How to Be an Extraordinary Human Being Pt 2

How to Be an Extraordinary Human Being Pt 2

[00:45] Q – How do charm and planning work together?

I have a question about charm and long-term planning. I’m trying to understand how those two things work together. Meaning, I’ll just talk about what I’m dealing with right now, is I’m planning on moving to another country in about a year. There’s a lot of planning that has to go into it. I have very good reasons for wanting to move. I’m excited about wanting to move. I also love where I live. So I’m kind of moving for my future benefit, which I’m looking forward to.

But some days I wake up and I think, “I love living here. Why on earth do I want to move?” For all the reasons I just gave you. But I have a lot of change going on in my life as well..

[01:41] A – Planning Without Predicting

But now, that’s not enough. You need 10 times that, which is what you’re going to get.

So the way that we do this long-term planning thing, you plan the plan. And let me give you an example from banking. One of my clients is the CEO of the largest bank in Australia. And I said to him one day, “When people want to borrow large amounts of money from your bank, say 100 million plus, do you require a business plan from them to show you how they’re intending to get it back to you?” He said, “Absolutely. Detailed business plan for every 10 million dollars is 10 pages of explanation. So 100 million, there’s going to be a lot of pages.”

And I said, “And do you interview them?” “We have teams of people from the bank interviewing them, asking what if this, what if that, what if that, what if that?”

I said, “All right, now here’s the pivotal question. Once you’ve lent the 100 million plus, whatever it may be, how many of those people actually follow the business plan?”

He said, “There’s an exact number.”

“How many people follow it?”

“It’s zero.”

It is zero. There is nobody who follows the business plan that they hand over to the lending authority. But we want to see that they can do their homework.

So when we’re doing a long-term plan, we’re really kind of doing our homework. “It’s going to look kind of like this. It’s going to look kind of like that. If this happens, I’ll do that. If that happens, I’ll do that.” And you feel, you give yourself a certain degree of satisfaction, just like those Polynesians who were getting on those bundles of sticks and heading off across the Pacific.

You’ve got a kind of pretty much idea… you’re going to head towards the rising sun or the setting sun or whatever. And you wait for the stars to guide you in the night. And there’s a few plans.

But of course, most of what happens when you move is not going to be according to plan. And we have to know that. And so what’s our fundamental resource in our planning is not going to be, “Everything will happen exactly according to plan.”

Let me tell you absolutely for sure, it will not. It won’t go exactly according to plan. Hallelujah. Thank goodness for that, that things don’t go according to little human plans.

But we have two things. We have our stability. That is our fundamental staying power, our energy, our intelligence, our creativity. And the next thing we have based on that stability is we have our adaptability. We can adapt.

If I know my capability, which is made of stability and adaptability, if I have my capability, of course, I’m going to make a plan. Make a plan.

When things don’t go that way, and I’m not saying if, they’ll go kind of that way, parts of the plan, especially the early parts will probably be pretty good. The later parts, you’ll see quite a lot of loose change in the way things go. The one thing you know absolutely for certain, you have your stamina, your staying power, your intelligence, your creativity. You’re ready to walk out the door because based on that, you have adaptability. And you’ll be able to adapt to whatever comes.

And probably with that, it will all be better than what you’re planning. It’ll be better than what you’re planning. And this really is the faint little cherished hope inside the human heart, is that I’ve got it all planned out, but maybe it’ll actually be better than what I’m planning. And generally speaking, it is if you’re an adventurer.

[06:01] Guided Tours and Real Adventure

You see the difference between an adventure and a guided tour. Now, around here in Sedona, there’s a lot of retired people. And they get around on little buses that says, “Old folks retirement adventure.”

And what’s the adventure? They’re going to Safeway to pick up some groceries. And maybe they’re going to go park in a parking lot and look out across bushes or something and see a view, a Sedona view. That’s not an adventure. That’s a guided tour.

And our inner spirit actually wants us to have a true adventure. And what’s an adventure? You don’t actually know what’s going to happen. And there’s a part of you inside that knows that. I’m not going to a far off distant place to lead years of my life because I know exactly what’s going to happen. I’m going there because I actually faintly kind of hope things are going to come that I don’t know what’s going to happen and there’ll be some surprises. That’s what makes an interesting story.

