Special Spiritual Bonus ~ The Derek Loudermilk Show with Charles Eisenstein

It’s a special edition Stress Therapy Session! Today, we are pausing to listen to an episode from the Derek Loudermilk Show, You are going to love it! This podcast, just like mine, is a proud member of the Ethereal Network of Shows.

In this episode, Derek interviews Charles Eisenstein, the author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.

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TRANSCRIPT: 

[00:00] Speaker A: Hey, beautiful people, what’s up? Today you’re going to have a special edition stress therapy session. It is with Derek Loudermilk and the Derek Loudermilk show, which is a proud member of the ethereal network of shows, same as stress therapy podcast. And today you’re to listen to Derek interview Charles Eisenstein, who wrote the book the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, which I immediately downloaded right after I listen to this episode. I know you’re going to love it, so relax and settle in and listen up because your stress therapy special edition session is about to begin right now. Hey, beautiful people. It’s time for some stress therapy, a podcast about how to meditate and get better at stress for people living in the real world. Finally, a place to park my 25 plus years of experience of working as a psychotherapist in the mental health field. And now your host, me, the stress therapist Sherry flake. Okay, before we get into the thick of it, we’re gonna take a teensy, tiny break. Be right back.

[01:27] Speaker B: Welcome to the Derek Loudermilk show. This is episode 366 with Charles Eisenstein. Charles Eisenstein is an american author and speaker, and I first saw him speak when I was living in Bali maybe six or seven years ago. And after that, I read some of his work, his book, a beautiful world our hearts know is possible. And he’s perhaps the best I’ve ever read at articulating exactly what it is that is wrong with a world that we can’t quite place when we just feel something is off. And also what solutions there might be to solve these problems that we can’t even name. And really, there’s fundamental ideas underlying why we have these problems. And that is, as Charles puts it, a story. A story of separation. And we’ve since learned from physics that we are all connected. We are all the same in many ways. And so fundamentally, a new story we’ll need to have is a story of interbeing. And this will apply to all aspects of our society, how we run our economies and our schools and how we parent and how we do commerce. So I was really thrilled to have Charles on the show today to ask him some of my questions about, really, how can we build a better world? And what are some examples of how we can do that? Practically speaking, in my day to day life, how can I be showing up in living a story of interbeing and moving away from a story of separation? So today we cover things from the heart and the brain to animal behavior, to parenting, to mythology, to the media, UFOs, so many different topics. But this is the backdrop which is the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. So without further ado, here is the one and only Charles Eisenstein. So I want to sort of place a marker for one of the themes, and that’s this quote, which is actually a misquote. I interviewed the guy who told me that it was his misquote in a book. But this Einstein quote of, you can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that it was created. And you’ve spoken about these two different stories that we have, the story of separation and the story of inter being. And I think a lot of people, and I have this conversation with my friends, how can we fix the world? How can we make it better? I look and I see a problem and I think this has got to be easy to solve. But I understand that this putting out fires type of problem solving is only going to. We haven’t been able to make that effective. So it’s really a complete fundamental change in approach. Maybe you could just sort of paint a picture of what these two stories are and what they mean for how we solve air quotes. Solve things.

[05:00] Speaker C: Yeah. Just going to start with returning to the putting out fires metaphor. What happens when it dawns on you that the techniques you were using to put out the fires are actually contributing to more fires? That’s what happens when we’re stuck in a story or when our problem solving, our solutioneering, comes from and intensifies or enhances the very story that is causing the problems. So that is kind of a way of restating what Einstein didn’t say. Yeah, that is a way of kind of restating what Einstein didn’t say. So I want to actually even like the idea of how do we fix things? How do we solve our problems? That way of asking the question smuggles in one of the assumptions from the story of separation that kind of holds the world as this object that you can maybe fix and that we could even possibly know what the answer to that is. Or the idea that this is a how to question to begin with, another way to look at it is that we are in the midst of a stupendous transformational process guided by an intelligence far beyond human understanding. And that, yes, you do. You as an individual have a role to play in the healing of the world and the metamorphosis of the world. And in order to enact that role, you do not have to have a grand plan that makes sense of it because you are deployed by this intelligence to be at exactly the right place in the right time, with the right set of gifts that are necessary to be part to participate in the healing process. The organ of the perception of what is yours to do in participation is the heart. Sometimes the heart’s guidance contradicts what the mind thinks it knows about how change is going to happen. For example, if the heart guides you to be at your dying mother’s bedside, and you just know with every fiber of your being that that’s the most important thing you could possibly be doing right now, and your mind is like, but climate change, but Ukraine, but there’s all of these. How is it going to help the world to spend maybe days and weeks changing bedpans and she’s going to die anyway. The mind cannot make sense of that. If you were going to get together with all the other smart guys and come up with a plan to save the world, would you be sending people to spend more time in hospices? Well, maybe you would, but only if your mind were very deeply steeped in the story of inter being, which instead of holding the world as an object, understands that self and world are intimately entwined, and that anything that you do on the micro level has macro effects, and that anything that happens on the macro level is also happening to you. When you understand that, then heart and mind come into more alignment and the irrational calls of the heart no longer seem so irrational. There’s another logic that validates them. And so that’s really what my work is about in this transition, in our stories, it’s not about don’t listen to your mind, only listen to your heart. It’s how do we bring heart and mind into alignment and heal that division? That’s one of the aspects of the age of separation between heart and mind, between spirit and matter, between self and other, between man and nature, all part of the same division that we are in the process of healing.

[09:44] Speaker B: I liked what you said about reminding us that we are here at this specific time with potentially a specific role to play. This is coming up for me to ask you about this interesting scenario that I encountered a couple nights ago. Someone broke into my car and stole the money. I left my wallet in my car, and I live in the city of St. Louis. And this sometimes happens. You hear about it like the smash and grabs or the checking open doors. And so they took my money out of my wallet, they didn’t take anything else. And I was like, I don’t like it. I don’t really know what to do about it. I feel like it’s a problem that needs solving. And then I thought about the other issues that I see around me. Like, we live near a business district and there’s a lot of panhandling, and I don’t often like giving money to them. I’ve heard statistics that 95% of them are going to be using it for drugs. What would your advice be? Or how would you approach thinking about these problems or these nuisances that make me feel. I can’t figure out what my heart is supposed to feel about these things.

[11:04] Speaker C: Yeah, well, as far as the panhandlers go, I would just give them the drugs directly instead of giving them money to buy drugs.

[11:12] Speaker B: I don’t have the drugs.

