TRANSCRIPT
I believe someday we are going to enter a different psychological age of humanity, a different era of humanity that will be an era of mass grieving. I see us now as being in an era of mass denial. If I had to put a term on a little title for the era we’re in, I mean, you could call it the post-industrial era or the industrial era, stuff like that. But on a psychological level, I think we’re in the era of denial. We’re in an era of profoundly destroying the natural habitat of this planet.
Parents, normally and comfortably and easily, with full societal acceptance, are psychologically destroying their children largely and also raising their children, bringing children into a world that is becoming sicker and more toxic and more polluted. People are pushing down their own feelings, not dealing with the history of their lives. I even know people who are psychologists and therapists who devote their lives to supposedly helping other people grow and heal, and yet they’re not dealing with their own healing. It’s like “healer or heal thyself,” and yet they’re not even doing it. Some of them even admit it to me. They say, “I can’t write in a journal; it’s too painful. Once I open that stuff up, I can’t focus on my work anymore.” And I think, well, what is your work if you can’t even do the work yourself?
These are people sometimes who are 20 or 30 or even 40 years into their career. What has their career been? What have their lives been? It’s been a life and a career of denial. And I think it speaks to the larger truth of our world right now for the last, I don’t know how many hundred years, since it’s really gotten screwed up, and it’s becoming more and more screwed up. This age, this era of denial—denying feelings, denying thoughts, denying memories, denying grief, denying trauma—letting traumatizers off the hook, forgiving people who have not done any healing but have only caused trauma to oneself.
And yet, I cannot see this era of denial lasting forever. In fact, I know it won’t last forever. It can’t last forever. Someday, the denial is going to break. That’s how denial works. Sooner or later, it will end. Denial is not something that can possibly last forever. Yes, it can last for people’s whole lifetimes. I think of my grandmother as a perfect example. She lived until almost 97 years old in profound denial, pushing all her feelings down, never acknowledging the harm she’d done to others, not having any desire to acknowledge the harm she’d done to others, denying the harm that had been done to her in her childhood 90-something years earlier, never bringing it up, never looking at it. And she died with this denial in place.
I spoke with her the day that she died. Her marbles were still intact; her brain was still working. She wasn’t demented at all. And I asked her, I said, “This is your last chance,” because she told me she was dying. She knew she was dying; her heart was giving out. She said, “I’m dying, Daniel.” I said, “Now, last chance to talk about what happened to you in your life, to talk about what you’ve done, what you did to my mother, what your father and your mother did to you.” “I don’t want to know,” she said. “I don’t want to deal with it.” And then she died in denial. She never grieved, and so she passed that legacy on to my mother and my mother’s generation. And my mother’s generation is also not dealing. I am convinced my mother is going to go to her grave with her feelings shut down, with her psychology in denial, her history in denial, locked shut down, put under barbed wire and concrete and metal, gone under electricity. Do not go there. Shut.
And so she passed it on to me and my generation, as it were. For whatever reason, I, in my early 20s, late teens even, started to wake up and started realizing I can’t live this way. I would almost rather be dead than live this way in denial. And I started opening it up, and whoo, hell, horror, grief, sadness, self-loathing—all those feelings that I’d pushed down started coming up. Also, rejection from my family. They hated what I was doing. They hated me for it. Many of my friends hated me for it, or if they didn’t hate me, they just slunk away. They were terrified of me. Other family members, who—something’s wrong with Daniel—even pathologizing me. Oh, he is mentally ill. I was to them mentally ill for actually dealing with my feelings. I wouldn’t have been mentally ill if I just shut it down and put on a happy face and smiled and be normal and function and forgive everyone—to be in denial. Mass denial, profound denial in this modern era is to be considered healthy. That is how sick our norm is.
