 Say that you have learned ecological restoration techniques and you found a piece of land that you love and it has a damaged stream that's been confined in concrete and you tear down the concrete and you rediscover its old meanders and you create water retention areas and you're restoring this beautiful, beautiful creek and you know that as the water slows down and is no longer channeled that it will carry less sediment into the salmon runs in the water side below it and and like you feel really great about this you're like yeah I am in relationship to a being that I love this land this this water but then some doubt comes into your mind you read the headlines about climate change or whatever else and you're like none of this matters because in the face of this gigantic problem what good is it to take care of just one little creek and maybe I should you know not spend so much time on that and really like write a blog or make a film or or you know fundraise to lobby congress to have legislation that will save all the creeks like maybe I should do that so hopefully you won't listen to that voice to the extent that you'll abandon your little creek because isn't one of the reasons why the world is in the state that it is because everybody mortgages what is really pulling at their heart for the sake of something abstract for the thing that they think that they have to do for the numbers to work out to suppress the care because the numbers the the the metrics the the rational plan demands that you pay attention to this other thing so okay but isn't it true that taking care of one little creek isn't going to change the world in the theory of change that we've inherited yes it's true it's true that nothing you do matters because you're just one little person and what is no matter what you do unless you have tons of money and a big platform or lots of force at your disposal you can't do very much can you that view that theory of it's based on a theory of change that is Newtonian it says that something in the world changes when you push it when you exert a force on it and if you exert a little force you make a tiny little change if you exert a big force you make a big change so in order to be a worthwhile person you have to leverage your force somehow for example through money or through your project going viral or scaling up then it matters but not otherwise so if you believe that okay for one thing you're subscribing to an obsolete physics now probably most physicists would not yet say that this is obsolete but i'm not going to actually go into the scientific argument around this but i will invoke rupert sheldrake who articulated a theory that he calls morphic resonance which is really a it's a beautiful example of what i mean by interbeing morphic resonance says that any change that happens in one place will create a field of change or strengthen a field of change that allows the same change to happen somewhere else so any act of service to a stream or service to the soil will create a field that brings more acts of service to the soil around the world now it may happen that way because you happened to film it on youtube and people got inspired by it and yeah you can explain how this thing created a field of change but it doesn't depend on that this principle goes beneath the vector that happens to operate to bring this change to other people it works even if what you're doing seems completely invisible if you are holding the hand of somebody on their deathbed and there's a moment of forgiveness and it feels like that was the most important thing in the world that could be happening right now that intuition is true and even though you walk out of that room and your mother's dead now still something momentous has happened you have added to the field of forgiveness no act is wasted this is a different theory of change it doesn't mean that you purposely refrain from publicizing your work but it means that you trust the opportunities to do so when they come and if they come one way to one way I try to explain it is okay say who's the most important person in the history of South Africa well Nelson Mandela and he certainly did big things and he was the the most prominent spokesperson for the ANC and then he was the president of South Africa and his if it weren't for him the country may have descended into bloodshed and right but was actually the most important person in the history of South Africa and Nelson Mandela or was it maybe his grandmother now I actually don't know his biography but I could easily imagine like what made him into the person that he was it might have been a special grandmother who who imparted knowledge and experiences to him that bloomed into maturity when he was in prison and if it weren't for that grandmother he might have just been another warrior so maybe it was the grandmother how do you know what the most important act is that you could do on a two-year timescale those invisible acts of compassion are not important but on a 500-year timescale they can send ripples of change out into the future that might be much bigger than whatever the movers and shakers are doing the movers and shakers they make big waves on the surface of the ocean but they don't change the deep currents all of us have an equal power to change the deep currents because every act matters so yeah I'm skeptical sometimes of the impulse to value something or to engineer scalability into it from the very start you know here we are recording we're filming this I don't know what to call it interview with the idea that it'll be a more powerful impact on the world if we film it and make it available for people to watch online but that may not be true it might actually have been more powerful if we had just had a conversation me and the few people in the room here who knows if if we had had a conversation with no camera eye looking at us what conversation would we have had what impact would that have had on the four four or five of us in this room that would bloom forth in generations to come maybe because it would have influenced the way that we treat our children or the way that we treat some other person in our lives and that influences something else and something else I don't know the world might be better off if these cameras are not actually working I don't know all I know is to trust what is called forth from me at any time that is my job and that's everyone's job to ask what is mine to do right now what am I to say and we have an internal guidance system that can bring us to the right action and the right speech and it's a guidance system that we are not really in the habit of listening to in fact we've been trained to override it to not listen to it so to recover it maybe take some time and some practice to recover trust in your desires because you're not bad in the story of separation you're bad your desire is to maximize your own interest but in the story of interbeing your basic nature is that you want to give you're part of a larger whole you want to exercise your function you want to exercise your purpose in the story of separation you don't even have a purpose you're just a flesh robot but in