TRANSCRIPT
So as I sit here out on the edge of nature, on the edge of a forest in upstate New York, I can’t help but think that from the perspective of nature, humanity, the human species as it’s become, the many, many billions of us, are not the friend of nature. From the perspective of nature, the natural world, the natural plants and trees and fungi and animals, humanity writ large is often an enemy, not a friend, not an ally. And to me, that’s a tragedy because I see so many beautiful things about humanity. The beautiful things that I see are largely untapped potential, untapped opportunity. Untapped opportunity not just across the species writ large, my species writ large, but in the human individual.
And so I’d like to talk about the best potential of people, the best potential of any given person. And that is the potential to become conscious, to become conscious of who one really is. What I’ve seen is that most people, by and large, when I’ve asked them, and I’ve asked tons and tons of people over the years, how well do you think you know yourself? Most people, from what they say, from what I observe, say they know themselves pretty well. They feel that they know themselves pretty well. And I think that’s part of the self-deceptive capacity of being a human, that we can have different levels of consciousness. And people sometimes who are not at a very high level of consciousness have some consciousness. Sometimes it’s a consciousness only of the illusion of themselves, of the falseness of themselves, but they don’t know the difference. They don’t have the ability to discern how true they are and how false they are.
Sometimes the more disconnected people are from the truth of who they really are, and the truth of who their real feelings are, the truth of the little child they once were, the more that they think they know themselves and really are confident about it. So they have a degree of consciousness, but it’s a kind of delusion, or maybe better said, an illusion of consciousness. And to me, that’s a real shame. It’s a loss of human potential when people, especially, are very committed to their perception of themselves that happens to be very disconnected to who they really are on the deeper levels, when it’s very disconnected from how unconscious they actually are, that they’re actually very disconnected from nature. They’re disconnected from the basic part that connects them to nature, and that’s the human nature, the truth of the human spirit.
And I think the more that people are disconnected from the real truth of the nature of themselves, the more they are disconnected from the world. The less they care about the world, the less that they’re able to actually take the perspective of nature as something that they can understand and feel, something that they see as important and valid. I think it also disconnects people when people are disconnected from the real truth of themselves, disconnected by trauma, unresolved trauma, the truth of their childhood, what they really went through, who their parents really were, and how their parents really felt about them. They have to block it out because they need to live in an illusion of the goodness of their parents. They had to do that as children in order to survive in their troubled family systems. This, by the way, being a normal process, this being the truth of the norm of my society, of all the societies I’ve ever seen, blocking this out, believing in the goodness of their parents, being the right way to be a person.
Well, all this disconnects people from the reality within, the reality of their parents and the reality of the world. And then writ large across our species, this to me explains why nature doesn’t like us very much, why we don’t align ourselves with the truth of nature, why we’re not a sustainable species, why our populations are out of control and voracious, not just in number but in exploitation. Why we are mass polluters, poisons we throw into the earth, poisons we throw into the water, poisons we throw into the air, even into outer space. I mean, what about all this space junk? And that’s the least of my worries. I worry more about the plastic in the ocean, the heavy metals in the ocean, all these fish, small little creatures and krill going right up the food chain, eating these heavy metals, concentrating as it gets up toward the salmon and the seals and then the whales. All these whales full of poison. Will there be whales in a generation? Whales are not killing whales. Humans are doing this. Humans are killing the large creatures of the world and the small creatures of the world.
And then I think of humans as the primary enemy of human nature. Humans killing the human nature of the individual child, the human potential of the human child. And then humans being the biggest enemy of the human species. It’s possible that in two or three or four generations, or maybe even one generation, humanity is going to be facing a crisis that is far more severe than this coronavirus epidemic that has people up in arms. So often I think this coronavirus epidemic, while a real epidemic, is actually not that significant in the greater scheme of things. And sometimes I think people unconsciously know that humanity, the human species, is facing mass destruction on a lot of different fronts. We’re living so unsustainably that a big crash is going to come. We’re not talking volcanoes and asteroids. We’re talking the things that we have caused: pollution, overpopulation. Who knows about climate change? What’s going to happen? But I think we’re poisoning our world in all sorts of terrible ways, and a horrible thing is coming. And people know this unconsciously, and they’re displacing it with an extreme overreaction to, “Oh, COVID, it’s going to take us.” I don’t think COVID’s going to take us out. Yeah, COVID is hurting some people. COVID is a risk to some people, but we’re living in this terror underneath the surface that plays out and gets displaced in sort of phobic ways.