If someone gives you the latest, greatest novel and they also give you a little AI printout saying, “Here’s the summary of everything. The protagonists will do that. Here’s the twist in the plot. Here’s the this. The person you thought was a good guy is actually a bad guy. Remember that when you’re reading about the good guy, at the beginning, he’s actually a bad guy,” so it’s wrecked the book.

Who wants to read a book where every page you turn and you go, “Oh, I knew that was coming. Oh, okay. Let’s turn another page. Oh, well, I knew that was coming too. All right. The good guy has turned out to be, shown their true colors and they’re actually a bad guy. Okay, well, I knew that was coming. The summary told me that. Oh, let’s turn another page.” Who’d read such a book?

We want a book where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. “Oh my God, that thing happened. How are they going to get out of that? Let’s turn the page and see. Oh, new chapter.” Like that. We want that in our life.

So we are always going to make a plan. We’re always going to make a plan. And it’s good to have the navigation turned on because it gives you a certain degree of sufficient comfort to actually make a move. We want to have at least sufficient comfort that we’re going to get in our little bundle of sticks and head off over the horizon with a minimal amount of information about what’s over there. Otherwise, we might not move.

And what makes us move is the comfort that’s given to us by making a plan. But things won’t go exactly according to plan in a good way. The plan won’t be able to plan for unforeseen phenomena, circumstances, and things that are going to come, thank goodness, on your adventure. You’re going to have an adventure.

[09:41] Q – How do I relate to conflicting thoughts?

So what I want to understand better is, so when those thoughts come, well, you know, the thought of like, this is such a, you know, you’re having such a great life here and you have this new, this other thing that you’re going to be doing and that other thing, you know, maybe it doesn’t make sense to go travel, you know, go move in a year. I’m wondering what to do with those thoughts because sometimes they feel like charm. I’m like, “Oh, well, maybe I should be, you know, building my practice here or, you know, doing something here.” That’s what I’m really wondering, how to relate to those thoughts.

[10:12] A – The Unknown Is Safe

You counter those with all the thoughts I just gave you.

Okay, so that’s it. You basically, so your relationship to those thoughts is, “The best thing for me to do is the highest level of change. Right, the highest level of change and the designed change and the embrace of the unknown is safe and the ever repeating known is not safe.” All those thoughts.

So let’s get going.

Yeah, great.

Jai Guru Deva.

What else?

[10:48] Q – How do we contextualize chaotic times?

Can you help us contextualize this moment in time? It feels sort of broadly chaotic. You talked about some of the movements that are trying to make things again. It’s hard not to get sucked into the day-to-day of that, right? And so it’d be really helpful sort of at a more cosmic timeline to contextualize that.

[11:09] A – Every Day Is “These Days”

Unlike you, I can remember the 1960s and unlike you, I can remember the 1950s and world leaders being assassinated and there were so many assassinations. By 1968, it was like, “No, there goes another one.”

People being assassinated, Cuban Missile Crisis. My father was one of the advisors to President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and my father tells the story that we were three minutes away from global thermonuclear war. Three minutes before the Russians agreed to start sending the ships that had nuclear missiles away from Cuba. Had it gone beyond three minutes, American missiles were going to come up out of the silos and it was on and the whole of civilization would have been gone in less than 20 minutes. All libraries, all cities, all ships, all everything. And it wouldn’t have been a world worth surviving to experience after that.

And so we always think that we’re in the worst possible time. I’ve been hearing, “Oh, what about these days?” I heard it in 1968. I heard it in 1970. I heard it in 1972. I heard it in 74 and 75 and 76 and 80, 81. Everybody goes, “Oh, these days, it’s so terrible. These days, what’s going on these days? These days, how do we deal with the world as it is?”

Back in the Stone Age, people were coming into the cave master who was making the drawings on the wall and going, “What are we going to do about these days? These days, these are the toughest possible days. We thought we saw cold winter storms before, but this is really the coldest. We think we might’ve seen the last mammoth. I don’t know, we’re not going to get past this one.”

So I’m contextualizing it. It’s never been anything but this, actually. If there was a period that was slightly less exciting between a worldwide pandemic and these days, you know, the worldwide pandemic seems to have been over, at least the most recent one.

And these days… every day is one of these days. Every day is a these day. Every one, actually. What we have to do is realize this and stop buying into it because it’s never been any different, ever. It’s never, ever been any different.

