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Herr Mueller had a tree.

He was my teacher when I was a young man in Germany, the man I wrote about in The Prophet’s Way, and nearly every day I lived in or visited him in Stadtsteinach we’d take a walk through the mountainous forest of the Frankenwald that went past an enormous old pine. He’d stop, hold his open palms against its bark, press his cheek to the tree, and talk to it.

He told me he was exchanging energy with the tree and that it kept him young and strong, something he said Europeans had been doing for millennia. He said I should build a relationship with the plants and trees around me, that they were our sentient neighbors and not just scenery.

I was in my twenties and I nodded along the way you do with a teacher you love, never quite sure whether he meant it literally.

The year after he died, so did that two-hundred-year-old tree. I still remember my shock when I came upon the stump and wreckage while visiting my old haunts.

I’m reminded of that tree a lot these days, as Herr Mueller’s view of the plant kingdom has broken into the open in the scientific journals, and it’s getting nasty.

The Guardian ran a long article earlier this month on what it called the “bitter debate” over whether organisms without brains can think, and the headline essentially quoted a skeptical scientist who’d called the whole line of inquiry dangerous.

The creature at the center of this particular fight is a slime mold called Physarum polycephalum, a single yellow cell that can spread to the size of a dinner plate and has no brain, no neurons, and nothing you’d recognize as what we’d call a nervous system.

But then came along Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki, who showed it could find the shortest path through a maze to reach a pile of oat flakes. His team later laid out their oats in the pattern resembling Tokyo and its suburbs and watched the mold grow a network that closely matched the region’s actual rail system, and arguably improved on it.

Stranger still, when researchers blew cold, dry air at a mold once an hour for three hours, it slowed down movement on its own at the fourth hour, bracing for a gust that never came. Nobody knows how a slime mold keeps time. And biologist Chris Reid found that the slime trail the organism leaves behind also works as a kind of external memory, telling it where it’s already been so it doesn’t waste effort going back.

More complex plants have their own version of this story. A 2018 study in the Annals of Botany found that ordinary anesthetics stop plants in their tracks. Venus flytraps quit snapping, Mimosa leaves quit folding, pea tendrils quit curling, and when the drug wears off they start again, just like you and I would do after surgery. Whatever the anesthetic is switching off — what we always assumed was the nervous system responsible for what we call consciousness — plants have it too.

Nobody’s disputing the science here; the mold solves the maze, the flytrap goes under, and the oak does, in some sense, decide. The argument roiling the scientific community is about which words we’re allowed to use for these behaviors, and whether they have something — anything — that resembles what we call consciousness.

The philosopher Pamela Lyon calls the broader view encompassing plant consciousness as being “biogenic,” the idea that cognition is a property of life itself rather than a late upgrade reserved for animals, and she told the Guardian she thinks a Copernican shift is on its way that will transform the way we understand life and consciousness.

Our ancestors didn’t need that shift: they started there. Around the year 723, the missionary Boniface took an axe to Donar’s Oak, a tree the Germanic tribes of Hesse held sacred, and used the wood to build a chapel. Since that tree had been held sacred by pagans, his goal was, in part, to prove that it was “only wood.”

The people who’d been talking to that oak for generations — like the Celts in their groves, the Shinto priests who still tie ropes around ancient cedars, and virtually every Indigenous culture I’ve ever spent time with — would’ve told Boniface he had it backwards. Herr Mueller, a Christian to his core, had connected deeply and daily to what that oak’s people knew.

It turns out he may have been onto something that even a skeptic can measure.

Qing Li, an immunologist at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, has spent two decades studying what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, also known as “forest bathing.” In his best-known experiment, twelve men spent three days walking in the woods, and their natural killer cell activity, a frontline immune defense against viruses and tumors, rose sharply and stayed elevated for more than a week.

When the same men walked the same distance through a city, however, they got no such boost. Li’s leading suspect for the way trees can influence the biology of humans is a group of proteins called phytoncides, the aromatic compounds pines and cedars release to defend themselves, which people breathe continuously while walking in a forest.

“Exchanging energy with the tree keeps me strong” doesn’t sound nearly as mystical to me now as it did when I was twenty-something.

I have a tree of my own. It’s on a walk I take several times a week, and when I get to it I do what Herr Mueller did. I don’t know whether the tree knows I’m there or not, but neither does anyone at Oxford or Murcia or Macquarie. But I’ve had pain in my back ever since a skydiving accident when I was 19, and every time I visit my tree it goes completely away for a few hours. Placebo effect? Maybe…

I’ve decided I’d rather err on the side of the older cultures and Herr Mueller than on the side of the Cartesian missionary with the axe.

So find your tree. Pick one on a route you already walk, and stop to touch it, sharing energy with it, even talking to it. Do it every time you pass the tree and remember to.

Give it a season, and then notice what’s changed, not in the tree, but in you. I’ve shared this with a few dozen people over the years, and based on their experiences I suspect you’ll be pleased with your own results.

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I’ve known Professor Richard Silberstein for decades; he’s one of my closest friends. And when you look at his credentials, you’d probably think he’d be the past person to write a book about telepathy. He’s a physicist by training who spent four decades as a working neuroscientist in Melbourne, chaired a physics department, founded a brain sciences institute, and invented a brain imaging method that labs still use to study memory and attention.

I still remember years ago when he told me about the experiment he later conducted, published, and now includes in his new book Stranger and Stranger, thinking that while I hoped he was right, I expected him to be disappointed.

