October 3, 2025 • 60 mins
In this uplifting episode of 45 Forward, host Ron Roel welcomes back Dr. Stephen Post, director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics at Stony Brook University, to discuss his new book Pure Unlimited Love. Stephen explores the seven paths to love—from giving with kindness, raising kind children, cherishing nature, to honoring the spirit of freedom. He shares practical ways we can apply these lessons daily to find inner peace, strengthen relationships, and live more meaningful lives—especially as we age. Together, Ron and Stephen dive into:
Learn more: unlimitedloveinstitute.org
Preorder Pure Unlimited Love now
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/45-forward--6550893/support.
- Why love is ultimate reality beyond politics and division
- The difference between unconditional vs. unlimited love
- How humor, forgiveness, and compassion become daily expressions of love
- Why raising kind children matters for the future of our society
- How freedom, properly understood, is a gift of the spirit, not just independence
Learn more: unlimitedloveinstitute.org
Preorder Pure Unlimited Love now
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/45-forward--6550893/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And if you get totally possessed by the I mean,
the politics of the world is important, but it's not
ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is pure unlimited love. And if
you're driven away from that spiritually by such morose and
threatening politics, it's just very bad for you, but it's
(00:23):
very bad for the people around you.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello, everyone, I'm Ron Roell, the host of forty five Forward,
where my mission every week is to help you make
the second half of life even better than the first.
Today we're talking about pure unlimited love. That's a really
welcome idea today, especially at a time when there's so
much talk about political division and violence and hate speech.
(00:50):
It's also the title of a new book by doctor
Stephen Post, who is my guest today. Stephen's the director
of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care Bioethics at
Stonybrook University School of Medicine in New York. He's had
a really fascinating career and he's what he's widely known
for is his unique perspective on the human side of
(01:11):
medicine and the interface of spirituality and science. Today, Steven's
going to explain what he means by pure and limited love,
and not only that he's going to break it down
into seven main paths, from things like the path of
healing with kindness to honoring the spirit of freedom, and furthermore,
we're going to talk about how you can experience this today, now,
(01:33):
today and as we age. So now let's welcome our show,
to our show, doctor Stephen Post Stephen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Thank you, Ron. It's always a pleasure to see you.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
It is.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
It's always great seeing Steven. So this is a return
visit for you, and they're always one is better than
the next. So before we dive into your book, let
me hear a little bit of a story about how
you got to this, because you've covered this for a
long time. I remember you know, I know even as
a young man, how you wrote a book about I
(02:06):
think it's called God in Love on Rude eighty and
so this is your journey after graduate school. So let's
hear a little bit about the story behind Pure Unlimited Love.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Well, Rude eighty is a bit of an origin story,
you will, but it is true that I was very
interested in great spiritual classics even as a high school
student in conquered New Hampshire. Pat Saint Paul's and while
the other guys were off playing hockey, I used to
(02:38):
be reading all these incredible classic narratives and sacred texts
about love. I would be peripatetic. The woods were beautiful.
I love the fall leaves, and I would just walk
on the paths and I would read these things.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
And people we're very accepting of it. I found.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
So that was interesting and I was even encouraged. So
that's the whole story, really, where the beginning was, and
I think it was something to be untapped. It was
a bit of a calling for me to study higher
ideas of love. Not the love of chocolate, although I
can't resist chocolate.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I was thinking chocolate it is, and.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Not necessarily the love of designer genes, although I liked
designer jeans.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
My wife loves them.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
But something deeper, something more universal, something that is associated
with the great, great spiritual traditions of all types. And
I went to read college in Oregon. Steve Jobs happily
(03:54):
slept on my floor a few times, and I read
the autobiography of a Yogi, and then he left that
He went to India to an ashram, and I never
saw him again, but we did correspond once by email.
In later years, But the kind of thing he was
talking about at that time was this universal love. It
(04:17):
was really not just unconditional love, because that suggests something
that's really quite limited to interpersonal relations.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
But unlimited love is more cosmic. It opens up the
ideas of.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Ultimate reality and the whole notion of physics and dialogue
with spirituality. So that's the kind of wide open perspective
that I think is important. And I had a good
fortune of going to the University of Chicago Divinity School
(04:54):
and studying psychology there too, so I met a lot
of the great historians of all the religions of the world,
from Murcia, Eliotte too, you name it.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
And then.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I met Sir John Templeton actually at a certain key
point in my life, and he more or less took
me under his wing. And he is the one who
really coined this term pure unlimited love and a pamphlet
he wrote, but he always wanted me to develop it
because it wasn't even it wasn't a book. It was
(05:29):
just kind of a set of fairly esoteric ideas.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Tell us a little bit more about Templeton.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
What was he? John Templeton was called the Tennessee mystic.
He was from Winchester, Tennessee, and he actually went to Yale.
He might like to know a little a few years
before you did. But he was a great human being.
He was a great investor, but he was much more
(05:54):
interested in world mysticism, spiritual and he was interested in
other things too, including positive psychology and the ultimate reality
that is pointed to by high level mathematics and physics.
(06:16):
And so actually this afternoon, I'm going into Lincoln Center
to attend the awarding of the Templeton Prize. He's been
dead since two thousand and eight, but the prize continues
on and he can go to people as varied as
Jane Goodall and Mother Teresa, to great great physicists and mathematicians,
(06:42):
great biologists, but anybody who is contributing to the development
of knowledge and is interested at the interface of spirituality and.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Science.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So he wanted he wanted to move religion forward because
he thought that people would just get more and more
tired of sort of the old doctrines.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
And this is sort of what you've been doing too,
but again blending science and spirituality.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, very much. So.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I met Sir John at a conference in Northern Virginia
in about nineteen ninety or so, and the first thing
he did when we sat down in the foyer was
asking what I thought about love. We had a great conversation,
(07:40):
and then I guess by the time nineteen ninety eight
rolled around, we had a big conference together at MIT
on Science, Empathy and Altruism, which was very well attended
by a lot of world famous researchers but also practitioner.
(08:02):
And then I was sitting in my office at Case
Medical School and he sent me a fax which said,
we need to start and institute to study the highest
human asset, which is unlimited love, and why don't we
start a program on that? And I said, well, it
sounds good to me. Of course I was at Case
(08:23):
and I was doing a lot of genetics with Alzheimer's
at the time, and I said, maybe we should just
to make it a little more scientific, quote the Center
for Creative Altruism.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And then he faxed me back.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
He didn't email you facts, and he said, no, I
think unlimited love up to eight point nine million dollars.
And I did what anybody would do. I happily, very happily,
authentically fax back. I said, Sir John, I love that language,
it jumps right off the page. And he was so correct,
(08:58):
because it's love that resonates with all these great traditions.
It's not algorithm, which is a Johnny Come Lately term
or comfortable for social scientists and evolutionary biologists. But he
wanted a program on love that would move us forward,
and he asked me to be the president of it
and to build it, and I'm happy to have done.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
So.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
We've done a lot of funding, of great research proposals,
lots of big conferences, and lots of books, and pure
unlimited love is my most recent and I think also
by far the best.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
But when we talk about it, so I find that term,
you know, interesting. The script is pure unlimited, so unlimited
in what sense.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Limited in that most human love. In fact, I would
say all human love possible, exception maternal love at its
very best, but even that has its limits. But a
kind of love that is perfectly wise. You know, parents
can love their children, but maybe unwisely they'll over indulge
(10:07):
their kids, and then the kids will not have any
sensibility about the needy and and and those in the
world who are really imperiled. So you want to love
your children in a way that allows them to understand
that the love for the neediest is important, and that
(10:29):
they can use their gifts their talents to serve others.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
You know, a love that is truly universal, not just focused.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Myopically on the nearest and the dearest, although that's inevitable
in most people's lives. Yet you can also lean outwards
toward all humanity, and that's that's a.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Point of importance. Also, a love that is relatively stable.
It doesn't just go.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Up and down, up and down here and there, disappear
with the latest moment of anger. But a love that's
really steady and dependable and loyal. So these are all
aspects of love that I associate with the divine, because
no human being is perfect in these respects. We all
(11:30):
have our moments. But somehow the divine love what the
Hindus call the Supreme. Whatever your tradition is, it doesn't
matter to me. Could be God with a small G,
or it could be a capital G, or it could
be higher power. But somehow or another, this is an
(11:52):
ultimate reality in the universe that has, among other aspects,
this profound, universal and lasting love.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Now I know that you also talk about it. It's
that you can form specific about it. You're describing it
in some respects. But then you also have seven paths
to this love, which I think is important. So let's
just run through them quickly. I might, you know, talk
more about one or the other, but let's just let's
just itemize what are the seven paths that you identify, the.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Seven paths of love, which I think bring us to
inner peace. The first one is may you give and glow.
And you know, I've done a lot of work on
the internal emotional benefits of being a giver, giving with kindness,
(12:50):
so that's in there. We've even done national studies on
that topic with Gallup and other organizations, and they've really
I think I was the first person maybe to point
out how even if you don't have reciprocation, you can
still have a lot of internal benefits which I won't
(13:12):
describe quite yet, that come from just getting away from
the self and the problems of self and focusing the
mind on the needs of others.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Right. I think that's Our first show together was years
ago around Thanksgiving, and then we talked about gratitude. Yeah, people,
people can jump on my forty five forward dot Org
website and look up that first show. Anyway, go ahead, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
The next one is may you heal with kindness, And
that's about how important kindness as well as empathy and compassion,
and they're all a little different are for all of us.
And it's not just about being a professional healer, if
you will, a doctor or nurse and for but it's
the fact that we can all approach in our actions
(14:00):
with the intention of healing.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
And that is most evident in.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Kindness and tone of voice in some kind of curiosity,
gentle curiosity, not harsh curiosity. There's a difference, but gentle
curiosity about people. Empathy is that sort of more deeply
present affective element where people feel that you're really understanding
(14:28):
them and with them and supportive. And then compassion is
empathy in the context of suffering, and it includes an
intention to alleviate that suffering if it's possible.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
So we teach that.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Here at the medical school and we do pretty well
with it, but students really respond. And then the third path,
may you follow your callings, and that means don't get diverted,
don't get pulled away from the things that you feel
are dearest to your soul.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
And your heart.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
It may be a little more prestigious institution over there,
but you're not doing what you know you should be doing.
