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I agree with our guest today, Jonathan Rauson, that more and more people are coming out of a

cultural closet we made, using the word spirituality with a new seriousness. He is an applied

philosopher and a chess grandmaster, who explores the influence of our inner worlds on society and politics.

The challenge for democracy now is partly, he says, a challenge to change human consciousness.

We engage his broad spiritual lens on the great dynamics of our time, from social life to the economy

to the climate. Getting things in their fullest broadest and deepest perspective is necessary to

actually feel this problem. You know, the crisis of climate change in particular is a crisis of

disconnection between the facts and the feelings. We know something is true, we don't feel it

it's true, we don't live as if it's true. There is what you might call a kind of stealth denial,

it's because if you believed it, but it's not obvious from our behaviour and the way we

vote and what we campaign for and how we talk that we accept this is a real problem.

And I think that is ultimately spiritual. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Jonathan Rauson has studied the brain philosophy, economics and education, and he directed the

social brain center at the Royal Society of Arts. And he's co-founder and director of Perespectiva,

a research organization in London that examines the relationship as he says between systems,

souls and society. One of the threads of your thought and perspective and work is the matter of,

well, just using the word spiritual, reserting it and then pondering like what it means, what it

doesn't mean. And it makes me curious about if you can identify kind of roots of that longing or

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