- [Announcer] Generous support for the following program provided by the Bible Family Fund of the Denver Foundation and the O'Bannon Foundation, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation.

(soft jaunty string music) - [Judy] As an 88-year resident of planet Earth, I'm constantly amazed by the infinite variety of activity I see going on around me, the complexity of it all, the way it all works together.

Every animal, every vegetable, every mineral, every solid, liquid, and gas, each its own unique contribution, just like us, to the bigger picture, the vast, infinite, interdependent, interconnected web of all creation.

I admit it's a lot for me to process, more than I can handle on my own, which is why I reached out to these people.

- I exist because you exist.

- Some of my most thoughtful and most thought provoking fellow Hoosiers to help me sort it all out.

- I see this connectedness in my community where pieces fit together.

- You know, if we kind of allow science to inform our social understanding and whatnot, it's that we really are connected.

(bright upbeat music) - [Judy] If there really is a true back and forth connection between everything and everyone, what does it mean?

How does it affect, or maybe how should it affect, the way we live our lives, how we think and feel and believe and behave?

Good questions in search of good answers, which I hope we can get a little closer to as we explore the connections that exist between you and me, everyone and everything everywhere.

(singer sings in foreign language) We begin today with David Sasso, a man who may appear to lead a double life.

- Well, my name's David Sasso.

I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist and also a musician.

(singer sings in foreign language) I think the idea that we are all connected comes to me from two strands, both from my experience as a musician and as a psychiatrist.

As a psychiatrist, I know that we as human beings are built through connections.

Our bodies work because our cells communicate one to the other through hormones and chemicals.

We think, we experience things, we learn things because we have individual neurons that are individual entities, and they send messages one to the other, creating circuits, and so we are built as connection machines.

I also think that in my work as a psychiatrist from a psychological perspective, we develop connections from the very first moments of our lives.

When we are born, we see the world as if we are one with it.

There's no connection because we are the whole thing.

When we are hungry, we cry, and suddenly, food magically appears, and when we are uncomfortable, we fuss, and suddenly, if all goes well, the discomfort disappears.

But as we develop, we begin to learn that there are boundaries between who we are and who other people are in the world, other objects in the world.

We learn that we can't just wish something and have it happen, and you can only create connection when there is a difference between two objects.

So once we begin to learn that there are caregivers and then concentric circles of other people around us that are in the world and we learn that there are objects in the world that we can act upon and they can affect us, that is the essence of what early development is.

And when it goes well, you develop a sense of self esteem and self worth because you have had that early experience of a positive sense of that oneness that turns into a sense of connection.

When it doesn't go well, that sense of connection can get disruptive.

We all know that when there are early problems with abuse or neglect or trauma, that that sense of safety that comes from those early connections can have really disastrous consequences on a sense of individuality, on the relationships that we create in our lives.

♪ Dreamers say, will you dream for me ♪ So in addition to being a psychiatrist, I am a musician.

- [Judy] That's putting in mildly.

Not only is David a multi-multi-instrumentalist, he's also a singer and a composer of everything from ballads to bluegrass, from coral to chamber, to orchestral works.

And in 2003, his opera, "The Trio of Minuet," had its premiere not only before a live audience but also nationwide on television through PBS.

- When people are creating music together, there is something that fits for me in a way that I don't experience in other realms.

There's also a way in which if the communication and trust occurs between the musicians and the audience, it's not just on stage, even if it's a solo performer.

There's a sense of a pact of communication and trust between the performer and the audience, such that the performer provides the expertise, the study, the practice, and the audience provides the careful listening, and in that interaction, those two things fit together to create often something beautiful.

And I believe the same thing happens in good psychotherapy where a patient who wants help comes in and decides as best as they can that they're going to speak openly.

But they can only do that because they know that there's someone there who is providing a space in which there is trust and confidentiality, all of the boundaries that are necessary for one to speak openly, and in that communication and trust, those two things fit together, and that's where good healing can occur.

(audience cheers and applauds) - [Judy] David's own childhood and adolescence were given special shape and meaning, thanks, at least in part, to his mom and dad and the somewhat distinctive nature of their matrimonial situation.

