Living Between Worlds 4.5—Between worlds? Or among worlds?

Foreign.

Welcome Everybody. This is May 17, 2023. Welcome to Living Between Worlds with Grace, Dignity and Power. I'm Gil friend of Natural Logic and various other sustainability and climate focused escapades. Ken is co host for these calls. Hey there, Ken. Ken, take a moment, just orient people to the logistics and ground rules for the call.

Sure. So if you'd like to speak, if you look at the reactions button down at the bottom of your screen, you click on that, there's something that says raise hand and that way we'll know you want to talk. Feel free to make comments in the chat and I think most of you been here, but this is a very easy group, friendly group. We're here to explore how to live within the world in between worlds with grace, power and dignity. I'm gonna forget anything. Logistically, there may or may not be breakouts today. We're going back and forth. We have a really big topic, so we'll see what we do. So, Gil, anything else?

Now we are recording the call. We will send out the recording to participants afterwards. We're not gonna send out the chat. So if you wanna save the chat, do that yourselves. Use the three dots, the lower right hand corner of the chat window. If we do do breakouts, you have to save before breakouts, during breakouts and after breakouts. That's a quirk of zoom up to you. But you know, use the chat to interact and engage with each other as you wish. So, as Ken hinted, we usually begin these calls with a fairly lightly held plan. Today is lighter than usual, so we'll see where we go with that. Reminder to those of you who have been here before, in an orientation for those who are new, these calls began in the early days of COVID Beginning of 2021. We saw, I saw a parallel in the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis. Parallels and echoes between them, similar curves if you look at how they were propagating. A common call for speed and scale and scope in our reactions, very mixed results on both of them, one could say. And in beginning of 2022, we changed the title from a focus on Vuca to Talking about Living between Worlds. And for the past three years, we've mostly talked about living between worlds as a liminal transitional state between taking a cue from the Gramsci quote, you've heard me say from an old world that is either gone or about to be gone, in a new world that is not yet here. We don't know what it is, but it's not a state, it's not It's a place filled with worlds. We. We apprehend worlds, we inhabit worlds, we generate worlds, perhaps. And what do I mean by world? So according to my chat buddy GPT, Martin Heidegger's concept of world world was not primarily a physical one, but an existential and phenomenological one. More about the context of meaning. Excuse me, more about the context of meaning and the context of significance in which human beings exist and act, rather than the usual meaning we carry of a collection of objects or a physical location. For Heidegger, the world is the background against which things become intelligible to us, a background in which things show up. Heidger talks about the notion of world disclosure, which refers to the way in which the world and its meanings are opened up or revealed to us. How through our engagement with it. We've spoken before about the book Disclosing New Worlds. We'll come again to that in more depth in a coming call. But that's a deep exploration of this in a social and political context. But the world and its meanings are opened up or revealed to us through our engagement with it. Our moods, for example, have a world disclosing function in Heidegger's philosophy because they affect how we perceive and how we interpret the things around us. Our moods affect our how we perceive and interpret. In turn, our engagement affects our moods. I guess we could say it infects our moods. Our moods affect how we apprehend and engage with worlds, and so on and so on, endlessly intertwingled. You know, I've said in the introduction to these calls that new worlds don't just happen, we speak them into being. And so here we find ourselves in a place between worlds, in a place filled with worlds, what some have called a pluriverse, a notion that we've introduced in the last few calls. Ken, let me take it over to you and take us on a walk into the pluriverse.

So I have to blame Gil. I don't usually blame people, but I'm going to blame Gil for setting me off on this path that's just been really amazing and frustrating and challenging and delightful. I've been hanging out in the ontological coaching world for over 20 years now. And you know, people talk about worlds and I never really got the world and planet. And I finally discovered planet is the physical world in which we live. And it's. It's given birth to everything we've seen around us. Brian Swim, mathematical cosmologist, says here's the whole story of the scientific enterprise in One sentence, you take hydrogen gas and you leave it to its own devices, it turns into giraffes and rose bushes and people. So there is obviously some kind of inherent intelligence that has brought forth this world. But then we have all these different worlds. So I'll give you a really solid example. Take two people born in 1960, both in the city of Berlin, but on either sides of the Wall. They would both share the same biology, many aspects of the same culture, the same language, the same geography, except they would have very different worlds because one's growing up, you know, inside, behind the Iron Curtain, and the other in a democracy. So that's one example of how we have different worlds. Recently, as I've been reading more and more about the resistance in South America, where there's still an enormous number of indigenous people, and they're saying, you know, the universe is. And the anthropocentric view of the way in which Western educated people, industrialized people look at the world is destroying the world, the physical planet. It's. It's. It's ruining it. And it's not just a matter of seeing things differently. It's a. It's not. It's not an epistemology difference. It's an ontological difference. We have to recognize there are other ways of being in the world, not just seeing the world. And I don't have a. This is all new to me in the last 60 days or so, so I'm hardly an expert on this, but it's just got my mind frothing about, how are we going to do this? What. What do we need to do in order to genuinely engage with other cultures who see the world very differently? The example that comes to mind is many first nations people say, all my relations, they see everything in the world as alive, as a relation. And when you have that kind of worldview, which is the other thing. Worldviews create worlds. You have the kind of worldview that says, everything's alive. That river over there, that mountain, it's alive. It has agency. It's part of who we are. Then you don't say, we're going to pollute the river and we're going to take the mountain apart in order to get the coal that's underneath it, because you're basically killing an ancestor. So I think this is just a really interesting place for us in living between worlds to recognize. The old world is dying. The ascendancy and hegemony of the Western view of the world is being severely challenged from within and from without. And where Are the worlds in which we can engage so that we can inform ourselves in ways that will allow us to live between the demise of the old world and the birth of the new one, which may or may not be what we're hoping for. It might be just we're moving into a place of chaos. We've destabilized the climate, which is going to have enormous impacts and effects. So that's where I am right now.

So from there, how are you moving? How's this. How is this affecting you in your daily life? Ken.