There are localized periods in which nothing’s happening at your house that’s all that different. It won’t last. But there’s nothing happening at your house for the moment. Enjoy it while you can.

[14:23] Build a Contextualizing Consciousness

What we have to do is build a consciousness state that is maximally contextualizing. That is to say, whatever comes, whatever is coming, I have the stability, what we were talking about. Stability, the adaptability, the capacity to continue growing is in my hand. And all I have to do is to radiate as much of that as I can radiate to the lives of others around me.

It all comes back to here because otherwise it becomes very convincing that the cause of my discomfort is the behaviors of all those people who are running things. It looks like they’re running things. They’re not really running things.

But all the people that you read about on your little handheld newspaper, the iPhone, your little handheld newspaper. Used to be this big. You had to unfold it and everything. Now it’s down to this size and it glows in the night. That’s not actually what’s going on.

What’s going on is right here inside you. What are you experiencing personally?

[16:43] The Collective is in Charge

Because when we make it that They are the cause, They, you know, capital T, those They’s out there, They’re the cause of what I’m experiencing and what the world’s experiencing, you’re falling into a trap.

“If I get different They’s out there, if we put different They’s there, then everything will be better.”

No, it will not. You cannot put some enlightened leader who meditates and does yogic flying and things in the White House and expect that the whole world’s going to change. It will not. Why? The collective consciousness hasn’t earned that and they’ll tear that person to pieces because that person doesn’t represent their stressed consciousness state.

So who is in charge? The collective is in charge. It’s not these individual They’s. If you follow them around, I’ve met a whole bunch of them. They’re completely at odds. They’re trying to figure out what the collective is, how the collective is going to react to whatever they do or they don’t do.

It’s the collective that is stressed. It’s the collective that’s aggressive. It’s the collective that is tolerant of stupidity. It’s the collective that’s ignorant. It’s not the leaders.

You could have a dozen cosmically conscious enlightened leaders in power in world positions all over the world. It wouldn’t make a whit of difference if the collective continues to be millions of ignoramuses. The millions of ignoramuses, ignorami, that are actually causing everything to happen.

And so who are they? Well, open your eyes and look around. Whoever’s within reach is one of them. We’re one of them to one extent or another. We need to raise our own consciousness to the highest possible level.

And then we need to become an exemplary inspiration to others who look at us and say, “You amaze me. How do you get to be the way you are?” And then you can say, “Well, you know, this meditation thing might have something to do with it. I don’t know. I can give you a website to look up if you want.”

Don’t be a missionary. Don’t be a proselytizer. Just be an inspirer. And then you can always have some website at your fingertips in case somebody asks a question or answer a few questions. But unless you’re exemplary, you’re part of the problem. You may be one of the ignorami that’s contributing to giving permission to all those leaders to behave like idiots.

The leaders don’t lead. They are led by the collective. They’re led by the collective.

[19:29] Wars Start in Kitchens

And this is the thing, you know, for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Perhaps millennia. Everybody’s been waiting for the enlightened leader to appear. “The enlightened leader will lead us out of fear. The enlightened leader will lead us out of anger. The enlightened leader will lead us out so we can get back to arguing with each other in the kitchen.”

Wars start in kitchens. Wars start in bedrooms. Wars start in living rooms. Wars start in traffic. That’s where wars start. And they end up on an international scale.

And so just coming up with clever leaders who can cleverly and diplomatically work their way out of bad fixes that everybody seems to have got themselves into, it’s just the same ever repeating known.

Democratic leaders in America and American politics, Democratic leaders have started thermonuclear wars. Truman was the first. The Democrats dropped the first nuclear weapon on a country and then dropped a second one a few days later. And by some miracle, nobody’s dropped one since 1945. It’s astonishing. That’s miraculous if you ask me.

The nuclear club is 20 plus. And those are governments. But there are probably some actors and players who are not governments, who also have nuclear destruction capability.

So how is it that the world is going to come back from ever increasing potential for self-destruction? It’s up to you. It starts with you.

Don’t wait for somebody else to be a clever leader that’s going to lead you out. There’s no such thing as a golden leader who’s going to lead everybody into redemption. It just doesn’t happen. It never has happened. Everybody’s been waiting for thousands of years for it to happen. It’s never happened.

