Tending and Befriending

    Twenty-five years ago, Taylor et al published a paper, "Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-befriend, not Fight-or-flight" (Psychol Rev 2000; 107(3): 411-29) which suggested female behavior is more marked by a pattern of "tend-and-befriend" than by "fight-or-flight."  
    They defined "tending" as nurturing activities to protect self & offspring, to promote safety & reduce distress; "befriending" the creation & maintenance of social networks that help this tending process.
    Despite this surprisingly promising start, the story - to be published in a "scientific" psychology journal - had to devolve into reductionism: "oxytocin, in conjunction with female reproductive hormones & endogenous opioid peptide mechanisms, may be at its core." 
    So wise motherly love & nurturing care for children, family, friends, neighbors & beyond was reduced to meaningless, accidental matter activated by hormones, while other hormones activate male machines fight & run. 
    Now it's all figured out! BUT ONLY IF you value a meaningless, accidental, mechanical model to the exclusion of an infinitely greater, wiser reality!   

    "Spiritual intelligence is the foundation of who we are and our particular type of consciousness. It is the perception identified across wisdom & religious traditions, and known by many names, which can be summarized as the awareness of awareness, and so of being itself. It is the foundation of peace, even in the face of death, as well as purpose and solidarity. The challenge today is to recover and live according to that knowledge." 
    Mark Vernon, "Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps" 2023.

 

    Iain McGilchrist is a highly & broadly educated (a very rare combination) and experienced literary scholar, neuroscience researcher, psychiatrist and author of 3 respected books. He sees our present society as being very far from wise, and hence, recklessly self-destructive. 
    The key feature of this blindness is a strident left-hemisphere-dominant perspective, hellbent on grabbing as much as we can, as fast as we can, with no concern for the destructive impacts on other people, animals, plants, the Planet as a whole. This struggle to rob-or-be robbed, is openly adversarial, and feels like "fight-or-flight." India, China, Japan etc which once had profound wisdom traditions, are also drowning in rabid capitalism. The inevitable result is degradation of quality of life, the environment, international relationships, ... everything.
    This is in stark contrast to a right-hemisphere-dominant perspective on life, which uses & values the left hemisphere's qualities of looking after practical matters, AND BALANCES this with careful attention to larger contexts, 'the big picture' in order to nurture & collaborate or 'tend-and-befriend.' This is living in wise relationship with Self, other humans, other beings, Nature, Cosmos, Source. 

     Too many of us have forgotten our own wisdom nature, traditions & practices. We must reclaim these ASAP to help revive our culture's wisdom vacuum.

    "... consider Thomas Banyacya's four words: 'Stop, consider, change, and correct.' Stop what you are doing. Consider the effects of what you are doing. Is it upholding life on this land? Or is it destructive to the life on this land? If it is destructive, then change your value system and your actions. We are not supposed to be subduing the earth, treading it underfoot, vanquishing the earth and all its life. We are supposed to be taking care of this land and the life upon it. So it's up to you to consider which side you are going to be on." 
    Craig Carpenter, traditional Mohawk messenger, in "The Book of Elders - The Life Stories & Wisdom of Great American Indians" as told to Sandy Johnson & Dan Budnik

    In one of his recent informative online interviews, McGilchrist comments on materialist science when it strays far beyond its appropriate limited domain:
    "Reductionism has always tended to produce an answer that is unsatisfactory for what it’s going to make. A simple down to earth example, if I may give one, is a piece of music. So if you ask somebody who is analytically bent, to work our what a piece of music is doing, well they’ll say, first of all what is a piece of music made of? It’s made of notes. Well, the first question then to answer, what is a note? And a note is a sound like that. Then what does it mean? Nothing. Okay, well the music has another of these notes. What does it mean? Nothing. And after 30,000 notes, I’ve got Mozart’s G minor quintet. It’s just made out of notes, none of which mean anything. So it must be a heap of nothing! And in this process, you have driven out everything that was invisible to your analytic eye, which was the web of connections in which, and only in which, the thing had any meaning.