I've been aware for some time about this move towards decolonizing the mind. And this is really kind of speeding up my decolonization. And it's very challenging. Some days I wake up and I'm like, I'm really clear on this. And then two hours later sort of slips out of my grasp and I'm not quite sure how to articulate it again. It's got me moving more slowly, more mindfully, got me listening deeper to people. I'm not trying to. When I read Disclosing New Worlds, which is around 2005 or 6, with a group of people, what I came away from that book realizing was that my father was a merchant and I grew up as a salesperson. My job was to persuade people, and I. I carried that through in many areas. I was always trying to persuade people from a point of view. And I realized I don't want to just persuade people to my point of view. I want to disclose, create the conditions where they can see things differently. So that has me listening and asking more questions and not being so much of an expert, but rather, how can I understand what it is you're saying? How can I help myself to express more clearly? And how can I help you to express more clearly so that we both have a deeper understanding and we're not just arguing back and forth about who's right and who's wrong.

Let me. Thank you. Let me poke it a little further if I can. So the shift from wanting to convince somebody of something, which is a game that most of us are in some of the time, at least some of us, most of the time, even if our fathers weren't merchants. But the shift from persuading convincing to disclosing is an interesting step. Maybe there's a step of not disclosing, but cultivating the conditions in which someone discovers something or in which something disclosure is different for them. I was. I was working with a coaching client of mine yesterday, and they were very challenged by the process of sales and what, you know, how to bring a more powerful offer into a conversation, and which is sort of stepping in the direction of what's the sales script, which is classic technology of modern sales. You know, what are you going to say if they say this? You have branching decision tree. The whole thing is scripted out. And this is a person who also has been studying improv, where somebody says something and somebody says something else, and there's not a script. And if there's a script, the whole thing falls flat. And we got into an exploration of what would sales be like if it was like improv, if there was an opening and a commitment to building a relationship and to seeing what emerges. And as my friend and teacher Fernando Flores would say of listening for the offer, not coming in with the offer, but listening for the offer that emerges, wanting to be offered in the conversation. So I raised that because it's really different than trying to convince somebody. And here we are in a world of fear and stress and political struggle, and the political struggle looks like trying to convince people to do things to get their votes, you know, to elect somebody to get their votes in Congress and so forth. This is, you use the word slower and listening. This is a slower and more listening flavored approach to human interaction.

It's also about orthogonal approaches. So I'll give this example. I don't know if I've shared this on this call or not before, but in 2004, I was asked, would I please facilitate a world cafe for a group of business people and a group of peace activists? And I really didn't want to do it because peace activists tend to be very violent people. No blood for oil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and they've taken a stand of, I know what peace is and you don't agree, and therefore I'm going to convince you what peace is. And I realized when I walked into that room that it was a volatile space. And it was proven to me when I said, hello, this is, you know, here, this is me, and this is Jennifer. She's our graphic recorder. She's going to capture the output of today's conversation. And immediately somebody said, capture is war language. You can't use war language here. And I was like, okay, what would you say? You know? And they didn't have an answer. So we just went with it. But it took me a long time to figure out a way in. And my way into the conversation was to ask people, they're all tables of four. I said, would you please tell the story of the first time that you Realized peace was important to you. And very surprisingly at the time, but in hindsight, not so surprisingly, most people went back to a time when they were a teenager when they tended to be a little more idealistic than as, than, you know, before they became cynical adults. And we heard these amazing stories of personal experience of when someone, something was revealed to them. Someone was disclosed. Right. My own story was, was I grew up on a, in a town with a naval air station. And every year I'd go see the Blue Angels. I love them. They were so amazing to watch. And then I was actually in Atlanta waiting for a bus and it was right next to an Air Force or a Navy station. I'm not sure what it was, but five of these jets flew over really low and I could see all the armaments underneath. The Blue Angels never have the armaments. And when you see these missiles and, and you go, I had this flash like I could be a woman in a rice patty with a child throwing it back and one of these huge horrible things screaming in from above, guns blazing, missiles firing. And I just went, oh my God, I can't support the Blue Angels anymore. And I've never watched them since. But people told very interesting stories. And after two rounds of that, there were no longer peace activists and business people. There were people in the room who were concerned with peace. And because we had talked about it, it had taken about 45min to establish this. We're able to have a very different conversation about what does peace mean? And what does being a peace activist mean? What's being a business person mean? So I think we really need to let go of our. I have to convince you and think about how can we change the tone and tenor of the conversation by asking questions that deal with stories. Tell me about the story. Why do you care about this? What's. What's important about it? And genuinely listen and say thank you, that's really interesting. And ask questions to, to better understand, not start to direct the questions towards what about this? Have you thought about that? Because that's moving into that persuasion mode. So I think that's one of the, one of the ways that we need to collectively start to shift our attention.

Yeah. And what's happening there, Ken, in that peace example and in other conversations that we have, I think is a quest to find out what we each really care about. Because it turns out, and I've seen this in example after example, I've shared some with you guys before, that human beings, even across vast political and cultural and ethnic and religious and Other kind of gulfs largely have the same concerns in life, largely care about the same things. And a different kind of conversation opens up when we can touch that shared career than when we don't. If I start with, you know, you're, you know, pick your favorite enemy, you're that, and I objectify you through that, I can't hear you and I can't hear what you care about and you probably can't hear me. And so if even, you know, even in the instrumental quest of persuading into my point of view, it ain't going to happen because there's no basis for listening to each other, this perhaps opens up something else and back to where we started lives to some extent in our moods. How do I come into a conversation? Do I come in with a mood that's open or closed, with a sense of possibility or not? Am I ambitious for a possible future that could emerge here? Am I resigned that this is how things are and always have been and always will be? I had a lovely argument with my Torah study teacher this last weekend, who is a brilliant woman lawyer by background, deep scholar, and we were talking about the portion about the remission of debts, the seven year cycle of the remission of debts in the 49 year cycle of returning land to its original owners. And she said there's no evidence this ever happened. And beside that, it couldn't possibly because human nature, human nature was like a capital letters human nature. We started to talk about human nature and it was striking to me how tenacious she was that human nature is what it is, always has been, never will change. And you know, look at our lives in these last, you know, 20, 50, 70, 80 years that we all have lived. Look at the world that we've lived through. Those of you who've read the dawn of everything have a 50,000 year perspective on what human nature has been in different circumstances at different times. And so just a really, if you can feel it, there's a very different mood in those two different conversations. And guess what? The world shows up differently and the moves that are available to make show up differently and the possibilities of interaction show up differently.

So I think when I hear things like that's human nature, you can't change it. That's just the way things are. I think what's being described there is the edge of my worldview or the edge of the other person's worldview, not the edge of the world. It's, it's the description about this is where the limitations of my thinking. So my Thinking is. And I think it was, this is.

