Thomas Hübl: Welcome to Point of Relation. I’m Thomas Hübl and this is my podcast, and I’m honored to be sitting here with Roger Walsh again. So Roger, dear Roger, I’m so happy to see you again. I really enjoyed our last conversation. So, warm welcome, first of all.
Roger Walsh: Well, thank you. I loved our conversation, so I’m very happy and grateful to have an opportunity of continuing.
Thomas: Yeah, yeah, me too. It was lovely. Last time was such a lovely resonance and a dance, and we took it deeper and deeper together, so I really enjoyed it. And I guess a lot happened since last time. And so there is this phrase, civilization at risk that you speak about and with many, many different, many aspects that we can kind of distill from it. But tell me a little bit what you mean with civilization at risk and what you’re thinking of. What do you see at risk when we say civilization? Is this extinction because of climate change? Is this our values, our ethics, our democracies, all of it? Maybe you can speak a little bit about this and then we can hone in and explore deeper some aspects.
Roger: Sure. Thomas? Yes. Well, all civilizations have a lifespan. If we look back over history, every one of the great civilizations has gone through phases and eventually disappeared. And one would think there’s no reason that can’t happen to our civilization, but we have a lot more skills, technology resources, could we continue it for significantly longer? But the current trajectory is not promising. We face multiple threats and the unique feature about each and every one of the major threats we face at this time, and by we I mean our world civilization. This is the first time we’ve had an interconnected world civilization. So it’s not just one little civilization that could go down. It’s our entire human civilization. And we are facing a variety of threats. And the common ones that are usually acknowledged are global warming, gets a lot of attention. Nuclear missile, nuclear warheads, of course weapons of mass destruction, but there are a lot of others.
And the growing, as our technological powers grow and the distinctive feature of our time and of all the threats we face for the first time in human history, every one of them is human caused. And what that means is that what we are calling our global problems, there are actually global symptoms. They’re symptoms of our individual and collective psychological and spiritual dysfunctions. And so if we are to preserve civilization and perhaps even our species, then that means we’re going to have to address not only for example, reducing nuclear stockpiles or pollution or preserving our environment, but we’re going to have to dig deeper and also address the psychological and spiritual roots within and between all of us that are creating havoc here.
Thomas: Because you’re speaking to something interesting because many people might say, we are not even sure about climate being human. I’m not saying that that’s my opinion. I’m saying we hear this a lot in media and society and then it seems like, anyway, that’s an external problem. Now I hear you say, wait a moment. So yeah, it seems that it is also an external problem, but there’s more to it. So maybe you can speak a little bit to that point that I think often is not clear to us as humanity, like how our inner architecture is responsible in the creation of our outer architecture. You can say the state of the world is being reflected in the state of our minds. So maybe you can speak a little bit, how can we get access to a deeper understanding that these are not two things, not this is in me and there is climate change, that there is some kind of interconnectivity. Maybe you can speak to this interconnectivity a bit.
Roger: Yeah. Because there is an interconnection factor, two way interconnection. First, our technological powers have grown so enormous that we have shaped the world in the face into express, and it now reflects our psychological, our psyches, our individual and collective psyches. We have, for example, take pollution. We are polluting and we are extracting resources at unprecedented rates. Now, people argue about climate change being human course, but you can’t argue that pollution, for example, is not a factor of human activity. And when we look at our technology, we see that our technology is so powerful that we’ve become nuclear giants and technological wizards, but we’ve remained ethical adolescents and wisdom infants.
And so this incredible imbalance has given us this incredible power. We’ve become sorcerer’s apprentices, effectively, enormous power with little wisdom. And that means that we are using our technologies in ways, some of which are extraordinarily beneficial. I wouldn’t be alive, but for contemporary medical technology. And at the same time, we are using it with limited foresight, with egocentric, ethnocentric attitudes of well, okay, it’s their problem. And at the same time, these great issues we face are now impacting us psychologically. And for example, among youth, there’s a considerable anxiety about the future, about whether there will be a future for them. So it is as you implied a two-way process.
