TRANSCRIPT
Part of what I love about nature, as manifested right now as I’m making this video, and I don’t know if you can see it, but I don’t have my glasses on. When I just finished recording the last video and pressed stop, right on the stop button was this little black and white hairy caterpillar. I think it’s some sort of moth, or it will become some sort of moth, but I don’t know what it is. I wouldn’t be surprised if its little furry hairs or tentacles, or whatever they are, are a sort of irritant. So I’m going to probably let it go in a moment. I’ll take a picture so that maybe the camera can focus better on it and you can see what it is.
The reason that I share this is that I love the diversity of our world. So I’d like to talk a little bit about the subject of diversity in nature, in humanity, and the diversity of each of our own individual true selves in our modern world. Diversity is, for some people, a really positive ideal, and for other people, it’s kind of a dirty word. I know some people who don’t like diversity, who like a sort of homogeneous society of one type of people. Well, I tend to fall, at least culturally, racially, religion-wise, I tend to fall into the category of liking diversity. Often, I live in the East Village of Manhattan, an incredibly diverse neighborhood—racially, socially, culturally, linguistically—people of national origin, all sorts of different types of people, all living together. What I love is basically really largely getting along.
What does this say about the potential of the world? This is part of why I love diversity: that people can, to some degree or other, live and let live. People can actually learn from each other. People of very different backgrounds can actually get along and become friends. I think so often in the world, especially in so many of the hot spots of the world, people who are different hate each other. People don’t learn from each other. People only go to be around people who are just like them. Often, when I see people who are around people who are just like them, what I really mean is they’re only around people who are shut down, dissociated, living in delusions, living in fantasies, living in very unhealthy ways, just like them. People who don’t challenge their troubled beliefs, don’t challenge their false ideals, don’t challenge their fantasies. I think that a lot of people like to live that way in bubbles of comfort. The only people who are allowed in their bubble are people who challenge them in no way at all. And how can we grow?
The other thing is I travel a lot. I live in a lot of different cultures, and I live in a very multicultural place. Pretty much my whole life, I’ve lived in multicultural neighborhoods, multi-ethnic neighborhoods, and I’ve found that to be something of great value. There is not one culture in the world I’ve ever lived in where I haven’t found there’s something better about this culture than my own. Sometimes the food is better. Sometimes there are certain practices that they do that are better. They all have something worse than my culture. There’s always something that I can bounce off of, say, you know, this helps me appreciate where I came from, but that I can learn more.
Then I think about nature, how absolutely profoundly diverse nature is. I actually spent most of my growing up years living in upstate New York—not exactly here where I am in upstate New York, a couple hundred miles away—an area that’s kind of similar, a lot of the same trees and plants and butterflies and frogs. The geology’s a little different, but even that’s kind of similar to where I grew up. Yet even here now, there is so much diversity. So many things that I’ve never seen before, like that caterpillar. It’s a reminder of just how complex the world is. Yet one thing I see about humans so often, so many people that I know and see, even people that I respect in different areas, don’t really appreciate the diversity of the world. They don’t care about the crushing of nature. So much of what I see humanity doing more and more is striving to live in monoculture. People like the same people, don’t care about diversity very much in nature. Okay, we like it that there’s some giraffes left and some whales left. They like knowing that there’s still lions and tigers and hippopotamuses out there. But who cares about the different species of frogs?
I remember for a little while I lived in a town called Leticia in southern Colombia, in the Amazon, right on the border of Tabatinga, Brazil. You can actually walk back and forth between Brazil and Colombia; it’s an open border in a lot of places around this town. Sometimes the border isn’t even marked. Well, I remember reading that there was a study that some scientists had performed, saying that within, I think it was like a five-mile radius of the town of Leticia, they’d found something like 30 different, or 30 or 35 different species of frogs—more diversity of frogs in this area than anywhere they’d ever seen in the world. And that’s just the frogs that they found. There’s probably another 10 or 15 species that they hadn’t even found. I remember going to sleep at night and hearing frogs calling out and chirping and singing, and there were so many different types. It was amazing. Frogs have so many profound different colors, even the ones that I saw.
