of being elated for the sake of being? My old research habits as a scientist die hard. A lifetime of training cannot be easily dissuaded. I began to turn my investigations to this most important question: How can one hold to that incredible moment of happiness? It turns out I am not alone in this matter. Happiness — at least, the pursuit of it — has obsessed almost all of mankind, from our founding fathers to a slew of high-powered scientists who have been tracking the elusive nature of happiness. Martin Seligman, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania, developed a new school of therapy aimed at what he has termed “positive psychology,” a discipl... posted on Jan 22 2013 (51,508 reads)

Williams memorial lecture at Cambridge University, and I wanted to start something new to do honor to that great Welsh radical cultural thinker. I began to read about disaster and be amazed by some of what I found, and the talk became a Harper's essay that went to press on August 29, 2005. That was the day Katrina hit, and I saw everything go terribly, horribly wrong not because a hurricane had hit the Gulf, but because the authorities believed every standard lie about disaster and human nature and acted on them. Later, the term "elite panic" became key to the book. (It was coined by Caryn Chess and Lee Clarke at Rutgers.) Mark Karlin: Is what happened in Red Hook Brookly... posted on Jun 24 2013 (14,857 reads)

living it is the cause of the focusing illusion." Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs, Princeton University. 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Hidden layers These are the layers of understanding that exist between the external reality and our own perception of the world.  These systems of layers become more interconnected as we develop habits. Learning to ride a bike was hard; but after a while it's like second nature. "The general concept of hidden layers captures deep aspects of the way minds — whether human, animal, or alien; past, present, or future — do their work." Frank Wil... posted on Aug 5 2013 (592,261 reads)

TIPPETT, HOST: It's a remarkable feature of our time: We are changing the nature of aging. Like all progress, this has an upside and a downside. As Jane Gross's mother went through a long decline after her mid-80s, she put it this way, poignantly: "We live too long and die too slowly." Partly as a result of accompanying her mother through these years, Jane Gross started, and still contributes to "The New Old Age" blog at The New York Times. Her hard-won wisdom on experiencing the new old age of our parents — and ourselves — is eloquent, practically useful, and blunt. JANE GROSS: It kicks up all the dust of childhood.... posted on Jul 2 2014 (28,264 reads)

is not an individual property, but is a property of an entire web of relationships. It is a community practice. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. A sustainable human community interacts with other communities — human and nonhuman — in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their natures. Sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of coevolution rather than a static state. Because of the close connection between sustainability and community, basic principles of ecology can also be understood as principles of community. In part... posted on Jun 17 2014 (18,570 reads)

mediation, more control. Are these anything more than the fantasies of people whose worldview is crumbling? Are they any more than delusions? Certainly many of these fantasies - because this is what they are - start to fall apart on examination. Take that colonization of Mars, for example. The writer John Michael Greer recently drew attention to a paper published in the journal Nature in 1997. A team of economists had calculated how much value was contributed to the global economy by nature, as opposed to human effort. Their results suggested that, for every US dollar's worth of goods and services consumed by human beings each year, around 75 cents are provided free of charge ... posted on Jul 27 2014 (14,265 reads)

he bumps me, I push him back." Intuitively, he got that pattern we call "escalation" — that in a closed loop system, things loop back on themselves. It was an awesome insight: a shift from being in the conflict, to seeing the pattern of the conflict. It's one of the things a systems perspective lets you do, shift away from the personal view to see the pattern. LB: In the Center for Ecoliteracy's book Ecoliterate, we write about the practice of understanding how nature sustains life, which is another way of saying understanding living systems principles. In your book Connected Wisdom, you identify 12 living system principles or laws of nature. Let's talk ... posted on Jul 5 2014 (19,120 reads)

of the “richest” people in the world are always “hungry”. Much shopping is for useless trinkets which act as displacements for lack of meaning and love in life. Many a parent, for example, who has no time for talking with their children, will just buy toys. Most people identify with the stuff that they own as an extension of their personal ego. Consider automobiles and houses which function as symbols of wealth, but are also destructive to the natural capital of nature. True wealth goes beyond the concerns of the skin encapsulated ego. True wealth includes the social, political, and transpersonal levels. What about a friend or relative who needs help? ... posted on Nov 24 2014 (21,367 reads)

we must recognize Earth as a living being.” Korten talked about his ongoing metamorphosis with YES! Executive Editor Dean Paton. Dean Paton: Tell me how somebody who was an organizational management specialist, and then a new-economy thought leader, made this leap into what is as much a spiritual proposition as it is a political one—that Earth is a living organism, that we all are essentially a part of this one big life form. “It comes back to this: Are we a part of nature? Or apart from nature?” David Korten: It’s not that hard, actually—once you get into the living-Earth frame—to see that Earth is essentially this organization of livi... posted on Mar 31 2015 (18,131 reads)