    The point I think I’m trying to get at is that if you take things apart, you destroy their meaning. And if you think of the Universe as just made up of little bits of stuff that you’ve got down to with your microscope, you can’t see what it makes in aggregate. 
    A simple analogy would be like, what is a motorbike? Oh, I’m going to find out. There’s one in the garage. I’ll take it apart. And several hours later, the other person comes back and says, ‘Okay, what is it?’ ‘Well, it’s got two of these and three of those, and something else, but search me, I have no idea what it is.’ And it doesn’t mean anything, because it’s completely destroyed by the acts of analysis. And the only way in which you could work out what it was, was to get on it and ride it. 
    And life is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, from outside, and understand it. A religious belief is like that. You can’t stand aside from it, and inspect it, and go, ‘Well, it doesn’t add up, according to where I am standing now.’ But it only doesn’t stand up from where you’re standing now because of where you’re standing now. 
    Another example would be like learning to swim by sitting on the bank of a river with a book saying ‘this is how to swim,’ and swearing you’re not going to get into the river until you’ve learned to swim from the book."
    Iain McGilchrist "Your Brain Has 2 Masters — And One Is Leading Us Astray" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ5C11mlTH4 

 

    “When good is done, it contains all good. Although good is formless, when it is done, it attracts more good faster than a magnet attracts iron. Its power is stronger than the strongest wind. All the accumulated karma throughout the earth, mountains, rivers, world and lands cannot obstruct the power of good.”
    Master Eihei Dogen

"Choices in a meditator's life are very simple: 
Do those things that contribute to awareness. 
Refrain from those things that do not." Sujata

“Now is the time, and we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Hopi elders

 

Food and Drink for the Soul

    "Beauty is that, in the presence of which, we feel more alive."      John O'Donohue

 

    "Beauty isn’t all about just nice loveliness, like. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace & elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life. 

    ... the beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person. And it’s amazing, you know? Here am I, sitting in front of you now, looking at your face, you’re looking at mine, and yet neither of us have ever seen our own faces, and that in some way, thought is the face that we put on the meaning that we feel and that we struggle with, and that the world is always larger and more intense and stranger than our best thought will ever reach. And that’s the mystery of poetry, is poetry tries to draw alongside the mystery as it’s emerging and somehow bring it into presence and into birth. 

 

    ... there are individuals holding out on frontlines, holding the humane tissue alive in areas of ultimate barbarity, where things are visible that the human eye should never see. And they’re able to sustain it because there is in them some kind of sense of beauty that knows the horizon that we are really called to in some way. 

    I love Pascal’s phrase that you should always keep something beautiful in your mind. And I have often — like in times when it’s been really difficult for me, if you can keep some kind of little contour that you can glimpse sideways at, now and again, you can endure great bleakness. 

    … my old friend Meister Eckhart, the 14th-century German mystic … said, ‘There is a place in the soul that neither time nor space nor any created thing can touch.’ And I really thought that was amazing. And what it means is that your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

    above from John O'Donohue's WONDERFUL interview by Krista Tippet: 

    Audio: https://onbeing.org/starting-points/new-to-on-being-start-here/ (also bottom of this page)

    Transcript: https://onbeing.org/programs/john-odonohue-the-inner-landscape-of-beauty/#transcript

