Good Life Project - Mark Nepo: More Together Than Alone.

Episode Date: November 27, 2018

Mark Nepo (http://marknepo.com/) has been immersed in a path of spiritual inquiry for more than forty years. He is the author of twenty books, including the #1 New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening and his newest book, More Together Than Alone (https://amzn.to/2AFBGgm).His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. In 2014, Mark traveled the country with Oprah Winfrey on her sold-out The Life You Want Tour and has appeared several times on her Super Soul Sunday program.In this conversation we catch up with Mark (he's been a guest twice before) and dive into his decades-long inquiry around how we are wired to live in community, what happens when the bonds that connect us fail and how to rediscover community at a time when we seem more divided than ever.Want more of Mark Nepo? You can listen here to our 2015 conversation (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/mark-nepo/) and our 2016 conversation (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/mark-nepo-2/).---------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

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And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So my guest today, Mark Nepo, has been immersed in a path of spiritual inquiry for more than 40 years. He's the author of 20 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller, The Book of Awakening, and his newest book, More Together Than Alone. His books have actually been translated into more than 20 languages. In 2014, Mark actually traveled the country with Oprah Winfrey on her Sold Out The Life You Want tour, and has appeared several times actually on her Super Soul Sunday program. In this conversation today, we catch up with Mark. He's actually been

a guest twice before, and we dive into his decades-long inquiry around how we're wired to live in community, what happens when the bonds that connect us fail, and how to rediscover community at a time when we seem more divided than ever before. It really kind of matches the title of his newest book, More Together Than Alone. This is the moment where we need to deepen into how do we actually make this happen? So really excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. It's so good to be hanging out. I feel like every couple of years we touch base.

Yeah. We check in, you and I are in sort of different moments, different explorations. But I think what's kind of interesting, and for those who are tuning in for the first time, Mark and I have sat down a couple of times before on earlier podcasts, and we'll certainly reference those in the show notes so you can kind of get the backstory. This conversation, I think, is really, it's important, it's timely. And you have been, your 20th book is as 20th, right? Yes, I can't believe we're even saying that. I mean, can we just talk about that for a second, actually?

Sure. And you know, from my work, I mean, I'm a longtime cancer survivor, 31 years, and I'm 67 now. And so just being here, you know, 20, I never, that's beyond, if you ever asked me 10 years ago or 15, what my dream was, I, this is beyond anything I ever dreamt. So I just feel every day blessed to be here and to be like a fish that's found its current, you know? So I am just, I think that's one of the things that human beings, we're so complex and yet at the same time so gifted

that we struggle to find what's our element. And if we can find that and serve it and let it be our teacher, then everything kind of unfolds. So for me, actually, that I've been so prolific has honestly come because years ago I learned to get out of the way. I mean, I write about what I need to know, not what I know. If I only wrote about what I knew, I would have written very little.

So it's the way, and I share that because it's the introspective process for everyone. For me, it just happens to be around expression, around writing is the trail. But writing is really listening and taking notes, not intending or bending material to our will. That's a really interesting way of looking at it because it really honors and exalts the process of seeing, process of starting from a place of openness and emptiness to a certain extent and owning the fact that I have a question.

And yes, you know, maybe you devote yourself to the craft side of a form of expression. That's great. But there's something that's underneath that, that has to feel... Well, yeah. I think it was Ruskin who said that a person isn't shaped by what they create, but by how they are created, by the toil they put in it. And so I think that we are all... I mean, that's the paradox. We are all driven to create, build, repair, do things. And that's all wonderful. But we're really being created by our involvement in this thing called life.

And sometimes we forget and think that we're controlling things or we're participating. And we get smacked down pretty quickly when we go too far down that road. Both of us speaking from personal experience, I'm sure all of our listeners as well. The control thing though, I mean, it is such a sustained impulse. And I wonder if in some way that is sort of the surface level manifestation of a desire for permanence, a desire to be immortal on some level. Well, and a desire to feel like, you know, we have, and this kind of dovetails as we start to get into where we are culturally and globally right now, I think, and the work

that I've been doing in this new book is that, you know, we have a very unhealthy relationship with the unknown. We're taught, and so that, you know, for instance, you know, when I was young, I would turn on the TV and there would be the weather report. Now you turn on and it says storm watch. Well, the last I knew storm was one form of weather. And I think this is because we as a global culture, transcending national boundaries, we have become addicted to the noise of things falling apart. Everything comes together and falls apart at the same time. And all the traditions speak about it, but one way that I like that's so clear is the Hindu cosmology, the Hindu trinity. In Christianity, there's a trinity. Well, in Hindu cosmology, there's a trinity between Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So Brahma can be seen simply as life force

that's not in form. It's like air that's not yet in our lungs. And then Vishnu is the life of forms all that that eternal unformed spirit creative energy life force whatever you want to call it atman you know whatever you want to call it name you give to it that takes form as the guitar on your wall or the microphone or you or me or the glass of water. And by nature, all of that life force always outlives its container. Now that container might be a lifetime for us. It might be for a stone a couple of hundred years. It might be for a tree, if it's a redwood, three, four hundred years or more, or for this glass if we break it tomorrow. But the Brahma, the life force, always outlives its form.