Basically, he was trying to find out if identical twins were somehow connected to each other via some sort of as-yet-unknown mechanism of consciousness. There have been tons of literature published over the past few centuries about twins experience things that are inexplicable — one gets injured while on the other side of town, and the other feels the pain is one of the most common — and Richard wanted to test it with hard science.

He and his colleague Felicity Bigelow recruited pairs of identical twins and put each twin into a separate, sensorily-isolated room. One twin was designated the “sender” and watched a series of 100 images flashed on a screen at random intervals over 11 minutes. Half were personal pictures both twins had chosen together for the experiment, the other half were emotionally neutral and ordinary landscapes and cityscapes.

The “receiving” twin stared at a single unchanging picture for all of those 11 minutes, and both work a brain-recording setup that also exposed both to a faint 13-hertz flicker on the edge of their vision, which Richard hoped would lock their brains into something approaching synchronization.

What happened next was amazing. The “receiving” twins’ brains showed brief spikes of connectivity between the “seeing” visual cortex of the brain and the parietal and temporal regions, the same type of spike a brain scientist would expect to see when a person had just looked at something meaningful.

The “receivers” brain spikes lined up with the “senders” at a statistically significant level, something that — without some sort of physical communication between the two — should have been impossible. It’s the first time any hardcore scientists have tested this and the results (while needing replication) are already creating a buzz in scientific circles.

Most interesting, when the sessions were over and the “receiving” twins were asked whether they’d experienced anything at all, a twitch or a twinge or a sudden thought or picture or anything, they universally said that they had not. Nothing. No images, feelings, hunches, or anything else.

Their brains were responding to the other twin in a faraway room, in other words, but it was all happening at a level that was way below their own consciousness. Something was arriving, but their thoughtful, conscious mind was blissfully ignorant of it.

A mother of one of the twin pairs in the study told Richard how they played netball on separate courts, out of each other’s hearing or sight, and when one fell and dislocated her kneecap the other twin instantly felt an inexplicably sharp pain and had to limp over to the bench. These kinds of twin stories are legendary, but nobody before ever took an instrument capable of finely measuring brain activity as they were happening. Until now.

More than a century ago, William James suggested that the brain might be more of a receiver with a filter on it than a generator of consciousness. Richard’s experiment — and dozens of others he cites — puts the meat on the bones of that argument.

Every second, receptors on every square millimeter of your skin are sending signals to your spinal cord that you’re unaware of because of a massive inhibitory network you brain runs; it’s whole job is to suppress anything not relevant to staying alive in the moment. Evolution fine-tuned our senses to look out for physical threats, food, and sex but a faint signal from a sibling across town was never going to grab our attention more effectively than a snapping twig.

Richard reports on how 2024 study in the journal Cortex found that briefly quieting part of a person’s left frontal lobe with magnetic stimulation let “ordinary” people affect a random number generator with their minds in ways they otherwise couldn’t. It’s more of the same stuff.

This is an idea found in the teachings and core assumptions of every major religion in the world, particularly in the mystical traditions. The only thing that’s truly new is the science being applied to it.

So here’s a small experiment for this week that any Christian Scientist or Hindu meditator would instantly recognize. Pick a person you’re close to and, at some quiet moment, simply hold them in your mind and heart for a few minutes. Then let us know in the comments whether you learned anything, about them or about yourself.

And if you’ve ever known something before you had any way to know it, I’d love to hear that story too.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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When Kōnosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, was asked what quality he most valued when hiring, his answer baffled the room. It wasn’t intelligence, credentials, drive, or even discipline or experience.

It was, he said, “Luck.” He wanted to know whether the candidate was lucky.

For years, people repeated this story as a kind of charming eccentricity, the sort of thing a titan of industry gets to say because nobody around him dares to laugh. Then a neuroscientist named Nobuko Nakano spent years studying the brain chemistry of “fortunate people,” published her findings, and the psychology community suddenly stopped laughing.

What Nakano found is that luck operates through identifiable patterns of brain chemistry and behavior. The consistently lucky aren’t visited by fate: they’re running different neurological software.

And the remarkable thing, the thing that made me put down my Macha tea and reflect my own life, is that Matsushita figured this out by watching people. He didn’t have fMRI machines or randomized controlled trials: he just paid attention over a long lifetime and noticed the pattern.

So did Claude Bristol. So did Earl Nightingale. So did Dale Carnegie.

In my years between seventeen and twenty, restless and full of possibility and without much money, I finally saved enough to pay for the Dale Carnegie Course. I barely remember the specific sequence of events that led me there. What I remember is what it felt like from the inside: the experience of watching ordinary people, people who were afraid to speak, afraid to claim space, afraid to say what they actually wanted, stand up week after week and become more of themselves.

The course was about reprogramming the story you told yourself about who you were and what you were capable of doing. Around the same time I discovered Claude Bristol’s book “The Magic of Believing,” published in 1948, and started working my way through Earl Nightingale’s recordings. His 1956 record “The Strangest Secret” had a message so simple it almost felt like a trick: we become what we think about.

I was listening to those tapes on a beat-up cassette player in the car and at night as I was falling asleep, and something in me was rearranging itself. Over the decades that followed I started about half a dozen businesses that succeeded, and a few that didn’t, and those failures were their own graduate education.

I met Louise. We built a life. We lived on a floating home in Portland and later on a 46-foot boat in Washington, DC, and through all of it I kept coming back to the same question: why do some people seem to move through life collecting “good fortune” while others, facing nearly identical circumstances, keep missing it?