What happens is collectives can become more stable. Collectives can become less stable. Who is the collective? You, your family, your neighbors, your contacts, whoever it is you have contact with. That’s your localized territory of influence. So to be the best that you can be in your territory of influence and then to extend and expand your territory of influence, those are things you can do.

Getting somebody better elected, watch what happens. Better people get elected than other people and then they have all the same problems because they govern millions of ignorami who just make them do all kinds of stupid things.

So we need to get out of this mentality of somebody else is to blame and therefore somebody else is to credit. If we can get a creditable person in place then we’ll have less blameworthy people in place. But let’s really hope that somebody good’s going to come and volunteer to be the golden redeemer. It’ll never happen.

So if there is somebody who is better than average, who appears, that’s also a product of a collective who’ve done that. That person is led by a collective, created by a collective. They’re not just going to appear and start redeeming.

[23:02] Q – What is pleasure versus charm?

Could you talk a little bit about the difference between pleasure and charm and how to distinguish between those two?

[23:09] A – Localized and Overarching Charm

Yeah. The difference between pleasure and charm has to do with the capacity for detecting overarching charm. So there’s localized charm.

Somebody gave me a packet of donuts and I’ve got my streaming video and I’m all ready to have a charming experience. 40 hours of Ren and Stimpy and a dozen glazed donuts. What could be better?

So that’s very, very localized charm. There’s overarching charm which is what it might feel like to get a good night’s sleep and not be vomiting all night.

So I can detect, the more conscious we are, the higher level of overarching charm we can detect. And we need to go for the highest level of overarching charm. What’s the highest level of charm that I can detect? And then I lean into that.

So, and not everything that is the most always occurs to us at every time because we’re evolving. We’re evolving into a status where we’ll be able at all times to detect the overarching charm that is the highest rainbow, if you like, of activity or restfulness or whatever it may be that is going to yield the very best outcome for this individuality.

And so the capacity to recognize overarching charm has to do with state of consciousness. The more, the greater.

[25:27] State of Consciousness Expands Choice

So state of consciousness means, let’s really define that. What can you be aware of? What is the limit on the number of things of which you can be aware at a given time? If you can be aware of, let’s just say, 10 things, that’s a certain consciousness state, and how those 10 things might interact with each other. If you can be aware of 10,000 things, that’s a higher consciousness state. And how all of those things are interacting, that’s a much higher consciousness state.

What about 100,000 things? Can you be aware of 100,000 things simultaneously and how they’re all interacting? And I’m putting it to you that you can. And you can sense the combinations and permutations which will then generate where evolution lies, where the highest level of evolution lies.

And then we go beyond the immediate charm of the donuts and Ren and Stimpy. Which, I’d say could be quite charming for a minute or two, like one little lick of that glazed doughnut and watch Ren do his crazy thing for a second. And you might find, “well, that’s over with. You know, I had enough of that. Let’s move on to the overarching charm that’s lying above this thing.”

It doesn’t mean don’t do it. It just means maybe a little taste might be okay just for old time’s sake or whatever. And then move on to the next experience.

So then to what extent do you get stuck in… a lower consciousness state is only aware of a limited number of factors going on at the same time. A higher state of consciousness is aware of multiples of hundreds of thousands of phenomena that are all interacting with each other that are beckoning you to a particular style of thinking and behavior.

And so then higher consciousness, less localized charm, much more all comprehensive charm like that. Does it make sense?

Yeah.

[28:05] Q – How do I make peace with privilege?

Hi. We are all financially very comfortable, but there are people outside who doesn’t know if they’re gonna get their next meal. Yeah. So how do I make peace with that? I feel like I am privileged to be born in such place, but other people are not.

[28:27] A – Make Your Contribution Count

Did you all hear the question? Should I repeat it?

Okay, so there are billions suffering. If you Google this question or AI it or Claude it or Anthropic it or whatever, whatever it is these days that you do, how many people don’t know where their next meal is coming from? The answer will astonish you. It’s the majority by far of people on earth if you go next meal, it’s one answer, which is really depressing.

What about the next two days of meals? The answer is even more depressing. It’s a much larger number who don’t know beyond two days where their water is going to come from or where their food is going to come from. So that means the vast majority of humanity is having gross levels of suffering and uncertainty.

