In the current issue (May2015) of The
Atlantic, Sam Kean delves into the current research on altruism.
It appears that our pleasure centers are stimulated when we give.
I'm not a generous person – I tend to
hold onto what I have pretty tightly. But there came a day in 1982
when I encountered a beggar in the financial district of San
Francisco. Suddenly I had the urge to give him something.I pondered
this unusual feeling, unable to determine where it might have come
from, but finally decided to give him just a quarter. Maybe I'd find
out, in the giving, where the urge came from.
I did. Suddenly I was thrust below the
level of ordinary consciousness, to a realm where the beggar's “thank
you” seemed to come from me or through me rather than from the
outside. I wrote of this encounter to my first spiritual teacher, in
Japan. “You are the beggar,” he wrote back. Indeed.
So I wonder now about this research
Kean explores. The possibility of going beyond the separate self into
another realm where giver and receiver are not separate doesn't occur
to any of the researchers into altruism – nor to author Kean. But
because the initial urge when I saw the beggar seemed to be an
altruistic one, I have to wonder what changes in the brain when we go
to that place where we know unity with another.