I thought I had an answer early on, but I didn’t have the science to explain the mechanism until much later.

Here is what Nakano’s research shows, and why it maps so precisely onto what Bristol and Nightingale were describing.

When someone even simply declares “I’m a lucky person,” brain imaging shows that this activates the prefrontal cortex in a way that shifts perception from threat-detection mode into opportunity-recognition mode.

The brain begins filtering the environment differently. Possibilities that a self-described unlucky person scans right past start rising up into awareness. Over weeks and months, these small perceptual advantages compound.

The lucky person encounters more openings, takes advantage of more of them, and builds a track record that reinforces that original belief. The brain, it turns out, takes you at your word and reorganizes its filtering system accordingly.

This is what I’ve been calling, in the NLP framework I’ve taught here at Wisdom School, the Reticular Activating System at work. Every second your senses deliver something like eleven million bits of information to your nervous system. Your conscious mind can handle roughly forty of them. The RAS decides which forty, and it builds its filter almost entirely out of your expectations and beliefs.

You find what you’re already looking for. You’ve always been finding, it turns out, what you were already looking for. The question is whether you chose the filter deliberately or inherited it from your circumstances.

Bristol called this “the mirror of your mind.” Nightingale called it “the strangest secret.” Nakano calls it a self-fulfilling prophecy, though she prefers to say the brain is taking your word for it. Different vocabularies, identical mechanism.

But here is where Nakano’s research goes somewhere the old positive-thinking tradition didn’t quite reach, and it surprised me. Luck has a biochemistry, and that biochemistry follows a daily rhythm.

Serotonin, the neurotransmitter that regulates mood and social confidence and resilience, is not produced on demand. It requires morning sunlight hitting the retina, the amino acid tryptophan from food, and a regular sleep-wake cycle.

People who rise early and spend their first waking minutes in natural light are, in the most literal sense, manufacturing the chemical foundation of good fortune. People who keep erratic hours suppress serotonin and raise cortisol instead. Chronic stress from cortisol narrows attention toward threats and shuts down the peripheral awareness where serendipity lives.

Nakano’s conclusion is direct: the perpetually unlucky are not cursed. In many cases, they’re simply chronically sleep-deprived. Their biology is tuned for threat-scanning, and so threat is reliably what they find.

I don’t think Carnegie or Bristol would have been surprised by this, exactly. They knew that a person’s physical state shaped their mental state. But they lacked the vocabulary to explain why the person who wakes up tired and anxious tends to have a different kind of day than the person who wakes up rested and grounded.

Now we have that vocabulary, and it points toward habits that are less glamorous than “believe in yourself” but possibly more foundational. Get enough sleep. Get outside in the morning. Eat the foods that give your brain what it needs to make the chemistry of optimism. This is not a metaphor: it’s upstream of everything else.

Then there is what Nakano calls the “fascination compass,” and this is where her neuroscience and the NLP framework I’ve been teaching here converge almost perfectly.

The brain’s dopamine system, which drives motivation and creative engagement, responds most powerfully to genuine interest. Pursue what society tells you to want, and dopamine trickles. Pursue what actually fascinates you and it floods the circuits of perception.

Lucky people, it turns out, are not luckier because they try harder. They’re luckier because they’re paying attention to what is real for them, and that attention produces the heightened awareness in which good fortune is most likely to appear.

In NLP terms, this is about operating from your own “map of the territory” rather than someone else’s. The person who chases a life that doesn’t actually call to them is moving through the world with muted senses. The person following their own fascination compass is, neurologically, far more fully awake.

I spent years in the advertising business, years in the mental health field, years in broadcasting and writing and political commentary and everything in between, and the common thread is that each of those chapters was driven by something that genuinely lit me up. Not every business succeeded. But I was never bored, and I was never sleepwalking, and I think that has something to do with why enough of them worked. Why I was “lucky.”

Now here is the part of Nakano’s research that I found most moving, and most consistent with what I believe about the deeper nature of this life.

You might expect that people so attuned to their own desires, so deliberate about following their own fascination, would be fundamentally self-centered. But the research shows the opposite.

Brain imaging studies find that acts of genuine generosity, helping someone without expecting anything back, and celebrating a friend’s success without jealousy, activate the striatum, the deepest reward center in the brain, far more powerfully than receiving a benefit yourself.

And the brain is very precise here. Help someone to create an obligation, and the reward response is muted. Help because you actually care, and it amplifies. Lucky people understand this distinction instinctively. They give freely, and in doing so they build the kind of social capital that opens doors they never even knew existed.

Our brains are wired to reward us for extending networks of mutual care, because for hundreds of thousands of years that wiring was the difference between life and death. The neuroscience of generosity is not separate from the neuroscience of luck. It’s part of the same picture. The lucky person who gives freely isn’t being naive: they’re activating an ancient and very well-tested system.

Bristol knew this too, even if he explained it differently. He believed that what we send out returns to us, that the mind “broadcasting” generosity attracts generosity in return. Nightingale talked about “giving more than you receive” as a kind of natural law. Carnegie built his entire program around “genuinely caring” about other people. They were all pointing at the same neurological reality from different angles.

And then there is the final piece, which Nakano draws from game theory. Mathematical simulations of repeated interactions show that long-term outcomes overwhelmingly favor those who stay in the game.

Participants who persisted through stretches of bad luck ultimately accumulated far more than those who quit early. The arithmetic is unforgiving: withdraw, and your probability of future success falls to zero.