And then it reenters Shiva, which is the transformer, unless you're being transformed and we like to call it the destroyer. So where that life force that never dies goes back to enter other forms. So the question has always been, what kind of steward will we be for the portion of life force we are privileged to carry in this container that is us while we're here? You know, so things are always coming together. Things are always falling apart. But we have this addiction, obsession with the noise of things falling apart. So that's in the foreground.

So I don't know that we need a good news station. We need a whole, W-H-O-L-E, news station because the resilience, the resource of life is always the wholeness of it. And things when they come together are quieter and they require us to listen more. So this fuels the life of fear that we're addicted to the noise of things falling apart. Yeah, I completely agree. It's interesting sort of the model of that trinity and how it does appear in different theologies, different spiritual traditions over, you know, like different places on the planet in many thousands of years. The idea of an addiction to the destructive side of life, which is a natural energy that is always there, but, you know, as you said, counterbalanced by this also prevailing creative energy and sustaining energy. So this isn't new. I mean, these processes have been with us time immemorial, which makes me really curious. If we are,

quote, addicted to this destructive element, to hearing about it, to news about it, to focusing on it, to giving our attention to it now. Why more so? Well, let me not assume that. Do you feel like it's more so now than it has always been? And if so, why? Well, and first off, as we dive in, let me just also say that I'm just guessing. I don't have any answers. We're all guessing. And I'm just as troubled by the time we live in and trying to contribute in any way I can to help figure out what our next steps are. So I think it is maybe more acute, and I think this is because one reason or one way of thinking about it is because if we don't meet the outer world with an inner life, it doesn't mean we have to have things figured out. But that we're not involved in the inner coming out as the outer comes in, then existence will crush us. Not because existence is evil, but be the way that water will fill any empty hole because of gravity.

Existence will just fill us in. So, you know, there's a counterbalance there where we need to meet inner with outer and outer with inner. And so when we're dormant, when we're quiet, when we're reacting to life rather than participating in life, the characteristics of the outer world take over so for instance technology which i love there's nothing wrong with technology they're inert instruments look at how we're using them right now it's fabulous but if i'm if i don't have an inner life that is alive that i'm committed to then by default let's for this instance the characteristics of technology then become my default values.

Then all of a sudden, what does that mean? That means I'm never in the same, I'm never where I am. I'm always split. I'm always racing. And so one of the things that happens, I think, you know, we have now 24-7 news. We have it on so many stations. And when things happen, like, you know, back in 9-11, you know, I remember all of us, I remember seeing that plane go into those towers a hundred times. Well, I've since come to understand, you know, that's valuable around the globe so that a hundred different people can see it and we're all informed. But I don't need to see it a hundred times. I just need to see it and take it in with my heart once. So what does that mean? That means that our inner responsibility as a modern global

citizen is not to be seduced into watching that a hundred times, whatever it is, even if it's the bomb scares that happened in the last 24 hours around the country, whatever it is, even if it's the bomb scares that happened in the last 24 hours around the country. But it's to take it in with our heart. It's just like no one can comprehend the Holocaust, that many deaths, that much atrocity, and so many novels and amazing novels and the most successful treatments, fictionally or in a documentary sense to me of incomprehensible periods like that is when they present to you as a reader, viewer, citizen of the world, give you a chance to take it in your heart just once. And then your heart can say, I can't comprehend multiplying that, but just try to feel it. You know, Martin Buber said, the world is incomprehensible, but it is embraceable. And so our job, how do we counter the rapidity and endlessness of technology?

It's not to blame the technology, it's what do we do with it? So I need to take in good things and difficult things once with an open heart, then turn away from that and digest it and say, what does that, now that I'm touched by that, what does that mean? How do I behave? What's the next step? Rather than circling it again and again and again until I just become numb and then actually become part of the destructiveness. It makes a lot of sense. It's interesting, the addiction to destructive news, to destructive ideas, just to experiences. It feels like when you share it that way, that the deeper addiction is actually the addiction to not even

technology, but the addiction to now, you know, we have this intermittent reinforcement that we have been programmed with over years now. We're constantly walking around with devices that we know have something for us to hear, see, do. And it is that literally our brains are wired to just yearn to want to take it out, to wonder what's happening in my pocket. And I wonder if the two-part thing that's going on here is we have that addiction to this impulse. And more recently,

the things that are being pushed into the devices that let us satisfy that Jones in the moment are increasingly the negative, the destructive side of life. Well, I think that's true too. And I think that all of this, and again, while this is all, even as we're talking about it, it seems difficult and incomprehensible. What do we do? Anyone who's listening, what do I do?

Well, there are things that we can do individually one step at a time. And Mother Teresa said that courage is doing small things with love. So, you know, like turning call the virtual coliseum effect of reality TV and that whole world that has happened over the last 25 years, which is really anything but reality. And so, you know, in the Roman times, why I call it the coliseum is in the Roman times, the coliseum was deliberately created to divert and dissipate rebellious energy of the common masses. So that if they would show them gladiators fighting to the death or anything like that, any rebellious energy would be siphoned off through this vicarious Colosseum experience. And then when it came to their own lives, they wouldn't have any energy left to rebel. Well, that was very conscious and insidious by the Roman

aristocracy. I don't think anyone has designed that in the modern sense, but we have an inadvertent creation of the virtual Colosseum where we tune in and we have all, it looks like we're participating. It looks like we're having connection. You get to vote for a singer on The Voice. You get to vote for American Idol. It's the illusion of connection and relationship. But then when you're done, you really haven't had a relationship or any connection.

