It’s not often that you encounter a book that can flip your entire view of the world on its side, which is why I’m taking a moment to share this incredible work by an old friend with you.

A physicist by training, Professor Richard Silberstein spent four decades as a working neuroscientist at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He was the Chairman of the Physics Department, founder of the Brain Sciences Institute, and the inventor of a brain imaging method (Steady State Topography) that’s now used to study everything from memory to ADHD. The author of more than 110 peer-reviewed published scientific papers, he is, by temperament and profession, a scientist and skeptic.

Those credentials — he’s literally among the world’s top brain scientists — is what makes his new book, Stranger and Stranger: The Neuroscience of How Mind and Cosmos Communicate (Park Street Press, out this October) so astonishing and life-changing.

He started out trying to make sense of one well-known stubborn anomaly, precognition (seeing the future), and ended up going down the rabbit hole that his book lays out in astonishing detail.

In the first half of the book, Richard takes us on a tour of the tens of thousands of replicated, solid, usually peer-reviewed science that suggests the existence of something parapsychologists call psi. They include:

— The Ganzfeld telepathy protocol, where a meta-analysis of 108 studies published between 1987 and 2010 produced odds against chance of roughly one in ten quadrillion that such a thing could be possible, yet it keeps getting reaffirmed over and over again.
— He digs into quantum random number generators that are influenced by human thought, the double-slit experiments run by Dean Radin’s team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and a body of presentiment studies in which people’s skin conductance rises a few seconds before a disturbing image appears on a screen, and, confounding all expectations and “rational” explanations, before the computer has even selected it.
— He revisits the CIA’s infamous remote viewing program (and its considerable and well-documented successes) and the 1995 evaluation in which statistician Jessica Utts and professional skeptic Ray Hyman, asked to assess the same data, ended up largely in agreement.

Silberstein’s own research also appears in the book and its mind-boggling. In 2024 he and a colleague published a study of identical twins placed in separate rooms, sensorily isolated from each other, as one viewed a series of random images while the other stared at a blank screen.

Changes in the “receiver” twin’s brain lined up with the moments the “sender” saw a “meaningful” picture and happened at a frequency that should have been four times in a hundred million trials. Even more fascinating, when these twins were, essentially, telepathically connected hroughout the experiment, the receiving twins reported feeling nothing at all. Whatever was going on, it was happening well below the threshold of human awareness.

It’s that observation that’s at the heart of Richard’s book’s most interesting argument, one that has massive implications for humanity, religion, politics, and science.

Silberstein proposes that our brains don’t so much “create” consciousness as connect to some vast universal source that our brains then filter. Evolution, he argues, built our nervous systems to prioritize necessities like food, sex, and survival, while it built elaborate inhibitory circuits to suppress everything else the universe is giving us access to but that our brains consider “not necessary.”

Recent studies he cites include patients with left frontal lobe damage, showing that they can affect random number generators in ways “normal” people can’t. Interestingly, when that same region of the brain is temporarily quieted by transcranial magnetic stimulation, normies can also influence random number generators.

Turn off the brain’s “gatekeeper,” in other words, and you let both creativity and the intelligence and experience of the universe, psi, leak through.

And then the book gets even stranger, as the title promises.

Silberstein shares the details of Michael Levin’s work at Tufts showing that bioelectric fields, not just genes, direct how animal (and, presumably, plant) bodies develop, including the now-famous tadpole grown with a working eye on its flank because of bioelectric stimulation.

He tells the stories of the heart transplant recipients who reported acquiring their donors’ tastes, from food to motorcycles.

He engages seriously, and with genuine intellectual courage, with Ian Stevenson’s decades of case files on children who describe past lives in detail.

And he posits that probable futures exists in a nested hierarchy of what he calls Temporal Causal Levels, shaped by consciousness itself through what he terms retrocausal loops.

While the science is amazing, the possible implications for society and politics are equally astonishing. Studies done by hardcore scientists working under the umbrella of the Global Consciousness Project found that when a certain threshold of people in a community regularly meditate, the crime rate and rate of general violence drops.

But what about the opposite? What happens when billionaires like Musk and Zuckerberg use their social media platform algorighms to feed hate, bigotry, fear, and rage directly into people’s minds? Whether they’re doing it to “increase engagement” to crank up time-spent-scrolling and advertisement exposure to make more billions, or to influence politics and political perspectives, the result could well be the same.

He argues that these billionaires have built a global machine for generating exactly the kind of massed, focused, hostile intent that his science finds actually affects the physical world around us as well as the minds of those around us.

Citing Peter Turchin’s work on Cleodynamics that charts cycles of political disintegration, Richard closes his book by calling for coordinated, large-scale group meditations focused on making a better and more peaceful world for us all.

This book will both astonish you and change how you view much of what we’re confronting today, from our psychology to our religion to our politics. Don’t miss it!

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In 1978, I was half-owner of a small advertising agency and had been hired by the founder of a German charity to promote a US tour of his orchestra made up of orphaned and abused children. (I tell the story in detail in my autobiography The Prophet’s Way.) The first thing I needed to do was produce a brochure and some posters and ads, but that founder, Gottfried Müller, told me he didn’t want any pictures of any living thing in it.

“It’ll be more interesting to people if it is just words,” he said.

I pushed back, because conventional wisdom in the advertising industry is that you should always include images in ads and other ligerature.

“Pictures always draw the eye faster than words,” I said. “They’re powerful tools to get people to look at something.”

He nodded. “Too powerful.”

I asked what he meant, and that’s when I realized something I’d walked past on every previous visit to the Salem Children’s Village in Stadtsteinach without noticing.

“There are no pictures of living things at Salem,” he said. “None in our newsletters, none in our literature, none in our homes. None.”

I thought about his residence, his office, the children’s houses, the guest house where I’d stayed, and the clinic. He was right; everything was either abstract art, maps, or paintings and drawings of buildings and streets. But there were no images of people, plants, or animals — living things — anywhere.

Then he ran an experiment on me. He said:

“Think of somebody you know very well but who you have not seen in several years.”

My maternal grandmother came to mind.

“Did you ever see a picture of that person?”

The one that immediately came to mind was a framed photo that sat on my mother’s bureau for years after her mother died, and a few seconds of a home movie of my grandmother that my father had shot when I was about three, which we watched most Christmases.

He leaned closer. “Can you remember her face, or just the picture of her face?”

This is what I wrote in my diary that afternoon after I’d left his office to consider how to produce the ad materials for the upcoming orchestra visit:

“I felt disoriented, as if the world had just turned sideways, as my mind raced through the dim recesses of memory looking for memories of my grandmother’s face. I remembered her house, the black-and-white kitchen tile, the hardwood floors, the mahogany dining-room table, a green-felt desk blotter. I remembered the house in Charlevoix right down to its smell, the brick building where she worked and the sound of the noon siren, the swing-sets in the playground where we played. But I couldn’t remember her face, except from those photos.”

He told me to try someone more recent, so I tried my father. I’d spent two weeks with him visiting Michigan, just a few months earlier. But the image that surfaced was a portrait my brothers and I had commissioned ten years before.

His explanation has stayed with me for nearly fifty years:

“Pictures are frozen in time, while reality flows in time. When you look at something living for a few minutes, it makes millions of little time-moment pictures. But when you see a frozen picture, all those time-moments become filled with the same image. And so it will destroy the other, more fragile, but real images you have in your memory.”

I took this, at the time, as an eccentricity of Herr Müller’s Christian mysticism. He’d read the first of the Ten Commandment, the one against graven images, and either taken it too literally or as an echo back to the oral traditions of what I called Older Cultures.

His comment about memory, though, knocked me for a loop; could it be that he (and, maybe, Moses) was onto some deep psychological reality that we’d all been missing throughout the years since that day 3000 years ago on Mt. Sinai?

And, sure enough, now — decades after he told me that story and had me reality-check it against my own memory — psychologists have gone and measured it.

In 2014, scientist Linda Henkel ran an experiment with undergraduates by walking them through an art museum and having them photograph some of the displays while merely looking carefully at others. The result of her study, published in Psychological Science, was straightforward: people remembered the things they’d only looked at better than the ones they photographed, even though they’d spent the same amount of time looking at both.

Dr. Henkel called it the “photo-taking impairment effect,” and at first she concluded it was just because the process of whipping out the camera and framing the show pulled people out of the here-and-now experience of looking at and interpreting the meaning of the artwork, saying:

“When people rely on technology to remember for them — counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves — it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences.”

But a follow-up study she did was even more interesting, as reported in that journal:

“A second study replicated these findings, but it also presented an interesting twist: Taking a photograph of a specific detail on the object by zooming in on it with the camera seemed to preserve memory for the object, not just for the part that was zoomed in on but also for the part that was out of frame.

“‘These results show how the ‘mind’s eye’ and the camera’s eye are not the same,’ says Henkel.”

And just this month, researchers at Binghamton ran seven experiments with 892 participants and found the same thing is happening when we take screenshots. People remembered fewer details about what they’d captured that way than about about the things on the screen that they’d merely looked at or read.

The researchers went looking for some compensating benefit, some freed-up attention of ours that simply showed up elsewhere, and couldn’t locate a single one. It was the same result that Herr Müller had introduced me to in 1978 and Dr. Henkel discovered twelve years ago.

In a fascinating twist, Henkel’s second experiment discovered that when her students in the art museum zoomed in and photographed only one specific part of an art object rather than the entire thing, the “impairment” effect vanished.

They remembered both the detail they’d framed and shot, but also the details outside the frame of the photo as well. Apparently, the extra attention required to view the entire object and then decide what to focus on made all the difference, presumably because it required more detailed attention.

So, it turns out that the camera isn’t stealing your memory; it’s the consequence of essentially deferring your memory-making processes to the camera in your hand instead of the one in your brain. Herr Müller was emphatic about this, too, telling me that most people spend most of their lives essentially sleepwalking.

“The average person cannot walk even ten steps without falling out of this awakeness,” he told me once. “It is so easy to forget G-d and to forget to be awake and alive here and now.”

He taught me a practice to overcome this tendency to fail to notice all the life around us. We took a long winter walk through the steep hillside behind Salem in Stadtsteinach; standing on a trail we could see over the tree tops that fell away below us to a distant hillside where there was a crumbling castle built around the year 900, now abandoned in the forest.

The trees were bare browns, the ground red and orange with fallen leaves, the pines around the castle a deep green, the sky sparkled bright blue with thin crystalline clouds up high. The air smelled of pine resin and a coming snow.

“Thomas, have you ever thought that G-d needs you?” he asked.

I offered something about the coming millennium.

“More than that. He needs every person. Everybody. Always, for all time.”

Why?

“To be His eyes and ears, His senses. He created the world, but He is not here in a physical body to experience His own creation. Therefore He created man, to walk on the Earth and see, hear, smell, taste, and feel His creation. And so our lives can be a gift to our Creator.”

Then the exercise.

“Look in front of you. Do not look at only one thing, and do not look at everything. But notice it all. All the detail. All the color. All the texture and sounds and smells. And then close your eyes.”

I did. It was gone.

“Then open your eyes, look at it again, and close your eyes again. Keep doing that until you can see the same scene with your eyes closed as with your eyes open. And be as present in the here and now as you possibly can be: don’t think about what you are looking at, just take it all in.”

After a few tries, the valley began to hold in my inner vision.

“That is the beginning of seeing,” he said. “You must learn to see with power. To hear with power. To sense with power. And then keep those images in your mind as a gift to G-d.” Then he slapped me on the back hard enough to move me and laughed. “It makes Him very happy when you take pictures here on the Earth for Him!”

When I look back over my past, I see little jewels of vivid and bright memories, surrounded by a long fog of blurred time. Those bright memories, when I examine them, are invariably from the times when I was momentarily but fully awake and living in the here-and-now.

So, the challenge for us is to decide how much of our lives we want to actually experience, deeply experience, and remember (or “take pictures for G-d”). Try this:

Pick any one thing you’d normally photograph; a grandchild’s face, the light shading a particular tree, whatever stops you. Take it all in, close your eyes, check whether it survived, and open them again. Do that three or four times until it holds.

Then, if you still want the photograph, zoom your camera in on one detail and take it. You’ll end up with both the picture and the memory..

Tell me in the comments what you looked at, and whether it stayed when you closed your eyes. I’ve been practicing this for almost fifty years and I still fail at it most days, so don’t worry if it takes a few tries.

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My mom got me started on this. We’d go someplace cool and see some extraordinary site and she’d say, “Aren’t we lucky to be able to be here and see this?” When she sat with me as a little kid and we said our prayers together, they were always lists of things we were thanking God for. And she could find beauty that she was grateful for in everything from her backyard garden to our dog’s loving licks.

The British Journal of Healthy Psychology just published a study that pooled 24 independent samples covering 6,967 people made up of a cross-section of ordinary adults, university students, and people living with chronic illnesses including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and cancer.

