For a very long time the core animating drive of human life was pretty much we could say, a mystery.

Freud, for example, believed that the core human drive was discharging a libidinal energy that built up along with at times aggressive

energies. The Western philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche believed that we were animated by this blind will to survive at all cost,

this kind of animating feature that simply look to amass control, power, good simply for the purpose of survival.

A very dark view that deep down inside all we care about is ourselves.

And certainly at core points of the Buddha's

darma, he or she, talks about the dismay of looking at the human condition and observing the behaviors of others and the

conclusions that the Buddha arrived at. Perhaps no more beautifully put than in a suit called the atadanda which is a masterpiece of

both poetry and psychology. In it we hear the Buddha proclaim,

everywhere I looked in the world, I saw were people quarreling and in dismay

People living like floundering fish and ever dwindling puddles,

competing with one another for limited amounts of food,

and a great fear arose as me

as I looked at others. The world was utterly without purpose. There was nothing but

competition and discontent. You don't get more cynical and neolithic than that view.

And if that's all the Buddha proposed,

then the Buddha would be amongst the most Nietzsche and nihilistic philosophers and psychologists

that the world produced.

And yet that's not all the Buddha saw. He also saw a twin impulse, another impulse, that was

far, far healthier and led ultimately to the entire spiritual path.

The Buddha noted the second circuit

was a social brain that compels us to connect with each other for love and security and kindness.

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