Wisdom Lives in Widening Circles
I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
A researcher interviews twenty-four people known for their sound judgment: university presidents, executives, clergy, senior civil servants. She asks them, in substance, what makes them see further than others. And she finds one unexpected thing they share: none of them experiences themselves as a fixed self. They change, they evolve, they transform, and it is precisely that which lets them read each situation with a properly adjusted eye.
The researcher is Caroline Bassett. Her study, published in 2005 in ReVision under the title “Emergent Wisdom: Living a Life in Widening Circles,” offers a map of wisdom built through grounded theory, a method that starts from interviews rather than from theories. I want to walk through that map with you, because at each stage you will recognize something. Something you already practice.
A map, not a verdict
Bassett opens with a note of humility: researchers and practitioners agree on very little about wisdom, except two things. It does not reduce to a single quality. And wise people remain imperfect.
Her model is therefore not a definition, not a test, not an ideal to reach. It is a map of territory, with four regions that answer one another. She offers an image for it: a balloon with writing on it. Deflated, you can read nothing. Inflated, the letters become legible, yet it remains one single membrane. The four dimensions that follow are distinct to the eye and inseparable in life.
Discerning: the cognitive function
The first dimension Bassett calls Discerning: the capacity to distinguish subtle variations, to look at “the underlying forces without being distracted by surface symptoms,” as one of her interviewees puts it. Its master characteristic is objectivity, stepping out of the situation to see it as it is, with as little projection and distortion as possible.
The training questions she attaches to this dimension will sound familiar: What is really happening? What is true? What matters? These are, almost word for word, the questions you ask when you calibrate, when you separate observation from interpretation, when you move up into the Meta space to look at a situation from a vantage point no longer stuck inside it.
Bassett draws here on Robert Sternberg (2001), for whom wisdom consists in balancing three levels of interest: one’s own, other people’s, and those of institutions. Neither selfishness nor self-erasure. Buddhists, she notes, call the latter “idiot compassion.”
You can hear that balance with a practitioner’s ear: it is a meta-program, the self-or-other orientation, with wisdom as its movable setting. In the Experience Matrix, meta-programs occupy the inner circle of the Meta space: sorting filters that operate without our knowledge until someone names them, and that become levers the moment they are spotted. What Sternberg describes as a virtue, you can work with as a setting. Where does your attention go spontaneously, to your interests, to other people’s, to the collective’s, and what does this particular situation ask for?
Respecting: the affective function
Seeing clearly is not enough. “You have to care about people,” says a state supreme court judge interviewed in the study. The second dimension is affective, and its master characteristic is openness, what Bassett calls radical openness: the deliberate effort to take the perspective of people very different from oneself, particularly those not at the table.
Her training question: How does someone else understand reality? You recognize it. It is second perceptual position, pushed to its ethical conclusion. Not merely putting yourself in your interlocutor’s shoes during a session, but reconstructing the world from inside the head of the man across from you, the single mother, the farmer at the other end of the country. Bassett cites two large-scale expressions of that widened sphere of consideration: the Dalai Lama praying for the invaders of his country, and Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which chose amnestied confession over revenge.
Engaging: the active function
The third dimension may be the most awkward for a certain contemplative image of wisdom. “I don’t think you’ll find anyone wise who leads a passive life,” says an activist interviewed for the study. A university professor puts it this way: “Wisdom is action, not just being.”
Discernment and compassion cannot stay by the fireside. They have to show themselves in the world, as action engaged for the common good. The associated skills — sound judgment, decisions grounded in fairness, moral courage — meet what we call ecology checking, extended beyond the individual: What ends are my actions directed toward? What means am I using?
Transforming: the reflexive function
The fourth dimension is the one that stopped me longest, and the reason I wanted to bring this article to you. Its master characteristic is self-awareness, and its skills are self-knowledge, self-acceptance (including of one’s less flattering parts) and the capacity to see oneself as part of a larger system.
To describe its upper reach, Bassett draws on Robert Kegan’s orders of consciousness (1994). At the fourth order, a person becomes the author of their own life: they gain distance on the beliefs their milieu instilled in them, instead of being governed by them. At the fifth order, one step further: the person understands that they have a self but are not identical to that self. The self stops being a stable unit and becomes a process, what Kegan calls the self-transforming self.
That reflexive dimension has a precise address in the Experience Matrix: the Meta space, the center where meta-programs and meta-states are layered. Kegan’s fourth order, looking at your beliefs instead of looking through them, is the move Michael Hall describes with meta-states: bringing a state to bear on another state, a thought on its own thought. The self-awareness Bassett places at the heart of wisdom corresponds to the movement you perform every time you go meta: subject becomes object, what governed me becomes what I can observe, and therefore work with.
And the fifth order carries that movement up into the upper half-circle of the Matrix: the space of Identifications. What Kegan describes through developmental psychology is precisely the passage from identity to identifications. A wise person, in this study, does not defend the existence of a single fixed self. They navigate among multiple belongings, accept paradox and uncertainty, and recognize themselves as part of a larger whole. “I don’t see myself as an individual,” says a woman who runs a cultural center. “I know where I am because I stand on the backs of many, many others.”
A spiral, not a line
Bassett closes her map with a qualification that changes everything: these four dimensions are not a ladder you climb once and for all. They form a spiral. Self-transformation lets the cycle begin again — discerning, respecting, engaging — but at a deeper level, with fewer distortions, a wider sphere of consideration, a more accurate engagement. In the language of the Matrix: each passage through the Meta space widens the circle from which the next one will be travelled. The circles widen, as in the Rilke poem that opens this article. We do not know whether we will complete the last one, but we give ourselves to it.
This model remains what it says it is: one map among others, drawn from twenty-four interviews and a cross-disciplinary reading, not from a randomized controlled trial. Not proof, not doctrine, an invitation. But that invitation speaks directly to our practice: every one of Bassett’s training questions could appear as it stands in a session protocol. And if wisdom can be learned, which is the central conviction of her article, then Neuro-Linguistic Practices are among the disciplines best placed to train it, circle after circle.
Try the exercise. Take the four families of questions — What is really happening? Which point of view am I adopting? What guides my actions? What am I part of? — and put them to a situation currently occupying you. Bassett suggests using them as a ground bass, returning to them again and again, without telling yourself stories about your own answers. It is a modest practice. It may be where the circles start to widen.
Sources
- Bassett, C. (2005). “Emergent Wisdom: Living a Life in Widening Circles.” ReVision, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 6-11.
- Bassett, C. (2005). “Laughing at gilded butterflies: Integrating wisdom, development, and learning.” In Oxford Handbook of Adult Development and Learning, ed. C. Hoare. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Rilke, R. M. (1996). Rilke’s Book of Hours, ed. A. Barrows and J. Macy. New York: Riverhead Books.
- Sternberg, R. (2001). “Why schools should teach for wisdom: The balance theory of wisdom in educational settings.” Educational Psychologist, 36 (4), pp. 227-245.
This article is also available in French on atelierpnl.eu: La sagesse vit en cercles qui s’élargissent.