In all three groups, they found that the people who scored highest on gratitude were also the people who were doing the best in life, regardless of the challenges they faced.

Dr Amy Baraniak, the chairperson of the BPS’s Division of Health Psychology, noted:

“This study demonstrates the potential for gratitude interventions across a breadth of populations including clinical and non-clinical samples. As a non-invasive, low-cost and straightforward approach, it has the potential to have a significant impact on population health.”

People who scored highest on gratitude were also most likely to eat well, engage in regular physical exercise, get enough sleep, and handle stress well, the constellation of behaviors and habits that are both signals of good health and things that explicitly promote good physical and mental health.

Gratitude, it appears, was the main common denominator. And gratitude is something that if you don’t regularly practice you can easily learn and incorporate into your daily life.

When the researchers dug into why this would be, they came up with something they called the Temporal Affective Self-Regulation Resource model. It’s a fancy way of saying that gratitude — and, uniquely, only gratitude — alters three things in our lives: how much good feeling we carry, how we handle bad feelings and adversity, and how vividly we can imagine positive futures for ourselves.

While all three are vitally important, that last one is the key for most people.

One of the most useful exercises in NLP is called Timeline Therapy. Bandler and Grinder discovered that when you ask people to describe the time-line of their lives, most people “see” the future in front of them, the past behind them, and the place they’re standing as the present.

Some people, however, have their timelines all twisted around. When I was teaching NLP to therapists back in the 1990s, I met one guy whose past was actually in front of him and his future behind him; he described himself as “paralyzed by fear of the future” because every time he tried to “look forward” to the future he had to peer through all his past traumas and fears.

Timeline therapy involves intentionally straightening out your timeline, usually through an exercise of laying it out on the floor, future ahead and past behind, as the therapist walks you through the exercise. Entire books have been written about it, so I’ll keep this short, but the bottom line is that unless you feel that you’re worth the actions or success or achievements you hope for in the future, you won’t imagine them in your future self. And what you can’t imagine is much, much harder for you to achieve.

So gratitude isn’t just a reward for a well-lived life; it’s the thing that helps make you willing to build a well-lived life.

The Haudenosaunee got there first and shared their observations with early Americans. The Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen (“Thanksgiving Address”) roughly translates as “the words that go before everything else.” Every meeting started with statements of gratitude, rather than an agenda or goal-setting. I’ve been in multiple meetings over the years with aboriginal and indigenous people and seen this over and over.

While we westerners sometimes do a closing benediction, most older cultures open every event with a statement of gratitude. Gratitude to the elders present, to the gods for this life, to the soil and land and animals for their food, to the children for their promise. Sometimes these statements — which are often joined by the entire group — can run as long as an hour.

They do this because they know that if you don’t ground yourself in gratitude, you can’t govern wisely or decide anything worth deciding until you’re in “right relationship” with everything that keeps you alive. That goes for everything from the plants outside to the mountains and the stars and the moon.

While they consider gratitude a precondition to pretty much everything, we tend to treat it as a self-care accessory to be half-heartedly invoked when it seems appropriate or as a form of flattery to get something out of somebody else.

This study found that gratitude journals and lists are a “genuinely low-resource” approach to getting people moving in the direction of healthier behavior, both physically and mentally/emotionally. And spiritually, I’d add. It’s free, no prescription required, and science is just now catching up to it.

So, tonight, before you go to sleep, name three things for which you’re grateful and the person or nature that’s responsible for each. And make them specific: instead of “I’m grateful for my health,” try “I’m grateful my knees still work and my mom walked me to school every morning for six years.” Specificity and attribution are keys.

Let us all know in the comments section how it works out for you! :)

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I was a teenager the first time I tried LSD and mescaline. Tim Leary had sent a dozen disciples out to evangelize the world and a guy named Keith St. Clair showed up at The Paper office (the MSU underground newspaper; I was living there) with a box full of Owsley acid and cactus buttons.

It was 1967 and this was all entirely legal; Henry Luce, who owned TIME and LIFE magazines and was an anti-communist Republican, had taken it himself in 1960, as had his wife Clare Luce Booth, who credited it with saving their marriage. He announced it to a ballroom full of stunned colleagues in a New York hotel in 1964 and it shook the media.

A local pastor let us use the sanctuary of his church (“set and setting are critical,” Keith said) and we tripped to stained glass windows, a 33 RPM LP of Leary telling us to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out” as he explained what that meant, and music from that same portable record player ranging from Ravi Shankar to Gregorian Chants.

It changed my life. I discovered that the reality I’d grown up in, the one my parents, school, and country agreed on, wasn’t the only one available to me; it sent me on a lifelong spiritual search. As William James wrote in 1909 of his own psychedelic experience:

“...our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. …

“No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.”

Which is why I’ve been following the psilocybin (I tried that, too, a few years later) drug trials. I know from personal experience that I wasn’t the only person whose life was changed for the better by this experience, and now these studies are backing that observation up.

A company called Compass Pathways has developed a synthetic psilocybin (the “magic mushroom” chemical) and just finished Phase 3 trials on nearly 600 people with treatment-resistant depression (depressive episodes that had lasted 3 years or more and no drug or therapy had helped). The benefit appeared the very next day after their first dose, and was still just as strong 26 weeks later.

They hope to have FDA and DEA approval by the end of this year so it may be clinically available by the end of next year. And the feds are moving fast on this, based on an executive order this April telling them to speed things up.

I remember several of the trips I took after that first one where I was alone for the entire few hours and just sat in silence, in awe of the world around me. One of my favorites was sitting in the deep forest with a large stream running through it across the street from The Paper office. I was transported back to neolithic times; the memory is still vivid.

And that’s what they found in these trials, too. In fully 78 percent of the six-hour psilocybin sessions the study subjects simply chose to sit in complete silence. Their “providers” were there, available, like Keith had been for me on my first trip, but most people simply wanted to savor the new world the drug had opened up for them.

The company’s chief medical officer, in a paper titled “Silence is golden,” argued that this wasn’t “psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy”; instead, he said, the improvement in people’s depression came exclusively from their own internal experience. The single most therapeutic thing the trip-helpers did was to stay out of the way and keep their mouths shut.

In the years since, I’ve participated in psychedelic ceremonies with indigenous people on three continents: this “revelation” that St. Clair and James and Luce experienced (and me, too!) has been well-known to humans since the most ancient of times.

As I noted back in 2021 on HartmannReport.com:

“For millennia across the European arctic circle around the North Pole, from Scandinavia through Siberia, indigenous shamans sought out red-and-white mushrooms (amanita muscaria) and dried them in socks hanging from their fireplaces.

“The mushrooms contain a powerful psychedelic, Muscimol, but are also laced with compounds poisonous to humans. Reindeer, however, love to eat these mushrooms and, when they do, they behave oddly, as if their names were Dancer and Prancer.

The reindeer love the taste of the mushrooms, and their livers detoxify the poisons in amanita while letting the Muscimol pass through untouched, so the shamans would collect their urine in fresh snow and make it into a powerful drink that gave them visions of tiny men and the feeling that they could fly.

On the longest night of the year they’d set a pine tree on fire to reignite the sun, take their drink, and fly up to the spirit world to help the sun return. The mushrooms are red with white dots and trim on the edges, rotund, and look like little miniature Santas. We didn’t lose that ceremony, we merely secularized and modernized it into what we today call Christmas.

A few weeks ago I wrote about why and how the NLP technique of reframing works and that new brain science connects our minds to a universal mind, a common experience on psychedelics. This is apparently what happened to these people who were treatment-resistant depressed; nobody talked them out of their depression or showed them new strategies or ways of thinking. They simply discovered their solutions on their own as the world opened up for them.

It’s important to note that this isn’t for everybody. I was 16 and going to college when I took LSD, but today I’d never recommend it to anybody too young to drink alcohol. And studies over the decades suggest it can be downright dangerous for people with psychosis in their family history.

I had a wise teacher who guided me in Keith; this isn’t something to do on a lark or recreationally. One of the things I really, really learned from the shamans I’ve tripped with is that this is powerful, deeply sacred, and should only be used with the most serious intent, be it therapeutic or spiritual.

The FDA is holding a public hearing on September 14th in Silver Spring, Maryland about psychedelic treatment in supervised settings and whether it should be more generally allowed. If you have strong opinions or personal experience on the subject, you may want to let them know your thoughts.

And tell our community in the comments section your experiences and thoughts on all this.

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When I was sixteen, a friend of mine and I — inspired by the underground newspaper out of MSU called “The Paper” — wrote up a newspaper for our high school that we called “The Jurist.” We weren’t even sure what the name meant, but it sounded important, and we had important things to say.

The Vietnam war was a croc…

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The Wall Street Journal, in an article by Sumathi Reddy titled “You Gorged on Your European Vacation but Lost Weight. Why?” noted in their opening paragraphs:

“Shelly Wegman enjoyed all the good stuff on a two-week trip to Rome and Tuscany last year, indulging in pasta, wine, bread, fresh fruit and vegetables, and of course, gelato.

“The effect on her waistline wasn’t what she expected: She actually lost 2 pounds, says Wegman, a registered dietitian in Raleigh, N.C.

“Americans who eat their way through European vacations sometimes come home surprised to see a lower number on the scale. I had the same experience on a recent trip to Portugal’s Azores islands, where I indulged in specialty cheeses, breads, cakes and the sweetest pineapple I’ve ever tasted—without gaining a pound.”

So, what’s this all about? Is there science behind these claims?

When Louise and I lived in Germany years ago, the thing that surprised me most wasn’t the language or the trains: it was the bread. We had our own bakery at the Salem International complex in Stadsteinach, and the bread was like nothing I’d ever tasted. The same was true from the small, family-owned “commercial” bakeries in town.

You bought it in the morning from a bakery where somebody had been up since four and it had a lifespan — you had to eat it within a few days — the way living things do. Then we came back to the States in 1988 and I once watched a loaf of supermarket bread sit on the counter for two weeks, still soft, still springy, still perfectly cheerful.

I remember standing there thinking, “This can’t be good.” If a Twinkie can last over a month without refrigeration — or 44 years, as one apparently did — that suggests that the yeasts, molds, and even bugs that may otherwise like to make a meal of it simply can’t; it’s too toxic for them.

I’m reminded of our years living in Germany back in the 1980s because there’s been a wave of stories lately — beyond just the WSJ piece — about Americans who spend a few weeks in Italy, Spain, France or elsewhere in Europe, eat pasta at lunch and bread at dinner and gelato in between, drink wine every night, and come home a few pounds lighter.

The usual explanation is that they walked more, and sure, they probably did (although some dispute it), but actual science suggests there’s something fundamentally different between the diet most Americans eat and what most Europeans prefer.

Scientist Kevin Hall’s team at the National Institutes of Health admitted twenty volunteers to a metabolic ward for a month and fed them two diets, two weeks each: one was filled with ultra-processed foods that Americans typically eat, some every day, and the other made from whole, fresh ingredients.

The meals were matched for calories, sugar, fat, sodium, fiber, and macronutrients. Nobody was told to restrict anything, be it quantity, frequency of eating, or portion size.

They found that when people were on the ultra-processed weeks, they ate roughly 500 more calories a day, ate faster, and gained an average of two pounds over two weeks. On the whole-food-diet weeks, however, they lost that weight back.

The CDC reported last year that ultra-processed foods today make up 55 percent of all calories consumed by Americans over the age of one, and a stunning 61.9 percent of what our kids eat.

On the other hand, backing up these anecdotal reports from tourists, researchers across 22 European countries writing in the European Journal of Nutrition found the range of ultra-processed foods consumed by locals runs from 14 percent in Italy up to a high of 44 percent in the less-healthy UK.

In other words, an Italian child and an American child are not eating variations of the same food supply, even when it’s mostly pasta and pizza. The Italians are eating actual whole foods, while the majority of Americans — we, with our obesity and metabolic disorders problem — are eating stuff created in a laboratory.

As Julia Bellluz writes in her brilliant Substack newsletter:

France’s relatively low obesity rate and higher propensity for cooking and eating well are not accidents of history. They were carefully fostered by policy and regulation. When Americans visit Paris and marvel at how svelte people are, it’s not because the Parisians have superior willpower. They are objects of their environment, just as Americans are objects of theirs.

She notes that pretty much everybody is just a short walk away from a store where they can pick up fresh ingredients for dinner, and most shop multiple times a week to keep everything as fresh and new as possible. It’s built into European culture.

But it’s not just how freshly-picked or unprocessed a food in Europe may be; there are other dramatically real differences between the food you’ll find on that continent and what you can buy on ours.

Consider the additives. Europe approves somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four hundred in total across the entire European Union; we allow several thousand chemicals in our food.

And our government isn’t bothering to test them; instead of the European precautionary principle that says you must prove something is safe before putting it into the food supply, we wait for cancers and deaths to show up before investigating.

