Diversity has lost some of its strength as a term in our bifurcated world, and yet in nature diversity has always mattered. Our apprehension of using the word points to our further alienation of nature—and ourselves. Derek discusses the power of diversity in three realms he has spent decades studying: international music, fitness, and psychedelics. He also contemplates why diversity matters when considering the growing influence of conspiritualists.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality's weekly bonus episode.
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One of the realities of producing a podcast in this age is that you're inevitably going to get a good amount of feedback if you have enough listeners, and I'm very grateful that so many people take the time to comment and discuss the themes that we talk about on conspirituality.
One thing I've learned after having worked in media for almost 30 years is you will never be able to please everyone all of the time and really that's okay.
I think that's actually part of creating things.
You get feedback and some you take in, some you ingest, some you turn over.
Sometimes you change and adapt and we have actually done that with the podcast.
And then sometimes you just have to accept that there are differences and you decide whether or not you want to continue to engage or move on.
It's not unlike being in a relationship with someone that you love.
One reality that I pointed out to Matthew and Julian early on is how I deal with feedback, and it is different than how they deal with it in certain capacities.
It's a discussion we've actually been having on Slack over the weekend.
I relate all of this to loving a musician.
First to mind is always Fiona Apple.
Her debut album when I was in college, or at the end of high school, just completely rocked me.
And she has since been one of my favorite artists.
And you know what?
I don't really like the idler wheel.
She was having a moment, and for her, that's where she was at.
Doesn't resonate with me.
But then Fetch the Bowl Cutters came out this year, and really, right at the beginning of quarantine, completely actually set the soundtrack of what were happening this year.
And no love was lost during Idler Wheel.
It was just like, ah, she's moving in a direction that just isn't capturing me right now.
And that was okay.
Because you see the bigger picture at play.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
We've gotten feedback before that certain people really enjoy the more free-flowing discussions that we have, and other people really like the segments, and so that's why we produce different content.
Thursdays has become structure with discussion, and then we have these bonus episodes and the different things we do on social media.
Sometimes they're a little more open, and sometimes they're very structured and written out.
And today, there's not a lot of structure here.
But what does relate the theme that I want to address today is diversity.
That's a theme that's been in my work for as long as I've been working, which began in 1993 when I began writing as a newspaper columnist.
And before I begin, I do want to point out one thing that I said on Thursday, which might have been slightly inaccurate, when I mentioned that on our social media fields, when we're having more heated discussions with listeners about the fact that when someone says, three cis white men, That I stop reading.
That's not actually true.
I stop engaging at that point.
I don't stop reading, because I will read everyone's commentary to the degree that my time allows me to.
So, it's not like my eyes glaze over at that moment, but I do stop engaging for reasons that I mentioned on Thursday, so I'm not going to revisit them there.
I'd rather actually push this conversation forward.
Matthew has written an exceptional piece that he's planning on working on that talks about the difference in our relationship on that topic.
And I read it this morning and he's still massaging it.
And it really speaks to why I love working with Matthew and Julian because as I've said on the podcast, We do have slightly different opinions.
We agree on the big picture.
And that's really what I'm talking about here today.
And something that I've pointed out over the weeks that I think is so important for people who are more liberal or progressive in America that they have to understand.
Is that when you are thinking about the bigger picture, sometimes the smaller things don't matter that much.
It's something that the right in this country understands and are very disciplined about.
And it's why they've had control of government for decades.
Even when we had someone like Barack Obama in power, he didn't have power.
We saw that with the appointment of judges, the blocking, the constant blocking of legislation.
It's because there's a level of discipline that does not exist on the left.
And part of that specifically has to do with our inability to get over the smaller things when we're talking about the bigger picture.
So, for this conversation, I want to briefly contemplate three ideas that are represented in three books that I've published.
In 2005, Global Beat Fusion, The History of the Future of Music.
In 2017, Whole Motion, training your brain and body for optimal health.
