[Music] I do believe that uh Humanity has reached a crossroad and I I hate to uh exaggerate that I don't want it to sound Sensational but I think it's true I think our species the species of human beings is um coming to a place where we are deciding about ourselves we are making a huge decision about who are we who do we really choose to be who are we who do we really choose to be who are we who do we really choose to [Music] be we imagine that the issue is a political issue then
we say ah well it must be a financial problem the problem is not political and it's not financial and it's also by the way not military obviously circumstances don't determine who you are they reveal who you are and the world that we live in now the circumstances are changing so rapidly that we're being revealed there's no such thing as a problem a problem is essentially a transition so I see the crisises of today as a trans transition point for [Music] Humanity look down on the human drama and discern through your critical faculties what's going on
without judging it just discern what is this human drama about right now and what role can I best play in [Music] it all [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] the latest Global risks report published by the world economic Forum presents an astonishing risks interconnection map it clearly reveals how all Global risks are interrelated and interwoven so that economic environmental geopolitical social and technological risks are hugely interdependent a crisis in one area will quickly lead to a crisis in other areas the interconnection and complexity in this map compared to our surprise at the impact and speed of
the recent financial crisis illustrates the Discord that exists between all systems we built and shows just how disconnected we've become our attempts at managing these systems are fragmented and simplistic and not up to the challenges that we face today the way we use natural resources is based on our economic system which is closely related to our social values which directly affect our psychological and emotional system and all our actions what we see in the world is a reflection of who we are you cannot separate what's happening in the world and what's happening within people so
we're not just in crisis in politics or in economics human beings are now in crisis with themselves when I studied biocybernetics it was a Wonder to see that the more we delve into nature the animal kingdom plant life ecos systems we see that everything is interconnected through reciprocal actions some of which we understand some of which we still don't but now Human Society is also becoming so integrated that it's like a single closed system that incompasses the entire Globe the crisis we're facing now is actually very unique we are all closed together in the same
system and we can no longer do whatever we want in it world leaders presidents have lost the ability to manage the [Music] people it's as though the world began to move without any Reigns but rather according to a new law of interdependence of connection the law that is characteristic of integral [Music] systems and here we see that world leaders first of all they can't even make decisions whether it's G8 or G20 and even if they arrive at something they can't realize it [Music] [Music] the [Music] [Applause] in science we started as neutronian physicist and we
started pretending like we are machines that was the worldview for some time that changed with biologist coming along biology gives a different view of the of the human being alog together biology says that well we are machines but we are PA with competition with survival in mind and we fight for our survival we compete so we our higher values are important only if they are important for survival outside of survival there is no other impetus to the human being and because of this idea we have become as you know extremely competitive in our society if
somebody else has something I must get it if somebody else doesn't have it yet I must get it before here she gets it this idea is causing havoc in our society much of our progress in human civilization has been driven by egoistic competition people try to outdo each other and that creates better science better technology [Music] Etc however now we're at a point where this ego drive has become so extreme that it will stop at nothing in order to be more or have more than others and so companies are destroying the ecosystem Bankers are creating
economic crisis people are building themselves on the ruin of others Our Food Supplies are increasingly at risk water resources are increasingly being strained and our financial systems continue to be highly volatile and risky at the same time time we're also discovering how all our systems are connected and interdependent clearly business as usual is a dead end uh in the previous days and times we've been involved not exclusively but largely in the process of individual Survival how do I get through the day how do I get through the week how do I get through the month
uh in the 21st century we're learning now that uh we can no longer concentrate on individual survival strategies that unless we begin to coales those strategies and learn how we can survive collectively that no individual is going to survive in the long run again I don't want to be an alarmist but I realize that we are facing a very critical time now the separation theology that Humanity has established through the years has created a separation cosmology that is a cosmological way of looking at things that says everything is separate from everything else and a separation
cosmology has produced a separation sociology that is a way of socializing with each other that says I'm over here and you're over there and our interests will not meet unless they do if they do we'll try to cooperate but if our interests do not meet if we have separate interests I may just have to harm you I may in fact just have to kill you there's an old Story the grandfather who's speaking to his grandson in the Lodge and the grandson comes in and says I had a dream last night and in the dream there