The Environmental Working Group found that of the 766 new food chemicals introduced into our food supply since 2000, 756 of them were declared safe by the companies selling them, not by the FDA. That’s the GRAS or “generally recognized as safe” loophole, written in 1958 for things like vinegar and baking soda, that’s how these lab-made industrial compounds end up in our groceries.

Pesticides tell the same story. Nathan Donley’s peer-reviewed analysis in Environmental Health found 72 pesticides approved for use here that are banned or being phased out in the EU because they cause cancer, neurological damage, or other illnesses, and over 322 million pounds a year of these poisons are sprayed on American crops.

Which brings us to wheat, and to the gluten intolerance that’s so endemic now in America (but still rare in Europe) that restaurants are now routinely putting gluten-free bread and bun options on their menus.

In the late 1990s, American farmers began to routinely spray glyphosate on wheat shortly before harvest to dry it out. This practice — that Italy has banned outright — kills the plants and thus makes the stalks more brittle so when the threshing machines harvest the crop they pick up a slightly higher percentage of the grain heads that they would have if the plants were still green. It’s done, in other words, to increase profits.

A careful review in Frontiers in Microbiology lays out the puzzle: double-blind trials show gluten doesn’t actually produce symptoms in healthy non-celiac people, yet millions of Americans have begun reporting over the past two decades that we feel better when we quit wheat.

It turns out that glyphosate blocks a metabolic pathway that both plants and bacteria use but animals don’t, which is why it was called “harmless to humans.” The problem, though, is that our gut bacteria (being closer to plants on the evolutionary tree) require that same plant-based pathway, and the beneficial bacteria in our guts appear to be even more vulnerable to it than the opportunistic ones.

On top of that, Bob Kennedy has been claiming for years that glyphosate causes cancer, and the World Health Organization has concluded that glyphosate is a “probable carcinogen.” Multiple families successfully sued Bayer for millions when family members who used Roundup died, at least until the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court threw out their lawsuits. (Justice Jackson wrote that the ruling “departs from the near unanimous view of the many state and federal courts.”)

And our money-corrupted EPA now permits Americans to have a daily glyphosate intake that’s more than three times what European regulators allow. We may have spent twenty years blaming an ancient grain protein for what a modern herbicide is doing to us.

And then there’s the plastic. Researchers who bought 111 protein products in and around Portland, my own city, found microplastics in 88 percent of them, with significantly higher levels in the heavily processed items.

Chicken nuggets, for example, carry roughly thirty times more microplastic per gram than chicken breast. Every grinder, emulsifier, conveyor, and pouch in the ultra-processed system throws in a little more plastic detritus. The particles are even turning up in human brains, and now we’re finding them in higher concentrations in autopsies of people who died with dementia.

The difference between America and Europe isn’t culinary, it’s philosophical. Europe operates on the precautionary principle: prove it’s safe, then sell it. America operates on what I’d call the litigation principle: sell it, and if enough people get sick, their survivors can sue.

That’s the predictable result of a corrupt political system in which agribusiness “invested” a record $178 million in lobbying in a single year, and where, ever since Citizens United, the industries being regulated can now spend without limit to buy both politicians and threaten legal action against regulators.

This is why the answer isn’t the Mediterranean Diet, or keto, or any of the variations that are so popular right now here in America. Those are simply strategies for trying to lose weight or stay healthy in a system with a poisoned food supply.

Europeans, on the other hand, aren’t following a diet; they’re just eating “safe” food, because their governments still make their domestic food-processing industry prove safety before they can sell them.

We shouldn’t have to fly to Rome to feel healthy again, and a good start for those of us who must eat on this continent is to buy fresh, locally-grown, ideally organic food and make as many as possible of our meals at home.

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Nature is powerful medicine. Multiple studies over the years have found that people in hospitals with windows overlooking nature recover and heal faster than those without. And I remember the years when Louise and I ran a community for abused kids that was out in the woods of rural New England, it always seemed that taking them on nature walks calmed them down more than anything else, including most of the meds.

Last month, a team of researchers from six countries published an argument in Communications Health that nature should be thought of as a therapeutic tool in and of itself, and should be available to everybody. They point out that worldwide anxiety is up 63 percent and depression up 26 percent just over the past 15 years, and argue that much of this is the result of what they call “nature deprivation.”

The solution, they recommend is something called “nature-based mental healthcare” or NBMHC, citing multiple studies showing the power of regular immersion in nature as a psychological tool every bit as important and effective (and sometimes more so) as pharmaceuticals.

Ralf Buckley, the lead author, points out that more than half of all doctor visits these days are now about some aspect of mental rather than physical health, but mental health gets roughly half of one percent of public health funding.

— A 2007 study found that “forest bathing” — a Japanese concept that’s taken hold around the world, basically standing in the forest and pausing to take it all in — measurably reduces levels of cortisol, the “stress hormone.”

— A 2010 study discovered that the anti-cancer immune system “killer cells” (NK cells) in our bloodstream jacked up by exposure to nature:

“…2-night/3-day trips to forest parks enhanced human NK activity, the number of NK cells, and intracellular anti-cancer proteins in lymphocytes, and that this increased NK activity lasted for more than 7 days after the trip in both male and female subjects.”

Follow-up research found that even a one-day trip to the forest similarly increased killer cell activity, helping prevent cancer in people for at least a week thereafter.

I’ve been drawn to nature my entire life, from exploring forests and a nearby stream as a kid to Louise and my weekend trips to Portland’s Forest Park to climb the foothills of the Tualatin mountains.

And it’s not just the physical activity; when “forest bathing” is compared to working out in a gym both produce physical improvements, but the psychologically positive effects of forest bathing far outstrip those of simple exercise.

Louise and I, however, live in a city with the largest urban park in the world with over 80 miles of trails in it. And we have a good enough income to afford a car to drive to it, something many people simply can’t do.

Pointing specifically to this imbalance in access to nature caused by financial status, the authors of that first study I mentioned argue that nations should start thinking of natural spaces as part of the panoply of psychotherapeutic tools available to society, rather than decorations or recreational opportunities for people who can afford to get to them (or pay for a park pass, like in many parts of America; here in Portland, Forest Park is free).

I wrote a while back about awe being the cheapest medicine we’ve got, but cheap isn’t the same thing as accessible. In the medical context, we spend a fortune on both physical and psychological tools to repair people, but nature is almost never (other than the hospital windows studies and changes in new hospital construction) considered as a therapy.

Buckley’s team calculated back in 2019 that national parks contribute upwards of five trillion dollars a year to the global economy through the mental health benefits to visitors alone; that’s roughly five hundred times what the world spends maintaining protected areas that, it turns out, can be so critical to improving mental health (with considerable side-benefits for physical health).

Nature, it turns out, is the cheapest, safest, best-tolerated intervention in the entire mental health toolkit, but has been quietly reclassified as, essentially, a consumer good, now only available to people who have a car, a weekend, and enough disposable income.

Teddy Roosevelt understood the importance of wilderness areas instinctively and intuitively, having used nature for years to treat his own asthma and “weak constitution.” It’s why he set aside over 230 million acres of wilderness as national parks, land that sadly today’s administration is trying to sell off to donor drilling and mining operations as fast as it can.

China, on the other hand, having examined this type of research and drawing on centuries of folk medicine pointing in the same direction, has, according to researchers, a “national health strategy includes nature-therapy infrastructure in 1200 forest reserves, to provide a billion person-hours per year.”

Nature should be available to everybody, and our urban planning and policies should make sure that we have wild spaces and public transportation cheap enough to get pretty much everybody to the wild spaces.

Let your state legislators and city council know, and put together a plan to get yourself into nature at least once a week!

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I remember a summer when I was around five or six years old. My parents had recently purchased a hammock and put it in our backyard, and I was lying on it on a bright sunny afternoon. The sky was a deep blue, with thin wispy clouds, and I could smell the fresh-mowed grass crushed by the green-painted metal frame of the hammock.

I could feel the ropes of the hammock against my back through my T-shirt and pressing against my bare legs below my shorts, and hear the melodic sounds of birds singing in the trees that surrounded the yard. One of the birds was repeating over and over a three-note call, while others chirped randomly.

I wondered what they were saying, and to whom. Over the years since, that question has hit me again and again; the natural world around us is alive, but how “conscious” are our fellow beings?

One of the assumptions of our culture — that was particularly amplified by René Descartes 1645 notion of the world as, essentially, a giant machine with us being the only living things in it (the so-called “Cartesian worldview”) — is that we’re the only beings on this Earth who really have understanding and can derive deep meaning from communications with each other.

When we talk with each other, our words evoke pictures, memories, and meaning in each other’s minds. We can put those into context, assign or derive significance, etc. Our culture’s assumption about animals, however, has always been that they’re simply communicating “triggers” for behaviors: run away, fight, eat, sex, etc.

When a bird chirps, for example, are other birds who hear them simply reflexively, instinctively responding mechanically? Like a “danger” call provokes them to look around so they’ll catch the source of the danger?

Or when a bird hears another bird’s chirp is it, instead, receiving an idea and responding to the complexity of that idea, rather than simply and mechanically responding like in a way that’s really more of a reflex than a response to an idea, a mental concept?

That was the question that Dr. Julie E Elie and her colleagues set out to answer using zebra finches, little birds with a repertoire of 11 specific calls. Their work was extraordinary and detailed, and you can read the entire study here, but to summarize it, what they found was that the birds are not responding to calls as a reflex, but rather were communicating actual ideas and concepts to each other.

These little tiny birds, with their little tiny brains, in other words, were engaging in what we call cognition rather than what we’d mistakenly though for six hundred years, that they were simply acting out conditioned responses either learned from their parents or wired into them by evolution.

The entire world is not only alive and speaking to us all the time, at every level, but at least for animals that speech has meaning. We’re not surrounded by little robotic machines but, instead, smaller versions of ourselves, capable of both conceptualizing an idea, communicating that idea, and responding to that idea.

As one of her colleagues, UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience Frédéric Theunissen, noted:

“We have shown, indirectly, that [these] birds understand what they are saying.”

That’s also a foundational concept among pagans and pantheists: everything is alive and we’re simply a part of a remarkable web of life.

Louise and I were climbing a small mountain here in Portland’s Forest Park last weekend, and as we walked (and got seriously out of breath!) she pointed out how most of our religions today carry Descartes’ worldview, overlaid with patriarchy and rationalizations for division and violence.

“I’d rather identify with the pagans,” she said, “who saw life and intelligence — what you might call divinity — in everything from plants and animals to rivers, mountains, and oceans.”

We’ve built an entire civilization around the bizarre concept that we’re the only things on this planet that genuinely think and feel. It allows us to rationalize treating other animals with brutality — think factory farms — and despoiling our environment. After all, we humans are the only ones who really think and feel, right?

When older cultures tried to tell us this concept was wrong — that it was a form of wetiko mental illness, in fact, as I detailed in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight — we ignored them and paved over the world, bulldozing whatever got in our way.

Dr. Elie won a $100,000 prize for this work, the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Two-Way Interspecies Communication. It’s groundbreaking and another little step in chipping away our Cartesian myths and realizing that, ultimately, all life on Earth is both interconnected and conscious.

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Back in my advertising days there was a campaign I got well and truly stuck on. I’d been at it the better part of a week, index cards spread across my desk, crumpled legal-pad pages on the floor, the deadline coming at me like weather. Nothing worked. The harder I pushed, the worse it got.

So one night I gave up, went home, slept, and somewhere around five the next morning I woke with the whole thing assembled in my head, clean and obvious, as though somebody had quietly solved it while I wasn’t looking.

I’d love to tell you I was brilliant. The truth is I just got out of the way. These days, a lot of my writing works out that way, too.

If you’ve ever done creative work of any kind, or really any kind of work at all, you know that feeling. The click. The penny dropping. The thing the Germans and the psychologists both call the “aha.” And until recently we didn’t have much idea what was actually happening in the brain at that moment.

Now we’re starting to.

Last year a team at Duke ran people through a clever little puzzle while watching their brains in a scanner. They used what are called Mooney images, those high-contrast black-and-white blotches that look like nothing at all until, suddenly, you see the hidden object, a face, a dog, a guitar, and then you can never un-see it. That instant of recognition is a tiny, pure aha.

And what the scientists found is that in that instant the brain literally reorganizes how it represents the image. The pattern of activity in the visual regions doesn’t just take in more of the same information; it rearranges into a whole new configuration. They call it representational change.

At that same moment, the hippocampus and the amygdala also light up, the brain’s memory and emotion centers, which is part of why a real insight feels so good and tends to stick. In fact, the solutions that arrived in a flash were remembered about twice as well as the ones people ground out step by step.

And here’s the part that’s really amazing: newer research has looked at how we have these aha moments while we’re following a story or making sense of unfolding events, and found that just before the insight lands, the brain reaches back and reinstates older memories, the patterns of earlier, causally related things we’d already taken in.