And so, likewise, it dissipates our longing and energy and we're still alone. So all these things connected. But, you know, there's, and through all the, you know, so with the book that I've, you know, spent the last 13 years kind of retrieving, I've been looking at the lineage of care and interdependence, looking for stories throughout time and cross-culturally of moments when we've worked well together and just the lessons from those stories. And if, you know, there are four kind of at least, but let's bring up four as a way for people who are listening that we can do things, you know, in our own lives that will make a difference. And so these are four eternal resources or types of medicine. Holding, listening, the life of questions and story.

Those have been resilient, indestructible sources of medicine throughout time. And I can say in my own life, while sometimes when I listen, I don't always hear the things I'd like to hear, but I have never listened or been listened to that it didn't heal me in some way. I've never held or been held when it hasn't helped me in some way. I've never pursued the life of questions that hasn't, in a way that hasn't brought me back to being enlivened and story story is medicine you know muriel ruckheiser the wonderful poet of the last century had said in one of her great poems he said say it say it the universe is made of stories not atoms and so we we can personal in our own personal lives, we can contribute

to healing these divides and balancing what's happened more acutely in our modern world by telling stories, by asking questions without looking for an answer. Because questions historically, the lineage of questions, and this is very much in the Jewish tradition, the Talmudic tradition, there's a great Talmudic saying that says, why ruin a perfectly good question with an answer? I love that. But, you know, questions in the outer world of circumstance have answers, like what time we were going to meet today, right, and how to turn this on so it would work.

They have answers. But in the world of how we thrive, in the world that has meaning and presence, through all traditions, those questions don't have answers. Those questions are asked to open up relationship. You ask a question the way you would open a door we'd want to walk through together, or the way you'd throw a log on a fire to keep us warm. So questions, we can truly ask questions and hold and be held. So as we look at this time we're in, and as I mentioned

to you before we started, you know, the timing of this book of mine coming out, More Together Than Alone, is way beyond me. I've been working on it like a little worker bee for years, and I kind of lift my head and it's done, and it just happens to be now. And I'm very grateful for that. But as we look at this time, and as I've been in this historical lens throughout history of humanity. So there's a couple of things that I really want to share, you know. And one is the fact that when you look at humanity as a biological metaphor, as a global body, so when we look at your body or my body,

in a gross, not gross as in ugly, but gross as in a large way of looking at things in a gross way of looking at it the body any body is healthy if it has one more healthy cell than toxic we'd like a lot more but as long as we got one more healthy cell, we're on that healthy side of things. Well, so to humanity, and if you look at humanity as a global body, every soul is a cell in that body. And therefore, everything we do matters now more than ever, because every gesture of kindness, every gesture of compassion and listening and holding might be the gesture that makes humanity have one more healthy soul than ill. So it really matters. And if we, you know, and I'm not convinced yet, we certainly are in a difficult time, but I don't know yet if

we're entering a dark age or not because of this addiction in the foreground of all the noise. Until we listen accurately to all the things coming together, we'll have more of an accurate sense of where we are. But if we are entering what might be a dark time, let's look to another dark time, which was the dark ages in Europe. And there was about 250 to 300 years, only 10% of the European population was literate. 10% kept literacy alive for 300 years for civilization in the West. Actually, the rest of the world was doing quite well, thank you very much. We don't learn that in school, but the rest of the world was actually an enlightened time. But if we are entering a dark time in modernity, then it's incumbent on us to keep the literacy of the heart alive. And by any means.

And that means by being as visible and heart-centered and present as possible. So the other thing that I want to share, which comes from this chapter in the book called The Two Tribes, so as I struggle, like you, like anyone, with what's going on, you know, I'm Jewish, we've talked about that before, and explored our common heritage and experience, and so, you know, how am I supposed to deal with that in this age, there would be Nazis in the streets of America? What are we supposed to do with that? And we've talked about this. I had family that died in the Holocaust two generations back. And so at the same

time, while I'm struggling with that, as I looked at all this research, I tried to take it back and say, well, what are the patterns throughout humanity and through history? And there have always been like swells in the ocean, crests when we have come together for long periods of time, decades, centuries, and swells when we've pushed each other away. Come together, pushed each other away. And if we go back far enough, I tried to imagine the first time one human being came upon another in cave times, prehistoric times, when they didn't know there was someone else. Imagine someone comes to the mouth of a cave, they look in, they see each other, who are you? What's going on here? And I imagine that the one in the cave looked out at his other and said, you're different, go away.

And that that was the beginning of the go-away tribe. And depending on the level of fear that dominates our being, we've had periods in history where people from the go-away tribe have said, you know, I can't trust you'll go away, so I'm going to put you where I can watch you. I'll put you in a refugee center. I'll put you in a camp. I'll put you on a reservation or in a ghetto. And when we've had the fear of go away, you're different, be malignant, we've had these horrific periods of genocide where the people who are overcome and dominated by that way of thinking, of fear-driven thinking, say, you know, I can't even trust you'll be where I'll put you. I need to make you go away. But if we go back to the

mouth of that cave and the other sees his counterpart and says, oh, you're different, come teach me. And that was the beginning of the come teach me tribe. Oh my God, thank God we're not the same. Teach me what I don't know. We will be more together than alone. Plato was a great member of the Come Teach Me tribe, and he said we are born whole, W-H-O-L-E, but we need each other to be complete. All the spiritual traditions speak about this.

