humans are born selfish? Think again. Dacher Keltner reveals the compassionate side to human nature. Humans are selfish. It’s so easy to say. The same goes for so many assertions that follow. Greed is good. Altruism is an illusion. Cooperation is for suckers. Competition is natural, war inevitable. The bad in human nature is stronger than the good. These kinds of claims reflect age-old assumptions about emotion. For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness, and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. Plato compared the human soul to a chariot: the intellect is the driver and the ... posted on Nov 5 2014 (22,944 reads)

they're true. Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas. And that's how the industrial revolution created a factory system in which there was really nothing you could possibly get out of your day's work, except for the pay at the end of the day. Because the father -- one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith -- was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone... posted on Nov 26 2015 (19,488 reads)

jump right into things and ask you what a Re-Love-ution is? Joserra Gonzalez: I had an experience in India, two years of volunteer work, and I was touched by many of the things I could see there. I can say I have never received so much love. It really touched me deeply how people treated me, how everyone gave me everything without expectations, with so much love and patience. And since that experience for me it is about this: how can I bring the spirit of love to everywhere I am?. Our nature is this- how can we spread the love? This is the Re-love-ution, an opportunity to spread love. Recently we just had a 3-day retreat, "Head, Heart, and Hand" retreat. People left ... posted on Jul 21 2017 (8,793 reads)

the math jumps out of the page, kind of grabs us by the lapel, slaps us in the face, and says, “Look at me. What this is telling you is there might be parallel universes.” And we say, “Oh, that’s curious. Let’s think about that, investigate it.” So that’s the typical rhythm of the way in which these ideas surface. This idea that you’re referring to comes out of quantum mechanics, which is this new way of describing the fundamental particles of nature that emerged in the early part of the 20th century. And the new idea is that you can only predict the probability of one outcome or another. Newton wouldn’t have said that. He would say, ... posted on Dec 3 2018 (6,047 reads)

clouds, smoke, streams, the wind-blown waves of sand on the beach, the pattern of branches against the sky, the shape of summer grasses, the markings on rocks, the movement of animals. Even solid bones have lines of flow on their exterior and in their spongy interior. Spiders build their webs, caterpillars their cocoons in water-like spirals. The rings in an exposed log look like a whirlpool. And looking up in the night sky we can see a river of stars. Alan Watts once remarked to me, “In nature, the shortest distance between two points is never a straight line, but a wiggle.” One need only follow a deer through the woods to verify this; animal trails meander like dried stream be... posted on Aug 17 2020 (9,625 reads)

patriarchy at almost every turn.”[i] Julian insisted that the feminine penetrate every aspect of our understanding of the divine, all dimensions of a triune God. She is a forceful spokesperson for the “motherhood of God” in our day when matricide, the killing of girls and women, wisdom, creativity and compassion, a matricide that culminates in the despoiling and crucifixion of Mother Earth, is going on everywhere…. She lays out her case for the goodness and grace of nature during a time of pandemic when so many were turning their backs on ever trusting nature again. In Julian’s day, people drew very different conclusions from the pandemic--namely, that natu... posted on Nov 13 2020 (10,798 reads)

a very male way of looking at the world. I have to say, with all due respect to my gender, it is really how men look at it. They get in this Promethean mode like Bill Gates and say, “Well, we’re going to fix it, and we’re going to get new technologies to fix the technologies that have caused the problem.” And every time you get a technology to fix all technological problems, you get new technological problems. You don’t fix it at all. You just change the nature of the problems. Rather than looking at it as an “it” out there somewhere, which doesn’t exist—it’s a figment of the imagination, and the ego, so forth—we... posted on Sep 29 2021 (3,063 reads)

unconditioned Now.      These three - beauty, truth, and goodness - being spoken of together has held up over the millennia. There’s something intuitively whole about the way they co-create each other and co-emerge and co-exist. I do think they open the door. When we experience it, it stops the momentum, and it opens up; it cuts right through into that vastness. And he talked about it reminding us of home; I would say yes, it reminds us of the true home, our inner nature. RICHARD:  That’s beautiful, Aura. Pavi, I know you have some questions. Pavi Mehta:  Yes, I think are three domains in which I have questions.  At this time [in ... posted on Oct 14 2021 (3,602 reads)

even some rocks, were seen as sacred and alive—as was anything that moved. These ancient views are well documented in ancient creation myths. In China, people asked, “Where does this world come from?” It’s born out of a vast cosmic egg—an organism. In South America the myth said that the world comes out of the body of a serpent—an organism. Same in the Ancient Near East. The entire world was enchanted. With Galileo there’s a new great idea of nature that emerges. We go from the idea of nature as one vast living organism to one vast mechanism. Galileo takes a child’s toy, a telescope, and he aims it at the heavens and he doesn’t... posted on Nov 10 2021 (12,152 reads)

hardly any sound as powerful as a pipe organ; the resonating sounds fill every inch of the room. Whether you’re most familiar with the sound from the heart racing intro to The Phantom of the Opera or the classic bridal march, there’s a magic to the sound of an organ. So, what if that acoustic power was combined with an even more awe-inspiring power, nature to create the world’s largest instrument? In a cave below the hills of Luray, Virginia there is an acoustic wonder that combines music and nature into a singular, incredible experience. The Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns turns the Earth into a magical instrument producing one of the most unique con... posted on Apr 25 2024 (5,676 reads)

