Beyond Self Improvement: The Quiet Work of Human Becoming

0:01 We'll be right back. I have spent years in conversation with people who are successful by every measure and still quietly restless, not broken, not lost, just aware somewhere underneath the noise that there is a version of their life that feels more honest, more grounded, more genuinely theirs. This podcast exists for those people, for the ones who are done performing and ready to go deeper. My name is Dr.

0:57 Doug. Welcome to Inspire Vision. I'm glad you were here. Richard, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Dr. Doug. I'm very happy to be here. I'm pleased to have you here. So, with the accent, and you're probably thinking about my accent too, but where are you from? Yeah, I'm operating just outside London in the UK this morning. Oh, wonderful. Okay. So, What I'd love for you to do is kind of share the audience a little bit of your background, just kind of briefly what your background is. Thank you. Yes, I currently work at a university as an associate professor, but I've been a coach and worked in science for 35 years. And yeah, I just had this unending curiosity with mankind, with humanity. with the way that people behave, the way that all of us behave, that in my own behavior, everybody else's. And that curiosity has just driven me in so many different directions. And yeah, it's come about and it's got me thinking a lot and it's got me working towards, yeah, some certain philosophies that we can explore a little bit today.

2:16 Yes, and you work with, you're still involved with the university? Yes, still involved with the university, yes. And what area is your area of expertise with the university? Oh, well, yeah, it's actually in the sciences. It's actually in microbiology and things like this. But the coaching I've been doing has been alongside that and coaching colleagues and coaching people outside. So I've had this wonderful opportunity to be immersed in science at the same time as, yeah, following my own passion, which is exploring people. You know, and it is so interesting that I've developed something that comes from a very well-known business behavioral analysis, and I've converted it into something called what I call a personal portrait. And the reason I've done that is that so often, and you may identify with this, not personally, but with the people you've worked with, is so often we find ourselves in a profession that is not necessarily fulfilling those inner needs and motivations, and we find ourselves doing either something entirely different, not being happy, or doing something in addition to, such as what you're doing. And I find that so fascinating. For me, I'm not sure that I would have been doing this except I was no longer able to practice dentistry, and suddenly, All of

3:48 a sudden, I'm trying to do something else. I did some business consulting and so forth. But ultimately, you know, something really came to me that said, you know what, you need to be doing something different. So that's what I'm doing now. But it sounds like you've gone through a similar thing. You're loving what you do at the university, but you also have this passion for helping people to understand themselves more. Yeah and dr d you're absolutely right and it's always been there and i think that a lot of people operate with these multiple identities um that that can express themselves in different ways and yeah i love certain aspects of science i love um i love the way it's structured i love the inquiries it generates but i know it has its limits and i've you know it's there's So I've always felt, do you know what? Having a foot in different worlds means you belong to either, but you can occupy all of them. And that's the way I think it's been a really useful way to live because it gives you so many different perspectives as well with which you can approach your experiences and the things that you learn.

4:51 Well, and you know, one of the things that really caught my eye about you as I was looking at your biography and so forth and some of the things that you are doing and talking about is this concept of self-improvement to human becoming. And, you know, I've looked at that. I've done so many podcasts and, you know, so often it's focused obviously on self-improvement. But over the years, I have kind of come to a similar understanding the way that you just, you know, have you made that comment that, if we keep focusing on self-improvement, that's not really the goal. The goal is to become. And there's a big difference between self-improvement, trying to reach a certain whatever, and truly just beginning to understand, and what I call it is just acquire return to who you genuinely are.

5:50 And you're talking about a human becoming. So talk a little bit about where that motivation and that thought process and that concept came up for you? Yeah, that's a great question, and I'm really glad to jump in on this one. So, yeah, the self-improvement, it's where everybody starts, and I'm judging from what I've listened to from this pod, Dr. Doug, I know that your listeners, most of those, will be enlightened, they'll be curious, they will be you know, informed in many ways. They've also looked and probably studied themselves. They probably understand themselves quite well. So that's all great. I mean, you know, the know thyself, the Greeks gave us, the self-inquiry, which psychology encourages, and the disattachment to ego, which they do in Buddhist countries, like the one you're living in. So all these things are great, but then when we get to there, when we get to this place of awakening, I could call it, if you like, What then? So what do we go from there? And I think that's where a second journey begins.

