Greetings, Love-Revolutionaries. You may have already noticed the “Mexico” and “Africa” tabs at the top of the Love-Rev.com homepage. If not, I would encourage you to check them out.
Two Love-Rev team members are leading exciting initiatives to help some of our brothers and sisters outside of the U.S. Rob, founder of OneSmallHouse.org, has partnered with a team of architects to create plans for building a hospice care center outside of Tijuana, Mexico. The project has just recently started, and the goal is to complete the care center by the first week of January, 2009. Rob will be giving us updates from the build site over the next several months, as well as letting us know how we can get involved and give the gift of dignified, sanitary healthcare conditions to chronically ill patients near Tijuana.
The other project that we will be documenting is an effort led by Scott, another member of the Love-Rev field team, to combat poor public health conditions in Africa. Scott will be relocating to Africa next month, where he will be working with several villages in Uganda to secure better health and a better life for the people there. Watch for updates from Scott, as well, as he shares with us what the fight for health looks like in Africa, and how we can help him in his efforts to make real impact against disease.
I’m excited about these opportunities to work together as a Love-Rev community to help other people. I think we can expect to feel the “warm glow” of giving as we flex our compassionate-love muscles to mobilize the Love-Revolution definition of love: dedication to the happiness of a person other than one’s own self.
If sex didn’t feel good, would as many people do it? If drugs didn’t make you high, would as many people take them? No—definitely not. We like to do what feels good, and we generally don’t like to do what doesn’t. Inverting the question, then, if GIVING felt good, would more people do it? I believe the answer is a resounding, “YES!”
And you know what? Here is a secret: giving can feel good. Amazingly good. It can feel so good, in fact, that the positive feeling from giving has been given its own unique name in the scientific literature: warm glow.
In a 2007 Science magazine article*, leading neuroscience researchers reported that under certain conditions, charitable giving causes parts of the human brain associated with the reward system (the pleasure centers) to light up. If you change the circumstances for giving, however—like making the giving compulsive or required (like taxes)—then no lighting in the pleasure centers is observed.
What does all this mean?
Simply put, not all giving is equal. There are certain circumstances in which giving just doesn’t feel as good. Change the circumstances for the giving, however, and–BINGO–the brain’s pleasure centers start firing more intensely. Same behaviors of giving, but different context and reasons for doing it.
The hypothesis of the Love-Revolution is simple: if we can understand the conditions that cause warm glow to happen when we give, then we can create giving opportunities that cause the warm glow feeling. The result is that we will better enjoy our giving experiences, and we will be more likely to continue giving in the future.
Let’s not underestimate the value in this: how much we enjoy something has a more powerful impact on our behavior than we might like to admit. If the South Beach Diet, for example, was as enjoyable as eating our favorite chocolate dessert, I would daresay we would all be walking around sporting rippling abs and toned triceps. In other words, by understanding how to find pleasure in helping others, we can empower ourselves to help others more abundantly and more joyfully.
A few years ago, I was talking to a gentleman who is a project director for the Red Cross. In speaking to a group of incoming volunteers who were going down to Louisiana to give their time and energy toward Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, he told them, “We don’t give because of what other people will think of us. Do you know why we give? Because of that rosy feeling we get in our chest.” I thought this was very interesting—the feeling of afterglow that followed giving was enough to make this man not just give himself, but to motivate an entire room full of volunteers to find the energy and the will to give.
All of this is very exciting. It is an opportunity to merge the best of charity and the best of neuroscience. More research still needs to be done to explore how our motives for giving effect our brain and our feelings. But we can clearly see exciting links being made between our brains and our humanity. This is cool stuff—science and technology are becoming friends with the realm of philosophy and ethics, and even with behaviors and ideals that are universally important to religion and spirituality. You can sense the potential for love growing as these disciplines come together to start trading notes from the lessons about human love that they have been accumulating over the past several millennia.
Hola, amigos. This Saturday, September 27th, Rev-Heads will be getting together to help cheer up New Yorkers by offering free hugs. This will be a great opportunity to break social taboo and put a smile on people’s faces—two things that Love-Revolutionaries love to do.
If you would like to join us, take a sec to register for the event, officially part of ServiceNation.org’s nationwide day of service:
Hey Rev-Heads—if you haven’t already heard about the Service Nation Day of Action, it’s not too late to get involved. Coming September 27th, people all across America will be taking action to make their community a better place live. Check out the action events happening close to you: http://servicenation.org
Hey guys. We are pleased to announce our 2008 Love-Rev.com photo contest. We are excited about being up and running online, and about the wonderful comments and emails we’ve been receiving from our readers. To help make our Love-Rev.com community more interactive, we want to see your photos from your service activities, or from anything else that speaks love to you.
