 In the earlier session, a question came up when Matthew was talking about all the things that are happening here from where all of the things that the Edmund Hillary Foundation are supporting and referencing the social entrepreneurs and non-profit people in this room. And the question kind of came up, well, what is this stuff, I mean, all the stuff sounds nice, you know, restorative justice, regenerative agriculture, impact investing, social enterprise, ecological healing, et cetera, et cetera, it all sounds quite nice. But what do these things all have to do with each other, except that they're all kind of like in the category of a good thing. So I'd like to actually speak to that a little bit. What unifies all of these areas of activism and why is it that when you, even if you are passionate about composting toilets, why is it when you meet somebody whose passion is reforming the prisons or saving the whales, why is it that you recognize immediately that this person is an ally? And the way I look at it is that we are all serving the same thing. The emergence of what I call a new and ancient story. And that we're all part of a transition from the old story, the story of separation into a new story, which is also an ancient story, the story of interbeing. So whereas separation understands, it's our mythology, our meaning, the dominant culture. It understands life and self and the world in a certain way as understanding us as separate individuals in a world of other as these kind of bubbles of psychology bouncing around in an alien universe of generic particles and deterministic forces that must be overcome in order to have a good life. While being in that old story comes through the domination and control of the other. The competing other beings out there or the random forces of nature. So the old story looks at human civilization as this kind of triumphalist progression from a state of primitive superstition to a state of scientific knowledge and technological power over reality. And that story says, but says it not very convincingly anymore, not compared to 50 years ago says that someday our triumph will be complete. And we will not even need nature anymore because we will have devised technological substitutes thanks to the miracle of whatever the steam engine or, well, that didn't quite work. So maybe it was electricity. And while that didn't quite bring about paradise either. So maybe it's nanotechnology or genetic engineering that's going to be the final frontier. New frontiers is about a very different kind of frontier that recognizes the limitations and even the futility of this story that's bringing us not to paradise. But as Matthew mentioned in some of those slides, bringing us to helplessness, bringing us to the decay, the degeneration of the ecological basis of life on Earth. Bringing us to a place of, wow, maybe we didn't understand how to do all of this. Maybe we don't know. Sending us therefore into a space between stories, as I like to call it, where that story of separation doesn't work anymore. Where we see that it's brought about crisis that cannot be solved from that story could be on a personal level where the story of how to be human, how to have a life, how to have a marriage, how to take care of your health, how to engage the world of work. You had a formula to do that. You followed it maybe very dutifully. You went to the doctor for your annual checkup and then you got sick. And the arsenal of modern medicine couldn't help you. And perhaps that was your initiatory experience into a new story, where, well, first a space between stories where you're like, I don't know what to do. And then you start in that empty space, then a new story can emerge. So everyone enters this in a different way. And our civilization as a whole is also entering a space between stories. And one thing I appreciate about New Frontiers is that it's not an attempt to push the existing frontier a little farther. One thing that, you know, like these Silicon Valley guys, like I kind of know the typical Silicon Valley mindset. It's another version of Masters of the Universe. We know how to do this. We can do anything, anywhere, because we have the technology. We have the know-how. But the founders of this project are coming to it with an understanding of the limitations of that way of approaching the world, and therefore a kind of humility that recognizes we don't know and we're willing to learn. Another thing that Matthew mentioned that I feel is a very important aspect of this transition, in his answer to the last question, he said that it all comes from an understanding that life itself is a gift, which is different from the story of separation attitude toward the world and nature as something that we extract from with force. But other cultures really understood that the world and our lives are a gift. That we didn't earn this planet. It wasn't through our hard efforts that we created water. We didn't earn the sun. We didn't earn our breath. We didn't earn our mothers taking care of us. Recognizing that brings about gratitude, because if you know that you've been so richly gifted, then you feel grateful, gratitude being the desire to give in turn. And that leads to a view of life, not as a headlong competition to maximize self-interest, but as a journey of the gift to discover what is it that I'm here to do? Am I a gift to the world? How can I give forward from this rich gift that I've received? And that is what unites so much of what the people in this room are doing in whatever social enterprise or nonprofit, or it might be just very humble work with your hands. That unites what we're all doing, I mean maybe you're a healer, maybe you're a farmer, maybe you're working with composting toilets. But all of these things are based on the spirit of the gift, because you're not asking how can I take the most. You're asking what is the best way that I can enrich, regenerate, and heal the world around me. Because in a new story, see in the story of interbeing, using Tick-Not-Hahn's word for it, in the story of interbeing, that's not an act of self-sacrifice, because we understand that we're not actually separate individuals in a world of other. But that we are the holographic mirror of all that is. That anything that happens in the world is happening to us. That anything we do, we ultimately do to ourselves that the consequences of what we do are inescapable. That no wall or fortress or security fence or surveillance system or attack drone system can keep out what is