This Helped Me Respect My Past, with Andy Puddicombe

Headspace Studios. Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday morning. So a few days back, I was going through some old photos. I have a box, I was born in a time of an age where I actually have real photos like not on my phone, but printed out from another time mostly from when I was sort of growing up. But I have a few photos from when I was away training to be a monk, and one of them was taken in a place called Ulander University. It's a university sort of thousands of years old and if you go there, it's really extraordinary, actually. It's mostly remains now, but there's still something really grand about it. You can only imagine what it would've been like that long ago. And as you look at sort of pictures of it of how it would've looked once upon a time and as you read the kind of things that were going on there, the conversations that were being had, the debates that were being had, the philosophy that was being explored, you start to see that, wow, like thousands of years ago, this stuff was going on and I feel like more often than not, there is a tendency to think that just because we are the most recent, we feel like we're perhaps the most advanced and we don't really pay due respect, whether it's tradition, whether it's lineage, whether it's history, however we like to think about it. There are cultures that exist and that have existed that have over thousands of years, sometimes over tens of thousands of years, have created an environment which is harmonious, harmonious in nature amongst themselves, harmonious in nature in relation to the world. And yet somehow that seems to have sort of dissipated. Whether it's been squashed or pushed out or ignored, of course you'll find the odd quote or two on Instagram. In fact, I feel like now, people just take those quotes from ancient cultures and find an appropriate background. Maybe it's a rainbow or something and all of a sudden, okay well that'll look nice on Instagram. And when you really look at that quote and you dig into it and you see where it's come from, and you understand that that has been passed down through many generations, in many ways, it is a refinement of clarity. It's a refinement of wisdom through lived experience, not an idea of philosophy, but a direct experience. And it's through understanding those cultures better that we can live like a happier life. Why would we ignore thousands of years of understanding of direct experience? And this came up. So as I was looking through these photos, I was having a conversation with a friend and he was talking about a project he's working on. And it's this idea that in many cultures, especially sort of more ancient cultures, there's not so much a focus on...