On being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation, harnessing the power of the sciences

to explore the deepest and most perplexing questions facing humankind.

Learn about the winner of this year's Templeton prize, Dr. Jane Goodall, whose discoveries

changed our understanding of humanity's role in an interconnected world at Templeton.org.

The psychotherapist, Esther Perrell, has changed our discourse about sexuality and

coupled them with her TED Talks, her books, and her podcast, Where Should We Begin?

Episode after episode, Les Bear, the Theatre of Relationship, which is also the drama of being

human. And now, in the post-2020 world, she's launching a game to catalyze at home her kind of

conversation. It's also called Where Should We Begin? The singular insights in the fascinating

conversation I had with Esther in 2019 speak to the flip side of social isolation.

The incomparably intense experience many have now had of togetherness. And her deep understanding

of erotic intelligence feels so interesting as we grapple with emergent dynamics of the human

condition writ large, coupled or not, and both intimate and societal. My book and my work is about

eroticism. It is about how people connect to this quality of the liveliness of vibrancy,

of vitality, of renewal. And that is way beyond the description of sexuality. And it is mystical.

It is actually a spiritual mystical experience of life. It is a transcendent experience of life

because it is an act of de-imagination. I'm just a tip it and this is on being.

Esther Perel was a therapist for 20 years before she began to write about sexuality.

She'd studied Jewish identity in different national contexts and focused on relationships

between different minority groups in the US, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. She grew up

speaking multiple languages at home, above her family clothing shop in Antwerp and Belgium,

a child of Polish holocaust survivors. Both of her parents were the only people left of their

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