Massive Harvard Study Reveals True Wealth of Nations

Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Today we rewrite the headlines: Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations. That sounds like an interesting headline. What is the true wealth of nations? Isn’t it gross domestic product?

We’re thinking through the true wealth of nations in relation to our last contemplation. At that time, we considered the famous Grant Study, more formally known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development. If you haven’t heard about the study, it’s worth listening to that other contemplation of it first.

ult development that began in: 1938

The study has received a lot of media attention over the past few months, and the previous contemplation began to consider why we need the headlines to change. The headlines miss the most profound findings and implications of the Harvard study, and we need to hear about those things now more than ever.

The headline for this second contemplation gives us one possible alternative—though we still need to understand what the “true wealth of nations” is, as far as a more critical reading of the study might suggest.

Aside from rewriting some of the headlines related to the Harvard study, we could also think of the title for this contemplation as follows: How Our Culture Might Change if We Took Our Science and Our Wisdom Traditions Seriously. A culture of ignorance has to keep reality at bay, and we see that to some degree in the commentary and media coverage of this Harvard study.

It may seem surprising to refer to the dominant culture as a culture of ignorance. We of course have a lot of knowledge. And we also have currents of wisdom flowing from the ancient Greeks and the Biblical traditions all the way to the present. We even have some fairly wise people in our culture.

But, overall, we have to see the dominant culture as a culture of ignorance, and that kind of culture has to keep reality at bay. That’s why we have a crisis of truth, in which we can’t even agree on basic facts that we shouldn’t have to argue about.

And even though the researchers involved in the Harvard study are intelligent and caring human beings, the way people have discussed the Harvard study gives further evidence of our cultural ignorance.

This famous research program has gotten significant press coverage recently in part because of the publication of a general audience book reporting its findings, but the discussion has failed to take either the fullness of the science or the fullness of our wisdom traditions into account.

That ends up taming the findings, and leaving us all short-changed when it comes understanding and cultivating the true wealth of nations and their people. Nations are comprised of people, so what is our true wealth?

The new book on the Harvard study is called, The Good Life—a phrase closely associated with the ancient philosophical traditions of Greece and Rome. We suggested that the authors, Robert Waldinger (current director of the study) and Marc Schultz (the associate director), didn’t seem to fully acknowledge and promote the most profound finding of the study they report on in that book. In other words, we have an unstated finding in this study that we urgently need to receive.

We also have an excellent stated finding, and George Vaillant, the study’s previous director, put it rather well about a decade ago when he said, “the seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points . . . to a straightforward five-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’”

That’s a lovely stated finding. But we need the unstated finding—even to make more sense of that stated finding. The unstated discovery of the Harvard study—the one that we need to get into the headlines—is the most important finding we have about happiness and a meaningful and fulfilling life: That we are relational beings through and through, and that we and our world are a holistic flow of total interwovenness.

Intellectually speaking, this seems a pleasant and perhaps even an unchallenging fact. But the real lessons of this finding about us, about our world, would come as a paradigm shift. The nature of a paradigm shift means we can’t make sense of all of the lessons that would come from such a shift. Both our reason and our emotion can take offense at such lessons, giving rise to defensiveness and reactivity—even scorn and various forms of aggression.

To understand that, we might consider a few examples of the kinds of things we might have to consider if we saw the Harvard study as support for the fundamental relationality of our lives and our world. If they really promoted this unstated finding, if that became our focus, how would things have to change? This just means taking our own science and our wisdom traditions seriously—because these findings aren’t new.

For instance, if we understood the fundamental interwovenness of ourselves and our world, the fundamental relationality of our being, we would realize that parents don’t merely love and care for their child, but they love and care for the whole world in the process of raising their children. A parent doesn’t produce “offspring” in some narrow sense. Rather, they produce people, and thus they produce culture and Nature together. Parents produce the world we share—doesn’t matter if they’re human parents or not.

If you didn’t hear the first contemplation, the study traces how our early childhood experiences shape the whole of our life, from our IQ in college to how much money we make, how happy we are, how meaningful our life seems to be, and how healthy we are all the way through to old age.

As parents plant seeds of love, diligence, generosity, and so on in their children, they create flowers and fruits of love, diligence, generosity, and so on in the future adult their child will become, and also in the beings who will relate with that future adult. So the ripple effects are expansive. It means we have to consider carefully what it means to parent well—to have a philosophy of life that empowers us to parent well.

