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So, as I said, it's intuitive that, when we have real connection,
a real feeling of connection, it feeds our souls and
it's a basic need.
One of my favorite stories about Mother Teresa was when a reporter asked her
which was the poorest country she had ever been to
and she said: 'Well yeah I've traveled to a lot of them and everywhere I go there's
lots of poverty and suffering and people tell me about
their hardships and their struggles',
she said, 'but the poorest one I've been to is America.'
What she was really writing, and this is the quote, she said: 'There are many in the world
who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love.
The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty;
it's not only a poverty of loneliness, it's a poverty of spirituality.'
That here we are and we don't feel that intrinsic connectedness
with our own beings and with each other and really with the sacred.
I want to read a bit from Albert Einstein because
his way of framing this question of, you know, belonging,
is with the following, he says: 'I think
the most important question facing humanity is:
is the universe a friendly place?
This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves.'
So even if this is a familiar reading, you might just ask yourself fresh:
do you have a sense of the universe as a friendly place, some intrinsic benevolence?
And I'll go on with what he writes:
'For if we decide the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology,
or our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating
bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness,
and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly.'
Some prescience there...
'If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly
and that God is essentially playing dice with the universe, our lives have no real purpose or meaning.
But if we decide that our universe is a friendly place,
then we will use our technology and our resources
to create tools and models for understanding that world,
that universe.
We'll seek understanding, seek connection, meaning.'
So is this world a friendly place?
My understanding of that language
that friendly doesn't mean that we don't suffer and die,
it doesn't mean that humans don't act in incredibly insane and cruel ways
- it doesn't mean that.
It points to an essence of awareness,
a capacity for love that is pervasive, that is in all of us; a potential there
that's really intrinsic to existence, that sometimes doesn't get cultivated, but it's there.
The reptilian brain does not perceive the world as a friendly place,
the reptilian brain does not perceive belonging.
Now, what about the rational mind?
Typically, the rational mind would say: well, it's not friendly and it's not unfriendly
logically speaking; there's no proof, right?
Which reminds me of when I last gave this talk on:
is the universe a friendly place?
My mother was here and we would drive home and often we'd
talk about the subject and
she said: 'Ok I'm putting on my Barnard philosophy major hat'
- because she went to Barnard and she was a philosophy major -
and she said: 'Well how do we know that the universe is friendly and that
love and awareness is essential?
I mean, why can't greed and hatred be essential?' You know, she did that kind of
a move on me after I had taught all evening, you know, and
but she said: 'Aren't we believing what we want to believe,
and manufacturing the experience we want?' you know, she was asking good questions...
And it's true: if we think about it rationally, we can't say:
'Oh yes, the universe is friendly'
or that love and awareness is essential
if we think about it rationally.
But if we begin to come into presence
and a presence that goes beyond our thoughts,
then we can begin to experience in that presence
a wakefulness and a tenderness and a mystery
that does have an intrinsic sense of benevolence, of love.
And one way to think of meditation is it evolves
the brain to that integrated state
so that we can experience that friendliness and that belonging.
This is the potential
of the two wings of mindfulness and compassion
to heal that place of severed belonging
and the more we practice that,
and we begin to trust our belonging,
the more we start looking at the world and feel a trust for other beings,
that there's friendliness in the world.
We're not survival of the fittest, we're survival of the nurtured
and the more we nurture the more this world actually becomes a friendly place;
we know our belonging."
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