Essay - Youth and the Legacy of the Future

Growing up today, the world feels majestic and yet it can fit in a pocket. There’s a desire to be authentic, contribute, and build bridges at a time when machines are taking the lead, and nationalism and war are running rampant. Young people have a special connection to the spirit. In all their vulnerability, they bring with them a resource greater than oil or hyper-automation. We should not do without it.

Coming of Age

My body takes on adult proportions. When my limbs have stopped growing, it’s as if there is more space inside. I can have a child. I can serve in the military. I can be tried in court as an adult. I can vote. I understand complex issues in conversations with adults. My heart becomes a gown of textures and colors—crude here, and rough there, while other areas are silk. I am tortured by shyness; enlightened by joy; enraptured by beauty; frozen by anxiety. I am infuriated with injustice. I fall in love. My memories lose their photographic, objective character and become more dramatic and personal. The growing verve of feeling and conscience can hurt. Above my heart there is an obstacle, and above this am I. I carry myself but I am disjointed. I download Instagram and lose a weekend in doom scrolling. My heart leads to my second self. I am tortured by this somehow. I delete Instagram from my phone. I listen deeply, with empathy; I speak from the heart, feeling my toes; I keep the faith in others, and I sense wisdom. My journal testifies to this. I pledge and make promises to this self, to the future. The ideals don’t tell me how the world is but what I might become. Who can be trusted? How can I be trustworthy as I get older?

Youth Movements

The naiveté of this age can be striking for elders, but is easily forgiven and refreshing, for in youth there is a genius of truthfulness—if not truth itself. Our hearts move along the meridians of the essential, even when our judgement errs. Yet, while we are easily forgiven, we make many elders uneasy. They avoid our ideals with “anesthetic” ideas. They focus on the energy of youth and the “physiological slowdowns” and lack of flexibility for dealing with the “inconsistencies and compromise” that come with old age.¹

The digital revolution has drastically changed the experience of growing up, as did the ecological crisis and the changing climate. For late modernity, the significance of youth societies and movements is a growing sense of the legacy of the future. We see this in over a century of youth movements, many of which predate the digital era.

Recently, I helped host 900 high school students from around the world for a weeklong conference. In collaboration with them, we chose the theme “disconnect to connect”—inspired by their desire to counter the technologically dominant lifestyle without demonizing technology. What was striking was not any political agitation or energy, but the sincere transnational interest in meeting each other. There was a non-romantic, non-sentimental feeling of understanding and love. Active in speech or hearing, they were being transformed. What might youth associations founded on an epistemology of love and interest look like?

Out the Door

As a member of the Wandervogel in 1910,² setting off with small pack carrying simple fare and a tent, you were not heading out for sensations and entertainment. Arm in arm with your friends, you would sing and dance and would be disappointed if this did not become an erlebnis [an experience] wherein, as Robbert-Jan Adriaansen writes in The Rhythm of Eternity, “Landscape character, mood, natural events, encounters and the exchange of ideas with local inhabitants, the sounds of songs and strings–everything merges into great images in which he himself lives as a figurine.”³ Through “empathic appropriation,” the Wandervogel became receptive for a life not found in the classrooms and lecture halls. This was not an association for “leisure,” but for “affiliation to the innermost existence.”⁴ One night you’re lying with your friends on a hillside under the dark sky, grass scratching your neck, immersed in the beauty of a fir forest. The moment begins to speak through the “rough pliability, the swaying strength of the wood” caressed by the evening wind. “We sensed through feeling, also the intrinsic value of the things around us.”⁵ Here, with very few words, the most “intimate feeling of community” emerged from the “non-sensuous, the supra-sensuous, the ‘spiritual’ dimensions of the world.” You don’t need much when you have sincerity. Everyone spoke of it differently, but everyone spoke from “the depths of the soul.” Not only “churches and castles speak like this, also towns, streets and roads; stretches of land, settlements and cultivated areas” have this “slow speech, which starts on a small and the smallest scale–not with deep wisdom.”

