Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m so happy to be sitting here with Rick Hanson. Rick, a warm welcome to our podcast here.
Dr. Rick Hanson: Well, thank you, Thomas. I feel that we are friends who talk with each other a few times a year, and each time it’s as real as the last one.
Thomas: That is true. That exactly my experience. Every time we meet, it feels like we just left the cold before and come back no matter how much time has left. And it’s always interesting. So thank you for making the time and I’m sure our listeners will really appreciate the exploration. And I think we both are really interested in bringing the voice of science and the voice of contemplative practice and ancient wisdom traditions together and see how that’s beneficial for the world where we find some kind of agreement between these voices where it seems like there are gaps and how to be with those gaps. And so maybe let’s start with inner transformation or the positive neuroplasticity of change, how we can adapt to new situations. And it seems like growing with the world is a trait that we really need. The world’s changing and we need to change.
And so maybe you can speak a little bit how that’s seen from the side of neuroscience and then maybe also from the side of contemplative practice and how they live in us.
Dr. Hanson: Beautiful. I’ve been reflecting lately about what it was like for each of us when we were born or even what it was like for each of us before being born while still growing inside our mother, and then what it’s like to go through our lives. And there’s this combination, there’s this meeting, much like you and I are having a meeting here, there’s this ongoing meeting of the interior world unfolding in contact with an exterior world unfolding, personal, external, individual, environmental. That’s how it really is. And what we see in the meeting of science and contemplative practice is a similar meeting from what’s called the first person perspective of subjectivity and the third person perspective of science and objectivity, inside out, outside in, and much as the intimacy of our personal life involves that meeting. So too is the meeting of contemplative and scientific. And so for me as a person who’s fascinated by the science and yet most fundamentally is really interested in the pragmatism of what eases suffering and what helps people heal and grow and awaken, it’s wonderful in my own personal practice at least that I offer it to other people to be able to toggle back and forth between the stream of consciousness from the first person inside out perspective and then some knowing from the outside in with more and more scientific understanding of what’s happening from the third person perspective in the underlying physical machinery of the body, particularly through the nervous system that is constructing moment by moment by moment this moment of experience.
I think that the flow of experience has causal independence in that it enlists underlying neural processes to change them based on our flows of thought and feeling and desire to be sure both are co-occurring, mental and neural, Nama and Rupa together are co-occurring. And to me, this gives us tremendous opportunities, tremendous opportunities to know ourselves more deeply, to come home more effectively for our own sake and for that of other people.
Thomas: Wow, that’s beautiful. So you made a lovely gesture with your hand before, the inside out, and that’s what’s happening right now. I’m speaking, so information comes out, but at the same time I’m taking you in. And I’m sure because you have a long-term clinical practice, you saw a similar thing that I see often in our groups or in one-on-one work, how the information of the world cannot fully go in because we learn to protect ourselves through all kinds of processes that flow inward and also the outbound flow of data is kind of limited, reduced, warped, whatever. And I would love you to speak a bit to what that means for us as individuals that we needed to change the incoming data flow because of life circumstances, often painful life circumstances obviously. But what that also means for us as a society when that data flow that is actually available is kind of reduced or changed or whatsoever.
There are many versions of it. Maybe you can speak about your experience of how you see this, how you think about this, maybe also how this looks like from a neuroscientific perspective. Oh,
Dr. Hanson: Beautiful. I think that what you’re bringing up here, which is so intimate and so felt, illustrates the point I was making in that we have two dynamic processes intertwining, interacting with each other, mind and body. And that means that with some understanding, we can use the mind to change the body, which in turn will change the mind. And we can do that in our contemplative practice based on some understanding of how to change the brain for the better, which then in turn will change the mind for the better. So in that context then, I used my mind growing up in a decent family background, but with a lot of unnecessary criticism and control that was invasive and fault finding and kind of relentless from my two loving, decent, and traditional parents. And what I learned to do is I used my mind to create stiffness in my body, to create armor in my body, to create somatic markers and patterns of sensation that were rigid and frozen to keep feelings at bay, to survive, to manage a normal process.
