All right, now: clear mind, quiet heart. I have been reading about the reasons that people are so divided these days. I’m actually working on my next book, which is how could we go from a polarized, quite internecine—Did you ever have to learn that word in high school? It means mutually destructive. The politics, the attitudes, the ways of speaking that characterize people, not only in the United States but all over the world, have been getting increasingly more upsetting, and there’s a reason for that. And today I want to talk about how upset some of us feel and why that upset is not actually always coming from a clear place. It’s not coming from a place that we should trust.

Let me get to it. Once upon a time, they invented something called the internet. And on the internet, social media began to play out. And social media has everything to do with getting us to look at certain things online and engage with them, these items, for a long period of time. And these wonderful, beautiful machines will notice what makes us glue our eyes to the screen longest and it’ll give us more of that. It’s not that it’s thinking this out—it’s a blind algorithm. But what the little algorithms figured out very quickly is that we pay more attention to something when it upsets us. And it began, therefore—the social media platforms began therefore—to feed us more and more things that upset us.

I recently read a book that goes into the reasons we get upset by things online. And it talks about—oh, my favorite thing—the evolutionary development of our tendency to get into these very, very antagonistic, muddled, emotional and mental states. So the book is The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher, and he talks about how human beings evolved in a really interesting way. There was a point in time where we seemed to be developing language. If you look at the evidence, the anthropological evidence, the archeological evidence, humans developed all kinds of culture, language, tool use and all these things at about the same time. Our minds had reached the point where we could communicate abstractly. And strangely, at this very same time, our development became less physically strong. So the ancestors of our ancestors had the bones and heavy brow ridges and long teeth of mature apes. If you’ve ever seen a fully grown silverback gorilla or an alpha male chimp get upset, it’s a very frightening experience. They have enormous strength and very long teeth and they’re very violent. But the archeological and anthropological records seem to show that as humans developed our language capacity and our ability to think abstractly, we also became more docile, smaller boned, our teeth started to shrink. In other words, we became domesticated. Now you can see how domestication happens by looking at the way other animals became domestic. And there was a woman who did a study in Russia to see how dogs had evolved to be so much less violent than, say, foxes or wolves or coyotes.

I used to go for walks in the desert in Arizona and sometimes I’d see a pack of coyotes, and at first I’d think they were dogs. But when a coyote looks at you, oh, you know it’s not a dog. There’s no friendliness there. It’s just a beast, right? But when this Russian woman, I’m sorry I’m forgetting her name, but she did a study where she took a bunch of wild foxes and she started to breed them to get friendly foxes. So she’d take the foxes that seemed most friendly toward humans and she would breed them together. Within a few generations, they started to have more puppy-like characteristics. So these friendly foxes, they started to wag their tails the way dogs do. They lost their native coloration and they got more spotty. Their coats got more spots, their ears got smaller, their teeth got smaller. They became ingratiating. They wanted to pay attention to humans. And it was a really interesting study because when it was over, these foxes couldn’t be released into the wild. They had to be adopted as pets. They needed to be with humans.

Well, it seems that at the point we developed language, we domesticated ourselves, we became sort of friendlier and more able to hang out with each other. And at this time, the sort of alpha-ape structure of the society changed as well, and it changed to something that they call the “tyranny of the cousins.” I love that language. What that means is that when you get a bunch of social, a bunch of people in a social group and they’re not going to rule by violence of one brutal person over another—in other words, if they’re all kind of friendly and domestic—what happens is that group opinion starts to sway our individual opinion.

So in the 1940s, they did some very frightening studies where they took groups of people, and they showed them something simple like two lines where the lines were of the same length. And then they would ask them, “How long are the lines? Are they the same length or are they different?” Well, a group of people would come in and all but one person were actually collaborating with the investigators. So they were to say—say the lines were the same length— they would say, “No, the top line is much shorter.” There was one person in the group that could see that the lines were exactly the same length and would disagree with the whole group. And usually that person would not only say that they saw what the group saw, but they would actually start to see differently. They would see whatever the group saw so that nobody would get mad at them.

So, this psychological tendency for us to agree with groups and to be swayed by groups of people—the tyranny of the cousins—even if we imagine that a group of people is upset at us, we get very, very nervous, and we tend to get really ingratiated and we try to agree with everyone so that nobody will be mad with us and they won’t throw us out of the pack, out the society.

Now you add that, you add all that evolutionary and all that psychological background to social media, and social media soon found out that by triggering the fear that we were facing mass hostility, the algorithms could get us to stay online a lot. They could also scare us and make us want to lash back at the people we saw as angry with us and find a group that was on our side and really emphatically get in with that group.