The insight isn’t new material flooding in from outside. It’s the mind suddenly connecting pieces it was already holding, reaching into its own past and rearranging what was there into a shape that finally makes sense.

The breakthrough you’re waiting for usually isn’t out there somewhere. It’s already inside your head, in pieces, waiting for you to stop griping long enough to let them rearrange.

Now, if you’ve spent any time around the world I came up in, this is going to sound familiar, because people have been pointing at this truth for the better part of a century, just without the scanners. I teach Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and one of its most powerful tools is something we call reframing.

You take an experience that’s locked into a single meaning, a failure, a rejection, a humiliation, and you deliberately visualize or use a story to put it inside a different frame, and the feeling attached to it shifts, sometimes in an instant.

For years the skeptics waved that off as a parlor trick. But look again at what the Duke team found: an insight is, at the level of neurons, a reframe. It’s the same information held in a new configuration.

Reframing works because it’s doing on purpose the very thing your brain does on its own in a flash of insight.

Go back further and you find the same intuition everywhere. Earl Nightingale built a whole career on a single sentence: “we become what we think about.” Claude Bristol wrote a little book in 1948 called The Magic of Believing, and Dale Carnegie was teaching ordinary people to change their lives by changing the frame around their worries long before that.

Some of that old positive-thinking literature curdled into magical nonsense, the notion that you can simply wish a parking space or a fortune into existence, and I’ve got no patience for that. But underneath the hype was a real observation that the science now confirms: the frame you hold something in determines what you’re able to see, and shifting that frame can genuinely rearrange your inner world.

Those guys had the truth. They just didn’t have the fMRI.

So what do we do with all this, practically? A few things, and not one of them costs a dime.

First, when you’re truly stuck, stop pushing. The aha tends to arrive after you step back, not during the white-knuckle grind, because the brain needs a little slack to do its rearranging. Sleep on it. Take a walk. Get in the shower. (There’s a reason for that cliché.)

Second, feed the machine. Insight reaches back into what you already know, so the wider and richer your store of raw material, the more pieces it has to connect. Read outside your lane. Stay curious about things that aren’t useful to you yet.

Third, when something knocks you flat, before you accept the first frame your mind hands you, try another one on. Ask what else this could mean. Ask what it might be here to teach you. You’re not lying to yourself when you do that. You’re doing deliberately what your brain was built to do anyway.

There’s something quietly hopeful in all of this, I think. We tend to assume our answers have to come from somewhere else, an expert, a guru, a better set of circumstances down the road.

But the science keeps pointing back inward. You’re already carrying around almost everything you need. The work isn’t acquiring more of it. It’s getting quiet enough, and brave enough about your frames, to let what’s already in there fall into place.

So tell me, because I never get tired of these stories: when has an answer arrived for you in a flash, after you’d finally stopped chasing it? In the shower, on a walk, the moment you opened your eyes in the morning? And have you ever reframed something painful and watched it change right in front of you? Share it in the comments. Your aha just might be the spark that rearranges something for somebody else.

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When I was a kid in Michigan there was a patch of woods with a stream running through it behind our neighborhood, and one of my great pleasures was turning over fallen logs to see what lived underneath.

It was always more than you’d expect: beetles and centipedes and pale threads of root, the soft orange of rotting wood, that rich dark smell of soil doing its slow work. Nobody was in charge down there, and yet nothing was wasted. Everything was feeding something else.

I didn’t have the words for it then, but I remember the distinct feeling that the woods weren’t a battlefield. They were more like a vast, patient, mostly invisible act of sharing.

That memory came back to me this week reading about Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who just won a MacArthur “genius” grant for doing, with quantum dots and imaging robots, what I could only do with my hands and my curiosity: looking under the forest floor. And what she’s found down there is astonishing.

Beneath almost every plant on Earth runs a web of mycorrhizal fungi, threads finer than a human hair, trading nutrients with plant roots. Kiers and her colleagues have learned to tag phosphorus with glowing nanoparticles and actually watch the trade happen, and what they’ve documented is essentially a living marketplace.

The plants pay the fungi in carbon, the sugar they pull out of sunlight; the fungi pay the plants in phosphorus and nitrogen drawn from the soil. And it’s no sleepy exchange. The partners negotiate. Plants steer more carbon to the fungi that deliver the best return, and fungi withhold nutrients from plants that don’t pay fairly.

Kiers calls these networks “one of Earth’s circulatory systems”, and says watching them trade is like watching the best poker players in the world. The fungi even favor future opportunities over short-term gains. They’ve been refining this underground economy for more than 450 million years, since before there were trees, since before there was much of anything alive on land at all.

This isn’t some sappy, sentimental story about how nature is sweet and everybody hugs. There’s reward and punishment in that fungal market, hard bargaining, even cheating. But that’s exactly the most important part.

Cooperation in nature isn’t the absence of self-interest. It’s what happens when self-interest discovers, over and over, across billions of years, that the partners who work together tend to outlast the ones who only fight.

And it runs deeper than the forest floor. It runs all the way down into you and me.

The biologist Lynn Margulis spent her career, much of it being dismissed by her peers, arguing that the eukaryotic cell, the kind of cell that built every plant and animal and fungus and human being, is itself a “merger.”

The mitochondria powering every cell in your body (yes, the same ones you learned about in seventh-grade biology) were once free-living bacteria that, a couple of billion years ago, moved in with a larger cell and simply never left.

You are not a single organism in any simple sense: you’re a cooperative, a federation of once-independent lives that figured out they did better together. Every breath you take is powered by an ancient act of partnership.

The most successful living things on this planet have never been the fiercest competitors. They’ve always been the best collaborators, and that includes us.

Here’s why I keep circling this. The story our culture tells about nature isn’t a neutral description; it’s a mirror we hold up to justify how we treat each other. For a century and a half we’ve run our economics and our politics on a cartoon of Darwin, “survival of the fittest,” “nature red in tooth and claw,” a world of ruthless competition where greed is just realism and kindness is a luxury we can’t afford.

Elon Musk tells us that compassion is a pathology. Capitalists think of themselves as Masters of the Universe and are trying to live forever because, they say, their ability to amass wealth amongst so much poverty is proof of their inherent superiority. We built whole ideologies on it. And it turns out to be, at best, half the story, and arguably the smaller half.

A Russian naturalist named Peter Kropotkin saw this clearly more than a century ago. Traveling through Siberia, he kept looking for the bloody, every-creature-for-itself competition the Social Darwinists had promised him, and mostly couldn’t find it.

What he found instead, again and again, was animals surviving brutal conditions by helping one another, and he wrote it all down in a book called Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. His argument was simple and, we now know, largely right: cooperation isn’t a soft exception to some harsh law of nature. Cooperation is one of the central engines of evolution itself.

So what do we do with this? I don’t think it means we paper over conflict or pretend competition doesn’t exist. It means we stop mistaking the cartoon for the truth.

The next time somebody tells you that greed is just human nature, that it’s every man for himself because that’s how the world really works, you can know, with the full backing of modern biology, that they’ve got it almost exactly backwards.

The fungi worked out fair trade before our ancestors crawled out of the sea. The cell learned partnership before it learned much of anything else. We are the descendants, top to bottom, of billions of years of life learning to work together.

That’s not a reason for naive optimism. But it is, I think, permission. Permission to build companies and communities and economies around the assumption that people mostly want to contribute, not just compete.

Permission to treat mutual aid not as charity but as the most natural thing in the world, because it literally is.

So the next time you’re tempted to believe the cynics, go turn over a log. Put your hand in the soil. You’re standing on top of the oldest and most successful cooperative the planet has ever known.

I’d love to hear from you on this. Where have you seen mutual aid quietly working in your own life, in your family, your neighborhood, your job, the kind of thing the “every man for himself” story says shouldn’t even exist? Tell me in the comments. Let’s gather the evidence for the better story, the one that happens to be true.

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There’s a grove of old growth a couple of hours from where I live, Douglas firs so old and so tall that walking into it feels like walking into a cathedral somebody forgot to put a roof on.

The light comes down green and slow. The traffic noise in your head, the one that never quite stops, goes quiet. The first time I stood in there I caught myself doing the thing we all do when something is too big for us: I stopped narrating.

For a few minutes there was no running commentary, no to-do list, no me in the usual sense at all, just the trees and the smell of duff and a silence with actual weight to it. I came out feeling scrubbed clean, and I couldn’t have told you why.

Now I can, because the scientists have started measuring it.

This past winter a team at McGill, working with colleagues in Chile, examined more than a hundred brain-imaging studies of what actually happens inside our heads when we spend time in the natural world. What they found is a kind of cascade.

The brain processes the fractal patterns of nature, the branching of a fern or a river delta, far more easily than the hard edges and blinking screens of a city, so the sensory load drops almost the moment we walk outside.

As it drops, the body slips out of fight-or-flight; the heart rate slows, the breath deepens, and the amygdala, our little threat alarm, settles down.

Then attention, which we normally have to force, begins to restore itself on its own.

And finally the brain networks tied to anxious, repetitive, self-focused thinking grow quiet.

The researchers found that as little as three minutes can start the whole thing rolling. Three minutes.

That last part, the quieting of the self-focused machinery, is where this gets interesting, because it’s the same thing researchers keep finding when they study awe in particular.

A growing body of work shows that “positive awe,” the feeling we get from vastness, from a night sky or a mountain or a piece of music that lifts the top of your head off, nudges the nervous system out of fight-or-flight and into the rest-and-digest state, while quieting the very parts of the brain that keep us trapped in our own small story.

The psychologist Dacher Keltner, who’s spent decades on this, sends people out on what he calls “awe walks”, and finds they come back with lower stress, less inflammation, and a stronger pull toward generosity and connection. Awe doesn’t just feel good. It measurably moves us out of ourselves and toward each other.

Awe works by making you feel small, and it turns out that feeling small, for a few minutes, is exactly what an overloaded nervous system has been starving for.

Here’s what gets me, though. We treat all of this as a luxury. Wonder is the thing we’ll get to once the inbox is clear, something you schedule a vacation around once a year if you’re lucky.

But the science is saying nearly the opposite: that awe is maintenance, as basic to a human animal as sleep or clean water, and that we’ve built a civilization almost perfectly designed to keep us from it.

We’ve paved the groves, lit up the night so thoroughly that most of us can’t see the Milky Way from our own backyards anymore, and filled every spare second with a screen engineered to hold our attention precisely by keeping us agitated and self-focused, which is to say in the exact brain state that nature dissolves.

The people who never lost this knew it in their bodies.

Years ago, Louise and I had the honor of spending time with the psychologist Robert Wolff, who spent years deep in the Malaysian jungle with an aboriginal people called the Sng’oi. He wrote a book about it, and I wrote the foreword to it: Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing.

What struck Wolff, what changed him, was that the Sng’oi had an uncanny, intuitive sense of the living world around them, a way of knowing that came not from analyzing the forest but from being so woven into it that the line between self and place wore thin.

They weren’t taking awe walks. They were simply at home, in the way our whole species was at home for three hundred thousand years before we built walls and started calling the outside “scenery.” Wolff came back convinced that we haven’t evolved past that way of being. We’ve just forgotten it.

I’m not romanticizing here. I like antibiotics and hot showers and the laptop I’m typing this on as much as the next person. But I think we’ve made a quiet, costly trade, swapping a baseline of belonging for a baseline of low-grade alarm, and then wondering why so many of us feel frayed all the time.

The good news, and it really is good news, is that the door back is almost absurdly easy to open. You don’t need the cathedral grove (though I’d recommend it) or the forest where Louise and I climb a mountain every weekend. You just need three minutes and a little attention.

So here’s what I’d suggest, and it won’t cost you a dime. Once a day, find something bigger than you and give it your full, undivided attention for a few minutes.

The sky doing its slow evening thing. A tree you’ve walked past a thousand times, looked at as though you’d never seen it before. The ocean if you’re near it, a thunderstorm if one rolls through, the frankly unreasonable fact of a single leaf.

Don’t photograph it. Don’t narrate it. Just let it be too big for you, and notice what happens to the noise in your head. Your nervous system already knows exactly what to do. It’s been waiting for you to stop and look.

And then tell me about it. What reliably stops the running commentary in your head and fills you with that good, dissolving smallness? A place, a piece of music, a view, a memory? Leave it in the comments, because every one you name is a door somebody else can walk through. Let’s draw a little map together of all the awe that’s hiding in plain sight.

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When I was in my early twenties, somebody handed me a paperback with a strange title, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by a former humanities teacher named Joseph Chilton Pearce. I read it in a couple of long sittings, and by the end something in me had quietly rearranged itself. (You know that feeling, when a book doesn’t so much hand you new information as pull the floor up to a different level.)