So then when I moved into college at 16 and started opening up more, and this was the ’60s and a wild and crazy time, I had to gradually learn to, as Samuel Bonder puts it, wake down, not just wake up, I had to reclaim my interior. And I then would use my mind to change my body for the better by helping myself to soften a little bit when I was interacting with someone, particularly to soften if I was feeling angry or threatened so that I could be more authentic with my own interior and express it. So you see that fundamental process, and I think that’s so helpful to think in these terms, and I know you’re thinking in these terms. And in our healing journey, and I think many people on the more spiritual path neglect their bodies, and you’ve been a master and a really important advocate for waking down, not just waking up and really, really taking the body into account, patterns of restriction, these little somatic patterns of sensation that anchor the flows of feeling and thought that we’re more aware of, but they’re held in place.
Much like in music, the bass guitar and the drums hold the music in place, even though we mainly focus on the melody and the singers. So okay, I’ll just stop right there. How do you feel about what I’m saying?
Thomas: Yeah, no, I love the analogy with the bass guitar and the drums, how it holds the music in place. And I think that’s a beautiful… I’m happy you’re speaking about this because I think many people that are interested in spiritual practice might sometimes forget the incarnation process. I speak about this like we need to still incarnate and waking down, re-own our worldly experience. And I think we will later speak about the Global Compassion Coalition, but I think compassion and really being in the world and not trying to get out of this world into another spiritual state is really important. And in order to unify the world really, I think it needs this waking down a lot in order to anchor transcendence. So I really love that. And maybe you can speak a little bit more to what are the relational or communal symptoms or consequences of that reduced or changed flow of data?
As you said, when less data can go in, when less information, when I listen to you and I’m already guarded and I expect you to be critical, for example, so then I might not receive the data the way you share it with me and I might miss some of it. But for me, that’s all of it because I don’t know what I’m missing out on because it’s unconscious. So I would love, what is the communal effect in relationships, in ecosystems when that’s going on for many of us? Because you said that’s a very common process.
Dr. Hanson: Yeah, beautiful. Well, I love as well that you keep thinking about collective trauma, you keep bringing it out to the larger whole, really great. So let’s say now we have individuals who, a lot related to their family situation in very early childhood. I mean, the training, the patterning, the biology of the brain is to be very threat focused, especially in our early years. We have in general the negativity bias of the brain, which I say makes it like Velcro for bad experiences, but Teflon for good ones. That is really heightened science shows in early childhood in lots of ways, including the fact that young children in particular have a head start in the maturation of their right hemisphere. It’s switched for many left-handed people, but the point is the same. The right hemisphere takes in things as a whole, which is really wonderful. And it also is more inclined toward negative emotion than left hemisphere detail.
If someone has a stroke in their right hemisphere, as my father did, they remain cheerful typically as patients, nurses notice this, but if they have a stroke in the left hemisphere, especially the more forward regions that down regulate so-called negative emotions like anger, sadness, fear and shame, they tend to be really grouchy patients. So we kind of tend to extol the virtues of the right hemisphere. Yeah, we need the whole brain, but still there’s some negative emotion there. The point is why would evolution give toddlers and preschoolers and infants a head start in the maturation of the right hemisphere? It’s because back in the Stone Age and even further back, 10 million years ago, it was extremely important for little children to really track threats which come from the overall surround. That’s just a way of saying that we’re very threat sensitive. Okay, so we grow up, we develop different kinds of armor, just a deal, including with the big sister, brother or the coach or the priest.
Then we land in adulthood. So now you have all these armored individuals bumping into each other and interacting with each other. The problem is that that armoring has an embedded presumption of danger in it and threat and not safety. And when we’re already embedded in a protection mode, we tend to see threats around us even when they’re not there or we make them bigger than they really are. And then other people are doing the same thing. They think we’re stranger danger, and then it runs away. And you have people who then need to clutch at forms that create safety, like some kind of attachment to a leader who will then protect them from all those horrible, dirty other people outside that circle. And yeah, that’s how it unfolds. And that’s why for me, I think it’s so important, again, both and, external and internal, to do what we can to make the external safer.