The world that, this is the world that I'm living in, right?

And, and so I think Schopenhauer said, you know, every person takes the limits of their own vision to be limits of the world. And if we paraphrase that every person takes the limits of their own vision to be the limits of their worldview would really change the meaning, right? It's like, because we don't recognize. Oh, that's that I just came to the edge of my worldview and I have this conversation a lot with people in my life where I, I'm, I'm basically optimistic with a long term pessimism. I'm a short term or I'm three, three levels. In the short term, I'm optimistic. Day to day, I'm pretty optimistic. In the medium term, I'm very concerned about a lot of things that make me feel pessimistic. In the long term, I believe we'll, we'll find our way through. It may be incredibly ugly, a lot of people might suffer tremendously, but that's the nature of being human. But when I, when I encounter somebody who says that'll never happen, you can't, you know, that's. I have a friend who calls me a communist all the time, you know, because he's a hardcore capitalist. Every time I think about, you know, how we can build a society that works for people, oh, that's a dream. It'll never happen. Well, that's the description of where his worldview comes up and his world ends and he can't see another world. That's possible. And this gets us into this conversation of, you know, you know, what happens when we recognize the validity and legitimacy of people who have very different worlds. What happens when we go to the Kogi in South America? You know, what happens when we go to the Iroquois? They're still here in North America. They're not very, you know, they don't have as much presence as they used to, but their culture's intact. You know, there's lots of, or the Kung in Africa or the Sami in Northern Europe and Siberia. You know, those people live in very different ways. They have really different ways of relating. And for us to say, oh, well, that's an old way of living that's no longer applicable. The fact of the matter is, if you look around the world, wherever you find lands under indigenous care, they have usually from 30 to 60% more biodiversity. There's a lot to be learned from that. I read once that some anthropologists had studied the Australian aboriginal culture and determined they still tell stories about animals that went extinct over 40,000 years ago. Well, that tells me they have a culture that's been intact for 40 or 50,000 years. Surely there's lessons in that, that we today could benefit from. Human nature in some ways is unchanging in the fact that I think the Greeks really showed us by projecting the human nature and the gods of just how dysfunctional we are. There's always people, brothers and sisters and fathers and sons and daughters and mothers who won't get along. And yet these people have lived with that for millennia, and they found ways to work with it so that generally it comes down to either we all survive or if one of us is going to be above the others, that's going to lead to our collective downfall. So there's much more of a communitarian spirit. There's not so much of an individuality, which the ego then inflates to take up the whole space. So what can we learn from that? How can we be in conversation with those people in ways that will shift our way of being.

With. With. With cultures that we could think of as our elders?

Yes, very much.

Right. So let's. Let's open it up to the room. It's a good point to do that. Please. And, and let me. Let me ask you if you'd like to speak. Use the reaction button at the bottom to raise your hand. That will cue you up in order on our screens and we'll call on you in order to. You may have questions of clarification. Ask. Ask those, by all means. But what I'm interested is not. Not the philosophy of what we've been talking about here, but how this shows up in your life. How have you seen this show up in your life? What is this provoked for you in your own life? Let's start there.

Dawn, Was that a hand raise? Please go ahead.

So when I was in college, I noticed I either felt like higher up than somebody I was talking to or meeting or lower than. And when I got out of college, I realized there was another way to interact with people, that we could just see each other for who they were and not like this feeling of I was less than or I was better than. And I think that is part of what we're talking about to re. Look at each other as this person has gifts and is on this planet at this time to offer their gifts. My gifts are unique. I'm here to contribute my gifts. Some people can receive them, some people won't receive them, but it's all in good order and there's a synchronicity and a flow, and someone can touch your life briefly, but have a great impact. Someone you know for a long time. You can. You know, it may take a long time to receive each other in a. In a. In a loving way. I don't know. I just. I think there. There's a shift from the ego of seeing higher being greater or lesser.

Dawn, do you have a sense of when or how that shifted for you? I mean, you said after college, but any, any more texture you can give to that?

I remember this one girlfriend and she was going for her PhD, and I said, well, what do you want to do with your PhD? And it was always about getting somewhere, doing something. And she didn't. She just wanted to learn. And it was like this wake up thing that. It wasn't like she was trying to prove something to me, that I wasn't going for my PhD, but we could meet each other as equals, and she just was on that path and I wasn't. I don't know if that gives some clarity. I hope it does.

No, it's good. What a thing to discover after college. I wish I had thought of that before college. That would have been great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you, Don. Jan, welcome.

Yeah, actually, I just thank you both for exploring in this way. And I remember in the 70s, discovering the term belt and sound and really living out of that space. So this is very familiar and a rare kind of set of distinctions. So. And thank you for your recent explorations. What this brings up for me, I'm. I'm. I've been over three years in a relationship with someone who's pretty high score on what's called the ACEs index, the adverse Childhood Experiences Index. Some of you may know about this sort of grassroots trauma sharing movement that's going on, particularly with children who get sick and don't get better because of their trauma history. Anyway, we are so different. And in the last, I don't know, couple months in particular, six weeks, the degree to which we live in completely different worlds has become stark. And because we love each other so much, we're constantly forgiving ourselves and each other when we think we're on the same page and we're not. And literally in the last, I don't know, a couple weeks, several times, you know, I've had the experience of saying something with a certain intention to be loving and kind in my response. And what's received is the opposite of what I meant. Like 180 degree opposite of what I meant. And I've just been noticing there's some little things on the, on, on, you know, Facebook and Messenger about how we can say exactly the same words to one another and come out with a completely different, sometimes 180° opposite interpretation of what's said. And I just really found that it's just so clear to me that we are literally in completely different worlds and that bridging between those worlds is a lifetime journey for all of us, basically with every person. And much of the time, what I'm sort of getting is much of the time, I guess, you know, because we use the same words for different things and different words for the same things and lots of other sort of places where it's going like this when we hope to go like this. But it isn't that. It's just profound how different.

Each of.

We're literally a separate universe, each one of us, and we're, we're generating it. And I, I really like Gil. You're the only person I know that says, you know, we speak our existence into, into our, our experience of life into existence. And, and it's just so clear to me that there, there are things that come up in my interactions with her that, that, that are in my head that I just don't want to say because I don't want to speak that into existence. And that really what we say today and, and the way we say it is our experience tomorrow and next week where we're literally creating it, our visor. By, by our speaking.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's just becomes super. In a very personal, deep personal relationship that's just become so clear recently to me.