[11:14] Speaker C: Okay, I guess you have to give them money then. Okay, so there’s a couple of things going on here. One, this would be a classic example of putting out the fires when the causes of homelessness, of petty crime, of panhandling, those go so deep into our economy and into the whole structure of our civilization. And that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t give them money if you are moved to do so. But maybe that’s not your fire to put out. Sometimes I sometimes give and sometimes don’t. And I don’t care if they’re buying drugs and alcohol with it. Still, it can be at least a token of goodwill, a moment of connection, especially if you haven’t been obviously manipulated into it. But when the ask comes with humility, then you are, in a way, in a tiny way, disrupting the story of separation, part of which is everyone’s in it for themselves. More for me is less for you. Any act of generosity doesn’t, or even kindness in some small way disrupts the story of separation that holds us apart from each other. Basically, that’s just to say that even very superficial actions can also address the problem on the deeper level. Another thing, though, I live in a rural area, I never have to deal with panhandlers or petty theft. In a way, you could say, well, I’m very privileged and I’m escaping the problem. And I’m like, yeah, actually, I am escaping the problem. And I’ve decided that it is okay for me to meet my physical and psychological needs in order that I can do my good work in the world. I don’t have to be miserable in solidarity with the oppressed. That actually doesn’t even help the oppressed. So I just kind of go back to this animal level of, where do I want to make my den?

[13:52] Speaker B: Yeah, that’s something we’ve been struggling with is, should we try to make this place better because it feels ripe, it feels full of potential? Or should we just seek our ideal location and go there? And then there’s an aspect of the physical location, but then also the people that build the community of wherever it know. And I see for, like, everybody’s moving to Austin. Lots of people are moving to Austin that I’ve interviewed.

[14:21] Speaker C: Yeah, like, half the people I know have moved to Austin. It’s crazy. Yeah.

[14:25] Speaker B: So it’s gathering both this community, but I don’t know about the place. I don’t know if I would feel jazzed about the actual city of Austin. How do you think about stay and fight or stay?

[14:40] Speaker C: And so there’s the word should. Should we stay here? Should we move to Austin? What does should mean? Generally, people use it in two ways. One is, like, the moral should, which really means, will I be a good person? Will I have license to like myself and accept myself if I do that? The other should is in reference to a goal. Should I stay here, or should I move to Austin as the best way to change the world and bring on the age of. So I want to know what you mean, actually.

[15:25] Speaker B: Well, I suppose there’s a lot of different flavors, but I think one of my biggest concerns is where can I experience on a sort of day to day process the joy of being around lots of people that I want to be around?

[15:42] Speaker C: Yeah, well, that’s a very empirical question. You try it out and you don’t need any special wisdom to answer that question. But that’s where. When the question leads to that place, where am I going to thrive? Where am I going to experience joy more and more in my life? I’m navigating by that with the understanding that, for one thing, the more I thrive and experience joy, the more effective I’m going to be as an agent of change and healing. But also that joy, or even positive anticipation of something, excitement, the feeling of being alive, is a reliable guide. It’s not just like I need that in order to. I need to be nourished in order to nourish others. It’s also like my very attraction to an environment that nourishes me will bring me to the place where I am actually needed the most. Because what actually gives me the most joy? Is it eating a triple decker banana split while sitting in my hot tub? Really? No. We have this deep distrust of. I’m not even going to say joy, I’m going to say pleasure. We have a deep distrust of desire. This is part of the story of separation, part of the war on the self, which mirrors the war on nature. A war on biology, a deep distrust of our own biology, of ourselves, of our desires. And this attempt to escape it into some spiritual realm where progress comes through fighting desire, same as progress of civilization comes through fighting nature. Well, here’s inner nature. So what happens if we actually trust our desires and take them even deeper and trust our pleasure? And I look at what gave me the most pleasure of anything that I did. Well, I won’t say the most, but one of the things that gave me a feeling of deep fulfillment and fun and playfulness was this interview I was on, where I was asked, well, it’s for a. Actually, I probably shouldn’t talk about it quite yet because it’s still being prepared, but it was essentially I was being interviewed as if I were in a completely other reality where some incredible event had happened on earth. Like, say it wasn’t this, but say it was. Ufos suddenly become visible to everybody all over the place. And I’m asked, Charles, where were you the day that that happened? And I just went totally into that reality, and I had so much fun and so much stuff came through that is actually relevant to our current situation, where most people think that ufos aren’t all over the sky and seem to not be able to see them. Okay, so what if I listen to that instead of listening to my feeling of obligation and, oh, my God, the world is a **** show and I have to write another essay to do something about it, but I procrastinate. Let me check my email again. And slogging through a day and then getting sick from too much computer screen and ultimately getting nothing done. When will I learn to trust my excitement and feeling of life? Where will that take me? If I do that, what work am I ready for to learn to trust that more? What would happen if everybody trusted that more? It might seem that desire is an enemy, that if I indulged my desires. Yeah, I would be sitting in the jacuzzi with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a bag of potato chips. No, you wouldn’t. Seriously. Playing video games all day. You’d be playing World of Warcraft all day, right? If you didn’t resist. No, you wouldn’t. You might do that for a little while, but pretty soon it would suck.

[20:25] Speaker B: People that are resisting are playing World of Warcraft.

[20:28] Speaker C: Yeah, right. Even if you do resist, you still end up doing it, right? Yeah. And at some point, if you don’t resist and at the same time, you get really serious about what makes me love being alive. I’m going to serve what makes me love being alive. If everybody did that, this world would transform in a beautiful way very, very quickly.

[20:57] Speaker B: I see this a lot in, I’m part of a men’s group, and I see this people expressing, I would really love to do XYZ. I just need to do the thing that I don’t want to do just a little bit longer, or I feel this responsibility to this life I’ve constructed for myself, and I don’t really love it, but I could be a millionaire within two years. And so I’m just going to do this thing. And it reminds me of that. Men leading lives of quiet desperation, and it’s like they have all these things and there’s, like, ambivalent about them at best.

[21:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Because when you make choices like that, you are affirming your priorities and creating a reality in which that is first. I mean, it’s a cliche, but that day never comes. What do you love so much that you’re willing to sacrifice for it? Maybe it’s that million dollars. So one thing that might be going on with your friends. What if actually what they do want is to make that million dollars or that $20 million? Maybe they should actually just go for that.

[22:31] Speaker B: Yeah. If one of them really was super excited about it and I got this way about crypto. I was so into learning about crypto. I was like, this is such a fun. It reminded me of the board games that I played, and it made me excited about money in a way that I hadn’t been before.

[22:47] Speaker C: And then it crashed. Right. And you all of a sudden lost interest. Yeah.

[22:52] Speaker B: Then I started to question my own genius. My brilliance was correlated with the markets, for sure.

