TrueLife - Simon van der Els - Observation Without Evaluation

Episode Date: December 5, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Simon van der ElsI pursue supporting the healing of individuals, groups and systems in all the ways I am able to."fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual; and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to prevent us from being able to solve most of them."- David BohmThis fragmentation requires healing.The word 'healing' comes from Proto-Germanic 'Hailjan' which means literally "to make whole". The process of whole-ing I'm interested in is not one that is actively done, which does not require a 'doing' or a'making' even. It is a matter of perception, a widening of our attention to witness a state which is present: wholeness. The universe, the earth, yourself: these are already whole. When wholeness is truly perceived, the healing is quick to follow."The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence."— J. KrishnamurtiIn my academic studies and work I've gone from generalist (biology) to hyper specialist (molecular microbiology). Later I've resurfaced and moved to generalist again, specifically investigating humanity's current predicament in the Metacrisis. For this I've read and listened to a wide range of sources and subjects: philosophy, science, spirituality and metaphysics. I aim to bring whole-ing with my research and communication.In the recent years the state of the natural world (including humanity) presses heavily on all of my senses presses heavily on all of my senses (especially the heart). This weight functions as a force to deepen and widen my perception. I pursue different personal contemplative practices to integrate those percepts, these include: different meditations, time in nature, psychoactive plant medicines and also I'm training various shamanic practices.I offer life-coaching and guidance work to people who feel stuck in life and in this moment of planetary upheaval. In this work I journey with the client in identifying their stuck patterns, releasing them and developing a new orientation towards their personal path. The methods I use are determined by the process, and I'm developing myself in ways of supporting all of Life in healing.http://linkedin.com/in/simon-van-der-els-66434b231 One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. It's Monday. It looks like we made it through the weekend. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I got an incredible show for you today with

an incredible individual who may be one of the most well-read individuals we've ever had on the podcast. We've had them a few times before. For those who may not know, let me take a moment to introduce you to the one and only Dr. Simon Van der Leyenes, a visionary guide in the exploration of healing and wholeness. His journey from the intricate world of molecular microbiology to a holistic understanding of the metacrisis is a testament to his commitment to unraveling the interconnected mysteries of existence. with a blend of academic prowess, contemplative practices, and the touch of the fantastical. Simon facilitates transformative conversations that stretch the boundaries of imagination

and dove into the profound realms of speculative philosophy. I hope you will all join us in welcoming as we embark on a journey with Simon to explore the cosmic dimensions of healing and the uncharted territories of consciousness. Dr. Simon, thank you for being here today, my friend. How are you? Wow, what an introduction. That's amazing. I've never been introduced in this. That sets the bar high. So I'll sit up straight. Yeah, right. I'm doing, I'm doing good. Nice to be back. Yeah, it is. It's really good to have you back here. And congratulations on the book and all the publishers. And what an interesting time we live in, right? I was looking at some of your posts. And, you know, I'm not sure where we want to begin. with this. Maybe a good spot is I know that you've recently finished the giant Bohemoth two volume set of the matter with things. Maybe we could start start there man.

What do you think about it? I finished part one of that. Okay. I'm in part two at the moment. And I was just joking with a friend of mine who is also interested in the McGilchrist's work. I sent him, I read it and then I make pictures. I'm like, oh, this part is really good. And I'm now in a chapter on time and I just I just told them like it's it's a it's a interesting mix between aha and whoa this is amazing and what the hell was what the hell was this me so I'm constantly sort of yeah I would have to say I'm chewing my way through it and it's it's taking a while that's very very good yeah it's it's one of those ones like I haven't got it.

I don't know, but I've read some of McGillcrest before. And there's times he's got to set the book down and be like, okay, what's going on here? Let me just think for a minute. What is, let me to read this a third time. Let me see what I can get out of it again. For those that may not know, yeah. He constantly references or quotes or he has like whole sections of these other amazing scholars and philosophers.

And then I'm constantly like, okay, oh, I might want to have to read this person or this person. And if you don't check his bibliography, it's massive. So I'm thinking like, how does this man do this? How does, so I think, yeah, the sheer amount of scholarship that goes into the work is actually, yeah, absolutely insane. And it's great because he, you can tell that he reads all the sources. And he reads, yeah, his mind roams wide. and he yeah he finds all these interesting

citations and quotes just for the right topics and then I also encounter like scholars that I wouldn't think that he had read and then it's like oh all of something he quotes that as well it's interesting I know that we spoke a little bit about

brain lateralization but in the matter with things from what I've just touched upon a little bit and maybe you can embrace this a little bit but more is the fundamental reality and folding in front of us seems to be favoring the left hemisphere, like this real analytical approach, but we're beginning to see how the right here, the right hemisphere interprets the world on something. You can touch on that a little bit and kind of piece together some of the things that he's

talking about. Yeah. So the interesting thing about Ian McGilker's work is I think it's incredibly difficult to summer The way the man writes is already like, right. He takes, he takes his time. But to make an attempt to summarizing it, I think he calls it a hemisphere hypothesis. And what he states and illustrates in his books

is that we carry two ways of seeing the world within us, within our brains, and this is the brain letterization. and then in a very, again, you should read this work if you're interested, but in a very, very short manner, the right hemisphere is a sort of broad, broad attention to a whole field of moving things. And while the left hemisphere is a very narrow focused attention, and there's also this lateralization that the left hemisphere is very much focused on language. and tool utilization, all these kind of things.

While the right hemisphere is more interested or deals with flow, with flowing time, so the left hemisphere also decontextualizes. So this narrow beam of attention allows us to pick up individual objects from their surrounding. And then we also see them as objects. But we create a mental image of that object, so we de contextualize it. we create a re-presentation, so it's a re-presencing. And what McGilchrist says, which I really like, is that the right hemisphere deals with presencing.

So the right hemisphere presence deals with everything that is happening in the moment, flow, these kind of things. And the left hemisphere is like a, maybe like a tractor beam that picks up objects, focuses on them, and then takes them out of the surrounding. So we can interact with them. so we can modify them and we can use them and yeah you are saying that we uh and this is also mcgilchrist's point uh he takes a large part of his first book in the mausory master in his

emissary where he describes what would the left hemisphere spherical world look like and he takes a whole chapter for this and he more or less describes our current world this is this over bureaucratization and these systems so it's very mapped heavy. So if the right hemisphere deals with the territory, which is lived experience, which is the physical real, and the left atmosphere deals with a map made of the territory. But if this map is super intricate and wide ranging as the one we have now with this hyperproliferation information and all these legacy systems that hold, yeah, how you say, laws and all these kind of things. So this whole bureaucratic system is stereotypically something that he would call, I think, left hemisphere or left hemisphere dominated. And the problem that shouldn't be a big problem. Important to note, it's not that we see the world either or. It's the right hemisphere sees both.

So it's end. He typically uses the metaphor, I think, which are the one that are. really like is when you would have to play a piece of music that the right hemisphere initially can hear the piece of music as a whole thing and feel the experience of it and as you are going to have to practice playing that song the left hemisphere will have to step in to play all these the short bits that are very intricate I'm not a musician but but the left atmosphere is more focused on the decontextualizing again so you have to grind

it out but if you would have if you would play the entire song the way you've learned it by just the left hemisphere then it's this disjointed thing right so what he then says is then in a in a well-functioning left-right hemisphere interaction it's appreciating the whole going into detail and then the details get released again to join the whole again and that's sort of the ongoing way of these two, how they interact. And what he means with the left hemisphere-dominated world, or what I would mean with that, is that we're not giving up those deep and textualized parts that focus on the map is not being subdued in any healthy all anymore, not in the felt experience, not in the present moment. It's also with time, for instance, that we live on clock time,

which is a human construct. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you bring up music. I was talking to a musician friend of mine who's Adam Lopez, if you listen to him, man, you're an amazing musician. And he's an old school musician. Like he travels. He just goes from state to state and he'll play, you know, private concerts, private parties.

He'll play in clubs. Wherever people want him to play, he'll play at. And, you know, he's really good to when he's really talented. And when he talks about putting out a new album, we talked about going to Nashville. kind of has this rockabilly style. And I was asking him about Nashville. And he just kind of got this look on his face like, ah, George, he goes, I can't, I don't even like talking about it.

But I, you know, I want to draw it out. I'm like, why not? And he goes like, he goes, you know, George, this, let me tell you how modern music is made in studios. You go in there and you play one chord, they record it, and then they sample it. And then that becomes the chord that plays throughout the entire song. So somebody could come in and they'll play five chords.

and then the music team will put those five chords together and that becomes the song. And he goes, the same with singing. You'll say one word. They'll record it and that becomes the song. He goes, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in going out and playing music to people. I want to play the whole song. And you know what?