John, thank you for sharing that and for sharing it so vividly. And I can, I can feel it and perhaps other people can too, and recognize, you know, recognize myself and my life experience in that I won't take the credit for, for speaking worlds into existence. I'll credit Fernando and Chauncey Bell and some other of my teachers for that. Michelle, if you give me just a minute, I just want to react to something that Jan said, if I may. Thank you. I mean, you've, Jan, you've. You've highlighted in very vivid personal terms what is, you know, what is both a personal and a larger societal issue of how we engage with each other. And one, one of the really gifts that keeps on giving that I've learned from Fernando is the distinction. He's talked about. He's talking about language, action and different kinds of speech. Five different types of Creative language as opposed to descriptive language that we use. We've talked about that a little bit before. Declarations, assertions, assessments, requests and promises. And we'll come back to that, maybe in another call in more detail, but can think about it in the meantime, pivotally important and important in this conversation and the one you're referencing is the difference in the confusion between assertions and assessments. And we muddy that all the time. And it's a bear trap for all of us all the time. What's an assertion? An assertion would be like, it's 68.51 degrees in this room at this time, which is a testable statement. We can go look at the thermometer. If you don't trust the thermometer, we can bring in another thermometer. We can calibrate them. We can. We can determine it's a claim about the world that can be verified. Okay? And we do that. It's an important thing to do. Assertion is basically, I have an interpretation about something. I have an opinion about something. You know, assessment is the term he uses. And the parallel for the 68.51 degrees in this room is, hey, honey, it's hot in here. Which means what? Which means. Or, well, no, honey, it's cold in here. I need to turn the heat up. Well, that's an assessment. That's a personal interpretation. It is not testable. It is not verifiable. It's there, it's real for the person speaking that. And it invites a different kind of conversation. The assertion invites the conversation of, you're wrong. Let me prove it to you. My thermometer says, no, it's actually 68.9. You're. You know, you're wrong. Can't do that with an assessment. What you can do with an assessment is say, I hear you. I get that you feel that way. I'm sorry you feel that way. Or in the case of something less personal and more maybe political and abstract. Gee, that's interesting that you say that. I'm surprised to hear you say that. I don't understand that. Why is it that you say that? How did you come to that? What. What worlds are you living in that have you assessed? Have you live in those interpretations? What might be possible here? And just noting, just listening in yourself and in others about, is this an assessment happening here or an assertion happening here? Is this a claim of truth that can be verified, or is this an interpretation that can be engaged and explored? One last thing, Shel. Nothing wrong with making assessments or having interpretations or opinions. We do that all the time. We are assessment machines. We cannot not do that. Humans do that. It's how one of the ways that we live in the world. So it's not a matter of disciplining ourselves to not make assessments, not at all, but to just hear that in ourselves so that I can hold a little bit of a lighter hand on what I'm saying and not in others. So that instead of closing a possibility, I can open one. Instead of saying, you know, you, you bloody fool, you don't understand anything I can say. Why do you see it that way? What might be interesting here? What can we see together? How can we find common cares in this difference of interpretation to see if there's a possibility of creating something together that. That takes care of both of our cares. John, thank you very much. Shell, thank you for waiting so long. Let's turn it over to you.

Just one, one, one question.

Sure, sorry.

What was the fifth type of creative. I put it in the chat.

Declaration, declarations, assertions, assessments, requests and promises.

Got it.

And those distinctions are, in my experience, enormously powerful in navigating the, What Ken called the planet and what we're calling here, the worlds.

Michelle, if it's okay, I'll just, I'll just very quickly say. Gil, I. In that deeply personal thing, I also have led a lot of groups and I. Ken's story about the World Cafe just reminds me that when the right frame of discussion is created, people actually change their neural pathways in the process simply by hearing things that they never heard before in a way that lands with them. So I appreciate you doing this in this context today. Thank you.

Thank you. Guess what? We are actually changing each other's neural pathways in real time right now. We are affecting each other's biochemistry and neurobiology. Real time, right now, all the time, in every interaction.

Into the points that I was going to make, which are about the capacity for change. And I would not, after 50 plus years of doing it, still be an activist if I hadn't. I think at this point had significant evidence that people can change and sometimes. And I, I was a very bitter and selfish teenager and I got called out on it in college and I kind of thought, wow, that hurts to hear, but he's actually right. And I changed. But I've also seen, I've seen my mother in law who was openly homophobic in the 1980s when I came into that family and who has been extremely accepting of my kid, who has X and Y chromosomes but identifies as non binary and is in A relationship with a CIS man. I've seen it in. There was a remarkable interview with a former Nazi skinhead who now does anti racism work. And he's not the only one.

I've come across a few of them.

I see that. I remember back in the day, Joe Biden, practicing Catholic, was the one who convinced Obama that he needed to get out from under his resistance to gay marriage. This is back when he was vice president and Obama was president. I see it in the existence, however imperfect, of groups like Braver Angels, where left and right are talking to each other or in some of the Israeli Arab, not as Jewish Arab dialogue groups that I've been part of a long time ago. And those are some of the things that keep me not only on the barricades but also in meetings with various people who I'm not in agreement with. And one of the secrets I think that I didn't understand in my teens and twenties is that the way change happens is not by shaking and screaming and carrying on all these terrible things you did. Oh my goodness, you have to be stopped. It's about the kind of common ground that, that Gil, was very effectively establishing some parameters for. It's like, oh, that's interesting. Tell me why you feel that way. Looking for the places where the Venn diagrams intersect and maybe trying to push those circles out a little bit so the intersection gets larger over time.

Shell, thank you for that. You know, we all have personal examples and historical examples of where we've seen change happen.

I have a comment. Gil, it's okay.

Yeah, go ahead.

We recently observed, I think the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Accords. Everybody know about the Good Friday Accords. So this was Northern Ireland, Belfast, and know the Catholics and the Protestants and George Mitchell, who had been in civil.

War with each other for years, right?