Parents can affect whether their child will relate warmly and ethically with others—warmly and ethically—all the way through their lifespan, and they can affect what their children do for a living and how well they succeed at it, and their total well-being of their child all the way into old age.

The Harvard study makes all of this pretty clear, but it focuses on the relationships between parents and children. They include sibling relationships, but the study looks at the developmental path of atomic individuals who have various relationships in their lives of various quality. When we expand our vision to think of relationality in general, we can see that the proper measure of a culture’s parenting appears in the state of the world as a whole, and not just the state of being of the adult they brought into the world as their child.

That really puts it in a different perspective. It’s one thing if your child grows up to make a lot of money and feel basically happy, and be more or less healthy, comparatively to others in their cohort—but what good does that do if the whole world is going to pot? That’s not a very good legacy.

Saying we need to evaluate parenting based on the state of the world has nothing to do with blaming parents for the state of the world, but rather giving us a proper vision of how the culture is doing—how our philosophies of life are really functioning—and prompting us to respond in a collective, collaborative way.

We might think of our states of being as personal. If we water seeds of peace, love, compassion, and sympathetic joy in ourselves, we can expect to experience those states more often. The more often we nourish peace in ourselves, and love, and joy, and appreciation, the more those states bear fruit.

But as relational beings, we cultivate our entire ecology when we cultivate our own soul.

It’s not a personal thing, as if our psychic territory existed cut off from everything else—and our bank account too. When we cultivate peace in ourselves, we cultivate peace in the entire ecology. And when a parent cultivates love, care, kindness, and reverence for life in their child, they constitute a world in which those things become more likely to appear. An abundance of peace, love, healing joy, kindness, reverence, creativity . . . that abundance is part of the true wealth of nations, our own true wealth.

Understanding relationality would also radically reorient the meaning of money. We noted in the last contemplation that money is part of this study, and we need to get clear about what money is.

As of now, and in spite of whatever projections we wish to layer over it, money arises as abstracted and alienated relationships. We have to get our minds and hearts around this: Money arises as abstracted and alienated relationships—that’s what we’re looking at when we look at our bank account, whether it’s digits, a credit card in our hand, a phone app, or actual paper money, it’s all the same.

Money isn’t “energy”. That’s one of the silliest and most self-deceptive tropes of the self-help catastrophe. Nor is money a value-neutral “medium of exchange”. Money could function as a medium of exchange—but not a value-free one.

But, that’s not at issue, because in the system of the dominant culture, money has become the intention of the exchange. This we must acknowledge. It’s one thing to suggest money could be a medium of exchange, and we would have to make money a positive medium of exchange. In our culture, to the extent that money still serves as a medium of exchange, it has a negative value overall.

Worse than that, money is largely the intent of the exchange, either in whole or in part, in most cases. Money is what we’re trying to get, or save, in many of our exchanges.

We should find that shocking, because it indicates a profound confusion (or delusion) in our understanding of relationality. Think about what that says about our understanding of relationality if we would make money the intention of so many of our exchanges.

No such delusion comes without terrible consequences—and we already see them everywhere around us.

We orient our culture not toward the production of people, ecologies, sacred values, and the world we share—Nature and culture in nonduality. That’s not how we orient our culture. Instead, we orient our culture toward the production of profit, power, and “stuff”.

Profit comes first. Money sits at the top of the unholy hierarchy, and as money and things become more dominant, beings, ecologies, and relationality itself (the three go totally together) all suffer. We shift from being more to having more.

The abstract and alienated nature of money in our current context appears clearly in its production, which happens deus ex machina—the god in the machine that adds zeros to create more money. That’s how we make most of our money.

We have no concrete relationships, no flesh and blood, no living ecologies shaping this process. Money just gets produced ex nihilo, by the fiat of the invisible hand of capitalism. We could say the invisible hand does nothing more than to push us toward more money. Adam Smith was flat out wrong: The invisible hand doesn’t balance things—it unbalances them.

Fundamentally, capitalism has to do with living at a distance from our own body, our own heart, our own mind, and world. Money facilitates spooky action in a mirage of distance. The distance isn’t real.

This is somewhat subtle. Consider food in a grocery store, e.g. quinoa. It’s as if we could be at a distance. Quinoa doesn’t grow outside my door, but it doesn’t matter. If I have the money, I get it, and it doesn’t matter what the consequences are.