    From a wonderful young, living mystic's interview:
    “I don’t think I believe in evil spirits. I think that the words we’re using are making this binary in a way, or categorical. I believe in energy forces. We all speak of this rise of collective consciousness, but with it, we (((inevitably))) can see (((its shadow))) an incredible influx of hatred, anger & violence manifested at the same time. When you look at the state of things nowadays, it’s fairly clear that the collapse is here. We’re not on the brink of it. It's happening. (((BUT RIGHT NOW, revitalization - the OTHER SIDE of the 'collapse' COIN IS ALSO HAPPENING!!! MORE & MORE of us are AWAKENING to our True Nature, which is loving instead of lost in fear.)))
    The collapse is happening for one very simple reason. This is just the expression of ignorance. And when I mean ignorance, I don’t mean intellectual or philosophical ignorance. I mean to not know who we truly are. I mean to believe in an illusion; to believe in the idea of the self, that leads to the idea of separation – that I am this, and therefore I’m not that. I am me and I’m against you because you and me, we have different beliefs, and so we’re enemies; to the condensation of the self, the belief of the illusion of the separate self is what is causing all of this. 
    When you believe in a self, you believe in a country, you believe in an idea, you believe in a social status, you believe in a certain amount of power, in money, in a job that makes you better or not better than anybody. So it’s the story of the self that people believe in and they believe that to be the truth of who they are. And they believe that this is the reality they live and experience, and this belief of separation has caused an incredible amount of fear and suffering. 
    We’re just using words, and language is going to fail us inevitably, because language (((being inherently dualistic)))) separates. Tall only exists because short exists. Narrow only exists because wide exists, or black and white. We create oppositions through words, because we categorize, we label, because we have to. That’s what we found to understand and experience reality. 
    And so we say fear, but fear is just the same way that darkness doesn’t exist. Darkness is a word that means nothing. Darkness is just the absence of light. There’s light and there’s no light. Show me darkness. No. You can just show me the sun disappearing, ebbing and flowing and setting below the surface of the horizon. There’s light and there’s no light. And for the no light part, we created a word, and we called it darkness. 
    And so it’s the same with fear. Fear is just no love. There’s love and there’s no love. And the no love we turned it into fear. But love is what we’re made of. That’s the fabric of who we are. It’s pure love, because pure love is consciousness. And so there’s love and there’s the absence of it. In the absence of it, we made into a word. And that word – fear – has governed much of our understanding, behavioural patterns, and experiences of reality.”
     above from the INSPIRING (1hr 47min) Interview with House of Dragons Actor Emeline Lambert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOTefUSwj4w .
    MORE & MORE WONDERFUL PEOPLE like Emeline above, and untold numbers of less well-known people, like many of the readers of these blogs, are bringing MORE & MORE REVITALIZING LIGHT & HOPE into the dark corners of our world. 

 

Beannacht / Blessing
John O’Donohue

For Josie, my mother

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

 

John O'Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty

 

Not Separate!

    "There is something in all of us that seeks the spiritual … 

     The spiritual is inclusive. It is the deepest sense of belonging & participation. We all participate in the spiritual at all times, whether we know it or not. There’s no place to go to be separated from the spiritual, so perhaps one might say that the spiritual is that realm of human experience which religion attempts to connect us to through dogma & practice. 

    Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes it fails. Religion is a bridge to the spiritual — but the spiritual lies beyond religion. Unfortunately, in seeking the spiritual we may become attached to the bridge rather than crossing over it."      Rachel Naomi Ramen MD

 

    More and more brave, intelligent adults are freeing themself from religious & secular orthodoxies, evolving & awakening into their authentic, mature, spiritually-independent Self. 

     “We write here in conversation with Rilke and each other, opening to a ‘wiser way’ than is more generally offered in our hectic, demanding societies, where individuality is so highly praised and our inevitable interconnectedness is so poorly understood. It might well enable you to ground your life in what the ancients knew as the ‘transcendentals’: ‘the true, the good, and the beautiful.’ Those are the collective attributes we find singly and learn to live socially. 
     Rilke suggests in one of his early poems that ‘you are the future.’ You! 
     Is it the ‘you’ of the divine one Rilke often addressed simply as ‘Lord’ but equally call ‘neighbor’ or ‘friend’? Is it the ‘you’ of the poet himself? Or the ‘you’ of the reader? Rilke refused, characteristically, to define whom he is addressing. For in the deepest things in life, the truest things of the heart, the most enduring things of the soul, these three are not different. Not distinct. Not separable. 
    You are the future.”
     Mark S. Burrows, Stephanie Dowrick. “You are the Future. Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke.” Monkfish, 2024.

    It's fascinating to frequently hear a wide variety of spiritual experiences in which the experiencers are completely surprised by their experience, that it was nothing at all what they expected. Indeed one may be at a complete loss to identify the source of a powerful, authoritative voice, that neither quite sounded as if it were God, nor themself. 
    And many decades later, the awe remains ... and probably there is no difference, no distinction, no separation between Self and God.

    We CAN pull up our big adult spiritual pants and
stop externalizing the Divine!