[23:02] Speaker C: Yeah. But you could even do it with that. You can look into when the prices were rising and you were into it and checking the prices every day or twice a day and getting into some of the more esoteric defi stuff and whatever, farming and all that. But if you take a step back and you ask, how good did that actually feel? And how good do I feel after I turn off the computer? From the echo of that experience, probably it’s not the best you could do as far as doing what makes you feel the most alive. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t want to get too dry and intellectual about it, but there’s a recovery process of the joy of living, the joy of existing, the joy of breathing, because we are acculturated to become addicted to intense stimulus through television, movies, video games, the online world in general gives, like, one hit after another after another to the, whatever, pituitary, to the amygdala, even, like, kids watching screens all the time where life and death struggles are happening every minute. Well, the real world isn’t like that. So the real world becomes boring in comparison. And when the child or the teenager or now even us, when we are decoupled from those intense stimuli and we’re in the real world, there’s a withdrawal from that constant emotional hit. That’s what makes things like gambling addictive or crypto addictive deprogramming can actually be really painful.

[25:33] Speaker B: As you’re saying that. I’m just reflecting on. I have a five year old son and a three year old, and he gets his cartoon time after he’s had his outside time each day. But when he wants to engage, a lot of times he’s like, do you remember when in the cartoon, they were doing this thing? And he tries to make real life an analogy to these stories that he’s seeing in his cartoons.

[26:00] Speaker C: Yeah, I have four sons. Three of them are grown up already, but I have a younger one, too. He’s nine now. And with time, I’ve gotten more and more careful about what screens, what I allow them to see on screen, and what I’m allowing them to use screens for. And, like the youngest, mean mostly what we let him see. Now it’s changing a bit, but when he was little, would be like know my neighbor Totoro, for example, and older things where the pace isn’t quite so fast and where the stakes aren’t the fate of the universe, and even where the plot isn’t driven by conflict, can you find media where the plot is not driven by conflict? Very rare. But when every story that you absorb is a story of conflict and mostly a story of victory by force over the opponent, that programs you to see life that way and numbs you to all the other plotlines of the human drama. So it’s no surprise now that in our public sphere, in our political sphere, everything is a conflict, and we enact that all over the world, in our foreign policy. But also on Twitter, everything is like this habit of, you see a situation that disturbs you. First reflex is to find the bad guy, something that you can then overcome with the venomous force of your words by calling them names on Twitter. That’s all built into the way that we are enculturated in this society, and it’s also built into, on a deep level, even into the newtonian darwinian account of what the universe is and what a living being is and why we’re here and what motivates us. It’s a war of each against all in traditional genetics.

[28:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I’m glad you brought up this newtonian cartesian view. And I went as far as getting a master’s in virology, actually. And I’ve had to really rethink, as I learned about quantum physics and a lot of new science that turns the newtonian cartesian model on its head or shows me that that’s just a narrow aspect of the whole. Could you talk about how science itself implies the story of inter being rather than the story of separation?

[29:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I can. Yeah. Do I want to? I’ve said so many times, like, even though this is a new audience, part of me is, like, I already said that, though, you know, weren’t you listening before? But I’ll say that up until the early 20th century, science was on a seemingly successful quest to gain full understanding of the universe by breaking it down into the smallest possible parts that would be governed by deterministic laws. And that therefore would allow the scientist to perfectly predict, and then, through technology, control everything that’s happening. So that if we could map exactly where each atom, the location of each atom and its initial conditions, its momentum, in what direction, and we could map like a bunch of billiard balls, we’d be able to predict perfectly where everything would go, practically. Okay, that’s not possible. But we can get closer and closer and closer. If we can break the body down into its mechanical parts, then we should be able to have perfect health, because if something goes wrong, we can fix it. This is actually related to your initial question, how do we fix it? There’s a kind of a mechanical bias built into that question. So that’s the quest that science was on seemingly very successfully, but with. There were, I would say, three developments in the early 20th century that’s that punctured that ambition forever. One of them was quantum mechanics. You break matter down to the smallest possible unit, and instead of perfect predictability, you have randomness and you no longer have objectivity. You no longer can treat it as an object separate from yourself that you can manipulate because your very relation to it changes it. You’re tied in. The observer and the observed are inseparable. Self and other are inseparable. And a photon or an electron has no independent existence in space and time, separate from the observer. And its behavior is a causal. They called it random or a causal. You could also say that it implies that choice is an elemental feature of the universe, so that forever put a limit on the program of domination, of the ambition to completely control everything by completely understanding it, down to its very atoms. Another development was, I guess this was a little later, chaos theory, where in any complex system, your ability to predict it, the difficulty in predicting it grows exponentially with its complexity. How can I put it? Exponential increases in your ability to map the system give you only a linear increase in your ability to predict it. I don’t know if that’s too nerdy a way to put it, but basically, if you read like science fiction from the, they were predicting a world of complete control, like weather control, we were certainly going to achieve that by the year 2000, not to mention perfect health, not to mention a perfect society. Like all of these technologies of control were going to move from one triumph to the next to the next. But instead, we’re seeing quite the opposite, actually. Despite all of our technology, despite our increased ability to understand to a smaller and smaller level, the genetic level, the molecular level, life seems more out of control than ever. So that would be another. It’s not just like within science. It’s also the effect of science in society that hasn’t lived up to its ambitions or its promises. And then I could talk about biology too, or even virology. I’ve become interested in mutant swarm quasi species. Have you come across that at all? No, in virology, yeah. So like a quasi species, okay, so we like to think of a species as some discrete, unique phenotype. Here are the genes of the species. Here it is. That is what a virus is. Well, a quasi species is basically like a cloud. Like, almost like a cloud of quantum probability of related genomes that together are what we call the virus, but that act in a nonlinear way in processes of disease or other biological processes. So you might have one of them that replicates in your body, but that only does that if another related one is softening you up in some way or enhancing the function of that other one. So there might be hundreds or thousands of related genomes that we call the virus, but that are not a unitary definable species. Basically, variants are not necessarily it evolving away from what it was, they are part of it. And so this is, I would say, draws from what I would call the new story, the story of inter being, because existence is relationship even in ourselves, who we are, we’re not discrete, separate beings. We experience this in our daily lives. Like if I’m hanging out with you, who I experience myself to be is different than if I were hanging out with my wife Stella. And if I meet a new person, I discover something new about myself. Was that there all along, or was that created in the relationship? Just as you can ask, is that electron, was it actually there at point x, comma y, comma z, before I observed it? Or did the act of relating to it? Did the relationship create what we call the reality of it? It’s true of an electron. It’s true of you and me as well. We are in a constant process of becoming. And the becoming is part of the identity, it’s part of the self. It’s not that you become something different, it’s that you already were that, but you only became that in that relationship. The possibility was always there. And who you are is the totality of all of those possibilities. So that’s the link between that and a viral quasi species. Really interesting stuff. You can read about it.