For years. Over 3,000 people died and had been going on for forever, right? And George Mitchell, it was Bill Clinton sent him as a special envoy and said, see if you can solve this. And I was reading an article by Heather Cox Richardson, who some of you may know. And she said, you know, or she reported that people said, what George Mitchell did was he listened us into agreement. He went in with as much hope as possible. And after a while he's like, this is never going to work. But he kept listening to people, he never contradicted them. He just said, tell me what you care about. Tell me what's going on. Tell me your stories. And at some point he realized, he said, you know, I really, when I was in The Senate, he was the Senate Majority leader. He says, I realized when you, when you have the votes, that's when you take. That's when you take the vote, right? When you've got the number of votes, that's when you hold the vote. So I realized that we suddenly had the number of votes of people saying, we want to change. And so the key takeaway is he didn't try to persuade. He just listened to people, let them tell their stories and the stories of sorrow and the stories of death and murder and the toll that it had taken on people, both sides, was enormous. And at some point, when they told enough of those stories, they said, this gotta end. We can't keep going on like this. And that created a shift. So the power of listening is, to me, one of the most amazing things we have at our disposal when confronting people who see the world differently than we do. Not only just epistemologically, but actually from a way of being, who are different. You know, if we can suspend our need to be right, suspend our need to persuade them to see our point of view and simply listen, incredible things can happen. And you may have to sit there and listen for five years. It might not. You know, I listened to them for a whole hour and they didn't change. You know, you're going to have to be patient here.

It's worse than that. It's not just that they didn't change, but if I go into the conversation without the willingness for me to change, it's bogus. And I learned this myself very directly. I think I've talked with you about this before. The friend of mine who was a Trump voter, supply side economist, mutual, close, mutual friends put us together and we liked each other a lot and got deeper into conversation and started to learn from each other. And I realized that if, you know, if I was not as, if I was not as willing to change as he was, the relationship wasn't there. I just want to say one other thing before we go back. We've got two hands raised. And invite other people, please raise your hands. We'd love to hear from you. We're not saying it's all Kumbaya, you know, I mean, if I think about the health example, if someone's got heart symptoms and I'm their heart doctor, I'm going to talk with them about changing lifestyle, changing diet, exercising more, losing weight. Before I talk to them about surgical intervention, let's see if we can do that. If I'm walking down the street and someone's hit by A car, and they're bleeding out of their thigh. I'm going tourniquet. I'm not talking about vitamins. Different circumstances call for different kinds of action. But the rare, extreme cases are rare and extreme by definition. And most of the opportunity is the daily life and daily encounters. How we live with ourselves, how we live with other people, what situations we've set in motion for ourselves and each other. Dawn and then Jan, back to you. And then hopefully we'll see some other hands.

And I was so glad to hear you bring up the Irish and Protestant situation. I know of someone else who did mediation for that situation. And he came into a gathering of family, husbands and wives of both sides, and it was not in a good space. They had been trying to find common ground for at least a day and a half. And then he was invited to come in and mediate. And what he did was put all the women in one corner. Didn't matter whether they were Protestant or Catholic. All the women in one corner, all the men in the other corner blindfolded all the women and asked the men, well, I think they actually did the men first, anyway, asked, what's it like to be a woman in Ireland right now? And the women would share and feel that commonality of their sons going to war and their husband's not, you know, like that. Feel that commonality. And then they shifted for the men, what's it like to be a man in Ireland? And it was through that shared experience of other women or other men feeling that same way that it broke through during that particular meeting.

So.

Wow.

And, you know, it's related. I wanted to share that because of what Jan was sharing in terms of personal relationships. I'm going to just add one more thing. My husband is a Virgo. Virgo. Virgo. Okay. Everything has to be very strict. And I am Aquarius, and I'm all over the place. And it was a great realization when we realized he was a tiger and I was a butterfly. And butterflies can bother tigers sometimes. But we have grown, you know, and been together for 40 years and just appreciate our differences now. So sometimes analogy of, like, who you would be in the natural world actually gives some clarity to the sit. To the relationship.

Thank you, Don, back to you.

Yeah, I just really appreciating your reminding us of the five, you know, creative speech acts.

And we'll come back and dive into those in more substantial detail in another call. Let's not go too deep into them.

I think that's a good. The main thing that I just sort of got a distinction was that when you were talking about assertion versus assessment. And in my work, I teach mature measurement skills to intact teams, starting with the C suite and then driving it down into the organization. And I realized that what I'm doing is basically applying the scientific method to help a group of people from 6 or 10 to 50 to actually learn how to make assertions that other people can align to. And how much of the statements that we make are assessments. But when you're doing it in a collaborative manner, where sort of the where's Waldo game is, what are the actual facts we can verify about this, even though they may not be the most important thing. There's something about it turns out in any organization, there are 125 words, give or take, that they use all the time. That's the lingua franca of that organization. But only a few people actually know what the sacred glossary is. Only a few people really understand what the words mean when they're used in that context. And so I'm just really seeing that in part of my work and the direction I'm going to address what we're talking about today is from a servant leadership point of view, Teaching people can be arrived into unanimity by a collaborative group. It creates a fundamental transformation in everyone's worldview. People discover, as the facts are discussed and defined, how much of the things they think are either a pure fantasy or a paranoid hallucination. And that never needs to be discussed. It's just obvious. It becomes obvious. And sometimes in the room, I can sort of feel smoke coming out of people's ears as they realize the degree of which they've been in a completely different world from the actual world that they're in, that they're discovering in that moment. And so I'm just feeling like really, I don't know, affirmed that helping people to use the scientific method in their. In their small groups to actually come to unanimity on a core set of facts that no one's arguing about how profoundly that actually teaches people without. I'm not teaching them about assertions and assessments, but everybody kind of learns something about that in an interesting way in that measurement experience, learning.

Beautiful, beautiful example, Yan, of coming to clarity on shared, you know, testable assertions that provide a platform for a common conversation. Guess what? In which there will still be assessments and people's interpretations about the shared facts and what they mean and how important they are and what to do about them. And that's a different. A different sort of conversation. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Hank. It's on your mind, sir?

Well, there are a lot of things on my mind listening to this conversation. I have had a house in Ireland for the last 50 years and so I've lived through what they call the other troubles in all different stages for the last 50 years. But that's not so much on my mind now. I'm very happy that it came up in the conversation because the, the story of George Mitchell and the, and the, and the accord is really wonderful one, but I want, I've got something else on my mind because I've just come back from spending nine in Jordan. I was helping to run an innovation.

Camp.

For a seven country water innovation project. And a lot of the people there were Palestinians because they were one of the partners in the project. And at dinner I sat next to a very friendly and intelligent Palestinian man in a high civil service position.

Who.

