Shows
Being Humans Together25 The Transformational Love of GodGod knows you fully, and God loves you completely. Consider what it would be like to be in the presence of God. You would feel known, understood and seen. You’d feel loved. You would have a profound desire to be with Him. God’s love for you is not simply acceptance. It is love for you as you are, but also as you may be, hopefully as you are going to become through the experiences and growth that you will have through life. Some, perhaps even much of that growth will be the result of hard work, discomfort, and...
2025-09-0419 minBeing Humans Together24 Ways of Knowing God Part 2For thousands of years cultures, societies and communities have developed many ways to know god-- Animism or spirits in nature, including ancestors, Polytheism in its multiplicity of expressions, Devotion to a single personal god, with mystical spiritual experience, Monotheism or the worship of ultimate One True God, and transcendent eternal spiritual reality beyond God as a being.
In this episode we focus on Monotheism, the transcendent eternal spiritual reality, agnosticism and atheism. Then we explore ways that religions simultaneously embrace a wide variety of paths to knowing and following God.
2025-08-2921 minBeing Humans Together23 Ways of Knowing God Part 1Cultures and societies have approached God in many ways. On Being Humans Together we emphasize that knowing God is personal, relational, and present. What matters most is that you know God and strive to embody your highest ideals today.
In part 1 of this topic we explore Animism, or spirits in nature, the wide variety of Polytheism, and devotional worship of one God.
2025-08-2724 minBeing Humans Together22 Know Yourself“Know yourself” was inscribed in Greek ‘gnothi seauton’ on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Knowing yourself has been a fundamental quest for every human being for thousands of years.
Who am I? Who are you? What does it mean to know yourself?
These are not simple questions. And there are many answers.
Know yourself. Know your heart, mind, will, limitations, and strengths. Know your people and listen to them when they tell you about your mistakes and your strengths. Try to see those things more clearly, to grow, and to improve on all of i...
2025-07-1625 minBeing Humans Together21 Escaping Isolation and Loneliness“Leave me alone!” This is the curse we cast on ourselves.
Solitary confinement is the greatest punishment we enforce in many of our societies. We did away with torture and most capital punishment. So now we make people sit alone in cages.
But guess what? Many, many of us sit alone in well appointed cages of our own making and our own choosing. We buy our isolation in 4000 square foot homes, with smart phones and social media, and an increasingly caustic civil society where people resist, riot, and shout no at each other all day long...
2025-07-0822 minBeing Humans Together20 Negotiating Yes & No in RelationshipsWe can mean more than one thing when we say yes, or when we say no.
There are situations, actions, and people for whom we feel, say and perform solid yeses — strong and spontaneous affirmation. Parents experience solid yes for their children. We feel and do solid yes for our highest ideals. Love is solid yes. Loyalty or fidelity is solid yes. Sacrifice and nurture are solid yes. There are other principles that you feel deeply, passionately about. Our passionate goals and dreams are solid yeses.
What does “soft yes” mean? There are many other things...
2025-07-0244 minBeing Humans Together19 Resonating Together with Our PeopleResonating together with our people and relationships
How do we connect, resonate together, and form relational bonds?
How do we improve our relationships to bring more meaningful connections, closeness, or intimacy?
Human Beings hunger for connection, understanding, natural resonance, and relationship building. Many common human communications invite connection, shared experience, understanding, and shared resonance:
Do you see what I see?
Do you know what I know?
Do you agree?
Do you understand?
Do you understand me?
Do you hear me?
Will you do this with me?
2025-06-2716 minBeing Humans Together18 Know Your PeopleKnow who your people are. I recognize how challenging relationships are for all of us. Understand how your relationships fit into your circles of relations, including intimate relations, core family and friends, extended family and friends, community members, and acquaintances and contacts. Consider the kinds of experiences you share together.
Beware common mistakes we make in misunderstanding and undervaluing relationships.
Finally, we consider how to recognize the limits of contextual relationships are and how to bring special relationships into our homes and core circles where they can last.
2025-06-2419 minBeing Humans Together17 Relational Knowledge Is the Most Valuable KnowledgeParadigm shift: We should value knowing our people more highly than professional knowledge, technical knowledge, or political knowledge, even though those domains are often connected with increased status or money. Too often we are convinced to pursue success, degrees, career, or just excitement; and so we walk away from/ move away from/ let go of the people we know, who know us.
