David DeSteno

And so that's the danger.

I worry that people are going to move into a too much individualized sense of spirituality.

There are benefits to private practices, but there are benefits to community too.

And that's going to be the difficult needle to thread, I think, as people move forward.

That's the thing, you know, people don't realize this, most people don't realize this, that Buddhism originally, meditation was done in a sangha, which is in a community.

But now we're all sitting home with our little mindfulness apps, listening to them.

And, you know, does it help?

Yes.

And so, but it's not the same.

And so, you know, what I always tell people is we have to be careful when we try to extract from these traditions certain parts of them, like take meditation and make it entirely secular.

things can go wrong.

They might not work as well.

Sometimes they actually warp.

I mean,

There are people I know in Silicon Valley, a spouse of a friend of mine, who will say things like, yeah, I'm really into mindfulness and meditating.

And there's this great new app because I can compare how much meditating I'm doing to my friend and see if I can beat him.

And I'm like, no, that's not what it's about.

No, you know, I mean, and that's an example of the kind of the optimizing or gamification culture we're in.

And when people ask me sometimes, since I run this show and wrote this book, How God Works, they often say, so Dave, what's the common element of all these faiths?

I say, well, one common element that they all say is, it's not all about you.