I know that you’re doing beautiful work in the Middle East to try to affect external factors to make them safer. And meanwhile, it’s so helpful to make sure that we’re not overestimating the threats and that we’re not underestimating our resources, including the resources of calm strength and wisdom and loving kindness that we can grow inside ourselves.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. I’ll just summarize, what I hear is also, of course, we can take care of the external safety, create safer environments, and that helps us to digest some of the real life process more. We can, and we’ll come to this in a moment, take care how to train ourselves internally to literally feel more safe in ourselves. And you also spoke to something beautiful. You spoke to us noticing how we are consciously or half-consciously looking for hints in our environment that confirm our fear. And that’s important. Business leaders do this, people who work in the public with groups, and when you run a group, you might easily be looking out for the signs that tell you somebody’s maybe not fully happy, somebody is a bit critical, somebody is… And this on teams, in organizations. And so I think just that awareness that how our perception is already a bit warped, and we might confirm our inner states through things that are actually not really true, but for us very true is a very important practice to begin to notice that interplay and how it confirms my past basically.
And so this is a very important mindfulness practice, I think. And so you said mindfulness practices, contemplative practices might be helpful to begin to shift our inner ecosystem, our interior world. And maybe you can share a little bit more your experience, what you’ve seen, what you’ve seen in your clients and yourself, and how does that work? How can we change something that seems to be given to us by life?
Dr. Hanson: So good, so many ways. Starting point is to really appreciate that you and I are speaking here at the crest of a wave that began over three billion years ago with life emerging on earth, and then began more recently 600 million years ago with the evolution of the nervous system, and then three million years ago with tool manufacturing ape-like grandparents, and then 300,000 years ago with the earliest humans walking the earth. So we contain within us an enormous zoo. And literally, as you go back down what’s called the neuro access, you go back in time. This is a metaphor from the great neuroscientist, Yak Punksep, bless his memory, who really emphasized our kinship with all of life, including non-human animals. So it’s like we are a vast museum. He used that metaphor, and you walk in the front door, it’s all bright lights, looks like Star Trek.
But then if you walk further back, you’re going back in time and it’s more ancient. We carry that with us. We are walking museums, we are walking zoos to really appreciate that, both gratefully. Thank you, Mother Nature. Thank you. Amazingness of all. And whoa, I’ve got an inner lizard, mouse, and monkey in me. I got to really pay attention to it. Going back down, monkey, mouse, and lizard. So that’s contextual here. And in that context then, you may know this metaphor, it’s as if we can make two mistakes in life. One, we can think that there’s a tiger in the bushes always getting ready to eat us, but there’s really no tiger. That’s a certain kind of mistake. Then there’s the mistake where we think everything’s fine, we’re just whistling past the boulders, but there’s a real threat there about to get us. The cost of the first mistake is pretty trivial, needless anxiety, but the cost of the second mistake is no more mistakes forever.
So we’re designed to make the first mistake 10,000 times to avoid ever making the second mistake. That creates, I call paper tiger paranoia. So that’s exactly what you’re saying. Business leaders, group leaders, parents, children, lovers, friends. We’re very biased through well-intended biological evolutionary physical processes. The body is biased in that direction, which then biases the mind as well. So for me, while I’m an airy fairy kind of guy, I’m also really scruffy and believe in doing what you can. Like you, I think moxie, standing up for yourself. So if you want to stand up for yourself, it’s important to stand up to these inner biases in ourselves and in other people. So that’s where mindfulness and the heart really, really come in, in that we can become more aware of this bias and we can bring a gentleness to ourselves. And then through processes of physical change in the brain, positive neuroplasticity, we could talk about in a second, we can really cultivate healing, growing, and awakening embedded in the hardwired circuitry spread throughout our own body.
We can really cultivate those changes. And with other people, we can pay a lot of attention to what is it like for you to be with me? And are there authentic, skillful, kind things I can do that are also self-interested to be less of a perceived threat for you? Can I slow things down? Can I be attentive to the authority that comes with my privilege? And you, I think, have to pay attention to that, of course, because we carry a certain privilege. Are there little preemptive statements I can make that prevent you feeling threatened? Can I assure you of certain kinds of things while still standing my ground and maintaining my boundaries appropriately? So to me, those are the two huge takeaways, respecting how powerful the safety system is in our neurobiology, do not underestimate it, and deliberately take on helping yourself feel calmer and more at peace inside and help other people feel the same way.
That’s to me a huge priority, and it’s more important now at this point in history than ever.
Thomas:
Right. Beautiful. Yeah. I love how you just rolled out, in a way, very positive leadership skills, that I’m not just focused on my experience, but that I become increasingly aware of what my impact is and how other people experience me. That is, if I’m interested and if I’m sensitive to that, then there are many small things that can change a lot within our ecosystems. And I think if just the few things that you mentioned can make a huge difference of how we are being perceived, and especially if we carry some privilege or some are in positions of power, it’s so important because that changes the entire ecosystem. And so I think this is very powerful what you just said, so thank you for that. And then looking at, because I love the metaphor of the walking museum or the walking zoo, and so how does it work more in detail?