Thomas: So here’s a thought experiment that I like, and then I would like to hear what you say. I would say that whenever an organism, a human being or a family system or an organization or a society carries a certain amount of trauma. So there’s traumatic stress in the system. That traumatic stress, I believe is functioning like an overconsumption of resources. So it exhausts in a way the resources of the body over time. So if you do this for a long time, it’s like you’re digging up all kinds of resources in the soil and you do it excessively, which we are also doing. So in a way, you could say that in a state, even if it’s just 5% extra stress or 10% or 20%, whatever it is, you’re constantly over extracting inner resources of the soil. And so if that’s a pandemic state, we as humanity are kind of compelled to, we have to over extract external resources because that’s our inner software.
We are doing this to our bodies too. And so I’m wondering often if when we talk about sustainability, for example, if of course that’s very important and it’s good to follow that through, but without acknowledging that there is an inner non-sustainability by the way we live, by the way, we carry trauma inside. So it’ll create the way we act in the world. And so I’m curious what you would say to that and maybe expand a bit on what’s your view on how become more realistic that when we say it’s not sustainable, it’s not just about trying to correct the non-sustainability, it’s also looking how come that we are acting like this in the first place. And maybe this speaks a little bit to what you said before with this kind of our psychological inner makeup, but I just want to hear what you say to them.
Roger: Yeah, well, thank you. I hadn’t thought of the trauma in terms of a constant energetic demand on the system, but it makes total sense, and it feels like it’s part of a larger dynamic in that any unhealed issue with a traumatic or of another type does seem to demand a certain cost, not only energetically, but in awareness consciousness as well. And hence for the world’s contemplative traditions, the idea of purification is so central. The idea that if one would really wake up, grow up, reach the fulfillment of our human nature and capacity and even potential for service, one has to do the inner work to remove all the traumas and learnings and dysfunctional conditioning that we held and ways in which we’ve fed greed and anger and so forth because they just drain both energy and awareness. So I think you’re right
Thomas: On. Yeah, that’s beautiful. And so how is that, again, related to what you mentioned before, the ethical immaturity or adolescence you called it because it’s true, the faster technology advances at this rapid speed also now with AI. And I want to ask you a bit later about AI, but there is a gap. So our ethics don’t match our scientific mind sometimes. So that creates a gap. And the gap is I think the gap for the invitation for retraumatization, like a collapse of the civilization, for example. But how does this relate? How can we grow our ethics and how does all of that relate to the gap in energy and awareness where we are ethically in our development or the wisdom that we accumulate?
Roger: Yeah, okay. So there are several important points in that. First off, you’re pointing to the gap in the growth rate between our technology and psychology and technology is growing exponentially, and psychological maturation is growing very slowly, unfortunately. And that’s one of the great tragedy of our times that our focus in the western world in particular has been on externals to the relative detriment of our focus on our inner world and psychology and particularly spirituality. So then you raise the question, well, how do we foster, you mentioned particularly ethical development, but of course one can look at the development of any virtue. And in terms of ethics, this would be a whole conversation unto itself. But there are several things. First there, there’s just information. I think if I could get one idea out into the world, it would be this, that our cultural, we have a profound misunderstanding of ethics, and our culture thinks of ethics as self-sacrifice.
