Ancient Wisdom 5: The Seven-Fold Order

Where are you in the seven stages of human development? Continuing the Ancient Wisdom series, this talk covers the Seven-Fold Order as another tools for learning how to learn. When you know what to look for, the Seven-Fold Order is a familiar theme in classical learning. It can also be applied to everyday activities on the model world. Examples include opening a restaurant and the stages of human development.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Trevor Lewis and I'm here with Chris Largent,

Founder of the Seventh Academy,

And we're continuing our series on ancient world wisdom.

Today we're talking about the Sevenfold Order.

Chris,

Over to you.

Thanks very much,

Trevor.

So the Sevenfold Order is a universal order of creativity that turns up practically everywhere.

The Buddha's Eightfold Path is just the seven with the fifth stage pulled into two because he's being practical.

So the easiest way to think about this is in the seven days of creation in the Hebrew Bible,

Which then the Christians picked up,

And then that became the basis for a lot of esoteric teachings,

You know,

The let there be light,

Starting with that.

And what that really is,

Is,

Well,

It's describing a creation of the world,

Right?

It actually describes this creative order that was studied extensively in the 20th century without people realizing what they were doing.

There was a a study of how architecture happens,

How businesses start,

How people write books and articles,

And they all fell out in these seven stages.

And so the seven days of creation had that.

We run into them everywhere.

Like when people were doing astrology in the ancient world,

What were they doing?

I mean,

We had this idea,

Modern idea,

That astrology is some kind of superstition,

That planets cause things to happen,

Which almost nobody thought in the ancient world.

What they were doing was the seven planets represented these seven creative principles within a larger system.

And so when people say,

What if they discover a new planet?

Well,

It doesn't have to do with the planets any more than,

Say,

Chinese astrology that has animals has to do with the animals.

What if they discover a new animal?

Will people behave differently?

No,

These are just symbols,

Right?

And they're maps for our understanding how things work.

So what you discover is that,

For instance,

The articles of the Constitution,

Well,

The Constitution,

23 articles were handed from the Committee of Design to the last committee to say,

Look,

Can you put these 23 in some sort of order?

And no surprise,

They came out in the seven articles in the creative order.

Only in this case,

The foundation was for government.

So the foundation is law.

The first article sets up the legislature.

And then after that,

You get order the executive.

And after that,

You get,

How do we look at those two apply to everyday life,

The judiciary,

And so on.

So these can be applied to how humans develop and how we have relationships.

And when you use that as a tool,

It's very helpful,

Especially in relationships.

People think,

You know,

I just fall in love,

But no,

Actually go through stages.

And so one of the best examples is the sevenfold human development.

Now,

These ages are very artificial,

In the sense that you can have elders when they're kids and so on.

But the way that and starting with people from Piaget early in the century on in human development,

They slowly are arriving at this sevenfold pattern that a lot of indigenous cultures and people in the ancient world would have had.

In fact,

Shakespeare makes fun of it,

Of this order,

He gives a negative order of this seven.

And as you like it,

Where the famous speech put in the mouth of Jake Weiss,

A pessimistic philosopher,

All the world's the stage and all the men and women merely players and idea will come to again.

And each person in his time place has seven play seven parts and has seven ages,

And then kind of gives the pessimistic version of the seven.

So the Shakespeare writers already knew about it.

And that's the 1500s.

We kind of forgot about it in again,

After the age of enlightenment,

After the Renaissance,

Lots of things kind of disappeared.

But the quick version of this is when when kids are born to about age three,

Is they feel safe through feeling loved.

If the parents don't give them that kind of love,

And then we have attachment studies to talk about this,

They don't feel safe.

And so the second stage,

They're given stories about gods and monsters,

And they get a sense that the monster can be defeated or it can't.

So if they have a sense that the monster can be transformed,

Or there's a there's a god to help things,

Then the world can change and be better.

If they think these monsters just absolute,

They get the sense of absolute evil in their heads.

And that's why when they come to the age,

The third stage of defining,

Because the first is always the foundation,

Which is feeling love.

The second is,

What are the how do you sort things out,

We have changed,

You don't have change.

The third is then good and bad are defined and then usually in fairly absolute ways.

Very negative absolute if you think the world is dangerous,

Less negative if you think the world is a changeable one.