I'm probably going to fuck up from time to time. There might be some mess ups in there. But that's part of the music. I'm not going to play the same song in Nashville that I play in Texas. Every time I play it, it's a different song. But that kind of gets back to what you were saying. as that part all of a sudden becomes the focus. And it seems like you're seeing it in music

where if I can come in and play one chord, that's the left temperature. That's the one time, boom. And then people begin to respect it. Isn't that wonderful? Look, they played that one chord. No, that's not wonderful. That's not music.

It's one piece that they pulled out of the hole and they've made that the whole thing that we love. What do you think? Yeah, and you, as you were speaking, you immediately hit the number point that, me Gilchrist often reiterates when he wants to make this point is for the left hemisphere the whole

the whole thing is made up of parts so the left hemisphere sees sees the whole as a thing that can be de-contextualized and put into small analyzed so lised into pieces and then build up again but for instance if it's about a living thing so I would call a song or music

is something that is alive. He deals with flow. It's the same. For instance, let's use a morbid example. If you would, if you would dissect a dog or vivisect an animal into pieces, then it's dead. But if you were able to perfectly put it back together again, it's still dead, right? And that's the problem, let's say, with the left hemispherical look on things.

It's seeing if the world is made out of bits, or the universe is made out of bits, or this whole experience. And then if you understand all the bits just enough, then you could build it up from the bottom and explain the whole thing. But yeah, in McGilchrist's thesis, that it's just not possible, or that's a mistake.

That's a left atmospheric way of seeing it. And this is also a divide in, he calls it a divide in philosophy from pre-platonic, philosophy like Heraclydeus is more of a philosopher of flow and they have we have process philosophy and analytical philosophy so read the book read the book it's great I also feel like if I'm talking about the book it's like I there's just so much information in there and I I love to regurgitate it and then I'm forgetting things it's I wanted to bring it up in the beginning because I think it's a good segue into the way you think. You have a very diverse way at looking

at the world. And I think it's because you see the whole picture. But maybe you can talk a little bit about your philosophy of life. How is it that one moment you're writing about the metacrisis? And then the next moment it's rewilding. Like how do all these things come together? Because I know you have a whole picture. Maybe you can give us a little bit of background on how the things that you've been talking about relate to one of them. Nice. That's a, that's a, that's a super nice question. Maybe I haven't even, okay, then I haven't even thought of that.

I know. That's why I love it. Let's do that, let's do that now. Let me sense for a bit. Take your time, man. It's a, it's a deep question. I think what is essential to, to the way I, yeah, I think what is in the essential to the way that I see things or I feel or sense things is that the universe is alive.

And coming from a Western traditional science and molecular science, the first thing that we do in molecular biology, when we study something is we kill it. and then we look at all the bits, the molecular bits, so the DNA, the molecules, or the proteins, enzymes, RNA, yada, yada. We take a snapshot, so we freeze it, kill it, and then we analyze, and then we think back on how to study that life. And if we start from the idea that, what I mean with that is that even as a biology,

we treat life in a non-often, often of all biologists, but often in a non-sacred way, as if it's not alive, because we model physics and the old model physics, the old Newtonian model physics, was based on a sort of clockwork universe, a giant mechanism,

and a mechanism is a machine, is by definition, not alive. Or at least, in biology, often we talk, I even wrote it in my, the machine metaphor is hyper prevalent in the life sciences. Well, I feel more and more like that isn't the case. It isn't a machine. I use it as one of the propositions in my thesis. So in the thesis, you get the option where you define your thesis to add a couple of propositions that don't necessarily have anything to do with your work that you publish in the book, but that you also want to defend. So they have to be of

scientific rigor. And I used one in which I said that in bio, in bio, I have to paraphrase because I don't remember exactly what it was. But in biology, it's a bigger sin to mechanomorphize than to anthropomorphize. And what I'm, meant with that is usually anthropomorphizing is like a massive research. It's like yeah, you cannot project

human feelings or human ideas or human agency or even a sense of agency or intentionality on mechanical things. So if you look at bacteria, it's like now it's the selfish gene

it just doesn't survive, all these kind of things. well what I wanted to shine a light on this is that if we mechanomorphize nature then we're doing something way weirder actually because when we're saying like now this this thing is not alive, this bacteria

that it's more like a clock it's more like a like a car so it's a it's a machine built up of parts if we understand the parts and so we what I feel is that we take away by having that lens that's sort of the de-vitalization so it's removing life from something living right and by doing that we also strip it of a lot of information that we might if we were taking it

seriously right we might glean way more information from it or we would learn way more for it and that's I think I'm more interested in. So what can we learn from the living world, but also, yeah, the living cosmos more, yeah, so larger and larger. And that's why I think that on the base level, the universe or the cosmos is alive,

and it's a living, developing thing. And I, that's why I also am interested, no, to make it sure, But why I'm interested then, I think that's the base motivation that I have or the base feeling that I have. And all the work or all the reading and all the things that I like to do is connecting people back to nature. Because that's a, that's the living, to the living cosmos and embedding ourselves back into this living environment. Because I sense that that is one of the ways or one of the necessary ingredients. or strategies of making it out of the meta crisis as a species.

I think we are being asked to reintegrate into the living world. And notice we are already fully integrated in the living world. I mean mostly from here that our map integrates in the living world. And we start living with it again. I like that. It's interesting on so many levels. I, as you're, as you're, as I'm listening to what you're saying and, in the idea of, of anthropomorizing versus mecapormizing, like, on some level, it makes me think of science losing a lot of its credibility. It's science on some level.

And like, look, I'm not a scientist or anything like that. So, so I'm sure people are going to get mad of me right here. But it seems to me that science, science is, is basically prophecy. We're going to kill this thing and then try to make a prediction about the future about what happened on the past. That seems like prophecy to me in some ways. And I think that there's a lot of great things about the scientific method. And I'm so stoked we've had it as a vehicle to get us here. And I know it'll continue to take us great places.

However, it does seem like that vehicle of science is beginning to pull parallel back to the vehicle of spirituality. Maybe spirituality is beginning to lead the race again. And when I start looking at the way in which people are looking at subjective, behavior in trial, maybe not clinical trials, but they're beginning to bring the subjectivity back into questionnaires and giving it to people that have mental issues breaking down. And they're beginning to, hey, ask the family questions like, is your husband less of an asshole now? Or, you know, like these ideas that may not have something you could put a slide rule on or a ruler against that were commonly thrown out of the clinics are now being brought

back in. And I think that echoes what you're saying about, look, this living form. over here. We can recognize ourselves in that. And why is that a bad thing? Like that's probably a good thing. If we can recognize ourselves in this other living organism, now we have another way to look at ourselves. And you can learn a lot from that angle, right? Is that

too far to think about maybe the moving around like that? No, no, no. I agree with you. And it's good that you added that science is a very great tool. It's a very great technological tool. It's amazing.

But it doesn't matter to change our mind sometimes. It's okay to change our idea. It's not throwing out the, that's also my point. It's not throwing out the baby with the bad. Yeah, I agree. Your point on spirituality and science, I think anything that's not within the, that's a current framework of a scientific field,

often will get banished to what we would call spirituality. I see. And I think that we're also in a place where science as a discipline has been so hyper-specialized. So we also use the working as a modern scientist in a, let's say, a normal, normal field, so the standard field. It's akin to being in a centimeter of being in a hole, a centimeter wide and a kilometer deep, how specific it is. And so we have an incredibly high resolution of a lot of things. But what I think is where we're hitting up against certain boundaries of our current frameworks

or our current paradigms of where that data fits into. So we're hitting the boundaries of our, we're having problems with explaining, and I mean we as a sort of, as the whole species, having problems explaining or matching these way larger problems or of how the universe works. And I'm not a physicist.

I only, I try to read a little bit on it, but I don't, I cannot match that stuff. But I, I do here, and I think there's also within modern physics, quantum, quantum science, there is quite a bit of a problem trying to match all the theories. I guess. Yeah. But, okay, I'm not, I'm not well versed in that. But within biology, I would say that, for me, the sense is very much that. where the same is an example, for instance, cancer, cancer research.

And sure, there have been a lot of cancer medications for treatment of cancer. The prevention of cancer is the tools that we are using, the reductionist science tools and the high complexity of even a single human cell. It's so incredibly difficult to get to results or to get to cures. even with the so for instance most most cancer treatments have a lot of side effects and yeah those side effects are also because we don't understand the whole system because it's so incredibly complex and that's again a meta crisis problem if we if we are stuck in the mindset of problem solution and we only design our solution or only are our treatment for the desired solution without taking into account second order, third, fourth, or not end-order effects,

then you wind up with more problems. So your solution is causing more problems down the road. And I have a feeling that modern man or so 21st century humans, as we're running into all these planetary boundaries of like climate change, acidification of the ocean, biodiversity crisis, all these things, we're running into all the problems of our previous solutions. So the way we do industrial agriculture, which was a solution because people needed food. And then, okay, these cultivars were developed, which could be grown way closer to each other. Artificial fertilizer based on fossil carpents with a Haber-Bosch method.

