The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Taking Love Seriously: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Say About Interconnectedness with John Churchill

Episode Date: July 22, 2026

A growing chorus of psychologists, contemplatives, and systems thinkers argue that most of us, and most of our institutions, are running an outdated psychological and spiritual "operating system," one never built for the converging ecological, economic, and cultural crises we face. Technological and policy responses absorb nearly all of our attention and resources, yet the maturity of the humans making the decisions may be the most needed and least prioritized intervention of all.  Could ancient contemplative traditions, paired with modern psychology, offer a map for the kind of collective growing up this moment demands? In this episode, Nate welcomes Dr. John Churchill, a psychologist and former Buddhist monk, to explore a map of human development that runs from "first-person" perspective of the isolated self all the way to a felt, embodied sense of interdependence with the planet itself. Drawing on decades spent synthesizing Tibetan Buddhist contemplative science with Western developmental psychology, John walks Nate through why our centers of power remain frozen at the level of third-person individualism. John also explains why  "love wisdom" (the integration of heart and mind) may be the missing ingredient in how we respond to our more-than-human predicament. Along the way, Nate presses him on whether this maturation applies to individuals, cultures, or our entire species, and on how a 2,000-year detour through empire and the carbon pulse pushed these traditions to the margins. The conversation ranges from the lost sacred academies of Alexandria to a simple attention practice anyone can do, and it keeps circling back to a single throughline: that beauty, truth, and goodness are load-bearing structures for whatever comes next.  What do beauty, truth, and goodness have to do with finding alternative paths toward a more flourishing humanity? How would it feel to be truly at one with the planet, and how might it change the way we act? And what can an individual do, this month, with the time and resources they actually have, to begin living into that shift? (Conversation recorded on June 17th, 2026)   About John Churchill: John began his in-depth study of Buddhist Psychology while a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland. He then spent 15 years training and teaching in "Great Seal" meditation in an Indo-Tibetan Mahayana lineage under the mentorship of the late senior Western teacher, translator, respected author, and clinical psychologist Dr. Daniel P. Brown. He is also a founding member of the Integral Institute led by esteemed Transpersonal/Integral philosopher, Ken Wilber.  John has received advanced training in: attachment therapy, hypnosis, positive psychology for peak performance, and the "Pointing Out" style of Mahamudra meditation. For the last 25 years, John has developed the Fourth Turning Planetary Dharma which includes: a redesigned Nine Stages of Calm-Staying practice path, and a somatically based contemplative practice path; Embodying the Open Ground, that integrates psychodynamic healing, adult development and meditation. John holds a Doctorate in clinical psychology from William James College, and is a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine.   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

Our culture is suffering from a lack of developmental education. We need to learn how to calm down and structure our nervous system, and there's a bunch of practices for that. But we also need to learn to shift our identity, to start operating from a deeper level of identity. So the wisdom side of it is recognizing that. And then the love part of that is the experience of the intimacy and the tenderness of knowing that you are non-dual with the whole of reality.

So the developmental journey, that is a deepening of the wisdom of the perspective taking that deepens the experience of love. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm pleased to welcome clinical psychologist and meditation practitioner John Churchill for a winding conversation through foundational concepts in both Eastern and Western wisdom traditions and the light they shine on how we might attempt to develop as individuals

and as a culture. John is a founding member of the Integral Institute, a nonprofit organization that brings together experts, educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other stakeholders to explore and deliberate more sustainable paths for humanity. He began his in-depth study of Buddhist psychology during his time as a Buddhist monk at Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland. He later spent 15 years training and teaching in Great Seal, S-E-A-L meditation in an Indo-Tibetan Mahayana lineage. Additionally, John has received advanced training in attachment therapy, hypnosis, positive psychology for peak performance, and how I found out about him, the pointing out style of Mahamudra meditation. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from William James College and is a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine.

In this conversation, John and I work our way through the seven stages of psychological and contemplative maturity. that both individuals and cultures work through in our relationship to the living world. We touch on topics such as love wisdom, non-duality, metacognition, and why it's important to understand the difference between peak states and truly embodied stages of deeper development. This was a truly non-linear conversation, and I will admit I didn't fully understand. understand everything John said, but I still walked away with the sense, this is an important

exploration of the meditative technologies that we're going to need during the coming decades. I'm still learning. I'm still curious about all this. I hope you enjoy and learn some things. With that, please welcome John Churchill. John Churchill, welcome to the program. Thank you, Nate. It's good to be here. Where to start? You have spent decades, bridging the ancient contemplative teachings of Tibetan Buddhism with modern Western psychology and adult development theory. You have synthesized all this in your book, Becoming Buddha, Buddhist contemplative psychology in a Western context. You've also served several years as a Buddhist

monk, and you have a doctorate in psychology. So I'm not exactly sure where to start with your background, but I'm going to ask kind of a random question. At least two of my friends when I told them I would be interviewing you told me that you originated, or at least from their perspective, the phrase, the next Buddha is a sanga. And I don't know if that's true or not, if that's your quote, but maybe you could just define what, what is that even? mean because I have heard that quote a lot. Yeah, I don't think that was my quote. That was Tickna Han, who's a Zen master, but if we look at all these contemplative traditions with their sophisticated psychotechnologies of development, the next step in

the evolution of those traditions and the next step in our cultural evolution is a new cultural level of development. So what it means when the next Buddha is the Sangha is that the delivery system, the delivery mechanism of these teachings needs to be transformed in such a way that what we are focusing on is not developing individuals but developing communities and that the model of development is a group model of unfold. A cultural model that is that leads to, let's say, a new platform, a new cultural stage development upon which a lot of other things can be built.

So the new Buddha is the Sangha is saying, like, the next stage of human development is deeply communal. So the next Buddha is a trillionaire? That's the wrong direction probably. I think so. I think so. You know, there's a lot of unpacking to do with the science and the ancient wisdom traditions,

but what you just described from an evolutionary psychology standpoint is the maturing, potentially maturing of a species under a multi-level selection framework that we've kind of erred towards individualism, probably supported by the largesse from the energy carbon pulse, but that our future, should there be a long one, has to go in this direction. I assume Sanga is translated as community or a group or something like that. So we have to move back to more group level actions, behaviors, thinking. That's right. And what I would say is that there is an oscillation developmentally through the developmental stages of oscillating between individualism and community

and individualism and community. So we see that. So for instance, if we go back maybe 500 years, something like that, pre-enlightenment Renaissance, at that phase, it was swung the other way and society was much, the traditional society of Europe was much more, a wee-based with a lack of individualism. And then it swings, at the beginning of the Renaissance

to the Enlightenment, swings towards individuality, kind of swings back in the 60s. So there is a developmental oscillation. What's different now, if you will, is the kind of unity or the kind of communal kind of culture necessitates, It's based upon having completed your own individuation. So we're interested in a degree of community, in a degree of we,

that doesn't suppress the uniqueness of the individual, but actually is there to enhance it and allow people to then kind of work as a we beyond me, but without suppressing it. I'm not sure I fully follow that. So can you, maybe with a wider lens, can you help us see how our collective unfamiliarity with both the science and the wisdom of all the things you've studied over the years, decades, have spiraled out to shape the many levels of crisis that seem to surround us daily from the individual to the global level.

and how does the individual to the global level, how can you parse that? We can talk about development in terms of perspective, like first person perspective, which is me, second person perspective, you and me, third person perspective,

which is objectivity. Seeing something, you and me can look at something objectively and agree that it's out there. And so on. So let's take that journey. Let's take that journey because that's a pretty universal journey perspective. So clearly first person perspective is oriented towards self primarily, self-absorbed developmentally.