That’s a mirage. I can do whatever I want, because I’m not rooted to a place. If I poison the water here, I will have bottled water. If I poison the water somewhere else in order to get what I want, so much the worse for the beings there who have to deal with it.

Money, if we make use of it at all, should be about relationships. It should empower our relational dancing with each other and with the natural world (an ethical fact that would likely limit its use and scope). Money should ultimately come down to relationality, and the promises we make to each other—the responsibilities that go with what we refer to as “rights”.

Importantly, promises can be sincerely and respectfully renegotiated. In a culture that educates for character, we would never see this in terms of the disingenuous moralizing of debt (our current regime). Instead, we would respect that we are all lived by powers we pretend to understand, and we can help each other let the powers of wisdom, love, and beauty live themselves through us.

The Harvard study could get us to rethink money, debt, and the economy in general. But, it will not do so without the input of more skillful philosophical thinking and creativity.

It’s fun to report that you could make twice as much money if you enjoyed a warm childhood compared to a cold childhood. But what about rethinking the culture altogether once we realize that the difference between these two people comes down to relational experience—not whether one worked harder than the other?

That’s the finding that should click with us:

Wait a second . . . Here’s a person who makes twice as much money as a person who’s very similar. Both went to Harvard. Both had an IQ of 110. Both had access to good social connections. What’s the difference? It must be that one worked harder than the other. No! It’s that one had warm childhood relationships, and that warmth of relationality unfolds over the course of their life.

We should be ashamed that we have a culture that says, “Well, since you got lucky and had a warm childhood, we’re going to give you even more luck: This abstract thing called money will let you do whatever you want, as long as you have enough of it.”

Instead, we should say, “Wait a moment. This is a problem, a symptom of a disease. We can’t have a culture in which people make twice as much just because they got lucky enough to enjoy a warm childhood. We need to improve relationality, invest in relationality, and see money as part of that, inherently, and think about what it would mean.”

We can go a little further along these lines: If we understood the lessons of relationality in the Harvard study, and if we brought that insight together with other available research, we might finally recon with the ancient spiritual truth that money cannot buy us love or happiness—and we would do something about the fact that we have created a world in which poverty can buy us a lot of misery, and can put tremendous strain on our practice of love. A mature culture wouldn’t tolerate such a situation, especially when it accepted that success in life has more to do with love than anything we might imagine as blamable on the one we choose to view as a failure.

Here’s another example: If we received this study as a set of lessons about our relationality and the interwovenness of all things, we would likely develop a notion of relational style. Today, a lot of people have gotten deeply into “attachment theory” and “attachment style”. That’s a fragmented view.

Deepening our relational sensitivity would lead us to understand and eventually wonderstand our thinking, speaking, and action in the world as primarily relational—as essentially so. That would make even our values relational, which would lead us to ask, “What is most important in my relationship with the Cosmos? What do I want to relate with—because it will constitute me?”

In this discussion, here and overall, it’s easy to fall into errors of language. And perhaps another change that might emerge over time if we understood our interwovenness is that the Indo-European languages might begin to evolve in the direction of process and relationality, as we find in languages like Blackfoot and Mohawk. Not every culture, and not every language, breaks the world up into atomic objects.

And here’s an exceptionally important example of what we would do if we understood the nature of relationality and interwovenness more fully, as illustrated in the Harvard study: We would begin reimagining our cities and towns to feature far more biodiversity and biomass—trees, birds, pollinators, grasses, waters, shrubs, and so on. We would re-envision and reorganize cities and towns so they become 70-80% “green space,” including ecologies for solitude and for social gathering.

That biomass is important. Think of how much New York city weighs, and what percentage of its weight do we think is nonhuman, non-pet biomass?

This is a big revolution. Once we understand that we are interwoven beings. We would recognize that we don’t mine minerals or extract fossil fuels, but we actually mine and extract interwovenness—we mine and extract what we are. That realization calls for a revolution in how we continue human culture, which means how we continue the interwovenness of the world—the interwovenness that is the world, and is our nature.

That’s a funny thing to suggest: We’re not mining minerals; we’re mining our own interwovenness. We’re drilling into and extracting from ourselves. When we start to pull at the threads of our own interwovenness like that, we can predict that things will begin to unravel.

