 The other thing that you really bring out in many of your writing is this need for humility, which I really applauded and this feeling that you have, which I keep coming back to, is this feeling of, and it's difficult to get into, get in touch with, is this feeling that I don't know, I really don't know. One of my questions though is, humility doesn't seem to be something one can do. You know, if people try to do it, it becomes a sort of weird inverted pride, and even a kind of power play when people try, you know, it's so often a kind of trick. And yet I think you're right about humility and not knowing. I wondered whether there's more you could say about how can we get into that place of humility and not knowing, because I do think we need more and more not knowing and more and more forgiving our sort of mutual sillinesses about thinking we know things. Yeah, that's a very astute question. It's true that when you pursue humility, usually you end up with a counterfeit that doesn't actually fool people who don't want to be fooled. It only fools yourself in the end. And then you emit what I've heard in Buddhism called the stink of enlightenment. So, yeah, you cannot achieve humility, which should make sense. You know, it's not something that you can achieve that that's actually not humble. It's something that happens as a result of seeing more and more of the reality of who you are and what the world is. It's just a result of seeing truth. And how do you see the truth. For me, usually it's when it's shown to me in ways that I can't ignore in ways that obliterate my defenses against it. What are my defenses against it they're the constructs of self. So, but it's not that you can't do anything. It also requires a willingness to see what's true and to hold that above anything else. And that is I think the foundation of Buddhist meditation practice where you sit down with a resolve to be in reality to observe what is humility comes from that. And it comes from that. It's not that in and of itself, but that resolve, that willingness. Then when things from beyond what you knew come into your view, you accept them, you don't resist them, even though they might disrupt, disturb and disrupt and dissolve precious identity. Precious stories and myths about what the world is. Like it's a, it's a, it's a letting go. I mean, somewhere I think you talk about really struck me is that sometimes a path to humility is humiliation. I don't mean being humiliated by someone in that kind of aggressive way. I mean the humiliations that life brings to you that shows you that you don't know that shows you that you were wrong and so on. I don't know whether you would agree with that. One of the past humiliation is humility is humiliation. That's, that's how it usually happens for me. And yeah, that's a point I'd like to make not only on a personal level but also on a cultural level. But everyone's experienced it like what exactly is humiliation. It's when a false image dissolves the image that you had exhibited to others. You know, here's me and then someone says, Hey, I just saw you, you know, when you thought no one was looking, I saw you, you know, stealing something or I saw you like, you know, and then that image that you may have believed in yourself, it dissolves and you're exposed. The fear of humiliation is really the fear of being fully seen for what you actually are. And it comes, it's powered to a large extent in this society by conditional, it's this unmet need for unconditional acceptance, unconditional love. It goes back to parenting styles where shame and conditional acceptance is leveraged to control children. This is a huge topic. But then on a cultural level also the story that Western civilization held of itself as being the pinnacle of human development charged with the sacred duty of bringing progress and development civilization to the benighted masses of Africa and Asia and so forth, like this white man's burden, like this whole story. I mean, you think the white man's burden is so 19th century, but it lives on today in the ideology of development and modernization and progress and the undeveloped countries and the developed countries, you know, and the World Bank, you know, and development loans, all this kind of stuff. It's like everyone's going to become like us. We represent the future. Others are not quite as far along toward becoming like us, but we're going to bring them there. That's what progress is. Like this mindset is still with us, but the humiliation is gathering because we can no longer say, look at the paradise that we've achieved. You so want to be like us. That that is falling apart. And it is humiliating. And it is my wish. Like I would even phrase it as a blessing. May we be thoroughly humiliated so that we may become open to solutions to our problems that are from outside of what we thought were the limits of the world, the limits of reality. Because actually all of our problems are easy to solve. But the solutions do not exist in official reality anymore. It's interesting, isn't it? Because humility, I mean, even personal humiliation is very painful. I don't know quite why it's interesting, isn't it? Why it's such a painful experience and people will almost go to absurd lengths. I say people, probably me. You know, we'll go to almost absurd lengths to avoid it and we'll harden up against it. Of course, the other possibility is a culture and we'll harden up against it and the individual will protect itself against it. I think again that can be part of the sort of I'm right, you're wrong, you know, that's happening so much in the world and creating so much polarization. How do we know how we're going to help ourselves and culture sort of face that sort of pain and see that as a positive thing? Yeah, so a lot of the polarization, the I'm right, you're wrong, we're good, they're bad. A lot of that is a result of the breakdown of the story of the people that gives us identity and meaning. When that breaks down, then you can get identity and meaning from your belonging to a political ingroup that identifies itself as the good guys and the others as the bad guys. That is a source of meaning. Conspiracy theories are another source of meaning. Oh, I know what's happening now. So a lot of this, both