“Lucky” people set goals that are concrete and personally meaningful, not borrowed aspirations from convention, and then they simply refuse to stop. They treat setbacks as statistical noise rather than destiny.

I had a few businesses that failed, as I mentioned. What I didn’t mention is that each one of them was followed by another attempt. I kept going, not because I was especially brave, but because I genuinely believed something good was on the other side of the effort.

That belief, I now understand, was not wishful thinking. It was the attentional filter running the program I’d installed in my late teens and early twenties with Carnegie and Bristol and Nightingale. I kept going because my brain had been tuned to expect that keeping going was worth it.

What Matsushita was really asking, Nakano concludes, when he asked whether a candidate was lucky, was whether they possessed a particular constellation of habits: Optimism grounded in self-awareness. Biology aligned with the chemistry of wellbeing. The courage to follow genuine curiosity. The generosity to invest in others. The persistence to remain in play.

None of these require exceptional talent or unusual privilege. They require only the recognition that luck is not something that happens to you; it’s something you practice. Quietly, daily, with more neuroscience behind it than most people realize, and with a lot more ancient wisdom pointing toward it than the scientists yet know.

Go read “The Magic of Believing.” Then get to bed at a reasonable hour, get outside in the morning light, find the thing that genuinely fascinates you, and give more than you think you have to give. Matsushita would have hired you.

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There are books you read and enjoy and set down, and there are books that break something open in you permanently. Rupert Ross’s Dancing with a Ghost, published in 1992, is the second kind. I’ve read a lot of books in my life. This is one of a handful I’d say genuinely changed the way I move through the world.

Ross was a Crown Attorney, a Canadian prosecutor, assigned to remote Indigenous communities in northwestern Ontario. He went in, as he freely admits, with the full set of Western assumptions about law, justice, healing, and the proper relationship between people.

He came out a changed person. The book is his attempt to describe what happened to him, and to understand the radically different worldview he encountered, and it is one of the most honest, generous acts of intellectual humility I’ve ever read from anyone working inside a government institution.

What amazed me, and what has stayed with me ever since, was his account of the principle of non-interference.

In the communities where Ross worked, non-interference wasn’t a passive thing, a reluctance to get involved, the way we sometimes use the word. It was a deeply held, actively practiced value grounded in a fundamental respect for every person’s right to walk their own path and make their own choices.

You did not tell other people what to do. You did not offer unsolicited opinions about how someone else was living. You did not intervene in another person’s journey, because doing so would be a profound violation of their dignity and their sovereignty as a human being.

Ross describes how this principle operated across every domain of life, from child-rearing to community decision-making to the response to personal crisis.

The example that stopped my breathing was the story of a woman who had watched her son die by suicide without physically intervening.

To Western eyes, including Ross’s initial reaction, this was incomprehensible, even monstrous. Every instinct in the Western tradition, legal, medical, moral, and parental, says you intervene. You grab the rope. You call for help. You do something. The woman’s stillness looked, from outside, like failure or indifference.

But Ross spent time sitting with the community’s understanding of what had happened, and what he came to see was something far more complicated and, in its own way, far more serious than indifference. The woman had understood, within the framework her culture had given her, that her son was on a journey that was his to make. That her body stepping between him and his choice would have been, in the deepest sense available to her, a violation of who he was.

Ross doesn’t ask us to agree with this. He instead asks us to understand it well enough to stop assuming our framework is the only serious one. He writes about the encounter with that belief system as something that shook him to his core and never fully let him go.

I’ve sat with that story for years. I’m not going to pretend I’ve fully resolved the moral tension in it, and I’m not sure it can be fully resolved.

There are situations where I believe intervention is the only human response. But the principle underneath that story, stripped of its most extreme application, is something I’ve come to believe is among the wisest things one culture has ever offered another.

We do not have the right to impose our vision of the “correct life” on other people. Not even on the people we love most.

Since reading Ross’s book, I’ve tried to stop giving unsolicited advice to my children. That has not been easy. The parental instinct to correct, to guide, to share the lesson you learned the hard way so they won’t have to, is almost physical in its urgency.

When you love someone and you can see what you believe is a mistake forming in front of you, the impulse to step in feels like the most natural thing in the world. But Ross helped me see that what feels natural to me was constructed by my top-down culture, that my certainty about what would be good for another person is almost always at least partly a projection of my own preferences and fears.

My children are adults. They have their own relationships with reality, built from experiences I wasn’t present for and perspectives I don’t share. When I offer advice they didn’t ask for, what I’m communicating, beneath whatever loving intention I bring to it, is that I don’t fully trust their judgment. That I think I can see their life more clearly than they can. That my discomfort with watching them navigate something hard is more important than their right to navigate it.

Since reading Ross’ book, I’ve extended this to everyone. If someone doesn’t ask me what I think, I’ve been trying, with uneven but genuine effort, to not tell them. This is harder than it sounds in a culture that frames unsolicited advice as caring, as engagement, as proof that you’re paying attention.

We’ve turned the offering of opinions into a social currency. Withholding them can feel, to the person withholding, like coldness or distance. But I think Ross would say that’s our discomfort talking, not wisdom.

What he found in those northern Ontario communities was a social fabric built on a different kind of trust. A trust that people know things about their own lives that you cannot know from the outside. That growth often requires difficulty, and removing someone’s difficulty for them is often not the gift it appears to be. That presence, real presence — being with someone without an agenda for them — is often the most profound form of love available.