According to many of these hikers, the problem with the older generation and the outwardly oriented scientific culture was that they were inauthentic. They’d broken away from deeper spiritual sources. By “seeking experiences of historical elements that they considered to be a genuine expression of a life lived existentially rather than rationally, they tapped into the sources of life itself rather than those of a specific past.”⁶ The eternal is now, the dead are alive—souls and spirits long past become contemporaries through this culture of erlebnis. These youth beheld “people who came before us in such a way that we retrieve them in the being of our soul as soul-shaping powers.”⁷ They sought the eternally human within their own soul, through erlebnis as an “immanent mysticism”, although they could not justify it with the concepts of science. For the young holy vagrants, it guarded an inner sincerity and an emergent youth wisdom. Existing creeds and institutions missed the point—namely, the presence of the eternal, of life, so that “Every alignment with economical, religious or political affiliations is rejected.”⁸ There was, however, a scientific parallel to the culture of erlebnis in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey who pioneered a hermeneutic method for historical understanding and the humanities.⁹

The Dream of Fulfillment

In 1960, a global youth movement emerged for the first time in history. The number of members of the various Wandervogel–inspired hiking groups, the Blau Weiss Jewish hiking association, as well as student associations of various kinds, reached around 50,000 at its height. Half a century later, the Monterey folk festival began and the famous Woodstock took place with 500,000 people in attendance. Of decisive importance after WWII was that the folk song regained a special status in the Anglosphere. The students who created Foxfire magazine to capture the voices of Southern Appalachian life in 1966 were aligned in their own way with the young hikers in 1910 who sought out rural communities, acted out medieval plays, danced and sang folksongs. They lacked, however, the history of their 1910 European counterparts, and they wrote more songs themselves. Paul Simon’s “Sound of Silence” spoke for many in that rising generation, depicting a society lacking in authenticity and connection. Amid the hubub there was a deafening silence. It was a silence that the Wandervogel had also heard in Wilhelmine, Germany when they sought the spirit through “immanent mysticism”—an early version of what later will be referred to as “spiritual but not religious.” This thread runs through the new left, Marcuse’s version of politics in 1968 France, the countercultural hippies of 1969 in the USA, and the 1970 student protests at Lethbridge University in Canada.

The Expressive Turn

The philosopher Charles Taylor has called the thread I am drawing out “the expressive turn.” It is the ideal of individualization, of authenticity. It implies that each of us has a unique way of being that is only found through our own form of articulation. “Revelation comes through expression.”¹⁰ To live is to be an artist, and my connection to life becomes very intimate. I am creating myself. “Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition. The artist becomes in some way the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition.”¹¹ The rich tapestry of the world and history can only be reborn through my authentic expression. The angels are lost to us despite our medieval treatise, but they emerge with existential power through a poet like Rilke, becoming real “only through being ratified afresh in the sensibility of each new reader.” Nature and history have been hypnotized. Engaging them through authentic speech, they take root within the element of the individual with new life. “Contemporary angels have to be human-related” and they are rooted in a way of speaking and personal sensibility—of authenticity.¹²

The shadow side of this is individualization without love. It can take the form of radical postmodern relativism or techno-utopian capitalism. Then nature, history, cultural legacy and other people as inspirations become fainter. The ideal is to blaze a path of freedom, but it is without sources to connect to. “Self-determining freedom is in part the default solution of the culture of authenticity,” writes Taylor, “while at the same time it is its bane, since it further intensifies anthropocentrism.” Developed to an extreme this implies there are no sources, only tools and means.¹³

Humanizing Culture

In 2013, Mirabai Bush and Daniel Barbezat published Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning.¹⁴ The book draws on decades of collaboration, practice, experimentation and research that, in seed form, can be found in the 1960s. The importance was starkly framed in Parker Palmer’s introduction where he quotes Konnilyn G. Feig: “after Auschwitz we must realize that being a killer, a family man, and a lover of Beethoven are not contradictions.” For Palmer, this book “offers a powerful corrective to the chain of philosophical errors that has loosed too many amoral, and even immoral, educated people on the world.”

