 You've probably had those moments of despair where you think it's just hopeless, and the world is always going to be this way, and anything we do is not enough, but there's also, and I would say that this is maybe more of a heart-knowing that understands that a more beautiful world is possible. We get glimpses of it sometimes in moments of deep intimacy with a person or with nature, moments of cooperation, that effortless flow. Maybe you've had a time where everyone just came together with their gifts and was completely selfless, and the right person came at just the right time and did just the right thing, and you had this feeling like the world could be built on this. Or maybe you've experienced a miraculous healing or a miraculous synchronicity or something like that, an experience that you could not explain, but that was really beautiful to you, and that gave you a hint of a reality and a realm of possibility that was much bigger than what we grew up being told was real and possible. So you have these experiences, and you recognize them as real and not as some bait-and-switch tactic from God to trick you into thinking that a more beautiful world is possible, but you recognize it as kind of a promise, the glimpse of a future possibility that it feels real to you and therefore you can bow into its service. Even if your rational mind says, well, how could that possibly ever happen on a large scale on earth? That was just some peak experience or some anomaly, but could we really build a world on that? The rational mind cannot see a path from A to B. That's because the rational mind, for most people in our society, is fully steeped in the logic of separation. Part of the logic of separation includes a theory of change that tells us how change happens in the world. You have to exert a force on reality, on a mass. So the more force you have at your disposal, the more powerful you are to change the world. That's a recipe for despair because the world right now is governed by the people who have most of the force, most of the guns, most of the money, the concentrated media and so forth. If it comes to a contest of force, it is hopeless. And for the mind that is accustomed to thinking in linear causality, force-based causality, it is a hopeless situation. But these experiences that we have say, yeah, but it's still possible. And sometimes they suggest that the world doesn't work the way that we've been told. That things can happen that are beyond our understanding, beyond the understanding of the linear force-based mind of separation. In other words, you could say that the despair comes from the same place that the crisis comes from. The despair buys into the causality of separation and the crises also come from separation. The ecological crisis comes from treating the earth as an other, as just a bunch of stuff. If we really were in love with the planet and incorporated that love into all of our systems, into our money system, we would not have an ecological crisis. For example, if pollution was extremely expensive because we honor the earth so much and we know that there's such a high price to be paid for even cutting down trees or putting pollution out there so that we would only do that for a really, really important thing, then we would not have pollution, not very much of it. So it's not just like changing our attitudes. It's also incorporating that change into systems, especially the financial system. The experiences that I've been talking about aren't just kind of personal revelations. They also include maybe coming across some amazing permaculture project and it just makes you feel alive and makes you feel excited about the future. Like, yeah, we could do it like this. So I'm not saying that everything that makes you excited is going to be part of the story of interbeing. You have to look inside and be present to what it is calling forth from you. Is it calling on your ambition or is it calling on your love? I think that anything calling on our love, anything that enlivens us because it serves the well-being of those we love and expands our own circle of love. Something like that is going to be drawing from the story of interbeing because that story really is a story of love. It's an expansion of the self to include the other. That's what love is. When you fall in love with somebody, their happiness is your happiness. You are no longer just a separate self. You are a lover. You are a couple. You are a family. You are a tribe. You are a community. And when we expand that to include natural beings, then we are part of the tribe of all life on earth. So anything that awakens that and confirms that and strengthens that in ourselves, that is a guide or a pointer or a technology of reunion. Reunion with those cast off other parts of ourselves.