A Radical New Understanding of the Nature
of Human Vitality and Wholeness
We tried to retire mystery in the West in the last few hundred years and enshrined reality's sharp edges instead - solutions and plans and ideologies; communism and fascism and imperialism, with capitalism shape shifting among them. In our somewhat chastened age, we're circling back to the underlying reality that was there all along: the human condition, in all its mess and glory, remains the ground on which all our ambitions flourish or crash. The adage that "he who does not know history is doomed to repeat it" doesn't go far enough. History always repeats itself until we honestly and searchingly know ourselves. Now the chaos of global economies points at human agency. So, increasingly, does the chaos of the weather. Terrorism, the only "ism" left swaggering in the post-cold war world, hinges on raw human despair all around.
I think a great deal about a moral equation Einstein made that is as radical in its way as his mathematical equations, if far less famous. He began his life with a profound faith in the social good of the scientific enterprise - a community of cosmic endeavor that should transcend tribal rivalries and national boundaries. Then he watched German science hand itself over to fascism. He watched chemists and physicists become creators of weapons of mass destruction. He said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old. He began to see figures such as Gandhi and Moses, Jesus and Buddha and St. Francis of Assisi, as "geniuses in the art of living." He proposed that their qualities of "spiritual genius" were more necessary to the future of human dignity, security, and joy than objective knowledge.
My work has shown me that spiritual geniuses of the everyday are everywhere. They are in the margins and do not have publicists. They are below the radar, which is broken. The discourse of our common life inclines towards despair. In my field of journalism, where we presume to write the first draft of history, we summon our deepest critical capacities for investigating what is inadequate, corrupt, catastrophic, and failing. The "news" is defined as the extraordinary events of the day, but is is more often translated as the extraordinarily terrible events of the day. And in an immersive 24/7 news cycle, we internalize the deluge of bad news as the norm - the real truth of who we are and what we're up against as a species.
But our world is abundant with beauty and courage and grace. I'm aware of a growing aspiration to attend, with all the tools we have at hand, to the human change that makes social change possible. The digital world, though a new Wild West in many ways, is on some basic level simply another screen on which we project the excesses and possibilities of life in flesh and blood. Spiritual life is evolving, and its sources of nourishment are becoming more broadly accessible. Science is yielding knowledge of our bodies and brains that is an everyday form of power for softening the gap between who we are and who we want to be, as individuals and as a species. Across social and medical disciplines, we are gathering a radical new understanding of the nature of human vitality and wholeness.
We create transformative, resilient new realities by becoming transformed, resilient people. This is bout the lover as well as the beloved, the citizen as well as the politician, the social entrepreneur as well as the person in need. It means me, and it means you.
- Krista Tippett
Excerpted from the Introduction of her book
Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living
Krista Tippett, host of NPR's "On Being"
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