- So my parents are both rabbis.

They are in fact the first married rabbinical couple in Jewish history, in world history, and growing up as the child of two rabbis, people often ask, "What's that like?"

And that's a hard question to answer because I really don't have anything to compare it with.

But what I do know is that the sense of community that came from attending services regularly, learning about our particular tradition and history, our rituals, our literature, no matter what one ends up believing in terms of theology, that sense of community is something that fosters connection.

- [Judy] Back for a moment to David as a psychiatrist.

- I believe that human beings are connection seeking machines, connection creating creatures.

We look for connections everywhere we go, and I'll leave it to the philosophers to tell us whether those connections are really there, but from a human experience, much of what we do as human beings is seek connection.

When we do seek connection and it leads to relationships that are satisfying in our lives, when it leads to healing in medicine or in psychotherapy, or in just interpersonal relationships, and when it leads to beauty in art or music, that's a great side effect of this capacity that we have to seek connection.

- [Judy] We'll return to David Sasso in a few minutes, (bell dings) (Vimal sings indistinctly) but right now I'd like you to meet Dr. Vimal Patel.

Dr. Patel has lived in Indiana for more than 50 years, distinguishing himself as a teacher and researcher of integrative medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

For Dr. Patel, the idea that everything is connected is nothing new.

It's been a guiding principle of his Hindu faith and culture for thousands of years.

- From medical perspective, our interconnectedness is so obvious that just giving one example, for example, is the fact that when we look at our human body, we think the body composed of all the cells, but there are more foreign cells in our body than the human cells.

And the other cells that are keeping ourselves in a kind of living way or balance of these foreign cells versus our human cells is the fact that if we didn't have those cells, for example, bacteria, fungi, parasites, and all the other so-called viruses and so on, there is a very direct and delicate balance between the cells of these foreign origin and our own cells.

So therefore, we have a mechanism we call immunity.

So the whole idea of becoming physically in a good health requires us to keep everything in balance.

The balance comes from creating a situation where all of us can exist in interconnected but in a balanced way so that our health, physical health is maintained.

So it is not the saying that Africans had discovered over thousands and thousands of years that I exist because you exist.

So my existence on this planet earth not only depend on what I do but what everything else does.

So if you don't behave properly and don't care for the all other beings, not only you are destroying your own health, but you're also destroying the health of all other beings.

So this interconnectedness is very crucial.

Our education system is failing us because we are not educating people to understand our relationship, our interconnectedness with all life forms.

Not only all life forms but all insentient being, so called insentient being, they themselves also play a role in our survival.

If there are no mountains or no rivers and no hills and so on, our rain pattern will change.

See, our health is not simply physical health, but my emotional health, my spiritual health, my mental health, my ecological health, they're all connected, they're interconnected.

And when I take care of my fundamental issue of my being good, all the other things will follow.

So it's a saying goes, right?

If I want to have a flourishing tree, then I don't water the leaves, but I water the roots.

So watering the roots is changing the way we teach our future generation what it is to be human.

We are lacking the necessary elements of creating good human being, a leader, a governance.

They are all dependent on this courage of a person, the goodness of a person, the kindness of a person.

The spiritual health means how do I connect with my deepest level of my existence?

Say, because I know when I say, "This is my body," I know that is not me.

See, when I say "my body," it is not Vimal Patel.

It just simply that physical structure.

Anything you can say, this is mine, my mind, my health, my emotion, my spirituality, that is not you.

There is something deeper than all the definition we define ourselves with.

It's you.

What is that connecting thread that is true for me, true for you, true for him, true for him is a principle we called either you could call it soul or consciousness, awareness principle.

You are aware of not only yourself, but you are aware of me, aware of this earth that we are standing on.

We have the ability, human has the ability to see things both in the past in now and in the future.

No other animal system has.

- [Judy] No, and would you call that a consciousness?

- Yes.

yes.

That is the principle that is the same principle that dwell through me, that connects you, me, and everybody else.