In Judaism, God is an indwelling presence, only manifest through relationship. In Christianity, God is an indwelling presence, only manifest through relationship. In Christianity, where there are two or more gathered, then the Holy Spirit appears. And there's this beautiful, in Chinese mythology, there's this wonderful mythic creature, a qiyin. See, H-I-E-N. It's a bird that has one wing and one eye and its sole journey in life is to find another qiyan so that together they can fly and see and so the catch through all this is that we belong to both tribes and any day i'm speaking to you as a committed member to the come

teach me tribe but depending on what happens to me when I leave here I could wake up tomorrow overcome by fear and switch tribes and then I need you to remind me this is our obligation to each other and and for this, we move to a teacher in nature about community, which is the Aspen Grove. Now, aspens are very unique trees because the groves can be hundreds of square miles. I mean, thousands of trees. And I was first in one just outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. And, you know, above ground, they're all individual trees, but what makes them so unique is that underground,

they share one root system, and therefore they are one of the largest single living organisms on Earth. Well, it's a perfect metaphor for community, because beyond altruism and kindness and being a good person, we need to care about each other's roots. Because while we're separate, we're walking around like individual trees. If my roots are diseased, you need to care about it. Because they're your roots too. How, in your experience, if we take this metaphor of the aspens, where above the ground, they all appear

as individual trees, even though they may be clustered in an area. They seem like they're different, they're individual, but below they're all connected. If we extend that metaphor to humanity and assume that we are in fact all part of this one thing, but on the surface, we all, not all of us, but many times, and we see different people as other, as disconnected from us. And as you mentioned, on any given day, any person can swing from one side to the other, given context. What in your experience is the practice, the journey, the exercise that if somebody is listening to this and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, nice metaphor, Mark, but like I got to live in the real world. And I'm sorry, but I just don't buy the fact that we're all one, that we are all that intimately

connected. So, you know, there are scarce resources in my life. If I don't get, you know, somebody else is going to take what I need. And, you know, therefore I need to treat myself in one way and let them take care of themselves. How do we get somebody out of that? Well, the only thing that gets someone out of that kind of isolated thinking is great love or great suffering. And that has happened throughout history. Throughout history, that argument has happened where, so one of the things, patterns in all the stories,

through all the cultures that I researched all these years, there is an insight that is common to all of them, that where fear makes us think that self-interest will protect us, love and suffering affirm that we're more together than alone. And there is nothing, you know, I often feel that people, I mean, suffering is like physics, it's like gravity. I'm not advocating it, I'm describing it. And it's been throughout history, all the traditions. Buddhism speaks so deeply about this.

And so, you know, suffering is what opens compassion. Suffering is what says my, and this is why, you know, in modern times, it's been proven through studies that the people who give the most philanthropically are people who don't have anything because they know what it's like not to have anything. You know, when I was young and I saw an old woman who had a bad back going so incredibly slow in the grocery line, oh, I'd feel bad for her and then I'd get impatient. Well, you know, after tweaking my own back years later through sports or something, you know, didn't have a chronic back, but I knew what that was like. Now, when I see someone like that, I go help them carry their groceries.

So there's nothing except the humility of suffering and being loved that break us of the illusion of self-interest. And again, this takes quiet courage and the risk to be wholehearted and not to hide from our compassion. You know, it's interesting, I learned in here, you know, there are words that have been so fragmented or eroded through time that are very telling here. So the word idiot, the word idiot doesn't mean stupid. The word idiot was a sorrowful condition, not a pejorative one. The word idiot comes from the Greek, idios, and it means someone who has collapsed upon themselves, someone who is so isolated from others,

they have collapsed upon themselves. So the village idiot was someone who was in isolation, alone, no relationship. And I think we live in a world where we have collapsed upon ourselves. And we need, you know, and this is why, you know, from my cancer experience, and maybe this is years ago what drove me to be so interested in this moment of community. Because I think back then I was thrown in to my first experience of what we're talking about. I was in my 30s and all of a sudden I'm in waiting rooms and treatment rooms with strangers. And forget all the ways of, oh, self-interest and etiquette and what's proper to be polite.

All of a sudden you're there and you go, hi, how are you doing? Not good. I'm afraid, me too. I mean, some of the people I was closest to were people I don't even know their last names or what they did for a living. But that's because all of a sudden we were on the raft of life

and it made everything very direct and simple. And I think this is the humility that happens. And interestingly, to go back out, and I think in this conversation, it helps to go large and small, large and individual. So let's back up a little bit. And this goes back to the 1800s, mid-1800s with Karl Marx. Now, Karl Marx has been much maligned when it was, you know, he was actually quite a diagnostician of modern

society. Incredibly insightful, brilliant. You know, when other people tried to actually, you know, execute and manifest his ideas, it didn't work. But he himself, so Lenin and Stalin and all these people who just were awful in what they did when they used Marxism and tried to turn it into, well, just tried to make it work and it didn't work. But his original looking at the world, modern world after the industrial revolution, was really quite amazing. He talked about that the mechanization of modern life would make people, would divorce people from their true nature, and they would start to be isolated