So kids have these kinds of kids have these kinds of ways of thinking,

But they start getting more sophisticated,

Especially in storytelling cultures.

And so you have kids can define a good and bad in really much more sophisticated ways.

But then when you get into the teen years,

The focus is pretty much on relationships with peers and authorities.

So adolescence reacts to what my peer group is saying,

And what the authorities are saying,

And you're going along with it,

I'm resisting it.

And that's the adolescent mentality in most controlling cultures want their citizens to stay there,

Just react to the peer group and react to the authorities.

But James Fowler,

Who wrote stages of faith,

And this is an adaptation of that as well as old cultures,

Made the comment that jumping from stage four from adolescence to young adulthood is a very big deal,

Because then you have to break free of the peer group and the external external authorities and say,

I,

My worldview is valid as an individual,

That is to say,

I'm this responsible person,

And I start getting serious about my own creative self expression.

This is where usually academies will kick in,

In teen years and later to say the classical academy is to say,

Let's start emphasizing the responsibility to be this creative individual and bring out your natural brilliance,

Natural genius,

Natural intelligence.

So that's the individual responsibility one.

And then you have full blown adults.

And they start realizing,

Well,

The world view I developed,

I think it's pretty hot as a young adult,

I now realize everybody's worldview is pretty hot.

Worldviews and,

And so the world is this very complex place.

And so adults really will acknowledge that complexity.

And yet they'll be looking for a sense of unity and oneness,

They look for overarching principles,

And so often get very involved in either the big sense from science,

And math that way,

Or the spiritual or religion,

Philosophy,

Art,

Beauty,

And then of course,

Self mastery,

Who am I,

What did I get born to do?

And then you have elders,

And elders are wonderful beings,

Because they're very funny.

And they have this big perspective,

And they're not really thinking about themselves anymore,

They don't really care much about that.

And they are are usually they want to understand everything.

So they are very engaged and very involved.

And at the same time,

Very inclusive,

Very non judgmental.

And one of the tricky bits about elders is when you have a culture,

Like say some indigenous cultures that respected elders,

People listen to the elders telling their stories,

And describing things because elders like descriptions and not judgments.

But younger people can only hear judgments,

Especially in a controlling society.

And when I was teaching in universities,

And here in the Academy,

Too,

I'll have full blown adults say,

Well,

Isn't that a judgment,

They really cannot tell the difference between a judgment and a description.

But,

But elders are so clear about their description,

That very often the younger people,

It sounds like a judgment.

I'm not judging if I,

If I'm an elder,

I'm judging something.

First,

I'm unlikely to do it.

But secondly,

I'm going to be very clear about it.

Instead of saying,

Well,

This is the way this path works.

And the person who walks the path,

That way might run into that problem.

A judgment would be that person's a jerk.

That would be a judgment.

The other is a description.

And so elders have that quality about them.

And they're also very funny.

But you notice in most of these old teachers,

And what's so much fun about philosophy and comparative religion,

Which is my undergraduate and graduate work was most of the people there are really funny and engaging.

People like Confucius and the Buddha and Socrates and Plato were all well known for having a very good sense of humor.

And you get that right through Epictetus and so on.

In Judaism,

You get it with the major prophets.

And this will come as a surprise to most people raised in the in the Jewish tradition of Judeo Christian or Judeo Christian Muslim tradition.

But when one famous translator who had just done a brilliant job with Paul's letters,

Was asked to translate the great prophets,

The major prophets,

He said,

I'm not going to do it,

Because it's impossible.

And when asked why he said,

Because if you look at the Greek,

The Hebrew and Aramaic,

You get the same problem.

Like prophet is ripping a strip off the children of Israel for doing something or another,

You know,

Nobody knows what it is a worshiped an idol j walked,

They did something.

And so the prophet is really unhappy.

But while the prophet is ripping a strip off them,

In the original,

The prophets using puns,

Jokes,

And practically untranslatable jokes,

Especially sexual ones.

And so we have this picture of people trembling in front of the prophet,

Whereas probably they were falling down laughing while they were realizing,

Yeah,

I got to clean up my act,

But they're having a great time doing it.

There's this lightness about elders.

It's a lot of fun.

Thank you,

Chris.

Thank you,

Everyone for joining us today.

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