Had made some very intelligent contributions to the discussions at the camp. And we ended up talking about crises in the Middle east and why so many wars through the last hundred years have always been with perpetrated on Arab countries and Muslim countries. And of course, being Palestinian, I asked him what the situation there was and whether he thought there would ever be peace. So he said, no, there's no possibility of peace. And then he opened his smartphone and he showed me photos of, of Israeli rocket attacks on Palestine at the moment we were speaking, and dead women lying in the street. And then he told me of his children's fear every night and his father, a refugee from what is now Tel Aviv. It had a Palestinian name when his father grew up there, crying every night. And it's a story, an evening, a memory that troubles me deeply because I think, like many of you on the call, I also believe that with the right attitude on both sides, with powerful listening, with real dialogue, peace is possible. But I was very moved and disturbed by that story. It's on my mind. I thought I'd share it here and I'm just wondering if other people here might say something intelligent to me to get that awful feeling of inevitability out of my mind. Thank you.

Thank you, Hank. I've got some thoughts, but anybody else care to respond to that? John, let me hold on you. I'd love to hear some other voices. If we could come back to you in a bit. Doug, then Alan. So.

I was at war with my father forever.

And.

I went through a weekend workshop. I'm sure a lot of people here are familiar with those. And I was at the extreme end of the bell curve, of, you know, being transformed by it. And one of the things attached to it was at the end that you had to sort of have a goal, you know, something that you wanted to change. And I wanted to change my relationship with my father.

So.

What that ended up involving was two years of being audience, being present, listening and receiving pretty much six times a day, because I was also, aside from working full time, primary caregiver for him last couple few years of his life.

And.

So I stayed dutifully present for two years. And it was almost two years to the mark. And he made a statement about something which I received. And, and then he followed it with, what do you think about that? That that was the first time in my father's life. He was about 80 at that point, as far as I know, that he had ever asked another human being for their opinion about anything, ever. And so I picked my jaw off the floor, I was like, what do you do with that? And. And then I responded and it led to two years of connection and relationship. And so my takeaway from that, in response to the. The request just made is that. Love is absolutely the most powerful force. And when combined with will and intention of a human being to come from.

That place.

There isn't anything that cannot be mended, healed, cured and transformed. At least that's my belief. And, and I think it's, you know, but it's very much a individual by individual, one drop of water in the bucket at a time kind of thing. And with that I'm completely.

Doug, thank you. Alan Haber from the Heartland.

Hello. Glad to be here again. I want to follow up from the comment about Palestine being very involved in that question. I suppose, Gil, you figured I must raise up my hand on that. Well, love is all there is. And I do believe that in terms of bridging differences, that you recognize some quality of humanity across the boundary, there is also underneath differences in material conditions. And in Palestine, until the material situation is in some way recognized, acknowledged, touched, the man who said they'll never be peace is reflecting, you know, the reality in which love is suppressed by the continued memory of the dispossession. And until. And until the Israelis somehow see that their wealth is also extracted from theft and some sense of return is recognized, that's also relevant in the questions of land return in the United States between we settlers and the indigenous. But until that sense of redressing the theft, the taking without permission, which really strikes very deeply at what is a breach of love, there won't be Any change. And so how does one formulate a conversation that includes the, say, right of return to be willing to live in peace with your neighbors? And if that. Which, of course, is not across a red line for the Israelis in general, but if that were seen the other side of the red line as a redevelopment and economic development, a regathering of creativity from the Palestinian diaspora and also from the Jewish diaspora, it would be such a great renaissance of economics and culture in the Middle east that would become a light to the nations. And if in some sense the Israelis would see their role in that way, that they are making a place where all can come as to home to worship and become a nation of priests and not of occupiers, that positive vision could perhaps be the spark that would catch someone's eye and say, oh, there's another way to think about this. There is a positive way out of this. And not that peace is just allowing the old enemy to get behind you, to stab you in the back. Anyhow, the positive vision of a way past the impasse is, I think, an important part, and it's very lacking right now in the Holy Land.

Alan, thank you. A lot is lacking there right now. As you know, I share a lot of the same perspective as you do, both about the positive futures as an attractor in general and some of the specifics in this situation. I'd like to suggest that we not try to adjudicate the Israel, Palestine issue here on this call, because there's a lot to that. But I. I will suggest that you didn't really respond to Hank's question, which is, you know, how do I. How do I find a sense that something might be possible where things look absolutely impossible? Hank, am I summarizing that reasonably well? And. And for me, I look to the past, not the future, on that. I mean, it's interesting because I. In my work, I do a lot of. I'm the guy as the consultant to corporations. I'm the guy in the tribe who runs over the next hill and comes back and says, you wouldn't believe what I see over the next hill. There's stuff over there you couldn't imagine. We're headed that way. Let's get ready for that which we're about to encounter. That's my M.O. and my job, in a way. But in this case, in response to Hank, I look at the past, not the future. And I look back to the story that Ken told about the troubles in Northern Ireland and before Mitchell was sent there. I think probably the general mood was of resignation and absolute impossibility. This will never change. It's always been this way. This will never change. Before the Berlin Wall fell in what, 1989, six months before that, 12 months before that, nobody would have predicted that it fell. Nobody would have predicted the nonviolent collapse of the Soviet Union or the Iranian revolution or any number of the color revolutions in futures that were unseeable and yet happened. So I take a little bit of solace or something, comfort, I don't know, nurturance from that, to think that there are futures that I cannot see that may yet happen. Hank, it's an indirect answer to your question, but that's sort of where I stand with that.

Gil, I have to push back on something. Sorry, please. When you say nobody saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, no pundits saw the problem, no politicians, but people involved in citizen diplomacy said, of course this is going to happen. We were seeing inside the Soviet Union, we were there what was going on. It was impossible to sustain that. So who are we listening to when we are looking for? Who knows what's going on? And that again brings up another world. If you live in, you know, Washington is its own kind of bubble. You know, it's abstraction after abstraction after abstraction. And if you go and actually sit in someone's living room in the country in which you're trying to understand and talk to those people, you'll have a very different perspective if you're just reading policy papers that are coming to you out of think tanks. So there were people who foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall, and there are people who are foreseeing lots of things, but their voices aren't very loud or very much paid attention to. That's my only point on that.