Okay. and then we can grow more and more food but then human population also skyrockets and now we're heading to these issues where there's soil depletion well all this kind of stuff so the the i think this is also a main motivator for me to try to explore or at least for myself and then also in my writing or in the communication that i have with people is to develop up a way of sensing the world, a novel map, or maybe a new configuration of the map. So it can also include a lot of old things. It doesn't have to be the next best idea. I think we can also look back on, or there are probably already a lot of very good ways of

seeing the world still alive, and most likely also indigenous cultures, different ways of interpreting different languages. I think it's just a, I think it's a problem of, yeah, integrating in a, you know, in a well thought out way that maps, that actually maps, but we've, it's a massive challenge because also the sheer amount of information that we have.

And that's, that makes it difficult. Also for me as an, for me as an issue, individual for I think for any individual to make sense of things is because there's so much information and most likely

even with good scientific information it will take you a while to figure out what is actually true because, you can make, you can find almost any data to fit any hypothesis and I'm not saying that

any hypothesis is true but it will take you a while to figure out whether it's true or not. And I noticed that because or getting, getting sort of deluged with information, it's difficult to do the due diligence. So it's the slowing down and trying to integrate. It's fascinating to me.

I love the idea. I love what you said about. We're bumping up against the problems of our previous solutions. You know, it begins to beg the question of what were we solving for in the first place? Maybe that was the problem. You know, like, and you're right. There's so much information. The old one thing I know for sure is the older I get, the less I know.

And that seems weird because you go through life thinking you know all these things. I read the history of that. Who's history? Whose history did you read? Did you read the America's history? Did you read the history of the boomers or the history of Generation X? like it's constantly changing and when you start thinking about that

you realize okay I get it the people that wrote history knew it was wrong but they had to have some sort of shared sacrifice foundation to build on you know and it's not that they wanted to be horrible people it's not that they purposely tried to lie to everybody it's like look damn it we need a foundation to build on let's go with this

it's true enough you know you run into this idea of true enough but in this integrated world like I don't know if true enough is good enough what do you think nice nice no I like that yeah yeah or at least not not true enough with the power that we're building it's like is this accurate yeah it's accurate enough

okay sure if we had like a little little hammer and we were like building things and it's like okay we can make some mistakes but we're using like we're losing atomic one weapons. Is this true enough? Especially when it comes to to yeah, again, that that problem, solution mindset is right. Can we identify already? How are we identifying what is a problem? Right. And it's very based on our, in our framework, how we look at things. So I'm, that's also one of the main things I'm interested in is perception, just on a sort of,

base level how how do we sense things and then i'm yeah so how do we perceive things with different senses and also in um so it's less about what to think and i think more about how how to think this brings up an interesting question yeah go ahead yeah so about what what are the what are the the the the assumptions and the what are the heuristics that we use to think about things because yeah then we definitely sort of I think we cannot think unbiased bias is depending on which glasses you put on or which tool you use to think with you will have an bias and an assumption the most important thing is to them be aware of that bias and to have multiple sets of glasses so you can actually shift and that you can know like okay if i if i privilege this part

of me that wants this is this, then this is my opinion. If our privilege this part of me, then I find this, this is this, this is this, and then this is my opinion. I think this is constantly happening already within us, as we are a sort of constellation of different sub-personalities or smaller parts or even smaller parts. I think we are a sort of high consciousness. And within that, the central ego or whatever that is the one that has to make the decision is like the speaker in congress and you have all these different parties and at a certain moment there has to be made a executive decision but it's being aware of who is all what are all the opinions who is making the decisions based on what what are they what are the needs and the bias and the more i think

again i pull it to my i pull my view to the sort of individual level to myself but the more more I become aware of this, I think the more I can also be aware of this whenever I would work in a group, or if I would have to work in an organization. And I think that's part of the sort of, yeah, navigating the meta crisis is a lot of inner work. It's less. Yeah. It's more inner work than work out there. I think it's more about getting really to terms with how we are as modern, modern people. So how, I would say, you know, sometimes I struggle with a correct word, but maybe deficient. I'm not sure if that's the right word. It makes sense. How lacking we are as modern Westerners, I would say. I cannot speak for the rest of the world, but let me speak for myself. I love the idea that you brought up adaptability.

And I have this, I'm seeing this thing happen. I'm curious to get your opinion on it. I think on some level what we're beginning to see is a fundamental shift in sense ratios in the human species. And because there's so much information, we're beginning to adapt to that. And we're going to, like, I believe that today's children are going to process information through their senses differently than we do. And an example of that is, but let's look at language. A large part of conflicts from Time Memorial have been because people can't thoroughly express themselves to one another. You know, is it really, are you, are you really going to spread democracy?

Are you going to steal all their resources? Why are you taking their resources? Because we need them. Why do you need them? We need them more than them for these reasons. Like, there's a complete lack of communication that's happening. Is there a way to distribute a better? Probably.

But I think that what we're seeing happen to our species right now is a fundamental. shift and sense ratios. Like, let's look at the texture of language. Like, I think this is going to become a thing. And I think that because I'm trying to make it a thing. So the texture of language, like language has vibrations. Different words denote intentions. And so if I say to you, you are an incredibly well thought, well thought out individual.

And I love the way in which you're able to express your ideas. that thought has a texture to it. And if I put it into a synthesizer or an equalizer, you could probably see the wave function of it. And I think that that translates to people in a different way. And I think there could be classes where people, regardless of what language you speak, the shape of that word hits someone in a way that is meaningful.

And that's what I mean by the texture of language. I believe that this could be something that a group of people who don't even speak the same language could get together, and you could see that wave function, and it would show an emotion register through a smile, through a light up of the eyes, through an eyebrow flash. But I think that that's something that could be brought into teaching language, like the texture of language is meaningful.

And when you begin to think about that, wow, now you can see language through an equalizer. You can see language through the emotions of people. But like on some level, I think, AI and all of this information is being coalesced into it. Okay, you monkeys have just begun to get vowels. Like our first language is vowels. English is a vowel. But now we're learning how to put vowels together with words and images

that'll be like a sentence. And the next generation will actually be able to communicate on a level that's meaningful. You know, it seems like them passive. Is that too far out there? What do you think? Now, I like it. I like out where you go.

with it. What I have to think back on is I think in older many older civilizations, the word language is seen as power, right? Yes. Spelling. It's like casting spells.

I've been here for a lot. I remember like the, what is it? I think I have it here. The four agreements, like the Toltec book, yeah, right? He also talks about language again, about the spellcasting with words. And I think what you're hitting on is like the,

it has less to do with the words and more with the intention behind the words. Yes. And maybe some words capture that intention better than others. Maybe some words are more powerful or are better vehicles from capturing meaning or conveying, conveying energy. Better containers. Wow. Yeah. And yeah, I am very curious what is happening to us as a species in the information age,

and we're in the middle of this massive experiment, because we don't know yet. I sometimes get the idea that like an upsurge in neurodivergence or people that get diagnosed with neurodivergence, I don't think it's only that we have better diagnostic tools and that happens more. I do like to take that, for instance, I think Gabonate makes about a lot of these things being trauma-related, which sort of tracks me. Right. That's it. But there might be also a sort of adaptation happening, so neuroplasticity to this sort of high informational load,

this environment. But without making a moralistic point about it, is this good or bad? Because, yeah, we can also talk about that. Yeah. I think on a sort of base, base level, it's in species adapting to an environment. That might be also illustrated by these sort of more cases of neurodivergents, be it ADHD or different types of autism. It has something to do with sort of how information is processed, right? I often have to think back on the Gidu Krishna-Murti quote, which I just really like. It's no measure of health being well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

And yeah, so he said it somewhere in the 60s, I think, or 70s. that was before well mass media was there but that's before this mass information technology and if I have to sense for myself so this is this machine

I struggle man and I don't think it's I think it's the way how this this information is shared especially on well these algorithmic-based social media platforms. I think it's like almost a psychic warfare.

I also remember the quote somewhere that was it. Yeah, marketing is peacetime propaganda. And yeah, it kind of, kind of is. I'm not sure if, if we as humans are capable of adapting fast enough to this changing environment. And also, I am not sure if we would want to, if that is a desirable change. So it's a bit of a, yeah, depending on where you see the world going. I'm more in the favor of pushing the brakes somewhat, but there's, there's no,

there appears to be no cockpit where there is a break. And so it looks like we're in this thing. Yeah, it's Bernasian economics on a level that is out of control. I'm fascinated by propaganda. I'm fascinated by mental techniques that manipulate behavior, whether it's good or bad. It's mesmerizing to me to see how language or a spell or, you know, getting people to see things a certain way will cause a certain behavior. not sure the people that are in charge of that machinery are thoroughly aware of the unintended consequences that they've brought about. But I don't think they're going to be good for the people

in positions of authority. You know, it's like, look, we're going to go out by this. But what about this? You know, like, I don't think, I don't know if we as a species are capable of thoroughly understanding the unintended consequences. And, you know, maybe when you say you want to put the brakes on things, are you thinking about the way in which, you know, the AI, Genie is out of the bottle or is that what you mean by the acceleration? Oh, yeah. Can you tell me about it, man? Why?