But what one realizes is that ethics, ethical living, is actually enlightened self-interest. It fosters the wellbeing of everyone including oneself. And the more sensitive one becomes, the more one cultivates, for example, a contemplative practice as you know very well, the more you see how the mind works, and you see that every time you act unethically, if you look inside, you find mind states tinged by qualities such as greed or anger or jealousy or fear. And if you act out those unethical impulses, you reinforce those qualities, those painful states of mind. And on the other hand, the good news is that if you move to act ethically to be kind or generous or helpful, if you look in at those times, you find the mind is dominated by feelings of, for example, happiness, joy, generosity, kindness, et cetera. And if you act those out, you reinforce and strengthen those. So we come to see for ourselves how to, that first off, ethics is really, really feels good at a very deep level, and we’re motivated to develop it once we really see how it works.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And you’re also pointing to any kind of self contraction is a dissociation from the inner flow of wisdom. And that when we act out of that place, we reinforce it. And if we come more into alignment with whatever creation, the deeper or more enlightened self, so then we reinforce that, that’s beautiful. I think everybody knows that because if you’re not fully truthful, if you’re not fully saying the truth, you need to contract a bit. You cannot be fully open and not say the truth. You need to hide something, you need to cringe a little bit. And that tells you there are consequences to that. And the more sensitive we become to our practice, the more we feel that, and we naturally don’t do that because we feel the consequences. That’s really beautiful. So thank you for that.
Roger: Yeah, and exactly, and you’re adding a couple things in there in there, Thomas. One is that to act unethically requires going unconscious, in a way, and conditions going unconscious. The other thing is you said, which is really important, which is that is that acting ethically is actually in alignment with our deeper nature and perhaps in alignment with whatever you want to call it, the Tao, the divine, et cetera. There’s a resonance here in which one feels as though, and the beauty of these things is they’re not sermons saying, this is the way it is. We can all test these claims out for ourselves in our own own experience. And what you’re pointing to is that, is that there’s a kind of, if one practices trying to be ethical and kind, for example, one finds that one is just settling more deeply and peacefully into one’s nature.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. And you said it, the difference between dogma and practice is you can try this out. You don’t need to believe it, you can just try it out and feel it. And so you’ll feel it. And I would also say this divine ethical flow, if in the integrated state action and the divine law, I call this sometimes the divine law, it’s not the law in the law book. It’s a flow of ethics. It’s a flow of awareness. If the action and the law are one, you naturally act like this, you don’t need anybody to tell you, listen, you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that. When you do this, you mean you externalize the law. So there’s a difference between the ethical flow and the action. And I believe that the gap in between is trauma, is the trauma dissociation and thousands of years of trauma, not just my own, but that there is an unconscious gap between the action and the externalized law. So then the judge needs to come and tell to the father to take care of the child. It means that you don’t feel that that’s your most ethical self doing anyway, and if you don’t feel it, so you need it outside. But that’s very, that’s beautiful. I love that.
Roger: Yeah. I think you’re giving beautiful articulation to an exquisite verse from Taoism, which says, when the Tao goes, when the Tao declines, ethics appear.
Thomas: Exactly.
Roger: When ethics declined, laws appear, I I think you just gave a beautiful summary.
Thomas: Yeah, I love that verse in the Tao. It’s like, it’s beautiful. It’s exactly that. It’s like the leader, either the leader is not noticed or all kinds of leaders from the good one to the powerful to kind of chaos. Yeah, right. This is beautiful. Lovely. Yeah. So yeah, I deeply believe that our practice is to more and more feel not to have a dogma, but to really feel and refine and refine. And that’s a beautiful work because you refine your love, you refine compassion, you refine kindness, you refine so many qualities and you feel how they feel and they feel more like flow,
Roger: More like flow. Yes. And I just want to emphasize the point you made that we have within us this inner kind of guidance system and we just increasing as we do our practice, our contemplative practice or just live life as fully and with as much integrity as we can, that guidance system becomes more and more sensitive. And you just feel when you’re off and you don’t need, as you said, you don’t need the laws or others, it’s like, oh. And also beautiful thing is in relationship, if you’ve got two people doing that, then the relationship becomes the feedback. You can feel if there’s something just slightly off with the relationship, it’s like, okay, what did I say? What did I do? I’m sorry.