If you zoom in a little bit into this change process, that mindfulness, how come that mindfulness can help us to change millions of years of process, crystallized process? So how does that work? Because it seems like one is just me being aware and the other one is wired. If I listen to you, then it’s just, yeah, but I’m carrying millions and millions of years of making, and so my life is a small, I don’t know, span of years within this trajectory. So how can we change that? So that seems to be carved out of stone and not written on paper. So maybe you can speak a bit to this.
Dr. Hanson: Beautiful. So people use the word mindfulness in different ways. I use the traditional simple meaning of it as sustained present moment awareness of the inner and outer world. And what happens when you’re mindful then is you move out to the whole. So in that whole, let’s say we’re in a situation where we meet someone, we’re interacting with someone, they are who they are, they are understandably triggering different reactions in us, much like we are triggering reactions in them, that’s happening. The tendency of the brain and the mind is to get sucked into just one part of the whole, the one red light flashing on the dashboard because that’s how our ancestors survived. They super focused on what was threatening. Well, what mindfulness does is it exercises an inner autonomy, going back to my point about being on your own side and not just swept along by life, because now you’re looking at the whole dashboard, you’re seeing the whole, you’re seeing that this person is tired, you’re seeing that this person is a certain kind of person and they’re sort of awkward in how they are, but they’re really not a tiger, right?
You are not the tiger who will eat me, and I’m aware of the parts of me that are a tiger that will jump, but I realize when I go out to the hole, that’s just a part of me. It’s okay, kitty, kitty, kitty. I love you. You’re a part of me. No bad parts, as Richard Schwartz says in internal family systems. And no, I’m not going to let you hijack me. I’m going to keep paying attention to the whole. I’m going to pay attention to my whole body. I’m still okay. It’s all right. He’s not a tiger. I’m still okay. So mindfulness is absolutely foundational. Without it, we’re lost. We’re hijacked. We’re lost in the dream. We’re diluted. We think there’s a tiger there that’s going to eat us when in fact there’s no tiger at all. Mindfulness also helps us see the real tigers because when you’re preoccupied with paper tigers, you’re going to miss the real tigers.
So mindfulness also helps us track the facial expressions in other people and to realize that they’re all smiling, but really we are just a means to their ends. We are an it to their eye rather than a thou, for example. Or mindfulness helps us realize that big picture, if I get all cranky with this other person right now, that might be momentarily feel good, but it’s not good for me in the long run. That’s the bigger tiger that I will make some stupid mistake at a reactivity that will actually harm my future self in significant ways. That’s a real tiger to pay attention to. So absolutely, mindfulness is awesome. And neurologically, because I know you’re interested in this stuff like I am too, there are a handful of recent findings last 20 years that are totally my go-tos and they’re really cool. One of the most useful ones is to be aware of the fact that when we are lost in thought, when we are fixated on something, either to accomplish a task or to just be kind of ruminating, we tend to engage networks in the midline of the cortex toward the front if we’re goal focused, toward the rear, if we’re in the default mode, just kind of spacing out.
Well, and when we’re doing that, there’s typically a very strong sense of me, myself and I. On the other hand, when we’re mindful, this activity gets quieter and we start engaging networks on the sides of the brain, especially the right hemisphere, again for right-handed people, which is less verbal and more inclusive and spacious. So when we deliberately get a sense of things as a whole, our body As a whole as we breathe, this moment as a whole with another person, the bird’s eye view of the whole situation. When we do that, that automatically neurologically quiets activity in the midline. So we feel we take things less personally. We’re less caught up in the future or the past. We’re now march more in the present. We feel more ourselves altogether just by getting a sense of things as a whole, which of course supports mindfulness as well.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I mean, we also did some fMRI studies on meditation and the default network, and it’s really amazing to see exactly what you said is very powerful and how our practice can literally change how we experience our life, and hence it changes the path of our life in a way. So I think that’s very powerful that the agency in the practice really builds over time a different path than the one that we were on, and that’s beautiful. We spoke a lot about mindfulness, and I know you are very passionate about compassion, and you initiated a whole network, the Global Compassion Institute or –
Dr. Hanson: Coalition.
