my buddhist blog number 64

Hi Everybody,

This episode brings us to the last and undoubtedly one of the most significant of this little clutch of life-strategies we have been discussing, we might perhaps call it the connected life, because that is the very strong theme that comes out of much of the social research we have been referring to. What does it mean? It means a real sense of connectedness or engagement. a real sense of involvement in the lives of family and friends and colleagues and communities, as a constant reminder of our wider humanity. This turns out to be in many ways the fundamental constituent in a well-balanced and happy life. The evolutionary biologists tell us that we are in our deepest nature a co-operating animal, that we survive and flourish because of our ability to live and work and co-operate in family and social groups. As Sam Harris puts it in The Moral Landscape,

' There may be nothing more important than human co-operation...Co-operation is the stuff of which meaningful human lives and viable societies are made.'

Then positive psychologists tell us something very similar;

'The centrality of social connections to our health and well-being cannot be overstressed.'

What they are telling us is that hwen we do manage to build or experience these harmonious relationships they don't simply make us feel good about our lives, they seem to buttress and reinforce all our creative energies, so that we feel released or set free so to speak, and empowered to pursue many other fulfilling activities and objectivesin our lives.

And it is even greater than that. The strength of our social connections, the levels of altruism and compassion and willingness to support others, are absolutely decisive factors in how whole communities function. In some of their most recent research for example, sociologists such as Robert Sampson from Harvard have identified a quality that they have labelled the ' enduring neighbourhood effect,' which determines not simply how communities are able surmount and recover from major crises such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and the perfect storm that struck New York in 2012, but how neighbourhoods are able to deal with what he calls, ' everyday challenges,' such as anti-social behaviour.

So our level of connectedness, our level of engagement is in no way a marginal factor, it is clearly crucial in the quality of our everyday life. '

How ' connected ' are you is a big question. And it's interesting that this is a question that has moved from social theory you might say, to front and centre political debate, in terms of  ' The Big Society ' for example, which is being debated on both sides of the Atlantic.

The key question of course is what has all this got to do with Buddhism? Good question. And that's where we go in the next episode.

Thanks for reading. And if you feel you can pass it on to someone else, double thanks!!
See you next time.
William