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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Steve Taylor.

Good morning.

Ten years ago, in a London street, a cyclist was trapped under the wheel of a double decker bus. A crowd of around 100 people gathered together, and in an amazing act of coordinated altruism, lifted the bus, so that the man could be freed.

Emergencies and crises, feature these acts of heroism. A few years ago, a friend of mine was waiting for a train, when a woman standing next to him on the platform had a seizure, and fell down onto the track. My friend suddenly found himself on the track, picking her up, and lifting her to safety, with the help of another man on the platform. ‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he told me. ‘It just seemed to be the right thing to do.’

In my role as a psychologist, I have studied terrorist attacks from around the world, I have found that in every case, there were people who were willing to risk their own lives, to save others. It's significant that these acts of heroism, are always spontaneous. People act on impulse, without any conscious deliberation. To me, this suggests that there is a deep altruism inside human beings. If we are basically selfish, as some scientists and philosophers suggest, why would we be willing to risk our lives to save others? Perhaps it’s because we are not basically selfish. Or as I have put it poetically:

We’re not machines full of selfish genes, who are always scheming to outdo each other, and only ever show kindness, if there’s some benefit to ourselves.
We feel compassion because we’re connected.
We sense each other’s suffering, because we share each other’s being.
We risk our lives for others, because there is only one life.
We help and heal and love each other, because we are each other.

Blessings.