding dialogues with Michael Meade (Programs 48-51), I stated that: “The great challenge and necessity calling each of us is to go beyond our either-or modern polarizing and myth-less argument culture into artful co-creative dialogue, to realize ourselves as bards and storytellers in our lives, embodying the personal transformational stories which together can weave the next evolutionary Great Story of unification in diversity so needed in our time…Finding the thread that weaves all of the pieces of our personal stories into resonance with a new-old archetypal and universal Larger Story, we can become the “missing piece” of our adolescent cultures: the new elders, giving birth to an elderhood of service at all ages, including the wisdom of the “youth elders” as well as those chronologically older, each engaged in a dialogue of mutual mentoring.

In this dialogue with Angeles Arrien -- in my view the preeminent visionary cross-cultural anthropologist for the 21st century -- we talk further about how to create what I am calling “new evolutionary elders”. It is not simply about being or becoming chronologically older – then one is only an “older” person, not an elder. As Angeles points out in the “sixth gate” of the eight cross-cultural gates we cross on the path into wisdom, we need to avoid or leave behind the ethical compromises seen so often in middle-age, where we are seduced by circumstances and the competitive culture to adopt an ends justifies the means approach to career and economic advancement and identity. Our media reflects, tolerates, encourages, and rewards such behavior.

The elder perspective, by contrast, embodies the wisdom of authenticity, integrity, and honesty with oneself – which becomes a paramount aspect of self-fulfillment -- and supports and gives strong, clear voice to these values in the larger world. Interestingly enough, these same values are also sought by idealistic youth. Both older and younger people are marginalized as less interesting to the consumer-driven culture than those in-between that spend the most money. As such, youth historically have taken little interest in society’s political dialogue, with its obvious deceit and self-interested rhetoric posing as representing the common good, and older people are encouraged effectively to see themselves as a passive and fearful “victim” constituency and narrow interest group that cannot stand up for itself except through allegiance to such middle-aged power brokers.

As has been said, we cannot create a wisdom culture without genuine elders, speaking with respect and authority and real influence in society. For that gap to be filled, we need to become those elders ourselves. How to do so in very practical ways, whatever your age, drawing on both ancient and contemporary experience, is the topic of this dialogue.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of this Dialogue:

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 in 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 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 our 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” (vs. dialogue) culture, where as with Moses on the mountain a given individual goes up to the metaphorical mountain and connects with God, Ccreator, Spirit, the Logos, whatever we might call it, and gets the direct interview download and comes back, comes back down 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 gift to the fire together. And the people who are going to hold the space for that are going to be people who have explored, encountered, and embodied 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 also can 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, but often don’t believe it, or don’t say so persuasively. I just saw Cher the other day while happening to watch Oprah, and 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 those are two different aspects of how we can look at getting older. Nora Ephron, to take another example, has a new book out: I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Angeles Arrien: Yes.

Duncan Campbell: 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] Yes, pun intended.

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