I think about the Japanese concept of ma, the meaningful pause, the space between things that gives them their shape. Ross’s non-interference principle operates like that. The space you leave around another person isn’t emptiness. It’s respect made visible.

Dancing with a Ghost is out of print and harder to find than it should be. If you can locate a copy, I’d encourage you to read it slowly and let it argue with your assumptions. Ross is a careful, humble writer, and he earns every conclusion he reaches. The book didn’t just change how I think about Indigenous justice systems, which it did, thoroughly. It changed how I think about what it means to love someone.

Loving someone, I’ve since come to believe, means trusting them with their own life.

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My father died in stages, the way most people do, and the four of us boys — me and my three brothers, our wives beside us — didn’t know what we were watching.

He’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak or meaningfully move for the week or so before he died; we didn’t know what he was feeling. We didn’t know what to say, or whether to say anything at all, whether to hold his hand or give him space, whether the grimace on his face was pain or something we were misreading entirely.

We didn’t know why he’d suddenly seemed so alert for a day, and we didn’t know what it meant when that passed. We were well-educated, reasonably worldly men with decades of life experience between us, and we stood around that bed like children who’d wandered into a room where the adults were speaking a language none of us had ever been taught.

I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Not with guilt, exactly, though some of that is in there too. Mostly I’ve thought about it as a kind of cultural failure — a thing our society stopped teaching somewhere along the way and never bothered to replace.

For most of human history, people died at home, surrounded by family and neighbors who’d seen it before, who knew the signs, who understood the arc of it. Death was something a community witnessed together and held together.

Then we moved it into hospitals, handed it over to professionals, and quietly lost the knowledge that ordinary people once carried as a matter of course. Now we’re shocked, disoriented, and grief-stricken in ways that might be at least partly unnecessary, if only someone had thought to tell us what was coming and what it meant.

That’s why a piece published this month in the Washington Post was so meaningful to me Written by Ashley Abramson, it’s about death doulas, a profession that barely existed twenty years ago and is now growing fast enough that the International End-of-Life Doula Association has trained nearly 6,500 doulas worldwide.

A death doula is a non-medical companion who provides emotional, spiritual, and practical support to people who are dying, and to the families around them. As Kristen Patterson, a death doula and end-of-life planner in Northern Virginia, puts it, a death doula is “a calm, compassionate presence who can be there for dying people and their loved ones in their final moments.”

They can read aloud, play music, advocate with medical providers, help navigate paperwork and final arrangements, and simply stay present in ways that hospice nurses — stretched thin and focused on clinical care — often can’t. People don’t always realize that hospice care isn’t 24/7, Patterson notes; it certainly wasn’t in our case (Dad died at home). A death doula can be there as much as the family needs.

But what I found most valuable in Abramson’s piece wasn’t the description of the role itself. It was the specific things that death doulas, from their long experience at bedsides, have learned about the dying process that most families simply don’t know going in. This is the kind of knowledge that can transform a terrifying experience into something that still holds space for love and even peace.

The first thing the doulas want you to know is that dying can be peaceful. Diane Button, a death doula in Northern California and the author of What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living, puts it simply: “Just like the body knows how to be born, it knows how to die.”

For people who’ve been living for months or years in bodies racked by illness, the transition can actually come as a relief. Jill Schock, founder of Death Doula LA, told the Post that many people are relaxed at the end, because dying feels better than continuing to live in a body that’s been suffering.

That’s not what most of us picture when we imagine death, but it’s what people who sit with the dying actually see. And Button adds that the most common regrets she witnesses aren’t about things left undone — vacations not taken, money not earned — but about things left unsaid. If you can get to a place of peace with your relationships before that time comes, the dying itself tends to go more gently.

The second thing the doulas want you to understand is that the dying person can still participate in shaping that experience. Even in a hospital room, you can fill the space with what matters: favorite music, beloved objects, the people and even the pets you love.

Erica Reid Gerdes, founder of Waxwing Journeys in Chicago, describes a client whose husband found real comfort in being able to play music from his wife’s favorite musical and read her favorite books to her in those final days. She was unresponsive by then, but as Reid Gerdes says, “We knew she could still hear.” That’s not a small thing. That’s everything.

Third: death doesn’t need to be painful. Many of us carry images of painful deaths we witnessed in earlier generations, but modern hospice care is specifically designed to manage symptoms including pain.

Part of a doula’s job is to make sure the dying person has adequate medication and isn’t suffering unnecessarily. And medication does something else, too — it can calm what’s called terminal agitation, something my family saw with Dad and had absolutely no framework for understanding.

When someone is actively dying, the shutting down of organs can affect brain function in ways that cause the person to pick at their clothing, claw at their bedsheets, or seem frightened and restless.

Seeing that in someone you love is alarming, even traumatic, if nobody has told you it’s a known and manageable part of the process. It has a name. It can be treated. You’re not watching your father suffer some unique and inexplicable torment: you’re watching something that happens, that doulas and hospice nurses have seen many times, and that medication can ease.

Fourth, and this one is critically important: it’s normal, even expected, for a dying person to stop eating and drinking near the end. The body simply needs less energy. Swallowing becomes too taxing. The Post article makes the point explicitly — you don’t need to urge someone who’s actively dying to eat or drink. It doesn’t deprive them the way it would deprive a healthy person.

Families often feel guilty about this, or frightened by it, and push food and water when the body is trying to do what it knows to do. A doula can gently explain that letting go of that particular effort is itself an act of love.

