Transcript of "The election may not mean what we think."

Lightly edited for clarity

NOTE: I gave this video talk a few days after the election. Many of the themes will be explored and developed in the online program “Unlearning for Change Agents.”

Transcript

Welcome to today's installment of the More Beautiful World Progress Report. It’s the first day of a new era—or maybe not.

One thing is for sure: in the wake of the US election, there's quite a wide range of emotions and opinions. So I'm gonna first just spend a few moments to be present to the truth that so many people are reacting in so many different ways.

Some people are reacting with despair, some people with hope, some people with jubilation, some people with anger, many people with fear. One thing is for sure: the election of Donald Trump is going to accelerate many changes and add a lot of uncertainty into the picture of collective humanity.

Positive and negative possibilities have been amplified by the election. But one thing that I feel very fortunate about is that the election wasn't close. If it had been very, very close in either direction, we could be really in times of turbulence right now. But as it stands, we have some more time—more time to prepare for turbulent times.

The way I look at it, the field of forbearance, the field of restraint, the field of peace, is maintaining stability, an island of stability, keeping us on course to have more time to prepare.

But quite honestly, I don't know what's happening right now. I could weave a narrative that this is happening or that is happening, as many people are. Each of these narratives gives expression to feelings, to worries, to terror, to indignation, to grief, to despair, to joy, to hopes, to whole states of consciousness. You may have experienced this before, when you're in a certain state of consciousness, then doom narratives seem very persuasive.

And then you might experience something positive happening in your life. You might be put in touch with a deep love or a deep forgiveness, and all of a sudden, those doom narratives just don't seem that persuasive anymore.

So, yeah, so many people now on the internet are weaving different narratives, some of them doom narratives, some of them redemption narratives, all kinds of narratives, and saying essentially, here is what is happening right now.

We are in the midst of a fascist takeover by white supremacists in America. That would be one narrative. We are at the beginning of the clearing out of the deep state and the restoration of the American Republic. That would be another narrative. There are many narratives that answer the question, What is happening? What is real? That are making sense and meaning of events that are quite confusing.

I guess right now I'm not going to try to offer my own narrative, my own sense and meaning, and tell you to believe that. For me, it's not that time. For me, it's the time to be in the unknowing. It's the time to hold my narratives lightly, to put them down even so that something new, a new understanding, has the opportunity to arise. It is time to put down my preconceptions about the various actors on the global stage, to put down my preconceptions about the American public, and about the direction of world events.

Not to permanently put them down, but in this time of transition, to give a little bit of space for new information, that might contradict the things that I thought I knew, that might contradict the narratives that I was about to lay on to you guys, because I'm feeling inwardly a sense of uncertainty.

The flavor of this uncertainty actually is more of curiosity in this moment right now, more of curiosity and hope and possibility rather than fear or dread. But it's still an unknowing. And there may come a point... and I don't know, maybe some of you are in the place I am, and just not feeling so sure of what is exactly happening right now.

I guarantee you, whatever your political beliefs, if you spent a week in the information ecosystem of the other side, you would see things very differently. If you really allowed yourself not just to read their material, but to actually immerse yourself in it and say, I'm going to try on this worldview. I'm going to see what it's like to inhabit this ecosystem of information. I'm going to try on these beliefs. You might find, you know, that the views you have right now seem ridiculous. This is a good exercise actually to do sometimes

Another thing you might find is that even though the superficial opinions are diametrically opposed to those from the belief system that you came from, the underlying energies might be the same. Before the election, there were those who were predicting doom if Kamala Harris got elected, and there were those who were predicting doom if Donald Trump got elected. Superficially, they were saying opposite things. Underneath that though, they were still in the same mentality of, “Doom is coming. Doom might come. This is an existential choice that we're facing. This will determine the course of history, either toward heaven or toward hell. Everything rides on this moment.” That energy was common to both sides. And so a lot of the narrations of what's happening now draw from that same energy and that same kind of appearance of certainty.

But are we really so certain? Maybe some of you are. But maybe some of you share my sense of uncertainty, the sense of uncertainty that makes me really hesitate to say what is happening right now.

I will make a prediction though, which is that however much or little uncertainty you carry in this moment, it's going to grow. I believe that we are facing events, revelations, twists and turns in the human journey that will defy all of our expectations, that will introduce information that doesn't fit what we thought was real, what we thought the way the world was; that sooner or later we are going to be asked more and more insistently to put down what we thought we knew and that whatever narratives we are carrying right now, they will become obsolete. Many of us will experience cognitive dissonance as we encounter new information that is very hard to fit into what we thought we knew, and that requires a greater and greater effort to shut it out and to keep believing the same, and not only to keep believing the same but to keep being the same, because our beliefs are inseparable from who we are.