It may be a little more money over there, but
just don't chase the bucks. In the end, you're better
off over the course of your life if you really
stick with your callings and a true friend, as Aristotle said,
(15:24):
kind of person you want to have on your board
of directors, someone who's willing to tell you when you're
getting off course. And then the fourth path, may you
raise kind children. And there's a lot of science about
that now that's in the book, and it's very important
because if you can raise kind children, you can be
(15:47):
very happy with their life and indirectly with your life.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
It's not always an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
There are so many negative cultural pressures, and so the
book is very practical about the techniques that have come
along in the last fifteen years to help parents raise
their kind children.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
And then fifthly.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
May you know the one mind that's the more mystical side. Sixthly,
may you cherish the gift of nature. I mean, have
you ever noticed if you go to some meditational center
in Northport or Port jeff or someplace there will probably
be some wind chimes and a little water flowing, and
(16:36):
you'll have much colorful autumn leaves to behold around you.
So there's something about the inner piece that comes from
our joining with nature and coupling that with meditation or mindfulness.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
That's what that's about.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And then finally the seventh, may you honor the spirit
of freedom, which.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Is a little more mystical.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I may have to explain that, right, Yeah, well we'll
get to that in a second. But before we get
to that, I just wanted to I mean, so the
nature for me is something that's been very much part
of my past and a lot of sense when I
when I grew up, you know, in a much natural environment,
when there was a lot more nature on Long Island.
(17:24):
But I found it interesting too that actually, when you
started talking about, you know, the one of the paths
to nature, you actually literally, you know, as you're describing
your time at Saint Paul's, you're walking on a path,
you know, of nature. And so I think that is
very important. And I think, you know, I noticed that
healing with kindness, and then you mentioned kind children. So
I think this is something that we're really lacking today,
(17:46):
you know, if you if you look at the public discourse,
the element of kindness is missing. You know, there's caustic behavior,
there's criticism, there's hate speech. There is the sense of kindness,
and what it brings out into us is really essential,
and I think that's what gives us our sense of community.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Oh yeah, and forbearance is the lost virtue. People may
disagree with you, you know, in my classes, I never try
to impose my viewpoint on students, graduate students, undergrads, medical students.
I really encourage artful debate. That's the sort of historical
(18:32):
notion of taking the side of some that you disagree with,
representing it as clearly and as well as you can,
arguing on its behalf against someone who takes a different
view but doesn't necessarily hold to it. So that's called
(18:53):
an utram. Don't necessarily look that up. But that's even
how the great philosophical works of the Medieval and the
Renaissance were written at utrum style, So you know, until
the very end of it get to and my view
is such and such. So the idea is to be
able to deal very respectfully with other perspectives. And I
(19:15):
don't mean necessarily in superficial ways, I mean in serious discourse,
and I think we need to reteach that in our schools.
I think our so many of our faculty everywhere. I'm
not talking about Stonybrook, but every place, they're really indoctrinating,
even in ways that are quasi threatening, with certain kinds
(19:42):
of viewpoints. And I don't believe that. I think that
freedom and good debate, mature debate, methodologies of debate. I
think that that's what we need to be teaching kids.
We need to teach them how to think, not necessarily
what to think.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, I think this notion of freedom is, you know,
it's it's important to really, you know, break it out
and break it down, because I think people it's not
it's not being just a cowboy in the range, you know,
being self reliant. It's about it's understanding ourselves in relationship
but also being you know, free to accept others. Yeah.
(20:25):
So I'm looking at your list here and I'm thinking, Stephen,
so it's giving, healing with kindness, follow callings, raising kind children,
knowing one mind, charging gift of nature, honoring the spirit
of freedom. And I'm thinking thinking back to my childhood
learning how to play the piano, and thinking like we
(20:47):
needed some sort of device like remembered the keys, like
every good boy does fine, you know, so we need
to come up with some sort of mnemonic device for you.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my view of freedom is very
very non Western in a way. You know.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
I have spent some time in India, and in the
Hindu tradition, the nature of the supreme being, who is
beyond time and place, really includes three elements. One is freedom,
(21:25):
another is creativity, and another is love. And if you
have those three things going on in your life, you're
really blessed, at least in the Upanishads. And so for them,
what is freedom? Freedom isn't.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
A dog chewing through a leather leash.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
And actually, if you give a dog a good plate
of food, it will must prefer security and a leash
to escape, you know. And this is what Dostoyevsky was
after when he wrote The Great an Inquisitor, right that
the Grand Inquisitor notes that human beings, by their nature
prefer security to freedom. Well, I think that's largely true,
(22:12):
and I can give evidence for that. But that's why
in the Asian, true in Hinduism in India, but also
in the Great Russian writers, the great theologians of Russia
and Eastern Europe. Freedom is not understood as a sort
of biological impulse. Freedom is understood as a gift of
(22:36):
the spirit. May you honor the spirit of freedom means
that freedom is something that is within us. It's not
necessarily something we create, you know, the great spiritual Figures MLK,
(22:58):
so many.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Others have.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Followed freedom, but they felt that their freedom was a
gift from whatever you want to call it, God and
so forth. And I think in those terms, and so
that freedom then becomes a duty.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
To live up to, not so.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Much an escape or an excuse for misbehaving. Of course,
when I was a kid, I did my share of misbehaving,
even up in New Hampshire. But you know, I feel
as though we need to deepen our concept of freedom
because if you look around the world, American culture is
(23:40):
associated with an awful lot of debauchery, abuse of freedom
run amok. So we need to respiritualize freedom and associated
with what really is the essence of freedom in Hinduism
and Buddhism, but also in Christianity and Judaism. And that's
some version of the positive golden rule. You know that
(24:04):
that Malcolm. Uh, that Rockwell image of the of the
Golden Rule.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
It's so beautiful. It's in, it's in the.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Un and it's got all these individuals from different backgrounds. Uh.
Contemplating the positive version of the Golden rule, do unto
others as you would have them do unto you. It's
not the negative rule of version of the rule, which
just means don't use things to others. That means, you know,
you can get home tonight, ron And and if you
haven't kicked kicked anybody in the knee, you can feel
(24:34):
pretty good about your life.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's not what we're after all that's important.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Uh. Nevertheless, you know, it's this idea that somehow, by
contemplating that way of life, we are truly free. That's
what gives us freedom, so we're not taken in by
all the negative forces around us. You read about terrible
things happening every day, including today the newspapers, and I
(25:04):
think that we really need to have a deeper appreciation
for freedom as an expression of the spirit, which means
that it's connected with love and creativity. And that's how
I think it. Fringsmart, I've been writing about freedom forever,
and I think it's important to reassess. I mean, our
(25:28):
freedom has become an excuse for a lot of debauched
and terribly unethical behavior.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
You know, my show was forty five forward. It certainly
it focuses on how to keep living a vital life
from midlife on. Are these lessons that so you've been
working on this for a while. Is there a way
to deepen this knowledge? As I mean, I think some
of this it comes from experience. I mean, you've been
through lots of things. You learn things, and you evaluate
and you reassess things. How do you do this? You know,
(25:58):
from the perspective of now, let's say you're forty five
and beyond. For those you know younger than.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Us, well, you know, absolutely younger than us.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
I am. I am past forty five. I'm willing to
so I you know.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
So there was a psychologist at Harvard named Eric Erickson,
and he believed, I think wrongly, that real generosity, real
authentic giving, is pretty much the purview of people who
(26:38):
are in the seventh stage of life. That means they're
really up in years, they're looking retrospectively at their own lives,
hopefully with some satisfaction, and now they want to live
meaningfully by passing the torch.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
To others.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
They want to be transmitters of loving kindness. Now, I
believe though, and have shown that that actually pertains even
to the youngest among us. So there are lots of
studies now from the Yale Child Study Center Paul Bloom
showing that Toddler's eighteen month old children have a very deep,
(27:24):
innate sense of affective or emotional empathy. They may not
quite know how to operationalize it in terms of doing
unto others, but that will come.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
But they have that within them. Now, if you don't
have that within you, if.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
All the wrong buttons have been pushed by bad parenting
and bad environment, then that's a problem and you can
wind up being very disadvantaged in life. Violent, violent and
difficult and unkind and identified as such. But sure, so
that's there in our lives from the get go, and
(28:02):
you hope that you don't have to reach forty five
and have some kind of a midlife.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Crisis like everything falls apart. My life has been empty.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
I've been a husk, a shell, running on nothing, and
now I want to turn it. Now, that does happen
to people, and that's a good thing when it does happen,
but hopefully you will be able to unfold as a
giver over the course of the years. And that's called
(28:35):
the in Greek, well among the thought of Aristotle and Plato.
That's you daemonism. That's living a good life over the
course the whole course of a lifetime. And so we
sometimes say, well, you've got to go through these really miserable, counterproductive,
(28:55):
destructive moments and periods in your life to get to
kindness in your older age.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
I just don't think that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
And so this is my sense of it, that old
age is it is a time for wisdom because you've
been there, done that, and hopefully learn something in the process.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
But not always. I mean, I say, I run.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Into older adults left and right who are quite misbehaved.
Now they're you know, hopefully they're not common, but they
are there. And so I'm not sure that age alone
brings that kind of wisdom. It's age plus something like
(29:45):
living according to the Golden rule, or having some sort
of tradition or approach to life which accounts for the
other by the way definition of love and I take this, yes,
this is my definition for years. No Latin, no Greek
(30:05):
No arevadic texts necessary when the well being which I
prefer to happiness because people have butchered the word happiness.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
So when the well being and security of another.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Is as meaningful to you, you could say it's real
to you as your own and sometimes even more so
than you love that person. So it's very down to earth,
it's very common sensical. And and you know, if you
(30:48):
sit down at a coffee shop with an old friend
who's had a hard time and it's really struggling, they
may need some compassion and that's that's an expression of love.