[37:38] Speaker B: That’s fun. I like that we were already as we were, but we become that aspect. One thing that really brought me sort of maybe giggle a little bit, was imagining blowing up. So the fundamental idea of choice on the quantum scale, like a particle can choose. And then I sort of blew it up to the billiard table model. And I was like, what if I was playing pool and the balls were choosing where they wanted to go? It was kind of this like Harry Potter ish game of billiards. And it’s like I shoot it and they’re like, man, I want to go there. And it’s like they went the other way. And I was like, oh, that’s really fun for me to think about as choice blown up on a larger scale.

[38:22] Speaker C: Well, it could happen. I mean, you could say, take a billiard cube, billiard ball and throw it through a hole in the fence, and there’s a non zero chance that it would diffract into some totally other direction. Now, the chance is vanishingly small. All the ink in the world would not be able to write the number big enough to express how, say you want to. There’s a chance, but if it’s a photon going through a slit, and no force is determining where it goes, what’s called a causal in quantum mechanics, actually, you could say, well, electron is choosing where to go. Now, a billiard ball, there’s quadrillions and quadrillions of atoms, and even though each one is maybe making a sovereign choice, they’re all glued together and most of them are going to choose. This is kind of like society.

[39:35] Speaker B: Oh, this dissenting atoms within the billiard ball are getting steamrolled into.

[39:39] Speaker C: That’s right. Yeah. Except in certain circumstances. Maybe not with the billiard ball, but in certain circumstances, quantum effects can get amplified into macro effects. And there are some people, like Roger Penrose, for example, that theorize that this happens in biological systems all the time. And for example, that microtubules in the cells are just the right size for these quantum effects to operate. And I don’t remember all the details of it, but still it suggests that choice. If an electron or a photon going through a slit is free to choose where it ends up in your relation to it, then that primes our intuition to think maybe the same is true of ourselves. Maybe it’s likely when you’re hurled through the aperture of the circumstances of your life, maybe statistically, most people will end up at a certain point. Maybe most people who were born into a dysfunctional, abusive family are going to end up in whatever, poverty or in jail or something like that. Statistically, yes. Statistically, most of the electrons will end up in this area and a certain amount will end up in that area. You can calculate that, but each individual one is not constrained like you could grow up in that kind of family and end up a peace worker, end up a billionaire, end up an artist. An incredible artist.

[41:35] Speaker B: Hey, friends, I want to take a quick second to tell you about a free, no cost business training that I’ll be hosting in April. This is a three day event, April. I’m calling it the Quantum Entrepreneurship series. And this is a high level business training for coaches, healers and spiritual entrepreneurs. And on the first day, you’re going to learn the best types of businesses, let’s call them soul aligned business models that you can use to fuel your mission to create freedom in your life, to live from anywhere. I’ve been testing this myself for almost nine years now, and I’ve interviewed thousands of people. And so we’re going to be distilling all that information to show you the different ways that you can earn a living and be highly abundant as a spiritual entrepreneur. Day two, we’re going to talk about the best metaphysical practices. My favorite. I’ve done more than 50 metaphysical experiments in the last five years, and I’ve distilled those down into the ones that are most applicable for running a business. And finally, the last day is about infinite opportunity, how to build a world class network and understanding the different levels of abundance so you can bring those into your business and your life. So again, this is a no cost series. You can sign up for it. Now. We’ll have links below this episode wherever you’re listening or watching on YouTube. And you can also go to Derek loudermilk.com and sign up for free there. And it will send you emails to remind you exactly when that is. But they’ll be at twelve central on those dates, the 19th, 20 and 21st. Thanks so much. Hope to see you there. You have lots of fun analogies. But I like this, like, thinking of a person almost as like as a light particle that can sort of choose its own path because it reduces the weight, it reduces the mass of our choices to some extent. I want to share a little story that came up for me that I was reminded of when I was starting to think about the story of inter being. And also in Bali. We were talking earlier about being in Bali. I went up to the highlands there. It’s actually right at the edge of the botanic garden where the sort of place where nobody can get to because the jungle is so dense. There’s a tree, it’s 800,000 years old. And I had my first sort of magical experience touching the tree. And my consciousness was projected to another part of the world. And what was expressed to me was this tree was like, hey, I’m worried about this forest in China that’s becoming a desert. And I think you need to look at your own relationship with nature. And I was almost given a mission by this magical tree to bring more people into nature. It was like, you need to remember that you are also nature. Yes, but the simple fact that a tree on this continent was worried about trees on a different continent. It was like, I’m not worried about this jungle because we have all the water we need and nobody comes here. But it was like, this other place has me feeling sad. And I was like, first, the fact that a tree is communicating with me this way was unique to me, but then also the sense of the time and space didn’t matter to the concern expressed here.

[45:12] Speaker C: Yeah. All this philosophy we’re talking about, inter being, separation and so forth, it pales in importance compared to the kind of experience you’re talking about right now. What you described it is in a way, I always call it a medicine story. It reveals just how little we know about how this world actually works. If you ask somebody, how do we fix it? Are they drawing on the kind of knowledge that that tree represents? Do they have that way of understanding what’s happening? Like, how does that tree, first, for one thing, how does it communicate with you? How does it know what’s happening? In China, there’s, like a whole other intelligence network that operates on this earth that is almost entirely invisible not to human beings, but invisible to human beings who have been acculturated to the reductionistic, force based causality of modern science. And the built environment, the economic environment that goes along with it, and the technological environment, the screens, for example, all that stuff. Yeah, we become very perceptive in a certain way. Our minds, our cognition develops to a high degree in a certain way. And in that tunnel vision, we lose touch with so many other capacities that we can then rediscover as a gift from other species or even from other human beings who have not been so going. And this maybe goes back to the Einstein quote. If we’re going to transform, if we’re going to be part of a planetary transformation and healing, we have to access those other capacities, the things that are not valued or even acknowledged to exist in the world story that we’ve grown up in. We have to learn how. It’s not even learning how to communicate with trees. We have to do it. We already actually know how. You can take the most urbanized noob out into the rainforest, and they can have a mystical experience like that. This is an innate human capacity. The key to it is to accept that it is possible. Once you accept that it is possible, then you’re going to try. I get information by watching and listening to geese. They fly. There’s a lot of them here on island. They fly overhead all the time, and they’re honking. Now, why are they honking so much as they’re flying? The darwinian, reductionistic evolutionary biologists would be like, well, okay, why are they wasting all that energy? Flying is pretty tiring. Are they signaling dominance? What are they doing? Other interpretations do not occur to that mind that they are channeling the joy of life and they cannot hardly even contain it, that they love the sound of their voice and they love listening to each other. There’s so many things that we just don’t think of, nor do we suspect that the pattern of their calls transmits information about where they have been and what they have heard and seen, that they are interwoven into the tapestry of all being. So you can listen to geese and observe geese, and you will learn something about the world that you probably could not find out on the Internet. You can watch fish in a pool, I mean, anything in nature. You can look at the waves on the shore, and you will know something. Now, you might not be able to put it into words, but you will receive information and it might be like your experience with that tree. You received information that made you know what to do. It transmitted. This is mine to do. Now, in this case, maybe your rational mind could have made sense of it. Well, forests are important carbon sinks and we got to. Whatever. Your mind can make sense. But come on, that’s not what was happening. That was your mind’s justification of it. But that’s not where the information came from. That’s what we have to listen to. Why? Because we have no freaking clue about how this world actually works or how to fix it. We cannot rely on the legacy knowledge systems that we’re operating in. Mostly right now, we have to go to those other places. And it doesn’t mean that you all of a sudden become inactive and you’re spending all your time watching geese. It’s the contrary. You become more decisive and you can’t even explain it to anybody else. Why am I now going to China? Or why am I now doing this thing? You can’t necessarily explain it because the terms of explanation are foreign to that way of thinking. The only explanation you could be like, you could say, go spend a couple of hours watching geese and you’ll understand. That’s not an explanation. It’s an induction into a field of knowledge.

