Welcome to the Peace Table
The Peace Table is a space for people who seek an enlightened conversational space, one concerned with the future of our children and our planet. It is here for those who want grounded, serious, and accessible discussions about Human Potential, Human Development, Healing, Actualization, and the practical work of building Eupyschia—a healed world that works for everyone. If you are working to move past Toxic Socialization and contribute to something better, you are in the right place.
This is a list of readings that pertain to the question, "What is Human Nature". If you have questions or want to discuss, start a new thread with the title of the reading you want to discuss
Rogers, C. R. (1957). A note on the "nature of man." Journal of Counseling Psychology, 4(3), 199–203.
This article by Carl Rogers discusses his view of human nature, empirically grounded in his experiences as a therapist and humanistic psychologist. For Rogers, individuals are "a basically trustworthy member of the human species, whose deepest characteristics tend toward development, differentiation, cooperative relationships; whose life tends fundamentally
to move from dependence to independence; whose impulses tend naturally to harmonize into a complex and changing pattern of self-regulation; whose total character is such as to tend to preserve and enhance himself and his species, and perhaps to move it toward its further evolution." (p. 24)
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Tucker, J. B. (2005). Life before life: A scientific investigation of children’s memories of previous lives. St. Martin’s Press.
Stevenson’s successor at the University of Virginia offers a readable synthesis of more than forty years of case research for a general audience. Tucker presents representative cases in detail—including American cases, which undermine the objection that the phenomenon occurs only in reincarnation-believing cultures—and summarizes the database’s recurring patterns: the young age of onset, the high proportion of cases involving violent death, the fading of memories by middle childhood, and the concordance of birthmarks with verified wounds. The book’s distinctive contribution is theoretical: Tucker engages materialist objections directly and argues that the accumulated data are best accommodated within a framework in which consciousness can exist independently of the brain, sketching parallels with the nonlocal character of quantum phenomena. Life before life thus functions as the contemporary bridge between the case literature and the philosophy-of-mind debates treated in the final section of this bibliography.