because they would lose relationship. That's right on. That's pretty profound. 1844. And he coined the term, he said, you will start to have an alien nation, which will lead to personal alienation. And so he called for the first generation of therapists, which he called alienists. That's very helpful to this day. This is what's led to people collapsing on themselves, people being distanced. And so all of that to say, you know, I was talking with someone in an interview a couple of weeks ago in London, a wonderful young woman who was saying, you know, there's an epidemic of loneliness in the United Kingdom, and I'm a young person. I don't feel, I feel like I'm good at relationship, and you know, you suggest in your book that you gather five people to look at these questions. She said, I don't know if I could, what are we,

and I know, and I said, I recognize what you're saying, and you know, when you need an ambulance, you don't interview drivers. We need to recognize that we're desperate for restorative relationship. And we can't self-select and enforce our collapse onto ourselves through preference. You know, well, I'm not going to, even movies or plays, well, I'm going to read 14 reviews and I don't want to go to something I'm not going to like. Why not? It's live theater. I would relish. I'm happy to go to a bad movie and be able to come out and say it annoyed me.

And so things, again, mechanize things if we don't counter them like Pandora. I'm not criticizing the company Pandora. I'm not criticizing the company Pandora, but the notion, the way it works is very insidious and self-fulfilling. That is, I listen to music and now it only suggests to me music I already like. Well, how am I ever going to hear something I don't know? Yeah, I think that's what's happening with so much of the way that we experience the world these days, too, is we've turned over the job of curating our participation in the human condition, in life, in media, in experiences that we feel like we're moving so fast. We're so overwhelmed. We're so overwhelmed. We're so

stressed. We're already so reactive. So anybody who comes along and can make the job of choosing or not having to choose less burdensome for us. We say yes, but we don't realize what we're losing. Well, this comes back to all the spiritual traditions, whether the meditation traditions or practices offer all these tools, because throughout history, it's more acute now. But it's the same thing. One of the most insidious diversions and distractions and seductions throughout history for humankind is the insidious assumption that life is other than where we are. It's not. There is no there.

There's only here. Yes, I had to travel up the subway from where I was sleeping to be with you. But once we're together, once we're present, it always unfolds to the same moment. And so there's lots of things to do and many places to go and things to care for, but we're not getting anywhere. There's nowhere to go. And I was blessed to learn this from almost dying, not through any wisdom on my part, but from almost dying from cancer there. And, and I think that this is the thing that propels the self-interest. Well, if I can, if I can get over there, you know, it's like when we were kids in, you know, the King of the Hill game. That's a training ground for self-interest. And it really proves like anyone who's played, any kid who's played that, if you look back on it, so the idea for anyone who's listening who hasn't heard of it,

King of the Hill was a kid game where one person get on top of this small dirt hill, any hill, and then everybody tries to knock that person down and take their turn on top of the hill. Well, once you, if you get a moment on top of the hill, you realize it's the most paranoid, lonely place in the entire world. Who wants to be there? Right, you're spending all of your time just trying to hold your ground and defend and rather than just yeah yeah and the truth is what we learn through love and suffering is actually there's room for more than one person up there that was a made-up premise as it is in life the grounds for self-interest are often bogus and not well tested you know one of the great,

and yes, there are things where, you know, there are extreme moments of survival and stories where people are either lost at sea or, and there's only so much food. And yes, so I'm not denying that there are particular moments, but in the 98% range of living, there is more than enough. You know, one of the mythic stories in my family was my grandfather,

who my father and that family grew up in the Depression here in New York, and he was an out-of-work printer, made linotype lines in the old for the world, a telegraph and sun. And so they were out of work like so many people. And my grandfather would bring strangers home to dinner. And my grandmother would take them inside the kitchen in her thick Russian accent. What are you doing? You know, how are we going to feed them? He would kiss her on the cheek and say, break whatever we have in half, it'll be enough. And that's been the history of the world in spite of the legacy of self-interest.

That's the stronger because quieter and counter, I believe, to survival of the fittest is survival of the kindest, and the whole reason I even did this book was to affirm that we're not alone when we feel that. There is a lineage, a strong, irrepressible lineage that we are all a part of throughout history. One of the earliest universities in the Gandhara Empire in 200 BC, which is now in what was Persia, the Pakistan area, Taxila University, 10,000 to 20,000 students, free, cross-cultural.

People were welcome. They taught cross-culturally. They brought people from, students from all over. If you qualified, you went for free. And those who had in the community, in that culture, paid for everyone's.