Understanding this, and then wonderstanding it, would lead us to see the total nonduality of what we now refer to separately as Nature on the one hand and Culture on the other. We currently don’t practice forest thinking because we have no skillful interwovenness with forests.

In fact, it’s very unskillful. It’s an abstract relationship facilitated by the abstract machine we call money. And yet we very much need forest thinking, mountain thinking, river thinking, horse thinking, bee thinking, and so on.

Just as we can find exceptional and even extraordinary benefits from a warm childhood compared to a childhood lacking warmth, love, and social stability, so too could we begin to cultivate the inconceivable benefits of a childhood profoundly rooted in what we now refer to as Nature.

We don’t want to oversimplify this. People came to Turtle Island from conquest cultures, and they encountered more Nature here than we can functionally imagine, but that exposure didn’t alter the consciousness of most of them. It probably did for some, especially for those fortunate enough to leave the dominant culture behind and live with Indigenous people. We’re talking about a real rootedness in Nature, and a nonduality of Nature and culture.

We can feel deeply connected with Nature, but if we have been infected by conquest consciousness, we still need a lot of humility, and we need to realize most of us have a lot of work to do in order to properly reindigenize.

A child who grows up embedded in Nature, and living with true elders who can help them leaern to think with mountains, with rivers, forests, and the great Earth—that child can think more skillfully than a child kept mostly away from Nature.

Again, we can’t naïvely equate exposure to Nature with a capacity for skillful thinking. We don’t achieve sagehood just because we went into the wilderness. Buddha himself made this very clear. . . .

How the nonduality of Nature and Culture unfolds depends on holistic education. As of now, we mostly cut ourselves off from vast potentials. In a certain sense, we have made most childhoods cold or loveless when it comes to connection to Nature and wildness, and that depletes the wealth of all nations, especially when a nation as large as the United States lives that way.

Conquest consciousness is that way. We cannot have conquest consciousness and full attunement with Nature.

If we understood these things, we would not merely spend more time in Nature learning, observing, studying, and experiencing wonder and sacredness—we’re talking about real work with the mind, a trained mind—we wouldn’t just spend more time in Nature with our trained mind, but we would integrate that with a collaborative and creative effort to care for the community of life, in reverence and respect.

We would understand that we can’t do anything1 properly without orienting in the direction of cultivating the whole of life onward. Science cannot be merely about gathering knowledge. It has to be about cultivating the whole of life onward, supporting the whole community of life.

There is no job we could do that could stand outside of that kind of intention, but right now we live as if we could. We can go to work every day at a bank or a tech company, and it could be that absolutely nothing we do for the entire work week has anything to do with cultivating the conditions of life.

It usually is the opposite, because of the nature of the culture. Most of us, most of the time, our activities add up to degrading the conditions of life in one way or another. It’s a terrible thing to have to countenance.

This is why the Harvard study needs new headlines. The study reveals to us how crazy our current regime is. Most of us—in our work life, in our lives as citizens, in our family, in our life as friends—we don’t get to focus on cultivating or enjoying the true wealth of nations.

How can we live well aside from the true wealth of nations?

If we understood this, we would also focus community effort on rejuvenating the wealth of nations that we have already squandered. Just as one example, we would focus community effort on replenishing watersheds, reregulating hydrological cycles, reducing pollution, and protecting and revering the beings who live with and take care of our waters.

We all need access to clean water. That seems like a ridiculously obvious—until a culture has so misunderstood relationality that it poisons and misuses its own waters, often for the sake of the abstraction we call money.

“Why did you poison the river?”

“To get more money.”

This shows us clearly what money does in this context. We can wish for a different meaning, but that’s like wishing gravity accelerated us at 7 meters per second squared, or that we could float if we had the right kind of intention. I wish money didn’t do what it does, but it does.

We would likewise practice replenishing other ecologies. That would of course include forests, mountains, rivers, and oceans, but also our own mental and physical ecologies—reregulating our sleep cycles (and thus our dream life), reducing toxins in our minds and bodies, and in general cultivating positivity, joy, love, compassion, warmth of heart, gratitude, cooperation, communion, ceremony celebration, and mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation. We would learn how to be together more skillfully, learn how to cultivate our relational skill and our ecosensual awareness.

We would understand all of this as what we need to do in order to cultivate and enjoy the true wealth of nations.