happening to all beings in this world. Therefore, your well-being depends on the well-being of all. So your service to the other is also a service to self. The division between the heart and the mind disappears in the logic of interbeing. And that is one of the aspects of the reunion that we are approaching. So that might be a bit theoretical. I don't know, I know a lot of people here are very hands-on. But I wanted to give this kind of a big-scale picture to what's going on here, why we feel so united. One thing that I was, so okay, I'm going to also relate this a little bit to the ceremony that we experienced this morning, which I deeply appreciated because sometimes at these things, like a lot of times now, it's become fashionable to begin your conference or something like that with, you know, you trot in the North America, you trot in a few Native Americans, and they do some invocation of the four elements, thank you very much, and then they get sent out, and it just reeks of tokenism. But this felt, it felt sincere. And I felt, like I felt really welcomed. And during the short break after that, I heard Diti, hope I'm trying to pronounce that right, Diti talked about, he was speaking very passionately about the importance of learning the Maori language. And the mind of separation says, well, why is that really so important? You know, I mean, given all that's happening on this planet, given climate change, given that we might not even survive the next 20 years if you believe some of the more alarmist scientists, isn't it kind of a waste of time to devote? I had this conversation with a leading environmentalist in the States. He's like, Charles, someday you're gonna have to decide if you're gonna be relevant. Because I've been talking to him about my passions, about some of the things I'm interested in. Yeah, I'm interested in climate change, and I'm also interested in restoring the sacred aspect of the masculine. And I'm also interested in restorative justice and restorative circles. And I'm also interested in various kinds of holistic medicine and the intelligence of water and plant communication and pan subjective metaphysics, you know, and all these other things. And he's like, you know, that's all very nice, but come on. None of that is gonna matter when the sea levels rise 30 meters. None of that's gonna matter when the temperature rises 10 degrees. Like you got to put that off and deal with what's important here. It's a call to arms, a call to hear is the enemy right now. And I tried to communicate to him that that mentality is actually part of the problem. That the habit of the problem solving strategy of first find an enemy and then go to war against that enemy is the same psychic energy as the war against nature, the treating of all of the world as an enemy or a competitor. And that the solutions that come from that contribute to the ground conditions that give rise to the problem to begin with that climate change or global warming is kind of a symptomatic fever of something else in my research into climate change. I've discovered that we have under emphasized the importance of local ecosystems to maintain global equilibrium and that and instead put all of the emphasis and identified green as being related to carbon made that the enemy and invoked kind of a war mentality against that enemy that lends itself to global solutions and empowers global institutions. But in fact the capacity of intact healthy ecosystems to absorb carbon even if you do want to look at it in the car through the carbon lens even that way the capacity of intact ecosystems to absorb carbon is much greater than anyone had imagined. And that if we had if we had planet wide healthy forests, healthy mangrove swamps, healthy sea grass, healthy peat bogs like all of these ecosystems, we could handle a lot of emissions without a problem. But instead these are being degraded everywhere. Which means that even if we cut carbon emissions to zero the planet would still die because it would be like like you're degrading all of your tissues and organs all the time and and suffering fevers and someone says well the room is too warm let's turn down the temperature in the room that's the problem but the problem is much deeper than that and it is unavoidably local because there is no blanket recipe for how to take care of your local places the land that you live on. That knowledge is fundamentally local and it requires a political shift and a conceptual shift that re-empowers the local which takes me back to the Maori language because language is more than just a an arbitrary system of representational signs that could be replaced with some other arbitrary system of representation of representational signs. Language is intimately related to the land itself and the way and this is what I was getting when I heard the the speakers doing the welcoming dialogue at the beginning I'm like there is power encoded in these words encoded in even the the prosody the cadence of these sounds that is necessary for the thriving and the survival of our of our of our world in part language because language ultimately where does it come from it comes from the land itself which is why even a language that has gone extinct can come back if people have a close enough relationship to the land and you see when people migrate to a new place their language changes New Zealand has its own special accent if that were left undisturbed if we cut off all global communication that maintains homogeneity around the world then New Zealand English would gradually migrate over centuries to something that it wouldn't be exactly like Maori was because the land evolves too but you would recognize it as of this place so this means that restoring regenerating and celebrating and spreading the Maori language is an essential part of caring for the land the place of New Zealand which is the work that's necessary in order to do New Zealand's part in healing this planet and also if it can be done successfully here it serves as kind of a template or an example or a precedent for other places to do that everywhere I go I ask myself and this is the question I did in that little dialogue what is the unique gift of this place to the world every culture has every nation every country every place has a unique gift to give toward the healing and the evolution of the whole and every place I go I'm always curious what is that gift of that country just as you might ask yourself what is my gift what is the gift of this country so and I'm not I don't