We don't use the word love that much in everyday life.
I mean, I'm come into work here, I don't run
around with a big placard saying love or let alone
(31:11):
pure live love. Yeah, but I know what I know
the people around me, and I know the expressions of
love that will be most helpful to them.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Just a good segue, Steven, So the next chick, I
want to talk about it. So we have this concept
of the seven past. But then you chill down a
bit so to your point that they were making, which
is there are different expressions of love that bring in
into our everyday life. And you were starting to talk
about compassion. Now you have tenet these. I don't want
to overwhelm our audience with numerology. But people can find
(31:43):
this in your book Pure Unlimited Love. They can find
them in more. But let's talk about some of these
expressions of love that we might not say love, but
these are ways in which they are expressed in our
everyday life.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
It's not terribly important to run around blathering about love, love, love,
you know.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
I think we did a lot of that once upon
a time. Yes, yeah, you need is love. I don't
blather about it.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So I get up in the morning and I meditate
for a while about the people I know I'm going
to encounter over the course of the day. And I
asked myself, you know, fairly deeply and with a kind
of mindfulness, what expression of love would be helpful for them.
So for some it could be listening, because I've witnessed
(32:39):
that people are not taking their thoughts seriously. They're cutting
them off there, interrupting them after fourteen seconds on average,
that's the average that takes a doctor to interrupt a
patient by that. So attentive listening is important. And some
(33:00):
people need loyalty, and I know that because maybe they've
been divorced unfairly by a spouse who just took off unexpectedly,
and they're panicking. So I want to assure them that,
at least in their relationship with me, because I have
(33:21):
a lot of roles to play, leadership roles, that I
will always be loyal to them and they don't worry
about about that problem because loyalty is an expression of love,
carefrontation on my favorite. Now, that's not my original word.
You know, when you read the book, you'll see I
(33:43):
picked that up from a very close friend named m.
Scott Peck. They'll remember he wrote The road Less Traveled,
which was a huge bestseller years that, you know, twenty
years ago, twenty five years ago. He'd gone to case
Western School of Medicine for his psychiatry training and I
was there for twenty years and I did not overlap
(34:04):
with Scotty, but he knew I was writing about love
back in the day and he was writing about love.
And so I have a whole folder of letters back
and forth, and one time he sent me a letter.
It's a three page letter and he said, Steven, you
know you need to have a concept of love that
(34:24):
isn't just soft and agreeable. And we agreed in correspondence
that we didn't like the word tough love because it
just sounds a little bit on the gritty side. But
we didn't like the word confrontation either, because that sounds like,
you know, you're at the end of the cliff. So
(34:46):
he had come up with the word carefrontation in the
Road Less Traveled, and he allowed me to utilize it.
So in my book You Know Why Good Things Happen
to Good People, there's a whole chapter on carefrontation, and
carefrontation runs through this book. So when you're on these
seven paths, you know, like I come to work, there
(35:08):
are some people who just the best thing I can
do for them is not to confront them, but to
care front them. Is to say, you know, you are
a wonderful person, you have a great heart, and we
all love you.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
But.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
You're kind of veering off course, and let me just
talk with you about that. I'm not going to talk
at you, but I want to discuss it, and hopefully
through that kind of a process you have to leave
a lot of room for their autonomy. We run a
department here in preventive medicine and if you're ever going
to be successful in preventive medicine. It doesn't mean that
(35:49):
you sort of lord it over patients and say you've
got to change your behavior, lose twenty five pounds, do
this now. But what you do is you ask them,
so you would like to lose weight, how committed are
you to that? And then when you move ahead, you say, well,
(36:10):
how would you like to achieve that? And write it
down because writing it down is helpful, and then let
me see you in two or three weeks and let's
talk about your progress. So that's a form of care
frontation in a way. It's not confrontational, but it involves
the agency of the other.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Right. This reminds me of a friend of mine, good
colleague the caregiving business broadly, Laura. I think she coined
this term co opetition, co opetition, which is again, you're
you know, when you work with lots of people, there
are ways in which, even if you're in the same field,
(36:50):
you can be you know, you're competitive, but you also
can be cooperative, not necessarily mutually exclusive, not at all.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, So these.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Are all ways of these are all forms.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Of they're the expressions that love sometimes love is expressed
is forgiveness, sometimes as compassion, when people are suffering, but
they're not suffering all the time, unless you're an extreme
follower of say the Buddha, or maybe uh Kurkerguard. Kirkerguard
(37:23):
sort of thought we were all suffering all the time,
but we were hiding it by getting in grooves and
forgetting about the anxiety we have about losing the things
that bring us happiness. You actually coined the term anxiety,
which is now, of course, a big thing in psychiatry.
Celebration is a form of love mirth. I'm notorious for uplifting, tasteful, positive, clean,
(37:56):
small cute jokes around here because I see people who
were run down. They've been working all day and all
night in a difficult medical context, and I just need
to brighten them up. And I know that in a millisecond,
the right ounce of humor can turn them around emotionally.
(38:20):
So my latest one, you know, because Halloween's are coming.
I used this the other day, where do ghosts buy
houses on dead end streets? As for all your listeners
and their children and so forth. But you know, there
(38:43):
was a wonderful guy, Norman Cousins, who wrote a great
best selling book called The Anatomy of an Illness, and
it's about how he let he watched silly stuff on TV.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
The Three Stooges.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
A candid and they let him do this, and he
felt that he laughed himself back to health. He had
a very difficult illness and no one could help him really.
So now at UCLA, in the medical school, there is
the Norman Cousins Center. It's worth googling, and they do
the best research in the world on mirth, laughter and health,
(39:25):
because laughter will turn you around from stress. I don't
mean laughing at people, but involving them in a new
way of being that's an alternative to the sort of
and today, by the way, I'm concerned because I don't
think ron that people laugh enough.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
They're so damn serious.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
I understand people get very committed politically, but I have
to remain publicly neutral because otherwise I'd lose so much
of my constituency in this medical school or any place.
And so I want people to get out of that.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Routine of.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Nastiness bordering on violence, and I want them to laugh.
I want them to be able to let go of that.
Like my mother was a Democrat, My dad was a Republican.
She was also Irish, you know, he was English and
so the and they always disagreed politically if Nixon Kennedy,
oh my god.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
But my mom always approached it with.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Mirth, Henry, why shouldn't an Irishman tell an Englishman a
joke on a Saturday night because the Englishman might possibly
crack up laughing in choice the next day. And then
my dad would say, well, Molly, what's the Irish definition
of hospitality?
Speaker 3 (40:54):
She drew a blank.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Well, you make someone pearl feel perfectly at home while
you be wishing they were so the that are so humorous,
and we just laughed these things. And if you get
totally possessed by the I mean, the politics of the
world is important, but it's not ultimate reality.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Ultimate reality is pure.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Unlimited love, and if you're driven away from that spiritually
by such morose and threatening politics, it's just very bad
for you, but it's very bad for the people around you.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think certainly. Humor Well,
it's sort of first of all, it disarms us from
our you know, you know, fortress, and it opens up
to sort of shared vulnerability and shared appreciation of sometimes
the absurdity, as you know, or just the incongruities of
(41:52):
life and that we all share and can appreciate. Now again,
you've got ten of I want to see if I
get people can see this, but I really can't see
it too well. But anyway, this is your wheel. Okay,
that is in the book. It's the you know, so
it's the wheel of the of the ten different expressions. Yes,
(42:17):
so that's that's so, that's sort of a way. And
I know that you you have this on your in
front of you, and that you've used these. I know
there are there are a lot of things we're talking about,
but you've used these, the seven paths and then the
different forms as a means of sort of getting going
in the morning.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Express It's a practical everyday way of life for me,
and it has been for a lot of years.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Even since I was in high school, you know, going
back that far. And if you just prime yourself in
the morning, you know, I get up pretty early. I'm
usually up about four thirty or five, annoying my family.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Always trying to be as quiet as quiet as I can.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
But then I just have I have a wonderful chair
in my office and I just meditate for an hour,
and I have, I know, my daily scheduled because.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
I keep it in this book.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Okay, you know, because by writing things down it's easier
to remember them. I don't like to just put things
in some electronic venue. But you know, I have in
mind the people I'm going to encounter, and that includes you.
(43:35):
And then this afternoon, I know I'm going to encounter
in New York.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
I've got to go to the annual Templeton Prize Award meeting.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
In Lincoln Center, and I know I'm going to run
into certain people there, and I have and I know
what's going on in their lives, and I know kind
of basically what form of love I want to bring
to them. And I'll think about that when I'm driving
in on the Northern Parkway in my Jeep compass, I'll say,
(44:08):
and I'll be actually thinking about that actively. So I'm
always you know, from the morning I envisioned these things.
I do little meditation, I do, you know, sort of
the not musty type things and seeking inner piece, breathing purposefully.
And of course, now when I come into work, I
(44:31):
sometimes fail because there's a road here called twenty five
A which I know runs vy YouTube and we get
to Nichols Road and Snorting Brook University is just about
two miles down there on toward the south, and there
is an annoying yellow light, and you don't really have
(44:53):
to stop at this yellow light. But some people are
so much more diligent than I am. At times there
isn't another car for two miles or three miles that
I can see, but they stop, and that means I'm
finished for the next ten minutes, and I can get
very annoyed. I don't yell out a curse or anything,
(45:16):
but I will sometimes fall full chested on the steering wheel,
and you know, I say.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
What fish say when they swim into a wall. What's that? Damn? Okay?
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Yeah, I'm always cultivating mirth, and I make a lot
of it up myself, and some of it's psychological, some
of it's theological. And of course it's important to have
those things, but only to use them when they really
make sense, not to inject them unnecessarily.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, And I think that what I liked about your
approach is that you know you have these paths and
these expressions, but there are ways you can access them
every day. So I was looking at some of your
your introduction and you say, well, okay, so you mentioned
that in the evening of time permits I might quietly
ask myself a question in each of these seven paths.