6:57 And that's what we're talking about. You call it coming home. I absolutely love that. I call it human becoming as well. So what are we becoming? And I think this comes from the concept that life is still going to change us. We're still going to have experiences, seeing beauty, feeling awe, being rejected, grief, all these things that will happen. to us in this human existence and they're all going to change us slightly and then what are we going to do with that learning we get from that change and that's that's where i see us if we can find a way to integrate that um and become wiser then it we when we're growing um and what we're growing into i don't know but it's certainly it it's it's i think it yeah coming home possibly coming home to a unity which we we sense is out.

7:46 There yeah and you know it's interesting um When I moved to Thailand and obviously started really being fascinated by Buddhism, and I come from an entirely different theology than that, but what I found fascinating was this concept of reincarnation. My curiosity and my approach goes to, okay, I understand what he's talking about based on his understanding of things, but what could it really be meaning? And I just wrote an article for Substack talking about the fact that we live many lives before we die. And we can be reborn so many times. And that's not a Christian thing.

8:34 It's just the fact that we're reborn so many times in our lives. And I think that as you're talking about that, how often we find that as we're experiencing change in our lives, we're literally... starting a new life, starting a new process and a new experience. And sometimes it's for the good and sometimes it's not for the good. And I think the real question that comes to my mind and I want to ask you about and talk to you about is how do people start to choose to move their lives in a direction that is positive, that starts to bring about that sense of joy and peace rather than what we are seeing so much now is anger and frustration.

9:23 Yes the the death and rebirth cycle i love that um stan groff talks a lot about that our life is full of those cycles and in fact even birth itself is a is like the death of the birth stage and the birth of the life you know it's we go through those um and it's interesting you mentioned about reincarnation i read something which really resonated me recently which was uh Why is being born twice any more remarkable than being born once? It makes no sense. But yeah, going back to your question, how do we grow? Because you can change without growing. but you can't grow without changing. So yeah, it does mean we have to let things go. It does mean little parts of us will die and we will be reborn. And there's obviously resistance and there's always fear with letting things go when it's part of ourselves. But we can do it a little bit at a time and we can grow and we can change. yeah, we can become more human and more, more, more of that coming home sense of unity. But we do, and we, it's very difficult to let go of everything at once. We can't do that. It's, it's not, it's too dangerous. It's too psychologically difficult. Um, but we can do it in stages. We can let go a little bit to ourself, which are not serving us. And I think that comes about through that self inquiry we've already mentioned and the, and the self improvement. Um, and there's loads of different ways of doing that. I appreciate every single one. Um, you know, whatever works for people, absolutely, but yeah, the knowledge of, even so simple as like,

10:56 as you mentioned there, anger, okay, if we find ourselves getting angry a lot, then what is triggering us? Because it's no longer the world, it's now something in us, it's not out there in the world, because we participate in what we experience, and that's, that's very much at the heart of my interest in phenomenology, you know, the fact that nothing happens, we are not passive observers on a world, like we create the world which we experience, so yeah, it's down to us, so what do we want to let go of, what do we know about ourselves which passively we don't need anymore? Well, and you know, as you were talking, what comes to my mind is, I just did a podcast a few weeks ago, and one of the things that that he said that I thought was so resonating to me is that so often we say, I am angry. I'm this, I'm that. And the reality is that, no, that's not who I am. I am feeling anger. I am feeling frustration.

11:53 And I think that as people begin to separate that out, it starts to separate that whole concept of who do I become? Because my emotions are responding, you know, You and I can see a similar event and you might just look at it and go, oh, wow, that's such interesting that that happened or it's a shame that that happened. And I can look at it and go, oh, get so angry about it and so forth. And it has nothing to do with who we are, well, to some degree, but it does have to do with how we have allowed our emotions to begin to control our response To events. Yeah.

12:39 Yes, yes, absolutely we do. There's a wonderful book, I don't know if you're familiar with it, it's called The Presence Process by, I think it's Peter Smith, I think it's him. He talks about the triggers and he says you shouldn't see them as these triggers, you should see them as messages. Messages that there's something about you you still need to learn about yourself when you find yourself feeling the anger or feeling irritation or feeling jealousy or feeling you know any of these like emotions which we all recognize and as you say we identify with them very easily i'm jealous today or i'm angry or i'm irritated or i'm frustrated but if we look inside and look at the message what's the message behind that that that sensation and we can learn a lot about things of that maybe has happened to us in the past that maybe we can work through maybe we need help to work through and and eventually we can get to the place where well we're a I think that's a direction of human becoming.

