 The story is part of a larger being, that includes many levels, including a feeling level. Because so someone might have a very paranoid story of the world, or a very judgmental story of the world and other people, but then they have a healing experience, they have an experience of safety, and beliefs about the world that had seemed so logical and compelling before, now they no longer seem that way and new beliefs are available. So yeah, the story can be almost a symptom of something deeper, but it also can be a cause. I don't think we can, especially on a collective level, the way that we interpret events is part of how we make our personal and collective choices. So really though, it's not so much okay, I'm going to impose a new story on the world, and simply it's intellectual coherency and beauty is going to make everybody change their mind. Now it's part of a bigger change, it's speaking to a readiness for that story. And the readiness comes through all kinds of processes, all kinds of healing processes. But it's also a landmark moment, it's not just a symptom, it's also a choice too, like at some point we come to a readiness, am I ready to step into the state of being of which that story is a part. The story itself can be a trauma, you know, the thing to tell us about ourselves, especially if it's coming from an authority figure, like the apparent or a parentalized figure, like that can be traumatic, you know, the story, especially when it's backed up with emotion and backed up with power, like the story is important too. Yeah. No, definitely, definitely. Yeah, lovely, like when we see it as a whole physical, emotional, mental experience of ourselves and the world. So when you spoke, you also speak about the normalized trauma. Can you say a few words, what do you mean? Yeah, there are some experiences that we would all agree are traumatic experiences of abuse, for example, or abandonment. Well, abuse and abandonment have a more muted form or a more dilute form that is so ubiquitous in our society that we take it as normal. We take trauma as normal. I would include in that birth trauma, not only the biological trauma, which I mean trauma is not necessarily a bad thing. It's one of the ways that an organism grows. So in addition to the normal biological trauma of birth, there's also the trauma of, in many cases, being taken away from your mother and put in isolation under bright lights, where the trauma of, if you're a man, being mutilated on the most sensitive part of your body without anesthesia, which is how it used to be done. The trauma of not being held all the time when your nervous system needs that. And then when you get older, there's the trauma of being taken out of your familiar environment and cast among a bunch of strangers when you're four or five years old or three or two years old. And then getting moved again and again from one daycare center to another, where the bonds that you have begun to make and the familiarity gets cut, gets severed. And here's a new one and a new one and a new one. The trauma of being shamed and yelled at by the person who you are biologically programmed to trust the most and to see as the universe speaking to you. Like all of these things, even just the ways that we talk to children, things like, you should be ashamed of yourself or why did you do that or what's wrong with you? Like those kinds of outbursts are traumas. Even the trauma of being indoors all the time and not receiving the infinity of stimulation of many, many varieties that a human is supposed to have through interactions with nature. And eventually, maybe we don't want to use the word trauma for these things. It's a useful lens to help understand our development and who we are in this world. But it's not always the right lens to use. But a lot of the effects of these experiences are very similar to the effects of trauma. So trauma of our social, political, scientific, intellectual authorities telling us things that on some level we know are not true. That the result of that is a cut off just as acute trauma, acute physical trauma causes a cut off until it's integrated and healed. It causes a cut off from some of our feeling body. This repeated cognitive dissonance between what we're being told by authority who are supposed to respect and what we know to be true also causes a cut off that leaves some of our mental and emotional faculties unavailable to us. And disables our critical thinking and our independence and our sovereignty. This cults, one way that they control their members is through, by traumatizing them. And then we probably know a lot more about how that works than I do. But it creates dependency and destroys one's ability to, as you were saying, self-regulate or to have full access to one's power. And so to the extent that this has happened universally in our civilization, people are left very dependent on, so one way maybe that it happens is when we are traumatized as children and then as citizens by the conditional approval or rejection of authority. I mean, that's very traumatic for a child to be rejected by the parent. It's a form of abandonment really, which is the biggest trauma probably for at least any mammal or a bird that's kicked out of its nest, you know, falls out of its nest. I mean, that's the biggest trauma there is. So this isn't new information to you, but parents can control their children by invoking that trauma through punishment and praise even. So once someone has been living with that fear, they're easy to control, at least for a while. Eventually they rebel against this life and death control because really that's what it is. It's a threat to your life when you're a young mammal. And even for a mature human being, we know that the worst punishment in ancient times was not execution, it was ostracism. It was to be rejected by the community. So we have this trauma that is, it starts in childhood and then it's reinforced continually and yeah, it makes us either we knuckle under to authority, as you were saying, or we reflexively rebel and defy authority and both responses actually make us easier to control. Then there's also the cutoff from the meeting of our human needs for identity and connection and belonging. The cutoff from these needs is itself traumatic and as I was saying before with not being in nature, for example, or not being allowed to make lasting ties, probably just because of the modern economy and how many people live in their extended family. So that is itself traumatic and then it engenders further trauma. So this cutoff leaves us hungry for those unmet needs that we are economically, socially and psychologically unable to meet for ourselves, like maybe we've never had practice in forming lasting ties and negotiating complex relationships. So that hunger for connection, belonging and identity can then get channeled onto consumerism or political affiliation where that need to connect to or any other addiction really, but the need to connect, the need to belong, the need for the kind of security that comes from safety. If you don't have that security, that basic experiential security, how much money do you need to actually feel safe? How big of a wall or a fence do you need? How many surveillance cameras do you need? How many authorities keeping you safe do you need? Like you're going to be attracted to fascism and to authoritarianism and to the totalitarian parent state that is providing what you never had, what has been taken away from you and then now it's dangled in front of you forever. So these are some of the ways that trauma makes us politically manipulable and also psychologically.