Submissions for the 2008 Love-Rev.com photo contest will be accepted between now and December 31st, 2008. The first place winner will receive a Love-Revolution hoodie, and the second and third place photo winners will receive a Love-Revolution tee. Thanks to Bob Bland and Brooklyn Royalty for providing the winning clothing items (http://BrooklynRoyalty.com).
Please send your photo contest submissions to:
photos@love-rev.com
Keep checking back on Love-Rev.com to see your photo submissions displayed in our Flickr photo panel.
Remember that you are the love the world has been waiting for.
There is an excerpt that I like from the book Ways of Enspiriting by Warren Ziegler that addresses attention:
“One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu: ‘Master, will you please write me the maxims of highest wisdom?’ Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word, ‘Attention.’ ‘Is that all?’ asked the man. ‘Will you not add something more?’ Ikkyu then wrote twice running: ‘Attention. Attention.’ ‘Well,’ remarked the man rather irritably, ‘I really don’t see much depth or subtlety in what you have just written.’ Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: ‘Attention. Attention. Attention.’ Half angered, the man demanded: ‘What does the word attention mean, anyway?’ And Ikkyu answered gently: ‘Attention means ATTENTION.’”
There is something elemental in the concept and practice of giving attention that we cannot sufficiently replace with anything else—not a check to charity, not a gift to a loved one. It is true that our attention may ultimately lead to other forms of giving, but attention is, intuitively, an unavoidable gatekeeper and toll collector on the road to love, and a mandatory checkpoint through which we must pass if we desire to enter into the realm of loving and being loved. If anything is given without first giving attention, how genuinely love-filled can the gift be? Another author has written, “Where your attention is, there will your heart be also,” suggesting that attention is not only the gatekeeper, but our guide, subtly pointing us to the person or thing in which our love will ultimately become invested. Whether it is to our neighbor, our sibling, our parent, our child, our enemy, a child in an impoverished nation, or any passerby in our path of living, we cannot experience love for them unless we first have the experience of giving attention to them. Daniel Goleman is a Harvard psychologist who studies emotion and relationships. He recently gave a talk that he entitled, “Why aren’t we all Good Samaritans?” The answers that came back from research on the topic indicating that the single most powerful predicting factor that determined whether or not someone stopped to help another was simply this: whether or not the individual felt like they were in a hurry. The video for Goleman’s talk can be accessed here:
We in the industrialized West live in a fast-paced, competitive world. We are extremely busy and often must be so in order to simply keep up. I wonder if our increase in hurry and busyness is perhaps the chief vampire that clings to us, sucking out our motivation to give attention, and, consequently, sucking out our ability to experience love. What is the remedy? Many ideas could be proposed. I will close with an excerpt from The Little Prince that gives me something to think about in my own life:
“Good morning,” said the little prince. “Good morning,” said the merchant. This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need of anything to drink. “Why are you selling those?” asked the little prince. “Because they save a tremendous amount of time,” said the merchant. “Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.” “And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?” “Anything you like…” “As for me,” said the little prince to himself, “if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”
Thanks to everyone for the wonderful comments on yesterday’s posts. By no means do I wish to curtail the conversation themes that are being played out through the posts started on September 11th, but I would like to create a new post to continue to feed the love.
Some of the criticism and concern that has been voiced to me as I have started assembling ideas and energy for this Love-Revolution experiment regard the choice for using the word “love.” I have been warned by some intelligent and articulate folks that the word is too ambiguous and too charged with divergent meanings for people and that the ideas about “love” are all over the map. Whereas one person might think instinctively of maternal imagery upon hearing the word “love,” another might be mentally directed toward erotica or intense romantic meaning. All of these are valid. I would like to deliberately hijack the word, though, in large part exactly BECAUSE it is so disparately charged. If anything, the coalescence of a common understanding for the word “love” in the context of Love-Rev-related conversations is, itself, symbolic of what the experiment is all about: namely, bringing wildly distinct backgrounds and ideas to a common table where we as a part of the same human family can enjoy one another’s company, recognize and support the things we share, and learn to respect the things we don’t. I’m convinced that when we see each other rightly, we will increasingly learn that our hopes, needs, fears, joys, and aching are more common than we might initially appreciate.