Joe’s argument was that the reality we take for granted isn’t simply “out there” waiting to be perceived; it’s something the mind participates in building, and that the egg of our cultural certainty has cracks in it, places where the light of a larger reality leaks through. Decades later I’d have the honor of writing the foreword to the most recent edition of Crack, and I still think about that idea almost every day.

I thought about it again this spring, when I read that one of the most respected consciousness scientists alive had, in effect, conceded that Joe might have been onto something.

His name is Christof Koch, and for forty years he’s been hunting for the place in the brain where consciousness lives. Back in 1998, full of confidence, he made a friendly wager with the philosopher David Chalmers: within twenty-five years, Koch bet, science would pin down the exact neural machinery that produces subjective experience.

In 2023, at a packed conference in New York, he publicly conceded the bet and handed Chalmers a case of fine wine. The machinery still hadn’t been found. A massive seven-year experiment designed to test the two leading theories of consciousness against each other had just come back maddeningly inconclusive, unable to crown a winner.

What’s remarkable isn’t that a scientist lost a bet. It’s what Koch is saying now.

At a symposium in Porto this spring, he laid out the case that we may have been asking the question backwards all along. The wall he keeps running into is the one Chalmers named decades ago, the so-called “hard problem”: we can map every neuron, trace every electrical flicker, watch the brain light up in real time, and still not have the faintest idea why any of it should be accompanied by an inner experience, by the redness of red or the ache of grief.

Matter doesn’t obviously come with a felt interior. And yet here we are, feeling.

Koch’s response is bracing, coming from a hard-nosed neuroscientist. Maybe, he suggests, consciousness isn’t manufactured by the brain at all.

Maybe it’s closer to a fundamental feature of reality, the way mass and charge are, and the brain is less a factory that produces it than an instrument that focuses and channels it.

He points to three stubborn things that won’t fit the old story: the hard problem itself, the strangeness modern physics keeps uncovering about what’s even “real,” and the persistence of experiences we can’t explain away, near-death experiences, mystical states, and the eerie phenomenon of terminal lucidity, where people lost deep in dementia sometimes surface into perfect clarity in the hours before they die.

The most materialist science we have keeps arriving, by its own rigor, right at the edge of mystery.

Koch’s preferred framework has serious critics, including scientists who think he’s smuggling mysticism in through the back door, and they may turn out to be right. Nobody has proven that mind is fundamental.

But notice what’s happened: the question of whether consciousness might be woven into the fabric of the universe is no longer something you get laughed out of the room for asking. It’s being asked out loud now, by the people holding the brain scanners.

And that’s exactly the crack Joe Pearce and I were pointing at.

For three or four centuries our culture has run on a single confident story: that we’re meat machines in a dead universe, that mind is just a kind of exhaust the brain gives off, that the cosmos is fundamentally indifferent and we’re a lucky accident rattling around inside it.

It’s a story that gave us antibiotics and airplanes, and I’m grateful for every bit of it. But it’s also a story that quietly tells us we’re alone, that consciousness is rare and accidental, that the rock and the river and the redwood are nothing but objects.

If Koch and the panpsychists are even partly right, that story has it upside down. Mind wouldn’t be the strange exception in the universe; it’d be the ground the whole thing stands on.

I notice what that possibility does in my own body when I sit with it. It doesn’t make me want to believe anything in particular: it makes me want to pay closer attention. Because if your own awareness might be a thread of something far larger than the three pounds of tissue behind your eyes, then awareness becomes worth investigating directly, not just reading about.

This is what the contemplatives have always told us: don’t take my word for it, sit down and look for yourself. You don’t need a scanner to study the one thing you have unmediated access to every waking second of your life. You just have to get quiet enough to notice it.

So I’d offer this, gently. The next time you catch a moment when your consciousness seems to slip its leash, standing under a night full of stars, holding a newborn, sitting beside someone you love as they leave, don’t rush to explain it. Let it be evidence. Not proof of any doctrine, just evidence that the egg has cracks in it, and that the light coming through is worth turning toward.

Also, an old friend of mine and one of the world’s top neuroscientists has a book coming out this fall about this very topic and all the ways it presents itself in our lives and our science. Dr. Richard Silberstein authored Stranger and Stranger: The Neuroscience of How Mind and Cosmos Communicate and it’s amazing! Order a copy today and prepare to have your mind blown and your consciousness elevated.

I’d love to hear from you on this one, because I suspect nearly everyone reading this has had at least one experience the meat-machine story can’t quite hold. So tell me about yours in the comments. What’s a moment when your own mind felt bigger than your skull? Let’s compare notes, carefully and honestly, the way Joe taught me to.

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We treat loneliness as a private failing. The science, however, says it’s a survival signal, every bit as urgent as thirst.

For a good stretch of my life I lived on a floating home, tied to a dock with a couple dozen other houses that rose and fell with the water. (If you’ve never lived on a moorage, the thing nobody tells you is how loud the river is at night, all that slapping and creaking, until one day you stop hearing it and start sleeping better than you ever did on dry land.)

What I remember most, though, isn’t the water, or even the rocking motion at night that sent me into dreams of flying. It’s that you couldn’t get to your own front door without walking the length of the dock, past everyone else’s living room windows, which meant you couldn’t really disappear.

You’d head out to the car with your head full of some deadline, and somebody would be coiling a hose or hauling in groceries, and there’d be a few words, and the deadline would loosen its grip just a little.

I didn’t think of any of that as medicine at the time. I do now.

Because a sweeping review of more than two hundred studies, published by researchers at Portland State (my old neighbors, more or less), landed on something that sounds obvious until you sit with it: you can be surrounded by people all day and still be “starving.”

The team looked at loneliness in the workplace, and what they found is that the feeling has almost nothing to do with how many bodies are in the room. A crowded office, in fact, can be the emptiest place on earth. Loneliness, they write, is the gap between the connection we have and the connection we need, and that gap can open up in a packed elevator as easily as in an empty apartment.

Here’s the part that reframed the whole thing for me. The researchers describe loneliness as a biological signal, much like hunger or thirst, a built-in alarm that evolved to push us back toward the group.

We don’t shame people for being hungry. We understand that hunger is the body’s way of saying it needs something to stay alive. Loneliness is the same machinery pointed at a different need.

Loneliness isn’t evidence that something’s wrong with you; it’s evidence that something’s missing, and that you’re built to go find it.

That reframe matters, because we’ve spent a couple of generations treating loneliness as a character flaw, something to be embarrassed about, something you’re supposed to fix quietly and alone (the cruelest possible instruction).

One of the study’s authors, Berrin Erdogan, put it plainly when she said loneliness isn’t a personal problem so much as a business problem, something baked into how we design our jobs and our buildings and our days.

And the stakes aren’t soft. The U.S. Surgeon General warned a few years back that chronic loneliness carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Last summer the World Health Organization concluded that social disconnection is now tied to roughly 100 deaths every hour, more than 871,000 a year. That’s not a metaphor: that’s a body count.

So how did the most relentlessly social primate on the planet end up here? My own bias, and I’ll own it, is that we built it.

For three hundred thousand years we lived in bands of a few dozen people who couldn’t survive without one another, where cooperation wasn’t a virtue you chose but the water you swam in.

Then, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, we invented agriculture and stored food, creating a way of life that treats connection as optional.

We laid out suburbs you can’t walk across, built jobs that reward you for keeping your head down, handed everyone screens that simulate company while quietly substituting for it, and wired up an economy that calls you a “consumer” instead of a neighbor.

We optimized for efficiency and privacy, we got both, and the bill came due as an ache nobody could name but we now know is called lonliness.

The dock worked because it made disappearing inconvenient.

That’s all. It wasn’t some enlightened community of seekers (we were as ornery and private a bunch as you’d find anywhere); it was just a piece of physical design that made small daily contact unavoidable, and small daily contact turns out to be most of the whole game.

The WHO report says as much, listing things like walkable space and decent public transit as protective factors, which is a polite way of admitting that loneliness is partly an architecture problem.

I don’t have a program for you. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they can sell you your way out of this, because the real answer is so unglamorous it barely fits in a sentence: we have to put ourselves back in each other’s path on purpose.

Not a grand gesture. The barista whose name you finally learn. The neighbor you wave down instead of waving at. The standing Tuesday call with the old friend, the choir, the volunteer shift, the porch you actually sit on.

The research bears this out, by the way; the things that moved the needle weren’t dramatic, they were small and repeated, like volunteering and simply showing up to the same group of people often enough that you become a familiar face. Familiarity is wildly underrated. So is the plain act of being reachable.

Maybe that’s part of why I keep talking into a microphone every day after all these years, and why I keep writing to you here. A radio show is a strange, one-way sort of dock, but it’s a dock (and I do take calls for half of every show). We find each other where we can.

The hopeful thing, the thing I keep circling back to, is that if loneliness really is hunger, then it has a remedy as ordinary as a meal. You don’t have to fix your whole life. You just have to answer the signal, one small contact at a time, and trust that the body that’s been doing this for a few hundred thousand years still knows exactly what it’s reaching for.

So here’s what I’d love from you: tell me about one small piece of “design” in your own life that keeps you connected.

The standing dinner, the dog you walk at the same hour as the same strangers, the dock.

What actually works? Drop it in the comments and let’s build a list together, because somebody reading this is hungry tonight and doesn’t have a word for it, and your ordinary answer might be the very thing they needed to hear.

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I’m a huge fan of Harrison Ford, and not just because he narrated a movie I’m in about two weeks a few of us spent with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj.

Ford stood in front of Arizona State University’s graduating class a couple of months ago and did something almost no politician in Washington has the courage to do right now. He told a generation of twenty-two-year-olds the unvarnished truth about the planet they’re inheriting and the people who handed it to them in this condition.

“The world you’re stepping into, the world my generation left you, is a real mess,” Ford said.

He didn’t dress it up, and he didn’t reach for the kind of corporate-friendly hedging you hear from senators who take money from ExxonMobil.

He told those students they have an “essential mandate to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and sea by 2030, to prevent the mass extinction, to slow the warming of our planet,” and then he reminded them that despite better science and better policies, we’re still hemorrhaging nature to “profiteering, corruption, conflict.”

Ford has been on the board of Conservation International for about 35 years now, and what he said in Tempe is something the data makes impossible to dismiss. The World Wildlife Fund’s 2024 Living Planet Report documented a catastrophic 73 percent average decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970, with freshwater species down 85 percent and Latin American and Caribbean populations collapsed by an astonishing 95 percent.

We’re not approaching a tipping point in some distant future. We’re already deep into what scientists openly call the Sixth Mass Extinction, and it’s the first one in the planet’s 4.5 billion year history caused by a single species, us.

I remember walking with Louise through a forest outside Berlin years ago, the kind of dense, ancient woodland Germans have spent generations protecting because they understand, in a way most Americans no longer do, that a country without intact nature is a country eating its own future.

The Germans learned the hard way in the 1980s, when their forests were dying from acid rain, that there’s no economic strategy clever enough to outrun ecological collapse. They acted, they regulated, they invested.

And here we are, four decades later, with an American president who took us out of the Paris Climate Agreement on day one of his second term and made us the only nation on Earth to walk out of the global compact to save ourselves.

But that was just the beginning. Trump’s Interior Department just rescinded the Public Lands Rule, eliminating the requirement that conservation be considered alongside mining, drilling, and grazing across 245 million acres of public land that belongs to all of us.

His Agriculture Department rolled back the 2001 Roadless Rule that protected old-growth forests from logging on millions of acres, and his budget proposal would slash funding for public land agencies by more than a third and transfer national park units permanently out of federal ownership.

In Arizona, where Ford was speaking, the administration is trying to open the brand-new Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument to uranium mining and drilling just a few miles from the Grand Canyon.

When Trump’s people solicited public comments on rescinding the Roadless Rule, more than 99 percent of the over 600,000 comments opposed the rollback, and for the Public Lands Rule, 98 percent of commenters opposed rescission. They did it anyway.

This is what Ford meant when he said we’re losing nature to profiteering and corruption. The American people aren’t asking for any of this. The oil companies and mining interests are, and they own the people running the agencies.

But Ford went somewhere deeper than the politics, and this is what made his speech matter. He talked about the Indigenous communities who, in his words, “have long understood that the trees, the mountain, water, soil, are not commodities. They are relatives to be cherished for following generations to embrace and protect.”

Then he said something that hit harder than anything else in those few minutes at the microphone. He said these communities are “being marginalized, and in many cases, killed in cold blood.”

That’s not Hollywood rhetoric. The London-based watchdog Global Witness documented 146 land and environmental defenders murdered or disappeared in 2024 alone, with 82 percent of those killings happening in Latin America. Colombia accounted for 48 of them, and Guatemala saw its killings jump fivefold in a single year.

Since Global Witness started tracking in 2012, more than 2,253 land defenders have been killed, most of them Indigenous people and small-scale farmers standing between corporate extraction and the last intact ecosystems on Earth.