And fifth — this is the one I keep returning to when I think about those last days with my father — there’s a phenomenon called terminal lucidity, or an end-of-life rally. In the days just before death, many dying people experience a sudden surge of energy and clarity. After days of not talking much or eating, they perk up. They seem like themselves again.

Families often mistake this for improvement, for a turn in the right direction, and the hope it kindles makes what follows all the more devastating. What doulas know, from having witnessed it over and over, is that this rally is often the body’s final gathering before it lets go. It isn’t a sign of recovery. It can be a gift — a last real conversation, a last moment of connection — if you know how to receive it as such rather than as cause for false hope.

I wish someone had told us all of this before we walked into that room. I wish someone had sat us down and said: here’s what’s happening, here’s what to watch for, here’s what it means, here’s how you can be present for him rather than just frightened beside him.

That’s what a death doula does. That’s the knowledge that used to live inside communities and families and has largely been lost, and that a growing number of remarkable people are now working to restore.

INELDA and the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance both maintain directories where you can find certified doulas in your area. Death doulas are generally not covered by insurance, which is a policy failure worth fighting about separately, but the field is having conversations about Medicare reimbursement and pro bono work for those who can’t pay. If the financial barrier is real for you, ask; many doulas offer sliding scales or even volunteer their time.

But even if you’re nowhere near this moment in your own life, I’d urge you to read Abramson’s piece in the Post, and to have the conversation with the people you love before it becomes urgent. Talk about what you’d want. Ask what they’d want. Write it down. The conversation itself is an act of love, and it costs nothing except the willingness to be honest about the one thing none of us can avoid.

My father never got to tell us what he wanted, and we never really knew how to ask. That’s a quiet regret I carry. You don’t have to carry the same one.

If this piece meant something to you, please share it with someone who might need it — a sibling, a grown child, a friend whose parent is aging. And if you’ve had experience with a death doula, or wish you had, I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

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The World Health Organization released a report last June that deserves far more attention than it got. One in six people on the planet, they found, is now affected by loneliness. It kills an estimated 871,000 people every year, more than 100 every hour, every hour of every day.

The Commission that produced the report called social disconnection “a defining challenge of our time” and drew a roadmap for governments and communities to respond. The usual proposals followed: more parks, better public transit, tech companies designing for connection rather than engagement, a minister of loneliness here, a national strategy there.

These are not bad ideas. But they’re solutions to a problem that’s being described incorrectly, and when you describe a problem incorrectly, your solutions tend to work at the edges rather than at the root.

The framing we keep reaching for treats loneliness as a malfunction, something that has gone wrong in an otherwise healthy social system. But what if loneliness at this scale is not a malfunction at all?

What if it’s the entirely predictable result of an experiment in how to organize human life that we’ve been running for about ten thousand years, and the results are now coming in?

I spent time in South Sudan in 2008, near the Darfur border, in a refugee settlement of 45,000 people who’d fled bombardment, rape, mass murder, and forced displacement. The conditions were severe by any measure: one hand-pumped well, no sanitation, no shelter beyond what people had gathered from the landscape, temperatures that dropped into the nineties at night.

Disease was everywhere. Food was scarce. And yet every single evening, in different corners of the settlement, someone brought out drums. The music would start, and then the singing, and then people were dancing and talking and the children were playing and the old men were telling stories to anyone who would listen. There was not a moment of the kind of blank, sealed-off isolation that I see on the faces of people riding the subway in any American city.

These were people who’d lost nearly everything. What they hadn’t lost, because it had not yet been taken from them, was each other. Not each other in the thin modern sense of being in proximity. Each other in the full sense: known, embedded, accountable, necessary to one another’s daily survival and daily joy. This is what a tribe is. This is what human beings lived inside of for the vast majority of the time we’ve existed as a species.

The Australian Aborigines have a phrase, “The Great Forgetting,” for what happened to European peoples over roughly the last two millennia as the old tribal structures were systematically dismantled by the British empire and then by the Catholic Church.

The sacred sites destroyed. The rituals banned. The languages absorbed into Latin and then into English and the national languages of nation-states. The commons enclosed. The grandmothers and grandfathers who carried the deep knowledge of how to live in a particular landscape, and how to live with one another, silenced or killed.

What was left, they know, was the outward form of a culture without its roots, people in tremendous numbers living side by side without any architecture for genuine belonging.

We don’t often tell this story when we talk about loneliness. We prefer to blame social media, or the pandemic, or smartphones, or the death of the third place. These things matter, but they’re just the symptoms.

The WHO report notes that loneliness kills as surely as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. What it doesn’t ask is how it came to be that the default condition for hundreds of millions of people is a kind of low-grade starvation of genuine human contact, and whether that condition might have structural roots that run deeper than any app or urban planning initiative can reach.

The answer, if you look honestly at the anthropological record, is that we built a civilization optimized for productivity and consumption, and we did it by dismantling, piece by piece, everything that made human beings feel genuinely held.

The village. The extended family under one roof. The practice of sitting together in the evening rather than each retreating to a separate screen. The shared ritual that marked time and gave life its shape. The elder who knew your name and your history and could place you in a story larger than your own anxiety. None of these things went away because they were bad ideas; they went away because they interfered with the efficient production of workers and consumers.

I worked for years as a psychotherapist running a residential program for severely abused children, kids who’d been failed by every institution designed to protect them. What I saw, over and over again, was that the damage was not only what had been done to them; it was also what had never been provided.