were two wolves inside fighting and one was a black wolf and one was a white wolf and the black wolf scared me grandfather and the white wolf made me feel hopeful which one will survive and the Grandfather said the one you feed the most and so to me that is the nature of humanity the nature of humans as we have both which one we're going to feed the most is the one we're going to see in the world the ash experiment is is one of psychology's oldest and most popular pieces of research a volunteer is
told that he's taking part in a visual perception test what he doesn't know is that the other participants are actors and he's the only person taking part in the real test which is actually about group Conformity please begin the experiment you will be taking part in today involves the perception of line length your task will be simply to look at the line here on the left and indicate which of the three lines on the right is to it in length so for example if the actors have been told to match the wrong lines the volunteer
will be monitored to see if he gives the correct answer or if he goes along with the opinion of the group and gives the wrong answer in the first test the correct answer is two uh one one one two one once again the correct answer is two three three three three [Music] three the ash Conformity experiment has been repeated many times it's been suggested that first the Distortion happens at the level of action the subject believes the others are wrong yet goes along with them anyway then it happens at the level of judgment the subject
begins to think maybe they're seeing something I'm not seeing and then it happens at the level of perception which means that the subject's actual perception of what's right or wrong is distorted by the majority now when you link these conclusions to what's happening in the world today you have to ask in what way have we been using the influence of society which is probably the most powerful force in human psychology [Music] [Applause] [Music] over 40 years ago I was cloning stem cells and uh one of the first experiments just so blew my mind that it
really changed the whole course of my education and my life I put one stem cell in a culture dish all by itself and that stem cell divides every 10 to 12 hours after about a week to 10 days I have thousands of cells in the petri dish but what's most important is all these cells are genetically identical to each other and then what I did and this is the experiment I separated the a culture of genetically identical cells into three different Petri dishes and I changed the environment but the culture medium to cells is like
the world that we live in it's got the air the water the food all the things in it so I had three different environments yet genetically identical cells in each dish and the results revealed that in environment a the cells form muscle in environment B the cells form bone and in environment C the cells form fat cells what was so profoundly important about this is if you ask the question what is responsible for controlling the fate of the cells what the experiment clearly reveal was that all the cells were genetically identical the only thing that
was different from one dish to the other dish was the environment so while at the time I was teaching medical students the conventional story out of the textbook the concept of genetic determinism that genes control Our Fate and our lives uh my experiments revealed a completely different story and that was it was the environment that was primarily responsible in shaping the behavior and genetics [Music] there's new research out of um Harvard medical school about social contagion and I think it's kind of obvious and intuitive that you um catch the moods of people around you but
now they're finding that people get fat in groups they get happy in groups they quit smoking in [Music] groups Nicholas Christus and I have been very fortunate to find a resource in the Framingham heart study that we never imagined we could find they were asking people for 32 years who are your family members where do you work where do you live and most importantly who are your friends for the first time now that we have data like this we are able to get a bird's eye view of networks like the networks that you live in
we had some validated measures of various emotions including happiness and uh what we attempted to show and were able to show is that my happiness depends not just on my own actions and thoughts and behaviors but also on the actions and thoughts and behaviors of the people to whom I'm directly connected my friends siblings spouses neighbors co-workers and so forth and the people to whom they are connected and the people even to whom they are connected and what this finding is showing us is that it's not just behaviors that are spreading through networks it's also
these emotional states that are spreading through networks so we think that what's spreading is this tendency to transmit ideas these Norms of Behavior you are in fact are a social organism you're created by your environment there's no you and there's no me once you begin to think about how everything you do has been taught to you one way or another granted you're putting things together and you're making decisions but your decisions are limited to the information that's been given to you and that you've learned so I'm a walking amalgam of a social engineering so to
speak if I see myself as separate from everything else that I could say is incorrect for example everyone knows they have to breathe through time people will begin to understand that their integrity is only as good as the Integrity of everything else around [Music] them so what is happening in in science is really quite pathetic and and what is happening in the public at large is also equally pathetic because what is happening is that by pretending to be something we are becoming that something by pretending to be something we are becoming that [Music] something I
