Wisdom in Complex Times: From the Will to Power to the Power of Service

Wisdom today no longer coincides with accumulated knowledge nor with introspection alone. It is the transformation of the will: from the desire for the will to power to the urgency to offer it.

In the early phases of psychological and social evolution — both in individuals and in civilizations — the will to power forms the fundamental drive: to assert oneself, rise, distinguish oneself, compete, conquer.

This stage belongs to psychological childhood, but also to a long stretch of human history, amplified by economic and cultural systems centered on neoliberalism, individualism, and the pursuit of personal maximization.

Yet every developmental stage, once it reaches its limit, generates a qualitative shift in consciousness. The will to power stops being sufficient when the self recognizes the insufficiency of living only for itself.

At that point, a new orientation emerges: the will to power is not meant to be held, but to be placed in service. Consciousness begins to ask not “How can I grow?”, but “What can I generate? What impact can I leave?” It is the maturity of the wave that understands it belongs to the ocean.

From personal will to power to transpersonal offering

Osho’s metaphor clarifies this passage: as long as someone perceives themself as a wave, every goal arises from the need to define their own shape. But when the wave recognizes that it is water, the will changes its nature. It is no longer a force that asserts the individual, but a movement that nourishes the field.

Identity does not disappear: it becomes relative, expanded, placed within the flow. Wisdom is the consciousness that acts knowing that every gesture propagates through time, touching people, relationships, systems and generations.

The systemic dimension: recognizing real power

Wisdom arises from a radical recognition of one’s real power. Before offering it, one must observe it.

It means understanding one’s abilities, natural inclinations, developed competences, spontaneous talents, and experiences transformed into emotional skill. It also requires recognizing luck and privilege — not as guilt or merit, but as resources passing through one’s life, becoming building material for those who come after.

This first step opens the door to the next: decentering.

When identity is no longer the sole center of decision-making, one begins to see the network of relationships in which one is immersed. Consciousness realizes that the wave-form is temporary, while the water-substance is shared.

Here the systemic dimension opens up: every choice contributes to a field that extends beyond the individual. This field is not abstract; it is made of biological, emotional, cultural and symbolic phenomena that feed one another. Wisdom is the compass that orients the individual within this weave.

Opening into the transpersonal space

When the mind recognizes itself as part of such a vast network, the decisive transition occurs: the opening into the transpersonal space. The transpersonal is not a mystical addition to psychology, but the natural outcome of systemic perception.

It is the dissolution of the belief that the self is confined to its own body or biography. Consciousness begins to perceive itself as a node of a larger process: cultural, ecological, symbolic, evolutionary.

Identity becomes a temporary expression of the whole, not its center.

The daily practice of wisdom

This process requires training. It is cultivated through concrete practices:

• Seeing one’s power as a shareable resource: recognizing that every strength, talent, fortune and privilege can become a seed rather than only an advantage.

  
  

• Adopting the long perspective: looking at the consequences of one’s actions not only today but in ten, twenty or fifty years. Thinking like an ancestor, not only like an individual.

  
  

• Acting from value responsibility: choosing what creates quality in the field, not only what is convenient. Ethics becomes the grammar of wisdom.

  
  

• Cultivating the transpersonal space: dedicating time to contemplative, somatic, aesthetic or relational practices that dissolve the boundaries of the self and allow the continuity between self and world to be felt.

  
  

• Creating works that outlive us: solid relationships, ethical gestures, teachings, cultural contributions, professional practices, ecological choices.
  

Every gesture that leaves a trace belongs to the logic of the ocean. Wisdom is active transformation, not passive reflection.

The archetype of the Old Sage as transgenerational impact and threshold of the transpersonal

This archetype represents the moment in which individual consciousness becomes capable of seeing reality as a dynamic weave of systems. Wisdom is no longer a psychological trait but a form of perception.

It is the capacity to see causes and consequences as waves propagating through time, reaching future generations, communities, students, children and people not yet born.

At the “yellow” stage of Spiral Dynamics, this consciousness appears as value-based integration: none of the earlier developmental stages is rejected; all are transcended and included within a complex and responsible vision.

Ken Wilber shows how integral consciousness emerges once all previous stages have been traversed, understood and integrated. At that point, a person no longer acts only for themself, but as part of an evolutionary tapestry that surpasses their biography.

The Bodymind perspective: making wisdom tangible

From a Bodymind perspective, all this becomes tangible. The body is perceived as a node in an evolutionary network. Emotions reveal themselves as transgenerational memories. Postures tell genealogical stories.

The healing of one person changes the emotional and symbolic field of those who come after.

The Old Sage thus becomes a mediator between eras: a carrier of memory and vision, a guardian of cycles, an interrupter of ancient suffering, a creator of future spaces.

It is the function of consciousness that integrates personal, transgenerational and transpersonal dimensions into a single movement.