Thomas: Coalition. Yeah, the Global Compassion Coalition. And so let’s talk a little bit about compassion and mindfulness. So where is the difference? What does compassion do in our inner development, and why are you so passionate about the coalition?
Dr. Hanson: Nice. Well, also building on what we’ve been talking about, as someone really interested in practice, I’m a methods guy, I’m really interested in practice and the fulfillment of practice and the process of practice and how to become skillful at practice. Well, in a way, I think the foundation of practice is like a three-legged stool. And to use traditional words that you may recognize, meta, sati, bavana. Meta, loving kindness, compassion, the heart, sati, mindfulness, awareness, self-knowledge, and bavana, learning, cultivation, development over time, growing the good that lasts inside, meta, sati, bavana. They’re all really important. What I see a lot is that many people have pretty good sati. They’re pretty mindful and they’re pretty committed to loving kindness, but they leave out learning. They’re not helping themselves to grow and change along the way, which is a very simple thing to do. You just have to do it often, which involves typically slowing down to really be with your experience for half a breath or longer, keep those neurons firing together so they wire together.
Plus you can engage other factors of lasting neuroplastic change, like feeling it in your body, being aware of what’s rewarding about it, understanding what’s personally relevant, and other things as well if you like. These are ways you can influence who you are becoming, who you are, what kind of person you’re becoming, what kind of healing you’re trying to stabilize inside yourself, what wholesome qualities you’re trying to establish increasingly inside yourself. So that’s a really, really, really important thing. That’s a general statement, meta, sati, bavana. And I start with meta because if you don’t have heart for yourself, you won’t bother to be mindful. If you don’t have heart for others and with some attention to your impact on them, again, you won’t be very motivated to be mindful. And if you don’t have heart, including for yourself, you won’t make the efforts to cultivate bavana along the way.
So heart is really foundational. And one of the beautiful things that neuroscience shows is that we can actually train the heart. We can actually become more compassionate. In other words, there’s a distinction between experiences and lasting change inside. Most of our experiences do not leave lasting changes inside unless they’re negative, but the experiences of the wholesome, the beneficial, do not sink in typically just by experiencing them. It really helps to help them sink in. So people can help themselves to become more compassionate over time, kinder. That was very much my own journey. I landed with intellect intact, but underneath it all have a very warm heart, but it was very defended and I had to really help myself become brave enough to be vulnerable enough to reveal the heart. And that’s a journey. And I’ll finish on this point. Science also shows remarkably that on that journey in the inner museum, the inner zoo, starting several million years ago, our ancestors who had a brain a third our size began to move in the direction of the human species among hundreds of other primate species.
We belonged to the great apes of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, baboons, orangutans, fine. And among all the hundreds of primate species, there’s only one that organizes its life in its bands on the basis of what’s called caring and sharing rather than holding and controlling. Other primate species organize their life in alpha dominance, holding and controlling, holding food, controlling reproduction. Humans uniquely evolved a different strategy for living with each other in their bands of 40 or 50 people grounded in compassion and justice, caring and sharing. That’s innate to us. The problem is, even though the compassion that it took for mothers to take care of their infants longer and longer as childhood got longer and longer so the brain could quadruple in size from that of a newborn to that of an adult compared to merely doubling in size from a baby chimpanzee to an adult chimpanzee, as childhood extended, mothers needed to have more and more compassion for their infants and toddlers to really care for them, which required more compassion for mothers and children, bringing in male partners, which required more compassion from the band as a whole, the village it takes to raise a child, which then enabled the brain to keep evolving and getting bigger and bigger and bigger, driving childhood longer and longer and longer.
So that’s the social brain hypothesis or theory really no longer a hypothesis that foregrounds the heart as the major driver of the evolution or certainly a major driver of the evolution of our own brain today. The heart is really central. That said, finishing the point, it’s easy, really easy in a second for the wolf of hate to wake up and protect and snarl and bite. So it’s very easy for compassion for others, which is grounded in empathy to disappear as soon as there’s a perception of difference or division. As soon as people start thinking you’re them to our us, boom, that undermines empathy and compassion with it. That’s why it’s very important these days. Back in our bands, 40 people, you did not have to work at being empathic or to realize that your fates are bound together. You did not have to work at being compassionate.