Beliefs are not just clouds of thought moving through the brain. They are expressions of a physiology. They are expressions of the body. They are expressions of a state of being. Different thoughts, different beliefs are attracted to an emotional state, a physical state, a spiritual state.

Therefore, when I'm speaking here of cognitive dissonance, of new information coming in that contradicts the information that we had believed, I'm not just speaking of changing your mind. I'm talking about a total transformation.

And so I am making actually a very bold prediction. (and in a way, this IS a narrative, or a meta-narrative, anyway) that we are in for very big changes over the next few years. And the nature of these changes is not anywhere close to the narratives of either side, that a Christian nationalist regime that will imprison political opponents and ban abortion and so on and so forth, that would be one of these narratives. Or on the other side, the cleaning out of the corruption and the reclamation of free speech and constitutional rights and American democracy that's going to make America thrive again and make America great again, according to some conception of a former greatness, to restore something that we were in the past.

No, neither of those two. The drama that will unfold in the next few years is beyond any of that. It's not even in that world of conception. That is my prediction. Basically, be prepared. Prepare yourself for that which you cannot prepare for.

And how do you prepare for that? How do you prepare for the inconceivable? The way to prepare for that is to put down the concepts, to put down what you conceive already, or, as I said at the beginning, to hold it lightly.

Hold it lightly, and try out other narratives and see who you are, who you are in the house of another. Who do you become? And who do you become when you are in no house? Maybe when you're just walking down the peering into the houses of the others, seeing how they live, seeing how they think, but not entering the door.

And then maybe you do enter the door and you see it from the inside, but you do not stay. And you remember that you're just a guest there. That's the kind of preparation I'm talking about, if that makes sense.

From my vantage point on this boat here, I am getting certain premonitions of what may be in store. I've done some pretty deep dives with some leading thinkers in artificial intelligence and, you know, activists, workers, entrepreneurs, people in climate change, in regeneration, ecosystem regeneration, in healing the oceans, and many Indigenous people on this ship too.

And so there are a lot of reports from various people peering into the future that I've been synthesizing and integrating. That's part of what's feeding my certainty right now that the storylines that are conventionally offered, especially from within a political field, are just very, very partial. There's just so much that they're not seeing. When I say all that, I don’t mean to invalidate or belittle the fears and the grief that many people have about the election.

What's it going to do to funding for ecological projects, for example? What's it going to do to women? Some of these fears, I think, are projections of deeper, less conscious fears and grief and anger. And some of them are actually quite realistic, quite plausible and quite valid and could actually happen. There's definitely work to be done under this new administration in protecting things that are precious—as there was actually in the last administration. It's just different things, different blind spots.

To me, free speech and the free flow of information, freedom from censorship, propaganda, that's important, it is precious, and I think it will thrive more now in the new administration. And on the other hand, the wellbeing of ecosystems, of the oceans, of this, well, actually there's hope for the soil. And for biodiversity, but there's a lot of beautiful work going on that was made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act under Biden, and could very easily be deprived of its funding.

In other words, there's much, much, much that is precious, that is not really recognized as precious by some of the people in the new administration. I could give many, many other examples of that.

To evaluate the pros and cons of both sides will upset people who are strongly identified with one side or another. And I'm okay with that. I want to be able to say that each has good and bad. Politically now, you can't really say that Trump is pretty bad. You have to say that either he's very, very awful, or that he's a hero, because if you say something kind of in between, then you've betrayed the war mentality that both sides operate in, that demonizes the other side, makes them an enemy, and defines success as the overcoming of an enemy.

But, I don't even want to say someone is pretty bad. By labeling someone as good or bad, you're collapsing complexity onto a polar dualism. And even if you say pretty good or pretty bad, it's still a linear scale, you know, where good is at one end, bad at the other, or amazing and terrible, you know... but it's like collapsing so much complexity, something that's three dimensional, four dimensional, 50 dimensional onto something one dimensional. What is sacrificed when we do that is understanding, humanization, compassion. So I'm not really going to issue such judgments, OK? That's not going to move us forward.

Let’s instead acknowledge all of the emotions that are coming up and recognizing that they come from a valid place. They come from a valid history. They're not coming from nowhere. It's not like some people are just fools and deluded. It's coming from a whole experience of life and should never be mocked or dismissed or belittled, the things that you feel, that make you cry, that make you laugh, that make you celebrate, that make you grieve.