And we can see that both in children who are still orienting from that perspective and also certain adults, you know, certain parts of the world where the warlords rule, if you will, primarily. me. Might is right, whether you're a tantruming child or a Kleshnakov wielding warlord. And as we then make a developmental journey to second person perspective, two perspectives, there's a cognitive movement towards what we call concrete operational, which is like black and white thinking, yes and no, in and out, bent basic fundamentalist, cognition. And either you're inside of my encampment, my religion, my race, or you're outside of it. And so in our journey of, let's say, Western civilization, we can kind of pick that up at,

you know, that that's been the, that's been the frame of Christianity to some extent, at least with the majority of the people in our civilization kind of concrete operational don't do this, do this you're part of our religion you're not part of our religion and we know

we know the world that that built and then as as individuality begins to stir and that becomes too suppressive we see the birth of third person perspective And you can see that in the history of art

where suddenly the art in Europe flips and there's depth in the art. It goes from like a flat art to an art with perspective. You see it in the music as well. So third person perspective comes online and we start looking through telescopes and we start looking at it. Third person perspective is about objective.

something in a particular way that you can study it. And of course, that was a major breakthrough back in the Renaissance. Major breakthrough, and all kinds of benefits happened from being able to objectify the human body, objectify nature, objectify our experience, and mathematics and algebra and the scientific method and all of that. grows out of that perspective.

So before then, like thousands of years ago, it was mostly that first and second perspective that you explained? Yes, and there would have been, they would have been the cutting edge, there would have been those developmentally who were able to do third-person perspective and therefore build the church structure

and keep the rest of the culture kind of contained developmentally, if that makes sense. So more sophisticated perspectives were around, but it would have been 1% or 0.1% of the population. What we're seeing is a general evolutionary process over time. What begins is the cutting edge. If it continues for too long,

and if it maintains power for too long, it then begins to then erode. It begins to then become problematic. And so that's what we're seeing right now, developmentally is that we are stuck at a developmental stage. We humans or we Americans or we as individuals? Good question. We is the center as the governing power of civilization.

So there's that the center of where power is organized developmentally. And therefore the majority of the institutional structures, related to that, like the media, the science, that the academy, the center of power itself is located, right? Third person perspective, individualism, Wall Street, the scientific method, empiricism, Cartesian dualism, that's where the center of the power is held. And fourth person perspective can take third person perspective as an object. It can see it. And this is the, developmentally, this is the development of a pluralistic view. It begins as a pluralistic view. It begins by recognizing that something's missing from the picture. That something could be that the planet is

missing. We don't have a perspective that is ecological. It could be that women are missing. It could be that the various races and genders are missing from the discussion. So the beginning of fourth person perspective is very horizontal in its wisdom, very pluralistic. Does that map on to postmodernism?

It's postmodernism, yes. Oh, it is that, okay. It is that, yes. So third person perspective is modernism. Second person perspective is traditionalism. right fourth person perspective at the beginning as it begins is postmodernism and so what it does is it goes horizontal

and it really starts integrating in horizontally and it's also because what's happening is the heart is opening and the heart wants to be inclusive and it wants to welcome more in now because things are speeding up we can also see that that also has a shadow so we could agree you and I could probably agree that modern has a massive shadow, which is the objectification, commodification, extraction of reality. And we could probably both agree that that was probably at some point in time a useful mechanism

to get something going for a certain degree of time. You know, like the extraction of coal, the extraction of oil, for a certain degree of time was useful. And as we move into post-modernity, we could also probably agree that that integration and the recognition of the necessity of diversity and a pluralism is also really important. So that's a horizontal dimension of fourth person perspectives. And as fourth person perspective matures, what also comes slowly develops is a recognition of a vertical dimension, meaning, oh, not only are their voices horizontally outside in the

world left behind. There are also voices within me left behind developmentally. Oh, there's a part of me that's an animal, there's an emotional body, there's a part of me that is traditional and and orients with values and with absolutes. There's a part of me that is a modernist and values that way of thinking. There's a part of me that's postmodern and wants to. So that fourth person perspective literally has four directions, right? It literally goes horizontal and it literally goes vertical. It can look up and it's like, oh, there are traditions of contemplative development. I've come through four stages of development. Wow, maybe there's four stages of development above me. And so when fourth person perspective fully matures, it begins to realize that there's a developmental

process at play, both within ourselves, but also outside in the world. And the civilization is the structure, if you will, the structuring of those processes, and culture is the interior of those processes. So that's where we get to fourth person. And then we begin to move into more spiritual or developed stage. of development. Above that, fifth and sixth person perspective. At fourth person perspective, you begin to recognize the relativity of things, of experience. Fifth person perspective, you begin to recognize the relativity of language itself, that language itself is a construct. Now, what happens as you're doing that is you begin to then recognize that there is something that's

functioning behind language, beneath language, that is not a, that is not constructed. Essentially, you begin to wake up to a ground of beingness. This is this non-dual, if you will. You begin to wake up to a degree of consciousness that's beyond structure. As that continues into sixth person perspective, so at the beginning, that becomes a state, then it becomes a trait. So the difference between the two is one is an altered state that comes and goes, and the other is it becomes your operating system.

That's where your consciousness resides. Once that becomes stable, then what also happens is you begin to realize a number of things. You begin to realize that your consciousness, that your awareness is part of a collective. The non-dual is not, is a, one of the challenges with the traditions is that they're kind of framed philosophically, not framed ecologically. So if we understand that actually that these levels of consciousness open you to different dimensions, not just of your own consciousness, but of the planet itself, of planetary intelligence. So as you're opening up these deeper layers, it's not just, it isn't just a psychology. One of the problems of the last hundred years, the only way we could save the sacred was packaging it in psychology.

But the truth is, we're not talking about something that's just my subjective experience. When you open up those dimensions, those deeper and deeper dimensions, you're opening up deeper and deeper relationship and information. flow with a larger planetary intelligence. So finally, when you get to seventh person perspective, which traditionally in the West, we'd call that logoic, that essentially your consciousness is able to interface with a logos of the planetary system.