want to be presumptuous because I've only been here for a week but I feel I felt like I was starting to get a sense of it New Zealand is very fortunate to have the indigenous language still pretty strong you know it's still a living language people still think in that language even so it it can be restored a lot more easily than some of the extinct languages of North America and that language encodes knowledge that you might not be able to to quantify or explicitly write down but it induces a mindset it induces a state of being that that in which someone intuitively knows how to live in harmony and mutual benefit with the land here so I was really heartened to hear we went to a another ceremony a couple days ago where there were some government officials and they one of them was talking about bringing the Maori language into the schools and making it a mandatory subject for for all school children in New Zealand I'm like wow that's kind of that's like reverse colonialism you know because it wasn't that long ago where where I mean this happened all over the world where speaking the indigenous language was was discouraged or punished even in schools I'm not sure if that happened here where like kids would get hit if they spoke the indigenous language like that and now it's getting reversed and I think part of that reversal you know like maybe there's some elements of tokenism or okay let's respect other cultures because that's a good idea but there's also I think an element of humility coming in here because as our story breaks down the dominant story the story of separation and we realize we don't know how to do this anymore our tools are making things worse and worse help we become more open to the stories that are carried by other people so the reason that and this is happening in America it's happening many places the reason that people are now drawn to indigenous knowing indigenous ways of life indigenous knowledge indigenous language it's not actually and should not be out of guilt or playing the victimology game it's because we recognize that there's something that we really need to know on behalf of the planet and that this knowledge is still preserved especially in New Zealand where there's something like 15 percent um someone told me that 15 percent minority like that's that's enough for New Zealand to be kind of a precedent center and this is something that has not yet happened on earth the turn of an entire modern nation state to say yeah let's really incorporate the suppressed and marginalized indigenous thread of our society and another inspiring thing is that the minority also like this is part of the gift of New Zealand too like there's such a welcoming inclusive attitude that is hospitable to this um emerging humility so that's kind of what I'm getting about New Zealand that the unique gift of New Zealand has something to do with the healing of the colonial rift and that's something that really inspires me about about new frontiers too that it hasn't that it's not like just giving lip service to this but that there's a real effort um and um humility in in seeking this unification yeah I would just maybe suggest that as you spend the next four days here that you that you explore and cultivate this feeling of alliance and maybe kind of test drive I didn't say too much about the story of interbeing but that is I believe what unifies us and so to kind of take that on and and and see how does that help you make sense of what you're doing what you're drawn to and what draws the other people here together what is because I'll just say one more thing if that's okay the world is built on a story money is a story law is a story politics that's a story when the story changes the world changes the dominant story is in crisis consequently everything built upon that story is falling apart and we have the chance to step into service to another story that's why we're here actually because out in society you're going to be called crazy naive irresponsible impractical if you follow that story in your life because no one else is doing it well not no one else but it's kind of a new thing it's really important to come together in a place where everyone around you says yeah I'm following that too I mean I spent you know so many decades on this lonely journey and I think many of you might have experienced this as well this loneliness this self-doubt is it really okay to live my life this way and maybe even getting pulled down as if like you come up for air and you have this this epiphany or this experience that says yeah this is how life is supposed to be this is how the world could be you're shown an experience of deep connection or intimacy or cooperation and and you recognize it as real you recognize it as a promise of what's possible but then the routines of modern life the financial pressures of modern life and your own internalized habits pull you back under the waves and you almost forget what it was like above and then you claw your way up again and yes here I am back in reality and then you get pulled down again and maybe you went through years or decades of that like I did but now what's changing is you come up for air and there's somebody else there too on the surface and you hold each other up before you both get sucked down but then you come up again and there's four people or eight or ten and now we're creating a living mat in the new story holding each other in that new story because this isn't something that one enlightened guy comes and does and leads everybody else to it this is a process of group awakening of collective awakening where we all hold each other in this new story because this consciousness that has been cultivated for so many centuries is now rising to the surface and bringing us up with it and so we can hold each other in this space and that's why it's so important to come together sometimes and and abide in a story of interbeing for a few days so that that experience imprints it self on us and creates the ties and the networks and that's why it's so important to meet some of these new people and and with the curiosity of how are you my ally and what is your gift so that that the uh floatation mat that we're creating together isn't just limited to this place so there's an internal imprint where we where we really immerse ourselves in this new and ancient way of perceiving and then there's the external imprint through the relationships that we cultivate here and carry forth into alliances after the event yeah so thank you very much