Taking Love Seriously: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Say About Interconnectedness with John Churchill

**John Churchill** (0:00)
Our culture is suffering from a lack of developmental education. We need to learn how to calm down and structure our nervous system, and there's a bunch of practices for that. But we also need to learn to shift our identity, to start operating from a deeper level of identity. So the wisdom side of it is recognizing that. And then the love part of that is the experience of the intimacy and the tenderness of knowing that you are non-dual with the whole of reality. So the developmental journey, that is a deepening of the wisdom of the perspective taking that deepens the experience of love.

**Nate Hagens** (0:39)
You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.
Today, I'm pleased to welcome clinical psychologist and meditation practitioner John Churchill for a winding conversation through foundational concepts in both Eastern and Western wisdom traditions and the light they shine on how we might attempt to develop as individuals and as a culture. John is a founding member of the Integral Institute, a non-profit organization that brings together experts, educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to explore and deliberate more sustainable paths for humanity. He began his in-depth study of Buddhist psychology during his time as a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland. He later spent 15 years training and teaching in Great Seal Seal Meditation in an Indo-Tibetan Mahayana lineage. Additionally, John has received advanced training in attachment therapy, hypnosis, positive psychology for peak performance, and how I found out about him, the pointing out style of Mahamudra meditation. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from William James College and is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In this conversation, John and I work our way through the seven stages of psychological and contemplative maturity that both individuals and cultures work through in our relationship to the living world. We touch on topics such as love wisdom, non-duality, metacognition, and why it's important to understand the difference between peak states and truly embodied stages of deeper development.
This was a truly non-linear conversation, and I will admit I didn't fully understand everything John said, but I still walked away with the sense, this is an important exploration of the meditative technologies that we're going to need during the coming decades. I'm still learning, I'm still curious about all this. I hope you enjoy and learn some things. With that, please welcome John Churchill.
John Churchill, welcome to the program.

**John Churchill** (3:30)
Thank you, Nate. It's good to be here.

**Nate Hagens** (3:32)
Where to start? You have spent decades bridging the ancient contemplative teachings of Tibetan Buddhism with modern Western psychology and adult development theory. You have synthesized all this in your book, Becoming Buddha, Buddhist Contemplative Psychology in a Western Context. You've also served several years as a Buddhist monk, and you have a doctorate in psychology.
I'm not exactly sure where to start with your background, but I'm going to ask a random question. At least two of my friends, when I told them I would be interviewing you, told me that you originated, or at least from their perspective, the phrase, the next Buddha is a Sangha. I don't know if that's true or not, if that's your quote. But maybe you could just define what does that even mean? Because I have heard that quote a lot.

**John Churchill** (4:37)
Yeah, I don't think that was my quote. That was Thich Nhat Hanh, who is a Zen Master. But if we look at all these contemplative traditions with their sophisticated psychotechnologies of development, the next step in the evolution of those traditions and the next step in our cultural evolution is a new cultural level of development. So, what it means when the next Buddha is the Sangha is that the delivery system, the delivery mechanism of these teachings needs to be transformed in such a way that what we are focusing on is not developing individuals, but developing communities and that the model of development is a group model of unfolding, a cultural model that leads to, let's say, a new platform, a new cultural stage of development upon which a lot of other things can be built.
So, the new Buddha is the Sangha is saying like the new, the next stage of human development is deeply communal.

**Nate Hagens** (5:59)
So, the next Buddha is a trillionaire, that's the wrong direction probably.

**John Churchill** (6:04)
I think so, I think so.