 The opioid addiction, the school shootings, the dronings, the prison industrial complex, the rising number of homeless and the one crisis after another. And it's like, for a while, you might kind of run with your fire hose trying to put out one fire in another and another. And at some point you burn out and you maybe stop caring where you care, but it's like, I'm not gonna let myself care too much because I can't do anything about it. So to realize that actually, like imagine like there was an underground, like sometimes these old coal mines, you know, where there's a fire underneath and imagine like that's where we are. And a fire breaks out here and it breaks out there and you're running with your fire hose, but if you don't find a way to put out the coal fire underneath, then you're gonna keep getting eruptions of these fires. And I think that's kind of the situation that we're in right now. We have school shooting here and some other atrocity there and sex trafficking, human trafficking thing here. And like we need to understand that all of these are outgrowths of the deep system and story and the mythology that we live in, which isn't to say that, oh, do nothing about it if something comes into your radar, it comes intersects with your life because after all it's coming from something so deep, et cetera, et cetera, no. But it means to be aware of these multiple levels and to act on multiple levels at once. So perhaps what you're confronting is sexual harassment and maybe that's like really come up for you in your life or in your workplace or something like that. And you're like, yeah, I'm gonna do something about this. Well, to be aware of the multiple levels and ask questions like, what is this a symptom of? Why are, what happened to these men that turned them into somebody instead of wanting to cherish and protect and hold women so precious and sacred, instead to dominate and abuse them? What has to happen to that man? And what is the psychic field, the field of perception and thought that makes the abuse of another person even thinkable? Well, you might go to, that's a natural consequence of objectification. When you see a person as an object, then of course, why not exploit them for your own gratification? Because they're not a full self like I am. Like we have no compunctions about, exploiting that cushion there to sit on to make ourselves more comfortable. We don't see that cushion as something that's gonna get hurt by sitting on it. And properly so, the cushion probably likes being sit on if it has likes. So if you see a human being as an object and not as a full self or a full being, then why wouldn't you just sit on her or do whatever to her for like, why not? So here's a deeper cause, maybe a root cause. It's called dehumanization or objectification. So if you wanna change that to be aware that that is the field from which sexism, racism, sexual harassment, that's the field from which these behaviors spring. So if you try to fight them using the tools of dehumanization, you're gonna strengthen that field. So one tool of dehumanization would be to demonize the men who are doing this. To say, yeah, they're just bad. They're just brutes, not like me. That's the essence of it is othering. Not like me, not as much of a full self with the full complement of conscious and awareness and intelligence. They're dulled, they're less than. That is dehumanization. So racism is the dehumanization of people of other skin colors, making them less than fully human. And the response, if it's the dehumanization of white supremacists, then you're contributing to that field, which doesn't mean to ignore it or to let it slide. It means to hold that consciousness in your response so that, yeah, maybe you do need to address the symptom. Symptoms can kill, but to do so in a way that also addresses the cause. That's where the story of interbeing takes us. Because it says, you're not different from me. Yeah, you're different, but on some level, I know that if I were in your circumstances, subject to your entire history, your genetic history even, because trauma gets woven into the genetics. It gets woven into the DNA and can be inherited. There's science around this now. Yeah, if I were in that situation, I might do what you're doing. So the question becomes, how do I change the situation? That's compassion. What is your situation? It starts with a curiosity. Without that curiosity, then your only option is to fight if you're just bad. The only solution is to defeat you, to dominate you. So we then want to be practiced and equipped for domination because we're the good guys. It's okay if we dominate the bad guys. Everyone thinks we're the good guys. Just go to the comments section of any right wing or left wing website. And you strip away the opinions and it's all, we're team good, fighting team evil. How could they? Everyone's in agreement about the wrong thing. The new question isn't, which side are you on? The new question is, what is it like to be you?