(46:17):
So there ways to do it. So do I feel
like uplifted and give them kindness? Did I speak with
the tone and heart of a healer? So there are ways?
Did I did I have a sense of all as
I encountered nature? Did I honor and fulfill the duties
and responsibilities of freedom? So there are ways. You can
kind of have a checklist of thoughts you that can
keep you on track each.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Day and in the evenings, you know, later at night,
you know, maybe around eleven or so. I will do
that before I go off into sleep. And you know,
I have a I find Long Island to be a
little claustrophobic, no offense, okay, but I you know, I
spend a lot of time in Ohio, and you can
(46:58):
just roll anyplace, and I like through at eighty and
the mountains and the Delaware Water Gap. I just like
that feeling of total openness and go south to Philadelphia
or north to Boston, whatever you want.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
But when I get that sense of claustrophobia.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
What I do is I take the ferry from Port Jefferson's,
which is a north shore town a little further east
from Stonybrook, and I take the ferry, usually the P T. Barnum,
because I.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
Like PT Barnum, I like the mirth of it all.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
And I take the ferry over to Bridgeport, not to
get off, although sometimes I'll get off and take the
train up to say New Haven, to the Peabody Museum
or whatever it might be. But I'll usually stay on
and for now, you know, twenty five bucks, you can
take that back and forth. I wouldn't advise the French prize,
(47:59):
but there's a lot of good food there and you
can just go there and look at the beauty of nature.
So it's one of my ways of enjoying nature, reconnecting
with the wider world, if you will, and also just
you know, getting away from phone calls and the constant interruptions.
(48:23):
You know, sometimes I get two hundred emails a day.
Ron it's so sad, and I wish I could tell
you that I can just erase them. I can't, because
you know, it could be a student, and these are
serious students. The medical students. I mean, you know, they
need responses. It could be a clinical thing, ethics related,
(48:45):
and they need responses.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
It could be related to a book or a speech.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
I have to go up to Rochester and up to
the Copley Plaza in Boston in the next few weeks,
and I've got to have all that stuff down, and
there's a lot to it. So there's it's nothing that
maybe ten percent of what I get is junk, but
most of it I have to attend to. I could
come in here and spend my whole day responding to
(49:11):
email and the brain.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
And I write this in the book. The brain did
not evolve for that kind of interruption, constant interruption, so
you can't. You know, I do better. I feel better
if I go out.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I go out sometimes to Louisbourg, Pennsylvania, because my daughter
went to Bucknell and there's.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
The best Western there. And I will go there and
just hang out for forty.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Eight hours, you know, rent the room for a night
or two and just have my computer and I will
be working on, say a chapter for a book like
Pure Unlimited Love. And then there's a pizza place down
in the village of Louisbourg that's all I need. I'm
not very picky, and they had the Susquehanna River, and
(50:00):
I can walk by the Susquehanna and I like the
Buttnell feel, you know, just a small private college with
lots of nice people around.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
And then I'll be so relieved.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
I will have I might even have worked for forty
hours on my writing, but I feel so uplifted by
it because I'm not constantly interrupted as I come to
work and everything, you know, my cell phone, you know,
everything's coming at me. And then I've got to make
time for people who come to the door, which actually
(50:36):
still happens.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
So it's you know, it's.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
Not an easy life that we live, and you have
to really work inwardly to be centered, properly centered, and
to kind of ward off the adverse effects of all
that because you can't ignore it. You can't just go
off the grid. Although it's tempting.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Yeah, well it is tempting, and I think sometimes it's
it's doable, you know. So you're reminded me of a
couple of periods in my life. One is when I
was in graduate school hers Pennsylvania, where you would go
through these intense periods and I would what I would
do is I would just drive west from Philly into
(51:17):
the Amish country. You know, pick some place in the
country and I'd find a sort of an open field
and then just and have some bread and cheese and snack,
and I would just sit there and just you know,
look at the sky and look at the fields, and
that sense of openness that was sort of in a
(51:38):
very different way, kind of replicated years later when my
wife and I would visit her brothers in a little
town called Nicholson north of Scranton, and there was you know,
going there and visiting with him and then being in
nature and being in a creek in the back of
his house in open country. And what I loved is
(52:01):
in that area there's a range called the Endless Mountains. Yeah,
and I just love that notion of endless mountains. Obviously
they're not endless, but there's this sense of freedom and
nature that I think is essential to to you know,
basically expresses your feelings of love in a very kind
(52:24):
of pure, unlimited way.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
Yeah, And I say, you know, the gift of nature,
you know, may you cherish the gift of nature.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
I don't say worship.
Speaker 1 (52:35):
Nature or something along those kinds of lines. But I
think we can cherish nature really as really the most
beautiful expression of if you will divine love one of
them anyway, And I like Scranton, by the way. I
like the University of scrant I've been there a number
(52:56):
of times. It's kind of beautiful. A lot of good
baseball players, pitchers especially.
Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yep, yep. But a lot of older people, you know, a.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Lot of older people.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a good place for older people.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
It's a good place for anybody, I think. But you know, so,
you're so right. I mean, you have to.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
Even though we are besieged by new technologies and can
easily get completely overwhelmed by the latest software or let
alone AI, I can.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
I can imagine that there are some.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Good things that can be done with AI. But I'm
also googling now pretty heavily AI psychosis, and that's not
quite a formal psychiatric designation yet. But there's a great
psychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center
(53:55):
who is who is working with that, and you will
find that there are probably.
Speaker 3 (54:02):
Ten to fifteen fairly new cases of adolescent suicide at
any time which engaged them with AI. So AI, you know,
can be cognitively empathic. It knows exactly what to say.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
If you say, you know, I'm having such a hard
time with my you know whatever, it will say that
is tough. I can really feel that way. Of course,
that's the machine and a machine. So what happens is
these these these AI sites lead people down destructive tracks,
(54:45):
and so it leads them actually towards self destruction because
it doesn't have you know, I was talking about toddlers earlier. Yes,
it doesn't have the innate, deeper, primal affective or emails
potional empathy which is so much associated with love and
a commitment to the security and well being of others
(55:08):
as you grow older. It doesn't have that, so it
can take and if there are many people. Hitler was
empathic by the way, obviously, and he could feel into
his audience. That's what made it such a good and
successful public speaker in the beer houses. I mean, but
it was all for a maleficent purpose, So you know,
(55:30):
I just I just want to point that out that
you know, the technology does not involve us at the
level of affective empathy and love that we yearn for.
Speaker 2 (55:46):
Well, you can find out much more about this subject
if you buy Steven's book. Now is it? It's coming
out and soon?
Speaker 1 (55:56):
Right, yeah, Well, it can be ordered in October and
it will be our You can order now easily enough online,
but it will actually be out toward the end of October,
and I'm happy to I've got doing a big program
on it at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, which
is a nice one, and the day before that doing
(56:20):
a plenary for the annual Benson Mind Body Conference, which
is the Mass General Benson Henry Mind Body Institute's big deal.
So I've gotten a nice opportunity there to sort of
bring this out. And I'm going to do something at
Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue and fifty first
(56:43):
Street a few days later, in a bunch of podcasts
and radio programs. But you know, I wanted to do
you first, Ron, because you actually are the deepest of
all of them.
Speaker 3 (56:55):
You really are. I hope you know that. I think
so kind and you manifest everything in the book.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
Well, I thank you for that.
Speaker 3 (57:06):
It's I'm not just bsing you, I mean I think
that's true.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
Thank you, Thank you. Yeah. So if people want to
find out more about your work, see what's the best
way to reach you, Well.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Go to the institute for go to Unlimited Love Institute
dot org. Okay, that's the website for the institute that
I started with Sir John in about two thousand and
it's still going fine. We have a nice board in
Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and around University Circle and the clinic
and all those kinds of places.
Speaker 2 (57:39):
Twenty fifth anniversary, now.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
Oh yeah, absolutely, twenty five and wow, it's hard to believe.
And you know, we've funded probably seventy major studies, including things.
Speaker 3 (57:54):
Like you know, teaching.
Speaker 1 (57:57):
Kindness meditation in grade schools in Baltimore, and they've been
doing that.
Speaker 3 (58:02):
It's been a national movement and they've been able to
get these.
Speaker 1 (58:08):
First and second graders in a more peaceful way of being.
And they don't send them to the principal's office. They
send them to the mindfulness office. And they're doing better
in school. They're less violent, they use language more appropriately,
and they're happier, and they're going home to their families
(58:29):
and they're saying, you know, we've got.
Speaker 3 (58:30):
To do mindfulness. This is in the news.
Speaker 1 (58:34):
So you've done a lot of really cool stuff and
a lot of the stuff on how to raise kind children.
You know, we funded that four million bucks with the
Fetzer Institute way back in about two thousand and three,
and I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 3 (58:51):
But many things we've done.
Speaker 1 (58:52):
All of the benefits of being a kind giver, not
a force giver, but you know, putting your kindness into it,
into it and it's not how much you give, but
it's how you give. And you know, so so the
institute has been very successful and I'm honored to have
been picked out by you know, the great Sir John Templeton,
(59:14):
not for the Templeton Funds you know now Franklin Templeton,
uh and the Tennessee Mystic but that he would pick
me out after a meeting in a in a in
a golf club restaurant in northern Virginia and a discussion
(59:37):
about love and that was a long time ago, and
then that.
Speaker 3 (59:41):
He would entrust me with this. It's a it's a
beautiful thing.
Speaker 2 (59:48):
Well, I thank you for a thought provoking conversation. It's
always great talking with you, Stephen, and I'm glad that
you know people can contact you. I'm sure that they
can go through Stonybrook, and they can certainly wear in touch.
If people have questions for me and want to get
in touch with you or get in touch with me,
I'm available Ron at forty five forward dot org. You know,
(01:00:13):
thanks for spending this time with us until our next meeting.