We can’t innovate well without having those sounding boards. I think some of that slumbered in the hearts of everyone who came to that beautiful gathering. RW: One formulation I heard that day was the hope and intention that somehow the Waldorf model of education will enter the mainstream of U.S. educational systems. Ida: That’s exactly right! So I thought: we’re one portal. Inspired by that gathering, Mary Roscoe and I are having more conversations around this portal nature of the Community School—as a launch pad for an urban Waldorf movement that one hopes will function as a key player in the country’s collective social reform menu of options. RW: ... posted on Aug 24 2015 (7,586 reads)

the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us. 2:40So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater. And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there. What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry. We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said, well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature. That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology: using an organism to do your wastewater treatment is an old, old technology called "domestication." This is le... posted on Aug 19 2015 (9,806 reads)

are you a morning person or a night person? If you’re a night person, you’re not setting yourself up for success [to get] up early to go for a run. That’s probably not going to work for you. But often, people just decide what they think their habit should be, or they look at what Benjamin Franklin did, or what their brother-in-law did, and try to copy it. But in fact, what you have to do is ask, “What’s true about me? What do I notice about myself? What’s my nature?”  Mogilner: I, like many others, want to improve my eating habits. But boy, that is a hard thing to do. Are there any habit-changing techniques that you would suggest to me and o... posted on Sep 6 2015 (20,077 reads)

legacy of Howard’s work than Goethe. Goethe at age 79 (Oil painting by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828) Around the time of Howard’s rise to fame, Goethe had grown increasingly interested in science in general and morphology, the study of forms, in particular — a rigorous fascination that produced, among many other things, his theory of the psychology of color and emotion. But meteorology, perhaps because it was a science of contemplation celebrating the inherent poetics of nature, enchanted the great German philosopher and poet more than any other scientific field. When Howard came under criticism for using Latin rather than the spoken English of the era in his class... posted on Nov 5 2015 (16,148 reads)

of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities. In accordance with the philosophy of Pachamama, it states, “She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation.” The passing of The Law of Mother Earth has established 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the righ... posted on Jul 15 2016 (31,772 reads)

be open to that is taking this risk. To meet what we encounter. Let me give you one other ancient example. TS: Please. MN: And that is in the story of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is this wonderful—[it’s] one of the oldest narratives we have. It is a Syrian tale about an empty king who is not close to life. He’s bored. He befriends a man who becomes his only friend, Enkidu, who was raised by animals, who is much closer to life. So the bored king declares a war on nature, on the nature god. In the war, his one friend is killed, [so] he journeys to the god of that culture, Utnapishtim, to ask for his friend to be brought to life. And he’s told, “OK, ... posted on Dec 10 2016 (26,459 reads)

in an urban American white guy. I was not only adopted into the nuclear family, I was told to introduce myself in Navajo as part of their clan. As I hesitatingly took on the role they offered me, it began to dawn on me that I could, through the clan system, have an unlimited number of mothers, fathers, sisters, or grandfathers. And my newfound relatives were not only human beings. I was taught and shown that I was also related to the fire and the air, the earth and the water, and all of nature. Indeed, I learned that I am always surrounded by relatives, and it still gives me a feeling of incredible support. Within a few years I was hired as a principal in the first tribally contro... posted on Feb 11 2017 (19,506 reads)

a bold smiley face. I helped her carry the bike down the steep steps of our brownstone and place it under the streetlight, the sign taped to the seat. Lying in bed that night, her face shone with happy anticipation. Things appeared and disappeared on the street all the time, but it was different being part of it. In a way, this was what I wanted her to understand: meaning is an action; we make meaning through our actions. You exist in a web of life: this was the message. You are part of nature and part of the human community. And when you give, you receive something. A good friend of mine once told me that her father took her and the other kids in the family to Coney Island to loo... posted on Feb 18 2017 (20,573 reads)

He explained, “Change is the dots, not the entire picture”. What makes this revolutionary at the end of the day isn’t the whole picture, but the little dots, the decisions that are made moment by moment, day by day. It’s each person, each soul that works, not just the dirt, plants, and wood. This work is not measured in money, power, or title. It is loudest inaudible. Nobody sees it but you. The epicenter of Tommy’s work revolves around the belief that the true nature of humans is goodness. As we grow older, we define each other by our bad habits and actions rather than the goodness we see when we hold a baby for the first time. As he pointed to the baby pla... posted on May 8 2017 (9,584 reads)

a little isolated at times. I never wanted to share my personal issues, but I would have a quick conversation about sports. And whenever I did, it put me in a better place to deal with whatever personal situation was upsetting me at the time a little bit. I felt connected with somebody. And that always stayed with me, as I’ve grown up. BS: And you’re also an avid reader, particularly with Steinbeck and Thoreau. In what ways did these authors inspire your understanding of human nature and how we relate to one another? Especially growing up, as you describe feeling isolated at times? DL: With books, you read and enjoy brilliant thinking by these brilliant people. It’... posted on Aug 7 2017 (9,498 reads)

of sanctuary—and of sacred places—in the context of our lives and creative pursuits? We recognize certain locations on earth, and even within our own spheres of activity, as special and consider them sacred by virtue of a resonance that suggests a living intelligence. We often long for contact with these places that have the capacity to help us return to ourselves. We may be attracted to the locations of our childhood; or cities where there is an enormous reservoir of human nature and activity, such as New York, London, Benares, and Tokyo; or places where energy is impregnated in the land itself, regions of power and grace, such as Mount Fuji, Canyon de Chelly, Mauna Kea... posted on Oct 5 2017 (9,642 reads)