The other way of putting that is Holonic. So you've opened up access to the whole on of the whole system. Now, what that means is, this is where we get to why it's not just a psychology. So from the perspective of these traditions, and if you update the tradition, so it isn't just the same, you don't just want to have Western psychology

and Eastern psychology, you have to update both into something that is relevant for now, if that makes sense. So essentially, that developmental process is about beginning to experience to yourself in a deeper and deeper way as being interdependent with a planetary system. What comes along with that is the experience that your cognition, your mind, isn't just separate

from the larger system. And so cognitions, or the complexity of thought, begins to start operating in systemic and metasystemic ways. Okay. Okay. Time. out. Sorry. No, no need to apologize. I'm just reflecting that had you been one of the first guests on my podcast four years ago, I might have pulled the plug because I wouldn't have understood why this is relevant. And now I still don't fully understand what you're saying, but now I have a ton of questions. So we had this ancient traditions, and I know you've also studied deeply with Dan Brown Mahamudra, which I believe goes back 1,500 years or so. But was it the fact that we kind of had European conquest in the world and then the Renaissance and the Enlightenment

followed by the discovery of the carbon pulse and the boost that that gave our consumption and material existence, that all this stuff kind of got pushed to the back corner because it wasn't as salient to, at least to the power brokers that ran the world in successive generations. What do you think about that? I mean, essentially, yes, I mean, essentially, if you understand a little bit about the history here,

if we go back to Alexandria, so a central point is Alexandria. So if we go, if we can look at story, because we live inside of a story and it's important to know the story. So we look at Alexandria and I'm going to be vague here with the dates, but I think probably found it. I don't know what, 300? Is it 300 BCE? But anyway, point being is we're at a very similar point of cosmopolitan-collet integration. So by the Sacred Academy, I would mean the kind of, this kind of neoplatonial. synchonic synthesis, the same kind of intelligence

that we have now, we had then. And so there was a project, if you will, to have a planetary teaching, to integrate. Because whilst there's the druids and there's the Druze and there's the Greeks and the Romans,

clearly those of a certain level development recognized there was also something that was universal. And so that project was also integrating wisdom from the East and the West. There was playback also from Alexandria to India. So, for instance, the birth of the Mahayana in many ways is born, one of the things is born in Gandhara.

So Gandhara was a Greco-Indian civilization, where actually the Greek wisdom had fed itself back into India. and then integrated with Indian meditative technologies. So the East and West integration has been going on for a long time, and that project, which got hijacked by the forces of empire like 2,000 years ago, had it not been hijacked, we would have had an academy, if you will, that recognized the scientific method and recognized the sacred within that.

So we would have had, I'll give you a good example, we would have had a psychobiology department. We would have had psychedelics for 2,000 years. And if you look in the written documents, the legal documents of the Inquisition, you'll see the list, you know, that they're burning the poor lady at the stake for a list of herbs,

and a bunch of those are including psychedelic, know, psychedelic herbs. So every single biology, chemistry, architecture, mathematics, every single part of the university had a dimension of the sacred. And essentially, kind of the forces of empire came in, stripped that out and maintain and kind of basically controlled the educational process for a couple thousand years. And what was the role? And by the way, a quick pin that you said,

meditative technologies, you did not say meditative practices. So you, back then, the meditation was viewed as a human technology. I guess it's just semantics, but. Yeah, well, the practices are the practices of a technique, of a technology that speeds a process up. Yeah. And so until that time, plant medicine and psychedelics were part of a bridge for, humans to get closer to the sacred. It was just part of the way. Yeah, one of the department, one of the departments, right? Like, um, would have been skillful means, you know? I mean,

just imagine, imagine that the degree of sophistication of the chemistry that we would have now had that been a continuous process. So we've been hijacked. So, so because of the struggle of the historical process, that academy was suppressed for, you know, approximately a couple of thousand years. And is it still in existence and is it growing again? It's still part of the deeper ecosystem of our planet. But there are still pockets of people in Tibet and in the United States and certainly in India and Nepal that continue carrying on these wisdom traditions and have cataloged and maintained the core of them. So I look at the world, John, from an ecological perspective and an evolutionary anthropological perspective. And so my critique of what

you just described, you referred to empire and these things have been kicked to. to the background for 2,000 years. I look at that as a fall from grace from hunter gathering, and then we started agriculture and started to store grain and surplus, and from that hierarchy ensued, and we're off to the races. But I just wonder, you were just mentioning the tissue and the planetary experience, which I don't fully understand. So let's just pause here, John, and,

let me ask you for some brief definitions of some words you just said. Planetary Intelligence. What do you mean by that? Let's imagine in Tibet, like the tradition, you know, the education in Tibet is like, it's a 12-year educational journey. So there was something comparable in the West that we've lost. So I'm going to, so I have to kind of update y'all on what, if we had had the Sacred Academy in the West for the last 2,000 years,

because there's been a little bit of shenanigans in the West and the suppression of our wisdom tradition. So this is not actually Eastern Wisdom. This is actually part of the Western Sacred Academy. So what do we mean by planetary intelligence? We mean that not only does our planet have a kind of, not only is it a physical whole system intelligence, so if you pull back,

you could see like Lovelock's conception of Gaia as a whole system of intelligence, where everything is integrated into a beautiful symphony of integration. So that's one level of that. But in the traditions, they say that not only do you have a physical body, you have a bio-energetic body, you have an emotional body, you have a mental body,

and so in the meditative traditions is an understanding that the human, that what you're seeing right now is just one wavelength, the lowest wavelength of a spectrum. That's also true of our planetary organism. And so all of what you hear, So when you take plant medicine, you open up the imaginal dimension, not just if you're

psyche, that's your personal unconscious, but also of the collective unconscious, what Jung called the objective psyche, meaning that the planet itself actually has dimensions like ecologies that are beyond the physical. And when we talk about shamanic journeying or heavens and hells, those are very traditional ways of understanding that this planetary system is a multi-dimensional intelligence, and that it itself is in an evolutionary process, and that humanity is a function within that evolutionary process. How does all of the work that you've done, of which you could just share a tiny little kernel of it in this conversation.

What's the Venn diagram with that with the field of evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology and the fact that we are evolved organisms that are related to every other living creature on life and there's a trajectory that brought us to this moment.

Is it congruent with that? In a multi-layered, evolutionary, multidimensional system there's going to be multiple streams of evolution. So what you're just describing is one stream of the evolution of matter. And so you can look at psychology, I don't know, biology, geology, you can look at probably every department of the academy through that particular lens of evolution. And it will give you like really good information.

But that isn't the only one. There's also, from the point of view of, let's say, the sacred academy, for want of a better term, a way of also looking at the evolution of consciousness and how it interacts with that evolving material substrate. So there's multiple evolutionary systems, if that makes sense, interacting with one another. So yes, they're integratable at fifth person perspective, because those perspectives are also degrees of cognitive complexity, if that makes sense.

Getting back to my questions on your questions, you mentioned Sacred, you mentioned Sacred Academy, you mentioned Western Sacred Academy. What does that mean? We have to define it, only being able to allow to use terms that are secular, because that keeps us kind of where we are right now. So I think the sacred has to do, in my experience, to do with a deep experience of value.