Thomas: Exactly. Yeah. But that is, you’re saying something very beautiful, at least what I hear is that through that rising sensitivity, you are more and more listening to the feedback in the moment. I think that’s already a very high skill to consciously listen to the subtle feedback that life gives you every moment and be able to adjust all the time you practice into deeper kindness, into deeper truthfulness, into whatever, all the qualities. But that is already a very high development. It’s like more instant karma,
Roger: Right? And since you are taking us into pretty deep practice levels, I’ll just say that perhaps the beyond even that is what I call transpersonal spontaneity, that at a certain stage, once one is attuned to that inner guidance, then the responsiveness becomes more and more spontaneous. One doesn’t have to think about, am I doing this right or wrong, et cetera. It’s more a flow or the Taoistic would be a word, I guess. Yeah,
Thomas: Yeah. I was thinking about the Tao too. The Tao expresses itself like the master steps out of the way and the master and the Tao expresses itself naturally. Yeah, that’s beautiful.
Roger: Beautiful. Yeah.
Thomas: So given all of that, I mean, these are such beautiful conversations about the depth of how deep we can take our spiritual practice if we practice for a moment and come back to it afterwards. I’m curious. So we together unfolded a bit, okay, the practice dimension of our spiritual and maybe ethical or inner congruence practice when we come back to technology now, we said technology is developing exponentially. So how do these two now interrelate and how do you see the rise of artificial intelligence? Not only the rise means also the ethics of artificial intelligence, but also the making of artificial, how it’s being programmed, how it’s being done, and the future of it in relation to that adolescent human or human wisdom that we seem to express at the moment. How do they, because it seems like very fast, the gap is getting very big given what we just said. So maybe you can speak a little bit to this. Where do you see us going?
Roger: Well, of course, this is a huge topic and one of the great issues of our time, and to repeat, one of the great challenges we face is not only that technology has given us enormous unprecedented powers, it’s the technology growth feeds on itself and develops exponentially. And we really probably are facing a watershed moment in human history where the technology is not only increasing exponentially in power, but growing so much faster than we are used to accommodating and particularly controlling. And at the current time, we have God-like technological powers or futuristic technology. We have medieval institutions and we have paleolithic brains. So there’s a real disconnect here. And with artificial intelligence, we have the first time a technology that can improve itself and potentially improve itself exponentially. So this just is a whole new ball game. And the question will be, of course, one thing will be can we find ways to use it ethically?
And of course we can. But the problem is every technology given in history has been misused. And we only have to look at the first AI that was loosed on society, and that’s social media. And social media was the algorithm behind social media was designed to keep people glued to their screens as long as possible, to present as many ads as possible. It wasn’t designed to polarize democracy, it wasn’t designed to initiate widespread massacres of Rohingyas, et cetera, but it did, it had those side effects. So one of the great problems is they all technologies tend to have effects that aren’t or even can’t be predicted. It took us three, 400 years after the industrial revolution to realize that burning a lot of coal has some real side effects. We are in a whole new name here. And I’ll just put one other point and you can comment and take us wherever you want.
One, to my mind, one of the most important discoveries of the last half century in psychology is that psychological maturation can continue past your normal or conventional adult levels. So one of our tasks is clearly to foster individual and collective maturation. If we look at the AI programs now, if you test them on tests of psychological development, turns out they score had a kind of mildly high conventional, they reflect the psychology of the programs. So could we make them more mature? Well, potentially yes. But is there the economic incentive to do that? Anyway, I downloaded a lot, please back to you.
Thomas: No, that’s amazing. It’s amazing. I had so many impulses while you talked. I don’t know if we got the coal burning yet really, if that really after 400 years we have this collectively, we got this already. That was one impulse ahead. And the other one was I was going the same direction. I thought, wow, if we look at how AI is learning, even if AI is learning from all the content it can find on the internet, but what are we putting on the internet, the stuff that we are aware of, and we are also putting there the stuff, all the unconscious stuff that doesn’t show up consciously, but shows up just the symptoms. So when AI is learning from that, so it learns from that fragmented state, and yeah, great, it can create, produce, text, and put the language into an order. That’s one thing.