Why are you to put the brakes on for? Yeah. So I was sort of reading into AI. So in the past couple of years, what I initially got into when I started worrying about the state of the world, I very quickly got to human systems because I thought, okay, I can read up on climate change and on bioter. diversity laws, but these are all, or social collapse. These are all symptoms of an underlying cause, or at least these are all symptoms of something else. And then I got into overshoot, which is a, is a phenomenon, which is, yeah, well, used to be ecology. And it explains how a population can overshoot the carrying capacity of its environment.

So meaning the amount of food that's available. A simple example is, for instance, you have in Canada or a place with islands, with fjords, in winter the fjords freezes over, a couple of deer make it to an island. And then in spring, the ice melts, and these deer are stuck on the island. There are no predators there. So what happens is they'll just eat and they'll reproduce and you'll get more and more deer. And what will happen is that they will overshoot the carrying capacity of the island. And after that, they will starve.

Yeah. But what happens in that overshoot, so the ecological debt that is built up in that population growth, it will, the debt will be or will cause more damage to the environment. So what will also happen is that the carrying capacity is not a stable thing. It's not like, okay, this island can fit. three deer that's it. It's also a dynamic thing. So what will happen is that as these animals are starving, they'll start eating more and more also things that they wouldn't normally eat, which will further debase the ecological carrying capacity of the other. And that will further plummet down.

So overshoot often happens when species are found in an environment without any um, how you say, without any breaks, right, sort of from the environment. I sort of started looking at the human growth curve after looking at bacterial growth curves for years in the lab. It kind of looks similar. And I thought, okay, it looks like we're in overshoot. Why? Why are we in overshoot? So overshoot on the Y axis is population.

But it's population times consumption. So it's also how much does an individual of that population consume. depending on the that will have an influence on the carrying capacity right so you have also this earth overshoot day website where they say like okay if everybody would live like a person in i think it's a person in the netherlands uh use up that amount of resources we would need 3.6 planets and then so you have different different rates for different places in the world but if everyone would live as the average person in India we would we would have need 0.9 planets and so these these are of course large metrics and that it's

illustrative of a point so it has something to do with that consumption rate and what I was thinking is that a major part of that consumption rate is our culture right it's the consumer culture it's the way we actively actively pursue consumption as an act, something that we really want to do instead of consumption for just survival. And again, I'm saying we, Western, the affluent worlds, I'm not saying people in, I don't know, in poorer places. And so it's interesting then to look at what is, what are the drivers in the culture that do these things? How are we in non-life-affirming culture? What are all the underlying drivers of this?

What is causing all these things? That's something I'm mainly interested in. But I'm also interested in what are the accelerators of the current problems? And AI, I think, is mainly an accelerator of the current problems, and now the problem solved. Ah, okay. And I initially thought I was clever when I was reading on AI risk. And I read a bit on, of course, even a Gilchrist, but also Jean Baudriar, which was like,

he was called like the archpriest of post-modernism. Very difficult. I found it very difficult to read. But I like this idea about hyper-reality, which is a point. Again, I have to just, this is my interpretation of it. what he describes is a hyperproliferation of symbols and signs. So the map, the things, not the physical reality, not the thing itself, but are symbols of that thing. And the more we live in an abstract or symbolized world, so as we are talking on a digital platform,

right, also human crafted, signs and symbols. And as we are more living in that world, he says that what will happen is that our map of reality will start replacing reality. So as we're creating a map that one-on-one fits, we think, one-on-one fits the physical real, fits the planet. We are replacing it with our representations. and the Anthropocene is the world shaped by man. So we're sort of projecting our inner world on the world, and we're changing it to fit our inner world. And what I was thinking with AI,

or the main point that he was making, I think, about hyper-reality, is that it's also becoming very, very difficult to discern what is real anymore. Because the real is actually disappearing, right? because we're replacing it with what is in the air. What he says is the hyper-real. As we are doing that, so we're replacing the real, it also becomes more and more difficult to communicate about what is actually real. Because we all have done different maps in our head about the same thing that we're looking at.

But the thing that we're looking at might already be also a hyper-artificial thing. So a city is like a virtual reality already. because it's a projection from what's inside of us and make it physical. And my, to get back to the point, my, where I thought like, okay, the main threat of artificial intelligence is not sky net taking up the world or that we're all going to be unemployed. It's just that we're going to lose even more or we are going to accelerate our communication and our coordination problems that we already have in the world because we are not going to be able to make good sense anymore

because we're not going to be able to be sure that whenever we're talking about something, that our words actually mean the same thing and that we're actually talking about the same thing. Because if we have generative AI and we're spending an average five hours or more, I don't know what the latest metrics are, on digital devices, that is our reality. if we don't know how it's generated or even if we would know how it's generated it's it's we're getting a weird map of the physical real so our our human ancestors would live on the savannah and their physical environment which very much correspond to their mental environment because they're constantly living in that world maybe they every now and then have shamanic tron sessions and I don't know how out into the stars etc We are spending most of our time in a digital environment,

and most of the world is getting replaced with a digital environment. But it is also making it super difficult to communicate, to make common, to have a mutual understanding. And I thought that is probably the main threat of AI. Then I read that I think one of the main guys at Google also stated this, so I was happy with that. Yeah. But then I heard Daniel Smocktenberger talk about the threat of AI,

and then I, that just felt like a punch in the stomach. Then I was like, ah, it's even worse. He said, like, it's an accelerator function of all the current technology that we have running, that we have running, debasing the world. So our sort of the global growth machine that we call the economy. and AI is an optimization tool. And if we don't set our directions right, if we don't align AI correctly,

then it will optimize all these things that are currently destroying the world. And it looks like we're doing that. You know, it's such a conundrum because it's, first off, it's interesting that the richest people are the people saying, look, we're using, too much. Like that's a, that's a pretty big problem just in itself right there. Like, you know,

and it seems to me that, you know, if you look at COP 28 or any of these climate situations, everyone shows up in their private jet. The very people that are concerned with ruining the world or the people that have developed the technology to do it. And like, it seems to me, if you want to lead by example, like, you know, words are, words make fantastic stories. and I love language, but you can say something to you're blue in the face, and if your actions are different, people aren't going to listen to your words.

And I, you know, right? It's it's gargantuan. And when you think about AI being an accelerator, like what, it's accelerating the, the winning techniques, the so-called winning techniques of people and positions of authority.

And now they're like, hey, wait a minute, you guys can't do that. Only we can do that. You guys can't do it. We're going to shut it off for you. That genie is out of the bottle. Like the people that have the most, us living in the West and the people that are above us,

like these people have to fundamentally change their lives. Otherwise, nothing they say is going to do anything. And again, it comes down to our definition of winning. Yeah, I think, again, I think Daniel, I heard him say that. I like that. He said, there is no winning in a self-terminating system. So you might be temporarily winning.

It's the same like if you have spleen cancer. The cancer might be winning. Things that is winning. It's, oh, I'm acquiring more resources and I'm dividing more often. That's great. It's going well. But at a certain moment, the host will die. Dying, right.

And I agree. it's it's a very tricky thing because it quickly devolves into also into politics and how to solve these major world problems right i i think again a lot of my ideas come from sort of system thinkers yeah it's it's so how do we do global governance without global government and at the moment I think there's a lot of focus on how do we do it with global government. And I think a lot of people are rightfully so very worried about where that might lead. And there's, of course, a plethora of conspiracy theory and all this other shit. Also, again, it's a map that's made over physical reality and it's super difficult to discern

what is actually really happening or what are the motives. bar so again I found this also super difficult to navigate then I'm not fully sure on I think also again certainty is something that should be treated as suspicious yes well said if someone is too certain about what is going out because certainty is also the tool that gets wielded like oh I'm certain that these are the bad guys so you just you just kill kill them all and then so any that gets used and I see it a lot in the current media right it's it's that the hyperpolarization again and but the big problem there with as you also pointed out is the hypocrisy of those that speak about

okay we have to lower emissions and net zero and yet these billionaires that are greenwashing more or less yeah it's well said it's the again it's the the um signal that people pick up So the signal is right. The signal is that, yes, there is something going awfully wrong with the, with the trajectory of global human civilization, our population. It's just that there are a lot of bullshit merchants peddling their different explanations as to why this is happening. And those explanations often get used to further their own goals. And that happens on the whole political spectrum.