Arthur Zajonc, an important figure in the field of contemplative pedagogy and epistemology, writes “Surely, science has brought enormous advances, but we cannot turn away from the central fact that the modern emphasis on objectification predisposes us to an instrumental and manipulative way of being in the world.” He suggests further that a “re-imagination of knowing will have deep consequences for education, consequences that give a prominent place to contemplative pedagogies. Indeed, I hope to convince you that contemplative practice can become contemplative inquiry, which is the practice of an epistemology of love. Such contemplative inquiry not only yields insight (veritas) but also transforms the knower through his or her intimate (one could say loving) participation in the subject of one’s contemplative attention. Contemplative education is transformative education.”¹⁵ Actively losing ourselves, we are transformed. The exercises in the book by Barbezat and Bush on beholding, journaling, active listening and speaking made up central facets of Wandervogel culture. The young hikers in the Black Forest who cultivated practices to “know” the landscape, to “know” history felt they were uniting with living spirit, with eternal sources of life.

We can discern a transgenerational thread uniting youth movements in late modernity. Mirabai Bush and Arthur Zajonc carried certain ideals of the youth movement throughout their lives, ideas that were at work among the Wandervogel as well: redeeming European enlightenment and rationalism through a more intimate participation in, and responsibility for, life. By the 90s, these two individuals started a new phase of work which is still unfolding. There is an arc moving from conversations over dancing flames of campfires in Alsace a century ago to contemporary conversations about contemplative pedagogies.

Zajonc has explored imminent spirituality. It’s not a return to religious creed or practice, but seeks “appropriate ways of including the contemplative and spiritual within … disciplines themselves. While we can learn much from our Christian, Buddhist, and other religious colleagues, we can and should find ways of transforming the disciplines themselves in the light of a broader, contemplative, and spiritual perspective.”¹⁶ This involves exploring how meditation can be developed as a path of knowledge. Adriaansen clears the way for spiritual presence through interpretive methods of texts, artifacts and practices, drawing on Dilthey and Gadamer in his study of the German Youth movement. Contemplative epistemology positions meditation as a path of knowledge. Zajonc aligns his efforts with Rudolf Steiner’s “Geisteswissenschaft,” among others.

Meditation

A basic meditative practice might involve drawing my attention and feeling together in concentration on a verse, object, feeling, or image. The quality of my consciousness changes over time. In meditation, I experience how my awareness fills with inner light that emerges behind and around me. This light is suffused with a subtle vitality and feeling that I do not feel separated from it. The content is not as important as the activity: it does not matter what I focus on. I feel that this living light is connected by innumerable golden threads to all points of my physical body, as if it is shaping me. In a way it takes on my form, but I sense that I am an image of it. I observe different qualities in this field of consciousness. For instance, some thoughts are flat and still—they have contour, but no life. It is as if I slip into an observing instrument or device that brings the world into focus across from me, exercising a power of duality. In meditation I also experience thoughts that say one thing a thousand ways while radiating vitality and meaning. This thought does not place a world on display before me as an object, but unites what is seen and what I am understanding as a mental-spiritual experience. I feel a sense of freedom in this mode of meditation. Time does not feel like a sequence of distinct points. Seed, stem, flower, and fruit are all at once. These living thoughts exercise a power of reconciliation.

Steiner suggested that through observations like these it was possible to discern between thinking conditioned by the body and body-free thinking that could also apprehend the spiritual in the cosmos. Having long explored these ideas and practices, Zajonc was well positioned as an intermediary for the Mind and Life Dialogues at MIT in 2003 that brought Buddhist monks and western scientists together in a remarkable intercultural exchange. The western scientists met masters of introspective observation and were challenged by notions that certain modes of consciousness in meditation were not conditioned by the body.