But I don’t. No, I just believe it cannot last forever. And so what do I envision for this future era, the next era of mass grieving? How many people will engage in this? How many people will be left when this era of mass grieving happens? There may be a cataclysm, and the population of humanity may be greatly reduced by then, or maybe not. Maybe there’ll be even more people. But somehow, I just feel it’s going to come. It’s going to come when denial no longer works. And when does denial no longer work for people? The first thing that’s going to happen—it’s going to have to happen, and it’s terrible, and it’s sad to talk about this. And this is part of why people want to stay in denial, is because what starts to break denial is suffering. So mass denial is going to lead to mass suffering. There have to be terrible things that happen to help people want to break their denial, to want to break denial. To get out of denial, you have to suffer.
And what happened to me? It happened to me on an individual personal level. I was, how sad to say, but I was a lucky rare person that, unlike the rest of my family, I was suffering. I had to suffer. I couldn’t be in denial. My suffering was too great. I was too evolved to be in that profound level of denial. My evolution, my spark of fight and light and whatever it is that I had somehow made me suffer more. I had to feel my suffering. I couldn’t kill my suffering, and that suffering led me to look at myself more. And that looking at myself more led me to grieving.
And so what I see is when the world fails, when this modern system fails, when people—when children someday read in history books about these strange things called whales and dolphins and realize they’re all extinct, and they all went extinct 50 or 100 years before, maybe they’ll suffer for this. When they realize that lions and tigers are gone, and leopards are only creatures in a zoo, and cheetahs are only in a zoo, and there’s no more animals that mass migrate, and birds are maybe much more rare, and the oceans are just polluted with plastic, and you can’t eat any of the remaining fish because they’re all full of mercury and other heavy metals. When there’s no more Amazon, when the jungles are all burned down and all their wood has been taken away, and all the rivers are polluted, and the air and the sea levels are massively risen.
And I think part of the modern profound denial is to say, “Oh, that’s not even going to happen. Oh, that doesn’t matter. Oh, we’re planting trees. We’re making up for the destruction of the Amazon because we’re planting trees of three different species, and oh, there’s a million new trees planted this year.” Well, that’s not how it works. When there’s no more giant sequoias, you can’t replant giant sequoias and make them come back quickly in 50 or 100 or 500 years. It’s like I’ve gone camping in the giant sequoias. I’ve had a nap inside of a giant sequoia several times—a two thousand five hundred year old tree. It’s like that doesn’t just get replaced. And when they’re all gone, and I believe they will be all gone, this may contribute to grieving, suffering first and then grieving.
What’s going to happen in this era of mass grieving? Who will be left in this era? These will be psychologically advanced people who can feel their suffering, maybe have no choice but to feel their suffering. I had no choice but to feel my suffering. I was—I didn’t.
Think of myself as lucky. Then I thought of myself then, as in my early 20s, as being very unlucky. Pathological, I believed what society said about me because I had internalized so many of the voices of society. I was more normal than I am now. I hated myself, but I didn’t realize it was a gift. Someday, I think when humanity evolves, more people are going to be much less happy. Now, people are happier. You go outside, and no matter how screwed up the world is because of people’s denial, they’re happy.
My grandmother was happy almost to the end. I have a lovely life. I have wonderful children. I was blessed with a wonderful husband and so many gifts. Her husband, who cheated on her constantly and couldn’t stand her. Her children, who were dysfunctional and didn’t develop lives for themselves and cheated and did horrible things and ruined their own children. Oh, I have wonderful children, said my grandmother. Her denial was profound.
Well, someday in this era of future, era of more suffering and then mass grieving, I believe people are going to look back and say to our generation, our era, “You were responsible for what you did. You were responsible for being inappropriate, unhealthy parents. You were responsible for polluting this earth.” And those people are going to feel incredibly sad. And when they grieve, they are going to grieve for what their parents did to them.
I believe that this new era, the shift from one era to the next, will happen quickly and it will happen cataclysmically. What year will it come? Will it happen in 2058 or 2098 or 2140? I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but something is going to happen. Some suffering, some mass cataclysm, some pandemic that really is going to massively take out a lot of people. Some realization is going to happen. Some mass destruction, mass war, mass pollution. Something’s going to happen, and it’s going to shift human consciousness to realize that past generations were responsible. And people are going to hold their parents responsible. That’s what I think. That’s going to really be the crux.