13:36 As well and you know I think that curiosity is so important I've had the opportunity to use NLP a bit with some people that I've worked with and what I find interesting is their responses to events or what's going on in their lives as we start to go back and identify where did that originate I had one client that called me, he just kept making decisions that he was not happy with, but he kept making them. He says, Doug, I really need to talk to you. And he's a good friend of mine, so I said, yeah, come on over. I said, let's try some NLP. And as we did that, we got back to his early childhood where he had experienced something in elementary school that was so unfortunate, but I think so many students experience this, that they've got a teacher that decides that they're going to decide the value of a child. And in his case, he was sent to the back of the room, told he was stupid, and on and on. And as we went through that, and as we started to reframe it and talk about it and say, you know what, was this about you or was this about that teacher? And the emotions that they were going through, whatever they're dealing with.

14:54 And as we got through that, it made all the difference in the world to him. He made some incredible decisions about his work and so on and so forth. And It just made such a difference. And I think for people to understand that, you know, those emotions that we're experiencing are not necessarily ours. They were created in our childhood or otherwise in experiences that we perceived and decided this is what it means. When if we really go back now more as an adult and look at that, we may decide that as we reframe that, we realize that it had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with whomever.

15:36 Yeah, that's a wonderful story. Thanks for sharing that, Dr. Doug. I think that we all have those, not necessarily, obviously, exactly the same as that, but we've all had incidents in our past. You've got to remember when we, you know, in our formative years there, the things that adults do have great importance and meaning. They have authority and we may store them away and Carl Jung said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will guide you and you will call it fate. And that's a great example of that. He had this belief about himself installed, planted like this seed in a very young age. And I think you've done a wonderful service there through that NLP session, yeah, to identify that. That's wonderful. Setting him free.

16:18 Well, and you talk about removing, and I go back and forth on this, you know, initially as I was talking to people and as I do, and it's like, okay, you bring it up and you remove it from your life. And more and more, and I do a lot of meditation, so a lot of things do come up for me. And more and more, I'm beginning to think that rather than removing, let's understand it, accept it, understand that it's part of our life, and then set it aside. And I think from the standpoint of neurological pathways there's there's an interesting fact that we can take this pathway that's been so strong in our lives and literally move it to the side and develop a new neurological pathway that is an entirely different experience in our lives what are your thoughts.

17:14 On that yeah yes yes yes completely because the the you're absolutely right the neurological pathway was fixed it was it was a motorway it was a it was a rigid only path through this i have to repeat this pattern in order to because that's the solution that i know and i understand and i'm used to so yeah you look at it you approach it from a different angle you understand it as you say you don't have to dismantle it you can leave it there and it become your friend almost you can You can wave to it every time it appears in a certain experience. And you can go, oh, hello, my friend. We're not going to go there today because I have other options now. I know myself better now. So, yeah, you take away the power from the things you know by examining these things.

17:58 You don't have to remove them. They don't have to, you know, just to work through them. It's to remove the power that they have. And they are part of us. I mean, we can't grow. in this human existence without bumping into problems and difficult situations and things that hurt us physically, mentally. But that's, the Buddha said himself, he said, life is suffering. This is what we signed up for. So it's going to come. And we have to accept that. And I love the fact that you bring up the Buddha. He does talk about life is suffering, but then he's got those four steps that, well, at least that we can experience, where, you know, we're suffering, we're beginning to understand we're suffering, we learn not to suffer, even though we're having the same experiences, like I was saying before when I was using the example of you and me.

18:56 You know, you're not suffering, I'm suffering, I'm getting angry, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. And yet, and I think this goes universal It doesn't matter whether you're Buddhist or Christian or whatever that happens to be. The reality is that we can achieve a level of non-suffering if we choose to. Yes, if we choose to. In my book, A Phenomenal Life, I produced a framework called the Orbits of Consciousness, which is it was really it's just a map it designed really for a coach as a coaching tool but a map of how people have experienced the world and we can occupy any number of probably an infinite number of orbits but i broke them down into five and and yeah the other orbits are only a fraction of an inch away how we want to experience the world we have a great deal more control than we actually think that we do and i think that once we do know ourselves quite well and we we can bring in these patterns which will lift our consciousness which gives us better options um you know more access to knowledge, to relationship, to understanding, to nuance, to making connections. And we're not just passive in this universe. We're part of it, and we can create what we want it to be.