We can think of all of this in many ways. For a kind of basic perspective, let’s assume something reasonable—that George Vaillant was correct to say that the millions of dollars and countless hours of work amount to one thing: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

We then need to understand the nature of love, in order to understand that finding. If that nature of love accords with the rest of the Harvard study findings, and with finds from other branches of science as well as from the wisdom traditions, then we must conclude that the nature of love is relationality.

We thus arrive at the ecology of love, and its inescapable corollary: the love of ecology, which extends to a love and appreciation of the real work of life, which is care, the care of and reverence for life and the interwovenness that we are.

We can start with love, and we still come back to ecology. The Harvard study verifies the nonduality of spiritual and ecological reality as it verifies the interwovenness of all things. The Harvard study shows us that love is ecological.

Once we understand that, we know we cannot contain love within the “nuclear family” unit. That doesn’t make any sense. We can love our child with incredible depth, but if they get lead poisoning, our love for them won’t save them from the consequences. That’s a simple example. Life is much more subtle, complex, and inconceivable for us.

But we need to see that our interwovenness means we have no atomic individuals, and no nuclear family units. We find that children grow up in, through, and as interwoven ecologies. When we consider adult development, and we ask how one person seemed happier, or maybe they earned twice as much money as someone very much like them, we need to see that as an ecological phenomenon, rather than naïvely locating the causes inside of an atomized person.

Some children grow up, through, and as ecologies of warmth that stimulate their creative intelligence. Some children grow up in, through, and as ecologies of coldness and rigidity that may harden their minds and hearts, leading to increased stuckness, self-doubt, and craving.

Some people grow up in ecologies with high levels of toxins, like lead, uranium, Teflon, rocket fuel, pesticides, and so on. And in the dominant culture, some people grow up in ecologies with intense inequality and injustice, while others may experience less of these.

For instance, Finland has ranked as the happiest nation on Earth for the past six years, and they have significantly less income inequality than nations like the U.K. and the U.S. Even small relative differences in income inequality can create more misery for the population as a whole.

We need to see the ecologies of childhood from as broad and deep a perspective as we can. When we do so, we can understand how the ecologies of childhood can put us into unskillful relationship with ourselves, each other, and the larger community of life, and the spiritual and ecological realities upon which we all depend, and which also depend on us. The broader spiritual and ecological realities carry a significance for us that we can hardly overstate.

And we encounter here one of the major drawbacks of the study: Because the researchers don’t seem to be aware, or don’t make explicit that they are verifying our relational nature, they fail to make connections to Nature itself, they fail to highlight and honor the ecology of love and the love of ecology a truly good life demands, and that is integral to the true wealth of nations.

The nature of Nature is the very relationality and interwovenness that comes through in the Harvard study data—the true wealth of nations, our true abundance, not the nonsense about who made more money than whom.

But of 36 instances of the word “nature” in The Good Life, not a single one refers to the natural world (instead, it refers to things like “human nature” or “the nature of social media”). There’s a functional absence of the ecologies we depend on—the ecologies which could educate, and thereby strengthen, broaden, and deepen our relational skill—and that functional absence of Nature takes the danger out of the findings, taming them and thereby taming us.

This taming may seem innocent, but it puts us and the world we share at risk. It’s not innocent.

The conventional analysis—what the study even allows us to know . . . not what the study found out, but what it allows us to find out—the conventional analysis perpetuates our ignorance about our relational nature, and about the fact that our relational nature makes us ecological beings, which making our highest values ecological or relational too.

We’re not talking about some new agey “nature religion” here. We’re just noting that our highest values are necessarily ecological because of our nature. If you believe the divine created the world, then the divine made us interwoven, and, whatever our religious or philosophical views, we find a nonduality spiritual and ecological reality.

Whatever the authors’ intentions, it’s quite easy in the present context to read The Good Life as a feel-good book about things we can do to self-soothe in the midst of a catastrophe. The book runs the risk of fragmenting our understanding of living a good life—by reducing it, abstracting it, and failing to help us turn toward the kind of dangerous wisdom our world rather desperately needs us to work with.

The Harvard study, like a lot of dominant culture science, thus obscures our fuller nature, including our need for ecological awareness (we could even say ecosensual awareness, or a sense of the sacred in the world and a reverence and gratitude for life) and it obscures vitalizing relationships with Nature and non-human beings.