And as against this, we in fact produce every day on earth more food than could feed the entire population of the earth, but we waste it. Something like 40% of all food production in the United States is wasted. And it’s not as if there aren’t starving people in the United States too.

So how do you make peace with it? When you find yourself more fortunate than average, then you have to put your attention on those things that you might be able to do that are more and more exemplary and going to be more and more helpful and relevant to people.

One of the things that doesn’t work is to cause yourself to go into austerity as a kind of penance for the fact that somebody else is in austerity. You’re not going to help the austerity of the world by becoming austere yourself. You could starve yourself. You could move out into the local park and out of a paper bag or something like that. And before there was one person in the park, now there’s two. You’ve just added to it, that’s all.

So we have to figure out ways of making our contribution to whatever is the group effort on earth to have our fellow human beings live at least dignified lives, at the very least. And each one of us should be thinking about this. What is our personal contribution to what could be a world effort to eradicate gross starvation and all of that?

As I mentioned with Phoenix, most of these problems are distribution problems, brain-power problems, not actual production problems. We can, in fact, produce enough food for 10 billion people on earth today with hardly changing anything. We don’t have 10 billion people, but we will soon. And there are about eight right now, eight and a bit, growing at a rate, I keep a finger on this pulse, there are about 375,000 to 400,000 babies being born every 24 hours.

And so some of them are being born in sand, some of them are being born on ice, some of them are being, 2% of them are born in sterile environments, 2%. 98% of babies are just popping out and landing on the ground somewhere.

[32:21] Evolution Still Moves Forward

Another astonishing fact is that the maternal death rate from birth, caused by birth, has gone way down in recent centuries. Getting back to the Stone Age, it was 36% to 40% of women died in childbirth in the Stone Ages. And infant mortality was over 30%. So over 30% of babies died just in the process of being born.

And since that time, things have dramatically improved. Dramatically. There always is evolution. And there was, given that there were a small number of people, there was also a high percentage of starvation in those times. Starvation’s just been a thing that’s been going on forever.

But we should have the creative intelligence to be able to do something about it. And I think each one of us needs to think, what can I do that is going to enhance the access to Creative Intelligence that will increase the probability of distribution, more equitable distribution?

Charitable things you can do, provided that you’re taking care not to be ripped off by clever operators who make you think you’re helping a third world country when you’re actually helping them buy their third Mercedes and their house in the Bahamas or whatever it might be.

So do your research, do some thoroughgoing research, but find out a way of making your contribution to this kind of problem.

[34:34] Follow What Breaks Your Heart

And this is one of the ways in which, and then there are other ways, you know, you can get up and move. There was a woman who came to me and said, “I don’t find anything charming. And I’ve heard you talking about detect the charm and move. And there’s nothing charming at all.”

And I said to her, “All right, is there anything that breaks your heart?”

She said, “Yeah, there is something that breaks my heart. I was watching a documentary,” this was probably 25 years ago, “I was watching a documentary on congenital AIDS in Africa and children being born as orphans from parents who died of AIDS, but born with congenital AIDS and who were just lying in tents and hundreds and hundreds of children in little beds, lying in tents, suffering from autoimmune disease and starving and no help for them at all. That breaks my heart.”

And I said, “Well, I think you found your charm.”

And she goes, “What do you mean?”

I said, “Go there.”

And she goes, “Go there? I don’t know anything about what to do.”

And I said, “You’re not going to find out unless you go there.”

And so up she got and went off to Africa. For 15 years now she’s been the head of the organization that has created change in that area. She meditates twice a day and she’s the go-to person who has reduced the numbers of congenital AIDS births and has increased the provision of medicines and nourishment and accommodations and all. She’s made a huge difference.

And she could have been doing something else and maybe had a boring house on the beach in Malibu or something. Yet another. But instead she lives in Africa and every day walks into giant tents. And she has no medical training, but she has learned a tremendous amount.

So if it really gets at us enough, it may be that the actual solution is to plant ourselves into place. Otherwise, there might be another way of leveraging where you can do something here that’s greater and more effective than showing up there. But we should think of doing whatever it is we can do.

We have Creative Intelligence. And we have resources, as you stated right at the beginning. Relative to the rest of the world, we have resources. Let’s figure out a way of making a difference.