And indeed, then, but when these hypocrisies are then not also admitted, then that further polarizes people. Because if someone, let's say, traditionally conservative, I'm just going to use that as a, so you're progressive and conservative. If a conservative person specifically says, for instance, okay, yeah, but renewable energy also requires that we mine in Congo and how green is that? Why am I not green if I drive my gasoline car?

That's actually a point. And then what often happens in the discussion is that people will be called or people who are concerned about how we're going to adapt to climate change. Or yeah, or to this changing planet. often will get thrown into a corner and be called denialists or whatever is

whatever works for this bipartisanship. Well actually it is a good question and there is a very difficult way and again it will come down to what is our definition of winning or what is our definition of adapting or

that we start talking about these things and that we get a shared understanding of what do we actually find important what are values actually yeah and I have the sense that at the moment we just recently had elections in the Netherlands which wasn't a very surprising result there was a one of the traditionally far-right parties won or at the most votes and it seems to be the yet again getting back to the problem with AI. It seems to be a communication problem, as you mentioned before.

It's how do we get from this floating hyperreal map where we're constantly in our, where we're overexposed to all these different ways of seeing the world. Some have more truth in them or have more, let's say, have a higher resolution than others. But how do we get down back to a sort of felt, human level where if you're communicating with someone, you see each other first as a human. And then later you can talk about that map.

Then vet what do all these words actually mean when we talk about, I don't know, when we talk about adaptation. Because some person will see climate adaptation as like the 15 minute city conspiracy or that kind of stuff. or the W-E-F industrial agriculture, blah, blah, blah, all this top-down kind of stuff. Well, another person might see it completely different. If they talk about adaptation, they might think of no, localized energy, smaller wind turbines,

communal living, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. And the moment that we don't know what it actually means to the other person, what the word actually means to them, then we start going with these then we're not communicating we're just sending information yeah it i feel like we're getting to a point where either or is being replaced by both and like let's talk about like a 50-minute cities is both it's a great way to to contain resources and have people live a more meaningful life but it is also very constrictive it's also definitely limiting your ideas is limiting your beliefs is limiting what's possible it's both you know and like i think and again i think

the can i think the 15 i think that the 15 minute city i think that the 15 minute city i i've been curious about this one okay because i don't so i try not to go into sort of internet rabbit holes and then just investigate conspiracy theory right like okay i i'll just enjoy reading fiction then That's time well spent. Same thing. It's the same thing. Yeah. But with the 15-minute cities, I have a sense that it's so, it's very American or very United States of America focused.

Because the infrastructure of the U.S. is so car-based, right? And how suburbs function and that everything is so stretched far apart. That's, of course, a logistical nightmare. if you run out of gasoline or if you run out of electric vehicles. So it costs so much energy to move food across all these massive. And it's, of course, again, a worldwide problem. But I think the 15-minute city problem is a very American one. Because I think here in the Netherlands, most of our cities are 50 minutes.

Because they were, they are older than a couple of hundred years old. And then we didn't have cars. And it wasn't like, okay, I'm going to get my milk, but I'm going to, I don't know, I have to be on horseback for two hours to get my milk. So of course, then, yeah, the infrastructure already makes sense. But now, yeah, how do you do that in a country that was built with the car in mind at a certain moment? And if that, yeah, if we're looking at peak oil, so if we're going to, if we're going to have declining returns on oil fossil fuel is it's like a battery and it's not being replenished

so at a certain moment it will run out so how do you future proof or adapt to that and then i can understand that this idea of 15 minutes cities makes sense but you have again the top down approach right where i can also understand some of the the let's say the more cynical or I would say what quickly gets lumped into conspiracy thinking. Conspiracy thinking is already like it has a very negative connotation. Yeah. And it doesn't have to have that because there might be quite a bit of truth in some conspiracy. Sure.

And I'm also not that trusting of any very large skill, top down. Yeah, again, certainty, a very large top down systems that, again, tried to create a left hemispherical map approach on the world, saying like, we use this template for a city. And we put a stamp. While living, adapting systems, they will adapt to their environment. And I think, again, if you're on a boat and you have to navigate a lot of, let's say you're navigating a place with a lot of small islands and it has very difficult times. or there's a lot of, let's say it has reefs. It's a very difficult to navigate area.

Let's say you're on there. You have a perfect map of where all the reefs are, and you want to go to that, you want to go to Island A. But if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, it's great. You have that map because the map very much matches the environment. Yeah. What if there was a tsunami the day before and it's now storming? Are you going to use the map to navigate or are you going to just pay a lot of it?

You're going to use both most likely, but are you going to pay a lot of attention to what is actually going on in your environment? Maybe the reef has changed. Yeah. If we're going to a very changing world, yeah, I put way more favor in bottom-up living systems that adapt to things instead of bureaucratic. Here's your carbon credits. Not saying that these solutions might not work on a larger scale. Let's put them to use for industry. I don't know.

But yeah, it's a very difficult, it seems to be very difficult to navigate. Yeah. You know, when I think about that, I read an interesting article a while back. And it was talking about some college was building a new part of their campus. and they had put up these beautiful buildings and this wonderful architect that came in and when it came time to lay the sidewalks the chances like don't don't put any sidewalks in

like what are you talking about are the kids going to walk? He's like exactly why would we lay the sidewalks? Like let's see where the kids walk and then we'll lay the sidewalks because in the other parts of campus there's all like these dirt paths and anybody's been to a campus

like you see all these shortcuts that people take so why lay down the foundation you know until you see what the best courses. Like if you look at ants, I have an ant problem in my house.

And these buggers, man, they always make these, like they'll make a line from here from A to B. But if I kill them, then they'll make a line from A to C to B. And like, there's another thing with slime molds.

I read an article or I was speaking with Mark Viola who told me about this slime mold project. They made like a, an agar plate in the shape of Japan. And they put these slime molds in there and it cut these trails.

to it. And it's almost the exact same thing as the subway. Like, look, we have a way of self-organizing. We are a giant collective self-organizing system. And when people up top try to start making decisions, like whether it's a corporation or a government, it's the same thing. And they make poor decisions because they don't have the information of the collective on the bottom. They're looking at it from like this top-down linear approach. And that might be another reason why we're beginning to see this non-linear way of doing business taking over. Shout out to the octopus movement. What's up everybody?

I love you guys out there. But maybe that's what's going on with this non-linear neurodivergent. It's a return to the bottom-up sort of organization. What do you think? Yeah. No, yeah. No, I hear you. I think that's true because it's also an adaptation to

this sort of the top down and I think it's easy to see that most of our top down systems are poorly aligned at the moment. Yep. With life affirming future. And it's very difficult to realign them within the confines of how they are structured. So the incentives within those structures are by probably already, because they are so poorly aligned they cannot be

changed within that system and I think then these different bottom up ways as they are as the situation is evolving you'll see that come up more and more but you will also see more and more restrictive

conservative old ways so I think we're in a what will happen during what is happening during collapse because I feel like we're in collapse. I agree. We will see both happening at the same time. So you'll have places where there's more and more coherence

in this sort of different way of seeing, different ways of seeing the future and trying to adapt. And you'll see more constriction on the other side. Yeah. So it's again an end. And, yeah. It's interesting. You know, I think we are in the midst of a collapsing system.

You know, and I was speaking to a gentleman yesterday, and he was talking about, you know, jobs and some fast food restaurants. And he had mentioned, like, they'll pay, like, $25 an hour to work at a fast food. And there's nothing wrong with that. But the point we were saying is that the people that are at the top of institutions, be it government or industry, you see the people on the bottom uprising, whether it's the Arab Spring or whether it's the unions fighting in the U.S.

It's the yellow vests. People on the bottom are sick and tired of doing things without any meaning to them, no matter how much money you pay them. And the people at the top are like, this is ridiculous. You know how much money we're paying you? The people are the bottom. Like, I don't care. It's not about money, man.

It's no longer about money. You can pay someone $1,000 of dollars. They're not even going to do it. Like that should be a door. direct reflection to everybody at the top. This industry is garbage. No one wants to do it. And you have to pay people lots and lots of money to compromise their values just to do it.

You might even have to replace the local culture with indigenous people to do it because no one wants to do it. And that's a short amount of time. Those people are going to be pretty fed up with it too. You know, and it just, it echoes a dying system. And, you know, I'm not an industry leader. I'm not in government. And I don't know what the answer is. I don't think the answer is continuing to force feed people, these solutions that don't work.

What do you see when you see a collapsing system? What do you see happening? Or do you see any rays of sunshine that are beginning to happen? Yeah. Yeah. I would say that by my temperament, I can have a very pessimistic tendency. but my heart my heart isn't that way

so it's a what is it scratch a cynic and you'll find a bruised idealist yes will say I think that I think again it's both so as as it's collapsing we're seeing

the most egregious forms of tyranny will we see and will emerge and will become worse and worse and we will see people connecting in ways that are actually human. And that is already happening. I think there's so much impulse towards these, these.