It obscures our need for creative, vitalizing, wise, loving, beautiful, sacred relationality, and the practices and ceremonies, the rituals and rites that would make us more skillful and graceful as the relational beings we already are.

By perpetuating our ignorance and by obscuring truths we very much need to hear, the study risks sending us further down the wrong path—a path we already find nearly impossible to leave, even as we see its terrible consequences. We can’t enjoy a truly good life when we have a limited vision of what we are, what we’re capable of, and what the world demands of us. Reality has its own obligations, which we cannot escape.

If we had more skillful and realistic practices of relationality, it would alter our entire experience of life. “Skillful and realistic” here indicates an array of things, including most basically an acknowledgement of spiritual and ecological realities. It’s not realistic or skillful to think we can degrade the very ecologies we depend on, or to think we can live functionally cut off from them.

But “skillful and realistic” unfolds as creative, collaborative, wise, loving, beautiful, graceful, inspired, and wild. It has to encompass everything that goes with a proper recognition of the relational nature of reality—that we are relational beings all the way to the core, and that everything thus arises in complete flowing interwovenness.

Part of the reason we miss these sorts of vital insights has to do with a lack of collaboration between scientists, artists, and philosophers. A study on adult development should almost never be conducted exclusively by people trained mainly in the sciences. It comes as a big shock in the dominant culture to suggest such a thing.

As we noted, Waldinger and Schultz admit the wisdom traditions have a very, very long head-start over the scientists. And philosophers reading reports about the study can recognize what that massive head-start means, and why we need more collaboration between science and philosophy—not exclusively the philosophy only of the university professors, but even more so the philosophy of the philosophers, the ones who taught us the practices and the deeper potentials of a life of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Creatives have a role to play too, because sensitive artists can help us vision our way forward, as well as helping us arrive at a proper vision of where we are. We find expressions of the good life—and the various pathways to arriving at it—in mythopoetic terms, across all traditions. The mythopoetic vision may come from the mystics of those traditions (people who are something like a cross between an artist and a philosopher), or it may come from artists translating the teachings as well as translating their engagement with and practice of those teachings (even if their realization lags a bit behind the more advanced mystics).

The suggestion here comes with the utmost respect for the intelligence and expertise of these and other researchers. We’re not picking on Waldinger and Schultz or other researchers.

It seems startling to suggest we shouldn’t leave scientific research to scientists alone, but it doesn’t make sense to leave it to them and them alone. That’s not a holistic and relational vision.

And it goes against the findings of the Harvard study and many other studies. It limits. It creates a monoculture.

So, we’re speaking from a place of respect for their findings, which recommend we cultivate vitalizing ecologies of mind. A vitalizing, resilient ecology of mind tends to exhibit diversity. We need the diversity of perspectives that come from what we now refer to as the isolated disciplines of science (lots of silos there), philosophy (ditto), the humanities in general (more silos), and the arts (more silos than one might guess). We have fragile ecologies there, with little cross-pollination. The Harvard study could have looked very different.

The need for a diverse ecology of mind in the sciences should also remind us of the common ground shared by the wisdom traditions of both Indigenous and conquest cultures. We might begin to realize that Indigenous people should also participate in scientific research as well, along with the philosophers and artists, as well as people from the local community.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about some of the differences between an Indigenous approach to science and the approach of dominant culture science. She would know those differences fairly well, since she is an Indigenous woman who has a PhD in plant ecology from the dominant culture educational system. Her book is an excellent one for opening up our vision of the ecology of mind. It’s not a complete statement, but it can expand the mind.

Among other experiential insights, she shares the following:

I remember feeling, as a new faculty member, as if I finally understood plants. I too began to teach the mechanics of botany, emulating the approach that I had been taught.

It reminds me of a story told by my friend Holly Youngbear Tibbetts. A plant scientist, armed with his notebooks and equipment, is exploring the rainforests for new botanical discoveries, and he has hired an indigenous guide to lead him. Knowing the scientist’s interests, the young guide takes care to point out the interesting species. The botanist looks at him appraisingly, surprised by his capacity. “Well, well, young man, you certainly know the names of a lot of these plants.” The guide nods and replies with downcast eyes. “Yes, I have learned the names of all the bushes, but I have yet to learn their songs.” I was teaching the names and ignoring the songs.

So writes Robin Wall Kimmerer. We might suggest the Harvard study ignores the songs—the love songs of our being, the love songs of the world we share.

