 The old story, the story of separation, part of it is what I just mentioned, the story of control. The idea that, so it includes a vision of, an understanding of what a human being is. A story tells us that. Here's what a human being is. Here's what the world is. Here's how change happens. Here's what is important. Here is what the future shall be. Here is what the past was. Here's how to do life. And so it tells you that who you are and what a human being is, is an individual. A separate self, separate from what? From each other, from the world. Here's me, there's the world. And therefore what happens in the world is separate from what happens to me. It doesn't really matter if I can control things enough. So if there are hundreds of thousands of desperate, miserable people on the US-Mexico border, as long as I can keep them out, as long as I can control that situation, I'm not a refugee. I'm not an immigrant. I'm fine. If the Congo rainforest is being cut down and strip-mined for cobalt, well, that's too bad, but it's not happening to me. I'm not being strip-mined, am I? If the whales go extinct, if the orcas go extinct because of PCB buildup in the food chain or something like that, that's too bad, but I'm not going extinct. And even if an environmentalist says, well, if enough other life goes extinct, then you will go extinct, so you should better be afraid, you better care. You can say, well, what if we can control the world enough that we won't go extinct? What if we can replace ecosystem services with technological services? What if we can fulfill the future where we all live in bubbles, bubble cities or space stations? That's part of the old story that I'm talking about. It's part of the mythology of human progress. What if then? Then we don't need the whales. We don't need the forest, we don't need anything, okay? That is the quintessential viewpoint of separation. What happens to you is separate from what happens to me. What happens to the world is separate from what happens to me. And there is a truth beyond that old story in a boundary, in a membrane. However, fundamentally on some level, what happens to the Congo rainforest is happening to us. Some aspect of us is being stripped mind, is being extinguished when something goes extinct. And you can just, I guess here, one way to validate that is to say, validate that on a visceral level is you go out, go outside into the forest here at dawn and just listen to the birds. It's so enriching. When I am hearing lots of bird songs, I feel present, I feel alive, I feel connected, I feel like I belong, I feel like I'm here. I feel whole, more whole than I do when there's just the hum of the refrigerator. And I'm alone, and I can't hear and see my kin, my community, my fellow beings of life. Something, and imagine, you don't have to imagine actually because the natural world that my children have grown up in is so depleted compared to what it was generations ago, when it was a normal part of childhood to catch turtles and frogs. And I think there's been like a 70 or 80% decline in songbirds actually over the course, I can't remember the exact number over the course of the last one or two generations. We hardly even know what we've lost. Maybe we don't know what we've lost. But, and we take for granted this impoverished existence, impoverished because it has been shorn of its connections, of its intimate connections. Maybe we take it for granted as this is just the way it is. And take for granted that it hurts just to be. And take for granted that we need electronic and chemical aids just to feel okay. And then we blame ourselves for needing those electronic and chemical aids. What a trap, all because of our lost connections, all because of this delusion of separation that does not understand that all that we have destroyed is part of ourselves. And by the same token, all the life that we nurture and all of the intimate connections that we build, that's part of ourselves too. The easiest way to cure depression is to do something in service to other people because then you become more alive. You're restoring some of these lost connections. And that is a aspect of what I've seen that I call the new story and the ancient story, the story of interbeing. It recognizes that we're not separate. It recognizes that what happens to the world happens to ourselves as well. And recognizes that we're not alone here, that we're not the only being, that human beings are just one type of being, the human. And there are other beings that are not less than ourselves. Our dog Inka is a full being. And that doesn't mean that I project human cognition onto her, but she's not a degraded level of beingness. She is having a full subjective experience. And so is everything else, even down to an electron. Everything is a being. And not just individual units are beings, but the totality is a being as well. A nation is a being. The planet Gaia is a being. Soil is a being. A cloud is a being. This was a universal understanding of humans up until quite recently. This would not have been controversial or childish to say. And over time beingness got abstracted from the material world. So in mythology, Greek Roman mythology, originally the nature gods, the dryads, the niads, you know, all of these spirits, they were not a separate spirit from the river or from the tree. They were the river and the tree. And over time, as civilization developed, and we occupied more and more of a position of a domesticator and overlord, then the gods left creation. They were dissociated from creation. Originally Mount Olympus, the gods literally lived on Mount Olympus. Like people thought if you went up there, you'd find the gods. And then by the classical era, it was, well, there's like this other Mount Olympus up in the sky. You won't actually find the gods on the real Mount Olympus. So, and this was a very gradual process that took many, many centuries and left us where we are today completely alone. So the transition that these glitches in the matrix foretell that I spoke of yesterday, it is the return, it is the reunion. And what is dying is the separate self. And what is being born is the connected self that understands that it was never actually even separate to begin with.