But when in terms of maturation and from which level the content is being processed, that needs integration and that doesn’t show up so much on the internet. So I think there is something really about our inner landscape is programming in a way AI. And that’s a big question I think. And when you look at it, when you look at the regular internet and the dark web, we also produce the sculpture of our interior the way develop the internet, basically. And so all that split is now in the learning besides also what you said that all the programmers have their state of consciousness that produces AI. So I think there are many questions about how are we dealing with that fragmentation? And I’m wondering what do you think about this? Because I often say humanity is a supercomputer that animated billions of laptops and got identified with the laptops.
Roger: That’s a contemporary version of classic teaching.
Thomas: And so now we think we had this limited laptop that is running around as a separate cup, as a separate particle, and that reduces our collective processor power by far because we are so fragmented into that separation that the true computing power of humanity is completely hidden.
Roger: Hmm.
Thomas: So when we compare that fragmented state to the development of technology, that’s of course looks like, oh my god, what’s happening here? But when we look at, wait a moment, but we are comparing this to the identification with that high degree of separation, then that’s not actually a valid comparison. So we have to also take in account what is all this separateness between us and do we not have a much higher collective intelligence than we are expressing at the moment because of that fragmentation? And what can we do for, because you said a beautiful word before, collective maturation is I think a high level of collective fluidity and data exchange so that the data is much faster in humanity. And I think that’s an interesting exploration on that level also.
Roger: Yeah, it is indeed, Thomas, and you actually, you’re pointing underneath what you’re saying is the recognition of what makes humans distinct. I mean, there’s been a lot of thought about what has allowed our incredible evolutionary success, and the general agreement seems to be that it’s collective learning and that we are the only species which is able first to store information and then to share it among ourselves so that there can be continual incremental growth. And what you’re pointing to is that that capacity for collective learning and maturation and growth in wisdom and other virtues really is so limited by illusory identification with this little body mind. And you’re pointing to the question, what are the potentials? If we really first recognized who we really are and second brought online into our culture and education system, all the technologies from around the world that we, are available, for example, for cultivating altruism or generosity or kindness, the psychological research is saying, well, altruism, they’re really studying it, too bad we don’t really know much about how to develop generosity. And then you go to say, turn to Tibet and you find 50 practices for cultivation of generosity. It’s like, let’s bring these together, as you say.
Thomas: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. First of all, there’s so much wisdom and because we have such a western dominated education system, at least in parts of the world that kind of suppressed for a long time other wisdom, traditions and practices. So we need to learn again and bring those back into a real global learning conversation. I love what you just said, and I also think when you just look at generosity, in my understanding in trauma, there is scarcity. Either there’s a scarcity of love, of connection, of safety, of being nourished or anything. There’s something not, there’s something absent for somebody getting hurt. And then there’s the trauma contraction itself. And so we are living in a collectively hurt world to a certain degree so that we don’t understand generosity. I think it makes total sense because for many of us, at least, there are places in us, not all of us, but there are places in us that live constantly in scarcity. There’s not, enoughness is part of the ego contraction, but that’s why I think what you said right now is the cultivation of generosity, especially in crisis times is so important because you dispel crisis through generosity. Well,
Roger: That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. I have a question for you, Thomas. How much, yes, in complete agreement that trauma brings contraction and a regression, psychological regression to more egocentric ways of looking and acting of the contraction, would you say in the sense of scarcity, how much of that is grounded in the very nature of the separate self sense, the ego? It seems that the separate self sense is inherently imbued with a sense of insufficiency or and inadequacy. Would you say the trauma builds on that? How do you see that relationship?
Thomas: Yeah, I think that the separate sense of self is an accumulation of thousands of years of trauma. It didn’t start with us. Our ancestors had some of it, or a lot of it depends where we live and the collective that we come out of. So it didn’t start with us. And since I think we don’t see also a great capacity in humanity to digest the past, how many Covid digestion places did you find most? Probably not so many. And we had a global Covid crisis in a way, but we didn’t really have places to integrate the learning of the crisis to go to become wiser. And so we just move. But all the people that feel heard, that lost relatives that lost their jobs, that were existentially threatened, that were locked down for a long time, did we digest our collective experience? Most probably not.