The instances during meditation when I feel each moment is an expression of a greater, unified, creative activity lead to an important insight. The thought I observe is an expression of a life I take part in while I am also outside of it. Time feels like space. In my heart I feel that outer forms, events, and processes have a hidden inner aspect. This is the foundational mood for a contemplative morphology. It is clear that the work of Zajonc points to a path where the culture of authenticity matures toward contemplative inquiry. The emphasis is not on the artist as the ideal of life, but the living spirit of the world as it is reflected in the human soul. This is the direction scientific disciplines might move to align with contemplative pedagogy.

When Steiner worked to pioneer methods like these a century ago, he called this task “Michaelic spirituality.” It involved connecting the innermost human with what appears to be an outer world totally separated from what is human. He encouraged members from the German youth movement with the image of Michael and the dragon. Modernity has involved developing freedom and individuality, but it is in danger of being cut off from deeper aspects of the greater world. Contemplative inquiry and contemplative morphology are the sister and brother of Taylor’s expressive turn and authenticity. They belong to the ideal in late modernity of a “fuller and more differentiated form of life, because more fully appropriated as our own.”¹⁷

Youth Wisdom and the Legacy of the Future

Youth groups found a way to the spirit without Dilthey or Steiner, and we must protect them from getting old too fast! Youth wisdom and spirituality only make sense when they align with the reality of being young. This involves knowledge that is so alive that it becomes an experience. Indeed, when Steiner and Maria Röschl-Lehrs established a Youth Section with worldwide connections as part of the Goetheanum in Switzerland, Steiner suggested it would involve looking for experiences that helped youth grow up to love science.¹⁸ Steiner and Röschl-Lehrs, both scholars, had nothing against studying books or meditating, but they were interested in the special form that spirituality can take before adulthood. Many members of hiking and student associations at the time had ardently requested this. Steiner and Röschl-Lehrs intended to contribute contemplative perspectives on youth pedagogy, youth wisdom and culture.¹⁹

The above portrayal of basic spiritual experiences accessible through meditation describes learning to participate in a horizon of living thought. This leads to new insights and perception. We can easily see the final growth spurt of the physical body accompanied by a strong sense of inner experience, and how feelings connected with bodily processes, desire and aversion, joy and enthusiasm intensify. We can learn to see more, to sense a luminous cloud around a young person, a dynamic shape. While it can seem chaotic and crude in some places, in others immaculate and differentiated patterns of living light and color emerge, often in flashes. This can be observed in adults as well, but there is more stability in adults and less dynamism. The weaving light is potent with wisdom and depth, with strong ethical energies. What a mystery! These youth have not lived long enough to be wise. They are not working out ethical theorems and existential riddles; they are already alive with them. We can see this even when they cannot articulate it well. Indeed, this latent youth wisdom makes a strange contrast with the awkward and insecure impressions that might appear at the same time. There are two selves, and the heart is, in a way, holding them together. There, the eternal and the temporal meet at the beginning of a life.

When youth speak actively—in dances, theater, conversation, or singing—this “second self” flashes through the heart and soul. These bolts of lightning leave traces: deep and fertile furrows, full of seeds. They are sown in speaker and witness. What is the content? Like the light that radiates in meditation that is connected in countless ways to our bodies, this light radiates through the young heart, connected with the future. Every person seems now a shadow of their true selves. Hold back your judgment. Be patient and exercise tolerance. The new ones bring their own legacy. Fostering youth wisdom does not involve keeping people physically young, but experiencing the wisdom of youth so that it can work into life and the world. The youth carry the legacy of the future.

What seems exotic is often common. This happens whenever we listen out of sincere interest. The person who addresses me sincerely awakens active listening in me and whoever listens deeply inspires me to speak authentically. The encounter becomes an event with the same texture and color as the field of living thought we learn to enter through meditation as already described.