Keep going forward, folks, forty five Forward
And if you get totally possessed by the I mean,
the politics of the world is important, but it's not
ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is pure unlimited love. And if
you're driven away from that spiritually by such morose and
threatening politics, it's just very bad for you, but it's
(00:23):
very bad for the people around you.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello, everyone, I'm Ron Roell, the host of forty five Forward,
where my mission every week is to help you make
the second half of life even better than the first.
Today we're talking about pure unlimited love. That's a really
welcome idea today, especially at a time when there's so
much talk about political division and violence and hate speech.
(00:50):
It's also the title of a new book by doctor
Stephen Post, who is my guest today. Stephen's the director
of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care Bioethics at
Stonybrook University School of Medicine in New York. He's had
a really fascinating career and he's what he's widely known
for is his unique perspective on the human side of
(01:11):
medicine and the interface of spirituality and science. Today, Steven's
going to explain what he means by pure and limited love,
and not only that he's going to break it down
into seven main paths, from things like the path of
healing with kindness to honoring the spirit of freedom, and furthermore,
we're going to talk about how you can experience this today, now,
(01:33):
today and as we age. So now let's welcome our show,
to our show, doctor Stephen Post Stephen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Thank you, Ron. It's always a pleasure to see you.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
It is.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
It's always great seeing Steven. So this is a return
visit for you, and they're always one is better than
the next. So before we dive into your book, let
me hear a little bit of a story about how
you got to this, because you've covered this for a
long time. I remember you know, I know even as
a young man, how you wrote a book about I
(02:06):
think it's called God in Love on Rude eighty and
so this is your journey after graduate school. So let's
hear a little bit about the story behind Pure Unlimited Love.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Well, Rude eighty is a bit of an origin story,
you will, but it is true that I was very
interested in great spiritual classics even as a high school
student in conquered New Hampshire. Pat Saint Paul's and while
the other guys were off playing hockey, I used to
(02:38):
be reading all these incredible classic narratives and sacred texts
about love. I would be peripatetic. The woods were beautiful.
I love the fall leaves, and I would just walk
on the paths and I would read these things.
Speaker 3 (02:59):
And people we're very accepting of it. I found.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
So that was interesting and I was even encouraged. So
that's the whole story, really, where the beginning was, and
I think it was something to be untapped. It was
a bit of a calling for me to study higher
ideas of love. Not the love of chocolate, although I
can't resist chocolate.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
I was thinking chocolate it is, and.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Not necessarily the love of designer genes, although I liked
designer jeans.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
My wife loves them.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
But something deeper, something more universal, something that is associated
with the great, great spiritual traditions of all types. And
I went to read college in Oregon. Steve Jobs happily
(03:54):
slept on my floor a few times, and I read
the autobiography of a Yogi, and then he left that
He went to India to an ashram, and I never
saw him again, but we did correspond once by email.
In later years, But the kind of thing he was
talking about at that time was this universal love. It
(04:17):
was really not just unconditional love, because that suggests something
that's really quite limited to interpersonal relations.
Speaker 3 (04:25):
But unlimited love is more cosmic. It opens up the
ideas of.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Ultimate reality and the whole notion of physics and dialogue
with spirituality. So that's the kind of wide open perspective
that I think is important. And I had a good
fortune of going to the University of Chicago Divinity School
(04:54):
and studying psychology there too, so I met a lot
of the great historians of all the religions of the world,
from Murcia, Eliotte too, you name it.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
And then.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
I met Sir John Templeton actually at a certain key
point in my life, and he more or less took
me under his wing. And he is the one who
really coined this term pure unlimited love and a pamphlet
he wrote, but he always wanted me to develop it
because it wasn't even it wasn't a book. It was
(05:29):
just kind of a set of fairly esoteric ideas.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Tell us a little bit more about Templeton.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
What was he? John Templeton was called the Tennessee mystic.
He was from Winchester, Tennessee, and he actually went to Yale.
He might like to know a little a few years
before you did. But he was a great human being.
He was a great investor, but he was much more
(05:54):
interested in world mysticism, spiritual and he was interested in
other things too, including positive psychology and the ultimate reality
that is pointed to by high level mathematics and physics.
(06:16):
And so actually this afternoon, I'm going into Lincoln Center
to attend the awarding of the Templeton Prize. He's been
dead since two thousand and eight, but the prize continues
on and he can go to people as varied as
Jane Goodall and Mother Teresa, to great great physicists and mathematicians,
(06:42):
great biologists, but anybody who is contributing to the development
of knowledge and is interested at the interface of spirituality and.
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Science.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So he wanted he wanted to move religion forward because
he thought that people would just get more and more
tired of sort of the old doctrines.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
And this is sort of what you've been doing too,
but again blending science and spirituality.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Yeah, very much. So.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I met Sir John at a conference in Northern Virginia
in about nineteen ninety or so, and the first thing
he did when we sat down in the foyer was
asking what I thought about love. We had a great conversation,
(07:40):
and then I guess by the time nineteen ninety eight
rolled around, we had a big conference together at MIT
on Science, Empathy and Altruism, which was very well attended
by a lot of world famous researchers but also practitioner.
(08:02):
And then I was sitting in my office at Case
Medical School and he sent me a fax which said,
we need to start and institute to study the highest
human asset, which is unlimited love, and why don't we
start a program on that? And I said, well, it
sounds good to me. Of course I was at Case
(08:23):
and I was doing a lot of genetics with Alzheimer's
at the time, and I said, maybe we should just
to make it a little more scientific, quote the Center
for Creative Altruism.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And then he faxed me back.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
He didn't email you facts, and he said, no, I
think unlimited love up to eight point nine million dollars.
And I did what anybody would do. I happily, very happily,
authentically fax back. I said, Sir John, I love that language,
it jumps right off the page. And he was so correct,
(08:58):
because it's love that resonates with all these great traditions.
It's not algorithm, which is a Johnny Come Lately term
or comfortable for social scientists and evolutionary biologists. But he
wanted a program on love that would move us forward,
and he asked me to be the president of it
and to build it, and I'm happy to have done.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
So.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
We've done a lot of funding, of great research proposals,
lots of big conferences, and lots of books, and pure
unlimited love is my most recent and I think also
by far the best.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
But when we talk about it, so I find that term,
you know, interesting. The script is pure unlimited, so unlimited
in what sense.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Limited in that most human love. In fact, I would
say all human love possible, exception maternal love at its
very best, but even that has its limits. But a
kind of love that is perfectly wise. You know, parents
can love their children, but maybe unwisely they'll over indulge
(10:07):
their kids, and then the kids will not have any
sensibility about the needy and and and those in the
world who are really imperiled. So you want to love
your children in a way that allows them to understand
that the love for the neediest is important, and that
(10:29):
they can use their gifts their talents to serve others.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
You know, a love that is truly universal, not just focused.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Myopically on the nearest and the dearest, although that's inevitable
in most people's lives. Yet you can also lean outwards
toward all humanity, and that's that's a.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
Point of importance. Also, a love that is relatively stable.
It doesn't just go.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Up and down, up and down here and there, disappear
with the latest moment of anger. But a love that's
really steady and dependable and loyal. So these are all
aspects of love that I associate with the divine, because
no human being is perfect in these respects. We all
(11:30):
have our moments. But somehow the divine love what the
Hindus call the Supreme. Whatever your tradition is, it doesn't
matter to me. Could be God with a small G,
or it could be a capital G, or it could
be higher power. But somehow or another, this is an
(11:52):
ultimate reality in the universe that has, among other aspects,
this profound, universal and lasting love.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
Now I know that you also talk about it. It's
that you can form specific about it. You're describing it
in some respects. But then you also have seven paths
to this love, which I think is important. So let's
just run through them quickly. I might, you know, talk
more about one or the other, but let's just let's
just itemize what are the seven paths that you identify, the.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Seven paths of love, which I think bring us to
inner peace. The first one is may you give and glow.
And you know, I've done a lot of work on
the internal emotional benefits of being a giver, giving with kindness,
(12:50):
so that's in there. We've even done national studies on
that topic with Gallup and other organizations, and they've really
I think I was the first person maybe to point
out how even if you don't have reciprocation, you can
still have a lot of internal benefits which I won't
(13:12):
describe quite yet, that come from just getting away from
the self and the problems of self and focusing the
mind on the needs of others.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Right. I think that's Our first show together was years
ago around Thanksgiving, and then we talked about gratitude. Yeah, people,
people can jump on my forty five forward dot Org
website and look up that first show. Anyway, go ahead, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
The next one is may you heal with kindness, And
that's about how important kindness as well as empathy and compassion,
and they're all a little different are for all of us.
And it's not just about being a professional healer, if
you will, a doctor or nurse and for but it's
the fact that we can all approach in our actions
(14:00):
with the intention of healing.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
And that is most evident in.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Kindness and tone of voice in some kind of curiosity,
gentle curiosity, not harsh curiosity. There's a difference, but gentle
curiosity about people. Empathy is that sort of more deeply
present affective element where people feel that you're really understanding
(14:28):
them and with them and supportive. And then compassion is
empathy in the context of suffering, and it includes an
intention to alleviate that suffering if it's possible.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
So we teach that.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Here at the medical school and we do pretty well
with it, but students really respond. And then the third path,
may you follow your callings, and that means don't get diverted,
don't get pulled away from the things that you feel
are dearest to your soul.
Speaker 3 (15:02):
And your heart.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
It may be a little more prestigious institution over there,
but you're not doing what you know you should be doing.
It may be a little more money over there, but
just don't chase the bucks. In the end, you're better
off over the course of your life if you really
stick with your callings and a true friend, as Aristotle said,
(15:24):
kind of person you want to have on your board
of directors, someone who's willing to tell you when you're
getting off course. And then the fourth path, may you
raise kind children. And there's a lot of science about
that now that's in the book, and it's very important
because if you can raise kind children, you can be
(15:47):
very happy with their life and indirectly with your life.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
It's not always an easy thing to do.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
There are so many negative cultural pressures, and so the
book is very practical about the techniques that have come
along in the last fifteen years to help parents raise
their kind children.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
And then fifthly.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
May you know the one mind that's the more mystical side. Sixthly,
may you cherish the gift of nature. I mean, have
you ever noticed if you go to some meditational center
in Northport or Port jeff or someplace there will probably
be some wind chimes and a little water flowing, and
(16:36):
you'll have much colorful autumn leaves to behold around you.