When somebody gives you something that's really precious, you relate to that in a particular way. So the experience of the sacred in my mind, one of its dimensions has got to do with it's the value of beauty and it's the value of goodness and the value of truth so goodness goodness has to do with the depth of intimacy beauty has to do with um the of valuing aesthetics so first second third fourth sixth person perspective those that is the development of aesthetics of perception, and truth is valuing what's like really true.

So what is sacred is what is true, what is beautiful, and what is good. So I'm smiling. Not only do I understand and agree with you, but I don't know that if you know Ian McGilchrist, he's been on my program three times. He basically said the same thing that you just said a few weeks ago. And I don't think you guys are studying the same things necessarily. So it seems like that finding may be robust. That view in my mind is one of the fundamental archetypal structures of the next civilization.

Goodness, truth, and beauty. That's first person, second person, third person. Aesthetics is the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So the whole line of personal development, you can think of it spiritually, but I like to think of it as aesthetic appreciation of deeper and deeper levels of beauty and reality. When I say the word sacred, I think of... a primeval forest or an old-growth forest or the animals in the meadow, undisturbed nature.

And I think you would agree that that is part of sacred. But you also mentioned when someone gives you something precious or there's a painting or an experience, it doesn't necessarily have to be nature. It's the whole human and non-human maybe experience. Well, I think we mean the same thing. nature in third person, nature in second person and nature in first, but like what is natural? In the Buddhist tradition, they call it Buddha nature. Let's just take Buddha, throw the Buddha term out, and say nature, nature in her manifestation of beauty, what you're describing, when you see that,

do you experience it as being beautiful? Like, what is it, is it beauty, is it beauty that stuns you there? Is that what makes it sacred? Or is a sense of relationality, the goodness, or is it a sense of the truth of the of appreciating the systems and how everything is woven together okay i'm going to answer that with another question i think the answer is um partially all three but partially something that i can only feel and i cannot describe uh in words so here's here's a question in a recent frankly i think i might have sent it to you a few weeks ago i shared that i have spent months trying to conceptualize the concept of non-duality, and I got right to the cusp of it, and then I lost it. But why is that concept so important now in our culture, in the face of our converging global crises, that more

people begin to actual experience non-duality rather than think about it? And just in that, in your last little paragraph, I felt again that I was right on the cusp of it integrating your truth and beauty comments. Non-duality is not the heart of it. Non-duality is a perceptual dimension of what is at the core of what's being spoken about. So what is central here is the intelligence of the heart mind

and its recognition of what we would call love wisdom and the fact that the heart, heart mind perceives in a non-dual way. The reason that that's important is if you get stuck with non-duality just perceptually, you don't understand that actually that which perceives in a non-dual way most naturally is the heart. And so there's a way of perceiving experience that is related to the heart. Now the heart is the central relational organ. So we're not just talking, we're not talking about like a nice warm, fuzzy feeling here. We're talking about relationality and being touched by something. And so at second person perspective, you'd be touched by a little, you know, like, oh, they're part of

my clan. When you get to like sixth person perspective and you realize that the body itself is open construct, you've got thousands of tendrils of relationality extending intimately into an interconnected field. So the feeling of non-duality is love. If you approach it philosophically, the danger of that, you're going to get caught with the headship around it and not the naturalness or the goodness of that. intelligence. And why is it central? The heart mind is, the heart mind organizes the psyche. So if we look at the research at heart math, the more this energy field gets coherent, it actually coheres the brain. Now let's not forget that the heart isn't just here. That's one end

of the sensory nerve. The heart is actually in the head. Because every, everything is in the brain. So the heart coheres the brain mind, and as it coheres the brain mind, the psyche becomes more integrated. And this heart field is in resonance and coherence with the electromagnetic field of the planet itself. So there is a communication of information from the larger planetary intelligence to the individual heart mind, that as that becomes more coherent, then coheres cognitive processes

that become more and more planetary by virtue of the person's development. Okay, I want to ask a follow-up question on love wisdom, but before I ask that, there's some part of me is feeling and not fully understanding what you're expressing. And the feeling I get is sadness and that our 8.1 billion

strong number of social primates are just expressing ourselves as a tiny, tiny, tiny, destructive fraction of what we're capable of, given the landscape that you're, laying out and it just feels like such an enormous tragedy in some ways. That's what I'm feeling, what I'm looking at the words and the concepts you're describing for what we're capable of and then looking at the clown show that is the weekly news that you and are both paying attention to. This is Wednesday, June 17th. Yeah, we have a crisis in education and this is maybe related more to the history of what we're talking about. And we mentioned the Sacred Academy.

We're then talking about history. And we're talking about then forces of control and power over human consciousness over the last couple of thousand years that have led to the deliberate enslavement of human consciousness and humanity as part of an extractive process. I want to come back because I want to ask you what love wisdom means because you mentioned that, but let me ask you this. Is there a way to look at this is we almost had to go through this last 2,000 years of immaturity and individuality and all the chaos that we're wreaking on the planet right now to arrive at this moment to make the next maturity leap up the journey

that you started this conversation with? What are your thoughts on that? Yes. Yes. I mean, yes and no. The yes part is, is that's the way that we got here. So we had to do that. Right. The no part, what's the no part? The no part is that we're working with like accumulated forces of multi-generational trauma. That, and when those forces are expressed culturally,

they become, you know, they become forces. within our own psyche of the shadow of suppressing, of controlling, and in the outside world, within civilization, they become forces that might suppress new developments. So, I mean, you and I are here, because this was the road that we had to take, but had I, you and I, I don't know, had a better therapist when we were 25,

then maybe things would have unfolded differently. So this is where we find ourselves. There's a lot of hope. And there's also not a lot of time. And we have to grow up and we have to, yeah, we have to grow up. And everything that's needed, everything is needed is here except for the resources for the very thing that's actually needed.

And to bring the pieces together. We're going to get to that. I know in your work and in this conversation, you use the word love wisdom. And you also previously said heart, mind. Maybe you can explain what love wisdom is and what happens in a person or a culture when we have one half of that equation without the other. The wisdom without the love? Or the love without the wisdom, maybe. I don't think we have that.

Okay. Yeah, the wisdom without the love. To be honest, I think our culture is starved for both of those. But why do you hyphenate that word? What led you to using that in your work? Well, I think the first thing is it's a term that not many people know. So it's like, what's that? And it also stirs something.

It's like, hmm, because love wisdom could also be, if we take it into Greek is philosophia. I didn't know that. It could be love of wisdom, but it could be love wisdom. So that's what I mean by the academy, the philosophical academy. If I said to you,

from one perspective, your physical body definitely has boundaries to it, right? You're a bounded body of meat. And I'm learning about that more every day. But if we turned up, if we looked closer and we started looking at the level of electrons, do you think that we'd be able to find a boundary between your body and the electrons around the body? As you go in deeper, is this boundary actually a thing or is it a probability, is it like an active probability pattern?