I used to call this “bonding by bashing” and I saw it going through school. You’d get a couple of kids who were afraid of being bullied, and they would band together and pick another kid to bully, and then all the kids would jump on board and bully that one poor person. Sometimes that person was me. I got bullied a bit and it was very strange and frightening to have all these people coming at me, and it basically just made me not want to go to school anymore.

Well, right now, it’s as if social media algorithms have taken us all to a place where we’re terrified of being bullied, of being jumped on, and where we’re looking for people to back us up. So we get more and more information that is more and more designed to upset us, and it works. And then we lash back in a way that feels like self-defense, but it looks to other people like we are the tyranny of the cousins and we’re attacking them. Everyone starts to feel attacked by everyone else.

And the basic reason for it is that we are seeing evidence online that isn’t real, that’s designed to make us feel upset so we stay in the algorithm longer. All of that is a lot of my social science mind being thrown at you at once. Take a deep breath and look at the basic idea we’re dealing with here. A lot of us feel vulnerable and outraged and afraid of the future and of other people right now. And it’s been so exaggerated by our media and our social media that we have lost our sense of truth in all of this. There’s not a sense of peace. One thing I learned doing a whole bunch of personal research with clients and with people I’ve taught in groups, I learned very, very quickly that if you get people off their basic sense of truth, they will do almost anything. They will attack other people. They will leave their own ethics in the dust. It’s like being gaslighted by a psychopath. You lose your sense of truth and suddenly everything bobs and sways and there’s nothing real to stand on.

So what I wanted to do today was sort of run through all this information and then say look into your heart to the places where you don’t feel peace, and then look into your mind at the chatter that’s going on in there and it’s been fed by things you’ve seen online, by people who are talking to you, by things you’ve seen on television, by books you’ve read, by this broadcast, by everything. Everything is spinning and slanting and trying to get you to feel a certain way. The only feeling that you can really build a life on is peace because peace is the sense of all the chunks of reality fitting together correctly.

Peace is when you get the jigsaw puzzle to line up, and you feel that click of that piece definitely goes with that piece. The sense of truth comes back when we take the emotional language out of what we’re thinking and we take the fear of other people’s disapproval out of the mix of thoughts that govern our minds on a moment-to-moment basis.

So here’s what I really would like you to do. I’ve asked you to look at places where you’re upset, and then I’d like you to repeat the one phrase that I’ve found feels more true to more people than any other thing I’ve tried, any other statement I’ve tried, this is the truest statement that you can make: “I am meant to live in peace.” And I’d like you to silently repeat that for a few minutes. I am meant to live in peace. I am meant to live in peace. I’m meant to live in peace.

Now, if you can feel the clarity of mind when you say that, it’s so simple, it’s so real, and then you come down in your heart to a place that feels calm, quiet. In a moment I’m going to do our silence, stillness and space meditation that we do every week on The Gathering Room. I would challenge us all to do this: As we go forward from this, or if you’re listening to this later as you go forward from hearing or seeing this broadcast, make peace the object of your every action.

So as you go into, say, looking online, set your heart at peace. Say, “I am meant to live in peace.” And then as you go through, notice what brings peace and what does not. What I’ve found is that accurate information—I don’t know if we somehow psychically know what’s true, or if it’s just that all the chunks of reality fit together better when we’re looking at the truth—but even if I’m looking at the news, if there’s something exaggerated or misreported, if I go back and think about it, I feel a sort of jarring sensation. It doesn’t bring me peace.

But when I find out information, even if it’s quite upsetting and it helps the pieces of reality go together, I can accept it from a place of peace. And when someone comes out with really inflammatory language—they’re afraid, they’re frightened—and I’m in peace, I don’t see an aggressor. I see a person who is designed to want the love of the group and who is afraid of being cast out. And from a place of peace, what I feel for them is compassion. From a place of peace, I don’t feel vulnerable, so the language doesn’t hurt me. I can look at inflammatory language and say, “Ah yeah, okay, this is the algorithm. This is someone driven by the algorithm. Let me return to peace. Let me return to peace.”

When there’s a dog barking and I’m trying to make a recording, I can say, “That sweet dog is not in his home, we’re babysitting,” and I can be in peace. And I can see your names and those beautiful little hearts that are coming up and feel such a huge rush of peace and know that social media is not evil. It can bring us peace just as it can bring us unquiet minds. It can help us stay clear and calm just as it can upset us.

We are the arbiters. If we choose peace and make that the main object of our attention, we can live in peace, even now, and we can make peaceful, wise choices based on whatever happens. And we can feel each other’s love. And that’s what I want to do now because I always feel the connection between all of us—the little puppy humans that we are—when I do the Space, Stillness and Silence meditation.