conspiracy theories and not to say that I don't want to dismiss everything that conspiracy theories say as well as just conspiracy theory because it's used now as a smear against anything that deviates from orthodoxy. Okay, but of course they're not all true either. So anyway, but just saying that that here is a way to gain a sense of identity and belonging. And it is so polarization and conspiracy theories, including rigid orthodoxy are all symptoms of a breakdown of meaning and collective identity. So to undo that. What you were saying is really relevant that like what makes this painful process bearable of humiliation. What and so if this rigid polarization is powered by a need for acceptance and belonging. We can undo it in even our individual interactions with people person to person on the internet whatever by extending unconditional love to these people to everybody to seeing each person not as a member of a category, especially a, you know, negative category. But as a divine soul that creates, and you know to actually see people like that. That makes them feel safe. And it meets the real need that underlies the political identification. And like, you can, you can try this in your next family gathering. How to translate that into political culture that's a much bigger question. You know it's not necessarily going out there and being really nice. But it is being respectful. It's to keep in mind that, no matter who's, you know, Twitter feed, or Facebook page you are commenting on that this is. This person is God in human form. This person is is the same as you are. It is life itself in a particular combination of circumstances. We are life, speaking to life, we are life, looking at life. We are life, you are life incarnate. I really love that. I think that what I feel strongly is that there is nothing higher than person. The person, you, Charles or I or anybody else, that's a miracle of life. I've been reading Marilyn Robinson, a great lover of her novels. She was saying that we've all got the most miraculous thing in the universe, the human mind. What I fear is a reducing of person to category. I'm a gay man, although I never use that language, but I don't want to be reduced to that. It's not my life. My life is bigger than any category and I want to be related to as a sort of sovereign individual. A bit like what you're saying about a sort of soul. Is that where you're sort of going with that? Full and complete individual. It's kind of mind blowing to actually see somebody and to realise that they are having a complete experience. There's a complete universe in there going on in their mind. I'm, to some extent, maybe a character in their all-encompassing drama. When I go there, then you become much less of just a character in my drama. You're an actual full subject looking out at me, having an experience that's every bit as visceral as my experience of you. Wow. That's simply the truth. In a modern society, we have massive training to deny that truth. Our economic lives are pretty much based on getting the best deal, avoiding getting taken advantage of. When you make a purchase, the training and the pressure, and this can be intense economic pressure, you don't think about which of these products was made with less exploitation of human beings. You might think about that, but you might not even be able to afford to think about that. You're certainly not encouraged to think about that because what you see on the screen is the price. You don't see anything else. This society, as we know it, runs on dehumanisation, putting people into categories of consumer, for example, not to mention racist and sexist categories. Dehumanisation runs the world as we know it. Not just dehumanisation, but the reduction of nature of non-human beings to less than full beings as well. Some people in a deep meditation experience or a psychedelic experience might have this knowing as well that beingness is not only in human beings, but we're in a world that is thick with beings, overflowing with beings, and with being. Therefore, we're not alone here. That's just another thing that struck me about your thought, is that there's this sort of deep vein of sort of animism. I think you want something more than mere appreciation of beauty and mere appreciation of nature. I think you want a sort of resonance, a kind of kinship, a sort of unity, which, again, is very relevant to Buddhism, really. My own teacher, Sanger, actually, he said that you can't really be a Buddhist at all unless you're first of all an animist. In other words, first of all you see the world as alive and conscious in some way that perhaps we can never explain. Or yes, ancient cultures, traditional cultures, many of which still exist on Earth, did not see and do not see human beings as the only conscious intelligences here. It's not to say that human consciousness is the same as the consciousness of a tree or a rock or a deer. It's not. But they are not fundamentally devoid of something that is the sole province of human beings. That has been an almost universal understanding among humanity that has only withered in the last few centuries. Over a couple of thousand years, this is a whole historical process that has to do with domestication and then Christianity and then science, like this progressive stripping of beingness from anything outside the human being. Christianity used to have all kinds of holy places and saints, and the divinity was quite diffuse. Over the centuries it became more and more concentrated. The division between the holy and the profane more and more rigid until holiness came to be only in God, Jesus and the Bible. And then science took it a step further and stripped holiness from everything. And then in typical fashion when the monster has devoured everything and then it turns on itself. And then human beings are stripped of beingness too and consciousness is reduced to neurochemistry and the random movement of, you know, atoms in a void. And that is a wellspring of despair that unconsciously colors anything from activism to the way we live our lives, like this little kernel of despair. Like this little grain of plutonium constantly irradiating the psychic body and generating one cancer after another after another. We need to extract that.