As you look deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper, the boundaries of the body become more and more and more open until there's a level of depth where this body, we don't see it because your eyes aren't seeing it because whenever you look in the mirror, you're like, oh, there's Nate, and you format your experience based on what these eyes can see. And so your experience is constantly being conditioned

by a self-image of who and what you think yourself to be. So the wisdom side of it is recognizing that. And the wisdom side of it is recognizing that, hey, we built a microscope with human consciousness. Human consciousness, Europe, can do the same thing as a microscope. What I mean by that is I can take my human consciousness. I can look deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into my experience until I'm like basically where you discover that the body is like 99% space. And then from there, you go out.

and what happens when you go out? There's no boundary. There's no boundary. Because we are like mountains, right? That go into the earth. We are like mountains that extend actually into the field around us. And then the love part of that is feeling that.

Now, if things are already like that, then the experience of love is, and you know it, then the experience of love is the experience of the intimacy and the tenderness of knowing that you are non-dual with the whole of reality. And to the extent that you know that by heart and that you're confident in that,

then the experience of that begins to deepen and deepen and deepen. And that love wisdom has all kinds of dimension. You know, the wisdom dimensions is, well, if that's true, then what does a financial system look like that is kind of understands that we're interdependent with everything? What does a medical system look like that understands that? So the deepening of the developmental journey, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, that is a deepening of the wisdom, of the perspective taking,

that deepens the experience of love. So do you think our culture is suffering from a crisis in love wisdom? And in what way is that failure playing out in how we're collectively responding or not responding to the more than human predicament? Yes, our cultures is suffering from a lack of developmental education in what it means to be a human. And the developmental education of what it means to be human is the developmental unfolding of love wisdom. In 2000 years ago, did Tibetan Academy the 12 years that children and young adults had to go through was love wisdom taught or part of the curriculum? Yeah, for sure. Well, and also in the West, the love, wisdom piece is core to all of the mystic traditions. You can approach these teachings through the mind and the head, and that's an important part of it, but it's so much more powerful to feel it. Okay. So let's start getting into the practical implications of this and why this is important. Kind of a two-part question.

One of the things I've been recognizing lately, and I think in the materials I sent you, I didn't include this, is when we talk about human behavior and culture, there's a difference between the median and the mean. And I think, based on what I've learned in the last year or so, is humans are better than we think or better than we've experienced. expressed. Humanity is not, at least not yet, because in aggregate, we are acting in extremely deleterious ways because a small percentage of humans that get into the power vector and steer things the way we've steered and the influence the institutions, and then there's a metabolism that carries on. So let me ask you this. What is the development? map that you summarized reveal when we examine our global leaders and thinkers today, and what stage of development would we need to see in our leadership to actually meet the scale

of all of the challenges and problems we're facing? The power and the leadership are frozen at third person individualistic perspective. Is that because of who they are as humans, or is because that's what their position freezes them at. The issue is that we need a global level deliberately developmental education project. You see, development, human development has not been part of the mainstream at all. Right. We train kids to get them into the workforce and serve the superorganism. To the extent, let's say that mindfulness became part of the mainstream. So essentially what's needed is a cultural project,

probably through the artist, probably through art and music, that is deliberately developmental, that offers a vision of a garden university planet of beauty, truth, and goodness, and reveals the developmental stages necessary to get there and offers the developmental processes and practices to do that. We have to have something comparable to the mysteries of a little bit. Lucius, the Elysian Mysteries, where all the politicians and all the intelligentsia went through a developmental process. So we need to have something that's comparable to that. If you're not

involved with this, then clearly, you know, like, there's a problem. So we need, so development needs to be made popular, colorful, sexy with a vision of where that developmental ladder goes, that people like, yes, let's go that. Let's go that way. And frankly, that hasn't happened. Here's a fundamental question that I've been sitting with. How do decent people, how does decency in a human compete on the current game board with power and the leaders that have power and are stuck at level three at best,

and like it's not a battle per se because even that is the wrong framing. But I guess what I'm asking is can decency and truth and beauty and goodness ultimately prevail in our species and the biosphere? Huge question. But what are your thoughts? Well, okay. So the most evolved of the Indian-Tibetan, Indo-Tibetan, tantric systems. So tantric systems are, if you take a culture and you integrate all of the,

all of the sciences into a single educational system, developmental system, that's a tantra. It's like everything gets integrated. The art, the music, the science, okay. The most evolved of those tantras is called the Kalachakra, which means time wheel. And essentially what the time wheel Tantra is, is a time machine. What do I mean by a time machine? I mean, if you want to go from one time to another time, you have to build an educational system that takes you in one time and out the other. And I quite literally mean time, meaning we are functioning within the Gregorian calendar. The Gregorian calendar is a calendrical representation of this chaos. that we're seeing. So if you want to get to a new time, and timing has to do with synchronization,

it has to do with internal synchronization of the psyche, external synchronization of people, essentially what's needed from a Western perspective is a sacred, secular, initiatory operating system, which is a secular way of describing a initiative, a deliberately developmental educational process that facilitates moving a populate through an educational process so that you can then essentially have people educated enough to begin to function within the different departments of a proto-civilization. Meaning if you want to get, you have to kind of like actually start a government in exile. You actually have to start that process.

But to do that, you also have to educate people enough into that new cultural level of development so that we can learn to relate to one another from a different level of consciousness, experience a different level of consciousness, experience what is like to work in new developmental structures. And that's to the extent that that's sealed off and then slowly that's allowed to grow out. At least that's how the traditions see that you make a time transition. I expect our viewers in the last three minutes might have had a reaction similar to me. When you said we need a structure for goodness and you didn't say it, but it was implied for love wisdom and these things to flourish, I think people felt that. like a charge, because, yes, that is what we're missing.

We're missing a structure to manifest goodness in this crazy twilight zone clown fest of a culture we have right now. And so presumably you're working on that with your organization and your efforts. Do you want to talk about that? Sure. But let's be like clear here. To put somebody on the moon. You need to be able to bring a number of engineering companies together and a number of disciplines together.

And the management and the coordination of that project is something that our civilization does very well, when it's highly invested in. It's good to understand also that this is one of, that there's a number of archetypes within the sacred world. There's the shaman, there's the sear, there's the priest, there's the healer. this is what we call tecton. So this is the tecton. So what is a tecton? It means an architect, sacred tectore. Also, it also means translated in Greek as carpenter, but, you know, tecton is an architect is a better.

So we're talking about the architecting of a civilizational initiatory system. And people are like, oh, my gosh. Well, actually, we used to have that. We had the Dionysian mysteries. We had the Orphic mysteries. We had the, you know, this is, so this is a. something that can be done, but of course it needs to be funded. So there's a number of components, significant components. We have, um, that need to be brought together. And that can't be brought

together by one person. That just to be brought together like building, like putting a rock of somebody on the moon, right? So it's at so. And the problem is, is that people in the field of human consciousness think that we have, that we have, that we are where we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, we have, all the technology that where we've got to is where the best of technology is no we're at the next stage where all those pieces have to be brought together when they can be brought together and that takes investment and it takes all the best management skills right so all the departments of the sacred academy include finance management information systems but it can be done for sure it just needs people to understand we're talking about a cultural revolution.