They’re dying so a mining executive in Toronto or a soybean baron in São Paulo or a timber consortium in Houston can squeeze a little more profit out of land that took the planet millions of years to assemble.

Ford drew the line very precisely. “Humanity is a part of nature, not above it,” he said. That’s not a sentimental flourish. It’s the scientific truth that the entire Western capitalist project has spent five hundred years denying.

We’ve been operating on the John Locke fantasy that the natural world is just inert raw material waiting for a clever European with a deed to convert it into wealth, and we’ve finally hit the wall that any first-grader could have predicted.

But you can’t run a civilization on the assumption that the air, the water, the pollinators, the soil microbes, and the climate itself are free and infinite. They’re not. They’re services the natural world provides for us that we cannot replicate at any price, and we’re systematically destroying the systems that produce them.

The 30 by 30 target Ford mentioned was adopted by nearly 200 nations at the 2022 Kunming-Montreal biodiversity summit, and we’re currently at roughly 17 percent of land and 8 percent of marine areas globally with four years left. The wealthy nations, including ours, pledged $20 billion a year to help the Global South protect their forests and reefs, and most of them, including the United States under Trump, have walked away from the commitment.

What Ford told those graduates is vital:

“Your generation has far more power than you may realize. And if you harness that power, if you find your leadership, your issues, your voice, the world will not be able to ignore you.”

He’s right about that. The Civil Rights Movement was built by college kids, the movement against the Vietnam War was built by college kids, and the first Earth Day in 1970 brought twenty million Americans into the streets and produced the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the EPA, all signed by a Republican president because the political pressure was overwhelming.

We’ve done it before, and we can do it again.

Call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to oppose every public lands sell-off, every monument rollback, and every attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, or the Antiquities Act.

Register and check your registration at vote.org, find out who’s running for state office where you live at openstates.org, because most of the actual fights over public lands and water and habitat happen at the state level, and support the legal work of the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the League of Conservation Voters, all of whom are in court right now fighting these rollbacks. If you have it in you to do more, join the work of Conservation International, the organization Harrison Ford has given the last 35 years of his life to.

If this piece spoke to you, please share it widely and forward it to anybody you know who cares about whether their grandchildren will inherit a living planet or a wasteland. Subscribe to Wisdom School at wisdomschool.com to keep this work going, and tell a few friends about it today.

Democracy runs on the daily decision of ordinary people to refuse to be silent, and the graduates Harrison Ford spoke to in Arizona have four years to bend the curve before the 30 by 30 deadline hits and that window slams shut. Their power is real, and so is yours.

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Walk into a piece of old growth Pacific Northwest forest, and something happens to you. The light goes liquid. The air thickens. The moss is six inches deep on every horizontal surface. The Doug firs go up two hundred feet without a branch and disappear into a canopy you can’t quite see. The fallen trees, what loggers used to call nurse logs, are slowly becoming the next forest, with seedlings already rooted in their soft, decaying bodies. And the silence isn’t really silence. It’s a different quality of attention than you can find anywhere else.

I’ve spent a lot of hours in those forests over the years. What strikes me, every time, is that the forest doesn’t feel like a place. It feels like someone. Or, more accurately, like many. A standing community of beings that knows you’re there before you know how you feel about being there.

For most of my life, science was telling me I was wrong about that. The official story, survival of the fittest, was that a forest is a kind of slow-motion gladiator pit, every tree fighting every other tree for sunlight and water and nutrients, and that the canopy I was walking under was the result of a few million years of relentless mutual exploitation. Whatever I was feeling under those firs was a poetic projection, not a fact about the forest.

In April, scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the ForestGEO global research network published a paper in Nature that’s quietly demolishing that story.

The team examined nearly three million individual trees, across more than five thousand species, in seventeen forests spanning Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and they found that positive, supportive interactions between neighboring trees are at least as common as the competitive ones we were taught about in school, and that the closer a forest is to the equator, the more cooperative its tree-to-tree relationships tend to be.

“Most research has focused on competition and other negative interactions among trees,” the study’s co-author Matteo Detto said, “but trees can also help their neighbors in many ways. We find that these positive interactions are more common in tropical forests, adding another piece to the puzzle of understanding their remarkable diversity.”

This is on top of decades of research, by Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia and by many others, on the underground mycorrhizal networks (the so-called wood wide web) that connect tree roots through filaments of fungus, allowing them to swap carbon, water, nitrogen, and chemical defense signals across species lines.

Simard’s framework, including her concept of mother trees (older, larger trees that appear to act as hubs in the underground network), has been beautifully popularized in books like her own Finding the Mother Tree and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, and has also, in fairness, been challenged by other ecologists who argue that some of the popular claims have run ahead of the data.

The careful version of the science, today, is this: forests are unmistakably interconnected through fungi and roots, carbon and signals do move among trees through those networks, big old trees do appear to play structural roles in the system, and the precise mechanisms of how, and how much, are still being worked out. What’s not in question, after the new Nature paper, is the larger frame. Forests are cooperative systems at least as much as they are competitive ones. They’re not gladiator pits. They’re communities.

This matters far beyond ecology, because for the last hundred and fifty years our entire economic worldview has been built on a stolen metaphor from biology. We took Darwin’s struggle for existence, ripped it out of its context, ignored the fact that he wrote at least as much about cooperation and mutualism as he did about competition, and built capitalism, libertarianism, and most of our public-policy frameworks on the assumption that competition is the law of nature.

We lectured each other about it for generations. We told the kids in our schools that the forest was red in tooth and claw. We told them the market was just an extension of the forest. We told them anyone who didn’t make it deserved their fate, because that was just how nature worked.

But nature doesn’t work that way. The Russian biologist Pyotr Kropotkin, observing wolves and birds and human peasant villages across Siberia in the 1880s, noticed this immediately and wrote his classic Mutual Aid to push back on the social-Darwinist misreading of his contemporary, Thomas Huxley.

Lynn Margulis, a century later, blew the whole story open with her work on endosymbiosis, demonstrating that the eukaryotic cell, the basic unit of every plant and animal on Earth, came into existence through cooperation between two ancient bacteria, not through competition.

And forest ecology is now arriving at the same place. The trees, it turns out, are not in business school. They’re in a long, patient, multispecies relationship with their neighbors, their fungi, their soil, their rain, their light, and the dead bodies of every tree that ever lived and fell among them.

I made a related argument decades ago in Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. The whole basis of life on Earth is a single, vast, hundreds-of-millions-of-years-long cooperative project.

Photons from the sun cooperate with chlorophyll. Chlorophyll cooperates with carbon dioxide and water. The resulting sugars cooperate with mitochondria. Plants cooperate with fungi. Fungi cooperate with soil. Soil cooperates with microbes. Trees cooperate with other trees.

And for almost all of human history, every culture except the most recent one understood this implicitly. The forest was a relative. The river was a relative. We were not above the system. We were part of it, and our job was to maintain the relationships that kept it alive.

What does this mean for the rest of us in 2026, with a planet on fire and a civilization built on the wrong story? Three things, I think.

First, defend the old growth forests we have left. They aren’t interchangeable with tree plantations. A two-hundred-year-old Doug fir, with its underground mycorrhizal partners and the centuries of local relationships it has built, can’t be replaced by twenty saplings on a clearcut. Once those connections are severed, it can take centuries for the network to rebuild, if it can be rebuilt at all. There’s a reason indigenous land sovereignty consistently produces healthier forests than corporate or state management does. Indigenous knowledge has known this in its bones for thousands of years.

Second, change the story you tell yourself about how the world works. Adam Smith was wrong about the invisible hand being our deepest nature. The forest is the deeper truth. Cooperation, mutualism, kinship, and care are the substrate. Competition is real, but it sits inside the larger frame of cooperation, the way a jazz solo sits inside the band.

If you build a society on the metaphor of the forest instead of the metaphor of the market, you get a different country, with different schools, different hospitals, different elder care, different economics, and very different relationships between neighbors.

Third, find a real forest, an old one if you can, and sit in it for an hour with your phone face-down. Not to perform contemplation. Just to listen. The forest will teach you what cooperation actually feels like, in your body, with no theory required. You’ll feel small in the right way, and held in the right way, and you’ll come out of it remembering something the dominant culture spent a century trying to make you forget.

The new Nature paper is just the latest piece of the science finally catching up. The forest was never a battlefield. It’s a community we forgot we belonged to. And the very good news is that the community is still here, still patient, still willing to teach us, in the language of light and root and fungus, who we actually are.

If there’s an old growth forest within driving distance of you, go this month. If there’s a campaign to protect it, donate or volunteer. If your local government is making decisions about a nearby greenbelt or watershed or working forest, show up at the meeting and speak. And tell me in the comments where your forest is, and what it’s teaching you. We’re a wisdom school here, which means our forests, like our wisdom, belong to all of us.

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A long time ago a Dutch-born psychologist named Robert Wolff sent me the manuscript of a book he’d been writing for years called Original Wisdom, and asked if I’d write the foreword. I sat with it for several days. I couldn’t put it down.

Wolff had spent decades among the Sng’oi, an indigenous people who live in the deep mountainous rainforest of Malaysia, learning a way of knowing that he had no Western training for and that, he came to believe, Western science had no real vocabulary to describe.

He wrote about Sng’oi who could find each other in dense jungle without speaking, who knew a thunderstorm was coming hours before there was any visible sign, who moved through their forest without leaving a trace, and who made decisions by sitting together in silence until something rose up in the group and was simply known.

The Sng’oi, Wolff insisted, weren’t primitive, weren’t premodern, weren’t on some earlier rung of a ladder we were finally climbing past. They were running on a completely different operating system than the one we run on, refined over thousands of years, that produced, among many other things, an entirely sustainable relationship with the land they lived on.

I wrote the foreword gladly. The book has stayed in print ever since, and I find I keep coming back to it.

I came back to it again this week, after I read a major essay in UNESCO Courier reporting that indigenous knowledge systems are finally being formally integrated into the world’s climate-response toolkit. The piece walks through example after example.

Aboriginal Australians have practiced cool burning, the controlled use of low-intensity fires, for tens of thousands of years to keep their lands safe from the catastrophic megafires we now know to expect when forests are left to accumulate fuel.

The U.S. and Australian governments banned indigenous cultural burning across most of their territories for over a century. The result, in California, Oregon, the Mountain West, and large portions of Australia, has been a fire regime that none of us alive today have ever seen before, because none of us alive today have ever seen the land managed correctly.

Inuit elders document weather and ice patterns with a precision that Western meteorological models still cannot match in the high Arctic. Farmers in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Kenya, and Senegal use techniques like zaï, small water-capture pits, combined with intercropping and indigenous plant varieties, to keep degraded soils productive without synthetic inputs. A 2025 paper in Scientific Reports found that ninety-two percent of South African farmers in one large region rely on traditional plant-based methods to manage pests and diseases.

And this isn’t a fringe finding any more. According to the United Nations, indigenous peoples make up less than five percent of the global population yet steward lands containing roughly eighty percent of Earth’s remaining biodiversity. Forests under indigenous management sequester more carbon, retain more biodiversity, and resist degradation better than forests under almost any other tenure arrangement.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report formally elevated Traditional Ecological Knowledge from “interesting cultural heritage” to “primary tool for climate adaptation.” That’s the kind of sentence I never honestly thought I’d write in my lifetime.

The deeper move, though, is conceptual. There is a Mi’kmaw word, Etuaptmumk, usually translated into English as “Two-Eyed Seeing”, that the late Mi’kmaw Elder Murdena Marshall and her husband, Elder Albert Marshall, of Eskasoni First Nation in Cape Breton, brought into the academic world in 2004.

The principle is simple. You look at every problem with one eye seeing what indigenous knowledge has to teach, and the other eye seeing what Western science has to teach, and you use the strengths of both rather than pretending one of them is sufficient on its own.

Etuaptmumk literally means the gift of multiple perspectives. It’s now spreading through Canadian medicine, marine biology, fisheries management, climate research, and education. Whole research grants are being awarded under its banner. Government departments are using it as a framework. The reason it’s spreading is that it works. The combination of methods, when honestly attempted, produces better answers than either method alone.

This is the argument I made decades ago in Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. The civilization we built over the last few hundred years operated on a fundamental error. We assumed we knew more than the older cultures did, and that progress meant leaving their methods behind.

We took that assumption and built a global civilization on it. The civilization we built has destabilized the climate, collapsed roughly three-quarters of the planet’s wild biomass, and put more than a million species at serious risk of extinction in our own lifetimes. The cultures we condescended to, by contrast, kept the lands they stewarded in some kind of working balance for tens of thousands of years.

What does any of this mean for those of us who aren’t indigenous? Two things, I think. First, give back what was taken, or at least defend it where it still exists. Indigenous land sovereignty isn’t a sentimental gesture. It’s a measurable, quantifiable climate strategy.