[51:18] Speaker B: Do you feel like they’re your personal, do you have a personal connection to them, or is that a particular affinity to that group?

[51:28] Speaker C: No, not really. They just happen to be here a lot, and they are quite loud, so they make their presence known.

[51:35] Speaker B: I was reminding me of a little video clip on social media, which was American Indian looking at a hawk and being like, here’s what white people do when they see a hawk, and here’s what we do. And they’re like, oh, thank you for answering my question. I was just wondering about that. And then the hawk came and you told me. Exactly. You clarified my thinking and using the animal world, the natural world, to interact with in a more personal way.

[52:05] Speaker C: Yeah. People who have not been completely mesmerized by modernity still recognize the, ah, these other sources of information.

[52:16] Speaker B: Was there a particular inciting incident that gave you an aha moment about the story of inter being?

[52:30] Speaker C: I mean, there’s been a succession of moments that have initiated me more and more deeply into that story. And I would also say that there’s a lot of ways in which I’m still completely lodged in the story of separation. I’m not some. Yeah, I’m a normal person, really. I’ve evolved in some ways and in kindergarten in other ways.

[52:57] Speaker B: I’m wondering how you first articulated it. What was the process that coalesced this story for you to be able to articulate it?

[53:09] Speaker C: Well, it really began when I started putting together the pieces of my first book, the Ascent of Humanity, which was about the origin and expression of the story of separation, the discrete and separate self in a world of other. Because I had just moved back to suburbia. I had been living in Taiwan through my twenty s, and our situation wasn’t so great for raising kids. We were in a polluted city anyway. We moved back to suburbia instead of the kind of neighborhood that I grew up in, with kids outside playing stickball and hopscotch and running around and cops and robbers. It was empty. Not because there were no kids. It was a lot of young families and a lot of kids. But you hardly ever saw kids playing outside. They were all indoors. And I began understanding why, on one level because of television, because of automobiles, because of air conditioning, because of the layout of suburbia, because of zoning that makes you never have anywhere to walk and only have somewhere to drive, because of. I mean, there were many social and technological things, but deeper down, I’m like, okay, this is a trajectory of separation from each other. And it’s related to our separation from nature and related to the money system, which also induces competition and separates us and degrades community and also to science. So I began putting all these pieces together and coming to see pretty much everything that I saw. I mean, war too. This was like, right around 911, like, oh, everything that disturbs me about the world is an outgrowth of this story of separation, the discrete, separate self. And it’s reaching a crisis. It has grown to epic proportions and is generating its own crises that then I well, they must be a birth crisis, because when I trace the story back, it goes back thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, even to prehuman times. Eukaryotic cells are more separate from each other than prokaryotic cells. They keep all their dna in the nucleus, whereas prokaryotes are always exchanging dna and conjugating together and exchanging plasmids. Eukaryotes. So I understood that it’s not about undoing or reversing the age of separation and abolishing technology, abolishing agriculture, abolishing language. I mean, language that was a step into separation, where you name the world. It’s the first step in the mastery that then takes the form of domestication. I went into some pretty deep anti civilization philosophers, right? And I took it even farther back in my mind. Oh, maybe we should abolish fire, abolish stone tools, abolish the eukaryotic cell. Obviously, that’s ridiculous. All of this is built on itself, and it’s leading somewhere. Toward what? Toward a convergence of crises generated by itself. That is, a birth crisis into something else. That’s the only thing that made sense. And that’s when I began thinking, what is the new story that underpins the age of reunion, the regathering of all of these lost parts of ourselves? And that’s when I started to talk of a revolution in human beingness. And I started using the word interbeing, which I later found out is a term in Buddhism. Actually, tiknat Han is the one who popularized it. I’m not sure if he coined it or not, but I want to give honor to Nat Han for bringing this word into currency. But it occurs naturally, because to anyone thinking about this, because it’s not only that we’re interdependent, it’s that we’re interexistent. And there’s other threads, too, that contributed to this and also direct experiences like the one you’re talking about. Psychedelic experiences were big for me, experiences in Taiwan that violated my inherited understanding of what’s real and what’s possible and how the world works. All these things contributed to inducing me into this new story.

[58:30] Speaker B: I heard your interview on my friend Beth Weinstein’s podcast, the psychedelic entrepreneur. That was a good one. So I want to point people there because you talk much more at length about the psychedelic aspect. And I’m also recalling your interview on Aubrey Marcus’s show where you use that birth analogy. You keep coming back to that many times. There’s something you said in that interview with Aubrey about, and everyone kind of skipped over it, but it was like the earth being a focal point for the whole galaxy right now, like what’s happening here being of interest to sort of every aspect of the universe. Can you talk more about that?

