The more beautiful world my heart knows is possible is a world with a lot more pleasure: a lot more touch, a lot more lovemaking, a lot more hugging, a lot more deep gazing into each other’s eyes, a lot more fresh-ground tortillas and just-harvested tomatoes still warm from the sun, a lot more singing, a lot more dancing, a lot more timelessness, a lot more beauty in the built environment, a lot more pristine views, a lot more water fresh from the spring. Have you ever tasted real water, springing from the earth after a twenty-year journey through the mountain? None of these pleasures is very far away.” Then there’s a theme about how we live our lives in relation to each other. I’ve encountered a deep yearning for closer or more meaningful relationships with others. People talk about getting to know their neighbours, living in communities where they know other people well, spending more time with loved ones. Often this is accompanied by a desire to give – to support friends when they are in need, to visit the vulnerable, to help out when needed. To find a place of value, contribution, connection, love. If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to yearn for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Most of us cannot stand alone in the new story—to do so would contradict the basic principle of interbeing. If you are part of me, then if you are in separation, so also is a part of me. Lord knows there are a lot of social and economic forces holding us in the old story. A miracle or a breakdown can catapult us temporarily out of the world of separation, but to stay there, most of us need help. This is something we can all offer each other. That is why I say enlightenment is a group effort. Another reason why we could say that all the effective action toward a more beautiful world comes from “Who am I?” is that that question implies another: “Who are you?” In other words, we see others through the same lens as we see ourselves. Seeing others as interbeings who desire deeply to give and be of service, we will engage them accordingly, holding the space for them to see themselves that way too. If on the other hand we see them as selfish and separate, we will engage them accordingly, applying the tactics of force, and pushing them toward a story in which they are alone in a hostile universe. It is an interesting and also kind of strange experience to be reading this book while also reading Yuval Harari's Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow. What is the purpose of life? There is no purpose, only cause. The universe is at bottom blind and dead. Thought is but an electrochemical impulse; love but a hormonal cascade that rewires our brains. The only purpose of life (other than what we manufacture ourselves) is simply to live, to survive and reproduce, to maximize rational self-interest. Since we are fundamentally separate from each other, my self-interest is very likely at the expense of your self-interest. Everything that is not-self is at best indifferent to our well-being, at worst hostile. The facts arrive at our brains already prefiltered by the distorting lens of the stories in which we operate.”

I felt it again when I gave birth to my son at home, this feeling---this knowing---that I was a part of an eternity of creation and in that one moment, that eternity came through me. It's difficult to explain, but since then, I've worked to recapture that feeling of oneness and belonging. I've studied Buddhist, Jewish, Taoist, Baha'i, Muslim, and Christian traditions, and this feeling of oneness is only heightened as I see similarities between each of these traditions. The more I see the oneness, the more I want it, and the more I seek it. And yet none of this really does it justice. The content is all there but it’s not quite poignant enough to stir us all to action. Perhaps only poetry or music or art can really do that. Perhaps what we’re missing is the poetry of revolutionary yearning. So let’s have a go at that too: How could your birth be a representation of the more beautiful births our hearts know are possible?

Harari says that we might have to get used to the idea that what we perceive as the self is nothing more but a collection of competing algorithms (probably something akin to Richard Dawkins' memes). That is the self of interbeing. Divested of “situation,” your attention is my attention is everyone’s attention. We are the same being looking out at the world through different eyes. And these “eyes,” these vantage points, are each unique. As the comedian Swami Beyondananda puts it, “You are a totally unique being—just like everybody else!” More importantly, it provides a glimpse of a more beautiful world – in the sense of both the outside world and the world we construct through the stories we tell ourselves. From my vantage point, the basic premises of this story seemed unquestionable. My education, the media, and most of all the normality of the routines around me conspired to say, “Everything is fine.” Today it is increasingly obvious that this was a bubble world built atop massive human suffering and environmental degradation, but at the time one could live within that bubble without need of much self-deception. The story that surrounded us was robust. It easily kept anomalous data points on the margins. Given the forest fires, flash floods, rising average temperatures, it’s hard to deny that global warming is here to stay (although I have written elsewhere of the dangers of becoming fixated with this).

Disrupting the Story of Separation

And this intuitive understanding seems to trigger a desire to reboot our relationship with the natural world. To find a way to be in connection, in communion. To be in a respectful and nourishing relationship with Mother Earth – a relationship that enshrines both give and take. A tribesman asked, “Is there a danger we will become lost in that world, and never wake up from the shamanic trance? Is there a danger that the despair, the cynicism, the pain of separation will be so great that it will extinguish the spark of hope, the spark of our true selves and origin, and that we will be separated from our beloved ones forever?” The book doesn’t provide a roadmap for arriving at a more beautiful world (it’s not a “self-help” book). Instead, it offers new ways of looking at the world so that its inherent beauty becomes clear. And so the second answer: you are everything. Take away even the tiniest relationship and you are diminished as well; add one and you are increased; change any being in this cosmos, and you are altered as well. You are, therefore, everything: a web of relationship, each containing all.