Keys to Personal and Global Evolution with Rick Hanson & David Sloan Wilson

I offer these every week, along with a guided meditation. Just click the subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the latest recording. Or, if you'd like to join us live, which would be great, just go into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free. I would like to start by introducing David Sloan Wilson, who I met a bit over a year ago maybe. I had heard about him as a legendary figure, a biologist, and great scholar, and someone who has thought both deeply and broadly, right? Either one is good. David combines both of them. As well as, I got to say, David, just a real, a real, a real mensch, a real good person all the way around. And somebody who's been a benefactor in various ways to myself personally, as well as to the Global Compassion Coalition, this international nonprofit that I founded with colleagues about three and a half years ago. As we jump in here, I'm going to be doing something, we're going to be doing something a little different, which is, as you'll see, I thought it could be exquisitely useful to draw on David's insights and his background in evolution, biological evolution at the individual level, and then at the group level, with implications for how we live together in some kind of durable, peaceful, prosperous ways in the 21st century, one whole human tribe. And in particular, applying some key principles from evolution to your own process, your own individual process of healing, growing, and awakening, and that will make more sense in a moment here. I wanted to start by just kind of getting a sense of your own background, David, with contemplative practice in general, and Buddhism in particular. And I'll introduce myself in that way, which, by the way, I don't think I've done for the rest of you here, at least in a really long time. So for myself, I was raised a very casual Methodist, growing up in West Covina, California, a suburb of Los Angeles in the 60s, 50s, and 60s. And I went off to college, it was sort of right in the high tide of the human potential movement, 1969 to 1974. And at the very end of all that, I stumbled into contemplative practice, the Eastern insight and wisdom traditions, such as Zen, and became a very casual meditator. I had long hair, golden rimmed glasses, I was playing my wood flute, sitting in the tall grass as the wind would blow by. And it was all very cool, and I thought, kind of cool. Pretty casual, not very focused, but I started getting immediately, wow, it is actually possible to have a quieter mind, and with that quieter mind, be able to see much more clearly some of the furniture and weather patterns in my own being, which then enabled greater influence over them, bit by bit, in ways that would help me suffer less and be happier. That was kind of a gentle beginning, and then around 35-ish years ago, 30-ish years ago, we had young children, and I got connected with Spirit Rock Meditation Center, which is a leading center in the Western world, certainly, related to Buddhism, especially drawing on those early teachings of the Buddha, and that kind of really took me ever since. And along that way, it's been really valuable for me to combine, much as the Buddha taught, these three fundamental aspects of almost any kind of practice. You find them in other contemplative traditions as well. These fundamental principles of personal virtue, morality, non-harming, number one. Number two, gradual training of the mind, and number three, wisdom, growing insight and then the application of insight there. So you might think about, in your own case, how summarized in three traditional words, sila, samadhi, and panya, we could say virtue, training, and wisdom, that your own life has been served by those kind of practices over time. Okay, that's a quick summary for me. David, I'm putting you on the spot here with no real warning. Could you do something similar? What's been your own journey of inner practice, including drawing on maybe some of the world's contemplative traditions? Well, I'll begin biographically, as you did, Rick, and my dad was a famous author. I think a lot of you have heard of him. His name was Sloan Wilson, and he wrote books that were said to define America in the 1950s. He wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Summer Place, and in general, I think when we talk about spiritual traditions, we should also be talking about novelistic traditions, and of course, authors like religious sages are thinking deeply about the human condition. So I come from that background, but as I often say, trying to follow in my father's footsteps was like staring up at Mount Everest, and so I really had to do something. I think a lot of children, their parents might or might not be famous, but I think just defining yourself in relation to your parents, I think, is something that's deeply embedded in all of us. So I love nature, and I've always had an opportunity to be in nature, which I'm grateful for. So I became a scientist, and not a lab scientist, but an ecologist. Someone who studies animals and plants in their natural environments, and in walking away from my father and his novelistic ways, I discovered a theory, that Darwin's theory of evolution, which also explained the human condition, or at least seemed to, it could explain everything. And so it's at that point that I began to, first of all, appreciate the explanatory scope of this theory, first for understanding the natural world, and then