Intergenerational Awakening To Our Innate Goodness

There's another point that you made though, which I feel obligated to comment on.  Just about your own history, And you know, the history of any family is gonna be fraught with a lot of complexity, and there's trauma in so many different places. And you're absolutely right. I mean, there's a huge amount of really good neuroscientific evidence on this now that there is a reality of the intergenerational transmission of trauma.

There's also a reality of the intergenerational transmission of resilience. Of the intergenerational transmission of awakening. Because the very same mechanisms that are responsible for trauma, as we said before, are also responsible for wellbeing and for flourishing. And so we can harness those mechanisms. And people will start off at different baselines because of their trauma history.

But every human being has innately the capacity for these qualities. And in fact, you know, I talk about the fact that we are born to be kind.  And to some people that may sound nuts in the kind of world in which we live, but the data are very clear. If you look in young infants and you look at their propensity for warm-hearted, pro-social interactions compared to interactions that are selfish and aggressive, the data are very clear.

And it's not like 55% of infants prefer the pro-social and 45% prefer the other. It's like 95. Depending on the study, it's between 90 and a 100 percent. This is something that we come into the world with. And so when we sit down or more actively meditate and cultivate these qualities, we're not  cultivating them from scratch.

We're not trying to create something.  de-novo, but rather we are familiarizing ourselves with the basic nature of our own minds.

Some more useful extracts -- 

Meditation and the science of how our genes are regulated

Not only does meditation change the brain, but it may also alter how our genes are expressed. For the most part, the genes we’re born with are the genes we’ll have our entire lives, but the extent to which each is expressed can change. This is called epigenetics, and it affects not only you, but your descendants. 

“Very recent research indicates these epigenetic changes can actually be transmitted across at least a couple of generations. Now, some of you have heard about the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which certainly occurs. And epigenetics is in part a mechanism responsible for that, and there’s good scientific evidence to show that. I’d like to invite you to consider the possibility of the epigenetic transmission of awakening. Same mechanism - very different outcome. But all of the data suggest that it’s possible.”

The basic goodness of human beings

Among the more controversial scientific breakthroughs is the idea that every human being is born with an innate, basic goodness. Studies show that before the age of 3, when implicit bias starts to take hold, we choose prosocial, kind and compassionate interactions over selfish or aggressive ones. Enhancing these good qualities through meditation, then, is not about creating something new, but about nurturing the basic nature of our mind and familiarizing ourselves with who we really are.

“A combination of mindfulness and connection practices, loving-kindness and compassion practices, together are particularly effective in reducing implicit bias. [...] We have a moral obligation to provide skills to our children to resist the devastating impact of certain messages that they get from media and other sources that inculcate these biases. And these biases, by the way, are also at the root of the achievement gap in the United States.”