On Being with Krista Tippett

One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue — experiences we've called spiritual — are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence — as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated how emotions are coded in the muscles of our faces, and how they serve as “moral sensory systems." He was called on as Emojis evolved; he consulted on Pete Docter's groundbreaking movie Inside Out. All of this, as Dacher sees it now, led him deeper and deeper into investigating the primary experience of awe in human life — moments when we have a sense of wonder, an experience of mystery, that transcends our understanding. These, it turns out, are as common in human life globally as they are measurably health-giving and immunity-boosting. They bring us together with others, again and again. They bring our nervous system and heartbeat and breath into sync — and even into sync with other bodies around us.Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. He hosts the podcast The Science of Happiness. His latest book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app — you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about — and not — when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict." Technology and vitality. Creativity. Woodworking and the meaning of life. Deeper truths and larger stories of ourselves as societies, as a planet, as humans, that at once complicate and enliven our capacity to live with dignity and joy and wholeness. And poetry, and poetry.As we live into, yes, this new way of being — with podcasting and not radio, our first audio home — we're eager to extend an invitation to listen as widely as possible. Please spread the word in your world and your digital places. And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living. We are so thrilled to have you as part of this, and to be back. Sign up for our Saturday newsletter, The Pause, for extras every week and news on all that is happening at the wider On Being Project, at onbeing.org/newsletter.

In the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. Each of us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do. And just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. "Some of us are called to be bridge people.. Some of us are called to be patient calmers of fear. This calling is so tender and so urgent if what we truly want is to coax our own best selves and the best selves of others into the light." “Across my life of conversation I have seen that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments like ours, when human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay: power and frailty, death and birth, pain and hope, beauty and brokenness, mystery and conviction, calm and fierceness, mine and yours.”– Krista TippettExperience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website. 

We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can’t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and it is more of a friend than we always know. Cracking time open, seeing its true manifold nature, expands a sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level."A long, reality-based view of time has a power to replenish our sense of ourselves and the world."Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website. 

We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — as in science — that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give.  Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questions themselves become powerful tools for living and growing. "If you are faithful to living a question, that question will be faithful back to you."Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website. 

The first of four short offerings, more wisdom practice than podcast: life-giving, hope-generating words, ideas and practices that can literally shape your experience of reality — and shape what can become possible. At this juncture in the life of the world, we are all stretching. We are finding the ground shifting beneath our feet, whoever we are. Think of these as tethering foundations towards walking our way into our callings in this world of so much pain — and so much promise.  We are fluent in the story of our time marked by catastrophe and dysfunction. That is real — but it’s not the whole story of us. There is also an ordinary and abundant unfolding of dignity and care and generosity, of social creativity and evolution and breakthrough.  How to make that more vibrant, more visible, and more defining?"We are strange creatures and this is one of our strangest qualities: that we don’t know how to tell this story of us. We don’t know how to take this reality as seriously as we take rupture and what goes wrong."Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website. 

Three years ago, Krista texted Pádraig Ó Tuama with a simple question: what if he were to start a poetry podcast that listened as much as it shared? Not long after, Poetry Unbound was born, and it keeps going from strength to strength. Pádraig likes to say that poems are interested in the people who listen to them. And so, as the next season of On Being takes shape for release in early 2023, why not take Poetry Unbound as a listening companion and ritual this fall?Season six of Poetry Unbound just started, and we’re sharing the first episode around David Wagoner’s beloved poem “Lost” in this feed, the only episode we’ll feature here this season. You can listen to the rest on Apple, Spotify, at poetryunbound.org, and wherever podcasts are found. And be sure to subscribe to the show to receive a new episode every Monday and Friday through mid-December.

Krista returns from her summer in Berlin, where her present-day self reunited with the 25-year-old of the 1980s, at large in the divided city. Hear the reflections that emerged from her season of creative rest, and her beloved practices of contemplative reading and journaling. Pull on the thread of emergence with Krista and our Pause newsletter community as the next season of On Being takes shape: onbeing.org/newsletter. You can read the transcript of Krista’s letter in our September 17 edition of The Pause.

A special offering from Krista Tippett and all of us at On Being: an incredible, celebratory event — listening back and remembering forwards across 20 years of this show in the good company of our beloved friend and former guest, Rev. Jen Bailey, and so many of you. We offer it here as an audio experience, and we think you will enjoy being in the room retroactively. You will hear the voices of wise and graceful lives — of former guests, and of listeners from far-flung places. You may also catch references to things seen and witnessed throughout the event — including a stunning opening poem by our dear friend Maria Popova, composed of On Being show titles — which you can take in fully by viewing the recorded celebration in its entirety on our YouTube channel.Krista will be back next week to send us off with a poem and short farewell — a “see you later” while we rest and dream and make some new things. In the meantime, we will be sharing offerings beyond this podcast. Join us at onbeing.org/staywithus.

The beloved civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these. We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.adrienne maree brown’s influential books include Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Pleasure Activism. More recently, she has published’s the author of Maroons, a work of speculative fiction, and she co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. And, a special heads up: in late summer 2024, adrienne maree brown will publish a phenomenal new book — Loving Corrections.This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.