But how can people regain their humanity? How can we realign with nature such that we stop crushing and exploiting nature, cutting down the Amazon? How can we stop the spread of the Sahara Desert? Maybe it’s too late for a lot of this. Maybe climate change has gone crazy. Maybe we’ve over-polluted the oceans such that nothing’s gonna stop it. But how do we make it less bad? How do we try to start living more in sync with nature? And to me, that’s the return to the best of human nature. And this is what’s so sad. In the midst of all this, there is something that I desperately, unequivocally love about human beings. I love it in myself, and I love it in others, even though in so many others I see it as just largely an untapped potential. That’s the potential to become conscious, the potential to work out those traumas and to manifest the true self.
Although I think people should be very, very careful about having children, and maybe it’s best if most people never ever have children. They’re in no position to do it. I love children. I look at children and I see their beautiful potential to be real and honest, to know the truth, to still have their intuition until they get slowly crushed by their parents, their family system, by their culture, by their society, by their religions, by the mores of the sick and troubled world, such that they become shut down. They become zombies and drones. And so often, by the time they become adults, they become normal. They lose their humanity. And so often humanity says, “Oh, making mistakes and being a bad person and screwing up and doing all sorts of awful things, that’s just part of being a human being.” And I think, no, that’s part of being a shut down, split off, inhuman human being.
And I think to be a conscious person, in many ways, to have this ability to self-reflect, to know who we are, to be able to take other perspectives, to love and nurture in a human way, to care about other creatures, this is a major gift. This is the crowning jewel of evolution in the world. I think a self-actualized human being is the most beautiful thing in the whole natural world. We represent the ultimate in altruism. We represent, we, a self-actualized person, the potential of humanity, represents the crowning jewel of billions of years of evolution. The creativity of a self-actualized human being, the human spirit.
It has to offer the intelligence, the thought processes. It’s possible that there are other creatures out there who have gifts that maybe resemble humanity. But I think the potential of a human is—I just believe it from what my observations are. Reading about the intelligence of dolphins, I know a lot of people say, “oh dolphins can do all these things,” but a lot of times I don’t see the evidence for it. Even though I actually have interacted with dolphins in the wild and I’ve looked them in the eyes, I think, you know, this is a being that has a lot of other thoughts. But I still think humanity, its potential in nature, is really unparalleled. And yet we’ve so profoundly misused it, and that is what breaks my heart about humanity and disgusts me also.
It’s like people go ahead and have children and harm them and don’t raise them to become self-actualized because they failed at their own opportunity to become self-actualized. I think if someone wants to reproduce, they need to manifest the best of who they are first. They have to work out their traumas. And if they go and reproduce before they have worked out their traumas or worked out a huge percentage of their traumas, then they failed. They failed at their mission, and all they’re doing is ending up reproducing all sorts of harm and reproducing another unsustainable being who they’re going to warp and bend and not even be aware that they’re doing it.
So when I think of the perspective of nature, these trees and the animals that are living in the forest, if they could think, if they could self-reflect, if they had a voice, I think by and large what they would say is this world would be better without the human species. Because largely, the human species so largely has failed to live up to its potential for consciousness. Humans are so unself-actualized; they live as a false self. They live as an enemy of nature. They’re afraid of nature.
If animals could speak, if the deer and coyote that live in this forest could speak, they would say, “We wish people—people as they are now—would go away. We wish they would just move on and leave us to live our lives freely.” These trees would be happy if we left. And what’s so sad is even if humanity did entirely disappear right now, our legacy would remain for a long time. And things might even get worse because I think of all these nuclear reactors that we have all over the place, nuclear power plants that if humans disappeared, they would leak and they would decay and they would spread into the oceans. And we might fully poison everything because of our nuclear reactors, and it might take millions of years before our horrible legacy was actually cleaned up.
But barring that, the disappearance of humanity right now would probably be a good thing for nature. But that’s not what I wish for because my wish—if I could have my wish—and I believe if animals really could understand, maybe there are some animals that could be aware of this and know this. Maybe there are some dolphins that know this, that know the potential of humans—the humans to heal, the potential of humans to heal their traumas, to become connected with the best of our human nature, to become altruistic, to live not just for ourselves but for the nature within us, the nature for each of us, the potential of each of us, and the potential of this whole world to keep evolving in a better direction.