So that’s one. I think we don’t have the digestion capacity. And I also feel we are this what we call sometimes this ego contraction. I think we think in the personal space, and I believe also in psychology, often too personal. So it’s like the person versus, oh, what builds me as a person, and this includes my relationship to my parents, my grandparents, and how I grow up obviously. But also the genetics and epigenetics that I inherit are a huge context. And that context is often not in our awareness because we are looking as a person all the time. And that’s why I think the spiritual, this what we call ego contraction, is the sum of the resistances in stagnation and frozenness that we experience because otherwise we are just flow, we the existence. It’s just, or the evolutionary impulse or the divine self or whatever it is, it’s just flowing through. So then th will and my will are not separate.
Roger: Nice. Yes,
Thomas: Yes. They’re just separate because something separate it. And the last thing that I think we often don’t see that in the trauma response is an intelligence that protects us. And I think most of the people repeat that trauma by trying to get rid of it versus seeing the intelligence and integrating the intelligence of trauma into vertical development into maturation. And so these are three, I mean, there’s more to it, but these are three, I think, bullet points to your question.
Roger: Yeah. Wow. There’s a lot in what you said. Maybe just starting with the last one about the crucial importance of when working with any trauma or even any psychological issue of first relinquishing the condemnation of it and the resistance to it. The way I frame it within the mind, what you resist persists and it, it’s like a counterintuitive reframing that, but it’s so important. So I just want to emphasize what you said there.
Thomas: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it really needs also a kind of collective learning on that level because we so often frame the residue of the trauma as a weakness, which is a complete misunderstanding of the process. And so we try to get rid of that part of us, which repeats a lot of it.
Roger: And what you’re pointing to Thomas is the fact that there are people like yourself who have these skills and know this, but so much of this is collective. And if we are really to have a collective healing and a collective maturation and growth and awakening, to any degree, this is going to have to be part of our educational system. It’s going to have to be come into the media. And one of the big questions of our time is, okay, you have this incredible reservoir of wisdom about how to work with trauma and other psychological and spiritual issues. How do we scale this?
Thomas: That’s right.
Roger: That’s one of the real questions of our time. And I think on that question, whether we can scale this, we are in a race between consciousness and catastrophe. And so given that understanding, scaling these ideas really becomes important. So anyway, and deep appreciation for the way you are doing it, you’re reaching an incredible number of people, which is fantastic. The question come on for us all is how do we reach more?
Thomas: That’s right. That’s right. How can it spread? Exactly. And there maybe also the healthy collaboration with technologies is part of the answer. I guess how we use, for example, AI as a conduit to support healing, not to take over healing, because I think sometimes people think, oh, AI will replace all the therapists. I don’t think that that’s the way, but the way is how to support the healing work to expand and embrace and support part of it that yes, because I think the human dimension needs to stay here. We often approach it anyway, disembodied. So we just reinforced with technology that disembodied part of ourselves, so that’s not very healthy.
Roger: And that aligns with the research We have date that in most fields, the combination of humans and AI is more effective than either alone. So yeah, exactly. How do we best make the question with all technology, how do we best make use of it? And how do we do we counteract the tendency to misuse it.
Thomas: Beautiful. So I see our time. Maybe we need to have another conversation afterwards. This is so enlivening. I feel much, we have so much resonance and it’s lovely to riff off each other and in this time. So here’s another thought that I’m curious what you think about, and then I have a question. So some people say, and something happens, we could have done it better. And I would say, are you sure? If you did it that way, maybe instead of saying you could have done it better, maybe it’s good to look at, okay, let’s explore how come that we did it that way? So if we create an over extractive economy that is hurting natural resources so that it endangers the life, the base for our living here on the planet, and we can say, oh, we could have done it better, or we can say, no, let’s look at the mess and let’s pause for a moment then to try to just run further into a solution.