marking the ever-shifting boundary between the known and the unknown. Paraphrasing the Socratic paradox, Gleiser writes: Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination — whose existence is nothing but a hopeful assumption anyway — but to more questions and mysteries. The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask. Echoing Ray Bradbury’s poetic conviction that it’s part of human nature “to start with romance and build to a reality,” Gleiser adds: This realization should open doors, not close them, since it makes the search for knowledge an open-... posted on Mar 16 2015 (18,834 reads)

was really lucky to grow up with a a couple of parents who were very experimental and very open to radical ideas and new ideas. My mom was a literature professor and a social activist. I think if I were to say what she really got me interested in -- in addition to things like yoga and massage and alternative foods in the late '60s when people just didn't do those kind of things -- was compassion. To this day, she is interested in the sectors of our society that suffer and the nature of human suffering and volunteering in prisons and teaching people who don't have access to things like that. She was a literature professor, and as Molly, my wife, who's back there, wi... posted on Nov 4 2016 (31,541 reads)

analogies and metaphors and ways of thinking about thinking and visualizing it. I suddenly thought that this is what thought really is. MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] MS. TIPPETT: Frank Wilczek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for his discoveries about quarks that helped illuminate our understanding of the strong force, or strong interaction, one of the four fundamental forces of nature in the Standard Model of physics. Though Frank Wilczek more poetically calls the Standard Model the “Core Theory,” gravitational fields he calls “geometry encoding fluids.&rdq... posted on Jul 25 2016 (12,453 reads)

easiest way for me to find God is in nature,” Sister Ceciliana Skees explains. Born Ruth Skees, she grew up in Hardin County, Kentucky, during the 1930s. It’s a rural place of soft green hills, where her father farmed his entire life. Now just a few months shy of her eighty-fifth birthday, she remembers feeling the first stirrings of a religious calling at the age of 10. Her peasant blouse and smooth, chin-length haircut don’t fit the popular image of a nun, but she has been a Sister of Loretto—a member of a religious order more than 200 years old—since she took vows at the age of 18. Skees’ commitment to social activism goes back almost a... posted on Sep 26 2016 (9,700 reads)

the listener, who experiences secondhand what the speaker experienced, and thereby discovers internally what it might have felt like to have experienced it firsthand. Historically, it has long been recognized that music stimulates intense emotions. Plato distrusted the emotional power of sensuous music and saw it as dangerous enough to justify censorship. Schopenhauer recognized the deep connection between human feeling and music, which "restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their pain." Nietzsche described an Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy in music, representing form and rationality versus drunkenness and ecs... posted on May 24 2017 (8,896 reads)

Nutcracker ballerina. On the last Winter Solstice, I noticed the morning sunlight reflecting off the colorful winter tallow tree, with the sky a brilliant blue. How could the longest night, an ancient time of fear and everlasting darkness, really be tonight, I thought, on a day with the sky so blue? Truly, that is how life is sometimes, things are moving along quite nicely when suddenly: uncertainty, chaos, change, loss, or an unexpected illness. When this happens, I seek the solace of nature, as a balm to heal my soul. I look for the little wild places in the garden and the creatures that live in it, or I seek the wildness of the Galveston shoreline, or I sit in meditation and t... posted on Aug 12 2017 (16,705 reads)

experiencing the beautiful gift of an Awakin Call with Zen monk and Tea Master, Wu De, I never would have understood the magic of tea. Other than being vaguely aware of its medicinal powers and high end varieties, there was little more that I knew and I certainly wouldn’t have equated tea with being “the great human connector”. But the wisdom with which Wu De shared with us how tea connects us back to nature, to each other, and to ourselves opened my heart to more than a different way of starting my day. Journeying from a Rural Ohio to Taiwan Suzanne: How did you find tea, being that you were born in North America? How did you listen to the self and fin... posted on Aug 5 2017 (10,215 reads)

be limited. DB: Yes, well, that again might require some discussion. JK: Of course, we must discuss it. DB: Now, why do you say knowledge is always limited? JK: Because you as a scientist, you are experimenting, adding, searching, so you are adding, and after you some other person will add more. So knowledge, which is born of experience, is limited. DB: Yes, well some people have said it is and they would hope to obtain perfect knowledge, or absolute knowledge of the laws of nature. JK: The laws of nature are not the laws of human being. DB: Well, do you want to restrict the discussion then to knowledge about the human being? JK: Of course, that's all we... posted on Dec 29 2017 (15,690 reads)

I began writing, it suddenly occurred to me that my unbridled gratefulness for this time of year is perhaps best put forth poetically, and this reminded me of a piece I began writing four years ago: “My Song to Nature, A Poetic Celebration Through the Seasons”. Utilizing fairly simple rhyming schemes, the verse is infused with a child-like spirit, and also informed by my decades of study of natural history. The poem is intended to communicate the joy I felt as a young boy exploring nature; a sentiment that is still quite alive within me as I approach my seventieth birthday (how fortunate to still be here now!). Sadly, “My Song to Nature” is currently unfinished, i... posted on Jun 6 2018 (8,183 reads)

the busy-ness of our contemporary life, we are drawn into ceaseless activity that often separates us from the deeper dimension of ourselves. With our smartphones and computer screens, we often remain caught on the surface of our lives amidst the noise and chatter that continually distract us, that stops us from being rooted in our true nature. Unaware we are drowned deeper and deeper in a culture of soulless materialism. At this time I find it more and more important to have outer activities that can connect us to what is more natural and help us live in relationship to the deep root of our being, and in an awareness of the moment which alone can give real meaning to our every... posted on Jul 5 2018 (19,647 reads)