So that principle, so that, now that you ask, so we have, what do you think the purpose of life ought to be?

It's to become one with the entire cosmos, and that is where interconnectedness means.

(soft ethereal music) - [Judy] Now let's spend a little time with a couple of gentlemen who spend a lot of their time looking up.

Brian Murphy, director of Holcomb Observatory and professor of physics and astronomy at Butler University, and Fritz Kleinhans, retired professor at IUPUI who taught physics and astronomy for 35 years.

We joined Fritz and Brian in Butler's astronomy lab.

- This was taken with our telescope in the Canary Islands, and so if we zoom in here closely, you can see that we have a lot of these bluish color stars in there, and those are our horizontal branch stars.

They're the ones that have helium core fusion going on.

(soft atmospheric music) - We followed them into Butler's Planetarium.

(people speak indistinctly on recording) We took a tour with them of Butler's Holcomb Observatory.

Then we settled down for a nice long chat out in front on the lawn.

What is it about science that shows us a connectedness of all things?

I hesitate to even say all living things, all things.

What is it about science?

- I think that the laws of physics are the same in Europe and Asia as they are here.

They may have a different political system, but apples still fall when you drop 'em out of a tree wherever you are, so we're all studying the same thing.

People have discovered there's a number of constants in nature, like what is the strength of gravity and what is the strength of attraction between an electron and proton?

It turns out that those basic constants in nature have to be fairly carefully tuned, or we wouldn't have stars and planets and people.

And so our universe is nicely tuned so that electrons and protons can get together to form atoms, and atoms can form molecules, and those things can then form more complex things like a blade of grass or a human being.

It's just like physics.

The same rules apply everywhere for apples falling and the moon going around the earth, and the same biological principles apply to that grass and my leg.

- Astrology was sort of, in a way, our first science, the study of the stars.

Back then, we thought it was due to beings or something moving the cosmos or they were gods themselves.

As time went on, particularly the Greeks, the ancient Greeks were the first to really try to use natural explanations to explain the cosmos.

That's why we focus in on them, people like Copernicus, Aristarchus, and then it wasn't until the 1600s that we got to modern science where Fritz already said, we created universal laws of motion of gravity, which means they apply throughout the universe.

In other words, the heavens are no more different than here.

- We're all familiar with the common constellations in the sky like Orion or Taurus the bull.

What's been fascinating to discover, the Big Dipper, which is also known as the Great Bear, the Great Bear was known to the Europeans.

Most European societies believed that that pattern of stars represented a bear.

When the Europeans came to America, they were stunned to discover that many American tribes, many Native Americans also believed that that pattern of stars represented a Great Bear.

And so now the question comes, how did this primitive knowledge diffuse around the world before we have any evidence of trade?

And so it's fascinating that many ancient societies had similar myths and similar patterns they saw in the sky, even though there's no evidence that we have of prior communication between those societies.

It's a fascinating little mystery that showed the world was more connected long ago than we understand.

- One of the most awe inspiring and making you think is when you get into the field of cosmology, the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of the universe.

That's where students really start to ponder the universe is what I think, 'cause they ponder how it started.

When we say we are looking at this galaxy, for instance, 13 billion years away, light years from us, it's not there now.

It might be 45 billion light years away from us, and it's moving near the speed of light, and they learn how vast the universe is and how we can start making predictions, and that's the thing where they just think, "Wow, what's gonna happen to the universe?"

- It's part of what makes astronomy a fascinating topic for people to study because astronomy tries to answer the question, "Where did we come from?

How did the universe begin, and what's gonna be the future?

What will the universe be like in 50 billion years?

Will it still be here?

Will it be toast?"

And the Big Bang is our best answer to the question, "How did we begin?"

- We are literally living in a giant explosion is what it is.

That's what the big bang is.

And what's most amazing, all this stuff around us that we call the earth, what we perceive as the universe, that's just a minority of the universe.

We're made of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

What you see around you, Fritz here, protons, neutrons and electrons, - Nothing to 'em.

- but the universe is made of something we don't know exactly what it is, dark matter, and that's one of the biggest problems in astrophysics and physics today, understanding that makeup of the universe.