On our online forums, on social media, we’ve got to remember that any reaction that we encounter is the reaction of a human being. And if the reaction is emotional, if it has charge to it, this is a human being having an intense experience. And I would say we must never forget that, but what I really mean is that when we forget that, we're not operating in reality. We're making a cartoon of a human being. We're not understanding something. When we shut out true information, when we shut out part of the truth like that and operate in a partial reality, in a collapsed reality, we get lost. We get confused. Things become inexplicable to us. And then we grasp for simplifying narratives to tell us what is. And we become susceptible to those narratives that are often wielded by manipulative forces, forces that steal our sovereignty.

That's what's happening when a narrative is offered to you, a belief system is offered to you that says, “Here is what is. Please abandon your seat and come and sit in mine. Here's what's real. Here's what Donald Trump is. Here's what Joe Biden is. And ultimately, here's what you are.”

No one has the right to tell you that. And I'm not going to tell you that. And, of course, that doesn't mean that you ignore what others see, because we realize, we all know, that our perception is not always reliable. That's why if you see something unusual, you'll turn to the person next to you and say, do you see that too? What am I seeing? What am I looking at here? So there's nothing wrong with that. But when someone else tells you what to see, instead of asking you what you see, but they tell you what to see, they say, “That is a whale, not a cloud,” you can take that in. But probably it would be more honest to say, “To me, that looks like a whale.”

This is all in the vein of preparation, preparation for a time when we see things coming on the horizon that we do not recognize. And maybe there's no one to ask, or maybe those whom we ask, they don't know themselves, but they're so uncomfortable with not knowing that they pretend to know. They tell us what they believe is happening. And again, that is my prediction: we are coming to times like that, where very few know exactly what is happening. And those who know do not say. And those who say do not know.

That's a phrase from the Tao Te Ching, actually. What is it? Yan zhe bu zhi, zhi zhe bu yan. Is that right Patsy, or did I get it backwards? Something like that. Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak.

I think we are facing such times, which is a little embarrassing, since here I am speaking. Ultimately, it's necessary that we face such times if we're actually going to change. If, if the future is not going to be just some kind of recapitulation of the past, we have to go through a phase of not knowing, when the familiar fades, drops away, and something new arises.

If it's really new, we're not going to recognize it in familiar terms. It won't fit into familiar concepts. It will not conform to familiar stories. Then it's new. And aren't we craving something new? Aren't we craving liberation from the concepts, the stories, the institutions, the systems, the governments that have contained us, the habits, the customs that have kept us so, as a species, so miserable, so constrained? Aren't we craving liberation from that?

I think maybe that craving is what powers some of those doom narratives that I spoke about. There's actually something aspirational in them. People are kind of hoping that it gets really bad. They're hoping that everything blows up. They're hoping that it all falls apart. They're hoping for collapse because that delivers them from a situation that has become almost intolerable. And it redeems the promise—or offers a possibility, at least—of the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. So I'll just invite you here to this moment of uncertainty, this place at the crossroads, that maybe you're firmly in and maybe you're not.

If you're not, if you are very much taken with one of the painful or hopeful storylines about the election, about the world right now, I invite you to enter as a guest into the House of Uncertainty just for a few minutes. We'll join here together in that House of Uncertainty, in the House of Unknowing, in the House of Unlimited Possibility, where our view of the future, our view of the world stage is unclouded by our preconceptions.

We shall see. And we sit here in this uncertainty and in this unknowing, maybe actually even close your eyes. I will do so at this crossroads, this nexus point of many paths radiating out into the future.

A momentary resting spot where in this moment we do not know what path we will take. In this moment, you know that you will choose a path, that the moment for choice will come, that the choice will be revealed to you, but not now. That understanding will come, meanings will come, but not now. And so alongside whatever the emotional generators of the stories were, the grief, the anger, the hope, the joy, whatever it was, alongside of all of those things, there's something else that you are aware of right now. It is a calmness, a light curiosity, and a serenity. Alive with possibility. And sometime in the next half a minute or so, you can please open your eyes again. And as you open your eyes, keep a lifeline to that feeling.

Serenity, curiosity, possibility. Not as a substitute for all of the other things that you're feeling that come from a valid place, but as a companion to them. So that, when this unforeseeable new information comes in, that will seriously challenge almost everybody, you'll be ready for it.

So thank you for sharing your attention with me, and with that I will turn it over to our beloved Patsy. Thank you.