Now, if you want to do a revolution in the 60s, this is a revolution that is designed, specifically a developmental revolution, to seed through culture, through the sciences, a new level of development. So we need a developmental revolution before we have a physical, infrastructural one, because otherwise it won't go well.

Correct. And following on the question I asked a few minutes ago, how does goodness compete with power? Zach Stein introduced me to some academic experts on Dark Triad and Psychopathy, who I hosted last year. And I learned a lot from them and subsequently on how much control and, and power there are by dark triad and dark tetrad type of humans in our society,

uh, mostly men, not all. And so this developmental path that you're talking about in a cultural revolution and wouldn't it be a threat to, uh, the current power structure and how would that have to be, uh, managed? Just, uh, Trojan horse through the humanities and music and art. There's a number of stories that play here, and the world and the human psyche loves story. So we love a love story, we love an adventure story, we love a war story sometimes. So we have to look through multiple narratives, right? When we look through the war story, then it's like, oh, there's baddies and goodies, right? And maybe that's where you and I played on the playground together with baddies and goodies.

And so when you're looking through that lens, then yes, you're talking about strategies, Trojan-horsing, security. But if we're using a war lens, and you do have an actual answer to my question, maybe from a Sunzu perspective, we shouldn't be saying it out loud on a public podcast. Maybe not. Yeah.

But there's also another lens, which is, how do we do it? Well, I think one thing is you educate the public around the nature of the human shadow and culturally and civilizationally. The other way we do it, We just make it a hell of a lot more fun and a hell of a lot more sexy and a hell of a lot more colorful. Well, I think that we are our culture now with the Epstein files, now with this Hormuz thing,

these are like staring us in the face that things are not what they seem. And the story that we've followed on the backs of our carbon slaves have divorced us. from truth, beauty, and goodness, and hard work and some suffering and lots of other stuff of our ancestors. And I think our culture actually is deeply hungry for a path like this. I agree.

I think we're ready for it. I just think that we, you know, when you can't be approached in a naive way, and it needs the best of the various departments to be brought to it. you know so at least for myself like in terms of my own work it's like i've got to the point where kind of coming down the mountain or coming out of the cave or whatever that is and like hey who like who knows these other pieces but you know because this is a group project that resonates with me

and actually a project like this kind of undergirds some of the biophysical interventions in culture. And like, I believe we need a lot more people who are soldiers, not, that's not really the right word, but that are mentally, physically, spiritually mature and capable to do the hard work that's ahead, which is what drew me. Actually, it didn't draw me. Several of my colleagues said, Nate, you would benefit from going to a Mahamudra week and I did benefit, but I still can't quite get into the view on demand, not remotely.

I digress, but I want to backfill some of the things that came up, and then we'll get back to your work and your plan before this conversation concludes. So, firstly, you have been focused on in this conversation what Eastern wisdom traditions have brought to the table. what is Western psychology maybe added or revealed that the Tibetan tradition alone couldn't address? What is the West contributed to all this? A lot of my work has been about redesigning a new contemplative system, meaning my apprentice with Dr. Dan, I apprenticed with Dr. Dan for 15 years. And essentially what I was studying was how to analyze.

various contemplative systems in order to understand the deep structure so that a new synthetic system could be developed that integrated the best of East and West. So what's the best of West? Well, Western psychology is really good. Well, the first thing to understand is

probably hundreds of schools of Western psychology. So you have to at least have metasystemic cognition to be able to integrate all of those schools to have a sense of what Western psychology is, right? It's not cognitive behavioral. It's not humanistic. It's not psychodynamic. And metacognition is thinking about how we think.

Yes. Thinking about how you think or then being aware that you're thinking, like being aware that you're thinking, like one step removed from that. So Western developmental, psychodynamic. We, the Eastern approach has been studying consciousness from a first person, perspective, the Western tradition has been particularly studying consciousness objectively, looking at children, how do they develop, looking at testing. There's a certain way of understanding how development unfolds that is structural and dynamic and developmental, and that happens

from a very Western perspective of looking at it, right, like the kind of scientific method, whether that's even Freud's approach or cognitive behaviorism or any number of those approaches to psychology. So Western psychology is very good at looking from the outside and looking in. Looking both at, particularly at structure. Like how does the self become structured?

For instance, early, what's called early attachment structures these are related to the kind of very basic ways the self is structured and how very, very early relational patterns become the fundamental structures of human consciousness, if you will. And then the very developmental stages that that structure goes through and becomes more complex.

So Western psychology is very good at understanding that. Understanding the shadow piece, which the East does have that, but it hasn't it a different, it doesn't look at it through that lens. By shadow, what I mean is, at each stage of development, it's easy as you move up to disavow

the intelligences of prior levels, to suppress them, right? So it's easy to suppress the body, bodily intelligence. It's easy to suppress emotional intelligence. It's easy to suppress ethical intelligence. What does that mean to suppress emotional intelligence? If in our natural state, our emotional flow can digest experience, feel pain when it's appropriate,

feel love when it's appropriate, feel anger when it's needed, and all of, like, actually, our emotional body, how we, when we're whole human beings responds intelligently to appropriate circumstances. Like crying when someone dies, for example, or something like that. not crying when you run out of, you know, when someone gives you ice cream, you know, the wrong flavor ice cream or, you know, right? Right. So because of developmental trauma, developmental trauma, you know, like let's say you're in a household where your dad beats you if you cry because it's a sign of weakness, then you're going to suppress, yeah, or let's say you're in a family where having boundaries doesn't exist and everyone's just kind of like bound, kind of flowing all over one

another. These are, so if that's the case, you're in a household that suppresses individuality and boundaries and no, right? So, so that's, so the developmental journey that we get to to become sitting here, you and I as adults, there's a bunch of stuff that gets pushed away that suppresses our emotional intelligence until we're just operating at third person. and that's one of the reasons why a culture is so destructive

is because if relating to nature or the natural world reminds you of your own pain so as psychopathy and sociopathy as it gets worse and worse and worse there's immense amounts of pain there so as the natural world

reminds you of pain, then you're going to do everything you can to destroy whatever it is that reminds you that you have feelings inside. So you're going to actually unconsciously start burning down the forests and kind of destroying

the world because it actually makes you feel something. That's in the most extreme. That would be the most extreme version. So that's shadow? That would be, yeah, that's shadow. So one of the problems of Western civilization is the suppression, right, of third person,

a first person perspective is my intelligence is an animal. Like a chimp, right? You and I have chimp intelligence. That's been suppressed. So that's, we've suppressed our own bodies, but because we've suppressed our own bodies, we can create factory farming slaughterhouses and do that to other bodies