[59:16] Speaker C: Yeah, so I can go into. Okay, more and more, I operate mythologically so I can step into a reality, a mythic reality, and speak from there. So, let me speak from the mythic reality of extraterrestrials and UFOs and that whole. It is kind of a mythology, right? There’s these different alien races. There’s the Arcturians, there’s the Pleiadians, there’s the negative Ets, the grays, whatever. Are you familiar with this whole. Sure. Yeah. And I call it a mythology not because it’s unreal or imaginary, but because you can’t fully understand it, thinking objectively. So I will enter that reality. And I can say that many, many extraterrestrial races are taking a great interest in what’s happening here. It may seem to us that this is just some inconsequential backwater of the galaxy. An ordinary star on the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary galaxy cluster. What does it matter to the vast cosmos whether the human experiment fails or not? Whether we end up destroying the planet? What does it matter? Well, it actually matters a lot. And that’s why so many extraterrestrial races are giving so much attention, watching with bated breath what happens and playing whatever role is proper for them to play. Because if we pass through this particular initiation, through this particular birth process, we do so on behalf of the whole cosmos. Again, inner and outer, reflect each other. The macrocosm and the microcosm. What happens here happens everywhere in some way, just as what happens to any person on earth happens to you in some way. Some strand of their experience penetrates your being. And the greatest triumph of some unknown person in somalia is in some way your triumph also, because you’re not separate from them. By the same way, same token, we’re not separate from any of the other races in this world, in this universe. And if we do not pass our initiation, then that is an evolutionary event that does not happen in the cosmos. In that interview, I think it’s in a story I wrote, actually, in my book, the more beautiful world. I said, no planet has ever gone this far into separation and made it through. Other planets have gone, have become even more ****** up than we are, but they’ve perished, but we can make it through. And if we do, it’ll be the first time that it’s gone this bad and someone still made it through. And that therefore, opens a new chapter in cosmic evolution. So it doesn’t mean that our transcendence, our metamorphosis is guaranteed, but it means that it’s possible, possible in the sense that you’ve got something to do with it, like, we are put here because it’s possible. And this is something that has pretty much saved me in the last couple of years, as I had bouts of pretty intense despair around what was happening in the world, the biomedical totalitarianism and so forth. At key moments, I remembered, if it were hopeless, I wouldn’t be here. I’m here because I’m needed. And I’m not saying that just for me. I’m saying that for every single person listening, if it were hopeless, you wouldn’t be put here with the particular gifts that you have. You have a role to play. How do I know that? I know it because it’s true. And I’m sure that you can feel the truth. Also.

[01:04:21] Speaker B: There’s on the, on the flip side, there’s the inevitability of our success. Sometimes I find that I am like, oh, I can just coast a little bit. You don’t have to be working so hard because it feels true to me that we’ll inevitably make it through this birthing process.

[01:04:48] Speaker C: No, we will not inevitably make it through the birthing process. And it is okay sometimes to coast necessary. Like look at childbirth. It’s not one continuous contraction. It’s a contraction and a pause, a rest, a contraction, a pause that maybe intensify reaching a crescendo and then a new stage begins. We are in the contraction stage right now and a lot of us experience it. Contraction, pause. If in the pause you think, uhoh, I’m not doing anything. Now you’re not understanding the process, but it’s not inevitable. It’s likely. But not all childbirths end in alive birth. Sometimes the baby dies, sometimes the mother dies. Not all indigenous initiations, sometimes people die in those too. They’re for real.

[01:06:01] Speaker B: I’m enjoying this line of questioning, but there’s another thing that’s popped up for me, which is I’d love to get your thoughts on. So one of the things I do is I train entrepreneurs. And as I been reading your work and thinking more about what the gifting economy means, and are there business models that I’ve never thought of that could be just as effective? Do you have any advice for ways to think about doing business as entrepreneurs that are examples of the story of inter beingness more than the story of separation?

[01:06:46] Speaker C: Yeah. I’ve been contemplating writing an article on this business in the gift because it actually is a viable business model. I use that business model like I have a substac and a lot of people on substack, not everybody, because a lot of people get this actually, but a lot of people. The classic business model is you put some stuff on for free and then other stuff behind a paywall. And the idea is, if you want this good stuff, well, I’m going to keep it unless you pay me for it. It’s kind of an adversarial relationship and I don’t do that. I just put it all on for free. And I say, if you would like to support me, then get a paid subscription or donate on my website. But I don’t compel people to do that. I trust what I have noticed in myself, which is if somebody gives me a gift, I want to give them something in, like, I subscribe to some very popular people on Substac, like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Tavy. They’ve got tens of thousands of paid subscribers or more. They don’t need my money, but I want to give them money. Like, when radio had released an album like this, I think it was in rainbows or whatever back in 2007, they were like, okay, all this electronic music downloads, we’re just going to put it out there for voluntary payment. And it’s not like Radiohead needed the money, but I’m like, yeah, I want to give you guys some money because this album rocks. This is great. I’ve noticed this in myself. I want to give to those who have blessed me. I do this for online courses. In fact, there’s an online course that I have called living in the gift that goes really deep into, because there’s so much psychology and so much wounding comes up when you try to offer things by gift, and then people take advantage of you and then you realize, oh, maybe I wasn’t fully in generosity and trust to begin with. So it’s a whole journey. And so that’s why when people try it, sometimes it doesn’t work, because maybe they’re still putting some manipulative energy into the ask. What I’m saying is that, yes, it is a viable business model, but it’s not trivial. And it can work for content creators of all kinds, musicians, it can work for software, it can work for film, it can work for pretty much any digital product, non digital products, that’s a bit more complicated, because the cost of production is non zero. For me, the cost of producing the first copy of an essay, I mean, that’s days or even weeks of labor. The second copy costs me nothing. And the third copy, the marginal cost of production, is zero. Therefore, there’s no natural price point. And the only reason that people can charge for such things is that they maintain artificial scarcity. Digital rights management, copyright paywalls, artificial scarcity. There’s enough scarcity in the world already. Why create more of it? So I really think that this is the business model of the future.

[01:10:28] Speaker B: Was there anything you didn’t expect when you first implemented that? Anything you were surprised by?

[01:10:47] Speaker C: I didn’t enter into it with a full consciousness. So pretty much everything that has happened has been, if not a surprise, like a discovery. It started when I wrote the ascent of humanity, and I was just putting it online as I wrote it and then revising it and putting that online, and finally it was ready to publish as a book. And this website that I had built myself, this is back in the early 2000s, from the style sheet on up, I just built it myself. I’m like, oh, man, now I got to kick it down because otherwise no one will buy the book. I’m like, no, I don’t care. It’s too beautiful, and I don’t want to make people pay. And besides, I don’t really believe in intellectual property to begin with. That’s another thing anyway, so I put it online, I kept it online, maybe people will buy the book anyway. And that’s kind of what led me to do more and more things in that way. Part of it also was, I’m putting this out for people to read, not to make it hard for them to access it. I want them to read it, and it’s sacred to me. And where did it even come from? Where do these ideas come from? Did I actually make them or did I receive them? They’re part of a cultural and intellectual context. They come from many, many conversations and many, many books, and from my own capacity to think, which was given to me by my mother, by my father, by the world that made air and water and sunshine. Like, in a certain sense, my life itself is a gift. My ability to do work is a gift. My ability to think, my ability to write, like everything that went into my creation came from somewhere else. So it is by nature a gift. So that’s another reason why I want to maintain it as a gift. And I trust that the return gift will come and it has. It’s a viable business model. Yeah.

[01:13:25] Speaker B: Thank you for sharing. I find myself, I want to move in that direction, and I, on some level, intellectually understand the reciprocity of all things. And I have a great ability to charge a nice fee for my coaching. And that’s like such a juicy thing also.