It was baked in. The conditions of living in a Stone Age band fostered that. But now when we’re all spread out and we’re interacting with people who are definitely different than us in various ways, we’re not automatically empathic. We’re not automatically compassionate. So we need to bring our practice to it. We need to be mindful of what’s really going on and we need to learn. We need to cultivate that other aspect of the three-legged stool to grow traits of compassion, not just states, but traits of empathy, traits of mindfulness, traits of commitment to justice, traits of compassion for other beings for our own sake, because how we treat them comes back to us. Karma is like hitting golf balls in a shower, good and bad. When we put out in the world, comes back. So for their sake and for ourselves, it’s really important to be deliberate, especially these days about empathy, compassion, and justice.
Thomas: Yeah. Wow, that’s beautiful. Such a great download and so concise. I love this. I was thinking when I listened to you, I though, “Wow, that’s beautiful because you talked about this bands of 40, 50 people.” And then eventually that was the ground of compassion, but everybody who wasn’t part of it was not part of that compassion. And so when we look at the world where technology turns us into a global village, suddenly billions of people live in this kind of global village that before was easy to include, but now it’s like we are hitting the differences. And I think not only the differences, also the trauma layers that we produced over thousands of years make it harder for us to host each other in each other and create intimacy. And I think that’s why I love the work of the Global Compassion Coalition, because I really believe that we all have to practice deliberately what you just said, this hosting and feeling that’s compassion or synchronizing our heart with our mind and our body that this becomes one flow of data, which is often disorganized.
And so I think that’s super important if we want to live in a world together that we can share and care, but globally.
Dr. Hanson: And
Thomas: So maybe you can speak a little bit more about the work that you’re doing in the Global Compassion Coalition and also what’s the vision and why is that so important, especially in this time when we become global citizens?
Dr. Hanson: Well, first I want to thank you for your involvement in the Global Compassion Coalition and helping it grow. We’re now entering our fifth year and to think of it like the life of a person, let’s say we’re a preschooler, but we’re kind of coming along. We can walk on our own and we’re going to have easily 250,000 members in the coalition by the end of this year, and we’re on track for half a million at the end of next year. And so anyone’s invited, it’s free. It’s a moral stand for a more compassionate and just world. It’s as simple as that. And so what’s clear from our biological history, and it’s clear in the world today, it’s only when people come together that they can make things better, whether it’s at the scale of their neighborhood or an organization, creating a new clinic, creating a program to build bridges between divided people in the Middle East, let’s say, or even at larger scales in terms of cities and states and even countries.
It’s when people come together that they change the world. I saw that in my youth in the US in the ’70s, which was mirrored with movements around the world for environmentalism, gay rights, rights for women, civil rights, anti-war, and holding governments to account. The rise of democracy, it’s still a long way to go, but still the world is in a better place today because of those movements and we have a long way to go. So it’s when people come together at scale that they make things better. Also, fundamentally, it’s when people feel like they’re standing with others for a better world, that they don’t feel so hopeless and helpless. There’s an inherent power when you look to your right and you look to your left and you know that people who are different from you in lots of other ways, but are joined with you in a common purpose to relieve suffering in various regards, to relieve the suffering of a billion people on our planet, one in eight, live with insecurity about food and three or more million people die of hunger-related causes every year.
10,000 children a day is a terrible thing. It’s only when we stand together that we have a prayer of addressing that level of issues. It’s only when we stand together inside a country like America in which roughly 15% of all children live in poverty, and that’s extremely consequential. So that’s the point. We need to come together and together we can change the world. The other thing is that let’s tell the truth about how the world works today. It functions, as Jeremy Lent puts it, through what’s called a wealth pump, extracting wealth, predominantly the global north from the global south, historically extracting wealth from enslaved people, including in my country America, and today with rigged taxation systems and something like most people in the world live under the thumb of a dictator and dictators with their corruption and their cronies are extracting wealth. That’s incredibly unfair.
That’s the old model. That’s holding and controlling. That’s alpha dominance. That’s Game of Thrones at the world scale. And the only way to change that is for people to come together and mass and claim more and more power, nonviolently I hope, but to claim more and more power to gradually pull power back from highly concentrated, wealthy centers that operate for their own interest at the cost of others. And if we want to make a better world by the end of the century to think big, think wide, think long, what kind of world would we like to leave to our grandchildren by the end of the century? The only way to gradually retilt these extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power back to something that’s more reasonable and sustainable for the planet altogether, we’ve got to come together at bigger and bigger scales. And so that’s what the GCC is about.
