 What we take for the reality outside of ourselves is actually or can be understood as a story that we're telling ourselves about who we are and how the world works and what life is and where we came from and what the purpose of life is and where we're going, how to be human, how to be a man, how to be a woman. Like these things that we take for reality are actually a mythology, actually a story that we tell ourselves. So we live in a civilization that gives us answers to the questions like who am I and all these questions I just named. Who am I? How does the world work? What's important? What's valuable? And the answer basically has been, and this is a gross simplification, but it's been who you are is an individual. Like here I am, you know, here's my body, here's my head, my brain, my thoughts. That's who I am and there's you and you and you, other people out there, other separate individuals. In a world that's also separate from ourselves. Therefore, my wellbeing depends on my ability to overcome my competitors, to dominate my competitors because more for you is less for me. There's a finite world outside of ourselves. We're in competition with each other in this story. And this world out there, it's just a bunch of stuff in this story. It's a bunch of natural forces, the laws of physics, electrons, protons, neutrons. It's a bunch of stuff out there. And my wellbeing then, and it doesn't have any intelligence or order. It's not a self like I am, it's just stuff. So my wellbeing in this story and the wellbeing of humanity in general depends on insulating ourselves from the vagaries of these natural forces to bring nature under control, to rise above it. That is understood as the direction of civilization toward more and more control, more and more domination on a personal level too. The more that I can control inner nature or dominate inner nature, overcome my desires, overcome the body, enter the realm of the mind or the spirit, then I'm progressing too. So that's kind of the deep level of the story. And then on top of that, we have the stories that we call law, the story that we call money, the stories that we call government, like all of these common agreements that in various ways, even things like medicine, education, agriculture, they are expressions of the deep mythology. So money, for example, it is a manifestation of the idea of separation. More for you is less for me. We're in competition with each other. The money system generates competition and individualism and also growth, the increasing domination of the world. It's conversion into property, into something that we can own, starting with maybe objects and then land and then even to the cultural realm, intellectual property, everything, more and more things become part of the human realm. So it's consistent with the mythology of humanity rising into overlordship. So that's kind of like the conceptual layer. And I think today, but maybe even always, we're naturally uncomfortable with that answer, with the answer of who are you? You're this skin encapsulated soul contained in a genetically programmed meat machine walking around, maximizing reproductive self-interest, like in a world that is composed of atoms and void. And you yourself are composed of atoms and void and everything that makes life beautiful and human, that's kind of an illusion. Love is a biochemical cascade. Belief is a pattern of brain waves, all this stuff. You're nothing but protons and neutrons and electrons in some different configuration. Like this has been a profoundly disturbing idea that we rebel against intuitively. Even the most rationalistic, cynical, atheistic people, I get the feeling that they kind of want to be proven wrong and they're afraid of, at the same time, they're afraid of being proven wrong because what if I do believe that there's more to life and to being than a random chemical melee of force and mass? Like what if I believe that and I'm wrong and my belief gets betrayed? So it's a little safer to be an observer, a little safer to pull back into this kind of amused, bemused cynicism that doesn't really care too much about anything. It's a defense mechanism. So I would like to say that I've fully rejected the story of separation, but you know, it was my birth religion. I was born, I grew up as an atheist believing in the religion of our time, which is the religion of science. And if you don't think that's a religion, just look at how similar it is to many other religions, especially Catholicism. But it starts with unquestioned metaphysical principles, such as objectivity, such as the repeatability of experiments, such as that the asking of a question through experiment doesn't change the reality that you are testing. Like those are untestable metaphysical assumptions that science just takes for granted. And then of course it has a priesthood. It has esoteric texts written in a language that is inaccessible to the lay person. It has a system for indoctrinating youth. It has heretics. It has true believers. It has evangelists who convert the masses to science. It has gizms. It has a system of ethics, how to live life. It has an origin story, a creation story called the Big Bang. Anyway, I could go on and on. But so I grew up in my birth religion, the religion of scientific rationalism. So even though on an intellectual level, I understand the limitations of that worldview. It still inhabits me very deeply. And influences my relationships, influences the way I see the world. On a deep level, I really, like part of me at least, let me just say this, part of me believes that what I do in the world, it doesn't matter unless somebody's watching, unless I can make something out of it. Unless there's, like if I give something, part of me believes that it's just a sheer loss, unless I can somehow contrive to get even more in return. And I kind of see other people that way too. So meeting a new person, my conditioned impulse is to think, what can I get out of you? Well, what are you trying to get out of me? To see you as a competitor? Rather than in a different story, we might meet a new person and think, what gift do you bring? What are we meant to serve together? What am I meant to give to you? What am I meant to receive from you? What is our right relationship? Like these are natural questions when we no longer see ourselves as fundamentally separate from each other. When I understand that anything that happens to you in some way is gonna happen to me also, that anything that we do to the world we're gonna be facing the consequences of in some sense doing it to ourselves. That anything that I judge you for is gonna be an echo of something in myself. That your well-being is connected to my well-being just like in an ecosystem where you can't say that if we just eliminated all those bugs, then the trees who do a lot better. I mean, people actually used to think that. They used to think, well, everything's in competition with everything else. So if you eliminate the competitors, then the rest will do much better. That's a natural way to think in the mindset of separation where we're all in competition. But when we understand ecology, that the strength of the whole depends on the strength of the parts, that everything contributes a necessary gift toward the well-being of the whole, and then we apply that to the social ecology. We apply that to each other. Then we understand like, yeah, competition is actually a special case. It's not that there's no competition, but it's part of a much larger fabric. And we no longer need to default to that when we relate to another person. And we can ask these other questions. Like maybe, you know, you're not my competitor. Maybe you're my symbiotic species, you know? Maybe you're my collaborator. Depends, what do you serve? What do I serve? That way of seeing each other is much more natural in a community because in a community, as opposed to a money economy, your needs are met through gift. And the more you give, the more generous you are, the more people want to give to you also. And if you grow up in a traditional community in an old culture, then you'll see that your whole life. You'll see that the generous person, the one who gives away everything that he can, is the one who's most respected and most cared for. It's not like you give everything away and then you won't be able to pay the nursing home bills in your old age. No, you'll be taken care of by everybody. And if you see that day in and day out, then you're going to be effortlessly generous, effortlessly compassionate, and spirituality becomes no longer such a struggle, the struggle to be good, which is another dimension of the conquest of the self. We've set it up that way. We've set up conditions that program us, you could say, to be selfish. But actually, maybe this is a little bit of an exaggeration, but all of the vices and personal flaws that we levy judgment on others about, these are all symptoms of a deeper condition, symptoms of the story that we live in, symptoms of the system that we live in that is built on the story. So you plunge somebody into a doggy dog money economy where you've got to go to work doing something that you don't even fully believe in just in order to make a living. And where everyone's always trying to take advantage of you, yeah, you're gonna start being acting selfish.