 

"Every Day, Think As You Wake Up, 
Today I Am Fortunate To Have Woken Up, 
I Am Alive, I Have A Precious Human Life, 
I Am Not Going To Waste It 
I Am Going To Use 
All My Energies To Develop Myself, 
To Expand My Heart Out To Others, 
To Achieve Enlightenment For 
The Benefit Of All Beings, 
I Am Going To Have Kind Thoughts Toward Others... 
I Am Going To Benefit Others
As Much As I Can."

H.H. The Dalai Lama

 

Courtesy of Buddha Doodles  www.buddhadoodles.com

"Houston, we've had a problem"

    I once read that our pace of life is too fast for the marrow of our bones. This, to some of us, is deep, aboriginal wisdom. 
    However, in our materialist society, including & perhaps worst of all in our institutes of higher learning, most are clueless about wisdom, spirituality etc. 
    At the same time, "The one who dies with the most toys wins," though initially meant as a joke, has become most peoples' unconscious guiding principle.

    “Hindu definition of hell: more, faster.” Iain McGilchrist “Approach the Sacred: Offer Gratitude, Dwell in Humility, Speak Truth and Let the Mercy In.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMtnSpjcyA

    Literary scholar, psychiatrist & author Iain McGilchrist and theologian & author Chris Green discuss the problems humanity faces today, foretold in Hermes Trismegistus' ancient poem:

“Nothing will be left to tell of your wisdom 
but old graven stones. 
Men will be weary of life 
and will cease seeing the universe 
as worthy of reverent wonder. 
Spirituality, the greatest of all blessings, 
will be threatened with extinction 
and believed a burden to be scorned. 
The world will no longer be loved 
as an incomparable work of Atun, 
a glorious monument to his primal goodness, 
an instrument of the divine will 
to evoke veneration and praise in the beholder. 
Egypt will be widowed. 
Every sacred voice will be silenced. 
Darkness will be preferred to light. 
No eyes will raise to heaven. 
The pure will be thought insane, 
and the impure will be honored as wise. 
The madmen will be believed brave, 
and the wicked esteemed as good. 
Knowledge of the immortal soul 
will be laughed at and denied. 
No reverent words worthy of heaven 
will be heard or believed.”         Hermes Trismegistus

Iain McGilchrist: 

      "I believe that we are engaged in committing suicide: intellectual suicide, moral suicide and physical suicide. If there is anything as important as stopping us poisoning our seas and destroying our forests, it is stopping us poisoning our minds and destroying our souls. 
    Our dominant value – sometimes I fear our only value – has, very clearly, become that of power. This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d’être of which is to control and manipulate the world. 
    But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d’être of our – more intelligent, in every sense – right hemisphere.
    Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous – a peremptory – master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us – or should be important, if we really know what we are about. 
    Even if we could, by some miracle, reverse the course on which we are set, unless we change our way of thinking, of being in the world – the way that is destroying us as we speak – it would all be in vain. This is why I have written the last long book I will ever write: 'The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World.'"            Iain McGilchrist https://channelmcgilchrist.com/home/

 

Chris Green: 

“I think we have to face two facts for sure. One is, in the tens of thousands of years that human beings have been on this planet, we’ve accumulated wisdom for living a certain way. And over the last two or three generations in our ‘developed world’ we’ve broken with that wisdom. For good or bad, we’ve discarded much of that wisdom. And we don’t have any wisdom to replace it. So even if you think this is progress, even if you think this is where we should go, you have to at least admit that we’re going forth into a future that we think is going to be better, but we don’t have accumulated wisdom to work with. And no matter what else you think, you have to reckon with that. What are you going to do with parenting, marriage, work, prayer, politics, if you can’t rely on accumulated wisdom? Where is that going to come from? You’ve got to reckon with that. 
    The other is, and they’re related of course, is we’ve also broken with the rhythms of Nature. So again, what we’ve accumulated over these generations of human beings is a way of living in harmony with Nature. We no longer do. So we’re out of rhythm with Nature – quite literally – and we’re breaking with received tradition. So what are we going to do then? 
    Even if in your wildest fantasies about human progress, you want to say, ‘We’re going to make a better, more human future,’ how are you going to do it, if you’re out of rhythm with Nature and you’ve broken with received tradition? I think all of us can get to those questions, no matter what our politics.”