Land returned to (or kept under) indigenous stewardship reliably outperforms land managed by states or corporations on almost every ecological metric we know how to measure. Defending that sovereignty is, in plain English, a more cost-effective form of climate adaptation than most of the policies our governments are spending hundreds of billions on.

Second, learn how to look with both eyes. Whatever community you’re in, whatever land you live on, there is almost certainly an indigenous lineage that knew that land before your great-grandparents arrived. In many places the knowledge-keepers are still there, still teaching, still willing to share if asked respectfully and on their terms.

The practice of Etuaptmumk, of holding both ways of knowing without forcing one to submit to the other, is something any one of us can take up tomorrow morning. You don’t have to be indigenous to use the gift. You just have to stop assuming your one eye sees the whole picture.

I came back to Robert Wolff’s book this week because the UNESCO Courier essay reminded me of something he wrote near the end of it, almost in passing: that the Sng’oi didn’t talk about wisdom the way we do. They didn’t think it was rare or special or something you had to earn. They thought everybody had it. They thought we’d just forgotten.

The cultures we used to call primitive were never primitive. They were running an operating system that worked, while we were busy crashing ours. The very good news in 2026 is that some of those systems are still here. They’re being formally recognized by the IPCC, integrated into national parks and marine reserves, and finally listened to in the rooms where decisions get made. That’s not just an environmental story. It’s a homecoming.

If there’s an indigenous community on the land where you live (and there almost certainly is, even if the federal government hasn’t officially recognized them), look up their council, their cultural center, their language program, their hunting and fishing rights, and find a way to support them.

If there’s a tribally-led conservation effort in your region, donate or volunteer. If there’s a Two-Eyed Seeing project in your neighborhood, and there are more of these every year, show up.

And if you’ve never read Wolff’s Original Wisdom, or Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, or any of the great indigenous-voice writers like Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Vine Deloria Jr (God Is Red), or Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk), do yourself the favor. The future of the planet and the deepest parts of the past turn out to be the same conversation.

Tell me in the comments what you’re doing where you live. We’re a wisdom school here, and what we’re learning, again and again, is that we mostly aren’t learning anything new. We’re remembering.

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Years ago I lived on a forty-six-foot boat in a marina in Washington DC, and one of the things I learned in that strange floating neighborhood was how quickly genuine community springs up when people are forced to depend on each other a little.

My slip-mates and I checked each other’s lines before storms. We loaned tools. We watched each other’s boats when somebody was traveling. When the power went out, we found each other on the dock with flashlights and made sure everyone was warm.

The marina had a covered pavilion with a couple of picnic tables, and on warm nights it would fill up with neighbors who’d brought a bottle of wine or a plate of something. Nobody RSVP’d. You just showed up. If you didn’t show up for a few days running, somebody knocked on your hull to make sure you were all right.

It wasn’t that we were unusually friendly. It was that the architecture of the place made avoidance impossible.

You couldn’t get to your home without walking past several other people’s homes. You couldn’t fix your boat without your neighbor seeing you fix it. You couldn’t ride out a storm without checking on the boat next to yours, because if their lines slipped, your boat was in danger too. Interdependence was built into the bones of the place. And out of interdependence, almost without anyone meaning it, came friendship.

I think about that marina a lot now, because the world we’ve built for most Americans does exactly the opposite job. A landmark report from the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection, released last June, found that one in six people on Earth is now persistently lonely, and that loneliness is contributing to around 871,000 deaths a year, roughly a hundred an hour.

That puts loneliness, the WHO concluded, in the same public-health tier as tobacco, alcohol, and air pollution. The former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who co-chairs the commission, made the same point in a slightly different frame in his 2023 advisory: being chronically lonely is roughly as bad for your body as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

Heart disease risk goes up about thirty percent. Stroke risk goes up about thirty-two percent. Older adults who are chronically lonely have about a fifty percent greater risk of developing dementia. And on the mental-health side, lonely people are roughly twice as likely to develop depression as their well-connected peers.

What I find most heartbreaking in the data is the age distribution. Most of us imagine the lonely person as an elderly widow in a small apartment, and certainly that exists. But the WHO found that the loneliest age group on Earth right now is teenagers, with roughly 21 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds reporting that they feel lonely most of the time. Among adolescent girls, the figure rises to nearly a quarter. These are the kids growing up with phones in their pockets that promised infinite connection and delivered the opposite.

Murthy and the commission aren’t subtle about why this is happening. We didn’t fall into loneliness by accident. We engineered it, decision by decision, over the course of about seventy years.

We zoned single-family suburbs that put working adults in cars for two hours a day, alone, with no porch and no sidewalk and no corner store to walk to. We bulldozed the dense, mixed-age neighborhoods where people of different generations lived on top of each other and rebuilt them as office parks and parking lots.

We replaced the corner tavern, the union hall, the church basement, the lodge meeting, the garden club, the bowling league, and the family dinner table with a screen. We made it normal for grandparents to live a thousand miles from their grandkids.

We let the institutions that used to put humans in front of each other on a recurring schedule (small businesses, downtowns, community theatres, public libraries, neighborhood schools) be hollowed out one by one. Robert Putnam laid out most of this in Bowling Alone twenty-five years ago. We’ve spent the time since proving him right.

The good news, and there is some, is that public-health researchers are finally starting to talk about loneliness the way they once talked about tobacco. A team led by Tyler Prochnow at the Texas A&M School of Public Health published a paper in Public Health Reports in January arguing that the same playbook that brought down American smoking rates by sixty percent in fifty years can be applied to loneliness now.

Smoking didn’t decline because individual smokers gritted their teeth harder. It declined because we changed the environment around the smoker. Cigarette ads got banned. Public spaces went smoke-free. Tobacco taxes went up. School curriculums changed. Doctors started asking about it at every visit. Insurers started covering cessation. Most importantly, the cultural meaning of smoking shifted, from sophistication and freedom to a slow, chemical kind of harm.

Prochnow and his colleagues argue we can do exactly the same thing with loneliness now: change the policies, redesign the spaces, screen for it in clinics, fund the helplines, denormalize the digital substitutes, and shift the cultural story from loneliness is a personal failing to loneliness is what happens when human beings are placed in environments human beings were never built to thrive in.

I’m not waiting for the policy. None of us should. The marina taught me that human beings will form a community wherever the architecture allows it, and that the architecture, in our own lives, is mostly something we control.

Most of you reading this can do at least three things this month that will measurably change your own loneliness numbers and somebody else’s.

Eat dinner with another human being three times a week, even if it has to be takeout in their kitchen or yours.

Walk somewhere on foot at least once a day where you might run into a neighbor and have to say hello.

And pick one institution in your life that requires showing up in person on a recurring basis (a Sunday service, a yoga class, a quilting circle, a poker night, a writing group, a community garden, a contra dance, a twelve-step meeting, a softball league, a community choir, an AA meeting, a town meeting) and commit to it for a season the way you’d commit to a job.

Don’t make it conditional on whether you “feel like it” on a given Tuesday. Treat it the way our great-grandparents treated church: as a non-negotiable rhythm that builds the muscle of belonging over time.

And if you have an elderly neighbor, knock on the door. Just knock. Bring a piece of fruit if you need an excuse. The data on what a brief, regular human visit does for an isolated older person’s biomarkers is close to miraculous, and the data on what it does for you is almost as good.

The WHO report is titled From Loneliness to Social Connection. It’s a hopeful title, and I think it earns the hope. We made this. We can unmake it. Loneliness is not a character flaw. It’s a public-health emergency hiding in plain sight, and the cure for it is each other.

Tell me in the comments what you’re going to commit to this month. Or tell me what’s already working in your life, the structure that’s keeping you tied to other humans, so the rest of us can borrow the idea. We’re a wisdom school here, which means our experiments belong to all of us.

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Years ago I lived on a floating home in Portland, and one of the rituals I still miss from those years is what I came to think of as my coffee-on-the-deck practice. Most mornings, before anyone else was awake and before the day’s noise began, I’d take a hot mug out to the deck and just stand there.

The Willamette River would be moving the way rivers always move, indifferent and unhurried. Mist would lift off the surface in slow rolls. A heron might pick its way along the bank. Sometimes the sky was the color of a peach, sometimes the color of slate. And every so often, if I held still long enough, something in me would let go all at once. The chatter would drop. My shoulders would drop. Time would do that strange thing it does when you stop trying to push it. And I’d come back into the day with a kind of inner steadiness that no amount of caffeine could account for.

I didn’t have a name for what was happening. I just knew the days I started that way went better than the days I didn’t, and I made a practice of getting out on the back deck whenever I could. Decades later, I recognize what I was doing. I was giving myself a daily, deliberate dose of awe.

A piece in National Geographic this fall caught me up on what science has finally figured out about the practice. The article, called “The Life-Changing Power of Awe,” summarizes about a decade of research that’s mostly come out of UC Berkeley, where the psychologist Dacher Keltner has been mapping what awe actually does to a human body. Keltner’s book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life is a beautiful account of what he and his colleagues have found, and the short version is this: awe is medicine.

The findings keep stacking up. A 2023 Harvard study found that just fifteen minutes in nature can measurably improve mental health, on something like the same order as moderate exercise or a basic dose of an antidepressant.

A 2022 brain-imaging study of sixty-three adults found that a single hour-long walk in a forest measurably lowered amygdala activity (the brain’s alarm system) when participants were later put under stress, compared to people who’d walked through a city.

A 2015 Berkeley study of undergraduates found that the ones who reported more frequent experiences of awe also had lower circulating levels of interleukin-6, a marker of chronic inflammation we now know underlies almost every modern disease, from heart attacks to depression to Alzheimer’s.

And a diary study tracking 269 adults over twenty-two days found that on the days people experienced more awe they reported about twenty percent less stress, fewer physical complaints, and greater well-being overall.

What the research is showing, in other words, is that awe doesn’t just feel good. It physically shifts your nervous system.

The neuroscientist Virginia Sturm at UCSF has found that awe pulls a body out of the sympathetic, fight-or-flight branch of the autonomic nervous system and into the parasympathetic, rest-and-digest branch. Your vagus nerve wakes up. Your heart rate drops. Your inflammation drops. The default mode network (the part of your brain that does most of the self-focused worrying) goes quiet.

You stop being the small, anxious self you usually are and become, for a few minutes, just an awareness that’s looking at something larger. Then you come back. And you bring the gentleness with you.

This is where my decades of teaching neurolinguistic programming come in. When Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed NLP at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s, one of their core insights was that powerful internal states are anchorable. A state, in NLP language, is the whole package of how you’re feeling and thinking and breathing in a given moment, and the body keeps an unconscious record of it.

If you pair a deep enough state with a sensory cue (a touch, a word, a piece of music, a remembered image) the cue can later re-trigger the state. Athletes do this when they touch their wrist before a free throw. Singers do it when they take a particular kind of breath before a high note. Anyone who’s ever caught a whiff of something and been catapulted back to childhood has felt anchoring at work. The body does it on its own. NLP just makes it deliberate.

Awe, it turns out, is one of the deepest anchorable states available to a human being. When you stand on a mountain and the world unfolds underneath you, or you sit in a great cathedral as an organ floods the space, or you hold a newborn and your heart does that thing it does, you are in a powerfully integrated state across nearly every system in your body.

Anchor that state (notice your breath, notice where your feet are, notice the temperature of your skin, hold a particular small gesture in your hand) and you’ll be able to come back to a fragment of it later, in traffic, in a hospital waiting room, at a kitchen table where a difficult conversation is underway. You won’t get the whole peak. But you’ll get a taste, and the taste is enough to reset your physiology.

The good news is that you don’t need a mountain. Keltner and his colleagues have spent years showing that awe is built on attention more than on scale. A 2021 trial of older adults found that a fifteen-minute weekly awe walk, where people just slowed down and looked carefully at the textures and colors and small movements of the natural world, produced measurably greater drops in distress and bigger gains in positive emotion than ordinary walking did.

Sturm calls these micro-doses of awe. A leaf. A patch of moss. The way light moves on water. The face of a person you love. Music that gives you goosebumps. A stranger doing a small kindness on a city sidewalk. Even, Keltner notes, the simple practice of thinking about a person whose courage or generosity has shaped your life. He calls that last one moral beauty, and it produces awe responses just as strong as anything in nature.

What I’d add, from a working life spent inside NLP, is this: don’t just have the experience. Notice it while it’s happening. Slow down enough to feel where it lands in your body. Anchor it deliberately. Pair it with one small specific thing (a hand on your chest, a word you say to yourself, the feel of your breath at the back of your throat) so you can come back to it.

The contemplative traditions have always taught some version of this. The Buddhists call it mindfulness. The Christians call it recollection. Jewish tradition has the practice of saying a hundred blessings a day, each one a small returning to gratitude and astonishment. The Quakers sit in silence until something rises. None of those practices are decorative.

