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Tara Brach

Making the Whole World Your Friend

Tara Brach

Tara Brach

Tara, Dharma, Selfhelp, Talks, Spiritual, Buddhist, Insight, Audio, Tarabrach, Mindfulness, Rain, Psychology, Compassion, Vipassana, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Meditation, Guided, Brach, Buddhism, Religion & Spirituality

4.810.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Making the Whole World Your Friend - A wonderful translation of the Pali word Metta is friendliness. This talk looks at friendliness through an evolutionary lens, and explores ways we can cultivate a more open heart.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

0:08.1

To make a donation, please visit tarbrock.com.

0:11.7

Namaste, welcome friends. I'm just back from a trip. I lettered a treat and I traveled

0:38.2

around Costa Rica a bit taking in the magic of the natural world and also of the culture.

0:46.2

There's a term there that everyone uses. It's putavida and it means the pure life, the simple life.

0:54.2

And Costa Ricans and they're called ticos consider it an expression of their culture. They use this term

1:03.6

to say hello, goodbye, everything's great, everything's cool. A lot of different kind of meanings, but it's an expression of friendliness.

1:14.3

There's a sense of saying, you know, here we are and we're connected. And so this talk, it's inspired by experiencing the friendliness as the atmosphere of a culture and and just the impact of that.

1:33.5

And I want to begin by sharing, you know, I've been reflecting on this groundbreaking work of a biologist Diane PC and her mentor, George Shaler.

1:45.2

And they gathered more intimate details about gorillas, about their lifestyle and their eating habits, their behavior, their socializing, then any prior biologists.

2:02.2

And the difference was between them and other generations of biologists, they didn't carry a gun.

2:10.2

You know, they entered the territory of these gentle giants with an attitude of friendliness, with respect, with a sense of curiosity, with warmth.

2:24.2

And the grillers weren't threatened. And as we can sense, if we have a gun, you know, if we're threatening aggression in some way, if we're mistrusting, if we're judging, it blocks the possibility of connection.

2:44.2

And whether we're approaching or inter-life for others, when there's friendliness, it opens the door to understanding and true relatedness.

2:59.2

So many of you are familiar with the word meta, which in Polly means loving kindness, but the less known facet in its translation is the word friendliness.

3:14.2

And I often think that if all we did on our paths was to really center cultivating friendliness. That was right at the heart of it. What a world we'd have.

3:30.2

You know, the inner freedom and just the transformations in our society.

3:38.2

So this talk will look at the value of friendliness. And I'll look at it through an evolutionary lens. And also some of the conditions that predispose a culture or society to being more or less friendly.

3:54.2

And then we'll explore friendliness with strangers. And the last piece will be cultivating more friendliness towards ourselves.

4:05.2

And so starting with the evolutionary lens, I've been reading about the research of Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. They have a book called Survival of the Friendliest.

4:18.2

And their main treatise is that friendliness often enables unusual evolutionary success. In other words, friendly species prevail over time.

4:31.2

And their research first they looked at dogs and at the social genius of dogs, how they can communicate with humans better than our closest genetic relatives, the Bonobo.

...

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