Iain McGilchrist: 

“And I’d add, ‘Broken with God,’ and I’m sure you’d agree with me. And just incidentally, the three things that the psychology literature shows are most important for people are 
    1) the sense of fellow feeling with other human beings with whom they share values. Now those values probably come from a tradition, from a culture. And they can trust them because they know how they think and they can share their meals, their houses. They can call on one another for help, and they respect one another. That is number 1. 
    2) Closeness to Nature – not ‘the environment’ which is some technical term for something that surrounds us. But Nature is inside us and we are in Nature, and we come from it, and we go back to it. 
    3) And this is actually the most powerful effect on physical as well as mental and spiritual health, is the connection with something sacred or Divine in your life. If you don’t have that, the evidence shows that we suffer in every respect.

So those things are, if you like, the wisdom. They were part of the tradition that knew this. Now people nowadays, misunderstand a culture and misunderstand a tradition.

To deal with culture first. We think it’s okay that we just destroy a culture. The industrial revolution started this, because it took people who had been living in a certain village perhaps with their ancestors for a thousand years, and they knew that place, and their ancestors were buried in the churchyard and all the rest. And they took them into a city, and put them in inhuman circumstances in a factory, and that helped them to lose their culture, unless they clung to the church. So it did have the effect that a lot of these people sort of thought that the church is the thing that can save us. 
    But their culture is also very important. And we now think that it’s perfectly okay to have something called ‘multiculture.’ Well there isn’t. What there is is kindness and compassion between people in a community, but if you choose to live in a certain community, you must become part of that community. You can’t just say, ‘Well, we’re going to be an indigestible lump.’ If you want to be an indigestible lump, then I’m sorry. My answer is don’t do that here. You have to do that somewhere where you can be digestible. All these things I’m saying are things you’re not allowed to say anymore. But I do think they’re right. And I’m not being critical of other groups in our society. I think they contribute a lot and some of them have great virtues of course. It’s not about good and bad. It’s about a culture needs to thrive, and it can only do so if it is cohesive. So that’s the first thing." ****
    **** Chris Green (later) tried to clarify: “… this is what I hear in you, if we care about equality, then we have to think rightly about difference. If we care about the stranger, and we care about making room for those who have come to us in desperation, we have to think about stability in culture. I will sometimes say to my friends, my students, those I’m pastoring, that in order to actually show hospitality, you have to have a home. You have to have a place that’s yours, that has a certain rhythm, that has walls and doors, doors that lock. You have your way of living that you can then open up to those who are (newcomers). But hospitality is not possible if you have no doors, no windows, no walls, no locks. If you don’t have a life that’s yours, there’s nothing to invite people into. 
    So I think if we could think oppositionally a little bit, if we would just start to think like that, we would realize precisely because we think all human being are made in the image of God and should be given equal rights and goods, precisely because we care about that full equality, we have to be able to rightly name and honor difference, and so on down the line. If we can just shift the terms of the conversation. And if we can’t shift the terms of the conversation, we’re going to keep having rage battles in which we’re denouncing each other in meaner and meaner ways. But somehow we’ve got to shift the mode of our conversation. I think oppositional thinking is a way to do that.” 

 