20:28 Well, and I'd love for you to talk about the book a bit. Talk about those five different areas of the orbits of consciousness. I think that would be really fascinating for the audience to understand what you have developed and your perception and understanding of that. So feel free to just go through each one of those, uh, and let's talk about it. Yeah, sure. I mean, actually it's, uh, um, almost on those same Buddhist principles of closest to the ego. And I could, I saw it more like an atom, um, where the ego at the very center or a planet, you know, planetary system or a galaxy, whatever you want to call it. So you've got the, at the very center, you have the ego. And if we're very close to the ego, That's the lowest orbit I call the darkest places, the orbit of dark places. And that's when we feel grief, self-loathing, anger, you know, terrible things, which when we get stuck in rumination patterns and we can't get out of those and we can with help or we might be able to wriggle out ourselves or it may need medical intervention, you know, heavy depression, that type of thing. You know, it's a normal human place. We all know those experiences. We've all felt those at times. And hopefully we've found our way out of those.

21:41 How does that, what does that have to do with the ego? I mean, and when I think of the ego, I think of it as something entirely different, you know. On a negative side, I need, I want a better house, I want a better car, I want this, I want that to make me feel better about myself and so forth. You're talking about ego relative to grief and sadness and loss and Help me to understand that a little bit. Yeah, the distance from the ego will become a little bit of self as we go on. I think it's with the self-loathing and the other heavy things we feel.

22:23 We don't feel that we can make decisions. We don't feel as if there's any room. We feel very, very tight, restricted, no connection to ourselves, to our own senses, to other people, and very isolated. And I put that down to it can be because we are stuck in a very dense place, very close to the ego. Now, if, for example, we can give ourselves a little bit more space to move out, a little bit of room, I go to the next orbit up is the orbit of the oppressed. So it's still not great. We've still got access to things which are holding us back. But there's a little bit more room and we can start to connect more with our own sensations, with our own body. And we can start to see more options because when we're stuck in dark places, we have no options. We can't see them. We're really trapped.

23:10 And we can keep going further out to the outer orbits of the orbit of sustaining. It's a very normal place for people to be. There's still lots of ways we can get sucked in. There's other ways that we can lift ourselves out as well. And then there's the orbit of wholesome existence, when we suddenly feel a lot more calm, comfortable, in a state of flow. You know, lots of compassion for the people around us and happiness and kindness. And it all comes easily. And then finally, the spiritual orbit at the top, which is probably unattainable for most people most of the time. I think everyone can get in there. And when you're in a state of awe, you think you feel that. When you're in a heavy state of flow through dance or work or sport, whatever that is, or prayer, we can find ourselves up there for short times. And I think we like to come back to those places because that's where we are no longer associated, attached to our ego at all. It becomes timelessness. It's not about us. We suddenly feel connected much more to the world around us. So that's where I think that the whole scale of the ego comes into it. The more we move away from ourselves, get out of our own way, the more that we can open up potentials and possibilities for the world around us. Now, this was a tool, and I brought it together just because I could see how people change through a coaching conversation.

24:33 You could lift them from one orbit to another and completely change their outlook on how they saw the world. It's almost like the pair of glasses that people walk. that when you're wearing red glasses, everything looks red. But if you can get them to try on some yellow glasses, then everything looks yellow, which may be better. It may be a better world for them to look through, a better world for them to experience. Well, you know, you talk about grief, you talk about loss, and we all experience that. So it's not anything that anyone is going to experience. They just do. But what I find interesting is for some people, They experience it, they live with it for a bit, and then, as you say, they let it go or they move it to the side. There are others that experience it, and suddenly they have become at the effect of that. And that grief, that loss, whatever it does, seems to control their lives. And they can't seem to move it to the side. Why is that? And how do you help people that are experiencing that as you're working with them to to move from being at the effect of that and literally then learn to be able to say okay it's okay to experience this but it's also okay to move it to the side so it's no longer controlling me.