We believe that relationships are easy to make or replace, We believe that the connections we made when we were young will always be there. Or we don’t place enough value in the people wi...
2025-06-2018 minBeing Humans Together16 Civil Society and the Tyranny of ExpertsWe need experts to accomplish many of our advanced goals. To gather, sift and organize new knowledge; to apply basic research in order to engineer new possibilities; to better understand the physical and human worlds we live in. Experts are well trained in narrow specialties that enable them to do original, creative things. Expertise is often accompanied by experience, commitment and dedication.
But there are limits to the utility of experts. Experts can be elitist and authoritarian. Experts can be bought. Experts can be biased and ideological. Experts can be as foolish and fallible as anyone else. Experts...
2025-06-1619 minBeing Humans Together15 Balancing Science and Religion - Galileo, Darwin and moreGathering knowledge from diverse perspectives and sources enriches our minds and hearts, gives us more complex tools to understand our modern and increasingly global societies, and provides us with more robust and healthier abilities respond to challenges.
How do we know what is real? How do we know what is true?
How do we balance the differing worldviews and approaches to knowing that shape each of our worlds and the larger world that we share together?
One of the core issues of this set of episodes of Being Human Together is h...
2025-06-1430 minBeing Humans Together14 Responding to the Mysterious UniverseContemporary physics theory is fascinating, productive, often useful, and sometimes truly mysterious, speculative, and often not applicable to the physical universe. In the face of such mystery and the unknown, we ought of adopt humility and open-mindedness.
In this episode we will explore a variety of the limits of physics theory, and propose an open, humble approach to understanding our perspective and our place in the universe. We consider the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Schrodinger’s cat, and indeterminacy. These principles apply to physics as well as human society. The indeterminacy and uncertainty of fundamental quantum phy...
2025-06-0618 minBeing Humans Together13 Life is Rare and BeautifulLife is rare, beautiful, and precious. Human conscious life is even more rare, beautiful, and precious.
Many humans in our society have adopted a fundamentally misanthropic or antihumanist perspective. They believe people are fundamentally destructive, violent, cruel, and that humans destroy all other life. They believe that humans are tiny, randomly generated creatures without agency or meaning. They believe that the planet would be better off without humans on it, or at lest far fewer of them. They believe that humans are likely to destroy themselves and much of the planet with them.
I...
2025-06-0321 minBeing Humans Together12 We Are 99% Binding EnergyIn this third series of episodes we’re going delve into physics to demonstrate that the architecture of the visible universe and all life is based on bonds and binding energy.
This reality can help us recognize that our bodies, brains, and minds are characterized not by separate bits but by bonds. From elemental particles to fundamental forces and fields, to chemical bonds and organic compounds, to cells and organisms, to complex biological creatures in living ecological webs, to intelligent conscious humans in networks of relations, communities and social fabric — we are bound together in ever more comp...
2025-05-2929 minBeing Humans Together11 Increasing Our Consciousness and AgencyWe conclude our second set of episodes by considering how we can grow our awareness, our consciousness, and our agency to live more empowered, meaningful, purposeful lives each day.
Surely we can grow our awareness of how things really are, our ability to see and hear and understand what is real, our creativity, and our will to do what is best, highest, and most important.
Too many people treat their philosophy or ideology or religion like a spectator sport. They sit in the benches every once in a while and cheer for their team, but...
2025-05-2614 minBeing Humans Together10 Historical Development of ConsciousnessHuman consciousness developed over thousands of generations as women and men chose one another, as families made long term marriage bonds and build communities. Our awareness and consciousness is built on the foundation of relational and community bonds and shared knowledge.
Our consciousness was born of fire, the first human tool.
Around hearth fires and communal campfires our ancestors shared meals and stories. And the fires transformed our bodies and our minds.
Our consciousness was born of language creation, from gestures and signs to words and songs and stories, told and retold generation...
2025-05-2340 minBeing Humans Together09 Exercising Agency and WillIn this episode of Being Humans Together we explore the paradigm shift from the widespread acceptance of determinism to human agency or the ability to choose. We discuss both theological and scientific philosophies about determinism and rebuttal them in turn. Then we explore the range of physical limitation and constraints on free will. We conclude by explaining the myriad ways that we do indeed exert our agency or will to choose and act, from eye contact, to thoughts, to actions. And we emphasize the importance of exercising and growing our agency to improve our lives and our world.