[01:13:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do that. Again, trusting what really feels right. There’s a lot of good reasons to charge money. Making a payment is a kind of an initiation. Yes. It’s an entry ritual. It signals to the unconscious that I’m doing this for real. So it could very well be that if you didn’t charge, people wouldn’t take your coaching seriously. Well, I didn’t pay for it. I can just take it or leave it. Maybe I’ll come late to my session. I’m not going to do the homework. But if they’re making a payment, they’re affirming to their unconscious mind that this is important. I hold this valuable. Definitely the reason to do gift economics isn’t so that you qualify as a good and virtuous person.

[01:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think where I’m coming from is something I hear a lot in the coaching industry of like, coaching is great for people that have the resources to pay for it and I find myself wanting to supply it to people that don’t have the money at the time in a lot of senses.

[01:15:00] Speaker C: And maybe you do that sometimes too.

[01:15:02] Speaker B: Yeah, we were just talking about teaching to entrepreneurs. Also, we mentioned I have two little kids, so I just want to get your thoughts on parenting. And in particular, there’s an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a few months, which is that children are going to be. They’re sort of the highest leverage for the story of inter being or the ascent of humanity. They’re going to amplify everything. And so if we can teach them the right things or provide the right conditions for them, then they’ll just be who they are and everything will accelerate from there. What do you think is important in the parenting aspect of the story of inter being, or from a teaching aspect?

[01:16:22] Speaker C: Yeah, there’s so many ways I could answer that and it’s hard to do it outside of context as like general principles. But I could say first, quite simply, avoid manipulating them through punishment and reward, which instills the habit of conditional self acceptance. Like a lot of it is avoid this, avoid that, because we have a lot of habits of separation. Another one is to do not teach them insincerity. This is one thing, this is like a small thing, but it’s actually pretty important. I never tell my children to say please thank you or I’m sorry. Especially thank you and I’m sorry. What do you say? Thank you. What do you say? I’m sorry. So you’re basically teaching them to be insincere, to say thank you when they don’t actually feel thankful, or to say I’m sorry when actually they’re feeling resentful. And the I’m sorry then becomes a token of submission rather than an apology, which now is rampant in our culture. Another thing I would say is I do my best to maintain a true vision of who they are and encourage them to know themselves as they are, rather than through a lens of judgment. I signal to them that they are trustworthy by not overprotecting them or hovering, but allowing them to experience the actual physical consequences of their mistakes.

[01:19:01] Speaker B: Which one of these do you have the sort of the hardest time allowing yourself to do?

[01:19:09] Speaker C: Um, for me, the hardest. Those. Those have come quite intuitively. The one that. That is the challenge for me is. Is discerning when to set a boundary and what the boundary should be. Because what I’m saying is not like a total. That’s not a total lack of boundaries, and let them just do whatever they want. Like I said before, we strictly limit screens. And I wouldn’t let a two year old go out and play in traffic in general. I will protect them from risks that are beyond their understanding, that are beyond their comprehension. So I will let a three year old play with a knife. Hey, buddy. It’s sharp. Be careful. If you’re not careful, you’ll cut yourself. And so this happened with, I think, two of my sons, actually. Matthew wasn’t careful, and he cut, you know, child protective services rushed in and took the kid away. No, but they would if they found out that I let him play with a knife. But what he learned was that knives are sharp. They can cut you and be afraid of them. Be careful with them. Not because dad ordered you to and will punish you if you touch a knife. The knife will punish you if you touch the knife in the wrong way. So he understands that I’m not the only source of danger in the world. Knives are sharp. And to boot, dad’s pretty smart. He said, this knife is sharp, and it could hurt me. And it did. Maybe I should listen to him in the future. But if I absolutely prohibit him from ever touching a knife because I’m afraid he’ll cut himself and punish him the first time he touches one and doesn’t cut himself, he just grabbed it by the handle, but I punished him anyway. What he learns then isn’t that knives are dangerous. What he learns is dad is dangerous, and that if I can avoid his supervision and punishment, then nothing bad will happen to me. Do you want your teenager to think that. Do you want your teenager to think that if he avoids getting caught, that nothing bad will happen to him because he’s never actually experienced the consequences of taking too big a risk and getting hurt? Do you want him thinking that when he gets behind the wheel of a car for the first time?

[01:22:20] Speaker B: Yeah. It just happened to me with my three year old. I would let her use a knife to cut kiwi or something for the first time. And I was like. I felt this, like I wanted just to take it away, but I was like, okay. Oh, yeah, just let her try it. One time, and then you can take it away. It was an internal battle for me.

[01:22:39] Speaker C: It’s agonizing. I remember when matthew was like five, he liked to climb trees and he’s like, hi, dad, look how high I am. And I’m like almost ******** my pants. Then he goes even higher. The top of the tree is swaying. But what I was transmitting to him was, I trust you to make wise decisions. I am telling him, you are capable of making wise decisions, or even you make wise decisions. I see that in you. That’s how he learns himself as a wise decision maker. What we project onto our children, they take it on and it becomes true. So if we project onto them, you are incapable of staying safe. So I’m going to have to hover over you all the time. Then that’s what they learn and they become incapable of staying safe. If you impose on them, you don’t actually want to do any work and I have to force you to do your chores or I have to force you to do your homework, then they will embody laziness and have to fight it their entire lives.

[01:24:00] Speaker B: Kids love chores. Surprised me a little bit.

[01:24:05] Speaker C: Yeah. If you look at them and say, I know that you want to help and contribute to this family.

[01:24:13] Speaker B: This is reminding me of if the parents are going to control the environment of the kid and then all of a sudden we learn, like, okay, the government becomes the parent and just controls everything for us so that we can just be safe and not have to do anything. And I was extending this analogy. I see when I’m trying to control my kids, like when I pick them up, when they’re just not listening to me and I’m like, okay, it’s bath time. We really need to get you in bed. And I see myself physically just pick them up and say, I’ve had it, you’re going in the bath. And I’m like, I’m just controlling them. I’m just using my muscle to just override their free will. And then I see the aspect going back to the story of inter being. I see structures and organizations doing the same thing. We’re just going to override your free will because we’re more powerful. And I see that in me and then I see it in the world and I’m like, ****, why am I controlling so much?

[01:25:12] Speaker C: Yeah. And it’s also true that children, most of them anyway, thrive on routines. They like regularity. And, um, and I don’t think that you necessarily have to force them or manhandle. Know, I received a deep insight into this from a story I read of Milton Erickson. He was a psychiatrist in the mid 20th century, one of the pioneers of hypnotherapy, and just like a brilliant, brilliant man. And he told the story of the family was all hanging out in the evening, and the three year old daughter wants attention from the mom, but the mom’s reading a newspaper. So she goes up and rips the newspaper out of her mom’s hand and throws it on the Milton Erickson says, stacey, give the newspaper back to your mother. And she says, I don’t have to. So then he takes her very gently and takes her onto her bed or onto a chair or something and just holds her. And that’s fun for a while. But after a while she says, let me go. And he says, I don’t have to, as he screams and struggles and stuff. Let me go. Let me go. I don’t have to. And after a long time of that, finally she says, okay, I’ll give mommy the newspaper back. And what does he say to her? You don’t have to. And she says, oh, but I wants to. I’m not going to over interpret that story, but I want it to lodge in you, because it kind of demolishes these various ideologies we have about, or these categories even, of what’s going on here. There you are. It demolishes, like, even these categories of control or not control. There’s other ways to think about things. Mmm.