And just last month, Hero's Dose, the case for psychedelics in ritual and therapy.
Let's begin with music.
Having grown up in a small, predominantly white suburb in New Jersey, by the time I got to Rutgers University, I happened to live on one by the time I got to Rutgers University, I happened to live on one of the most racially diverse college campuses in the entire country, Livingston College, which is now a defunct college, but it still
It was a place where There were people from all over the world on this campus.
It was actually created in the late 60s and it was designed by a prison architect because he knew that this was the era of civil rights that a lot of minority students were going to be there.
So you can imagine the physical atmosphere was rather dour but the Actual atmosphere of the people was incredible and it all related around sports.
I grew up an athlete.
I love sports.
There were members of the Rutgers baseball team that lived on my floor.
I played with the basketball team, not myself, but I played with those members in the gym there.
It was just perfect for someone like me who wanted to get the best that he could in regard to athletics.
And so here's the thing about basketball.
When you're on the court, it doesn't matter what color you are.
It matters how good you are, the integrity you bring to the game, the drive and the passion.
And that's something that I learned on that campus.
I was able to work through any biases I may have had in terms of race, ethnicity, religion.
All of those factors went out the door because when you were on the court, there was the game.
And the game is what you played.
That stayed with me for the decade of my life that I got to work as a world music journalist.
That term is now kind of defunct.
And that's a good thing because world music has denoted music that isn't American popular music for a long time.
And it was actually created, the term itself, in the mid-1980s to service record stores in a particular way.
So the origins of the word isn't bad, but there is a sense of privilege that came with it that they've worked through.
And now the industry is looking at different terms.
I called it Global B Fusion.
And the idea behind it was that all of the folk musicians from around the world, for the first time in history, were making music on the same instrument.
And that is the computer.
And why that's important is because Up until this modern era, my generation, folk music was defined by the instruments that people were using.
If you were in India, maybe it was the sitar or the santor, the tablas.
If you were in Sweden, it might have been the nickel harpa.
In Jamaica, it's the bass, because thank you Jamaica for putting bass at the forefront.
The computer was the first time that people were using electronic means to make music.
And that's what I was capturing.
I got to interview hundreds of artists during that time as I worked at magazines.
I got to travel around as a DJ and play with people from all over the world.
I got to travel quite extensively during that period of my life.
And the case that I make in the book Is that history is so important.
Knowing where the origins of things lies really helps you to create a framework for understanding what you do.
It's the perspective I try to bring to the podcast all the time.
I talk about it a lot in terms of evolutionary biology when I talk about things like vaccines or different applications of medicine, for example.
But this also applies to music.
And so in the book, I start in India and I trace migration routes out of India up through the Balkan mountains and how Eastern European music was heavily influenced by Indian music.
And then amazingly, it came back down the same trail and influenced Indian music as well.
It also took off from India up through the Middle East into Persia, into Iran and created classical Persian music.
So that was one of the routes.
The most interesting route to me was the Indian music connection that helped to inform and create hip hop.
on.
Now hip-hop is often pointed to as being directly influenced by Jamaican music, which is actually true, because some of the first hip-hop DJs and MCs were from the Caribbean and more from Jamaica, and that's how hip-hop was created in New York City in the 1970s.
In the 1830s, a whole boatloads of indentured servants traveled from India to what was called the Clarendon Plantation on Jamaica, which was a sugar and banana plantation.
They were actually brought over under the auspices of working on a tea plantation because tea was very popular and Indians knew how to grow it.
They lied just to get the workers over there for cheap because slavery had just become illegal in Jamaica.
It's funny, the U.S.
was actually kind of late on overturning slavery, comparatively to a lot of other countries.
And so the Indians arrived and all of a sudden they had to work in bananas and sugar, so they were already, you know, they had signed these seven-year contracts, the boat wasn't going in the other direction, they didn't have a choice.
