Wisdom Ecology: Mapping the Ancient Wisdom World into the Future

This chapter outlines the many tributaries and themes of ancient wisdom and maps the interaction and transmission of wisdom traditions within Shakespeare’s oikumene into the present and future. Exemplary is the fertile confluence of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Hebrew wisdoms in several centuries before and after Jesus Christ in Alexandria. Pythagoras looms large in further suggestive interactions with and between Indian and Buddhist wisdom traditions. A rich trove of metaphors and motifs shared within the oikumene suggests how the Afro-Eurasian thoughtworld may also converse with Indigenous science through a global sensus communis rooted in cross-cultural theories of conspiration and energetic knowing-with (etymologically, conscience in its original mystical sense of unitary consciousness), as splendidly depicted by Indra’s Net of interbeing. Such sapiential globetrotting on the horizontal plane goes along with a transhistorical transmission on a vertical plane. Of utmost existential relevance—literally, a rising again—to our present and future being is the ‘unforgetting’ of ancient and Indigenous wisdom traditions for our sapient evolving toward a livable planet.