for understanding humanity, therefore ourselves, put me in the same situation of being able to see the natural and human condition, not through the lens of my experience, which is what a novelist does, but through the lens of this theory. And ever since, I've been more or less shaped by the theory, and then at one point, not to go on too long, since my great topic that I studied was altruism, and compassion, basically, and the puzzle of how someone who acts compassionately, who acts altruistically, in other words, who acts to benefit others, how can such a creature evolve in a Darwinian world when natural selection is favoring those that survive and reproduce better than other individuals? The theory seems to explain selfishness well, and altruism poorly, and yet altruism can evolve, and then my career is basically on that. What does that mean in everyday life? And so about 20 years ago, I stepped outside the ivory tower, and I began to be a social activist, you might say, and to put this theory to work so that we could create a world in which compassion and all the actions that flow from compassion actually succeed. And there's a great convergence with the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. So when the Buddha said that life is full of suffering, well, that's true of nature, I hate to say it, in addition to the human world. And why is that? It's because suffering is caused by craving, it's caused by agents that are striving to benefit themselves, typically at the expense of others. That's true in the human world, and it's also true in the natural world. Is there a path that can end suffering? And then what might that path be? Well, there's also an evolutionary answer to that question. And so you ended your introduction, Rick, by saying, this is very practical. This is very, very practical. And then finally, my dad was an atheist. I seldom saw the inside of a church. But at the same time, he was a moral person, for sure. If you read his novels, everyone's trying to do well by each other, even when they fail. Although I studied religion, intellectually, I didn't regard myself as a spiritual person so much until I met Kurt Johnson. And I think you know Kurt Johnson, Rick, and maybe some other people on this call do. Another person who is, on the one hand, a scientist, and on the other hand, in his case, deeply, deeply spiritual, and is one of the main people involved in the interspiritual movement. And through him, I began to actually mellow out a little bit and regard myself as a spiritual person and to encounter these practices, and so on and so forth. So I'm kind of an apprentice when it comes to that. That was really nice. Thank you. And I'm going to build on various threads that were present in what you had to say as I toss the ball back to you in a moment. The Buddha obviously did not have access to Darwin's theory of evolution, nor a microscope, nor an EEG, nor an MRI. And yet, clearly, he and many others, through their own personal development, have attained very, very high levels of freedom. Moving through the living body and its nervous system, they could use only a first-person perspective. They were aware of their own experience, much as we are here, often. And now, 2,500 years later, we've learned at least a little bit about the underlying biological causes and conditions in which the streaming of consciousness is embedded, and from which, you know, certainly a lot, if not entirely, this moment of consciousness is being enabled and carried along. This is the intersection of mind and matter, thoughts and things, moment by moment by moment. And my particular interest in this is not to argue about philosophy or metaphysics, but really to be pragmatic in the spirit, as David was saying there a moment ago, and certainly in the Buddhist spirit. For example, in the meditation, if you were there, after I started reading some material from brain science about how activation of networks on the sides of the brain, your brain, particularly right-sided networks for right-handed people, or switched for many left-handed people because those networks are more associated with gestalt or holistic processing, that when we get a sense of things as a whole, the chatter that's grounded in activation and midline cortical networks gets quieter, reciprocal inhibition in effect. And therefore, in a meditation, as I now increasingly do, open into a sense of the body as a whole, or the room you're in as a whole, or the big picture altogether as a whole, you probably notice that there's a quieting in your mind, there's less verbal activity because those right-sided networks are nonverbal, and they quiet verbal activity, and there's less self-referential processing, me, myself, and I. So that's an example of learning something about the underlying physical, material, hardware causes and conditions that we can use to change our mind, and therefore our life for the better. You see, that's kind of an example. We can go back and forth between that first-person perspective and a third-person perspective, and draw on the third-person perspective that David's going to be really, really teaching us about here for the sake of our own subjective healing, growing, and awakening. So in particular, David, when I read a paragraph from you about the fundamental principles of variation, selection, and retention as drivers of evolutionary processes, my brain exploded. I started immediately reflecting on that in my own life. How can I be flexible enough to have more variation in