We’re Missing The Progress We’re Making

I really like that a lot because, you know, I'm in a lot of spaces these days where, you know, despite our deepest aspirations, Anu, people still continue to talk about, you know, an interconnected world across identity and community as naive, unrealistic, not possible.

Right.

I mean, I don't know if this is true for you, but it's certainly true for me.

Like I'll have in one conversation with the same human person.

You know, I really love

these

ideas, Tulane, that you talk about and that you talk about on Say More with great people about like how we can live and work together and grow together.

But I don't know if that's realistic.

You know, I mean, look at how things are playing out.

Is that naive? You know, and I and I wrestle with that.

I do believe I don't I mean, believing in the alternative, you know, I'm not going to

do that.

I'm stubborn, you know, if nothing else.

But I do wonder, how do you yourself navigate and when you're in community with others, navigate this sort of like deeply held collective belief that if you're being kind of rigorous and realistic, you are doubtful about people coming together across identity

with ease? I first came across this idea from after reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth years and years ago.

And he really talked about in his book that as a whole, social change is happening.

Human consciousness is evolving for the better and it is moving towards more equality, more equity, more justice, more love, more compassion.

And from a deep time perspective, it is if we think about way before a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, even 200 years ago, even four decades ago, a lot has changed with respect to human identities, how we relate to one another.

And for me, I sincerely believe in that because I'm so deeply rooted in various spiritual traditions.

But at the same time, at the relative level, which is our time right now where we're in this short term and medium term, we have to understand that consciousness shift takes some time.

And that we as individuals are a part of a collective consciousness shift.

So I think where my work has evolved, and I think writing Breaking Bias really revealed this to me because one of the central themes of the book that I discovered after studying quite a bit of cross-cultural history and anthropology, particularly from indigenous traditions, is that the way bias is spread around the world is actually a mind virus.

You know, the Algonquian people of the Americas called it Wetiko.

And it's basically an idea that some human beings were kind of infected with this idea from a very early age.

You know, if we think about what happened in the Dark Ages across Europe and even before that with the Roman Empire, this was all about... domination of land, ownership of things, and really this selfish desire that is unending.