2025-05-2117 minBeing Humans Together08 Meaning, Purpose, and PresentnessMeaning and Purpose are Operationalized Consciousness.
Meaning is (shared) understanding or interpretation of the past.The negation of meaning is isolation or nihilism. Meaning is narrative, order, connectivity, construction of wholeness.
Purpose is narrative, constructed order for the future--plans, goals, mission, direction for present work.
Will or Agency is how we act on our consciousness or operationalize our consciousness now in the present.
Presentness is a powerful way of orienting ourselves to overcome stress, anxiety, guilt, daydreaming, and fear.
2025-05-1910 minBeing Humans Together07 Consciousness: There Are No Feral HumansThere are no feral humans. While a fish or a reptile can hatch, grow, and reproduce without complex training, human children do not and cannot develop consciousness, language, healthy emotions, or social awareness in isolation. Caregivers make humans by showing them over and over again how to communicate, respond, share, cooperate, compete, agree, disagree, problem solve. Caregivers literally teach awareness, agency, and consciousness. Agency and consciousness are rooted in our relations with other people -- our caregivers, our peers, and from authorities in our societies and cultures. Language, ideas, memes, and principles are taught, passed around, and shared between...
2025-05-1518 minBeing Humans Together06 Consciousness Emerges from Human NetworksTwo paradigm shifts help us understand what human consciousness is and how it arises.
First, a lot of the smart kids, the ones with the doctorate degrees, think that consciousness is largely an illusion and that your actions are determined, or in other words, that you do not have the ability to choose your own actions. Second, most approaches to understanding consciousness are scientific and reductionist.
In response, I will try to demonstrate to you first, that consciousness is an emergent principle of networked human minds in relationship with one another; and second, that amidst...
2025-05-1223 minBeing Humans Together05 Breaking Free from the InstitutionsMy personal journey to making Being Humans Together.
So what took me so long to share this?
1. Fear. Imposter Syndrome.
2. I needed to learn some basic content creation skills, then invest the time to do this.
3. Most importantly, I was institutionalized by my corporate job and my religion.
What changed all of that? It sort of began with COVID. COVID closed down my corporate offices. I escaped my cubicle, and I became a remote worker. But my church closed down too, which I found very difficult. What follows is...
2025-05-0908 minBeing Humans Together04 Membership in Community-Based InstitutionsLocal communities are often nested within institutions. The key aspects of community-based institutions are: core ideals or principles, leadership, and community membership. We discuss each of these in detail, including hierarchies of values, community schisms over changing values, leadership structures and weaknesses, and the importance of active membership in healthy communities. Understanding and applying these principles can help each of us engage communities and make our participation more empowering and effectual.
2025-05-0820 minBeing Humans Together03 Our Society Has a Community-Sized Hole In ItWe continue to explore the modern conflict between state-corporate institutions and the relationships and communities that form an organic society. Most of us are very familiar with institutions-- from schools to universities to corporations to governments. In this episode we discuss what communities are and what they are not. We lay out the circles of relationships that form the foundation of communities. We consider the commercialization of relationships. And we encourage you to engage with your communities to make a difference!
2025-05-0612 minBeing Humans Together02 You Have Been InstitutionalizedHow have you been institutionalized by governments and corporations? The triumph of the institutions of the state and corporations over relations and communities has affected all aspects of our modern societies. We consider the ways we have all been institutionalized, from daycare and school to state institutions, to corporations and consumerism. We conclude by pointing toward the revitalization of relationships and communities.
2025-05-0318 minBeing Humans Together01 Changing ParadigmsDuring this first season of Being Humans Together we will develop a wide variety of related paradigm changes. Paradigms are patterns of ideas or perspectives that shape how we see and how we act.
Our society has a community-sized hole in it.
Consciousness emerges from networked human minds in relationships.
We are 99% binding energy. We are bound together.
In the universe life is rare and precious; conscious life is even rarer and more precious.
Know what you value, and what matters most.
Do not do what you ha...
2025-04-2910 min