my various activities and states of mind? How can I try different things, including playfully variation? And then, with wisdom, select appropriately, like just with discernment, recognize, oh, that's helpful, that's not so helpful, right? And then retention, which you may know I'm deeply interested in positive neuroplasticity. How can we accelerate the embodied landing of these states of being that we're selecting and appreciating so increasingly they become our home base? That's kind of a big sketch. So I've offered my sketch. I'm going to turn it back over to you. You set us up there. You give us a little bit of a tease there about these fundamental ideas from evolution, including how they can be understood in new ways, very innovatively, as a basis for altruism in the human species, certainly, that has a lot of implications as well for modern life. So now that I've said my bit there, over to you. I want to take less than a minute to explain what was so important about Darwin's theory way back when it was proposed. And then after less than a minute doing that segue right to what really matters for us here, us as individuals and our cultures, and how basically we can create a compassionate world. So Darwin identified three ingredients. One, organisms vary in just about everything you can measure. Two, these differences often make a difference for survival and reproduction. Three, offspring tend to resemble their parents. One, two, three. And yet when you put those together, you get this amazing outcome, which is the properties of organisms change over time, over the generations, in the direction of becoming better adapted to their environments. And this simple formula enables you to predict the properties or understand the properties of organisms based on the shaping influence of selection, without knowing anything about their physical makeup. So what you talked about the brain wick, that's useful knowledge. But in fact, it's knowledge you don't need. I can say, for example, in the desert, most species are colored like the desert to avoid being seen by their predators and prey. And I can make that prediction for any color of desert, white, black, brown, and any organism that lives in the desert, reptiles, birds, mammals. How could I do that? It's because it's just the very simple intuition really of this, you know, if organisms in the desert vary, then those that match their background will be. I didn't need to know anything about their physical makeup. So there's point one, variation selection and retention or replication. Then we can fast forward to the present to B.F. Skinner, the famous behaviorist, who many people will be familiar with, and his phrase, selection by consequences. And his observation is that there's something about the open-ended, our open-ended behavioral flexibility as individuals and multigenerational culture, which is like genetic evolution in that regard. There's some, this variation selection replication, this trio exists for our personal evolution as individuals and for our evolution as cultures. It's not confined to genetic evolution. And so now we can take this insight and we can apply it to ourselves and to our cultures. And then since evolution doesn't necessarily make everything nice, it results in suffering often, including internal suffering, then we can appreciate that our evolution needs to be conscious. We need to be stewards of our evolution at all levels as individuals and as cultures and as stewards of nature. And so this amazingly simple trio of ideas, variation selection and replication tends to have tremendous explanatory scope for ourselves as individuals and our cultures and calls for a mindful, conscious effort to steer cultural evolution in compassionate directions. And if we don't do that, then we're back with the first two noble truths. Life is suffering and suffering is caused by craving. Beautiful. So given that these topics can get super heady and airy-fairy, I want to keep bringing you down to earth. I just want to start out and these three will be kind of a through line here, variation, you know, selection and retention or replication. And I want to start by just kind of inviting people to consider to what extent do you allow yourself or even support trying new things in your life? That's variation. To what extent are you open to new thoughts? That's variation. New views. To what extent is there a playfulness in you? Think newly, look newly. To what extent are you served by the encouragement for beginner's mind, don't know mind, child mind, right? So that you've got more moves, you know, on the game board of life. And you might think about the contrast to that, particularly as we age. You know, it's quite common that in almost any gathering interested in mindfulness that people tend to be, you know, a little older on average. Well, as we get older we can often get pretty rigid, get locked into routines. We're kind of stuck in certain ways of doing things. And it's really important to consider to in your own life what serves you in kind of breaking out of those patterns, trying new things. For example, one thing that I try to do is I like reading novels because that's a way to keep expanding my empathic imagination so I have a sense of variation in how to be in this life. And also I like reading, you know, spiritual stuff, Buddhadharma, you know, issues, you know, bits and pieces here and there so that there are new inputs. And I really like reaching out to people like David Sloan Wilson here, you know, for new