[01:28:04] Speaker B: To this, actually, I’ll probably relisten to this whole. Your work is the kind of work that can be absorbed on many levels. Each time I read it, I sort of have a new aha moment. Is there anything I haven’t asked you about that you want to share about or you think is important to touch on?

[01:28:35] Speaker C: Well, sure, there’s a lot that’s important, but this is like a quantum thing. What’s important is also a function of a relationship. What’s True is a function of a relationship. I could say something that’s very true to you, and it would not be true if I said the exact same words to somebody else. So there’s nothing in the abstract that I want to say to an abstract audience. But if there’s something that’s really alive and present for you right now that you think that.

[01:29:19] Speaker B: Well, perhaps we had sort of talked at the very beginning about, should we address the situation in Ukraine? And you’ve also spoken about, how do we have conversations when there’s like this, facts are not facts or truth is not truth, or it’s relative in relationship. Maybe you could just say a few things about how to have conversations within this situation where we find ourselves very polarized, but how to sort of be, when you’re in conversation with someone that’s fighting against you or has a completely different set of facts to you, how.

[01:30:09] Speaker C: Do you approach that? You have to let go of trying to win the conversation by force, let go of conquest and domination, because it’s not going to work. You can assail your opponent with all kinds of evidence, all kinds of studies, all kinds of logic, and they’re not going to accept the evidence, they’re not going to read the studies, and they’re not going to accept the logic. So why are you even in this conversation to begin with? Maybe there’s something else that can happen. Maybe what you do is you listen, or maybe you tell a story, not even as a rhetorical maneuver, but because there’s something that they’re not seeing, that they could see through your story. It’s an offering. It’s to be friendly. It’s to speak to the part of them that is ready to learn something new, to speak to that you have to see. It may not be easily visible. And a lot of conversations, like, there’s no willingness to enter into that level. So don’t have that conversation. If someone is just bent on attacking you, then don’t step into the gladiatorial arena. It’s a waste of energy. You’re just going to get pumped.

[01:31:57] Speaker B: So have you been able to opt out of like, I’m sure people attack you, given how public you are, have you been able to opt out of stories like that? Has anyone ever?

[01:32:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I just don’t read the comments. I can opt out, but things get through sometimes and I don’t want to completely insulate myself. I want to understand how my words are landing. So I do sometimes go into the comments and stuff, but sometimes I’m super sensitive. Someone says like, a really mean thing and sometimes it just gets in and I’ll be up all night thinking about, oh, gosh, am I really a wannabe hippie narcissist, whatever, playing out his defiance against his father or, you know, whatever psychological analysis is feeding through my comments section. Like, you know, have I really, like, do I really have blood on my hands? You know, have countless grandmothers died because I have fostered vaccine skepticism or whatever, but certain things cut deep, you know what I mean? And I don’t think it’s when that happens. Sometimes it illuminates inner voices that are saying the same things as these outer voices are saying. And it’s good to know that these inner voices are there and maybe to give attention to the wounds that they’re speaking from. And also, yeah, maybe I got something wrong, too. That happens to me just as often as it happens to anybody else. But, yeah, if something is just like, obviously an attack, I’m not going to pretend that it’s anything else. Sometimes an offering. It’s not an offering. They don’t want to have a conversation. They want to have a fight.

[01:34:12] Speaker B: Yeah.

[01:34:13] Speaker C: It has to be at least some sign of a willingness to have a conversation. Although I’ve even had the experience of someone sends something really nasty and I’ll turn it somehow, jujitsu it into. I’ll pretend almost that they’re asking these sarcastic questions in earnest. And sometimes there’s a transformation. Sometimes. But again, it’s like the panhandler. I mean, you could probably do that with a lot of the panhandlers, too, but that’s not your only job here on earth.

[01:35:08] Speaker B: When you’re up at night being disturbed by stuff that you’ve read, what’s your process to move through?

[01:35:17] Speaker C: That’s usually I just stew in it, and then eventually, eventually I’m done. And sometimes if it goes on for days and stuff and I get into a funk, then something will happen in my life or somebody will reach out in the right way at the right moment. And it’s not just like, oh, Charles, thank you so much for your writing. It’s changed my, like, it’ll be something again that gets under my skin.

[01:36:06] Speaker B: Thank you. That was, like, a very real answer. I think perhaps this could be a good place to wrap for today.

[01:36:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I think so. Great.

[01:36:26] Speaker B: Really appreciate all the work that you’ve done in addition to this show. But, yeah, I just want to acknowledge you for thinking through so many things and feeling through and putting it out there and helping people and being the way you are.

[01:36:43] Speaker C: Yeah, well, thank you, Derek. I appreciate it. And, yeah, I enjoyed getting to know you a little bit in this conversation. Yeah, thanks. You’re very real as well. Thanks.

[01:37:00] Speaker B: Well, anything you want to point people towards or suggest that they pay attention to?

[01:37:08] Speaker C: No, not really. I mean, I have a substac that I publish most of my things on now. Great.

[01:37:17] Speaker B: Thanks, Charles.

[01:37:18] Speaker C: All right, thanks, Derek.

[01:37:20] Speaker B: All right, bye bye. Thanks so much for listening to the whole episode. You made it all the way to the end. Congratulations. And I’m going to invite you again, remind you again, to join us for the no cost quantum entrepreneurship training April. Again, this is a training that I’ve put together, a high level business training for coaches, healers, and spiritual entrepreneurs. You can sign up at derek loudermilk.com or find them in the show notes, and it’s a free training. We’re doing it live in person, so you’re going to want to be there on each of the days. You’ll have chance to ask personal questions, maybe even get some coaching on your specific business. This is something that I would probably normally charge $1,000 for or more to attend the event, but I’m doing it for free as a service to my audience, to my listeners, and to help spiritual entrepreneurs. So save the dates, mark your calendars, and hope to see you there.

[01:38:27] Speaker A: How y’all feeling after that stress therapy session? Good. Awesome. Check out the show notes to connect with me, the stress therapist on social media, at the stresstherapist on Instagram, and at stresstherapy on Twitter. You can always go to ilovetherapy.com to find out about meditation and yoga retreats and other offerings that I have there. If you live in Georgia and you’re ready to be one of my clients, go to my website to find out how you can sign up for a free face to face consultation with me. At the very least, jump on my mailer so you don’t stress or miss one thing. Until next time, have a lovely, lovely day.