When on a mass level, people hold their parents responsible for being in denial and specifically harming them. And when people, on an individual level, but on an individual mass level, meaning lots and lots and lots of mass numbers of people, are individually grieving the traumas that their parents did to them because of their parents’ own denial. When people on a mass level individually hold their parents responsible, it’s going to be a mass upwelling of grief. And it’s going to be catching. It’s going to be in a healthy way infectious, and it is going to spread.
Because I’ve even seen it in small ways in small groups around the world. When one person starts crying and grieving, other people feel safer to do it, and it empowers other people. And when it happens on a mass level, I believe it’s just going to spread like wildfire, and humanity is going to transform.
I think one of the big, big things that’s going to happen is that a lot fewer people are going to be having children. They’re going to grieve first. And the more people that grieve, the easier it is going to be to grieve one’s own childhood history. And when that happens on a mass level and people start to work out their traumas on a mass level, humanity is going to dramatically, cataclysmically evolve forward in a quick way.
People are going to become profoundly more healthy, profoundly more honest, profoundly more authentic, profoundly less fake, profoundly more integrated, profoundly more mature, insightful, and wise. I believe when that happens, and it’s going to be an ugly world that it’s going to happen in. But when people do this on a mass level, humanity is going to take massive strides forward to live up to its potential.
We, I want to say we, but it’s not we now because I don’t see this happening now on any mass level. I see it happening in small ways and some individuals in some isolated pockets in the world. But when it happens someday on a mass level, I’m going to say they, that new version of humanity is going to evolve profoundly. And we’re going to become profoundly more insightful and profoundly more responsible.
They’re going to have a massive amount of cleanup ahead of them, internally, on an internal level to clean up their own behavior. But also when they look around at the destruction of the world, the destruction of nature, when they look around at the trashed world that’s been left behind by generations past. Our generation now, probably the young children nowadays, when they grow up and they still continue to trash the world in their state of mass denial, trash their own children in the state of mass denial.
This new people, this new form of humanity, begins to live up to its potential through mass grieving. They are going to become much more alive, much more real, much more healthy. How healthy would their bodies be? What will they eat? What will be healthy for them to eat? How will they live in a sustainable manner in such a ravished planet? What animals will be left? What species will be left? Will amphibians even exist anymore? Will large creatures bigger than humans, aside from the animals we have domesticated, even live anymore? Will there be many different species of wild animals left? Who knows? Who really knows?
I think it’s going to be really ugly, but that I think is where humanity will find its real hope at a mass level. Right now, at a mass level, this era of mass denial, there isn’t real hope for our species as a whole. The hope remains alive in small individual people who are doing their own healing. That’s the real hope. I have hope on a personal level because I have been grieving profoundly. I am a grieving person. I am a person who is becoming more integrated.
There is hope on an individual level in my life for me. But when I look out at the world, no, no, we’re an unsustainable species. We’re in an unsustainable era that is not hopeful. People who feel hope and live in that denial, they are experiencing the false hope of denial. They’re winning the contest, as it were. They’re the richer people. They’re the people who are having their children and saying, “Tag, you’re it,” to their children. They’re traumatizing their children and feeling good and becoming fixed in their denial in that way.
My grandmother said that she felt hope. It was false hope. But someday in that era of mass grieving, real hope will return. And that is when the cleanup will begin. The cleanup of our species, the cleanup of our world. I hope it happens sooner rather than later because every decade that it goes on, the world gets more destroyed. Every generation that passes, the world becomes more destroyed and less sustainable.
But this is my hope on a mass level, that this era of first mass suffering and then mass grieving comes as quickly as possible so that humanity can transform and really live up to the potential of this wonderful conscious brain that we have been gifted by evolution.