And so, as often happens historically, When migrant populations come into societies, they tend to become friends and associate with other minority populations, which happen to be the African Americans who were enslaved in Jamaica at that time.
And over the decades, what would become known as the Nyabinghi communities, which would eventually become the Rastafarians, was very influenced by the Indian culture.
And a few of the things that they brought were marijuana, which didn't exist in Jamaica before that.
So if you think about Bob Marley and marijuana and cannabis, that was actually coming from India.
They brought the idea of karma.
So if you also think about the African Americans were predominantly Christian on the island and there's very exemplified in their devotion to Ali Salasi because there are a lot of Christian mythology that is used biblical mythology specifically that is used in the creation of the Rasta but the idea of karma to inform them with the idea of there being a life after this life.
So it changed their mythology.
They also brought the practice of dreadlocks, which was something that the sadhus had been doing for quite some time in India.
Now, you'll usually hear it specifically related to Samson in the Bible, because when he was imprisoned, his hair became matted.
But again, there's a difference between mythology and the social realities that cultures go through when they're growing.
And so there is a number of habits or practices that were brought over and the music also became part of it.
But if we think about how the patterns move, And the influences that we have, if you look at Rasta mythology and what has created reggae music, is very Indian in nature.
And all of the storytelling that occurred and the poetry and again the marijuana and the dreadlocks and the rebellion against the government and the powers that be, all of those things are embedded in the cultures of the Indians who were transported all over the Caribbean and influenced those I don't know.
That just shows the importance of diversity.
Diversity of thought, diversity of culture, of religion, and how really this also is indicative.
I mentioned it briefly in the last episode about flamenco music, which also has roots in India as well.
And of course, we can also talk about the exchange between Africa and Indian music that occurred before those eras.
But this isn't really a podcast about music.
The point is, folk music has traditionally always been created by communities that were not in power.
Reggae, Indian music, a lot of different... Bhangra is a good example of that.
Flamenco.
We can look at tango music.
We can look at the different Santeria musics around the Caribbean and South America.
Peruvian folk music and the influence of African and Latin cultures that were enslaved initially there.
American folk music, which is predominantly what?
Jazz.
Rock, which comes from African Americans.
Soul music.
I mean, you see this pattern over and over again.
And all of these patterns have to do with communities that were not in political power.
The Silk Road is a great example of this because what happened during the trading routes was also the exchange of musical information, songs, storytelling.
It's the way that people communicate and when you meet someone that is from another tribe and you don't know them, you could war with them or you could trade with them and trading didn't just have to do with spices or textiles.
You can even look at this through a religious lens.
We all know about the crusades.
Now, every time Crusaders went down into the Middle East, what would happen?
A number of those soldiers would stay and then marry and then intermingle with the populations.
In fact, I believe it was the second Crusades was a response to the first failed Crusades because the Europeans were frustrated that so many of the soldiers stayed and became parts of the communities they were initially invading.
Humans will find ways to get along with one another when the dialogues are there when the conditions are right and unfortunately those conditions are usually right when there is a sense of struggle because there has to be some sort of building going on and when you're concerned with building something, when your survival depends on working with other people, we do have a knack for getting it together.
And one thing that history has shown is that it doesn't matter what your background or your belief system is.
If the crops need to grow, if the shelter needs to be built, people will get along.
That is very much underlying the theme that I talk about when I say that progressives and liberals need to understand the discipline of building something together right now.
Why?
We are sorely lacking in that knowledge, and part of it has to do with the levels of privilege we have in America.
We live in a country that is more wealthy than any other country possibly in the history of the world.
And certainly, right now, we're still, even in the circumstances we're in, and I know things are tough, I'm going through that, we still have more resources available to us than most of the rest of the world.
And that's a point that I also want to get across, which is diversity of thought and beliefs.
And that's something that music also taught me.