because we're out of touch of our bodies. And then if we suppress second person, and I, thou and the whole relational intelligence, we suppress that. Then, of course, we can do, you know, we can, we're not feeling anything anymore. We've suppressed our bodily intelligence, we've suppressed emotional intelligence,

and now we're just cold, cold third-person perspective, which is just complete objectification of reality, developmentally with a bunch of trauma underneath that I'm not willing to feel or see, because if I do that, I'll start crying, and my daddy beat me if I was crying, both individually and culturally, and also suppression of anything above,

because, you know, I don't want to see that there's... Because third person perspective is so achievement-oriented, meaning it's an achiever self, it's so highly individualistic, that if it realized that it was not the highest, then it would be like, that would also threaten its sense of self. Oh, if someone at the third person level of development was told there was a fourth through seventh level,

that itself would be threatening. Well, that's why it needs to be out there culturally, because the moment it does that, that becomes part of the cultural conversation. The moment you do that, there's emperor's new clothes. Okay, let me bring this back down. And for someone ready to begin, how would a viewer of this program start a contemplative practice that might bridge the ancient wisdom with today's science?

And I guess are there any essential prerequisites before they would begin such a practice or technology? Gosh, I mean, yes, clearly there's a whole curriculum of practices here. but let's maybe start with what's readily accessible right now. And because I'm sure our listeners have learned about mindfulness and those kinds of practices. So maybe what's more interesting is introducing a seed that might be a little different than those.

What really matters is the state of consciousness that we're operating from moment by moment by moment. So yes, the practice on the cushion or the practice in the chair matters. What matters much more is where are we operating from right now. And so there's a very simple practice related to that that our listeners can start working with our viewers. And that's really first understanding that how we see experience is who sees experience. So because our visual system takes up probably 70% of information,

and because we spend most of our time working with our eyes open, understanding how these states of consciousness are operating in our visual field moment by moment is really helpful. So we want to define, let's say, we want to make two different definitions here. One is the attentional system. system. So the attentional system is what attends. That's the cursor on the screen. And the attentional system is at the center of the self-structure. So what the self-structure is, is that sense of continuity of experience that you recognize as being Nate and I recognize as being John

and the listener recognizes as being themselves. And that's glued together by the attentional system, if that makes sense, attending to various dimensions of our experience fast enough to create something that resembles Nate and John. That's the attentional system. And as long as I'm looking at experience through my attentional system, I'm looking through the self-structure. Because the attentional system is the central organizing principle around which the self-structure is built. So right now I'm looking at Nate, you're looking at John, the listeners looking at me or you and listening, that's the attentional system. And the attentional system, when we're operating the intentional system, it creates also a particular kind of cognition.

It produces cognition that is convergent, that is going to a single point. Now, we also have another system. We have the awareness for want to be a better term. And now awareness in the visual field right now is that which is viewing and seeing the whole visual field. So I can look at you, Nate, and my attentional system can see you, but I can also simultaneously look at the, I'm simultaneously looking at the whole room, my whole visual field, because those two are happening in my experience, but I might not have consciously been looking at the whole visual field before that, and that's what tends to happen. We tend to lock on to individual objects through the attentional system and go from one object to the next object to the next object to the next object

throughout our whole day. Visually, but the visual system is just indicative of what you're doing in every other system, right? So this is why understanding that process with your eyes open, understanding the desktop, right, the Windows, how does the Windows app work? Well, I have an attentional system that whenever I'm looking at specific things, but whenever I look at specific things, I'm a specific self. Whenever I'm able to look at the wholeness of what's arising, which is simply first like actually orienting towards the wholeness, what that changes is who is looking.

The attentional system is still there, but now it's held within a wider experiential field out there, but it's also held in a wider experiential field in there. Like how you look is who looking, is who's looking? So if we were to use a Western term, you would say that the soul looks at the wholeness of something and the personality looks at the particulars. So all I need to start doing,

moment by moment as I'm talking and I'm moving through the day, is just like noticing how am I viewing experience? And what you'll notice is actually it doesn't take a lot of work to just flip that switch and open up wide. But every time you do that, you plant a seed that dismantles the tendency to just be oriented from your self-structure and gives you a wider field of experience. Very easier to do.

Do you do that all day long? Not anymore. It's widened. Because if you do something like that all day long, neurons that fire together, wire together. So this is very important to understand that meditation is about understanding, one of these, understanding perception,

and you don't necessarily have to sit on the cushion to do a lot of the work. If you understand what the work is to do, that's the wisdom side. You don't just have to follow your breath. you can be meditating the whole time because meditation has also got to do in its deepest dimensions

about how you're viewing experience and where you're viewing experience from. So you go to the cushion. I mean, there's all kinds, like meditation is a term like sports. It doesn't mean anything. It could mean curling or the FA Cup or the World Cup,

soccer, rugby, football, you know, karate. There's a whole realm of, of practices. But what are the viewers? What do we need to do? We need to start, well, we need to learn how to calm down and structure our nervous system, and there's a bunch of practices for that. But we also need to learn to shift our identity, to start operating from a deeper level of identity. When you then do that, then this non-duality becomes easier. Are most humans able to do those things? in terms of the perspective taking that I was talking about?

Yeah, yeah. Yes, everybody. For sure. It doesn't necessarily mean that the person will understand what they're doing, but they can do it. So, yes, most people could do the exercise and have a state change. So you could take four people from four different levels of development, and you could give those instructions to those four people,

they would have the same experience, but when they come back, they're going to reinterpret it differently. That I understand. When done well and when done precisely, people could be led quite quickly into very deep expanded states of consciousness. That's got to do with the precision of the science.

So, again, I'm really a newbie on this stuff, but I feel, even though I don't understand everything you're saying, or other guests that I've had on, I feel a deep truth to this, that this is the pathway for humanity somehow to resurrect some of these ancient practices and integrate them into this culture. So I know that you mentioned Dan Brown. You've observed the practices of Mahamudra,

which examines the nature of the mind, which evolved in places like monasteries. but accessing these experiential teachings is probably going to require a different approach if they are going to impact the number of human beings that we will need for impactful change. So you teach currently and have for quite a while with hundreds or thousands of students across the world, how do you think that these teachings can be adapted to meet the teaching, the needs of so many humans that are like deeply embedded in a highly technological, highly distracted world, now with AI and in a culture that has leaders that are stuck at

level three. The good news is when you integrate the best of this Indo-Tibetan world wisdom to contemplative tech, when you integrate it into the Western understanding, with the Western understanding has a very good sense of where the core injuries are. So the attachment system, the early childhood, the early childhood traumas and multi-generational traumas are what higher up the stack lead to all that dysfunction. So part of the work that I've done is to see how you can take those higher tech and it can actually be folded into the lower tech, meaning that actually you can address both issues simultaneously if done, if the contemplative technology is designed

the right way. That's why you have to redesign the technology. So that I think has been done. So that we have. The second piece is what the delivery system is, because the old structures of the delivery system of these traditions was hierarchical in a very traditional sense. And if it's not traditional and you have Western teachers who are teaching these teachings, then they'll teach them within a modernist structure, which is a kind of capitalist extractive structure, where I'm the teacher and I'm the expert and you're my students, you're going to pay me. So both of those, neither of those structures work, and then they're not going to work. And also, we don't want a single teacher. So what's much more important is a decentralized, decentralized delivery system.

