TRANSCRIPT
I think the main thing that differentiates humans and animals is the ability to self-reflect. The ability to really realize, “Whoa, here I am. I am a self. I have a consciousness. I have thoughts. I have feelings. I’m alive. I have a body.” And other people also have a body, a self, a life. They have meaning. I have purpose. We have a path that we’re on. We have choices. This, to me, is what makes a human human, and animals, from what I believe, don’t really have this.
Now lately, I’ve been studying dolphins a lot. There’s a lot of talk that dolphins, and especially bottlenose dolphins, may be sperm whales that have these huge brains. Maybe they also self-reflect. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do. But really, it seems like we don’t have any way to test that right now. We don’t really have a way to communicate with them and form the kind of relationships that really give us an idea of what goes on in their minds. And if they do, by the way, and I say why not? They may be humans also. They’re probably humans, just a different form of human. They’re dolphin humans and whale humans.
So self-reflection, the ability to really know ourselves, that’s the big difference. But there’s a catch in that because, from what I’ve observed, most people really don’t self-reflect that much. They don’t really think that much about their own lives. They don’t really take a step outside of themselves and look at themselves, look at their life for much perspective. They don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their purpose and the meaning of their life and the path that they’re on and where they came from.
In fact, they often want to do the opposite because life is so painful, and what’s going on on the inside of them is so painful and horrible. And they have so many fears that it’s much easier to stay distracted by drugs, by alcohol, by relationships, by work, by having children, by video games, by television, by the internet, by sports, by all sorts of different things that keep us externally focused.
The main reason that I think most people don’t really self-reflect is because they’re very traumatized. They carry so much unresolved traumas from their childhood. So many horrible things happen to them that they’re not even aware of, that they push it down. And in order to keep it down, they have to not self-reflect. They have to not look at themselves because if they did start looking at themselves, all of this trauma would start to come up. And when it comes up, it’s ugly, it’s painful, and it really throws a kink in one’s regular life.
Because the first thing is, when people really start looking at what happened to them and the really painful stuff, when they start really relating on an emotional level to what they went through as a child, when they really start reflecting on what happened to them and how they felt as a child, when they access it, one of the first things that happen is they start saying, “That wasn’t fair.” And they start looking at who did it to them. Often, their parents directly did it to them. And if their parents didn’t directly do it to them, their parents put them in a position for it to happen to them, for the traumas and the bad stuff to happen. Their parents didn’t protect them. Their parents neglected them.
So people, when they start really self-reflecting, often start feeling a lot of anger and a lot of rage at their parents. And in our world, in our society, that’s really just not very acceptable. It’s not very socially acceptable, and it’s certainly not very acceptable within families for people to feel rage at their parents. Instead, in society, we have a lot of pressure to forgive our parents, to say, “I love them. Yeah, maybe they did a few bad things, but I loved them anyway.”
The irony in all this is the less that people really heal their traumas, the less they really confront the people that traumatize them, and the less they confront them in their own minds and start making sense of what happens, the less they’re ever able to really become humans. And they actually are more like animals. They live like drones, like robots, just going through their lives, going through the motions, doing what’s expected of them.
But the sad thing is they become like the worst kind of animals because the thing is, we’re still very smart. We’re still very clever. We still have all of technology at our disposal. And when you put technology at the disposal of someone who’s not self-reflective, who has a lot of intellectual strength, it’s a recipe for disaster. And what is the disaster? The disaster is our planet. The disaster is 7 billion people destroying nature, destroying ourselves, war, genocide all over the place, an ocean that’s full of plastic and other toxic chemicals and heavy metals, farmland that’s just covering what used to be nature, forests that are destroyed, rivers that are destroyed. This is all done by people who clearly aren’t very self-reflective.
[Music] [Applause]