Let’s rewind a bit and say, oh, what is, if I face the mess, but not in a judgmental way, in a way that I’m curious, how come that happened? Not just, oh, let’s do it different before looking. I can find out later how to do it different, but not before I looked at what created this. And so there is sometimes this, which I think is an individual and collective defense mechanism is kind of an idealism. Ideally, we could be like this, but we are not. Okay. And I think you also speak about realism. How can we be real? How can we look at the world in a real way? This is what we are in and this is what we are able to do right now. Instead of, oh, we could do more. No, let’s stay a moment, but not to lose agency or hope. And so maybe you can speak a bit about realism. How can we stay connected and not bypass the world as it is? And also keep that sense of I have agency in this world and there is hope, there’s a future. We can grow, we can emerge. Maybe you can speak to this too a little bit.
Roger: Okay, well as usual, there’s an awful lot in what you said, but lemme try. I love what you’re saying about learning from essentially from mistakes. And they can be either personal or they can be collective. And yes, there’s a psychological tendency to, particularly if we’ve made a mistake ourselves, to want to not look too closely, but what you’re pointing to is that perhaps it’s not only realistic, but idealistic at the same time, to look as closely as we can and to adopt deep, not only a learning attitude, but a deep learning attitude. And what you were pointing to was what’s known as this first order learning, which is, oh, I could do this different or below that. Oh, what were the processes that led to this? So the second order learning is, okay, wait on what were the causes, psychological causes, situational, environmental, interpersonal, what are all the factors that really went into this? And what are the most strategic ones to learn from and to change?
Thomas: Beautiful. Yeah. Right, exactly. That’s beautiful. Yeah, I love this. And how we in education, in our education system, in our parenting, and in many ways, how in our organizations, how can we cultivate this deep learning or the second order learning, right. That’s a good
Roger: Question. Yeah. Confucius, who probably has much influence on human history as anyone was once asked, a disciple once described him to someone else, and Confucius said, why didn’t you just say he’s a man who is intensely curious and would rather think through something than sleep? Okay, fair enough. Curiosity, one of the great, great gifts. Yeah, yeah.
Thomas: Well, Roger, I see our time passed nothing. It’s a blink of an eye. So I’m curious to have more conversation. And I think they’re very generative and we take each other into deeper spaces. That’s very lovely. And so first of all, thank you. Is there anything that we didn’t say that seems important right now that I don’t know that’s open for you?
Roger: Yeah, let’s see. Well, first, a big thank you for the opportunity of having these conversations and also second for the work you’re doing in the world. It’s so important, so important. So a big thank you for that. And second, I think that yes, as we look out into the world, it’s easy and the growing challenges we face, it’s easy to feel hopeless, but we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And an attitude of not knowing you implied is extraordinarily valuable. And then looking into the questions, and it seems like there are a couple of really important questions.
The first one that automatically comes up is, what can I do? And it’s important to know that that’s a particular kind of question. It’s a wisdom question, which a wisdom questions don’t have a one-time answer. Every time you ask them, they have the potential for taking you deeper into the question, deeper into yourself and deeper into life. So the question, what can I do is a wisdom question. And beyond even that is the question, what calls to me? What kind of suffering calls and what kind of inspiration do I feel? So what kind of response calls to me? And the third one is, what’s the most strategic thing I can do? How can I use my contacts and knowledge and information to leverage my impact as much as possible? And those are three wonderful wisdom questions to live with and very important for our time.
Thomas: Beautiful. So that was great. That’s a lovely practical application that I think everybody who listens now can really benefit from and take deeper in their own exploration. So thank you, Roger. This was great. I love it. And it’s such a flow and so wise, and I feel your practice, and I really appreciate our connection. So thank you very much.
Roger: Thank you.