inputs as well. So how do you do that, right? How do you create openness and possibility in your own mindstream so there's more variation? I invite people here to think about it. And I don't know about you, David, like what do you do? I mean, you could have settled into a very narrow, you know, life, superb vanilla ice cream. But no, you've gone really rocky road. And I just kind of wondered how that's shown up for you, variation. I want to bring in, not to do exactly that, Rick, but to bring in a colleague of ours and the whole psychological wing of mindfulness. So there's the Buddhist and the spiritual wing of mindfulness. And then there's a parallel wing, which very much emanates from B.F. Skinner but has also gone far beyond him. And Stephen C. Hayes is a valued colleague of ours. I hope he's well known among many people in this group. If not, they should. And his form of therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy. And then if you look at that and basically, you know, super quickly, it begins with an examination of your valued goals. There's your target of selection. What's the kind of person you want to be? Or what's the kind of world you want there to be? And then you ask the question, what would you have to do in order to achieve that goal? So there's the target of selection. And we're beginning to explore variation, the different ways that we might get to that target. But then what's really special about acceptance and commitment therapy and training is that you ask the question, what's getting in the way? What's inside our heads that actually prevents us? And when you look at those things, what you find is, is that they're adaptive in a curious way. They're actually protective or they're causing us to achieve things like controlling our relationships or avoiding uncomfortable situations or so on and so forth, which are, you'd have to call them adaptive, but not in a way which leads to your valued goals. Back to the idea that evolution doesn't make everything nice. And then how did that, what kind of behaviors do those manifest? And with that picture in mind, then you commit, you accept the existence of these problematic elements and you commit to working around them towards your valued goal. What would that be but a variation selection replication process? What would that be but your personal evolution? And one of my great joys is for Steve, the amazing person that he is, is to embrace that and to be now describing acceptance and commitment therapy as a variation selection replication process. Amazing. And so it's just so exciting to have that kind of resilience. It's very cool. So again, I want to keep supporting people bringing this down to earth. And one pointed question I might ask, and I'm asking it of myself here too, with regard to variation, in other words, not being rigid, not being stuck, healthy flexibility, right? Is to ask yourself a question, what's one thing that would be good for you or good for me to think newly about? What's one thing that could be good to change your opinion about? And I'm thinking about that with regard to my family system, my wife and two kids, other relatives. I'm going out there with that. What's one thing maybe about one person that might be good to change my opinion about? That would be a way in to reflecting on variation. Another question that I would nominate for you is to ask yourself, okay, maybe you already kind of know what you ought to do. What's one even very small change that would be good to make in your behavior? Like a routine, like getting up 15 minutes earlier or 15 minutes later, different approach to meals, different TV shows you watch or websites you go to. What's a behavioral change that you could vary that could be helpful for you? I mean, that's a kind of a relevant question here, right? And then as David was saying, there's the whole fundamental question of values. There's no escape from values. There's no escape from judgment. The only question is, is it skillful means or not? And then that's the question of, okay, if you're trying new things or you're just looking at the range in your day, what are some things in particular to select, to foreground, to value, to appreciate, to rest in? And I can say for myself as a real doer, one of the things that I'm really helping myself try to appreciate, it's kind of the equivalent of John Coltrane, I think, saying that music is the silence between the notes. I'm really trying to help myself select the sense of ease and space and contentment before contracting. I'm trying to help myself toward the next goal personally. Okay, those are examples. So maybe we can talk a little more about the element of selection, which is to say, as the Buddha said, wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser one. What are the greater happinesses and the causes of them that you could increasingly select in your life? I think that one of the great parts of this is that it creates a very healthy attitude towards failure. Wow, same word. Well, failure, you might say, is the leading edge of adaptation. If you try something and it doesn't work, then you know to try something else, and you should just speed that up. So the term failing fast is sometimes used in technology. We have to make our goals, try things out, see if it works, and then repeat again and again and again. Each step is a cycle of variation, selection, and replication. It's a generation of evolution, basically. So you want to do that again and again and again. Of course, it's an