So let’s do this. First, take a deep breath. Breathe all the way out, and then give yourself the strange question that always triggers the brain to go into synchronous alpha. And that question is: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Such a strange and beautiful question. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the back of my head? Can I imagine the space between the crown of my head and the bottom of my spine? Can I imagine the space inside the volume of my chest? Can I imagine the mostly empty space that makes up all my atoms? Can I experience and imagine that space as a vibrating consciousness filled with love?

Can I imagine the distance between myself and the others on this broadcast? Can I imagine the space inside me connecting seamlessly with the space inside everyone else here, and between us and every other being on this planet? Can I listen for the silence below all the sounds that contain all sound and is always present? Can I imagine the stillness in the buzz of activity that I see all around me? Can I feel the part of myself that is space, stillness and silence? And can I imagine that it is love?

Now this place, this place is where we can stand to look at whatever we see online, to receive whatever anyone says to us, to stand where when we look at people whose political positions or whose religious beliefs don’t go with ours, where we cannot be afraid of the differences between us.

So here are some questions, let’s turn to. Auspicious Redhead says, “What if it’s not being overblown? What if we are like the people before the Holocaust took charge?”

Yeah, I’m not saying that it isn’t that way. The reason I’m doing this topic is that I think it may well be that way. I think we may be in a polarizing society where there’s a huge wealth disparity and where—you know, as a sociologist, you look at the factors in our culture right now, and things could go very, very badly wrong. When you see the kinds of situations that we’re in right now, historically they have gone incredibly badly. And if we’re in a place of peace, we can receive messages from our own wisest selves. We can have a very peaceful impetus to act.

For example, in our family, we have this feeling we need to move to a certain place, and we don’t really know why, but it feels very peaceful. And we’re just crazy enough in this family to live our lives based on what makes us feel peaceful. So we’re like, okay, this situation in the world looks very dangerous. What should we do? And the peaceful solution to all of us, there are three of us in the relationship and then we’re, we’ve got two people who are my son and our daughter Lila. And the peaceful feeling in the heart said, yeah, go to this other place. And we’re like, really? Should we do anything else? No, not yet.

So this is where I get off the materialist training and get into the woo-woo, which is why I do this broadcast. I’m very into the woo-woo. I happen to have had so many woo-woo experiences that it’s impossible for me to deny it without losing my integrity. So what I believe is that peace is always trying to guide us. And the more dangerous the situation, the more important it is to move in a place of peace.

What I’ve been saying as I talk about my anxiety book, Beyond Anxiety, is if there was a serious problem with your body—if you’d fallen out of a window and broken many bones and damaged many organs and it was a really, really dangerous situation, wouldn’t you want the doctors working on you to be in a state of calm, creative, compassionate focus, rather than having a panic attack and yelling at each other? You’d want them peaceful and observant. And that’s what I’m asking. I’m not saying go to sleep to the dangers. I am saying be peaceful as you observe it because that is how we make the decisions that keep us safe, not only as individuals, but as people who love one another, who essentially at the root all love one another but have lost that perspective because we’re so frightened of each other. The moment you come home to peace, you can see others’ fear without getting afraid yourself. And it’s all fear-based, y’all. All the attacks, they’re all based on fear.

So someone else—AliceGoCurtis, I think it says—says, “Martha, do you think there were as many bad news now as in the past?”

There’s never been as much news as there is now. There’s just so much information flowing. There’s always been a lot of really scary stuff in the world. When would you have wanted to live before? When there was plague? When there were lords who owned all the peasants and could do whatever they wanted to them? There’s always been a lot of scary stuff happening. The difference is now that we receive it more. It’s being pumped at us, and it’s being pumped at us through a medium—most of us get our news through social media now, and it’s exaggerated. It’s deliberately framed in inflammatory terms because those get the most engagement.

So we’re being primed to be upset. So yeah, there’s bad news. There’s always been bad news, but it’s never been screamed from as many directions in as much overblown terminology as it is right now. That’s why we’ve got to go back to peace because right now, anything else, anything less than peace and we’ll be swept into insanity.

So Sam Keyston says, “What about people taking advantage of a situation? So we choose peace, but they get away with it.”

No. Peace makes you alert. I learned in martial arts class for eight years that peace makes you aware of what your opponent is doing and allows you to move in peace to get the right action in response. The moment you are terrified, you choke. But when you’re calm and attentive, you can move beautifully to block an aggressor. It is the way to stay safe—even in a fight—to have a peaceful heart. Aikido—the way of the peaceful spirit—is the most powerful martial art I know, and it’s all about staying calm and then moving, but mostly staying calm. They don’t get away with it when we choose peace. We get more intelligent.