26:00 It's it's yeah it's something as you say dr doug that everyone experiences and everything everybody will experience and there are of course there's no quick fixes it's grief it's the uh It's one of the most difficult things we can work through. And I use the word work through because it is a process and it's not a process we can come out the other side and be unchanged. This is one of the fundamental things which will change us because we have to let go of a part of ourselves. We have to let go of a world with the other person and that world is now gone. Now, how is it going to change us? What sort of person do we have to become to carry on without that person in our life and it's a process to get to that and let's know there are no quick fixes dr doug all we can do is um just talk about well what we've lost um that how did you know what did it tell us about how much that person meant to us you know if something is worth if something is worth grieving it must have been worth loving so let's talk about what that was about um and what that meant to us and and how can we learn to live with the world when that is not with us. And I don't know, it's very hard.

27:13 I think people do find a way, and it's not they find a way to stop thinking about what they've lost, but what they do is find a way to live with that grief and almost befriend it and just to see a way forward. Well, and as I see it, and you're specifically talking about the loss of a loved one, and obviously... You know, as we experience that, the other part of that, I think, becomes this concept of gratitude and recognizing that if we focus on, you know, what can I be grateful for while they were in my life? What did they do?

27:54 You know, what can I be grateful for? And I think just that mind shift becomes so vastly different in our ability then to move forward with life. We also have a lot of people that are experiencing grief, trauma, loss that is really deep. And I'm not sure it's necessarily something particularly with trauma that we can say, okay, what can I be grateful for in this? What have I learned? And so how do you help those people who have experienced that type of deep trauma whether it's emotional, physical, whatever it happens to be that, how do you help them to move forward?

28:45 Yeah, I think it depends where they are in their lives with that. I think it's absolutely medical help. Um, it has to be paramount. It has to be number one. I think that as, as it depends, you know, the relationships I have with that person, all I can do, or all any of us can do really is understand that, you know, they're going through that. Um, they they if they're carrying that trauma they may have found a way to live with it maybe they've found a way to accept it maybe they're still working through it um we just have to understand what other people everybody's going through something that you can't see and all we can do is love them and just try and um yeah give them the space where they can they can either you know find a way to work through it or find medical ways to work through it or just live with it it's very difficult and everybody carries some degree of trauma with.

29:36 Them and often times often times particularly with physical trauma and emotional trauma they end up attracting the same people over and over again they get out of one relationship they move into another one and it's similar different but similar because they're still experiencing it and how do you, you know, what is your step number four? Remind me the word that you use for explaining step number four. Um, it was step number four. It was, uh, the wholesome existence. It's the orbit, uh, that I was talking about. Is that what you mean? Yes. The one I was talking about, the orbits. Yeah.

30:17 Okay. So these orbits that, I mean, we can cycle in them out, out of them every day, um, multiple times per day, but yeah, now the, um, it's not, it's not a journey from the center to the outside. It's certainly not. It's, um, It's a way that we can see the world, I should say. It's just a framework. I'm not proposing that this is the way it will operate, but it's a framework that seems to work. But the word that you were using, I'm trying to remember the word you were using to describe that fourth orbit. Wholesome existence, I called it. Okay, existence. And you're saying wholesome existence, but how often do we find that Our existence is one of just continually living the same life and not changing it and yet not enjoying it.

31:11 Yeah, that's usually when we're stuck in the oppressed, somewhere like that where we can't, it's very difficult to get out. And it may be unconscious processes which are holding us in. It may be that the trauma is restricting us and preventing us from experiencing genuine happiness, genuine freedom. genuine um expansiveness that you know we can feel and uh there's there's there's ways you know i thought tremendous compassion for anyone who's going through those things and i'd urge them to see what do what they can to try and work through that it's not always easy it's not always possible um but i always think there is a way um i have to believe that because i'm a i'm an optimist and i'm a humanist and i believe that um You know, there's always a way.

32:00 Well, and, you know, you get into ego, and obviously there's different definitions of ego. But one of the things that I've seen you talk about a little bit is this concept of judging others. And I think that, you know, I see that a lot. In fact, I was just asking a minister the other day, what is the biggest challenge you have with your people in the congregation? And he says, you know, it's the gossip, it's the judging, it's that type of thing. And when we experience that in our lives, what are we missing? What are we losing because we're judging?

