Across cultures and centuries, in traditions that never spoke to one another, a strikingly similar claim keeps surfacing: that it is in the present moment we find the truth, wisdom, and peace we seek.
But these traditions go a step further, one that’s perhaps less acknowledged and understood: that the very ground of existence is not neutral, not hostile, not indifferent — but innately nourishing, innately good; that goodness is the very fabric of the universe.
In the Tao Te Ching, the Tao is described again and again in exactly this language. “It nourishes and completes all things,” Lao Tzu writes. “All things arise from Tao. They are nourished… developed, cared for, sheltered, comforted.”
In the Hindu Vedantic tradition, the ultimate reality, Brahman, is described as sat-chit-ananda — existence, consciousness, and bliss. Ananda isn’t something Brahman produces or grants. It’s what Brahman is, at its root — a fullness that lacks nothing, present everywhere, in everyone, all the time.
Mahayana Buddhism speaks about buddha-nature. Every being, the tradition holds, already carries within it the seed of full awakening — unconditioned, boundless, and, in the words used to describe it, nurturing and sustaining. It doesn’t need to be earned or built. It only needs to be uncovered or revealed.
Among the Lakota people, this same intuition takes the form of Wakan Tanka. The nineteenth-century Lakota chief Luther Standing Bear described it as a great unifying life force that flowed in and through all things and was the same force breathed into the first human.
Some call this God. Some call it Spirit, the Tao, Brahman, buddha-nature, the Great Mystery.
The name doesn’t really matter. What matters is the shared claim underneath all of them: that existence is fundamentally nourishing, that everything is connected to that nourishment at its root, and that we are part of that connection — not isolated, not separate, not depleted, not alone, no matter what we do wrong, no matter what happens next.
And that this is good. This is goodness.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Antihero’s Journey: From Burnout to Real Contribution in Polycrisis Times. To read other excerpts, go here.
