and learned about competition rather than co-operation. When the fires come, when the buildings burn, friends and neighbors are what we need, communities to support us, the kindness of strangers. We experienced it last Summer as the firefighters risked their lives holding the line. We were fortunate in our small town that this time no one lost their home, unlike so many inland. Hand-painted signs are still beside the road, thanking the firefighters. We cannot escape the imbalance of nature we have created, but we can learn how to walk together into an uncertain future. Years ago I had a series of visions of the future, of a civilization waiting to be born. I was shown how we... posted on Aug 19 2021 (7,027 reads)

such as theism and idealism being associated with having had a self-transcendent experience.  However, one interesting discovery is that philosophers who have used psychedelics and cannabis are more likely to have a more subjectivist view of morality and aesthetics (the view that there is no objective truth about what makes something ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’). Another is that hard determinism (the belief that human actions are wholly determined by the laws of nature and so genuine free will does not exist) is associated with lower life satisfaction and higher depression/anxiety. The finding related to hard determinism and poorer mental health is particu... posted on Nov 13 2021 (6,031 reads)

More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts… love your heart. For this is the prize. VIKTOR FRANKL: HAVE MORE MUSIC AND NATURE IN YOUR LIFE PA century after Nietzsche proclaimed with his nihilistic grandiosity that “without music life would be a mistake” and a century after Walt Whitman observed with his life-affirming soulfulness that music is the profoundest expression of nature, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997), having narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp, delivered a set of extr... posted on Jan 2 2022 (7,611 reads)

well with even very horrendous events. But particularly traumas that occur at the hands of people who are supposed to take care of you, if you’re not allowed to feel what you feel, know what you know, your mind cannot integrate what goes on, and you can get stuck on the situation. So the social context in which it occurs is fantastically important. Tippett:Something that’s very interesting to me in how you talk about trauma, the experience of trauma, what it is, is how the nature of memory is distorted; that memories are never precise recollections, but that in general, as we move through the world, memories become integrated and transformed into stories that help us ma... posted on Feb 10 2022 (7,618 reads)

pattern, the only one of its kind; it is having a sense of autonomy as an individual, being aware of yourself and your fate. Yet it also means building an opposition between the self and the world, and that opposition can be alienating at times. This optics of the self, the way in which the individual becomes “subjective center of the world,” is the defining feature of this most recent chapter of the history of our species. And yet everything around us reveals its illusory nature, for as the great naturalist John Muir observed, “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Art by Arthur Rackh... posted on Dec 9 2022 (4,108 reads)

dazzling interleaving of life that prompted Ursula K. Le Guin to write that “the word for world is forest,” that cathedral of interdependence where trees and fungi whisper to each other in a language we are only just beginning to decipher. Art by Violeta Lopíz and Valerio Vidali from The Forest by Riccardo Bozzi In consonance with the emerging science of “soft fascination” — which is illuminating how time in nature jolts the brain out of its rut and unlatches our most creative thinking — May writes: The forest… is a deep terrain, a place of unending variance and subtle meaning. It is a c... posted on Apr 25 2023 (4,096 reads)

Tippett, host:It has ever and always been true, as David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This “conversational nature of reality” — indeed, this drama of vitality  — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology, psychology, and leadership, his insistence on the power of a “beautiful question” and of everyday words amidst the drama of work, as well as the drama of life. The notion of “frontier” — inner frontiers, oute... posted on Jun 18 2023 (4,501 reads)

the non-profit Bioneers (“Revolution from the Heart of Nature”), producing an annual conference that attracts thousands to San Rafael, California in October. The event’s presentations, panels, keynote addresses and exhibits bring together internationally known  social activists, environmentalists, technological innovators, journalists and indigenous wisdom keepers with an engaged audience to seed and propagate collective change with solutions usually inspired by nature. Bioneers also produces an award-winning radio series, anthology book series, television programs and rich media website. Simons thinks of Bioneers as “a three-day ceremony.” Typic... posted on Oct 2 2011 (12,136 reads)

just ten corporations—with boards totaling only 138 people—had come to account for half of US food and beverage sales. Conditions for American farmworkers remain so horrific that seven Florida growers have been convicted of slavery involving more than 1,000 workers. Life expectancy of US farmworkers is forty-nine years. That’s one current. It’s antidemocratic and deadly. There is, however, another current, which is democratizing power and aligning farming with nature’s genius. Many call it simply “the global food movement.” In the United States it’s building on the courage of truth tellers from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and wo... posted on Nov 1 2011 (12,656 reads)

this kind of honeymoon. :-) For us, this walk was a pilgrimage -- and our goal was simply to be in a space larger than our egos, and to allow that compassion to guide us in unscripted acts of service along the way.  Stripped entirely of our comfort zone and accustomed identities, could we still “keep it real”?  That was our challenge. We ended up walking 1000 kilometers over three months. In that period, we encountered the very best and the very worst of human nature -- not just in others, but also within ourselves. Soon after we ended the pilgrimage, my uncle casually popped the million dollar question at the dinner table: "So, Nipun, what did you ... posted on May 14 2012 (398,132 reads)

Second Half of Life, emphasizing that we have an opportunity to develop our character. And I’m curious what you mean by it; it’s a word that people don’t use very often, but that I quite like. AA: Well, character is composed of integrity and patience and trust and flexibility and clarity. It’s the heart of our moral compass. But what fosters a spiritual growth and development is attending to coming into congruence with who we really are in our own authentic nature. And that’s always interested me: what keeps me in my integrity, and what pulls me out of my integrity or my patience or my trust or my flexibility, which are all qualities that foster wi... posted on Sep 17 2012 (30,572 reads)

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 (51,742 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 (15,265 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 (595,976 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 (28,570 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 (18,831 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 (14,463 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 (19,411 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 (21,686 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 (18,364 reads)