When Humanity Comes Together As One

SA When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by the world of Star Trek. There's something special about that world. In that world, there are no borders, there are no religions. The human race exists as one. And I think at some level, that vision always inspired me. So when I created mindvalley as a company, that was a driving force. You walk into a Mindvalley office and you'll see people from 40 different countries. You attend one of our events and you will meet friends from different 50 different countries. In a way, this space is my little experiment with building the Starship Enterprise because there's this key value that drives us, and that value is global unity. I think it's a powerful vision of the world that can help us figure out how to build healthy companies, how to vote for the right people, how to design our societies. And philosophers and scientists throughout the ages, it turns out, have been talking about this vision as the future of humanity. So to explain why unity is so important, not just to me, I believe this is crucial for the human race. I want to share something that Charles Darwin wrote about in 1871 in a book called the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this book, Darwin writes about this really interesting idea where as man unites into larger and larger tribes, he starts to learn that it makes absolute sense for his survival to extend his sympathies. And by sympathy, Darwin means what we would today call compassion to larger groups. To have a circle of compassion go from just his family to the tribe. But then once you get to the tribe, you start to realize that, hey, why not extend this circle to everyone of the same nation, even though I haven't met most of these people. But Darwin says this circle gets brought progressively bigger from the same nation. You start extending it to other surrounding nations. Think about the European Union. That was that circle extending from Britain to the wider European civilization. But Darwin said this extension will continue into wider and wider circles of sympathy and compassion till it encompasses the entire human race. And Darwin said sometimes things will slow down if we see someone who is remarkably different from us, who dresses different and prays differently. It might take a while for that circle to extend, but extend it will, and eventually that circle is going to extend to include all of humanity. And then Darwin used this line, which I still can't believe. Darwin wrote this in 1871 because it sounds like something that would come from the Dalai Lama. He said, this virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies, becoming more tender and more widely diffused until they are extended to all sentient beings. I believe Darwin's hope for humanity should be our hope. I believe all of us should be aiming to do everything we can to extend our circles of sympathy towards the wider human species and the entire planet. If we could do this, we wouldn't be having so many bullshit debates in politics about things like global warming or refugees or building walls. We'd be tearing down every single wall. We'd be fighting to protect the environment, we'd be standing up for refugees and religion. The differences between us and how we see each other would start to disappear. Because when our sympathies diffuse, we'd no longer identify ourselves primarily with our country or religion or ethnicity. DOSA important, yes, as part of our heritage. But primarily we're part of one race, the human race. This is why Mindvalley exists. This is why I exist. I want to do everything I can to help human beings move to this level. Now, modern philosophers like Ken Wilber explain this in terms of human development models. Ken says that you can look at structures of consciousness of people in the world today. And at the lowest level is what you would call egocentrism. Egocentrism is when it's all about you. Less than 1% of the human population right now is egocentric. These are people who might be psychopaths, murderers, people who would do bad things to other human beings because they are the only one that's important. They are often utterly lacking in empathy or sympathy. But most people go beyond egocentrism. And 70% of the world is in this category that you could call ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is when you are kind, you are generous, but you extend that to people who look like you, who belong to the same nation, who pray to the same God. And so you're the type of person who believes in America first, or you believe in the Quran, but you believe that is your religious book and others are not right, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like I said, 70% of the world exists at that level right now. But Darwin says we're evolving. Today, 30% of the world has extended their sympathy beyond ethnocentrism. We call this group or this level, this structure of consciousness, world centrism. The people who work at Mindvalley tend to be dominantly world centric. World centrism means you appreciate your culture, you love America, but at the same time, you wouldn't close your doors to a Syrian refugee because you Realize that as a human species, we have much more in common than we have different from each other. And world centrism is where the human race is destined to go. There is no other future for humanity except to come together as one human race, as one planet, one species. I believe in this idea. I want to live my life to push this idea. Because I am at a level right now where everything I do in the world is not about money. It's not about starting another company. I gauge myself based on something I call the Eve question. Eve is my daughter. She's three years old. She has German blood, Estonian blood, Indian blood, Jewish blood. She has brown skin and brown hair. And depending on how her eyes sparkle in any given part of the day, she could be Syrian or Greek or Indian or any other ethnicity. Because of that mixed heritage. She'd be one of the first kids who would grow up and be targeted because she looks different. I'm not going to let that happen to my daughter. And I asked myself, what type of world would Eve live in when she is an adult woman? And how can I make that world as beautiful as possible? And I'm seriously worried right now that my generation is going to hand Eve a planet worse off than the way it was when I grew up. So every decision I make, I ask myself the Eve question. Is this going to help me create a better world that I can give. Give to my daughter, Eve? And by Eve, I now mean every young child growing up on the planet today. And I think all of us need to push for that. All of us need to fight for that. This is why on Mindvalley today, education is important, but we're going to do so much more than education. We stand for unity. We stand for that vision of the world that Star Trek put forth in our minds. We stand for Darwin's hope that the human race can come together as one and we can stop so much of the bullshit that's happening right now that divides us. That's the world I want to give to my daughter. That's why I do what I do. You understand that. You understand everything about how I make my decisions in life. This is why mindvalley exists. This is why mindvalley is not a traditional company. It functions more like a movement, a community, but it's a community of people driven towards this idea of not just growing yourself, but using this as a force to thrust the human species forward into its next evolution. This is why we do what we do.