Students would live 500 with one teacher in a dorm-like situation. They would live together. And it was believed that if you used knowledge for self-interest, it was blasphemous. So there's a long, long tradition. And I would also talk, and this is not in the book, but I've learned this recently, because I think it tells about the purpose of goodness. So I was looking at, you know, Neil deGrasse Tyson, he has a short book out in astrophysics for people in a hurry. Well, I'm not in a hurry, but, you know, and it's not watered down. It's really amazing stuff. And I was reflecting on it. And there was this one little detail that he shared about the beginning of existence that still stayed with me, that really

helped me reflect on it in regard to all this other work around humanity and community. So he said in the very beginning, matter and antimatter were basically eating each other. And the only reason that anything exists is because at one point there were a billion and one photons, which were positive matter, and there were only a billion hadrons, which were negative matter. So because there was one, a billion and one over a billion, that any of this exists. And he said that if the earth had settled in its orbit just a little closer to the sun, all the water would have evaporated. The oceans, there'd be no life. If it had settled a little farther, it would have frozen. There'd be no life. And so here we are by this precarious thing. And as I kept reflecting on that, it occurred to me that this isn't a

snapshot of how we began. This is happening every day. This is re-happening every day. This is how the universe and life sustains itself, by the one gesture. And we're back to the one healthy cell, the one healthy soul, the one photon, human photon, the one act of kindness

that ensures that life keeps going today. And that's why so much of what we do matters in the smallest details. Because you don't know if what you do today is going to be the one photon that keeps the universe going. And there's a very one modern example just from last year at Hurricane Irma. When that came up, within 24 hours, we have an example of this. So the negative energy, the self-interest energy, the go-away tribe energy was that in St. Martin, when that hurricane was approaching and devastating the island, all people were trying to, and the airport was closed.

People were trying to get out. Marriott Hotels sent an ocean liner to pick up their customers. They had 1,800 seats on that ocean liner. They had plenty of empty seats and they would not let anyone on who wasn't a registered Marriott client and left those people. There's your go away. There's your self-interest. There's your hadron. There's your antimatter. Every day it's being acted out. At the same time, within 24 hours, a Delta flight, 431 from New York, coordinated through Florida, was sent to Puerto Rico to get out as many people as possible. They landed at the Puerto Rico airport. As they refueled, they got as many people on board as they could.

They got like 200, 300 people on that plane. Took off. They had 20 minutes where they slivered through the eye of that hurricane. And with the help of the air traffic controllers, we're able to slip out and save all those lives. And there's your photon. There's your lineage. There's your come teach me.

There's your lineage of care. There's your lineage of care. There's that all of our roots are the same. And because of that, the universe keeps going. Yeah, I mean, we saw that here in our city. You brought up 9-11 earlier. You know, both that day and the days that followed. I mean, just all these people with their own watercrafts just helping a mass exodus from the island. And in the days that followed, this horrendous, horrendous experience, there was, I have never in my life been in a place where there was such profound offering of service and fellowship.

It didn't last. It sustained for about six months and then as things started to return to quote normalcy around the city and some level people moved on with their lives it started to fade into the background but it was profound it was i've never experienced something like that in my life and i, the way that you lay it out also, it's really compelling to me because it also speaks to the argument that says, well, who am I?

I'm but one person. But maybe you're the one that tips the scale. Maybe you're the one photon, a billion and one, that keeps life growing, happening, existing. And I think that this is, again, you know, only through our own, I don't advocate suffering, but through our love and suffering, our heart opens. And through our kindness, we experience kinship. It's not by accident that kindness and kinship have the same root. Because one of the rewards for kindness is our intimacy with all things. And that reminds us that there's nowhere to go.

That heaven's right here. And no, it can't last, you know. We bemoan that, oh, it only lasts six months around 9-11 or here and there. But I'm not sure that it's meant just like all forms. A beautiful sunset doesn't last. But these brief human sunspots and these glowing of our best connections, they inform the rest of our time and they matter.

They're the foundational units of existence, of life on earth. And I think that that's the thing is we bemoan that, oh, it's not permanent. Well, nothing's permanent. Just how we navigate by the stars and then we don't see them in the day. So these are periods that we navigate by and find, we find our better angels. One of the things this also speaks to is a sense of agency married with responsibility and, and a notion of choice. There's something that there's a phrase that you actually was, you wrote that actually jotted down because it just really,

I wanted to remember, I'm just flip through my notes because I want to, I want to remember. I'm just going to flip through my notes because I want to read it. You wrote, we're all one gesture from being the cruelty we have suffered or one kindness from helping each other heal in the open. Yeah. Yeah, I believe that. You know, I was just this summer, I was in London just beginning. I was talking from the new book and I had some time just wandering around by myself and probably because I have this lens on of more together than alone I'm I'm open and seeing things and I do believe it takes because it's quieter it takes our looking and our attention it demands that we be present and so I was having a coffee outside of this flat that I was blessed

to use while I was there. And there's double, you know, beautiful British double deck buses are going by. So the bus comes and it leaves the corner where I'm sitting on the corner. And this woman missed the bus and she starts, you know, I missed the bus. And then about 30 feet, 40 feet away as it crossed the corner, the bus stopped. You hear that hiss of the brakes and the door opened. The bus driver saw her in the rearview mirror and waited. And we all know that, you know, that's not going to happen all the time.