Well, here I am in upstate New York. There’s frogs living around here. Sometimes I hear them chirping, even when I’m making these videos outdoors. My guess is there are probably five different species of frogs, and that’s including toads around here. Maybe eight there. Let’s just guess maybe there’s 40 or 50. It was really amazing—high, high diversity. And yet we’re trashing the Amazon, cutting it down so that we can herd cattle—cattle for our food. How many species of food do people really eat? I know some people who eat a very, very limited diet, and they’re even proud of it. Sometimes I only eat certain foods. They eat only certain grains. If they eat meat, they only eat certain types of meat—very, very few species of plants. Some people don’t even eat any fungus at all. Me, I love wild mushrooms. I’m always on the hunt for a new mushroom that I can find, identify, and if it’s edible, hopefully it’s edible. Hopefully I’m not going to die of mushroom poisoning. Could happen. I really hope it doesn’t. But I’m always looking for more diversity in my diet. There’s something about me that thinks if I eat a greater diversity of plants, mushrooms in the world, it’s like nature becomes more a part of me. I become more diverse.
But then there’s the emotional aspect of diversity. Something that I see again and again is in a world where people are so often shut down because of their childhood, so shut down by their parents because of their parents’ limitations and traumas. When parents pass their traumas onto their children in all sorts of different ways—sometimes direct from what the parents experience, sometimes metaphorical—children get shut down and they lose the diversity of their selves. Children become sort of a monoculture. They become sort of numb. They fit into a culture, starting with the culture of their family, but also the culture of television, the culture of school, where they learn to behave in certain rigid but acceptable ways. They become normal. They become average.
What I’ve seen, I’ve seen it for myself. I saw it in my childhood, and I’ve most especially seen it in my own personal healing process. The more I become a true self, the true me, the true Daniel that I always was meant to be and that I’ve developed more into, the more I become really unique—a real individual. Ironically, as I say this, the sun is starting to come over the trees and get into my face and light me up. That’s what happened to me as the result of my healing process, and it’s still happening. The more I expand, the more the truth, the fire of me comes out, and I become a real individual. A real individual is a powerful thing. And for the monocultural norm, when people are all expected to be little soldiers and do well in school and regurgitate information, and that is called true, that is…
Called smart, that is called intelligent, that is called being a good scientist, a good technology person, a good worker, a good musician, even a good artist. They can paint so well according to how they’re taught is the right way to do this or that art.
Even to be a real true self, who’s a creative individual who isn’t following any external rules except for the rules of what it means to be true to honor the individual honest self on the inside. Well, to be this true self on the inside is a threat to the norm.
And what I found more and more is the more true I become, the less the world likes me. Often, the less the normal unhealthy people like me. Unless, of course, I can hide, be strategic, put myself into a position where I fit certain norms. And that’s kind of sad, but I’ve learned that by hard experience.
The world is so confused and rejecting. But for me, my attitude that I really try to uphold, and I feel it deep inside myself, is that I love diversity. I find it fascinating. People are fascinating. Children are fascinating. The real honest expressions, the insights of children are often so far beyond anything that adults have.
And by that same token, I think it really expresses why so many adults openly say that they don’t like children. I hear adults say that I don’t like children. Children are just smelly, obnoxious little creatures. But I think really what it is, is adults don’t like the diversity of children.
And I think also what I hear people say that they don’t like children, what I really hear is that they don’t like their own individual unique selves. They have sided with their traumatizing parents against their true selves.
And when people don’t like their true selves, I don’t think they have it in them to love the diversity of the world. And for me, the more I love me, the more I really cherish and honor, appreciate, and want to fight for the diversity of this planet at all levels, external and internal.