the story of interbeing you're here for a purpose because there is an intelligence outside of the self outside of the human human being the qualities of a self pervade the world consciousness intelligence intention agency subjectivity sentience all things all things have these qualities in very different forms human consciousness is very different from the consciousness of a turtle or a rock and the consciousness of the planet of the cosmos is also different but it's there so we are woven into this larger intelligence we we we know that we have our role and our place in the tapestry so our deepest desire is to fulfill that and what what is that like sometimes it makes sense given whatever you think you know about climate change or social change sometimes it makes sense yes my purpose is in alignment with the way i think the world works the purpose that it's calling to me through my care sometimes though it does not make sense given everything you think you know sometimes it the call is towards something that that how could that possibly make a difference in the grand scheme of things to make this meal tonight as beautiful as i can to take care of this puppy like how's that going to do any good just another mouth to feed so so yeah our our habit of quantifying things of rationalizing things that can get in the way that can obscure or or um deaden the guidance system that we're born into that aligns care and purpose in the larger emergence of this this world which is now going through a transition into a new story and i believe that in each of us in our unique way in this time are called well maybe not everybody the old story is not quite done yet maybe your your destiny and your purpose is to take that old story to its final extreme and that's what excites you to push it to its to the end like if that's you then i'm i have nothing to say i'm not going to say you should change your story like only you know that you'll come to that if that is in your destiny but a lot of people probably most people who are listening to this probably your destiny and your purpose is in some way to contribute to the new and ancient story that i'm calling interbeing to serve that in some way that may make sense to your rational mind but may not the call might be to just be a beautiful parent to bring these principles to raise children in a way that doesn't rely on shaming and and conditional approval and control and hovering and what's wrong with you and why did you do that to like even just raise one family in that way is a huge accomplishment even if you pass on 10 less of the programming that you received you don't have to be perfect but even to pass on a little less of it that's an immense accomplishment to pass on a little less of the trauma if that happens every generation in 500 years the world will be very very different and the people of that time will thank you your it will thank their ancestors for having done this hard thing at the turning point when there was no assurance that they were doing any good at all when they were facing despair talking about us here our descendants are rooting for us wishing us strength to do the things that don't make sense to us that don't make sense to our mind that makes sense to our heart the heart is unaffected by the rationality that has a sacrifice the compassionate thing right in front of our face so because our minds are very deeply steeped in the ideology of separation they are very often in conflict with the heart and so we get people saying you know people devaluing the mind and saying we should listen to our heart instead and maybe that is a good antidote to the malady of our time but ultimately what we want is for heart and mind to be aligned and that happens the more that your mind can adopt the logic of interbeing the more aligned it will be with your heart the less conflict there will be the less irrational those choices to be at the bedside of a dying person to be there for a friend to take care of that little creek will seem they won't see me irrational anymore now this is something that's very hard to do under your own power fortunately we have allies to remind us that it's not actually irrational it's just irrational according to an obsolete logic but it makes total sense because i'm doing it too in whatever way i can but i'm afraid to do it in the next way there's a step that i want to take now but i'm afraid to take it and i'm not ready to take it but i see it i know it's coming i know what i'm going to have to do i'm not ready to do it how do i become ready again not something that you can achieve by yourself the way you come ready you come ready is with help from the people who see that it is the rational and it actually is the rational next step to understand that it's a necessity for your development that you'll be okay and can hold that knowledge i mean really a lot of it is i mean for me at least and for so many people who i talk to it's it's it's like kind of the social climate it's like well yeah i do know that it's the right thing but but aren't am i just being naive am i just being impractical but sometimes yeah sometimes you are being impractical i'm not saying like to ignore the facts on the ground and do something that see there here's the difference if you if you have like this this like secret knowledge that i'm just doing this for show i know it's not going to work then you're probably engaging in some exercise of vanity of futility of martyrdom but often it's not that voice often it is a doubt that is coming from outside coming from the society that we grew up in that assaults you it's impractical it's unrealistic it's idealistic it's naive and you know it's not true and then that voice maybe takes the form of a parent or somebody or a friend and says well how are you going to actually do that that plan doesn't make sense where are you going to get the money to get the land where are you going to do this how are you going to do that like how are people how no one's going to believe you no one's going to join in how are you going to know how are you going to pay people to do it volunteers no one's going to do that like what they are what they're doing is defending they're the immune system of the old story they're defending the status quo against a threat if it is is and often that assault comes from a secret longing to be doing that themselves and they're basically assuring themselves or consoling themselves yeah they're consoling themselves for not doing it you know it's like i wish i was doing this thing and here's why it's okay that i'm not and then projecting those reasons on to onto you here's why you shouldn't be doing it so and maybe it takes some practice to distinguish what is somebody pointing out your blind spot and what is somebody preventing you or trying to stop you from entering the place that they wish that they could enter i cannot offer a formula to distinguish but knowing that there are these two different things might bring awareness to it and you might develop your own ways to distinguish what's coming from a legitimate intuition about a blind spot and what is just an assault the old story grabbing at your ankles