I use the word life affirming that I think life with a capital L, so sort of sacred life. Life affirming practices of humans, humans as a species stepping up to be a keystone species which serve the ecosystem, which serve the global ecosystem. And I actually, I really

feel that that is possible and that we are being called and asked by the planet to do that. And we're seeing that. And at the same time, we see doubling down on the, I would call it the, maybe

even the cancer. So the sort of the yeah I'm playing around with this metaphor which yeah I'll probably write about at some point it's that we're in a planetary metamorphosis I love that specific like with how a caterpillar moves to the butterfly yeah and there are all these different stages that a caterpillar has to go through before becoming a butterfly And it's almost like they're all like initiation rituals. And I think we as individuals are going through this,

but we're also going through this as a collective. But also as a planet. So I think Gaia, as planetary system, is also moving towards his metamorphosis. And what I feel is that what I just call a cancer, I think so the the caterpillar behavior program is to acquire as much mass biomass as possible while fending off attackers would not be eaten so it's a quite fearful I again I have to anthropomorphize yeah why wouldn't you of course I I don't know what what it's like to be a caterpillar but I can imagine it's a

quite stressful experience as it's eating and making sure it's not being eaten. But it's very focused on that. But at a certain moment, the caterpillar will, after a series of molting, so it will grow new skin and move up, it will have to curl up under a leaf and then spin itself into a chrysalis, into a cocoon and more or less die. because the caterpillar will lose its entire structure, and it will still be metabolically active, so all these cells will decompose.

But then we'll have to recompose or compose into a butterfly. So this is this super drastic transition phase that it goes into. And what I think is happening is this is happening on different skills, and different individuals. And also in our society, it's happening in different ways. And we still have this old program or old program. For some civilizations or I think for some places on the planet, there's still a lot of accumulation going on,

necessarily accumulation because there's a very low material welfare. But in other places where we're massively affluent, where we're over-consuming, we're kind of being asked, I think, to step into this cocoon and start shedding. this old program of just wanting to eat constantly. And what I would call the cancer is maybe even a virulent form

of this caterpillar that is just maybe has a some insect world is brutal, right? You have these different types of parasitic wasps that, for instance, lay eggs in other insects. And then these larvae will control the behavior of the host. So maybe as a global civilization,

we have a parasite in our injected in our skull that's keeping us in this overconsumptive mode. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I identify with that on so many, so many levels.

You know, and if we, if we inject the ideas of the book the fourth turning in there too, and we just look at our species as the caterpillar. You know, like maybe this giant generation of the boomer generation dying is the chrysalis with which we're about to break out of. When we start looking at a lot of these older ideas, maybe our metaphors, our language, our ideas, like,

here's a giant portion of us. And when I say us, I mean humankind. Like, you know, this generation is facing the unrealized dreams. And there's all these wars and these silly ideas that, like, younger generations like that is so dumb you're going to get up and go work for 50 years and never do anything you want like that's a that is an old idea and it's it doesn't serve us anymore as a species like you know like i think that those things are dying and i see it in my own life too maybe maybe it's because i'm going through a midlife crisis or maybe it's because i've decided to

change who i am that i can feel like the caterpillar and understand the metaphor of new life but you know on some level but clearing all these things out of my my house, what I realize is even though it's stressful to maybe lose your home, getting rid of things has made me realize all these things that I've accumulated here have got in between the relationship to the people in my life. Getting rid of things has helped my communication with my wife and my child be better. Like, it's mesmerizing to think of like, just get rid of this and I'm like, why can't I get rid of this book? And I'm like, oh, it's a first edition. Oh, You know, but like, that's so dumb.

Just give me, who cares? What was the last time you read it, George? I've already read it three times. Okay, well, then maybe you should give it away to somebody to read it, you know? But you started thinking, like, why am I holding on to this? And if you speak to older generations who have to go and clean out their house or they're getting ready to move, like, they have that same problem of letting things go. But I think it speaks to your metaphor of like, look, the world is calling us. Look, start letting go.

And if you talk to any death doulas or people. who spend with time with people on their last days, I think that those are the conversations, the younger generation should be listening to it. Some of those things they say are, you know, they never say, I wish I would have worked longer hours,

I wish I would have made more money. No one on their deathbed says that. They do say, I wish I would have been a better husband, we should have been a better wife, we wish I'd been a better son. I wish I'd been a better parent. You know, these are the things

that the next generation should be listening to of like, okay, well, let me make those changes now. And maybe that's the earth telling us. Maybe the earth communicates to us through us and this generational talk of like, hey, here's what you guys should be doing for the next generation. But yeah, it's fascinating to think about it. And I love that metaphor because I see it in my life talking to you and other people. Like I see profound change happening in real time. It's hard to change.

It's hard to grow. It's hard to let things go. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, nice. I like the points that you bring in there. It's, yeah, it's letting go on all these different.

levels. And it's also, what I also feel, there is, there's also much needed compassion for these old things because they got us here. And that's also these old programs or these old ways of being. Material accumulation, yeah, that also brought us a lot of material wealth and safety. We've just been in a 70 plus year after Second World War. We've been in this. planetary growth or planetary banquet stage right with the fossil fossil hydrocarbons which allowed the human caterpillar to gorge to grow to grow and grow and this biomass will have to decompose so we'll have to move out of its current composition the caterpillar composition yeah those materials will not go to waste they

they can be used to become this butterfly and it's the same in our inner inner journey or inner processes is all the survival mechanisms and the trauma or the coping that you constructed around trauma yeah got you here got you to the place where you are and um letting go is also putting to rest and but also honoring it's like giving a funeral it's it's or doing complex composting, let it feed whatever wants to grow next. And that's the art of that flow of letting things go. And then if we come full circle again with the Ian Gilchrist, the left hemisphere thinks in linear sense.

The right hemisphere is way better in thinking and flow in these larger movements. Yeah, it's fascinating. Does the caterpillar have to eat, does it eat its way out of the chrysalis? or does it break through the parts that are weak? I think it breaks through the parts. And then it has to, I think, because if it doesn't able to, then it's wings. Right.

So for the butterfly, the wings will not be strong enough to fly. So they will have to also do that. Ah. Yeah, and you could see some of the institutions being the weak spot on the chrysalis, be it education or government or labor. Like maybe these are this, maybe the sun is shining through. and we're like, hey, we can break out right here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a call. It's a continuous, I think a continuous call to, I like to, I heard it somewhere called the hospicing work, and I really, really agree with that idea, because hospicing is taking care of that which is dying and really taking care of it, so giving something a good death. and it's honoring as well.

And I think in modernity, we are so used and revolutionary thinking is so used in destroying the old. If only we get rid of the old, and I don't mean the old people. Right. I mean, old systems. Yeah, exactly.

But like it doesn't go anywhere. So it's like, it's also how we treat in our, in that type trash. We treat it like, we throw it in the trash bin and I feel like it's gone but we actually know where it goes right all these plastics they go into the oceans they go into our clouds they go into our water they go into our bodies nothing is ever gone in that sense so these these parts so if we don't honor the old things the old systems we're just setting ourselves up for more problems by really press and sitting with the situation and everything that is, and then accepting, I think then accepting in the Buddhist sense, so not accepting and saying like, oh, this is, I accept you, this is great, but more like accepting that is reality. So I accept that the things are as they are.

Then we can decide on how to deal with it and how to orient ourselves towards the future. But as long as we're not accepting things as they are, we're seeing things as they are. problems and then we're thinking to quick fixes quick solutions and then we're causing more problems yeah there are no shortcuts no no although I at moments you would wish that right there are always moments where like if only things were if only things were easy if only blah blah we wouldn't have this economic system if only yeah All this stuff. But yeah, unfortunately, it appears to be a hard work.

Yeah. You know, I like what you said earlier too a moment ago about when you were speaking about letting go and thinking about the things in our life being a catalyst to get us where we are. And maybe that's part of embracing the old is realizing these things were necessary. That crisis in your life, that was the catalyst that. the catalyst that brought you to this stage. Like you needed that. And on some level,

being aware of that allows you to deal with it, or at least embrace it in a way that that isn't frightful. You know, when you can embrace something, and be like, oh, God, I'm so sad. I'm so,

fuck, I'm so sorry this happened, you know, but at least you're embracing it with the understanding that it was a catalyst to get you somewhere. Sometimes that's enough, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. And doesn't, again,

is the I think the major part of dealing or not not dealing with that I don't like that word the major part in resolving trauma is acceptance and because it is trauma because we don't accept it so it's it is kept out outside of us or it's kept frozen as not part of the cell the moment we start accepting it and welcoming it back again it can start to move with us again but there's a big good reason usually why we keep trauma outside because it hurts because there we cannot deal with the the heavy emotions of course there are very different gradations of trauma trauma with a capital t and small t but i think yeah acceptance uh yeah and from compassion of course yeah compassionate acceptance of the situation.