Thank you. And back to your earlier point about listening and your perennial point about who's we when we say we. So thank you for that. I had friends who were very much involved in the citizen diplomacy work US Soviet relations in the early 80s. And I think what they saw was a possibility of a different relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, for sure. Some of them perhaps saw a profound change, and perhaps I don't remember any of them talking about collapse of the Soviet Union. And certainly I'm going to go out on a limb. This is an assertion that maybe is testable or not. I don't, I don't remember anybody imagining people from East Germany swarming the wall with hammers and picks, axes and tape and hammering it down without being shot by East German guards, kind of beyond the realm of imagination in a certain way. That's what happened. It happened. Assertion, testable, provable. And you know, and our history is filled with impossibilities that came to pass. And that, that's. That's one of the things that feeds me in my work and in my worlds and how I. How I move in this. In this time that we're in. But thank you. Nobody is a nobody saws a dangerous phrase. And I. Thanks for catching me for using it. Yeah.

Let me just thank Doug, Alan and you Gil, for I thought all three of you brought new perspectives to how I'm looking at this.

Thank you very much.

Great.

And I really, I really appreciate the question. Hank as well. And Gil, you really teed me up because I was thinking of the Iroquois great law of peace when one of the most institutionally violent and torturing cultures in the history of the world, everybody came and threw their weapons to injure other people into big pits and they planted trees of peace across the Iroquois territories, you know, a thousand years ago or something like that. And I just. I refer any of you that don't know Dr. Bruce Dahmer. He gave a keynote at the IONS conference in 2019 in Santa Clara about how the creative leaps of humanity happen with the greatest tensions and the more the tension, the greater the creative possibility. And I've been, Hank, just super inspired recently. And I refer you to the work of the Twilight Club and a man named Walter Russell. And I think I've showed this to you all before, but this is like from 1870 up until 1940. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, et cetera, et cetera. They all actually got together and in 1895 they wrote the Poet's Code and they all came up with how do we shift from piracy to value creation in the economy? And this man, Herbert Spencer in 1870 just started having conversations with people about piracy wasn't a great model for a global peaceful civilization. And the Twilight Club in 1895 they all agreed that they were going to write based on this code. And Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Andrew Carnegie decided to build libraries. All these people got illuminated to move into a new space because they talked about something and they came up with this 88 portion code. And then they could you could you created live for decades and built our modern society and moved us away from piracy and theft as the fundamental. They healed caveat empire emptor in the market. That was the theme of the market up until 19. In the early 20s and this.

Some would say it's. Some would say it's the theme of the market again.

Well, that's.

Could you come back, could you post the link to the poet's code in the chat so people can find that?

You know, I haven't been able to find one. This is an out of print book from Walter Russell.

And if you would, if you would, if you would. If you would take that, if you would take a photo of that page and send it to me, I will send it out to everybody.

You bet I'll do that.

Okay, thank you so much. Thanks for that. I.

Anyway, Hank, I don't know if that, if that helps you, but nature always somehow figures this out when it looks very dire, but it turns out to shift in some amazing way.

Thanks. Thanks, John. Thank you. I'm curious to hear what's going on with the rest of you here. Anthony.

I guess I feel we've drifted off your original framing.

Okay, I. I think bring us back.

So I think if I understood it well, the idea of multiple worlds is based on fundamentally different ways of understanding. And you know, we've all been brought up in one way of understanding.

Pretty.

Maybe I shouldn't make that generalization. I certainly know I've been brought up in a particular way of understanding and find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine other ways of understanding, such as a way of understanding that an indigenous tribe might have. So I think, I think you were getting at that type of shift in perspective. Maybe I misunderstood, but I think that's what you were getting at, is that type of shift. I would call it an ontological shift.

Okay.

I think we are caught up in epistemology. How do we know about changing minds rather than how do we be about changing ways of being, which is very different. That's why I put some of that stuff from that article in the chat there. Is that, Is that your take on this, Anthony?

Say that again, Ken.

I think we got hung up on epistemology. How do we know what we know versus ontology? How are we being with what we know? And for example, I put some stuff from a very interesting article. It's long, but no, they talk about science, the universe, the universe versus the pluriverse, and it's aboriginally the monoverse. So science. And I have a good friend who's a scientist and he'll say, oh, that's not scientific. And I think one of the things that we need to do is bring back poetic language because science is one way of understanding the world and poetry is Another way. Art is another way. Being in nature is another way. Actually, you know, living as or attempting to understand the way first nations peoples who have. Have lived for millennia very successfully and we've managed to screw things up in a couple hundred years. They have a lot to teach us. And it's not just that we're going to go in there and we're going to understand their way of. Of thinking because that's cultural appropriation. We want to understand the way of being. We want to bring their way of being into our way of being. Not what do they know that we can exploit so that we can make more money or extend our ability to continue exploiting the planet for as long as possible before it all collapses.

I'd actually push back a little bit on that, Ken, and say it's even more than. It's not that we're trying to in any way integrate the two ways of the two ontological frames. They are just different. I would claim that they were complementary, but it's not that we somehow want.

To.

Appropriate one ontology in another. There's quite a lot of. I'll take. I was just earlier today found an article which I think might be relevant. I'll put the link in the chat, but it's called Moving beyond the Ontological Term, which has been a big debate in anthropology as I've understood it in the last year.

Very good. Would love to see that. I want to say a word. I want to challenge Ken, the interpretation that it's science or poetry. Because the best scientists I know are poets and artists and deeply intuitive and not hyper rational. And the common image of scientists is hyper rational. Just the facts, mem. And so forth. But there's something. These worlds interpenetrate in very rich and interesting ways. And as an ecologist, I'm always interested in the ecotones, the place where different systems meet and what happens in that mixing.

George, clarify my point. Guilt. Just clarify. I'm specifically in this instance referring to international relations. International relations is driven by science, by data, and it relegates indigenous views to the realm of legends and myths. And it's not real. And that is a complete denial of a way of being.

Sure. And let's call. Let's distinguish between data and science. But that's another larger conversation. I want to come back to Anthony for a little. Little further digging. You said you find it difficult to imagine a shift. I don't know you all that well, but I know you a little bit. And I would hazard to guess that you have experienced ontological shifts in your life here on this planet. Am I, do you agree or disagree with that interpretation? Because you know, and depending on, and if you say yes, I'm going to have a follow up question. You know that.

Yeah, I, I, I've been, it grew up in a science based background my entire life, so I, I think I might have caught glimpses of other ontological patterns, but I can't say that I've got close to inhabiting any of them.

