 So one of the concepts that I work with is that the world is built on stories or even a story, a mythology. Every culture has a mythology that answers the deep questions like who am I? What is a self? What's real? How does change happen? What's the nature of reality? What's what's possible? What's important in life? Every culture answers that in a different way? And the answers that our culture has that have guided, and when I say our culture, I mean the dominant culture of this planet, the answers that have worked and guided our culture for several hundred years now and to some extent thousands of years aren't working anymore. We're facing a crisis in our basic way of making meaning about the world and our understanding of the recipe for living life like all of these things are in a state of crisis. So we're entering a space between stories that creates the emptiness into which a new story can arise. I don't know if you've had this experience if you're an activist in some field or working to heal some aspect of society or the planet or even individuals and where you run into somebody else who's also devoted to this mission of healing in some completely other realm like maybe but you feel a sense of alliance anyway and you know that even though like I'm trying to free the orcas from aquariums and you are trying to end the prison industrial complex and somebody else is devoted to radical educational reform and another person is trying to save a wetlands from development and maybe another person is trying to restore the Maori language you sense that we're allies on the same thing now what is the same thing what ties all of these things pretty much anything that is alternative or holistic like what brings all these things together and one way I understand that is that we're all in service to the emergence of a new story on this earth the new story is the successor to the story that has guided us for so long the story of separation the story of separation gives a certain set of answers to the deep questions who am I what's real what's possible what's the role of humans on earth the story of separation essentially says that who you are is a separate individual among other separate individuals in this objective reality that has fundamentally nothing to do with you so different fields have a different conception of what the separate self looks like but they all share in common the underlying conception of separation so psychology might say well yeah you're essentially what you are as a mind kind of enclosed in a body religion would say you're a soul encased in flesh biology would say that you're basically a meat machine programmed by your genes to maximize reproductive self-interest economics says something quite similar that we're all driven to maximize rational self-interest so here we are these kind of bubbles of psychology bouncing around the world in competition fundamentally with other individuals because if I'm separate from you then more for you is less for me and the forces of nature outside of ourselves there there's no they are not intelligent they are not conscious in this story it's just a bunch of protons neutrons and electrons bouncing around out there according to mathematically determined forces so in order to be secure in order to thrive and enjoy well-being you have to on the one hand dominate the competing other separate selves and you have to insulate yourself from the forces of nature and become their master so that you're no longer at the whim of impersonal natural forces that are indifferent to human well-being you have to gain control over those so an underlying tendency in the story of separation is the will to control the will to dominate it's kind of baked into the cake it's not because like we're bad and we're dominators it's because of the story that we live in if you see the world as composed of separate competing others and if you see nature as this random melee of force and mass then of course you're going to want to dominate of course you're going to want to control so the history of civilization has been kind of like a history of an increasing power to dominate and control the other the cultural other and also the natural other and this was supposed to bring us into utopia it was supposed to we were supposed to live in paradise by now a paradise of electrified comfort robot servants space colonies artificial food infinite lifespans etc etc the breakdown that's happening today in part is happening because this glorious promise of technology and also social engineering was never fulfilled and in fact things are getting worse and worse and in fact our technologies of control now look to be ceding our destruction the breakdown of the ecological basis of civilization so we're entering now this time of of i call it the space between stories like we don't know anymore what the answer is we don't know who we are we don't even know what's real because on every level the story that answered those questions is breaking down politically economically and especially technologically and in our relationship to nature so that leaves us not knowing and it leaves us open to another story which is the new and ancient story of i used the word interbeing which i'm told was coined by tick not on interbeing is a very natural term it means more than interconnection or interdependency which kind of suggests separate selves having relationships interbeing is more of an understanding that we are relationship that my very existence depends or draws from or includes your existence so my my well-being is intimately connected to your well-being or to the well-being of the river the ocean the forest people across the world and so forth because i'm not really separate from you and that means that in the story of interbeing i know that that whatever i do to the world will come back to me somehow and it's impossible to build a high enough wall or a strong enough surveillance system to keep out whatever violence is happening somewhere else this is something that my country i'm an american doesn't seem to understand you know we think that if we bomb and drone the terrorists and and visit wars upon other countries that the violence can be kept out of our country if we have strong enough anti immigration policies and you know full spectrum dominance and global information surveillance and all this kind of stuff that we can keep the violence out but it's obviously not true i mean look at the levels of domestic violence of crime of gun violence and even inside our homes the levels of domestic violence are an exact mirror to the violence that's happening outside of ourselves and in the mentality of interbeing this isn't because we just haven't controlled it enough it isn't because we need to do even more of of the you know apply even more control to the other it's because fundamentally it is inescapable what happens to the world happens to the self because self and world are not really separate so that's the story of interbeing another important piece of it is the understanding that the qualities of a self intelligence consciousness subjectivity beingness sentience these are not only in human beings but they are universal indigenous people always whatever the differences in their world stories they in common shared the belief that other beings were in fact beings that it wasn't absurd to say what does the river want what does the mountain think what does the the deer want what is it like to be a forest these were not absurd questions but they lived in a community of being even down to the not just plants and animals but even things like rocks or the wind or clouds they were understood to be beings as well the story of separation says that beingness is only in human beings and the world outside of our stuff is just outside of ourselves is just a bunch of stuff so the the story of interbeing animates pretty much everything that you're making this film about everything that from from on a social level things like restorative justice or or you know alternative gift based ways of meeting human needs time banking for example to on the agricultural level or the ecological level anything that says that the way that we treat the soil the way that we treat nature the way that we treat the rivers the way that we treat other people that is going to benefit ourselves as well and it's not out of this calculating mindset that okay we better respect the river so that we'll be okay too that's still kind of an instrumental utilitarian mindset of the world is here for our benefit it's more like the relationship between a parent and a child the parent doesn't say oh i better take good care of my son because then when i'm in my old age my son will take care of me it's not that calculating mindset it's because the parent the the the self of the parent expands to include the son that's called love love is the expansion of self to include another so his happiness is my happiness i have four sons his happiness is my happiness his suffering is my suffering it's the truth the future of humanity is to return to that relationship to nature and to all beings and all human beings too to fall in love with the world its well-being is my well-being it's also true on a practical level practically speaking and this is being discovered by regenerative agriculture practically speaking when you do respect and honor and serve the soil then you get higher crop yields so it's not just like some spiritual principle but it pervades every level of interaction but the basis of it ultimately has to be love love for the soil love for the other people love for the world that's what unifies so many of the things that you're making this documentary about and this this is why we feel that sense of alliance even when it's hard rationally to connect what these two things have in common you know prison reform and uh stopping fracking something like that like why are those two related we understand that they are the reason that they are is that they both draw from and contribute to the new mythology the new story of interbeing