We know dark matter's there.

All our physical laws tell us there.

We just don't know what it is.

- I think Carl Sagan's discussion about the little blue dot, and, of course he, somebody, I'm not sure who it was, said, "Let's use one of our spacecraft to look back at the earth from far away," and in that picture, the earth is literally just a little tiny speck in the picture, and Sagan took that picture and said, "There's a philosophical message for us here.

All of the earth, look at it.

It's just that little tiny speck."

He meant to say exactly what we're talking about here today.

Connectedness, all of that conflict and biology and climate change, everything is happening in that little speck.

We better take care of that little speck.

I think we should honor all living things.

People who think that man is special and different than a dog or a cat, you know, doesn't matter as much.

I subscribe to the view that we really need to honor all life, that, if we do that, we'll take better care of ourselves.

- Well, what is it about everything that you need to honor it?

- The fact that all living life is valuable and should be respected.

- Carl Sagan said, "We are star stuff," because when our universe first formed, the only two elements that basically existed, hydrogen and helium.

To get the elements we need, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, you had to create stars.

We're star stuff from, you know, four and a half billion years ago when a supernova went off in our part of the galaxy and caused our solar systems to start forming.

We have some of the atoms from that supernova within us and some of previous generations of stars.

So we are all from the stars.

All this material around us was pretty much once inside of a star.

- [Judy] We're all connected because we all emerge from the same original celestial stuff, ("Stuff of Stars") which brings us back to David Sasso, who actually wrote a whole song about it.

♪ We are made of star stuff ♪ ♪ It's in your skin, it's in my bones ♪ ♪ In our hopes ♪ - A number of years ago, I was on a first date, and it was going pretty well, and I noticed on her ankle, there was a small tattoo, and it said, "We are made of star stuff."

And I came to learn that that quote was important to her mother who had passed away a few years before, and I had known that famous quote of Carl Sagan, which obviously is about connection, that every atom in the world is connected to every other one, and that inspired me.

So I went home and started writing a song with that as the first line.

So "We are made of star stuff.

It's in your skin, it's in my bones, it's in our hopes and our stories of all the truths and the unknowns."

♪ Molecules of stolen dreams ♪ ♪ The atoms in your angel's wings ♪ ♪ From ancient weary star-crossed beams ♪ ♪ Star stuff rides our breath and sings ♪ And I recorded a little demo of that song, and probably foolishly, probably against what any dating columnist would suggest, I played this demo of the song for her on our second date, and then, five years later, I played it for her at the reception for our wedding.

♪ Bright harbor ♪ ♪ Stuff of stars, we're not alone ♪ (soft pleasant piano music) The realization that we are all connected in some way makes me a little worried because of the way in which we can sometimes take that to places that are not accurate about the world around us, but it also makes me more than worried, hopeful, because it means that we can find points of contact with other people, with the world around us, through our curiosity and through our desire to make these connections, to meet other people where they are, even if, at first, they appear different.

The most different person in the world that you can possibly meet you can still find points of contact because of this way in which we as human beings seek connection, and as long as we follow that, I think there's hope for our species.

(singer sings in foreign language) - Ever since childhood, when faced with the mysteries of life, I found inspiration in the familiar quote, "The answer, my friend, is in the stars."

We've just witnessed Fritz Kleinhans and Brian Murphy, two astronomers explaining their personal witnessing of clues to life derived from visual trips into the celestial skies, and Dr. David Sasso, with musical sounds, has shown us that we are all made of star stuff.

("Stuff of Stars") Dr. Vimal Patel gave us insights into the philosophy that supports visual and audio findings.

We are all part of one complex web.

Look around you.

Signs are everywhere.

Those sounds from outer space are letting us realize that it is no silly saying.

You have connections in high places.

I'm Judy O'Bannon.

Thanks for watching.

(singer sings in foreign language) - [Announcer] Generous support provided by the Bible Family Fund of the Denver Foundation and the O'Bannon Foundation, a fund of the Indianapolis Foundation.