Iain McGilchrist continued: "People think, ‘Oh, we can’t be dealing with culture – that’s the past.’ But hang on. We are the descendants of literally millions and millions of years of history. We can’t just suddenly in three generations throw all that away. The history is there in us in any case, even if we don’t think about the valuable cultures that we have grown and brought into being over the last couple of thousand years. 
    But the other one is tradition. Tradition is a living, flowing, changing thing. It is not a moribund, ossified, never-to-be-changed anything. So a tradition is what enables you to change. Without a tradition, you make big mistakes. You say, ‘Oh, we’re going to break with everything in the past and we’re going to say it was all wrong, and we’re going to destroy it.’ And then you’re going to be faced with, ‘Where are you going to find it all?’ You think you’re going to re-invent thousands of years of wisdom, your puny little self in Manchester in 2025? No, you’re not. It’s a recipe for suicide to not learn from the distillation of the wisdom of the past. 
    Now that doesn’t mean that nothing can change. It means the opposite. It means that things now have a steady ground on which they can change. (((**** Echoes what Chris Green was pointing to re: the host needing to feel grounded, 'at home' before being able to host to newcomers, who always feel stressed / 'displaced' even when simply moving across the street.))) And if you look back over the last couple of thousand years of Western history, as I have done and have written about, what you see is that societies change very much in their ways of thinking, their priorities, and so forth. But they didn’t have this let’s rip up tradition attitude, at least not mainly. 
    Until some of the reformers had it I’m afraid, and that was a problem I think for a while. And then, one of the children of the enlightenment has been (the notion) that the past has no relevance, because the only thing that matters is logic. But I’m afraid logic will leave you barren when it comes to all the important things like love, the awesome nature of the natural world, the beauty of art, of music, of architecture, of myth, of narrative … These are the ways in which the great truths can be conveyed. 
    Myth has come to mean an untruth. But actually in its origin, it meant the big truths in the classical Greek era ‘mythos’ was the only way in which the big truths could be conveyed, because they can’t be construed in everyday language – the kind of language that’s suited to making a dishwasher manual. Partly because of course things are necessarily dipolar. Myth brings together opposites; confounds our everyday language. And therefore a story will bring this to life for you.

But ‘logos,’ from which we get logic, was thought the petty kind of understanding, that a lawyer would use in court – ‘No he owes you 30 shekels, and you owe him …’ whatever. Logos is fine for that. But for understanding the big truths, we need something else. 
    It just reminds me that Neils Bohr, who after all is considered the father of quantum physics said, ‘The opposite of a great truth is another great truth.’ This is obviously not true at the trivial level. I often say, ‘I either did have milk in my coffee this morning or I didn’t.’ I’m not suggesting that there are two ways about it.

But when it comes to the really big issues that matter, that give meaning to life, purpose to it, direction to it, these are areas in which the thing and its opposite have to be negotiated. And the best way that this can be done is in poetry, narrative, myth and in ritual.”

Chris Green: 

“And all of those are, in part, ways of creating the room where things can emerge."

    Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Chris E W Green “Approach the Sacred: Offer Gratitude, Dwell in Humility, Speak Truth and Let the Mercy In.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMtnSpjcyA 

 

    “… people who have a deep conviction and belief in a transcendent reality are better able to disconnect from the idea that the body and its ails are ‘all there is.’ 
    By connecting to a higher power – however one experiences this or chooses to define it – we bring forth our inner sense of innate wholeness. We are able to see ourselves as spiritually perfect, even when suffering ill health. This promotes our ability to reconnect with our implicate patterns of health.” 
    M.J. Abadie. “Healing, Mind, Body, Spirit.” Adams Media Corp, 1997.

    

The EXCELLENT FULL interview from which the above was quoted:

 

Hope, Courage, Patience, Perseverance

    "I believe that there’s an intelligence, a spiritual power that I don’t understand. I call it God because I don’t know what else to call this great spiritual power. It gives me strength. 
    I’ve also had amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human. Your humanness goes away, and you’re part of that natural world. It’s the most amazing and wonderful and beautiful feeling .....
    Traditional faith will have you believe in a loving God, and when I look at what’s happening on the planet, I think if there is a God like that, is he playing with us? Are we living in some great experiment? How can you believe in a loving God when you see the horrors that are perpetrated against nature, against animals, against each other? I sometimes think it is like an experiment which has culminated in this strange, confused creature that is human beings, and we seem to be lost. Who are we? What are we? Why are we here? I don’t know what the meaning of life is. 
    The meaning of my life is to give people hope because without hope you give up."  
    Jane Goodall PhD 1934-2025 

    There's a lot to unpack in Jane Goodall's heart-felt words. So what does she mean by "amazing times alone in nature when for a moment you forget you’re human"? 
    I understand that momentarily forgetting you're human refers to going beyond or deeper than your surface identity of name, address, history, likes / dislikes, virtues / neuroses etc, and opening up to / remembering our primal intimate Oneness & Source.      

    Goodall clearly contrasts what many of us see as human civilization blindly rushing towards self-destruction, with her sense that there is still hope, because human beings are also capable of experiencing, nurturing & sharing awe, wonder, & beauty. 