32:45 We're losing opportunity. We're losing possibility. judging is certainty and we're just letting go of curiosity we're dropping it on the floor at that stage dr doug we are going okay i know this i've seen it before this is what this is all about but actually judgment what it's doing really is it's setting a barrier down between us and it may not even be another person it may be a situation it may be you know an item of clothing whatever it is you shouldn't judge anything you're separating it the curiosity is gone um and i think certainty is an illusion and curiosity is the way forward with things so yeah and actually within that I'm just going to very briefly back to the orbits of consciousness I called it a ceiling of judgment around the level of sustaining that you can't actually break into higher orbits unless you let go of the judgment because you don't find judgment you won't find the Dalai Lama passing judgment over things he'll be very happily accepting everything and I'm sure the Buddha and I'm sure all the saints you won't find them judging a great.

33:43 Deal either no and And as they're judging, and here's the interesting thing, if you go back into becoming, when you look at, if I'm judging you for some reason, what am I really saying to myself? I'm saying that I am better than you, which means I have some level of discomfort Of who I am. And therefore, I'm going to mentally judge you so I can make myself feel better because I have a belief system that I'm really not better. And I think that becomes so interesting.

34:24 And how on earth does someone overcome that? There's something that I really should mention at this point, that sometimes the judgment is about us and the self-judgment. So it could be that, not that I'm better than you, but you're better than me. Or I'm not good enough, or I don't belong, or I'm a bad person. So the self-judgment can actually be one of the most destructive judgments. So every form of judgment creates this separation. It breaks any unity, it divides. dichotomizes, and I'd love to, if you'll allow me to bring one of my favorite quotes, Abraham Maslow, he said, dichotomies pathologize and pathologies dichotomize. In other words, when we get sick, we split things, and the things that we split make us sick. And by creating separation, we're doing that. We're pathologizing things. We're creating a dichotomy when there was no need to be one.

35:23 Well, that's true. And, you know, as you talk about those levels of consciousness, as we talk about experiencing new lives, being reborn time and time again. You make a comment that I think is so important for the audience to understand that these changes that can occur in our lives do not happen in a straight line. I think so often we try to say, all right, here's the path. In fact, I think of a particular religious aspect of holding on to an iron rod and following that path. And in my mind, I look at that and I'm going, there's no way because we, we have different cycles in our lives and it's not always straightforward because if it were straightforward, at least if we want to believe it's straightforward, that puts incredible pressure on us. And in fact, I think does damage. Yeah. Yeah.

36:21 We're all unfinished all the time. Um, Every day we wake up, we're still unfinished. And we will do tomorrow when we wake up. We'll still be unfinished then too. But the human becoming is, I mean, as a metaphor, I put it a bit like sailing, that we're going to encounter storms and we don't grow through avoiding those storms. We grow by developing the seamanship to survive those storms, to work through them and to be a bit more conscious about the, conditions that we're facing. And then we can learn to integrate some of those, if we can, integrate some of that and incorporate some wisdom into how we approach the world from there.

37:03 So when someone is experiencing a particular cycle in their life, what is the process for them to go through that cycle? How do they How do they sit back and look at the positive aspects and be grateful for that? How do they look at the negative aspects, perhaps, and seek to understand what lessons perhaps is teaching them? So as they begin a new cycle, it begins at perhaps a higher level of awareness, of understanding, of experience. Yeah, that's the key word there, isn't it, Dr. Doug? It's the awareness. If we are aware that we're on the cycle, That in itself separates us from the cycle.

37:47 So we take a step away from it and we go, OK, I can see where it starts. I can see where I am now and I can see where it's going. And much like avoiding the emotions that come up, if we see them, they're not going to control us quite as much. But yeah, what can we learn from a cycle? And are we prepared to let go of what it's telling us to let go? Or do we need to let go of something else? What's not serving us here? It's a great inquiry. Well, you know, I interviewed a lady just yesterday, sweet lady from Jakarta. She's Islam. And as we talked about things, and she shared with me that there are many facets of Islam beliefs. And, of course, I look at that from a standpoint of Christianity, many facets of Christianity, oftentimes believing opposite things, Same thing with Judaism, same thing with Buddhism, same thing with Hinduism. Everything has all these multiplicities of beliefs and ways in which they should interpret what the original teachings had to be. And what it made me think about, and I've done a lot of study on this, is how often if we go back to original teachings, that there's a basic level of goodness that is being taught.