Safety, yes. Food and shelter, yes. But beneath all of it, the absence of the sustained, unconditional, witnessed belonging that is the birthright of every child and that no therapeutic technique, however skilled, can entirely substitute for. You can heal a great deal. You can’t, however, manufacture a tribe after the fact and expect it to do what a tribe does when it’s the water a child has swum in from the beginning of her life.

This is not a counsel of despair. The drumming happened in the refugee settlement because the impulse toward community is not destroyed so easily. It’s biological. It’s written into us at a level that predates language or culture.

Researchers studying the neuroscience of loneliness find that it activates the same threat-detection circuitry as physical pain. This is not a coincidence: for most of human history, being separated from your group meant death.

The pain of loneliness is the nervous system’s alarm. We just built a world where the alarm goes off constantly and there is nowhere particular to run.

What this means practically is that the solutions worth trying are not the ones that make isolation more comfortable. They are, instead, the ones that re-create, in whatever scaled-down modern form we can manage, the conditions that the nervous system is actually asking for.

Not more social media followers, but more people who know when you’re sick and show up anyway. Not a longer list of connections on LinkedIn, but a smaller circle of people with whom you share actual obligations, actual history, actual meals.

The research consistently points toward exactly what every tribal culture already knew: that meaning and belonging are not separate things, that you can’t have one without the other, and that neither of them can be delivered through a screen or legislated into existence by a government commission.

The WHO is right that this is a public health crisis. But public health crises have causes, and the cause of this one is not a virus or a toxin. It’s a story we’ve been telling ourselves for ten thousand years about what civilization is for.

The good news is that stories can change. The drums are still in us, waiting.

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There is a field that fills all of space, and it’s not empty space, the way we learned in school. Physicists figured out decades ago that what we call a vacuum — the void between atoms, between stars, between galaxies — is not nothing. It hums. It pulses with energy. They call it the zero-point field, meaning it persists even at absolute zero, even when every other form of energy has been drained away. The universe, at its most fundamental level, is not silent. It is vibrating.

I’ve been sitting with that fact for a long time, and I find it impossible to read without thinking of Gottfried Müller. Gottfried was a German mystic, healer, and international relief worker who became my teacher and mentor in the 1970s, a man who’d spent decades exploring the edge where science and spiritual experience touch. (I wrote a book about him titled The Prophet’s Way.) He used to say that prayer was not talking to something far away; it was tuning in. And he didn’t mean that metaphorically.

A physicist named Joachim Keppler recently published a paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience arguing that consciousness arises from the brain’s resonant coupling with this zero-point field.

Not that the brain produces consciousness the way a generator produces electricity, but that the brain functions as a kind of antenna, and awareness itself emerges from its resonance with the field that permeates all things.

The cortical microcolumns that make up the brain’s basic functional architecture, Keppler argues, couple directly to the zero-point field, and it’s this coupling, this vibration in harmony with the cosmos, that ignites the complex dynamics we call conscious experience. When consciousness fades under anesthesia, this coupling appears to be disrupted; the antenna goes quiet.

This is a genuinely radical idea, although it wouldn’t surprise a single serious meditator, a single Sufi mystic, a single student of Vedanta, or anyone who’s ever sat quietly in the woods long enough to feel what Gottfried called the Presence.

What science has been slowly circling, the contemplative traditions worked out long ago from the inside.

The Hindus called it Brahman, the ground of all being, the consciousness in which the universe appears rather than the universe in which consciousness appears. The Christian mystics described it as the ground of the soul, the place where the self and God are not two. The Buddhists pointed to rigpa, pure awareness, the sky through which thoughts pass like clouds, unmoved and ever-present.

These are not the same teaching, and we shouldn’t flatten out the differences. But they do share something that the quantum physicist’s paper now puts in technical language: what you are, at the deepest level, is not separate from what everything else is.

The materialist model we inherited from the nineteenth century said that the brain secretes consciousness roughly the way the liver secretes bile: it’s a product of tissue. When the tissue stops, the product stops.

This is a coherent story, and it has the virtue of simplicity. But it’s really never actually explained anything. It has never come within a mile of answering why there is something it is like to be you. Why the redness of red is red. Why pain hurts rather than simply registers.

Philosophers call this “the hard problem of consciousness,” and it is hard precisely because no amount of describing brain function gets you across the gap between the mechanism and the experience.

The zero-point field theory takes a different approach. It doesn’t try to derive the subjective from the objective. Instead, it starts from the premise that awareness may be a fundamental feature of reality, like mass or charge, and that the brain is the structure through which a localized version of that universal awareness experiences itself.

You are not a brain that generates a mind. You are, perhaps, the mind of the universe, temporarily looking out through a particular pair of eyes. Gottfried used to tell me that we’re “G-d’s camera” and we have an obligation to look at the world with attention and intensity so He/She can see and experience His/Her creation.

I know how that sounds. I have been in enough psychotherapy rooms and enough refugee camps to have a low tolerance for ideas that float away from actual human experience. But this one doesn’t float: it lands with weight. Because if it is true, or even approximately true, it changes the meaning of every contemplative practice anyone has ever undertaken.

Meditation is not a relaxation technique. Prayer is not wishful thinking projected at the sky. The ancient disciplines of stillness, of attending to the breath, of sitting with what is rather than with the story about what is, are practices of fine-tuning our mind to this deeper reality.

They’re ways of quieting the noise that interferes with the resonance, the mental chatter that keeps the antenna pointed at itself rather than at the field it swims in.

Every tradition that has ever produced genuine mystics has said, in its own language, that what you find when you go deep enough is not your small self but something vast and, paradoxically, more intimately you than anything you had imagined.