So there's something about the inner piece that comes from
our joining with nature and coupling that with meditation or mindfulness.
Speaker 3 (16:52):
That's what that's about.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
And then finally the seventh, may you honor the spirit
of freedom, which.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Is a little more mystical.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
I may have to explain that, right, Yeah, well we'll
get to that in a second. But before we get
to that, I just wanted to I mean, so the
nature for me is something that's been very much part
of my past and a lot of sense when I
when I grew up, you know, in a much natural environment,
when there was a lot more nature on Long Island.
(17:24):
But I found it interesting too that actually, when you
started talking about, you know, the one of the paths
to nature, you actually literally, you know, as you're describing
your time at Saint Paul's, you're walking on a path,
you know, of nature. And so I think that is
very important. And I think, you know, I noticed that
healing with kindness, and then you mentioned kind children. So
I think this is something that we're really lacking today,
(17:46):
you know, if you if you look at the public discourse,
the element of kindness is missing. You know, there's caustic behavior,
there's criticism, there's hate speech. There is the sense of kindness,
and what it brings out into us is really essential,
and I think that's what gives us our sense of community.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Oh yeah, and forbearance is the lost virtue. People may
disagree with you, you know, in my classes, I never try
to impose my viewpoint on students, graduate students, undergrads, medical students.
I really encourage artful debate. That's the sort of historical
(18:32):
notion of taking the side of some that you disagree with,
representing it as clearly and as well as you can,
arguing on its behalf against someone who takes a different
view but doesn't necessarily hold to it. So that's called
(18:53):
an utram. Don't necessarily look that up. But that's even
how the great philosophical works of the Medieval and the
Renaissance were written at utrum style, So you know, until
the very end of it get to and my view
is such and such. So the idea is to be
able to deal very respectfully with other perspectives. And I
(19:15):
don't mean necessarily in superficial ways, I mean in serious discourse,
and I think we need to reteach that in our schools.
I think our so many of our faculty everywhere. I'm
not talking about Stonybrook, but every place, they're really indoctrinating,
even in ways that are quasi threatening, with certain kinds
(19:42):
of viewpoints. And I don't believe that. I think that
freedom and good debate, mature debate, methodologies of debate. I
think that that's what we need to be teaching kids.
We need to teach them how to think, not necessarily
what to think.
Speaker 2 (20:03):
Yeah, I think this notion of freedom is, you know,
it's it's important to really, you know, break it out
and break it down, because I think people it's not
it's not being just a cowboy in the range, you know,
being self reliant. It's about it's understanding ourselves in relationship
but also being you know, free to accept others. Yeah.
(20:25):
So I'm looking at your list here and I'm thinking, Stephen,
so it's giving, healing with kindness, follow callings, raising kind children,
knowing one mind, charging gift of nature, honoring the spirit
of freedom. And I'm thinking thinking back to my childhood
learning how to play the piano, and thinking like we
(20:47):
needed some sort of device like remembered the keys, like
every good boy does fine, you know, so we need
to come up with some sort of mnemonic device for you.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my view of freedom is very
very non Western in a way. You know.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
I have spent some time in India, and in the
Hindu tradition, the nature of the supreme being, who is
beyond time and place, really includes three elements. One is freedom,
(21:25):
another is creativity, and another is love. And if you
have those three things going on in your life, you're
really blessed, at least in the Upanishads. And so for them,
what is freedom? Freedom isn't.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
A dog chewing through a leather leash.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
And actually, if you give a dog a good plate
of food, it will must prefer security and a leash
to escape, you know. And this is what Dostoyevsky was
after when he wrote The Great an Inquisitor, right that
the Grand Inquisitor notes that human beings, by their nature
prefer security to freedom. Well, I think that's largely true,
(22:12):
and I can give evidence for that. But that's why
in the Asian, true in Hinduism in India, but also
in the Great Russian writers, the great theologians of Russia
and Eastern Europe. Freedom is not understood as a sort
of biological impulse. Freedom is understood as a gift of
(22:36):
the spirit. May you honor the spirit of freedom means
that freedom is something that is within us. It's not
necessarily something we create, you know, the great spiritual Figures MLK,
(22:58):
so many.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Others have.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Followed freedom, but they felt that their freedom was a
gift from whatever you want to call it, God and
so forth. And I think in those terms, and so
that freedom then becomes a duty.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
To live up to, not so.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Much an escape or an excuse for misbehaving. Of course,
when I was a kid, I did my share of misbehaving,
even up in New Hampshire. But you know, I feel
as though we need to deepen our concept of freedom
because if you look around the world, American culture is
(23:40):
associated with an awful lot of debauchery, abuse of freedom
run amok. So we need to respiritualize freedom and associated
with what really is the essence of freedom in Hinduism
and Buddhism, but also in Christianity and Judaism. And that's
some version of the positive golden rule. You know that
(24:04):
that Malcolm. Uh, that Rockwell image of the of the
Golden Rule.
Speaker 3 (24:11):
It's so beautiful. It's in, it's in the.
Speaker 1 (24:12):
Un and it's got all these individuals from different backgrounds. Uh.
Contemplating the positive version of the Golden rule, do unto
others as you would have them do unto you. It's
not the negative rule of version of the rule, which
just means don't use things to others. That means, you know,
you can get home tonight, ron And and if you
haven't kicked kicked anybody in the knee, you can feel
(24:34):
pretty good about your life.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
That's not what we're after all that's important.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Uh. Nevertheless, you know, it's this idea that somehow, by
contemplating that way of life, we are truly free. That's
what gives us freedom, so we're not taken in by
all the negative forces around us. You read about terrible
things happening every day, including today the newspapers, and I
(25:04):
think that we really need to have a deeper appreciation
for freedom as an expression of the spirit, which means
that it's connected with love and creativity. And that's how
I think it. Fringsmart, I've been writing about freedom forever,
and I think it's important to reassess. I mean, our
(25:28):
freedom has become an excuse for a lot of debauched
and terribly unethical behavior.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
You know, my show was forty five forward. It certainly
it focuses on how to keep living a vital life
from midlife on. Are these lessons that so you've been
working on this for a while. Is there a way
to deepen this knowledge? As I mean, I think some
of this it comes from experience. I mean, you've been
through lots of things. You learn things, and you evaluate
and you reassess things. How do you do this? You know,
(25:58):
from the perspective of now, let's say you're forty five
and beyond. For those you know younger than.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Us, well, you know, absolutely younger than us.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
I am. I am past forty five. I'm willing to
so I you know.
Speaker 1 (26:17):
So there was a psychologist at Harvard named Eric Erickson,
and he believed, I think wrongly, that real generosity, real
authentic giving, is pretty much the purview of people who
(26:38):
are in the seventh stage of life. That means they're
really up in years, they're looking retrospectively at their own lives,
hopefully with some satisfaction, and now they want to live
meaningfully by passing the torch.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
To others.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
They want to be transmitters of loving kindness. Now, I
believe though, and have shown that that actually pertains even
to the youngest among us. So there are lots of
studies now from the Yale Child Study Center Paul Bloom
showing that Toddler's eighteen month old children have a very deep,
(27:24):
innate sense of affective or emotional empathy. They may not
quite know how to operationalize it in terms of doing
unto others, but that will come.
Speaker 3 (27:37):
But they have that within them. Now, if you don't
have that within you, if.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
All the wrong buttons have been pushed by bad parenting
and bad environment, then that's a problem and you can
wind up being very disadvantaged in life. Violent, violent and
difficult and unkind and identified as such. But sure, so
that's there in our lives from the get go, and
(28:02):
you hope that you don't have to reach forty five
and have some kind of a midlife.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
Crisis like everything falls apart. My life has been empty.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
I've been a husk, a shell, running on nothing, and
now I want to turn it. Now, that does happen
to people, and that's a good thing when it does happen,
but hopefully you will be able to unfold as a
giver over the course of the years. And that's called
(28:35):
the in Greek, well among the thought of Aristotle and Plato.
That's you daemonism. That's living a good life over the
course the whole course of a lifetime. And so we
sometimes say, well, you've got to go through these really miserable, counterproductive,
(28:55):
destructive moments and periods in your life to get to
kindness in your older age.
Speaker 3 (29:02):
I just don't think that's true.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
And so this is my sense of it, that old
age is it is a time for wisdom because you've
been there, done that, and hopefully learn something in the process.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
But not always. I mean, I say, I run.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
Into older adults left and right who are quite misbehaved.
Now they're you know, hopefully they're not common, but they
are there. And so I'm not sure that age alone
brings that kind of wisdom. It's age plus something like
(29:45):
living according to the Golden rule, or having some sort
of tradition or approach to life which accounts for the
other by the way definition of love and I take this, yes,
this is my definition for years. No Latin, no Greek
(30:05):
No arevadic texts necessary when the well being which I
prefer to happiness because people have butchered the word happiness.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
So when the well being and security of another.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Is as meaningful to you, you could say it's real
to you as your own and sometimes even more so
than you love that person. So it's very down to earth,
it's very common sensical. And and you know, if you
(30:48):
sit down at a coffee shop with an old friend
who's had a hard time and it's really struggling, they
may need some compassion and that's that's an expression of love.
We don't use the word love that much in everyday life.