So in 2008 and then 2010, I got to travel to Morocco four times to write about music festivals, and I got to visit different parts of the country.
At the time, I was heavily involved in yoga.
I had been teaching for a number of years at that point.
I practiced predominantly at Equinox, but also at Jiva Mukti Yoga, where I had a lot of friends who are teachers.
And if you know anything about Jiva Mukti, it is an extremely vegan community.
At least it was.
Everything has shifted and changed recently.
But for a while, if you wanted to practice there, you were not allowed to wear leather into the building, into the studio at all.
To be a teacher there, you had to take a vow to be vegan.
I am not a Jiva Mukti teacher, but I know some of the foundations of that practice.
And some of the teachers truly were.
And some of them said they were and then ate whatever they wanted to.
But, you know, in private, they...
That's what happens when you create a cult-like mentality.
But that was what was happening in my life at the time.
When I first traveled to Morocco, I ate at Whole Foods often in Union Square.
My diet was very good for being a vegetarian.
I was not a vegan at that time, but I had my principles about meat eating.
And while I was in Morocco, I didn't eat, I stuck to a vegetarian diet the entire time.
But here's the thing, what I noticed.
When I first got there, I went to Fez, which is the largest outdoor medina in the world.
There's over a million people who live in that medina.
There's over 9,000 streets and something like 1,000 mosques.
It is considered parts of it the ghetto.
A lot of people who live in the medina want to get out to the city and you have this really This paradox that exists there because the French own a lot of the property inside and then they build these riads where they charge foreigners four or five hundred dollars a night while the next building over could be people living in squalor.
And you see this play out in real time.
There are the main thoroughfares where most of the tourists go, but I had my camera and I was a journalist.
So I explored a lot of the Medina and I took a lot of very small, narrow pathways and checked out different buildings and I was all around.
And one thing that I noticed was that the, let's say the, the ways that food is presented is much different than at Whole Foods.
And so when you're walking by someone has a stall and you'll see goat heads on the ground and you'll see horse hooves and you'll see all sorts of organs and they're just out there and the flies are around and it is what it is.
It's how people are able to survive.
And I remember walking through and coming with my own biases as you take everywhere you go and looking around and being like, this is what people do to survive.
And I only imagine taking the philosophies that I was learning in yoga, and then trying to stay stick them into this culture.
Imagine what would happen if I go in and say, no, you have to eat this way.
This is all bad.
You have to get rid of this.
First of all, you'd probably just be laughed out of the area, which is the appropriate response, right?
When you have your preconceptions and you move into other areas where your anecdote does not match up to the realities of that situation, if you don't adjust and understand empathy, then you're only going to if you don't adjust and understand empathy, then you're only going to either get laughed at or get angry because that's the tension
We can only see what's right in front of us and what we experience.
Our critique of the wellness figures that we cover on the podcast is just pointing out how limited their field of vision is right now in the totality of what other people are going through.
And it doesn't mean we don't also have our own limitations.
I certainly do.
But what I do understand, and I'm grateful for all of those years I got to travel around and talk to musicians, is that there is a much bigger world out there.
And if you don't understand that perception is always relative to the environment that you're in and the people you're around, if you get caught in those echo chambers, Then you're going to not only suffer when you come up into conflict with people who come from a different place, you're also going to perpetuate suffering.
Now, I'm talking about actually having a lived experience in these places with a range of people.
But on the internet, with these digital means that we have, It's a lot harder because we're just sitting in our own little boxes, looking at our screens, taking our own preconceptions and then blasting them out and we don't realize where they land.
Because they land in a lot of places.
And I think that's what Matthew gets at when he talks about needing a digital hygiene, about recognizing that this is something that I say often.
If you wouldn't say it to someone's face when you were with them in conversation, don't put it on the screen.
Talk how you talk and would talk and want to be talked to at all times.
It's a discipline, but I think it's one worth practicing.
At some point in my career in music, you realize that surviving as a music journalist is a very limited occupation.