Keppler’s model suggests this mind-boggling concept should be testable. If conscious states depend on the brain’s resonant coupling to the zero-point field, then systematic manipulations of conditions in the cerebral cortex should produce predictable changes in that coupling. We’re a long way from proving any of this right now, but the direction the physics is pointing is not away from the mystics: it’s pointing toward them.

What I find most striking is not the science itself but the reversal of assumption it invites.

For most of the last century we’ve asked: how does matter give rise to mind? Keppler’s work, alongside a growing body of research on consciousness, suggests we may have the question backward. The field comes first. Awareness is not the unlikely product of a sufficiently complex arrangement of atoms: it’s the medium in which atoms and everything else arise and have their being.

You don’t have to accept the physics to feel the invitation. The next time you sit quietly and notice the noticing, the awareness that is aware of your own awareness, you’re touching something that neither begins at your skin nor ends at your skull.

That isn’t poetry: it may be the most empirically accurate description of what each of us actually are.

Gottfried would have smiled and said he knew that already. What he wanted to know was what we’re going to do with it.

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Decades ago when I lived in suburban Atlanta I had a good friend who’d grown up in Japan but had been assigned by his Japanese company to our city. We’d met on a flight to Hong Kong and instantly struck it up, eventually getting together every month or so to explore the city and its uniquely American offerings from Western music to a plethora of restaurants.

One afternoon we were sitting together on the dock behind our house (we lived on a small lake) and our conversation sort of ran out of steam; we just sat together quietly for a few long minutes. I was starting to feel uncomfortable when he said:

“In my Japanese culture, sitting quietly with another person is one of the highest expressions of a deep friendship.”

It was an extraordinary learning moment for me. After all, some of the most important moments in life arrive quietly, after everyone else has stopped talking.

They happen when the argument has burned itself out, when the room empties, when the adrenaline fades and the performance ends. They happen late at night, in kitchens and living rooms, on long drives, during walks that weren’t planned to solve anything. They happen when no one is trying to win.

The noise comes first, of course; it always does.

Noise is urgency, explanation, defense, certainty. It’s the part of conversation that rushes to fill space, to justify positions, to make sure nothing vulnerable slips out unguarded. Noise is efficient: it gets things said quickly and establishes where people stand.

But it rarely gets to the truth.

Truth usually waits until the noise exhausts itself.

After the raised voices soften, after the clever arguments lose their edge, after the stories we tell about ourselves stop working quite as well, something else becomes possible. People slow down. They stop performing. And they begin to listen not just to each other, but to what’s been sitting underneath the words all along.

This is where real conversations live.

They aren’t always dramatic. Often they’re halting, imperfect, a little awkward. People speak in fragments. They revise sentences midstream. They admit things they didn’t intend to admit. The tone shifts from assertion to exploration.

Instead of “I’m right,” the subtext becomes “This is what I’m actually feeling.”

Modern life leaves very little room for this kind of exchange. Speed and visibility reward quick takes, decisive language, confident stances. Conversations are expected to conclude, to resolve, and to produce instant outcomes. Silence feels like failure; pauses feel uncomfortable.

So we rush past them.

We mistake resolution for understanding. We confuse agreement with intimacy. We leave conversations thinking something is settled when it’s only been covered over.

The most important conversations don’t feel tidy. They feel unfinished in a different kind of way because they open space rather than close it. They leave you quieter, not louder. They don’t give you a talking point; they give you something to sit with.

Children know this instinctively. They often ask their hardest questions right before sleep, when defenses are down and time loosens its grip. They sense that truth needs softness to surface. Adults often forget this and try to force clarity under fluorescent lights and tight schedules.

But emotional truth doesn’t respond well to pressure.

It emerges when people feel safe enough to be uncertain. When they don’t have to protect an image. When they trust that they won’t be punished for saying the wrong thing.

This is why some of the most meaningful conversations only happen after loss, illness, or crisis. When life strips away urgency and exposes what actually matters, people suddenly speak differently. They say things they’ve been circling for years. They regret waiting, but they also recognize why they did.

The noise had been protecting them.

Learning to stay for the quiet part of conversation is a form of wisdom. It means resisting the urge to fill every silence, to solve every tension, to steer dialogue toward comfort. It means allowing pauses to stretch long enough for something honest to emerge.

This doesn’t mean forcing vulnerability or demanding confession: instead, it means creating conditions where truth isn’t rushed.

It might look like asking one fewer question and listening longer to the answer. It might look like letting a moment pass without commentary. It might look like saying, “I don’t know yet” and meaning it.

The quiet part of conversation often reveals what people actually need, not what they’ve been arguing about. Beneath many conflicts are unspoken fears, griefs, and longings that never found a place to land. Once they’re named, the shape of the problem changes.

Sometimes the conversation doesn’t lead to agreement. Sometimes it leads to understanding instead, and that’s often enough.

Wisdom values this distinction. It knows that not every difference can be resolved, but many can be humanized. When people feel seen, even disagreement becomes less corrosive.

In a noisy world, choosing to wait for the quiet is an act of patience. It requires tolerance for discomfort, ambiguity, and unfinishedness. It asks you to trust that what matters most won’t always announce itself loudly.

But again and again, experience confirms it.

The conversations that change us rarely happen in the heat of the moment. They happen after the noise stops, when the room settles, when the performance drops away, and when someone finally says what they were afraid to say all along.

Wisdom learns to recognize that moment. And, when it comes, it knows to stay.

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