I mean, I'm come into work here, I don't run
around with a big placard saying love or let alone
(31:11):
pure live love. Yeah, but I know what I know
the people around me, and I know the expressions of
love that will be most helpful to them.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Just a good segue, Steven, So the next chick, I
want to talk about it. So we have this concept
of the seven past. But then you chill down a
bit so to your point that they were making, which
is there are different expressions of love that bring in
into our everyday life. And you were starting to talk
about compassion. Now you have tenet these. I don't want
to overwhelm our audience with numerology. But people can find
(31:43):
this in your book Pure Unlimited Love. They can find
them in more. But let's talk about some of these
expressions of love that we might not say love, but
these are ways in which they are expressed in our
everyday life.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
It's not terribly important to run around blathering about love, love, love,
you know.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
I think we did a lot of that once upon
a time. Yes, yeah, you need is love. I don't
blather about it.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
So I get up in the morning and I meditate
for a while about the people I know I'm going
to encounter over the course of the day. And I
asked myself, you know, fairly deeply and with a kind
of mindfulness, what expression of love would be helpful for them.
So for some it could be listening, because I've witnessed
(32:39):
that people are not taking their thoughts seriously. They're cutting
them off there, interrupting them after fourteen seconds on average,
that's the average that takes a doctor to interrupt a
patient by that. So attentive listening is important. And some
(33:00):
people need loyalty, and I know that because maybe they've
been divorced unfairly by a spouse who just took off unexpectedly,
and they're panicking. So I want to assure them that,
at least in their relationship with me, because I have
(33:21):
a lot of roles to play, leadership roles, that I
will always be loyal to them and they don't worry
about about that problem because loyalty is an expression of love,
carefrontation on my favorite. Now, that's not my original word.
You know, when you read the book, you'll see I
(33:43):
picked that up from a very close friend named m.
Scott Peck. They'll remember he wrote The road Less Traveled,
which was a huge bestseller years that, you know, twenty
years ago, twenty five years ago. He'd gone to case
Western School of Medicine for his psychiatry training and I
was there for twenty years and I did not overlap
(34:04):
with Scotty, but he knew I was writing about love
back in the day and he was writing about love.
And so I have a whole folder of letters back
and forth, and one time he sent me a letter.
It's a three page letter and he said, Steven, you
know you need to have a concept of love that
(34:24):
isn't just soft and agreeable. And we agreed in correspondence
that we didn't like the word tough love because it
just sounds a little bit on the gritty side. But
we didn't like the word confrontation either, because that sounds like,
you know, you're at the end of the cliff. So
(34:46):
he had come up with the word carefrontation in the
Road Less Traveled, and he allowed me to utilize it.
So in my book You Know Why Good Things Happen
to Good People, there's a whole chapter on carefrontation, and
carefrontation runs through this book. So when you're on these
seven paths, you know, like I come to work, there
(35:08):
are some people who just the best thing I can
do for them is not to confront them, but to
care front them. Is to say, you know, you are
a wonderful person, you have a great heart, and we
all love you.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
But.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
You're kind of veering off course, and let me just
talk with you about that. I'm not going to talk
at you, but I want to discuss it, and hopefully
through that kind of a process you have to leave
a lot of room for their autonomy. We run a
department here in preventive medicine and if you're ever going
to be successful in preventive medicine. It doesn't mean that
(35:49):
you sort of lord it over patients and say you've
got to change your behavior, lose twenty five pounds, do
this now. But what you do is you ask them,
so you would like to lose weight, how committed are
you to that? And then when you move ahead, you say, well,
(36:10):
how would you like to achieve that? And write it
down because writing it down is helpful, and then let
me see you in two or three weeks and let's
talk about your progress. So that's a form of care
frontation in a way. It's not confrontational, but it involves
the agency of the other.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Right. This reminds me of a friend of mine, good
colleague the caregiving business broadly, Laura. I think she coined
this term co opetition, co opetition, which is again, you're
you know, when you work with lots of people, there
are ways in which, even if you're in the same field,
(36:50):
you can be you know, you're competitive, but you also
can be cooperative, not necessarily mutually exclusive, not at all.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, So these.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Are all ways of these are all forms.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Of they're the expressions that love sometimes love is expressed
is forgiveness, sometimes as compassion, when people are suffering, but
they're not suffering all the time, unless you're an extreme
follower of say the Buddha, or maybe uh Kurkerguard. Kirkerguard
(37:23):
sort of thought we were all suffering all the time,
but we were hiding it by getting in grooves and
forgetting about the anxiety we have about losing the things
that bring us happiness. You actually coined the term anxiety,
which is now, of course, a big thing in psychiatry.
Celebration is a form of love mirth. I'm notorious for uplifting, tasteful, positive, clean,
(37:56):
small cute jokes around here because I see people who
were run down. They've been working all day and all
night in a difficult medical context, and I just need
to brighten them up. And I know that in a millisecond,
the right ounce of humor can turn them around emotionally.
(38:20):
So my latest one, you know, because Halloween's are coming.
I used this the other day, where do ghosts buy
houses on dead end streets? As for all your listeners
and their children and so forth. But you know, there
(38:43):
was a wonderful guy, Norman Cousins, who wrote a great
best selling book called The Anatomy of an Illness, and
it's about how he let he watched silly stuff on TV.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
The Three Stooges.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
A candid and they let him do this, and he
felt that he laughed himself back to health. He had
a very difficult illness and no one could help him really.
So now at UCLA, in the medical school, there is
the Norman Cousins Center. It's worth googling, and they do
the best research in the world on mirth, laughter and health,
(39:25):
because laughter will turn you around from stress. I don't
mean laughing at people, but involving them in a new
way of being that's an alternative to the sort of
and today, by the way, I'm concerned because I don't
think ron that people laugh enough.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
They're so damn serious.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
I understand people get very committed politically, but I have
to remain publicly neutral because otherwise I'd lose so much
of my constituency in this medical school or any place.
And so I want people to get out of that.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Routine of.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
Nastiness bordering on violence, and I want them to laugh.
I want them to be able to let go of that.
Like my mother was a Democrat, My dad was a Republican.
She was also Irish, you know, he was English and
so the and they always disagreed politically if Nixon Kennedy,
oh my god.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
But my mom always approached it with.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Mirth, Henry, why shouldn't an Irishman tell an Englishman a
joke on a Saturday night because the Englishman might possibly
crack up laughing in choice the next day. And then
my dad would say, well, Molly, what's the Irish definition
of hospitality?
Speaker 3 (40:54):
She drew a blank.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Well, you make someone pearl feel perfectly at home while
you be wishing they were so the that are so humorous,
and we just laughed these things. And if you get
totally possessed by the I mean, the politics of the
world is important, but it's not ultimate reality.
Speaker 3 (41:13):
Ultimate reality is pure.
Speaker 1 (41:14):
Unlimited love, and if you're driven away from that spiritually
by such morose and threatening politics, it's just very bad
for you, but it's very bad for the people around you.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I think certainly. Humor Well,
it's sort of first of all, it disarms us from
our you know, you know, fortress, and it opens up
to sort of shared vulnerability and shared appreciation of sometimes
the absurdity, as you know, or just the incongruities of
(41:52):
life and that we all share and can appreciate. Now again,
you've got ten of I want to see if I
get people can see this, but I really can't see
it too well. But anyway, this is your wheel. Okay,
that is in the book. It's the you know, so
it's the wheel of the of the ten different expressions. Yes,
(42:17):
so that's that's so, that's sort of a way. And
I know that you you have this on your in
front of you, and that you've used these. I know
there are there are a lot of things we're talking about,
but you've used these, the seven paths and then the
different forms as a means of sort of getting going
in the morning.
Speaker 3 (42:36):
Express It's a practical everyday way of life for me,
and it has been for a lot of years.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
Even since I was in high school, you know, going
back that far. And if you just prime yourself in
the morning, you know, I get up pretty early. I'm
usually up about four thirty or five, annoying my family.
Speaker 3 (42:57):
Always trying to be as quiet as quiet as I can.
Speaker 1 (43:01):
But then I just have I have a wonderful chair
in my office and I just meditate for an hour,
and I have, I know, my daily scheduled because.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
I keep it in this book.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Okay, you know, because by writing things down it's easier
to remember them. I don't like to just put things
in some electronic venue. But you know, I have in
mind the people I'm going to encounter, and that includes you.
(43:35):
And then this afternoon, I know I'm going to encounter
in New York.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
I've got to go to the annual Templeton Prize Award meeting.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
In Lincoln Center, and I know I'm going to run
into certain people there, and I have and I know
what's going on in their lives, and I know kind
of basically what form of love I want to bring
to them. And I'll think about that when I'm driving
in on the Northern Parkway in my Jeep compass, I'll say,
(44:08):
and I'll be actually thinking about that actively. So I'm
always you know, from the morning I envisioned these things.
I do little meditation, I do, you know, sort of
the not musty type things and seeking inner piece, breathing purposefully.
And of course, now when I come into work, I
(44:31):
sometimes fail because there's a road here called twenty five
A which I know runs vy YouTube and we get
to Nichols Road and Snorting Brook University is just about
two miles down there on toward the south, and there
is an annoying yellow light, and you don't really have
(44:53):
to stop at this yellow light. But some people are
so much more diligent than I am. At times there
isn't another car for two miles or three miles that
I can see, but they stop, and that means I'm
finished for the next ten minutes, and I can get
very annoyed. I don't yell out a curse or anything,
(45:16):
but I will sometimes fall full chested on the steering wheel,
and you know, I say.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
What fish say when they swim into a wall. What's that? Damn? Okay?
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Yeah, I'm always cultivating mirth, and I make a lot
of it up myself, and some of it's psychological, some
of it's theological. And of course it's important to have
those things, but only to use them when they really
make sense, not to inject them unnecessarily.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Yeah, And I think that what I liked about your
approach is that you know you have these paths and
these expressions, but there are ways you can access them
every day. So I was looking at some of your
your introduction and you say, well, okay, so you mentioned
that in the evening of time permits I might quietly
ask myself a question in each of these seven paths.
(46:17):
So there ways to do it. So do I feel
like uplifted and give them kindness? Did I speak with
the tone and heart of a healer? So there are ways?