Well, that we can do now, right? So, you know, you want a decentralized delivery system that can deliver to the path in such a way that the actual it's the intelligence of the members of the circle so rather than orienting towards the teacher the orientation is towards deep to relationality with one another and the educational process is a is an educational process in culture as you go through those developmental stages so rather than going through the stages individually, which is the old method, you go through those individual stages collectively and everything is oriented towards that developmental education. That can be scaled and decentralized and delivered, but again, it's got to do with the kind of size of project needed

to do that. But I don't think that that's a problem. And then you can convert that, core, you can convert that core technology from sacred secular, which would maybe speak to a certain amount of population. It can be re-skinned as Christianity in Islam and in Judaism, meaning that part of the study that I did with Dr. Dan, I started studying Dr. Dan's work when I was like 14, was looking at the deep structures of these systems. And of course, they're universal. The meditative traditions generally are universal because the people who worked on them with a 0.0.0.0.1% of the population

and they're very similar. So once you understand that, then you can have a deep structure that's universal, but you can have a languaging that is Christian and a language that is Islamic and a language that is Jewish, that can take at least 20% of the population to that kind of stage of development. With respect to your own work in the world,

What are your current fears and hopes and dreams? What I am really interested in is looking for those individuals who understand what it is that we have to build. That's where I'm really interested in that depth of collaboration to mobilize a... within one story you'd call it a Dharma army, within another story you could call it a rock band, right?

I mean, you know, because it really, it needs to have, in order to do what needs to be done, it needs to be outrageous in so many different ways. Because, you know, it's, it's, we're in a crazy situation. So one perspective, you have to understand it, it's like, it's a form,

without the understanding that what we have to do is a form of theater. And by theater, I mean, you know, in the great mysteries, there was always a mystery play that was the center of the mystery. But the difference from a metamodon perspective is that we are in that mystery play, and therefore we have to start to grow into a greater degree of narrative and creativity than we have thus far. That's what my dream and hope for the future is. So for people listening, I mean, you're a teacher and you've learned and experienced a lot

since at least when you were 14. What can someone listening to this show do right now today or this month to help address the things discussed in this podcast, or is it all up to politicians and leaders. Well, I think each of us in our own lives have to realize that it's go time. And so that's going to look different for each of us. But we desperately need each other. We need to find our courage for each of us. And whatever that means for you in your life to reach out to other people to take one more step in collaborating with others and exploring and exploring what that means. Taking more time in the natural world so that you feel what it is that we're fighting for

and realizing that when the beauty goes, the beauty's gone. whatever situation we're in, beginning to practice and learn and envision that there's a way that you might open to a mycelial connection with the others that are there. If we were all connected through a mycelial web of relationality and information, what might that feel like? So whenever I'm walking around, if there's a tree, I'm like, okay, there's a connection to that tree or that flower or that person. If that was true, because the brain doesn't know the difference

between what you imagine to be true and what is true, and because you're unconsciously imagining yourself to be separate, let's start consciously imagining that we're woven together. I used to do this as a teenager on the London Underground. I used to stand on the London Underground holding that thing and just envision

like that weave with everybody in the tube with me. And then the heart starts to expand and you're in relationship with everybody. Whether that's true or not, it doesn't matter. What matters is it feels like is true for you and therefore it starts to change your motivation and your behavior. So use your imagination. That was a Mahamudra practice that I remember

that they advised us to go through the airport on our way home feeling that and imagining that. That actually was beautiful. Thank you. How would you change those recommendations for young humans and their teens and 20s who become aware of all the things, economic, environmental issues with our current trajectory? I think the first thing is we have to imagine a world

that is more beautiful and more good and true. So we need that to be alive within us. And of course, because we're fed with so many images, you actually have to feed yourself. You have to let yourself dream because a lot of the youth are being suffocated by the cynicism and the lack of beauty of our culture. So that's so important to let yourself,

we have to let ourselves dream. You have to let yourself dream what you would like that world to look like. Why? Why is that so important? Why? Because the imagination is worth 100,000 words. And what you imagine to be real, what lives in your imagination becomes your chemistry. What you imagine to be real, your brain doesn't know the difference

between that. So if you're just watching the news and you're just seeing images related to a world that is in despair and slowly being exfixated and destroyed. And you're not feeding yourself with imagery of a world that is being born. Because, yes, we're hospicing, but we're also midwifing. So what is it that you want a midwife? Right? And yeah, it's like, yes, there's a hospice and there's a midwife, and we can do both.

So if the imagination is that important and we are empathic social primates, what you just suggested also implies we probably should turn off the news given how the news is these days. We should be discerning as to what we eat, for sure. Beauty, goodness, and truth is worth fighting for. So you need to look for those places where there is relationality,

where there is relationality. I think that that's so important for the... I know with my teens, like this, the journey's been one of, where do I find deep connection with my Piz? Where do I find deep connection with my Piz? Well, on the podcast with other guests, I often close by asking people,

what do you care most about in the world? So I will ask you that, John. Beauty and goodness and truth. I care most about the depth of love and intimacy that we all share. And that we all crave. And that we all crave. And that is the medicine for this time.

Yeah. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve the future for humanity and the biosphere? If I was to wave that magic wand, I would see a planetary level worldwide developmental educational project

that wove the best of the arts together in such a way that introduced this new developmental stage of a culture, it's art, it's music, it's food, it's in such a way that it kind of caught a light and we could leave this this tragedy that we find ourselves in behind. From your imagination to reality, my friend,

do you have any closing comments for people watching and listening who at least partially understand and agree with what you've laid out today? We are hospicing, but we're also midwifing, and so there is adorning, and so let us keep our hearts aligned with that world of truth and beauty and goodness, and even though it might not be here yet, and we're watching this hospice process, let's believe in that tomorrow of humanity

for our children and our children's children, and we're not going to give up. So nobody gets out of here alive. This is 100% mortality rate. So fuck, let's find something worth dying for and put ourselves into it so that when we leave, We don't feel like we just were potentially,

kind of, we watched something happen and didn't actually do what needs to be done. So whatever we need to do, whatever you need to do, whatever I need to do, whatever our listeners need to do, let's do it. Thank you for all your work and your vision and your time today, definitely to be continued, my friend. My pleasure, thanks to you, Nate,

and thanks to the listeners for listening. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyen, Julia Maxwell, Gabriela Slayman, and Grace Brunfield.

Thank you for listening and we'll see you on the next episode.