39:13 Love your neighbor. Love others. Be kind. Be generous. All of those things. And that is universal amongst all religions, particularly when you get into that aspect of those religions. There are some that aren't, but, you know, they are. and and I thought to myself here we are in a world now and and I think you're experiencing it over there in the UK we certainly experienced it in the US where there's such division there's such anger there's such political division and even religious division and this and that, how on earth are we ever going to reach a point where we start to minimize that division and start to bring people together again where they can start to really be kind, to start developing the attitude and the ability to be kind, to love, to support, all of those type of things. What are your thoughts on that?

40:19 It's a really, really important question of our times. Certainly, Albert Einstein said you can't solve a problem with the level of consciousness that created it. I think that humanity, much like the individual orbits of consciousness, I think humanity, societies, countries can be in certain orbits as well, and I can think of some that are in a pretty bad place right now. But are humans at the level of evolution, at the optimal? No. I believe we are on the verge of something more. I think that we can become, both individually and as a species, we can move into a higher level of consciousness where we can start to attend to the living world a little bit better. We can be kinder to each other. We can stop dropping bombs on each other.

41:11 We can certainly do better than that. And reach a degree of consciousness equality and compassion uh over the whole globe and i think that's the world that we're supposed to be living in and you're right we're a long way from that now we are um how do we make a difference just through ourselves by our own actions and by the the actions on the people around us that's the only power we have um which i think is great power by. The way and what are your thoughts about the goodness of humanity. Yeah it is it's a good it is fundamentally good I think that it gets distracted. I think that people can lose their way. I think that, um, things can happen to people and, you know, you can get bad leaders.

41:56 I think people who can be easily manipulated if they are not entirely, you know, haven't done this work on themselves, um, know thyself, you know, that, that would, that is where it begins and ends. Um, because if we know ourselves, then we can't be manipulated by others. Um, I do believe in humanity. I do believe that we are destined for a beautiful planet with a beautiful, beautiful species of humans living on it together in happiness, harmony, kindness, compassion. Yeah, we're still going to suffer. We will, of course we will. But then we will be learning how to suffer together within that. Well, and, you know, it used to strike me, I found myself, oh, how am I going to reach thousands of people? How am I going to reach all of these people? And What finally hit me was this concept of the one. You know, all you have to do is make the difference in one person's life. One person be kind to. One person put your arm around them when they're sad. Because as you do that, it starts to build. And then they might do the same for someone else. And over time, it doesn't happen overnight, but over time, we might see the change that you're talking about.

43:13 Yeah, and it should not be our intention to change the world. We can change ourselves, and the world will change around us. Even if our little bit is only a fragment of that, we've helped the world, right? We've helped it be a better place. And possibly it's never going to be. The world will never possibly get to that place which I imagined. But the closer we get to it, the better it's going to be for everybody. So how do people find you online? Um, they can find me through a phenomenal life.co.uk. Um, and there's some of my writings on there, some of my thoughts, um, some other information. There's a, even a map of the orbits of consciousness on there. Um, and yeah, uh, links to, to getting out of the book of phenomenal life.

43:59 Right. And what would be kind of a final message that you'd want to share with the audience that can cause them to start to think and maybe make a difference for them? Yeah. Thank you. Um, we've been exploring or touching on this idea of the unity. And I think that's something where actually it's very, very important. I think that we live in patterns that we can only partially perceive. And I think that the earth is alive with the relationship around us. And such things as mind and matter, they're not as separate as we possibly think that they are. Ancient traditions, what we've spoken about, they've hung on to fragments of that.

44:41 But it seems like... modern world certainly science which i've spent a lot of my time in um are starting to get distracted by fundamentalism by um you know physicalism or breaking things down and you know an analysis but analysis and understanding so i think we need to attend to the living world i think we need to recover some wonder and some reverence for the world that we live in and i think yeah um participate in our experience consciously and yeah love people and have fun Wonderful. Richard, thanks so much. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your thoughts and what you're contributing.

45:22 Thank you so much, Dr. Doug. I really enjoyed it too. Well, folks, thanks for listening. Hope you've enjoyed it. Hopefully you'll join us again soon. So this is Dr. Doug saying namaste. Every conversation on this podcast eventually comes back to that same question, not how do I get more? but is this actually who I am? If something you heard today moved you just a little closer to an honest answer, that is enough. I'm Dr. Doug. This is Inspire Vision. Until next time.