A recent interview with Arthur Brooks offered many insights on issues of our time that enrich Creation Spirituality and vice versa.
Brooks identifies as a “writer about the science of human happiness,” but does not restrict his work to the Via Positiva alone. I will attempt to share parts of his 57-page interview in the next few DMs as his thought overlaps richly with the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality.*
Brooks, a college professor at Vanderbilt and lecturer at Harvard, works closely with young people. He ends his extended discourse by asking them, when you near death, “how do you want to look back on your life?” He is sure one thing you wouldn’t say is “I sure wish I’d spent more time online….I could have done even better if I spent even more time on Instagram.”
I like his bringing our mortality in as a setting for asking the bigger questions in life: Why are we here? What can I contribute before I die?
He begins his interview citing current depression statistics. The numbers just don’t lie. Depression has about tripled over the past 15 years for young adults, and anxiety has doubled. The question is why?
He proposes the answer centers on meaning: “Does your life have meaning?” In the past, he proposes, “the answer for almost everybody was yes. People had a strong sense of meaning in their lives. But then something happened.”
An explosion occurred, especially among young people who felt life feels meaningless. The cause, he feels, lies in facing screens with friends and family rather than real life. The average American checks his/her phone 205 times per day and spends 4 to 9 hours on screens small and large. A kind of “simulation of real life” occurs and “a lot of young people say” exactly that: “My life feels fake. It feels like something’s missing. It feels like I’m living in a simulation…’technological simulation.’”
Not only is there a lack of meaning but a “lack of the ability to look for meaning….Why does my life matter?” If you are not looking for meaning, you are “lost in place,” and this trend “is exploding in numbers” today.
Brooks invokes the right/left hemisphere understanding of the brain. That has been a useful metaphor for me also, dating back to my book on Compassion in the 1970s and it lies at the center of my efforts to create a pedagogy for spirituality education. Bringing circle dancing and art as meditation into various graduate programs in spirituality over 28 years, and the YELLAWE project for inner-city teenagers, has been my way of awakening the right intuitive/mystical brain to work alongside the left rational/intellectual brain. And with great results.
In workshops and retreats too, I invariably pulled out crayons and paper for people to draw their experiences of the Four Paths. Many came awake in those exercises, which include sharing one’s drawings with another, with the instruction that the drawer be the last one to talk about his/her drawing. Didn’t Jesus say we have to turn and become like children to experience the kingdom/queendom of God? Crayons do that.
Brooks says the right brain is where “we feel things and don’t know why”; it brings “a little bit of mystery in your life.” Beauty “triggers this sense of mystery and, in fact, meaning, coherence, purpose, significance, the things that really matter most in you.” The right brain is “the meaning side, the happiness and love side.” I cite Einstein, who says the right brain gives us values while the left brain gives us methods.
Brooks believes our ancestors 250,000 years ago established relationships as central to survival within their small band of 30 to 50 kin-based individuals.
To be continued.
* Bigthink/Arthur Brooks, “Full Interview: Depression has tripled in the last 15 years. Arthur Brooks says he knows the real cause,” Bigthink.com,
For Arthur Brooks’ video talks on meaning, phone addiction, and recovery, click HERE.
Banner Image: A toddler and parents go on a hike. Photo by Children Nature Network on Nappy.co.
Queries for Contemplation
Do you think education and academia as currently practiced bring out the mystery side of existence, exercise the right hemisphere of the brain, and teach values? Can technological simulation smother our fuller learning capacities, including love and feeling, meaning and purpose? Does excessive technology have a role in the rising depression among young people?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Time
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic…and Beyond
Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest
Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet
Meditations with Meister Eckhart: A Centering Book