And that's presencing, again, that's sitting with how reality really is. And, yeah, perception is key again to see things as they are or as good, or as, yeah, as good as you can, are able to do that to see things as they actually are. With all the pain that comes from it. And that's also with the pain for, for instance, for a collaboration. society yeah yeah biodiversity collapse yeah that hurts that is that is really painful to me I feel that a lot but for a lot of people that's incredibly painful and it should be painful because it's incredibly sad but what is there

to learn from that what is what are we being asked to do that's constantly the question that I asked it's like okay how do we listen to this what what is how do we make not only meaning from this but also how do we let this meaning inform our behavior what are we what are we being asked to do i feel like the world is on some level like our our uncle or our big brother and it's like hey stop hitting yourself stop hitting yourself you know like what you're doing you dummy knock it off like yeah but passionate acceptance like that's proficient found to think about, you know, and when you talk about we're bumping up against the

solution problems to our prior solutions. A large part of these problems came from us not, came from not having passionate acceptance, from us wanting to do more, from wanting to, hey, let's stop these people from dying. I don't know, can you? Like, let's look at old people in the old folks home. Let's stop them from dying. Let's put them on this machine and put them in a room and feed them food and charge the insurance company, 10 million, you know, like, is that passionate acceptance? Or is passionate acceptance like, let's go have a big party? You know, and I don't have the answers to that. And I maybe each individual gets to, gets to say that. But on a grand scale, maybe that's what we're coming to as a species of like, look, we can't control this.

And maybe there's some things we shouldn't try to control. Yeah. Yeah. I think I haven't read it yet. but I listened to an interview that conversation with Ian McGilchrist and Dougald Heine. And Dougalde Heine I also admire. And I think the title was also, The World is Not a Problem. I love that. Yeah. And it really comes down again to that values indeed. What are our values?

What is important in the world? What do we see it? because we see death we see it as a problem a problem to be fixed yeah death is a part of life i'm not saying that we shouldn't we shouldn't make sure that people uh don't die of diseases that can be treated all this kind right but if we are so death averse a thing that is without death life doesn't exist death and life are intimately intertwined two sides of the same coin by saying by by being so death a person i think that is causing a lot of problems in our in our world that's one of the drivers this fear fear of death maybe the main driver yeah yeah you know we think about

language like palliative pa is the root word that means to cover up you know that when you have palliative care you're covering up people dying you know it's it's the western attitude towards death like We don't want to talk about it. It's taboo. We don't want to be around it. We don't be reminded of it. You know, we're afraid of it. Yeah.

Well, again, it's, we're being currently, we're actually surrounded by death on massive scale. So we have biodiversity crisis. That's death of the natural world or the wild world. But we are, we're also, I saw this metric of the amount of animals that get slaughtered each year in industrial agriculture. It's insane. This is really, really insane.

Just, yeah, if you stick with it for a moment or feel into that. So we're surrounded by death, but we conveniently put it out of view. So in the Netherlands, you have several areas where the Netherlands is a big exporter of meat and that's all factory farm but you have all these stables where the animals are only kept in doors for their whole life under these horrible conditions

but they don't have any windows and so if you cycle through the land it's like oh there's all these big stables here while actually in there it's horrible conditions and these animals being slaughtered on mass kill and it's the same with all it's the same okay I will just make it's

It's the same with old people's homes. We also put that we put people dying. That's something that happens not, not around us. That's just something that old people we put away in old people's homes. It's not integrated in our society. We don't have a, I read somewhere that modernity sort of this sort of ruptured civilization in a sense that it isolated all different generations. So we don't have a culture. but we have a youth culture and middle-aged culture and elderly people.

And by creating so much space between all the different generations, we don't have a, there's no passing all of wisdom in that sense. And of course, this happens in smaller skill, but I'm saying on a societal level. And death, the lesson of death is super important. If you learn as a child that death is part of life, that should be something that you actively feel and have to cut the terms with. But if you never encounter death in a personal, direct way,

then probably you'll start living with the idea that, oh, that is something that happens to some. And then if you become aware that you might die, you'll probably be super scared of this. And then you'll look for all these different ways of escaping death or coping. You know, it's interesting to think about the way we as individuals treat the world might be a reflection of how we're treated. And if you start looking at factory farming, you know, they have the little cows over here

and the big cows over here and then the slaughterhouse. It kind of sounds a lot like what you described about a youth culture, middle culture, and then we don't talk about the slaughterhouse. You know, and what does happen when people become aware that they die? Well, then they start pulling out of the system. Like, hey, wait a minute, I'm going to die. I don't want to work here anymore. I don't want to do this stuff that's not meaningful.

And maybe that's a reason why culture goes a long way or propaganda or the message goes a long way into making sure, hey, don't worry about dying. Go bungee jumping. Hey, isn't this girl cute? Hey, isn't that guy handsome? Like, don't, when you think about sex and start to thinking about dying, you know, like our world hides death, at least in the way. I think for that reason. Because on some level, we are factory farming. Like, we are, we do things to animals that happen to us.

How could we not? Like, that's in our nature. It need not be that way. And maybe that's what's happening. Maybe we're awakening to this idea that, look, we're much more than a race from the hospital to the graveyard. And if you want to take it on another weird, sad level, like what happens to aborted babies?

What happens to your child when your child's still born? that baby's taken and made for parts, you know, in a lot of place. I know it's sad to talk about, but the same thing with old people. The same thing on your license in the States. Oh, are you an organ donor?

We're going to make sure you're an organ donor. We're going to put that sticker right on your card when you die. Like, well, wait a minute now. Like, let's talk about this. People don't want to talk about it.

But on some level, you know, we start getting into this idea of soiling green. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Nice. Yeah. And again, the common denominator is factory, right?

Factory. It's an industrialized, industrialized model of civilization. Industrial revolution. It's, it's, yeah, we can have a whole discussion about that. That sort of comes down to, yeah, I'm quite critical about technology in that sense, how technology is used to shape, shape the world. Technology brings a lot of, has brought us a lot of great things, but it's unchaining.

I have to think back on, I think, angles from Karl Marx and angles. I think he said that the capitalist is like the sorcerer who lost control the spell or the, the creature that he summoned. And I think technology is that, is that we, we, and of course, technology, you have to first define what is technology. Yeah.

I'd say material, just, just the technological way of how we, we administer the world or how we sort of treat the world in a lot of our systems. Yeah, I think that that is a, as a sort of mind on its own, or that is something that was, yeah, it's a super powerful way of manipulating the world. But if it's not couched in wisdom, then we're, yeah, we end up in situations like we're right now, I would say, in the 21st century. And the drivers behind it to come back to the fear of death. And if we are not aware of what drives us, then we're just being driven, right? yeah and if we are i also had this i wrote this i think in a post i have this sense that

that we're living in a massively traumatized society or we're massively traumatized species and we're dealing with millennia of trauma in our in our system and i mean our body so stored up trauma in our bloodlines and yeah what do traumatize people do they they cope, they survive, you're in a survival mode if you're traumatized. And I think the majority of our consumer culture is based on coping and it's optimizing for coping for strategies of not having to deal with that trauma, not having to feel. And again, looking at it this way makes me way less angry towards people or towards systems. It makes me feel way more compassionate towards people because it's like,

shit we're just a lot of a lot of hurt monkeys yeah or apes and we're we're trying to get by and only those who are let's say most fortunate be it in their social surroundings but also in material surroundings yeah have the have the presence and the opportunity to resolve trauma and not get re-traumatized right it's it's well said like it it takes quite a bit of time, at least for me, to stumble upon compassion from anger. You know, and maybe that's a learned behavior after a while. Maybe after someone traumatizes you enough,

you begin to find compassion for that question of why would they do this? How could they do this? Maybe that's where the compassion begins to seep in. But, you know, it is interesting to think about those. those being anger and compassion being similar in some ways. Because, you know, the way through anger might be through compassion. Like, because you have to be angry at something. You have to be super pissed off before you can sympathize with someone who's pissed off.