In this vein, we need a little fierce compassion with ourselves. Think of the findings that got reported. Waldinger and Schultz wrote that, “Relationships are important”? George Vaillant said, “Happiness is love”?

How are these findings in the 21st century? What kind of culture do we live in that a massive study like this confirms such things—things we should already understand rather well, if we only practiced what our own wisdom traditions teach us?

In the spirit of both compassion and discernment, we also have to keep in mind that the study authors are effectively academics, not sages (all due respect if they are sages, and no scorn if they aren’t). Waldinger himself is a psychiatrist and a Buddhist practitioner, so perhaps he has more wisdom than what he has emphasized in the discussions around this Harvard study. In any case, we have lots of evidence that academics in general have no better functional understanding of, and skill at, relationality than anyone else.

Academics suffer from overwork, from high level of stress, from a lack of true mental health, from strain in their personal and professional relationships, and from a variety of biases, some of which come from the paradigms of dominant culture science, and some of which come from the pressures of needing to publish, to attract and retain funding, to guard theoretical territory, obtain tenure, and so on. Diversity in our ecologies of mind can help with all of this—most especially including the wisdom traditions.

We need the wisdom traditions, including Indigenous traditions, to help make the promise of the Harvard study a reality—not just the promise of the findings as reported. We cannot overstate the importance of keeping in mind that even the reported findings require the wisdom traditions to make them optimally accessible for us.

How do we love our children in such a way that they would carry with them the blessings of “the Cherished” that Vaillant, Waldinger, and Schultz outline? And how do we practice our lives in such a way that, even if we must count ourselves among “the Loveless,” we could still find true peace, happiness, and success in our lives—considered in the most holistic way?

We further cannot overstate the importance of keeping in mind that many of those findings can make us feel warm and fuzzy, but what matters more is everything left mostly at the margins, and even the things left completely out.

The Harvard study tells us that some people trapped in “The Matrix” experience more suffering than others, and that, even within “The Matrix,” a sense of relative happiness and contentment remains possible. The study fails to tell us that we could (and perhaps should) exit “The Matrix” altogether, realizing a level of meaning, fulfillment, and joy, a level of wisdom, love, and beauty, that can only arise when we achieve this exit out of delusion.

That would make for another great headline: Massive Harvard Study Says “Get Out of the Matrix,” and Explains How. But this study does neither.

We need headlines that ring out the Good News, the Gospel of Love. Perhaps it should go like this: Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations: Our Interwovenness.

Or perhaps we could put it like this: World Peace, True Happiness, and a Meaningful Life Are Possible, Study Finds—Just Don’t Look for It in the System We Have, Which Is Still Headed for Catastrophe. That’s very long headline. More than 140 characters. We can make an exception and have the headline properly brimming with honesty and promise—honesty . . . and promise . .

But, there’s good news: We know the true wealth of nations, and you can find, not only your peace, but world peace; not only your happiness, but happiness for all beings; not only the meaning of your life, but the meaningfulness of life itself. It’s all available, and we have a real blueprint . . . here’s how you can do it.

Then we need the all of the clarifications above, perhaps beginning with this key issue: If happiness is love, we also need to know that love is a trainable skill—one the wisdom traditions know how to train.

And here’s another example of something we don’t want to leave it to the scientists. Of the scientists start working on an evidence-based program for learning how to love, we’ll have McLove to add to our McMindfulness. If you want to know how we got McMindfulness, it’s that we let scientists try to develop evidence-based mindfulness training.

No. We need the wisdom traditions here. Those traditions know that love is a trainable skill, and those traditions know that it’s crucial for our individual, cultural, and planetary well-being and flourishing. It’s not a new finding.

Love is basic to what we are, as relational/ecological beings, so we have both a natural capacity for skillful relationality, and the ability to learn ever more inspired realizations of that natural capacity.

Leading with love matters. It’s an ideal place to begin if we want to cultivate and receive the true wealth of nations. It’s the reason why we have the word “philosophy” in the dominant culture.

Philosophia is LoveWisdom, following the path of love to find the meaning of our life.

In our next contemplation, we’ll reflect a little further on love as it relates to this study. For now, we’ve come to a good place to rest and integrate a little.

In the meantime, if you have questions, suggestions, or stories about the true wealth of nations, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org and we might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.