    Iain McGilchrist has been clearly explaining how human society's current tendency is "left-hemisphere-dominant" - seeing the world in a very pragmatic, abstract, detached, transactional manner: seeing only lumber when looking at a great forest, seeing only mining opportunities when looking at a majestic mountain, seeing only harvesting of fish, oil & natural gas when looking at the great oceans - focused only what they can quickly grab for short-term gain for themselves. Some, much like the tobacco industry a few decades ago, flatly deny that this way of seeing is "perpetrating horrors against nature, against animals, against each other." Many CEOs, populist politicians / dictators, billionaires, etc CAN BE clever, AND YET display no evidence at all of wisdom. 

    From a neuroscience perspective, McGilchrist would say that we are able to see things in balanced way when the left-hemisphere's exclusive emphasis on grabbing, controlling & surviving is not running the whole show. One way to facilitate this balanced, healthy, holistic perspective is being alone (and at peace) in nature. Then we more easily appreciate the right-hemisphere's way of seeing the world: appreciating our intimate inter-connectedness with everyone & everything, love, beauty, truth, the arts, mystery, spirituality, meaning, metaphor, humor, paradox, etc - AS WELL AS - the practical, limited role of the left-hemisphere. To have a clearer understanding of these two, ideally complementary ways of seeing and being in the world, I highly recommend one of McGilchrist's excellent interviews, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuqz0MO9mX0

    To paraphrase Einstein, our (left-hemisphere dominant) way of seeing / level consciousness that got us into this dire mess CANNOT possibly lift us out of it, into a better future. Our exclusive left-hemisphere ways: estranged, adversarial relationship with our own hearts, each other & Nature is what's so painfully unnatural & unsustainable. 
    Chronic fear, anxiety & anger has for too long, been drowning out our patience, wisdom & kindness. We desperately need to cultivate a FAR wiser balance.

    So can we gain some freedom from chronic fear & anxiety - when "being well-adjusted to a toxic situation is no measure of health"? 
    Well, we know that our executive function is easily shut down when we're stressed - ie stress tends to impair good judgment. 
    We also know that many are able to operate under high-stress life-or-death situations with amazing calm & competence: fire-fighters, police officers, paramedics, surgeons, psychiatrists, air traffic controllers, pilots, military personnel, martial artists, etc. 

    Common knowledge would incorrectly tell us that our level of stress is directly proportional to the degree to which we lack total control of our present situation. 
    Actually, our level of stress is mostly based on catastrophizing ie anxiously, vividly imagining the worst possible future outcome, which very rarely if ever materializes and / or being stuck re-living the past.
    The secret of the "grace under pressure" exemplified by fire-fighters etc is staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. Clearly, knowledge, training & practice in knowing what to do in challenging present situations is a basic necessity ALONG WITH knowing how to remain present, focused & grounded ie Mindful.

    Mindfulness training IS PRACTICING staying in the reality of the present moment and responding appropriately. It's best started under stress-free conditions eg being peacefully alone in nature, or in your own home away from distractions. Start by sitting, standing or lying down and remaining still, for a set period of time eg just 5 minutes at first, with eyes closed, and just quietly observe what goes on, mainly inside of you. 

    "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."  Blaise Pascal, French philosopher

     With patience, a bit of courage, and a lot of perseverance, a sustained regular practice will result in you being able to remain surprisingly calm, grounded & wisely responsive (rather than impulsively reactive in a way that everyone will later regret) to even the most serious challenges. You will also learn humility & empathy for yourself & others, because you will remain perfectly imperfect. Interestingly & a bit annoyingly, after decades of practice, you too might find major challenges surprisingly easy to accept, while small, meaningless events might still provoke you briefly. 

    So this is a life-long practice, with continual growth in wisdom, and less & less sabotaging interference by neuroses & traumas. Your quality of life, and the quality of life of those around you, will definitely progressively improve well beyond your current understanding.

“We are not isolated individuals. 

We are cells in the body of humanity, and what we do to one another we do to ourselves. 

The new story is one of interdependence, shared purpose, and sacred relationship with all Life.” 
Nancy B. Roof PhD 1929-2025

 

Another World is Possible www.kosmosjournal.org