And I'm like, oh, man, I bet you something happened to their kid. I bet you something happened to that. Like, and all of a sudden, once you begin to embrace that anger, then like a balloon pops out that little bubble of compassion. like, oh, maybe that thing happened. Oh, man, I bet that did happen. That would happen to me. In some ways, you have to have a little bit of quiet time,

be it in a safe space or having some surroundings where you're, I don't know. Do you think you need to have material possessions or at least a little bit of wealth to get compassion from anger? No, not necessarily. Yeah. And I think the journey to compassion is, yeah, how to get there is different, I think, for, for, there's different paths. And I think with anger, it's important to notice that anger is passion. And so you can only be angry about something if you're very passionate about it. And so why are you passionate about it? And anger can also be just simple giving up, sending out boundaries because you're passionate about it. your integrity yes physical integrity or your moral or mental integrity it's a way of

standing up for yourself or for someone it's passion yeah yeah it's a good back to question no you don't probably need material wealth but I think you need enough material wealth in the sense that you're not in survival note that's what I mean that you're not so you have a bit of shell you're not being you're not chilled in the rain or you're not constantly looking for food or you're struggling to survive it's difficult to i think the moment you're your your physical if your physical body starts deteriorating because you are in poor conditions it will become more and more difficult to have a compassionate outlook of things

And not saying that it's impossible, but... Right. Do you think compassion can only... Or do you think the compassion may come more easily with more life experience or lived experience? Yeah. Yeah, probably. And maybe even...

I would call them soul. So, yeah, more lived experience on this planet or another planes of existence. re-ingardating. Yeah. You had written a little bit of, well, I was reading a post about AI versus

real ecology that you had posted about. And I think that, maybe you can unpack that a little bit. Yeah, I think it was the, I referenced the video of Nate Hagan's. Yes, that's the one. Yeah, and he

more or less explained the point. that what I used previously is that a lot of people see AI as a as a tool that fixes things but are not aware of the material cost that's behind AI so how much energy it actually has to use computational power and all these kind of things let alone how it's aligned if it's aligned to actually fix fix the problems and we want them to fix and so Nate Hagen's he used I think he said using AI to using AI to fix climate change is like using gasoline and a bit of math to fix a forest fire.

I like that point. And I thought like, yeah, because what he talks about is he constantly hammers down the point of energy. That the base of our society is energy and not money. And that we are living in a time where we have a crazy amount of energy. it seems to be free because we don't we don't pay for oil we only pay for how much it costs to extract oil right so the oil itself we like it's nature's bounty let's say so we're getting it out of the out of the planet but it's something that is super precious and if you think about it i like the analogy or i like the using the story of if you have a let's say you have a let's say you

you have a liter of a liter of gasoline. So you can hold it in your hand. Like you have a, yeah, you're American. So it's a different system. Never mind. So the small amount of gasoline, right? You can put that in a car and then it can drive about 16 kilometers with that or 18, depending on how.

So it can, it can move this very heavy thing. it can move it for so far but you can also load the car with way more stuff so the crazy amount of energy that is in just this small liquid form and if you then think about how much how much energy would it cost you to push a car for 16 kilometers and it's like we're not he uses energy blindness again Nate Agan's watch watches stuff it's really really good he uses the term energy blindness for this and I think it's super apt that's the same with A. So it's the energy blindness behind. How much this is all cost?

We're so blind to what it costs. We just put in a plug in the outlet and then, oh, things run. But we're never aware of, I'm also not aware of how much energy things cost. I have to spend time to be aware of those things. Have you read any of the, there's a few camps when it comes to AI. One of them is looking at, looking at, looking. looking at it through the lens of like, you know, Elon Musk sometimes worried about it. And if you look at what happened with OpenAI recently and Sam Altman, you know, being fired and then let back and being bought by Microsoft and Open AI being a private company.

You know, like a lot of people are worried about AI. And it seems that the the AGI, artificial general intelligence, seems to be a sticking point. But have you read any arguments to the idea of the accelerationist and how it could be a positive thing? I'm curious if you read about that particular. A couple of years back when I was reading into philosophy, I was interested in the sort of accelerationism as a sort of, what is it, movement? I would you call it. And there are a lot of, like a lot of, again, the term. has now become problematic because it's associated to the all this far right shit but um yeah i was

interested in it and the idea of like okay can we if we accelerate fast enough that we can create this artificial super intelligence if it's aligned well then we can solve all problems of humanity the the the all this stuff um yeah i i see that as um continuation of the myth that we are already living in. Myth of Progress. And the myth of progress has been promising us, I read this somewhere, I really like this, that the myth of progress matching the scientific,

or matching the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, why it is our dominant myth of how we see the world, is because it was more potent than the previous myth. which was the previous myth within Europe, so within Western Europe where the scientific revolution really took up, which was Protestantism or believe in God, as in the you will reach the kingdom of heaven when you die. But what the myth of progress offered was the kingdom of heaven here on earth through progress, through technological and very advanced. advancement. And that's such a tantalizing prospect. And I think that is a base driver of, a base assumption of our systems, let alone of the people who have a lot of power. Because there's

also the myth of progress is that, oh, we can also become immortal in this life. So we can become the gods. And that's a myth as all the civilization. I think Tower of Babel was, a myth of humans wanting to become gods. I think that, I'm not sure. I think that the pyramids, the Egyptian pyramids were also the sort of most advanced technology that the civilization had at that time to allowing their rulers to become gods. That was also to join sort of that space. So I think most of the very utopic talk about AGI and artificial ASI, artificial superintelligence, I think it's mostly informed by this myth.

And I have serious doubts whether the artificial intelligence that we have right now is anywhere near what happens in consciousness or human cognition. and it can actually reach that. Again, there's this, I'm only cursorily aware of the different theories in that field, but I think it's a very physicalist argument that consciousness emerges from enough computation. I think that's one of the main ideas of the source. And then I can figure like, okay, yeah, if we put enough complex computation, enough complex neural networks with computer then it might become conscious at some point i don't i

don't think that consciousness arises from that i think that consciousness is primary so yeah that that yeah to give a sort of answer on how i look at it i love it yeah i i don't think you come into this world i think you come out of it you know and i i don't i don't know that we have the ability to, like we already give life to beings. I don't know that we could create something else, but it's interesting. It's fun to think about. On this topic, when we think about the world we're living in and all the amazing tools we're creating, have you read any science fiction where AGI is a positive force? That's a good one.

I don't know that I have. It always starts off good. And then you can you start seeing these little cracks and like... In the recent one by Andrei Tarkovsky, I think is really... Yeah, yeah. I think AGI, the woman who is the AGI, who is the AGI, with sort of a template for the AGI, she's bats it insane. But after enough sort of being embedded enough in a sort of wise system, she sort of does well.

She's still very rude mouth with them, has her own ideas, but it's aligned with humanity. But yeah, I'm curious that maybe it's also just incredibly difficult to construct a life affirming AI, one that is aligned to really positive outcome. And moreover, to make one that is not, maybe it's easier to make one that's life affirming than it's one that is affirming to us as a species. So maybe it's on the large scale easier to make an AI that's wise enough to see sort of the whole course of where of life so sort of sort of this this endless creative process of unfolding uh complexity something that is aligned with that then to make something that is aligned with

humans as we are now because we are not aligned at the moment with that umphobic process so yeah yeah it blows my mind to think i i i I think the science fiction writers are amongst the most creative and imaginative and wonderful people when it comes to their stories. And it blows my mind to think that the most, perhaps the most imaginative among us have trouble imagining this being a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, like, not even these guys can imagine it. Yeah. And I think the future, yeah, I have to go in a bit.

But I think the future is something that pulls us towards it. So maybe futures already exist. Yeah. And sci-fi is a creative way, any way of art, fiction, vision, work. is a way of mapping these different types of futures. And then seeing if we can align to one, that makes sense. But then to get back to your point, I think that we should be worried that a lot of the fiction on AI is dystopic.

Maybe that's like a very good, maybe that's like a good sort of marker or ruler to see like, okay if we can hardly think of a positive way of doing this should we right yeah Simon I love our conversations man so much fun we take we take we take it yes to choose us around everywhere and it's really we have to do it more often and we should bring in we should do a panel and we should conversate more often I know you have to go I'm super thankful for your time thanks for seeing with me this long before I let you go though where can people find you what do you have coming up what are you excited about? Yeah, cheers, man. I also enjoy you there. I enjoy your conversation. This is fun. And for me, indeed, it's just stepping in and we'll see where it goes. Yeah, I love it.

Next time we could talk way more about fiction. It's fun. We should, yeah. We should have started that part earlier. Yeah, I would say most people can find me on my LinkedIn profile. Currently, I'm using that. I'm working on a website, but it will be more informed on what I do professionally. And I think by LinkedIn, it's just, people find this interesting or I just want to have a chat with me. You can just send me a message. I would recommend everybody do it. Simon is an amazing individual. He's fun to talk to. He's one of the most well-read people I've ever had on the podcast, and he's got a unique view of things that will help you challenge some of your regular ideas. So I'm really thankful for it.

Hang on briefly afterwards. I'll talk to you shortly afterwards. But ladies and gentlemen, I hope your Monday goes amazing. I hope you have a beautiful day. And I hope that you choose to let go of all the things that you think you need and put in place the things that will make your life better. That's all I got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, hello.