Another name I can’t pronounce says, “You know this is all about community stability. How do you cope with the situation when everything is a disaster?”

Well, first you come home to the present moment, and you look around the room you’re in right now and you say, “Is this a disaster?” I think I told you all about how recently I sat down to meditate and I thought, “How can I be expected to be calm under these circumstances?” And inside me another voice said, “By circumstances do you mean this bedroom? Because there’s nothing dangerous here.” So you come home to the present where you can breathe in peace, where you can find the part of you that is stillness, silence, and space, and you can become a walking source of peace in situations that feel disastrous.

And if you go out in a state of disaster, you bring more disaster into the world. If you go out in a state of peace, even into a disaster, you bring more peace to the equation. And if enough of us did that—everyone wants to live in peace—so we might just turn the tide toward peace. Who knows?

So Jenna says, “What do you think could be in the way if I can’t seem to drop into the feeling I’m meant to live in peace?”

Well, you’ve been conditioned to be afraid, to be angry. You may not even have the neural pathways that take you to a state of peace now. So go to the most peaceful memory you can dredge up, or think of the most peaceful situation you can imagine, and allow yourself to just feel a slight shift toward peace. And then do that every day because it feels great, it’s good for your health, and it helps your relationships, your career, and everything else in your life. Move toward peace, even if it’s a tiny, tiny step at a time, you can get there.

Couple more. Rose says, “What if peace makes you fall behind in a culture that values and rewards competition, meanness, white supremacy at work and school and society?”

Well, everything is incredibly chaotic right now. And there are people who thought they’d fallen behind. I worked on a study at Harvard Business School that showed this—long time ago, but it’s even more now—there are people who think they’re falling behind because they don’t have, for example, the jobs that people of privilege can get. And that is very real. Absolutely that is real. But in a chaotic situation, some people have ideas like, “What if I just make my own service that does the same thing as this company that I tried to get a job at? And what have I become the source of my own way of making an economic ecosystem in the world from a place of peace in a state of chaos?” 

Those supremacist cultures are breaking. Everything’s breaking. And that means there are opportunities to do things that have never been done before. So I would really encourage you to go into peace because there you will find your creativity. This is what my whole book was about, I found that beyond anxiety is creativity, and creativity is how we make our lives work. Even if the deck is stacked against us—and it is stacked against certain people more than others, absolutely, and that’s not fair and we want to make it different. And let’s get creative about how to form a more just society.

Andrea says, “How can you shift from a place of anxiety to peace when you understand that fear is taking over?”

Again, come home, come home, come home to this moment. A few minutes ago when we felt and imagined the space between us, the space inside our atoms, I felt myself drop into a deeper place of peace. Even though I know most people are afraid and fear seems to be taking over, I’ll go with peace no matter what. I will go with peace no matter what. And I will work with my mind until I can find peace in a place of anxious people because most people are anxious.

Finally, Rock says, “How can we deal with leaders that are instigators of polarization?”

Don’t let your mind follow them. Stop and stand firm in peace and say, “Is this rhetoric that I’m being fed from all sorts of bully pulpits from all sorts of places—not just the internet, but individuals, organizations—does this feel like peace?” And you’ll find that all the people who are pushing their own agendas—and their agendas have to do with making their own personal benefit at the cost of others—what they say never feels like peace, not ever. It’s designed to knock us off our stance and into the fear of the tyranny of the cousins. “Everyone’s against you. Find some cousins and fight back.” Nope. Stop. Get quiet. Drop in. Feel peace. Feel that there are—by my screen it says 253 people here right now who are willing to sit and listen to this, and that means we are not just listening to the tyranny of the cousins. We’re talking about being calm no matter what and how to stay safe that way.

I really think it’s the only way to stay safe. But I think that our resources, once we go to peace, are virtually infinite, and we will find better ways of living. And we will find them from the place inside our hearts that is truest, and that is a clear mind and a quiet heart.

I love you. If you want to, those of you who are in the Wilder Community, we are going to do a meditation at 4:00 pm US Eastern. So we’re going to do our Still Point Sessions. It’s just a group meditation. If you are not in the Wilder Community and you want to be, jump on over and see it because we do Still Point Sessions to help us ground into a community of stillness, silence, and space. And it’s a very powerful experience, really powerful. So I will see some of you there at four o’clock.

And for all of us out there in a really scary world: Clear mind, quiet heart, all will be well. I love you. Thank you for coming to The Gathering Room. See you later.