In January of 2026, youth group members and youth workers associated with the Youth Section came together at the Goetheanum to deepen their connections, commitments and inspirations. There, we discussed youth wisdom in this way. Expression and receptivity are keys for the gates of youth wisdom. Sincere and authentic speech, arising from the heart, in semi-articulate clarity, is illuminated by wisdom. When the heart is stilled in listening, streams of blessings and insight flow through it! Then I see there is a higher self in others, and I feel this changes me. It inspires awe in my heart. I feel a desire to be patient and tolerant. On an inner horizon, I experience how this person is an expression of a higher life.

The growth of interest in ideas of reincarnation over the last century, as well as a sense for immanent spirituality as opposed to religious creed, are powerful experiences that many people have in their youth. They feel how this higher life is a key for understanding the whole universe. They may say: I feel all things have their origin in the living spirit.

Transformative pedagogy and youth work will grow more and more important. While economic, ecological, and political issues will remain important, they can distract us from a key tension between youth wisdom and late modernity. The young are coming into a world under increasing natural pressures. Youth wisdom involves fostering spaces where the humanizing legacy can take root for the good. Today, when youth are sometimes seen as a “market shares” in the attention economy, to be exploited for profits, insistence on understandings that can protect and promote a deeper human dignity are essential.

Coming of age today, young people often do not encounter transformative pedagogy, but rather rigid structures of information memorization. Instead of creativity and responsibility, they encounter convention and inertia. Many eco-systems, institutions, and traditions are falling apart and it is unclear what will emerge in their wake. The need for waves of youth wisdom to open the narrow rationalism of European enlightenment and transform society is great. We see the blazing fires of nationalism that tore through the world and nations like Japan and Germany in the last century, with cynical views of individual life. Again, we see nations with “great” missions growing in power. Youth wisdom is oriented toward an individual’s legacy of the future, not a nation’s. It involves a relation to a pre-natal spirituality. The youth, in all their vulnerability, bring a resource greater than oil or hyper automation, something that has united many youth societies in the recent past, and surely many to come.

Leaving the coworker gathering in January, we took the following meditation:

Youth Wisdom

Coming of age my heart rises in warm insight
Threatened by rigidity my heart awakens me in living thought through listening
Faced by the chill of convention my heart inspires authentic speech
Endangered by things falling apart my heart encourages faithfulness
My heart reveals the origin of all things in the spirit
And seeks the spirit of love.

Images Impressions from the International Student Conference (ISC) 2026, Photo: Sabrina Xuan

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Footnotes

Richard G. Braungart and Margaret M. Braungart, Youth Movements and Generational Politics, 19th–21st Centuries (London: Anthem Press, 2023), 430.
Wandervogel (lit. “Wandering Bird”) is the name adopted by a popular movement of German youth groups from 1896 to 1933, who protested against industrialization by hiking in the countryside and communing with nature in the woods—Ed.
Robbert-Jan Adriaansen, The Rhythm of Eternity: The German Youth Movement and the Experience of the Past, 1900–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 60.
Ibid., 63.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 109.
Ibid.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences: An Attempt to Lay a Foundation for the Study of Society and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991), 61.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 69.
Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful Methods to Transform Teaching and Learning (San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 2013).
Arthur Zajonc, “Love and Knowledge: Recovering the Heart of Learning Through Contemplation,” Teachers College Record 108, no. 9 (2006).
Arthur Zajonc, “Spirituality in Higher Education: Overcoming the Divide,” Liberal Education (2003), 52.
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991), 74.
Rudolf Steiner, “Announcing a Section for Youth,” in Youth and the Etheric Heart (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2007), 83–84.
See Maria Röschl-Lehrs, Es erklingt ein Ton … (Dornach, Switzerland: Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag am Goetheanum, 2005), especially the foreword by Elizabeth Wirsching and the appendix by Edward Warren.