Community & Connection

The inspiration was, what if we created a hub that brings all these different myriads of practices under one umbrella, where people could go on their own terms, find practices of interest, and connect with others of like mind? That was the inspiration for creating Contemplative Life, the nonprofit. Through Contemplative Life, I came across the work I am doing now with Prosocial World. I was introduced to David Sloan Wilson, my colleague and co-founder of Prosocial World. As I learned more about it, the light bulb came on. Oh my word, this is what so many have been looking for. It is an integrated scientific framework for cooperation. It integrates three sciences: the work of Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for her work on avoiding the tragedy of the commons, modern evolutionary science, which is the science of cooperation and conscious evolution, and contextual behavioral science. Science and spirituality need each other. Science needs spirituality for the same reason I suggested before, it does not go deep enough. On the other side, spiritual communities are some of the most dysfunctional of any communities, so they need the mechanics of cooperation and the things that science can provide.