uncertain world. We have incomplete knowledge. We don't know exactly what to do. Therefore, you have to try repeatedly and to do it in a way, of course, which is safe and so on. So that's a marvelous attitude towards failure, which can take place both at the individual level. In fact, everything that we're talking about can and needs to take place at the level of groups, our groups, in addition to ourselves as individuals. That's a major point I want to make sure emerges from this conversation. After you become compassionate in your mind, and now you want to become compassionate in your actions, now you bring in all the complications of social interactions in groups of all types and all sizes. We have to make that move. There's a whole bunch of considerations that come in to that. It's sadly not the case that compassionate intentions automatically translate into compassionate actions. All we have to do to save the world is get everyone to behave compassionately or to think compassionately. I'm sorry. It's more complicated than that. That's a mega subject, basically. We can just raise it here. Then, of course, all of this is an invitation for the people on this call to become more engaged. Both you and me, Rick, and with our many colleagues are more than happy. We're wanting to tell you. We're waiting to tell you. We're wishing to tell you. There's a lot to convey. Hopefully, we're providing just a taste here in this meeting. Your work with pro-social world is really cool, really important. I really encourage people to check out the website. It's a beautiful website with tons and tons of resources there that are very, very relevant for how we can live together in a durable, peaceful prosperity around the entire world over time. The longing in my own heart is big change by 2100. I think, gosh, it gives us 75 years. I think we can make some headway. How do we actually do that? Let's do big change in five years. I'd be really happy to see that. Absolutely, for sure. Gosh, so many places to go. I do want to highlight retention or replication. At the individual level, we're really talking about learning. We're really talking about growing the good that lasts inside. We have behavioral flexibility, mental flexibility. We vary. We try new things. We don't get stuck. We're adaptable. That's variation. Then with wisdom, we identify what's helpful for us. It was super pragmatic. What helps? What hurts? Contraction, opening. Less craving, more craving. That's selection. Then retention, where you help yourself live into this new way of being. I just wondered, David, tossing the ball back to you, what have you seen even from a biological perspective, whether it's fish or desert creatures or human beings? What helps people learn productively from their experiences rather than keep making the same mistake over and over again? There is an element of practice when we get to replication. I think this is also something that's embodied in both spiritual mindfulness and psychological mindfulness, that as we now do what we want to do in terms of our valued goals, you need to practice, practice, practice. You need to reward yourself by doing it. Then it becomes habitual, like playing an instrument, hours and hours of practice. Here again, I think the move from an individual to being a member of a group is really decisive here. We live in such an individualistic age that even the good people on this call, I think, are in some ways unwitting captives of individualism, of thinking of the individual person as this kind of standalone person. What we can say as scientists is that throughout our entire history as a species, individuals never lived alone, never, ever. They always lived in the context of small and, for the most part, highly cooperative groups. In many ways, we're like the cell of a multicellular organism or like a bee or an ant in an ant colony. That's the degree to which we are dependent in a good way on other people. When we think about pursuing our valued goals, think of doing that just as an individual. Then think of doing it in a highly supportive group, where that's the common goal of the group. You might say the norm of the group. The thing about norms is that there's consequences if you don't do it. I had a marvelous conversation with a philosopher named Simon Blackburn on morality. I asked him, Simon, before we talk about evolution and morality, just define morality as you would in an intro class. He said, there's two dimensions to morality. There's a compulsory dimension, things we are expected to do with consequences if we don't. Then there's a voluntary dimension, the things we're moved to do, motivated by altruism and sympathy and love and all of the positive emotions. Those are the two dimensions of morality. That's just what you'd expect from an evolutionary perspective because the compulsory dimension makes it safe to exercise the voluntary dimension. If you're in a group with strong and appropriate norms and consequences if you don't follow them, then you can be as compassionate as you want and you will not be exploited thanks to the compulsory system. A group that's like that is so much more, not only more powerful when we talk about being pragmatic, in other words, getting things done, but it's also the ideal psychological social environment. Once you find this is an empirical claim, we could study this and have scientifically. If you create that kind of social, safe and secure social environment and then people enter it, they flourish as individuals. They