And I've always made my career out of a number of different things that I love doing.
So yoga and teaching fitness, cycling, kettlebell training, all the things that I was teaching up until quarantine were very important to me because as I said earlier, I grew up being athletic.
I think that using my body is as important as using my brain.
And in fact, that was what my 2017 book was about.
The fact that when you're working out and training your body, you're also training your mind, your brain.
It's not like these are different systems.
Like when I'm reading a book, my posture doesn't matter, right?
Like my body doesn't Have anything to do with that knowledge that's coming into me or when I'm out swinging kettlebells or taking yoga class like my brain is offline somewhere else.
This is all part of Cartesian dualism and it's partly why I've been an atheist for a long time because that rift between mind and body is so frustrating.
The ways that we treat our body through food, through the media that we ingest, through the exercise that we get, all affect the entire system.
And so dualism is a pet peeve of mine.
I used to teach at the Hoboken YMCA, and I used to swim there a lot.
And I remember every time I was doing laps, I'd look up and I'd see body, mind, and spirit.
It was their motto, and it was just plastered everywhere, right over the pool as well.
And I just remember, it's the same thing.
They're all the same thing.
And the more we spend saying, oh, well, this does this to one and then the other, it distracts us from understanding both the unity that is an animal, that is one animal, but also the unity that is all of the animals, the ecosystem and the environment that we live in.
And diversity matters here too.
I believe it was in the book, Secret Life of Plants.
As I said, I didn't write down notes for this one, and I live in a room here with a lot of books.
But one of the points that was being made was that one of the worst things that we've ever done is lawns.
Taking one type of grass and then just putting it everywhere and then killing all of the other invasive plants.
Like, what is a weed?
How do we distinguish between a weed and a plant?
You know, my wife, her mother is Thai and she grew up in a small rural village in Thailand.
And when she moved to America and her father's American, she tells this story and I think it worth sharing that they would be driving sometimes and her mother would have her father stop the car and jump out to cut down some weeds in certain areas of where they lived.
because they weren't weeds, they were food.
But we don't recognize it as that.
That's actually something that happened during the Irish potato famine, when everyone was apparently only eating potatoes and getting sick, when there was a whole plethora of food around, but they didn't know that it was food.
And so people suffered and they died.
Diversity is important.
If you have a forest of one type of tree, the forest will die.
If a truly invasive species takes over an environment, as humans sometimes do when they occupy cities, for example, you will create very unhealthy conditions.
Forests grow because of diversity.
And that book that I was referencing, I'm going to pause here.
I'm back.
You didn't even notice.
The Hidden Life of Trees.
That was bothering me.
That is the wonderful book, The Hidden Life of Trees, that talks about the mycelia field that underlies the entire forest and how the mycelia and the trees We use one another to create the conditions that allow for forests to grow.
It's absolutely fascinating, but the point I want to make is that the diversity is what matters.
You need a diversity of trees, of plants, of shrubs, of grasses, of animals, of mycelia.
All of that matters.
Humans, as Alan Watts used to say, were not born into this world.
We grew up out of this world.
Why would we think we're any different?
That is what frustrates me so much by what's happening with America right now and identity politics in general.
On one side, we have what is perpetuating QAnon, this very privileged, predominantly white, although I know there's never any one thing, but predominantly white, right wing, Trump cult supporting ecosystem that is Trump cult supporting ecosystem that is self-contained right now.
Those are the conditions of death.
And that's why I've referred to it as a death cult before.
And I don't say that lightly.
Because there is such a limited vision that happens of understanding the necessity of diversity.
How societies operate is no different than how natures operate.
And the more that we try to operate differently, be it through monocropping to go back to that, because one of the worst things you can do for soil health is only growing one type of crop when you only grow palm trees to create oils.
We know this.
We have this understanding.