They are state-induction technologies, refined over thousands of years, that human beings developed precisely because we figured out, long before fMRI scanners existed, that the way we pay attention shapes everything else.

So here’s my homework, if you’ll take it. This week, find one fifteen-minute window where you can be outside without your phone. A backyard works. A park bench works. A walk to the corner and back works. Look slowly at one specific thing the way a child or a painter might. A bark texture. The geometry of a fern. The way the sky changes between two buildings.

Let yourself drop into it. When something inside you opens, even a little, notice it. Put a hand on your chest, take a breath, and say to yourself, quietly, this counts. That’s the anchor. Bring it back to your desk and use it during the next hard meeting.

Then come tell me in the comments what happened. We’re a wisdom school here, which means we do this practice together. The science is finally catching up to what the contemplatives have always known: paying attention, slowly, to the world that’s already in front of us, is the cheapest, most available, most reliable medicine we’ve got. Awe is a vitamin. And almost nobody is taking it.

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When I was twelve I had a bicycle, a Boy Scout knife, a library card, and what amounted to a couple of square miles of free range. My parents had no idea where I was most afternoons, and I had no real idea where they were either. We met up at dinner, told each other the day’s news, and went back out.

I built a treehouse with friends I’d known since first grade. I dammed a creek with rocks and caught frogs. I walked into the woods with no destination and came back when I was hungry. I read books up in trees. Some afternoons I was bored out of my mind, and that boredom was the soil in which I grew everything I’d later become.

A twelve-year-old today has a different life. The library card has been replaced by a piece of glass that knows them better than their grandmother does, that follows them to bed and wakes up before they do, and that has been engineered, with the same techniques I learned decades ago in advertising and broadcasting, to keep their eyes on it for as many hours as possible.

The treehouses are mostly gone. The creek’s fenced off or paved over. Free range, for most American kids, has shrunk to the distance between the bedroom door and the school bus, and even that distance is patrolled.

Now we have hard data on what that’s costing them. A study published December 1st in the journal PEDIATRICS by a team from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, working with researchers at UC Berkeley and Columbia, looked at over ten thousand American adolescents and found that owning a smartphone at age twelve is associated with higher rates of depression, obesity, and insufficient sleep.

The younger the kid was when they got the phone, the worse the obesity and sleep problems got. And in maybe the most damning finding, kids who reached twelve without a phone but then got one between twelve and thirteen had more mental health problems and worse sleep at thirteen than the kids who stayed phoneless.

That’s not screen time in general. That’s the smartphone specifically. The thing in their pocket. The thing in the dark beside their pillow.

I’m not surprised. I spent the early years of my career in advertising and broadcasting (writing copy, running radio stations, building ad campaigns for clients large and small) and I learned, the way every working ad person learns, how to manufacture wanting.

You learn the hooks. You learn how to plant a hunger that the product is the only answer to. You learn that attention is a finite resource and whoever captures it wins. None of that knowledge was secret. It was just the trade.

What’s different about the smartphone is that the techniques have been turned, full force, on children who’ve barely learned to read. Notifications are slot-machine pulls. Likes are dopamine reinforcers. Streaks are addiction-engineering. The endless scroll is a Skinner box you can hold in one hand.

None of that is metaphor. The people who designed these systems have been frank about it; many of them won’t let their own children near a phone, which is one of those small details that ought to be on the front page every day until the country wakes up.

What we’re discovering, study by study and casualty by casualty, is that there are developmental tasks a twelve-year-old’s body and mind absolutely have to do (move, sleep, wonder, get bored, fight with friends, make up with friends, walk in the woods, lie in the grass and look at clouds, have unsupervised conversations about the things twelve-year-olds talk about) and that all of those tasks are being displaced, sometimes silently and sometimes not, by the device.

My friend Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his beautiful book Magical Child, laid out what each stage of childhood is actually for. Each stage opens a window. If the window is open and the child gets what they need (movement, story, embodied experience, the felt sense of mattering to a real community), the window closes around a strong, integrated adult. If the window is open and the child gets a slot machine instead, the window still closes. Just not around what was supposed to be in there.

This is also where the Edison Gene comes in.

I’ve written for years about the kids we now call ADHD, the so-called hunters in a farmer’s world, the kids who learn through doing and moving and building and arguing and questioning rather than through sitting still.

Those kids are particularly catastrophic targets for the smartphone, because the phone hijacks the very systems (novelty-seeking, dopamine, immediate reward) that make a hunter-mind brilliant in the right environment and miserable in the wrong one. Hand a hunter-mind kid an infinite-novelty machine that punishes them every time they put it down, and you’ve built a private hell for the very child whose gifts the world most needs.

So what do we do? The study’s lead author, Ran Barzilay, is gentle about it, and I respect that. He notes that smartphones can do good things too: keep families in touch, give a lifeline to a queer kid in a rural town, help a curious mind learn anything they want. He’s right. I’m not arguing for phoneless purity.

I’m arguing for delay, and for rebuilding the village around the child. The two go together. You can’t take the phone away if there’s nothing else there. A bored, unsupervised, friendless twelve-year-old in a suburb where every other twelve-year-old is on a phone has nowhere to go but onto the phone too. That isn’t a choice the kid is making. That’s a vacuum the kid is filling.

The good news is that parents have started organizing. The American Wait Until 8th movement has signed up well over a hundred thousand families pledging together not to give their kids a smartphone until at least the end of eighth grade, on the simple insight that the pledge only works if your kid’s friends’ parents take it too.

Across the Atlantic, Smartphone Free Childhood launched in early 2024 from a single WhatsApp group in Suffolk and now has over three hundred thousand parents in its network, with offshoots in more than thirty countries.

School districts from Florida to California are banning phones from the school day, and the kids, after a couple of weeks of withdrawal, look up and notice each other again. Whole school cafeterias get loud again, the way cafeterias are supposed to be. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made youth social media use an official public health priority back in 2023. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is on parents’ nightstands across the country. The conversation has shifted. The data is now in the chamber.

What I want to say to every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, godparent, neighbor, and teacher reading this is simple: delay the phone, and rebuild the village. Twelve is too young. Thirteen is too young. Fourteen is borderline.

And while you’re delaying, give them what twelve-year-olds actually need. Trees. Tools. Bicycles. Time. Other kids who aren’t on phones either. A grandmother to bake with. A trail. A creek. A book read up in a tree. A dinner table where the phones are face-down in a basket by the door.

The childhood you remember (or wish you’d had) wasn’t an accident of nostalgia. It was a setting in which a particular kind of human being could grow up. We can build that setting again. It just takes a few of us to start.

If there’s a kid in your life heading for that twelve-year-old threshold, share this piece with their parents. Send it to the grandparents. Send it to the teachers. Talk to two other families on your street and start your own little wait-until-eighth pact, even if you’re the first ones to do it. And tell me in the comments how it’s going. Some of the most useful wisdom on this site comes from your stories, not mine.

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I read the news from a recent symposium in Porto twice, and then I sat with it for a long while looking out at the trees in front of my office. Christof Koch, one of the most respected neuroscientists alive, the man who literally helped invent the modern science of consciousness alongside Francis Crick back in the 1990s, was telling a roomful of his colleagues that he’s no longer convinced the brain creates consciousness at all.

He thinks consciousness might be a fundamental feature of reality itself, the way mass and electromagnetism and gravity are. The brain doesn’t generate awareness so much as receive, shape, and channel it. Coming from Koch, who runs the Allen Institute for Brain Science and spent his whole career trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness, that’s a tectonic shift.

For me it landed more like a homecoming than a surprise. I spent long stretches of my younger life walking a forest path in Stadtsteinach, in northern Bavaria, with my old friend and teacher Gottfried Müller. I wrote a whole book about him called The Prophet’s Way, named after that forest trail.

Things happened on those walks that I’ve never been able to explain to a materialist’s satisfaction. Herr Müller would know what I was about to say before I said it. Animals would behave around him in ways I’d never seen animals behave around any other person. There were moments when the boundary between his mind and mine, and between both of us and the woods we were walking through, felt less like a wall and more like a screen door. You could feel things passing through.

For years I tried to talk myself out of those experiences. I’d been raised in the post-war American faith that the brain is a meat computer and that anything that looks like soul or telepathy or awareness-without-a-body is either a glitch in the wiring or a story we tell ourselves so we’ll be less afraid of dying.

That’s still the official position of most of the scientific establishment. It’s called materialism, or physicalism, and for the last hundred or so years it’s been treated less like a hypothesis than like the air the room is made of.

Koch’s whole point in Porto is that the air may not actually be there. He laid out three places where the materialist story breaks down.

The first is the so-called hard problem of consciousness, named by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. Even if we could map every single neuron firing in your visual cortex when you see the color red, we still have no idea why there’s something it’s like to see red. Information processing alone doesn’t explain the inside view.

The second is modern physics, where the deeper anyone digs, into quantum mechanics, the measurement problem, the role of the observer, the harder it gets to defend the picture of solid stuff bumping around in empty space.

And the third is what Koch politely calls anomalous experiences: near-death experiences, mystical states, and a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where dementia patients sometimes wake up hours before death, recognize their families, speak in full sentences, and say goodbye, with a brain that on autopsy is far too damaged to be doing any of those things.

None of that fits the meat-computer model. And there are are now far too many cases to wave away.

So what does Koch propose instead? He says it may be time to revisit some old, supposedly-discarded ideas: idealism, which holds that mind is fundamental and matter emerges from it, and panpsychism, which holds that consciousness, in some form, goes all the way down.

He champions a particular framework called Integrated Information Theory, which says that any system integrating information at a high enough level (a brain, an octopus, a forest, perhaps even a galaxy) has some form of inner experience.

You and I have a lot of it. A worm has a little. A pile of sand probably has none. The line between conscious and not conscious stops being a wall between humans and everything else, and starts being a gradient that runs through all of nature.

This is the part where my lifelong reading list lights up. Aldous Huxley argued in The Doors of Perception in 1954 that the brain is a “reducing valve,” a filter that narrows the firehose of cosmic consciousness down to the trickle a primate body can survive on. The French philosopher Henri Bergson made essentially the same argument fifty years before Huxley, in Matter and Memory.

William James, the founder of American psychology, proposed in 1898 that the brain might be a transmissive organ rather than a productive one, the way a radio is a transmissive instrument for music it doesn’t generate.

And my late friend Joseph Chilton Pearce, in books like The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and The Biology of Transcendence (I wrote the foreword to Crack, and was lucky enough to spend many evenings sitting with Joe before he died) kept making the case that human awareness isn’t something the skull manufactures, it’s something the skull-and-heart together tune into.

None of those people were considered scientists in good standing. Most got dismissed as poets or mystics or romantics. And now here’s Christof Koch, in 2026, telling a room full of his fellow neuroscientists that they may have been right all along.

It matters that this is happening now. We’re in a moment when artificial intelligence is suddenly forcing everyone to ask, out loud and a little nervously, what consciousness even is, and whether a sufficiently complicated machine might have some.

That question can’t be answered until we have an honest theory of consciousness in the first place, and the materialist theory we inherited from the nineteenth century isn’t up to the job. So the door is opening. The wisdom traditions, the ones we used to call primitive or premodern, get to walk back in.

What does any of this have to do with how you live tomorrow morning? Quite a lot, actually. If consciousness is something you participate in rather than something your brain secretes like bile, then attention is sacred.

The hours you spend doomscrolling are hours of awareness leaked back into a feed that doesn’t love you. The minutes you spend in silence, in nature, in a real conversation with another human being where both of you put your phones face-down on the table, are minutes when something fundamental in the universe gets to come awake through you.

The contemplative traditions, every one of them, have been telling us this for thousands of years. Sit. Breathe. Pay attention. The Buddhists call it mindfulness. The Christians call it contemplative prayer. Indigenous peoples call it being on the land. They aren’t different practices. They’re the same practice in different vocabularies.

And if Koch is right, the materialism that’s been quietly running our civilization since Descartes, the assumption that nature is dead matter to be managed and that mind is a fluke of biology, is wrong in a way that has consequences. It’s the philosophical engine room of strip-mining and factory farming and treating each other like consumer units.

If consciousness is woven into the fabric of things, then the river really is a relative, the forest really is a community, and the person across from you really is, at some level, made of the same inwardness you’re made of. That’s not poetry. That’s what the math is starting to say, and Native people have been trying to tell us for centuries.

I’d love to know what you think. If you’ve ever had an experience that didn’t fit the meat-computer story, a moment of inexplicable knowing, a presence you couldn’t account for, a goodbye from someone whose brain shouldn’t have been working, please share it in the comments.

The wisdom traditions kept this data safe for thousands of years by people swapping these stories around fires. We can do the same thing in this corner of Substack. And if you haven’t yet read Huxley or William James or Joe Pearce on this question, do yourself the favor. The future of science may turn out to look a lot like the deepest parts of the past.

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