Did I did I have a sense of all as
I encountered nature? Did I honor and fulfill the duties
and responsibilities of freedom? So there are ways. You can
kind of have a checklist of thoughts you that can
keep you on track each.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Day and in the evenings, you know, later at night,
you know, maybe around eleven or so. I will do
that before I go off into sleep. And you know,
I have a I find Long Island to be a
little claustrophobic, no offense, okay, but I you know, I
spend a lot of time in Ohio, and you can
(46:58):
just roll anyplace, and I like through at eighty and
the mountains and the Delaware Water Gap. I just like
that feeling of total openness and go south to Philadelphia
or north to Boston, whatever you want.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
But when I get that sense of claustrophobia.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
What I do is I take the ferry from Port Jefferson's,
which is a north shore town a little further east
from Stonybrook, and I take the ferry, usually the P T. Barnum,
because I.
Speaker 3 (47:33):
Like PT Barnum, I like the mirth of it all.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
And I take the ferry over to Bridgeport, not to
get off, although sometimes I'll get off and take the
train up to say New Haven, to the Peabody Museum
or whatever it might be. But I'll usually stay on
and for now, you know, twenty five bucks, you can
take that back and forth. I wouldn't advise the French prize,
(47:59):
but there's a lot of good food there and you
can just go there and look at the beauty of nature.
So it's one of my ways of enjoying nature, reconnecting
with the wider world, if you will, and also just
you know, getting away from phone calls and the constant interruptions.
(48:23):
You know, sometimes I get two hundred emails a day.
Ron it's so sad, and I wish I could tell
you that I can just erase them. I can't, because
you know, it could be a student, and these are
serious students. The medical students. I mean, you know, they
need responses. It could be a clinical thing, ethics related,
(48:45):
and they need responses.
Speaker 3 (48:48):
It could be related to a book or a speech.
Speaker 1 (48:50):
I have to go up to Rochester and up to
the Copley Plaza in Boston in the next few weeks,
and I've got to have all that stuff down, and
there's a lot to it. So there's it's nothing that
maybe ten percent of what I get is junk, but
most of it I have to attend to. I could
come in here and spend my whole day responding to
(49:11):
email and the brain.
Speaker 3 (49:13):
And I write this in the book. The brain did
not evolve for that kind of interruption, constant interruption, so
you can't. You know, I do better. I feel better
if I go out.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
I go out sometimes to Louisbourg, Pennsylvania, because my daughter
went to Bucknell and there's.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
The best Western there. And I will go there and
just hang out for forty.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Eight hours, you know, rent the room for a night
or two and just have my computer and I will
be working on, say a chapter for a book like
Pure Unlimited Love. And then there's a pizza place down
in the village of Louisbourg that's all I need. I'm
not very picky, and they had the Susquehanna River, and
(50:00):
I can walk by the Susquehanna and I like the
Buttnell feel, you know, just a small private college with
lots of nice people around.
Speaker 3 (50:10):
And then I'll be so relieved.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
I will have I might even have worked for forty
hours on my writing, but I feel so uplifted by
it because I'm not constantly interrupted as I come to
work and everything, you know, my cell phone, you know,
everything's coming at me. And then I've got to make
time for people who come to the door, which actually
(50:36):
still happens.
Speaker 3 (50:37):
So it's you know, it's.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
Not an easy life that we live, and you have
to really work inwardly to be centered, properly centered, and
to kind of ward off the adverse effects of all
that because you can't ignore it. You can't just go
off the grid. Although it's tempting.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
Yeah, well it is tempting, and I think sometimes it's
it's doable, you know. So you're reminded me of a
couple of periods in my life. One is when I
was in graduate school hers Pennsylvania, where you would go
through these intense periods and I would what I would
do is I would just drive west from Philly into
(51:17):
the Amish country. You know, pick some place in the
country and I'd find a sort of an open field
and then just and have some bread and cheese and snack,
and I would just sit there and just you know,
look at the sky and look at the fields, and
that sense of openness that was sort of in a
(51:38):
very different way, kind of replicated years later when my
wife and I would visit her brothers in a little
town called Nicholson north of Scranton, and there was you know,
going there and visiting with him and then being in
nature and being in a creek in the back of
his house in open country. And what I loved is
(52:01):
in that area there's a range called the Endless Mountains. Yeah,
and I just love that notion of endless mountains. Obviously
they're not endless, but there's this sense of freedom and
nature that I think is essential to to you know,
basically expresses your feelings of love in a very kind
(52:24):
of pure, unlimited way.
Speaker 3 (52:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:26):
Yeah, And I say, you know, the gift of nature,
you know, may you cherish the gift of nature.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
I don't say worship.
Speaker 1 (52:35):
Nature or something along those kinds of lines. But I
think we can cherish nature really as really the most
beautiful expression of if you will divine love one of
them anyway, And I like Scranton, by the way. I
like the University of scrant I've been there a number
(52:56):
of times. It's kind of beautiful. A lot of good
baseball players, pitchers especially.
Speaker 2 (53:02):
Yep, yep. But a lot of older people, you know, a.
Speaker 3 (53:06):
Lot of older people.
Speaker 1 (53:07):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a good place for older people.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
It's a good place for anybody, I think. But you know, so,
you're so right. I mean, you have to.
Speaker 1 (53:19):
Even though we are besieged by new technologies and can
easily get completely overwhelmed by the latest software or let
alone AI, I can.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
I can imagine that there are some.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Good things that can be done with AI. But I'm
also googling now pretty heavily AI psychosis, and that's not
quite a formal psychiatric designation yet. But there's a great
psychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center
(53:55):
who is who is working with that, and you will
find that there are probably.
Speaker 3 (54:02):
Ten to fifteen fairly new cases of adolescent suicide at
any time which engaged them with AI. So AI, you know,
can be cognitively empathic. It knows exactly what to say.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
If you say, you know, I'm having such a hard
time with my you know whatever, it will say that
is tough. I can really feel that way. Of course,
that's the machine and a machine. So what happens is
these these these AI sites lead people down destructive tracks,
(54:45):
and so it leads them actually towards self destruction because
it doesn't have you know, I was talking about toddlers earlier. Yes,
it doesn't have the innate, deeper, primal affective or emails
potional empathy which is so much associated with love and
a commitment to the security and well being of others
(55:08):
as you grow older. It doesn't have that, so it
can take and if there are many people. Hitler was
empathic by the way, obviously, and he could feel into
his audience. That's what made it such a good and
successful public speaker in the beer houses. I mean, but
it was all for a maleficent purpose, So you know,
(55:30):
I just I just want to point that out that
you know, the technology does not involve us at the
level of affective empathy and love that we yearn for.
Speaker 2 (55:46):
Well, you can find out much more about this subject
if you buy Steven's book. Now is it? It's coming
out and soon?
Speaker 1 (55:56):
Right, yeah, Well, it can be ordered in October and
it will be our You can order now easily enough online,
but it will actually be out toward the end of October,
and I'm happy to I've got doing a big program
on it at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, which
is a nice one, and the day before that doing
(56:20):
a plenary for the annual Benson Mind Body Conference, which
is the Mass General Benson Henry Mind Body Institute's big deal.
So I've gotten a nice opportunity there to sort of
bring this out. And I'm going to do something at
Saint Bartholomew's Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue and fifty first
(56:43):
Street a few days later, in a bunch of podcasts
and radio programs. But you know, I wanted to do
you first, Ron, because you actually are the deepest of
all of them.
Speaker 3 (56:55):
You really are. I hope you know that. I think
so kind and you manifest everything in the book.
Speaker 2 (57:05):
Well, I thank you for that.
Speaker 3 (57:06):
It's I'm not just bsing you, I mean I think
that's true.
Speaker 2 (57:10):
Thank you, Thank you. Yeah. So if people want to
find out more about your work, see what's the best
way to reach you, Well.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Go to the institute for go to Unlimited Love Institute
dot org. Okay, that's the website for the institute that
I started with Sir John in about two thousand and
it's still going fine. We have a nice board in
Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and around University Circle and the clinic
and all those kinds of places.
Speaker 2 (57:39):
Twenty fifth anniversary, now.
Speaker 1 (57:41):
Oh yeah, absolutely, twenty five and wow, it's hard to believe.
And you know, we've funded probably seventy major studies, including things.
Speaker 3 (57:54):
Like you know, teaching.
Speaker 1 (57:57):
Kindness meditation in grade schools in Baltimore, and they've been
doing that.
Speaker 3 (58:02):
It's been a national movement and they've been able to
get these.
Speaker 1 (58:08):
First and second graders in a more peaceful way of being.
And they don't send them to the principal's office. They
send them to the mindfulness office. And they're doing better
in school. They're less violent, they use language more appropriately,
and they're happier, and they're going home to their families
(58:29):
and they're saying, you know, we've got.
Speaker 3 (58:30):
To do mindfulness. This is in the news.
Speaker 1 (58:34):
So you've done a lot of really cool stuff and
a lot of the stuff on how to raise kind children.
You know, we funded that four million bucks with the
Fetzer Institute way back in about two thousand and three,
and I'm very proud of that.
Speaker 3 (58:51):
But many things we've done.
Speaker 1 (58:52):
All of the benefits of being a kind giver, not
a force giver, but you know, putting your kindness into it,
into it and it's not how much you give, but
it's how you give. And you know, so so the
institute has been very successful and I'm honored to have
been picked out by you know, the great Sir John Templeton,
(59:14):
not for the Templeton Funds you know now Franklin Templeton,
uh and the Tennessee Mystic but that he would pick
me out after a meeting in a in a in
a golf club restaurant in northern Virginia and a discussion
(59:37):
about love and that was a long time ago, and
then that.
Speaker 3 (59:41):
He would entrust me with this. It's a it's a
beautiful thing.
Speaker 2 (59:48):
Well, I thank you for a thought provoking conversation. It's
always great talking with you, Stephen, and I'm glad that
you know people can contact you. I'm sure that they
can go through Stonybrook, and they can certainly wear in touch.
If people have questions for me and want to get
in touch with you or get in touch with me,
I'm available Ron at forty five forward dot org. You know,
(01:00:13):
thanks for spending this time with us until our next meeting.
Keep going forward, folks, forty five Forward
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