Having said this, I would like to direct the focus of the conversation to the emerging field of science known as “positive psychology.” Do not be deceived by the doleful sounding term. Far from a superficial “happy-ology,” the field of positive psychology is committed to rigorously and seriously investigating what it is about the experience of human life that produces the phenomenon of happiness. Short of spilling my guts to attempt a summary of the findings from the field, let me suggest that you investigate the website created by Marty Seligman, a major pioneer in this exciting field. The link to his site is:
Authentic happiness. At the end of the day, isn’t that what we are all seeking? Both for ourselves and for our loved ones? Beyond alleviating the suffering of others (a very necessary engagement), can we develop a set of skills and traits that will empower us to actually enable happiness in other human beings? Can we learn to include our un-loved ones in the group for whom we seek to enable authentic happiness? In essence, can we learn to become the type of human being who is both capable and inclined to create a radius of happiness in the world of people around them, regardless of the kin status, past experience, or potential for reward from those in our perimeters of influence?
Happiness is complex. But I believe that by understanding its nature and its roots, we will have a more secure anchor point for our work to include the entire human population in our circle of people for whom we wish this phenomenon of happy living.
This is the experiment—to see if we can truly understand the nature of happiness more comprehensively. Then, to challenge our own heart and emotion and psychology to reach beyond the realm of convenience and actively wish for this phenomenon of happiness to be a part of the lives of our fellow human beings.
Thoughts? Is it possible to define happiness? Is it possible to study happiness empirically, objectively, or even as a field of science at all? Are the root experiences of happiness so far different for every human and human population that any pursuit of this sort is doomed from the start to dissipate into vagueness, or to become so broad that it would become meaningless?
Hi guys. Welcome to the Love-Revolution blog, the interactive arm of www.love-rev.org. This will be a place online where the philosophy of the Love-Revolution will unfold in a dynamic process as people catch on to what’s happening and bring their own thought and energy to the table.
Love-Revolution is an experiment. It is an experiment to see if we can perform the internal alchemy to change our inner starting material into gold. It is also an experiment to see how far we can change the world around us to match the change that is taking place inside of us.
I’m excited about the blog taking shape and gradually building up a readership of “Rev-Heads” who get what we’re going for here. Love-Revolution is born on the premise that we, working together as a human family, have the raw ingenuity and the resources sufficient to tackle some of the most persistent problems in the world—from problems like disease, poverty and classism, environmental endangerment, to needs for diplomacy and peace. Just looking at the intense sophistication of our collective achievements as human beings, it is self-evident that we as a human species have the smarts and the goods that we need to make every one of these problem solving dreams become realities. We only lack the heart to do it.
Enter love into the picture.
Love-Revolution defines love as “a class of psychological and emotional dispositions characterized by dedication to the happiness of a person other than one’s own self.” With love—i.e., with positive regard and good will down in the bottom of your soul for another human being’s welfare and well-being—how could you not act in a way that would help the world become a better place? It will be in your nature. The efforts of Love-Revolution are going to be designed to help each of us to get that longing for the well-being of others down into the deepest parts of our hearts and psyches. If we can figure out a way—together—to make that change inside of ourselves, think of what change we can make happen in the world.
What do you think? Is it hypothetically possible for us to find a way to convert our hearts from dross into gold? Is this alchemy of disposition even theoretically plausible? Weigh in with your thoughts, and let’s begin to discuss the love.
Hi guys. Thanks for checking out the Love-Revolution’s “Project Heart” service forum. This is the first beta entry for the forum. Feel free to leave a comment for the group with suggestions, shout outs, or service opportunities you are participating in that others can join–all are welcome.
If you are going to post about an upcoming service opportunity in your area, please use the following format:
CITY
ADDRESS
DATE & TIME of event
DESCRIPTION of service
WHO TO CONTACT for more information
We’re excited about getting this effort underway. Keep visiting us over the next several months as we expand our web-based Love-Revolution applications. Finally, don’t hesitate to email us at info@love-rev.org for more information about how you can help to spread the love with the Revolution.
Two Love-Rev team members are leading exciting initiatives to help some of our brothers and sisters outside of the U.S. Rob, founder of OneSmallHouse.org, has partnered with a team of architects to create plans for building a hospice care center outside of Tijuana, Mexico. The project has just recently started, and the goal is to complete the care center by the first week of January, 2009. Rob will be giving us updates from the build site over the next several months, as well as letting us know how we can get involved and give the gift of dignified, sanitary healthcare conditions to chronically ill patients near Tijuana.
The other project that we will be documenting is an effort led by Scott, another member of the Love-Rev field team, to combat poor public health conditions in Africa. Scott will be relocating to Africa next month, where he will be working with several villages in Uganda to secure better health and a better life for the people there. Watch for updates from Scott, as well, as he shares with us what the fight for health looks like in Africa, and how we can help him in his efforts to make real impact against disease.
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