And yet to maximize and to monetize, we've decided that only growing a certain number of crops, of only allowing in certain types of people, of only communicating with people who we believe the same things as and that we can get along with on a religious, ethical, of only communicating with people who we believe the same things as and that we can get along with on a We have an entire history to understand that it's not.
That diversity, those trading routes that I talked about, the coming together of cultures to create new identities, it's what the world is doing anyway.
It's the natural extension of evolution and what's necessary for a species to propagate and to continue.
When an invasive species takes over too much territory, the resources become scarce and that species goes extinct.
We have an entire historical record to point to to understand this.
This is also why my books are never about one thing.
And I try to bring understanding of these forces together through the ways that I think and what I write about.
And so we have a perception in American culture of the body.
We have a cult of the body as well.
We have a fear of death, which creates the perpetuation of plastic surgery and constant Updates using toxins that I've referenced in earlier episodes.
But the way we treat ourselves through our movements, through the ways that we move together and exercise what we eat, the diversity of movement, the diversity of the foods that we eat, it all makes us stronger, collectively and individually.
If you only eat the same food all the time, first of all, that's called orthorexia.
It's considered an eating disorder.
But besides that, it's not healthy.
If you only move the same exact way all the time, it's not healthy.
What's true for individuals is true for cultures, is true for communities, it's true for the planet.
And so, one of the greatest things you can do is invite diversity into your life.
And again, that has to do with diversity of thought.
We won't all agree with everything everyone says.
That's okay.
That's okay.
Because if you open up room for a conversation, then there is growth.
But when you try to stop the conversation, even if you don't agree with somebody on something, then there's no growth.
There's only suffering.
I think that point's been made a few times in a few spiritual practices before.
And one thing that I've learned through decades of studying religion and these spiritual practices is that they are disciplines.
You may think that you are something because you were born into it.
But if you don't live up to the ethical and moral foundations of what is being taught, then there's really nothing there.
I decided to write a book on psychedelics because they've been very important to me for a long time.
What I talked about earlier about opening my mind to that diversity was very much tethered to my early experience with psychedelics.
Psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD and DMT and ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, the one I have not tried yet, they all shut down your brain's ego center, the parts of your brains that have to do with autobiography.
These identities that we create, the construct of who we think we are, which again is always relative and always limited.
When that goes offline, and you are truly in the present moment, when you're able to experience what's going on you and take it in without so many preconceptions, there's real room for growth.
That's why I fell in love with the psychedelic ritual.
It's why I think it's so powerful for treatment of depression, anxiety, addiction.
It's showing efficacy in so many different ways right now.
We should have caution.
I've written this year a number of times about the botched ketamine trials that led to ketamine becoming legal for psychedelic, for therapeutic use.
And as I argue, ketamine isn't actually a psychedelic, it's a disassociative and a hallucinogen.
And so, People often label psychedelics as hallucinogens, but that was actually not the case.
That was more of our own biases.
So ketamine isn't a psychedelic.
I did call it that years ago, and that's the thing about learning.
You learn and then you adjust and you move on.
And hopefully you become better and more understanding of topics like this.
Originally, I started writing the book as a memoir about my uses, and there is memoir in the book, but most importantly, I realized early on that if I wanted to talk about why psychedelics could be used in mental health treatment, I had to understand why the current protocols are not working.
And so I won't go on about the problems with antidepressants and benzodiazepines and SSRIs, but let's just say there are many with the recognition that they have helped some people.
In fact, I was on Xanax for my anxiety disorder for a short period of time and it was very helpful to me.
They were approved by the FDA for short-term usage.
My problem predominantly has to do with their overprescribing and the fact that people are on them for years and decades when there's never been any clinical evidence that they're healthy for that.
And in fact, the opposite, right?
There's plenty of evidence that they're very damaging over the long term.
That is all in the book.
I don't want to get into that, but it is an important component of it.