It’s about creating more and more of a global commons, more and more of a wider frame that supports the activities of people to come together fueled by the power of compassion to motivate and mobilize effective collective action to make a better world.
Thomas: Yeah, I love that. And I love also how you combine compassion and agency, like collective agency, because I think that’s such a powerful resource in us and that we are together impactful, I think has so many various variables that are playing together, but it’s a very powerful vision. And I love that also you spoke about the vision because often I think it’s also when we ask ourselves, okay, what’s the better version? If we can really come up with a vision or if we feel that the vision is pretty much informed by what’s happening now, just a little bit better, but really seeing if my inner world, the inspiration or the innovation capacity can come up with a vision that there’s enough freedom to form that vision and not just because we are escaping this reality. I love this understanding of that in the traumatic moment, hope is being pushed into the future.
The hope is in the future because in that moment it’s so bad that the only relief is the next moment. And I think in the healing of trauma is that hope comes back into the present moment, into the agency that I can do something about things now.
Dr. Hanson: Beautiful.
Thomas: Yeah. And so when I listen to you, I think what you’re also saying is how do we bring hope back into the compassion, the agency, the collective impact that we have now? And out of that, we hold a vision about the world that is different, not because we are dreaming about it in the future that will never come. So the fuel and the vision come together to really make it happen. There’s not just a vision without fuel. And I believe that’s why I love very much how you speak about mindfulness, because I think often the spiritual practice is actually a way out because it’s entangled with the hope being pushed into the future. And then the word has no power in the world.
The word, if word is creation, like at the beginning of the Bible, the word is creating, let there be life. The word has no power in the physical world. And that’s why often other tendencies take the power because that spiritual is too, it’s great on one level, but it doesn’t have the embodiment to make it happen. But if this comes together as you spoke about, then the power of the creative force and the embodiment have a voice that changes things now. And this is very powerful. So thank you for speaking to this also that global compassion has agency in the moment. We are not waiting for the next moment and the vision is now, not later. So that’s beautiful.
Dr. Hanson: That’s so excellent, Thomas. Thank you. Connecting hope with agency. And I think about people who sputter in helpless outrage, which is the worst of both worlds. You’re in a negative emotional state, probably creating stress and conflict with others, but it’s not accomplishing anything.
And there’s a place for starting with sputtering and helpless outrage. Great. Start there, but don’t stop there. Yes. And look for people around you. One of the easiest things to do, there’s a saying from Mr. Rogers who is an American TV person, a wonderful being. I think of him as an American saint actually, really focused on the welfare of children. He’s no longer here, bless his memory. He said that when he was young and upset about things, his mother would say, “Frankie, look for the helpers. Look for the helpers. What we can do today is to help the helpers.” Already today, there are many people like you and others, there are many nonprofits, small ones and medium ones and really big ones who are helping make the world better. We can help those helpers with volunteering a little time, signing a petition, sending a little money or getting more informed, and the helpers need to help each other.
It’s a remarkable fact that business people compete at the marketplace and cooperate at the political level, but the helping organizations do the opposite. They’re typically very friendly at the street level, but they almost never pool their resources at a scale and work together at a scale that can change big problems, that can change the upstream sources of the downstream suffering they’re heroically working with year after year after year, pulling out more bodies out of the river of suffering, but not addressing what’s pushing them into that river upstream. And the only way to change those upstream forces is through collective action at larger and larger scales in which the helpers could help each other.
Thomas: Wow, that’s very beautiful. Yeah, and that’s also the reason why I wanted to collaborate with you because I find it, first of all, again, in this conversation, there’s so much resonance and it’s so lovely. And once we get into this flow of work, it’s so beautiful to share this space with you and also to really collaborate and join forces. And so that’s really lovely. Rick, I know we are at the end of our time.
Dr. Hanson: Gives me hope. It’s just what you said. Our own agency with each other suddenly helps me be more hopeful and less helpless.
Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Beautiful. So with these words, I think that’s great for all of us to hear. I thank you very much for this time. I walk away again once more kind of sparkling inside. My neurons are sparkling, so that’s so lovely. So thank you very much, Rick, and I’m looking forward to the next conversation.
Dr. Hanson: Thank you, Thomas, and truly bless you. Take care.