Can I tell a story on you?

Please, go ahead.

For people who don't know, Anthony Upward, he's the developer, one of the lead developers of something called the Flourishing Business Canvas. He took this thing called the Business Canvas, which was developed in Silicon Valley and environ some decades ago as a framework for designing business enterprises to take all the factors into account in a single graphic, let people see all the critical relationships. And Anthony said, wait a minute, this is actually missing fundamentally important things that matter for the world and matter to me, Anthony Upward, and matter for the businesses. And it needs something richer and more richly textured than that. And you brought that forward in the world. Sounds to me like something shifted in you that enabled that to happen.

But I, I don't think it was an ontological shift. I think, I think it was in, in fact, deep in the philosophy underneath the Flourishing Business Canvas. There's a, there's a, an extremely deep irony which is the, all, all of the literature that I looked at points at the fact that this is a highly subjective topic and yet the artifact itself is highly objective and there's a, there's a deep irony there. And, and I've just had, in the last couple of months had a small chance to work with some indigenous people. And it's just possible that I will manage to find an ontologically different perspective on this topic through that dialogue, which is just beginning. I'm trying to keep my hopes under control. But. Yeah, so, no, I really, I really don't think I've experienced it. I don't think I would claim to.

Okay.

And thank you. Thank you for telling the story. You did it very, you did a very nice summary.

Thank you. You're welcome. And someday I want to buy you a beer and argue about this. Thanks, Anthony. George Mochrie and then Alistair.

Just a note. John Ehrenfeld, who is an emeritus professor at mit, wrote a book called Flourish, which I think was a change of his ontology from sustainability to flourishing. And it's an interesting book and John is a really, really smart guy.

That's where we got flourishing from for the flourishing business canvas.

Good.

Good.

Yeah.

Smart, smart guy with a. Smart guy with a lot of heart.

Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely.

Yeah.

He was, he was one of the people at MIT who really, who really gets it. And there are very few people, unfortunately at MIT who do get it.

When.

We talk about peace, Where we tend to get stuck in, in a duality and like the rest of the culture and a strict duality, according to Ann Wilson Shafe, and I believe that she's correct, is, is a symptom of an addictive system. Peace and war, fight and flight. But it's not really fight and flight. It's fight, flight or freeze. So that gives us three. And then recently I was going over some, some notes that I'd taken about Terry Dobson's book Aikido in Daily Life. And I put it in the comments, but I'll repeat it here. In any conflict situation, we have the following options open to us. One, Fighting back. Two. Withdrawal.

Three.

Parley. Four. Doing nothing. Freeze. Five. Deception. Six. IQ or confluence. And I found that when I started writing online, one of the places where I write is Daily coast and they offer you a poll. So I6Ikey or confluence questions. I'm going to use Buddhist logic. And that when I started writing online, one of the places where I write is Daily coast and they offer you a poll. So I said, okay, let me, let me do my poll questions. I'm going to use Buddhist logic. Buddhist logic is 6 just like Terry Dobson's, which is yes, no, that's our binary. Not yes, not no, neither yes nor no, both yes and no. And then I found over time that people who were reading the polls and said, well, we want. Don't understand the question, okay? And then somebody said none of the above. So that's eight different possibilities out of the binary. Right. And the other thing that I want to say is that Jewish super villain George Soros started studied with Karl Popper and Karl Popper, from what I understand his, the basis of his philosophy was falsifiability, right? Which is like the scientific method, right. If you can falsify it, then you know that your, your hypothesis, it's not real. We can always be wrong to think about the fact that you can always be wrong. I do this often because I say reportedly or I've read or so forth and so on. And it sometimes pisses the hell off of people because I'm not, I'm not determinant. I leave a little bit of space for doubt.

Thank you, sir. Appreciate that the Buddhist logic is a new one for me. I'm going to chew on that a bit. Alistair.

Yes. I know that we're talking about ontologies.

You know, ways of looking at the world and.

But I wanted to talk a bit about, just mention a book that I'm.

Reading about Changing Behavior which talks about the importance of changing our environment. It's called, the title is Willpower Doesn't Work. You know, instead of trying to force.

Ourselves, you know, or blame ourselves for not changing our behavior, it says change your environment. We want to bring about the change. Now, I don't know on a political scale, you know, how to. How you can do that or how you can do that for other people who don't want to change. But it's a useful shift in perspective.

Thank you for that. Could you put the reference in the chat, Alistair? Yes, yes, sure. Thanks. Thank you so much. Shell, let me call on you and if I can ask you to be brief because we're close to time.

Yeah.

And me each a chance to wrap up.

Yeah. First, I want to make an addition to Anthony's concept of the flourishing business. And he and I talked about this one on one, thanks to you. And that's the regenerative business, a business that makes the world better. I just actually read Paul Pullman and Andrew Winston's wonderful book Net Positive. It's really good and it's quite current. It's only a year out. And also speaking of regenerativity, the announcement that I said I wanted to make at the beginning is that Clamshell alliance is back. We are putting up a new website@clamshell alliance.com the old.org 1 We lost the domain when our webmaster died and nobody renewed it. And we are just about to release a very, very powerful statement looking at the broader questions of energy and why nuclear power is not going to solve them. And I got to write the press release for it. And I just want to read you the headline because it's fun. Are zombie nuke coming back from the dead? Not if we can help it. Say activists who buried nukes 45 years ago.

Sounds like some Horowitz guy wrote that headline.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Let me make the offer. Same offer you made to John. Send that to me and I will link to it and I'll circulate it.

Out to the right as soon as it goes live on the website. I'll do that.

Yeah, that'd be great. Good. Thank you so much. Ken, any closing thoughts?

Too many to enumerate at this point. Just. I just want to thank everybody for a really rich and deep conversation and always appreciate folks showing up here. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. I'll echo that. We had a sense that this would seed something interesting and I'm glad that it has, which depends on. On all of you. Come back next time. Can you throw up the last slide if you could? And while you're doing that, I just want to say that something that George said provoked something for me and I've been reading a lot of Matarana and Varela lately. We can talk about them another time. Book is the Tree of Knowledge, and it strikes me that evolution and consciousness may both have something to do with the expansion of possibility. And expansion of possibility seems to be what we're talking about here a lot. Ken, just give us a little music to go out on. Thank you, everybody.

You can dance in a hurricane.

But.

Only if you're standing in the eye.