Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘What we tend to leave out of most of our discussions about human functioning is to what degree we are primates. We have brains in order to get along with each other, to be with other people, to connect with other people. That’s really what we are fundamentally all about. And so, much of trauma is about a rupture of the safety of the people who are supposed to protect you and the people who are supposed to come to your help.

So basically, the way that we are wired is that we are wired to not be able to do everything by ourselves, but to be able to look for help and for other people to take over when we can no longer do the job ourselves. And that’s perfectly normal. But if, at that point, the people you can count on most are not there for you, let you down, have been killed, or whatever, then it’s entirely up to you. It’s a much harder thing to deal with terrible situations…

We are synchronous human beings. The source of pleasure in our lives is to be in sync with each other.’ (from the New York Times)

I hope this week of posts about the mind was as interesting for you as it was for me to think about. You may have noticed that three of the six posts came from Ezra Klein’s podcast in the New York Times, which I have been finding consistently illuminating.