But that's not the point. The point is that that bus driver stayed with me my whole trip because he was the quiet teacher of the trip. Because no matter our plans, no matter how hard we try, we're all going to be late at some point. And so life is all about waiting for each other. The kindness of, yeah, for whatever reason you didn't make it but i see you i can wait and you can get on the bus and that state you know in the hindu tradition

there's a term called upa guru which means the teacher that is next to you at that at this moment and that bus driver who i'll never know i didn't see his face he was my upa guru on that trip and i think that's the compassion that is awakened in us that's the come teach me tribe i oh thank god you you know maybe that woman who got on the bus was his upa guru and if he didn't wait he wouldn't have gotten to meet her or see her smile or hear whatever she might have had to say to him. The idea also that, I think we sometimes look at people and we're like, oh, there's a nice person. Oh, there's an evil person. You know, we create the overlay of kindness or evilness or hatred or anger as an identity,

as something that people are rather than something that people choose and wear and can equally choose and let go of. This goes back to the life of questions. And this goes back to the fact of, so this brings up something that I refer to in the book, which is a brilliant, helpful definition. And it's Robert Keegan, who's a developmental psychologist at Harvard. And he defines centrism, egocentrism, ethnocentrism, any kind of self-centered way of looking or being, he defines it as mistaking what is familiar as true.

So when something's comfortable and familiar, we assume it's true and we stop looking for the truth. And what's even more dangerous is by definition then, when we encounter something new, we see it as false because it's unfamiliar i think that explains a lot of what's happening in the discord around the globe today is this centrism this that says oh wait a minute it goes back to the you're different go away you're different go away and the fact is that we need to continually you know all these things are connected, that when we can inhabit a personal practice of being where we are, then we recover wonder. Then I say, oh, I don't know you. Who are you? I think now the largest closeted population in the world are the closet authentics. You know, Kierkegaard said we're all spies for God. And I mean, I didn't know, Kierkegaard said, we're all spies for God. And I mean, I didn't talk to Kierkegaard, but why that touches me is I think that he was saying,

yeah, you know, we go out of our house and we hide. We hide who we really are. And, you know, D.H. Lawrence raised the question in a poem of his called Self-Protection. What's the best self-protection, hiding who you are or being who you are? And I think it's being who you are. And that takes a quiet courage, which we need more than ever right now. So I think that, you know, I know for me, every day when I teach, speak, when I do my things in the world, I feel like being a child two generations down from the Holocaust and being where we are, I need to be more visible every day.

I don't know what that means every day, but I'm very aware of it. My wife and I were just, you know, we went out last night, we took a cab. Middle Eastern cab driver, and he starts talking to us. He starts saying, I don't like black people. And both my wife and I were very uncomfortable. And my wife said, that's enough. We don't want to hear any more of that. And so he was jarred and then he you know called on the phone and started speaking in

arabic to someone else probably saying i've got these difficult people in the cab but the point was that whether awkwardly we couldn't we couldn't stay silent we had to say no that's not okay that's not okay that might've been the one photon yesterday that kept life going, even though we felt like it wasn't adequate and we did it awkwardly and it wasn't, but we did something. We had to be present in some way. And so just as, just as, you know, it doesn't matter. You know, if I say I love you to you, you don't care if I cough it or if I sing it in perfect pitch. So it didn't matter how awkwardly or what the words were. What mattered was that we were present and my wife especially kind of got out there first and I felt, yeah, I admired that. And I said,

okay, this was a messy human moment, but we, we didn't vanish. Yeah, I mean, I think that the idea of centerism like that, which is not like us, is something to be feared or resisted. There's also, I'm going to make up a phrase, easyism. That which is not easy cannot be true. I also, I see increasingly, and I see it in, I see it in the, you know, like the pop culture literature and self-help. And I really reject it because there are a lot of hard things in life that are really true. And there are a lot of things that start easy that will become hard and doesn't make them any less true. No, no. And moments like this are just one example of that in this one particular

way, in a relational way, and rising up and not being silent in a moment. But also to sort of look out into the world and say, if you blend those two things together, that which is not like me is not true, and then that which is not easy is not true, that's not good. No, it's not good because it yields, it's disheartening and it's life draining because being human is being here and being enlivened and engaged and in relationship. And I think there's another thing that's humbly important in our conversation, and that is, for as frustrating as it is, like last night in the cab, we are they. There is no they. So there's part of me that says, well, even to myself, well, no, I'm not like that. That's why it upset me.

And under it all, nobody did this to us. We created this as humanity. And we have been here before. And we can move to a period of enlightenment and coming together as opposed to going away and pushing each other away and being brutal. But we are they. And it's only in holding that that we can inquire into each other. You know, Longfellow said, if we listen to the stories of our enemy's sufferings, they would no longer be our enemies. And sometimes it takes, you know, one of the touching, I think sometimes it takes courage to finish that thought. But one of the touching stories in the book is that World War II, the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania. Kovno was an amazing Renaissance city of high Jewish culture.

Just amazing, the talent in all spheres that were there. The Kovno Ghetto, which was the elder, was Elkanon Elkis, who was the father of a dear friend of mine who passed a few years ago, his son, Joel Elkies, at 102. And Elkanon Elkies, the ghetto was being liquidated and people were being trained to Auschwitz. And they knew that this was coming. They had like a couple of weeks notice from the Gestapo. And so they immediately tried to smuggle out as many kids as possible. At the same time, Elkanon Elkis convened all the musicians in the ghetto.

And they were charged, knowing they were all going to die, to play one last concert for the ghetto, to play Beethoven's Ode to Joy. And they played that. And at the same time they were throwing babies in potato sacks over the ghetto wall and one of those babies and this is another photon story one of those babies that was thrown over the wall that was smuggled out to poland that grew up in Israel was Aron Barak, who's now gone, but grew up to be the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, known for defending Palestinian rights as well as Israeli rights, and was one of the central people to the Camp David agreements and the Oslo Accords. He was one of those babies thrown over that wall.