One piece of information, though, that I think is relevant is that the 1960s are usually pointed to, especially the mid to late 60s, as the psychedelic revolution, the summer of love, and all of that was going on.
But at that time, way more Americans were on tranquilizers.
One in three American adults in 1967 or 68 were on a tranquilizer.
Compared to a much smaller number of people who were taking psychedelics, especially regularly.
If you think about a tranquilizer, you probably take them daily.
Psychedelics, you don't do often.
And so we put forward these ideas of substances as being dangerous.
But the one thing that psychedelics, as I mentioned, opened me up to was that diversity of thought and ideas.
And that's one of the reasons I would say that they're quite powerful medicine.
Just consider, to close here, why they might work for depression.
A marker of depression is an inability to see yourself in a better situation in the future than you are right now.
When you take an antidepressant, It's actually chemically changing how serotonin functions in your body.
And as I said, there's a whole list of side effects that happens to that, but you're doling sensations in a certain way.
Psychedelics, some people have found relief from them after only one session.
And the reason for that is when that part of their brain, when offline, that always associates this moment with forever so that they can't see getting out or past this moment, their mind is opened up to new possibilities.
Now I've always said that the work of psychedelics is done while you're sober.
The ritual is the ritual.
But it's what you do when you go out into the world that really matters.
It's not dissimilar than to the Eucharist, for example.
You know, you come, you have your wafer, and you move on and you're in this moment, you feel very connected to your religion.
And that's all fine.
But if you're going to be a Christian, it's a seven day a week occupation or discipline.
It's not that one hour you go per week.
It's what you do during that hour and then do the rest of the week that really matters.
It's that information you take in and then apply when you go out there.
This is true of all practices.
And psychedelics just give you a little reset, a different perspective, a moment to sit back and say, you know what?
Maybe this whole thing isn't all about me.
Maybe there's something larger happening.
What's one thing that's reported over and over again by people who do psychedelics?
They felt that they were a part of the universe.
That they were consumed by everything around them.
That all of those distinctions that they made disappeared for a few hours.
That there's all these visions of things that were unified.
How everything worked together.
That is the opposite of our digital world, of so much of what we're experiencing right now.
And what is that?
It's actually a diversity of thought.
You have a particular thought pattern that you live by, and then you have this moment where all of a sudden, an entire new world of possibility is opened up to you.
Everything that I've said during this podcast, and you can probably say during the collection of podcasts that I've done over the course of years, and all of my writing, some of it is true, some of it is not, some of it's off, and that's okay.
They're all experiences that I'm having, and the point is trying to get better.
We have enough information.
as a world right now, to know that one of the strongest fertilizers for things to grow is diversity.
But when we're talking about that term, we need to actually consider it.
It is a diversity of thought, of opinions, of beliefs and ideas, of music, of foods, all the things we celebrate, but also the things that we don't celebrate because we cling tightly to the singular beliefs that construct our identity. but also the things that we don't celebrate because we be.
And I think that's why I've taken to the study of the relationship between psychedelics and Buddhism, because while there is potentially some evidence that Buddha had a little cannabis, which is nice to wonder about.
Through his decades of meditation and his role as a civil servant because he was a prince and he also had to work with officiants in different areas so that his Sangha could operate in different areas of India.
We forget he was a government official in some capacity too.
He recognized that What stops us from enlightenment is the ego, is the self, this thing we cling to.
And what he spent that night overcoming, all the darts that Mara threw, he was able to fend off because he wasn't clinging to his own safe little harbor that he called his self.
I think it's a message and a practice that's going to be with us as long as humans are on this planet.
And I think the best that we can do is to try to take it into consideration the next time we're triggered by something or we come into conflict and maybe we're unable to look one another in the eye and have an honest conversation because of the media that we use to communicate at this point.
But if we can step back and imagine through this lens, this screen that we look through, that we could see that other person, what would we really say to them?
What could we learn?
Could we bring curiosity instead of vitriol to the table?