also become, you might say, more spiritual in the sense that they basically adopt the values of the group and place it above their own values. They now say that they literally are part of something larger than themselves. That's not how they feel about it. Words like sacred just emerge because they are truly part of something larger than themselves. They have adopted those goals and placed them above there. It can happen to anyone because that's the social environment that's been provided. You've just kind of turned on their pro-social natures. That's what we're in a position to do after we understand things. It's very exciting that it's almost like a key that you discover that can open many locks. Many people these days are aware of divisiveness and polarization, hyper-individualism. Many people are aware of the ways in which social media is used to exploit differences and to turbocharge the sense of grievances against others. What suggestions do you have for what individuals can do to promote a more pro-social world? I would say two things. Learn more about this. What makes us unique as a species is all species have genes. That's genetic evolution. We have our cultures. Every one of us has a collection of genes and a collection of symbols, a meaning system, a worldview inside their heads, which is influencing how they act and just as much as their genes, even more than their genes. Their genes and their cultures work together. There was a question about epigenetics quickly. Do you know that if you take a course of meditation, you're actually up-regulating and down-regulating a substantial portion of your genes? The gene expression is what epigenetics is. How we act depends very much on how we think. Therefore, there's just so amazing information. We've just touched upon it here. The more you learn about it, then the more that will actually change your meaning system and reconfigure the way that you see the world in a very positive way. There's a lot out there, but at the same time, the number of people that know about it is a tiny, tiny fraction of those who need to know about it. This is what we mean by paradigm change and so on. Read up. Go to events like this. I'm happy to help you out along with my many colleagues. That's a kind of interchange along with other kinds of interchange. Then, get yourself into groups that are appropriately structured. Small, meaningful, and appropriately structured groups. Research shows, as you know, Rick, that about 50% of a therapeutic relationship, if you have a therapist, 50% of the benefit of that is the warm human connection that you have with that person. It has nothing to do with a particular therapeutic technique. It's just that you have some social support now. Loneliness and isolation are the two most toxic problems of our time. Get yourself into groups, but not just any group. Those groups have to have a strong sense of meaning. They have to be purposeful groups. There has to be some sense of unity in that. Then there's some more structure that's needed in order to provide that normative social environment. That interchange, which in part is conceptual in addition to spiritual, and then the outer change of getting yourself into small, meaningful, and appropriately structured groups. You don't lose your agency by doing that. You remain a strong agent within those groups and then those groups need to be agentic in the formation of larger groups. It goes on like that. These are two things anybody can do. Read up, learn up, and get yourself into groups that are small, meaningful, and appropriately structured. Wow. Fantastic. We're happy to help you do it. Both of us are. Your organization and my organization, along with others. Many others. One of our projects, as you know, Rick, but we can share with others, there's so many organizations with pro-social missions and compassionate missions, hundreds of them really, that are all like distant stars, not connected to each other. How do we solve that problem and have coalitions of coalitions? That's one of the things that we can do and must. When I say, let's have this happen within five years, let's not wait until ... That's not unrealistic, I think. Cultural evolution has already accelerated. We know that. Every year is different. With AI, it's getting even faster. The idea that cultural evolution is fast, that's already happened, like it or not. Question is, how do we make it pro-social, cultural evolution? As one of my colleagues put it, cooperation can spread faster than COVID. If we're going to have disease pandemics, we could have a pandemic of cooperation if we know what to do, and we do. I really would love to motivate everyone here to learn more, and then it can translate immediately into, first of all, personal well-being on the inside, and then action on the outside. Those two things can go together. There's good news. How am I doing at being evangelical here? Well, you're really good for someone who ... Not bad for a scientist. Not too bad. Well, this is beautiful. Coming to the end here, we could obviously keep going. One of the things I'm really struck by myself is the freedom that each of us has, actually, to treat another person like they matter, even if we disagree with them. To be on the receiving end of another person who slows down for even just a beat to register you as a thou to their eye is really a powerful experience, and very foundational, obviously, in building up increasingly pro-social groups, and it's something that we all have the power to do.