On one of those gestures, one of those gestures of matter that keeps the universe going. And sees us in others and others in us. Yes, yes. It all comes back to that. It always comes back to that. It always comes back to that. And it feels like the work is always to just continue to revisit that. How can I reconnect with that understanding?

If I feel disconnected from it, if things are happening in my life that are taking me away from it, like what questions can I ask? Well, I mean, you're four things, right? How can I engage with those four things? Well, how can we personalize them? And I think that's the key in all of my teaching and things, which is not, you know, I'm really enacting and trying to enliven and share from all different traditions. What I term as, but it's really, I'm not making anything up new, but I'm just terming it a little differently, is an individual practice of return, is being human beings. For me, I mean, I don't experience a permanent state of grace or enlightenment. I mean, maybe someone like the Dalai Lama isn't a permanent, I'm not saying it's not possible, but that's not been my experience.

And so for me, the spiritual journey has been one of inhabiting a personalized practice of return. When I'm confused, how do I get back to be clear? When I'm numb, how do I get sensitive? When I think we're different, how do I remember we're the same? What do I do personally to recognize, oh, I'm starting to be part of the go-away tribe. Oh, I'm starting to see what's true is familiar. Oh, I'm collapsing upon myself. I'm becoming a Hadron and not a photon. What do I do personally? Because it matters. How do I, and, and again, you know, we talked about it earlier, but

just for, there are many, but, but holding, listening, the life of questions and story, what stories can I ask for that will bring my heart back alive? What stories can I tell that will enable a child to be the Aaron Barak of his generation? I wonder if also part of that is, it's almost like you're conflating some of these, but when you look at a story that's being told to you, that is creating the sense of separateness, questioning, both questioning and then saying, is there another story that can be told about this identical circumstance? Well, and there are a couple examples I use in the book. That's exactly what you're talking about is that, and this falls under

what I like to talk about is that we're more than what is done to us. And there are a couple of great examples, but just let me give you one, this story that I had no idea, and I wonder why I had to wait until my 60s to discover this story and why I wasn't taught it in school. This is the story of an enlightened king in medieval Korea. It's interesting, it just happens to be Korea, given everything that's going on with Korea today. This is Sejong, S-E-J-O-N-G. Now, Sejong was the youngest of three sons, and his father was a ruthless, a terrible king. So terrible that, you know, like Genghis Khan terrible. I mean, that when he was crowned king in medieval Korea, he immediately, after his coronation, had his siblings and his wife's siblings murdered so no one could threaten his power. My God. So we know that in monarchs,

historically, the eldest son is heir to the throne. Well, Sejong had two older brothers. Well, the first thing that we're more than what is done to us is those brothers saw something in their younger brother where they went to their father and said, you know, there's something special about little Sejong. We're going to step aside. We think he should be made king. Who ever heard of such a thing? We're more than what is done to us. And the second amazing thing is that the father listened. Here this amazingly ruthless, paranoid,

probably narcissist king, remind us of anyone today, but here he listened. So he semi-retired and because he didn't want to lose power completely and put his youngest son in charge. So now the amazing story is that Sejong, who had every reason to simply follow the way he was brought up, do things the way they had been done, the first thing he did as this young king was to assemble what he called a hall of worthies. He gathered the best minds in the country. And he said, your job will be that I will give you tasks and you will use your gifts to provide gifts for our people. And it was an agrarian culture.

So the first thing he did was he said, and illiterate. And so he said, I want you to create the first farmers on the neck so our people don't have to reinvent their wisdom every time the winter goes and the spring comes. But the real amazing thing, that's amazing enough, is that language was used as power in medieval Korea and an archaic form of Chinese was used purposely to keep knowledge away from the masses so they would be illiterate and not have the power of knowledge. And he said, he quote, quote, he said, it saddens me that my people can't express their concerns. And so he charged this whole, he said, I want you to create a phonetic language that anyone can learn in two weeks. And they created Hangul, which is the Korean language used today, October 9th, 1446. He gave

it as a gift to the people of Korea and changed the history of those people forever, forever. Today, that day is still celebrated as Sejong Day, but this is an amazing example of we're more than what is done to us. We do not have to follow the patterns that are laid on us or the wounds that are perpetrated against us. We can at any moment, through a courage of heart, be that one photon that turns everything around. I think we need t-shirts as we leave here this is be the photon i want to see that on a billboard somewhere instead of something negative that would be my reminder screensavers around the world i love that this feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well always Always so good to spend time with you and be in conversation.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. As we sit here, if I offer out the phrase, to live a good life, what comes up? I think to live a good life is to allow ourselves to be who we are in relationship. I think one of the challenges of our age is to stay in relationship, not an abusive relationship, not a demanding, but to stay in authentic relationship so that I am, you know, Thomas Merton said, if we truly beheld each other,

we would fall down and worship each other. So that if I truly listen to you, I don't know what I'm gonna say next because I'll be changed by you. And you by me. And then like those mythical qiyan, together we will be able to see and fly. Thank you. No, thank you.

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