began to feel that I was losing my identity that that the person that I call Clay the person who who put me in this place the person who volunteered to to go into this prison cuz it was a prison to me it still is a prison to me I I don't look on it as an experiment or a simulation it was just a prison that was run by psychologists instead of run by the [Music] state in 1971 today's well-known psychologist Philip zardo decided to examine what would happen if you take perfectly normal and healthy young
students and create a prison-like environment Within University and tell them for the next two weeks some of you will act as prisoners and some of you will act as guards one day into the experiment a riot broke out the guards began humiliating the prisoners they used physical punishments some became extremely sadistic the prisoners began to have emotional brain Downs some had to be removed from the study early and after only 6 days the experiment had to be completely shut [Music] down I I had really thought that I was incapable of this kind of behavior I
I was surprised even not I was dismayed to find out that I could I could really really be a uh that I could act in a manner so so absolutely unaccustomed to anything I would even really dream of doing and I and while I was doing it I uh I didn't feel any regret I didn't feel any uh uh guilt it was only after afterwards when I began to reflect on what I had done that this began to this Behavior began to dawn on me and I real that this was uh uh this was a
part of me I hadn't really noticed [Music] before by pretending to be something we are becoming that something by pretending that we are uh mindless matter we just material and that's it we are excluding the finer aspects of life we are excluding the finite aspects of our experience and this is very serious business if you take darwinian Theory which says that we're in a competition and we have to compare each other as to where we fit and you mix that with a newtonium vision from physics that the Primacy of the universe is found in the
physical structure then you put those two together you say well how do you know where you fit in the darwinian world the answer is how much material do you own and so evolution of humanity since Newtonian times was to extract the material from the planet so that we could have possessions and that the possessions then reflection of where we stand in the hierarchy if you are very low in the hierarchy of human life you have nothing if you're very high in the hierarchy of human life you have money and possessions and houses and toys and
all these things so then you say well then who suffers from all this well there's great suffering at every level whether suffering in the physical planet or in the human civilization there's suffering all over in order for me as a human to prove my hierarchy I have to extract the material from the planet so what do I do I mine the planet I rape the planet of all of its possessions so that I could hold in my hand this chunk of gold and say see how much I am worth where is your gold [Music] theory
of evolution was not based on community but based on the individual Newtonian physics said it's only the visible things that are relevant but in a world based on quantum physics which is based on energy some of the things that we understand in the nature of energy are emotions and feelings uh such as love and beauty these are expressions of energy and in a world of quantum physics we surely emphasize more the nature of love and feelings and energy and beauty and Harmony over the money and the material Expressions that we look at today and why
is this important because then you look at the world you say do you want a pound of gold or do you want to be totally in love in your life this is a painting known as the supper atas and in the 194 40s when it was thought to be painted by Johan vermier it was worth millions of dollars it was perhaps literally Priceless it was in Holland um and it was one of the most renowned paintings in Europe people would travel through Europe to see it until one terrible day when it was discovered that it
was not painted by vermier at all but by the great forger van migran in other words it was discovered it was not this painting but that painting and all of a sudden it's value dropped to nothing how you taste something is critically affected by what you believe you're eating and this shows up in all sorts of ways um one nice finding involves children how do you get children not just to to eat their carrots and drink milk but after they have the carrots and milk to report that they tasted good better than your normal carrot
better than your normal glass of milk it's actually terribly simple to do this this was done in a study a couple of years ago you take them out from a McDonald's bag they get people into a brain scanner and as they're lying on their back there's a tube going into their mouth and they get to drink wine through the tube while their brains are being scanned above them is a screen where they can read information about the wine that they're drinking everybody drinks the same wine if they think they're drinking the cheap stuff they'll report
a doesn't taste so good and they have a low-level neural response if they think they're drinking 200 out of a $200 bottle they say they love it and the pleasure centers of their brain light up like a Christmas tree this is John Cage's work uh comes under different names was often called 4 minutes 33 seconds because it was a famous Modern Performance where The Pianist is is instructed to sit at the piano and be silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds now as you can imagine this is fairly controversial uh whether or not this is
brilliant or just ridiculous but my favorite fact about this is you can go on to I tunes and you can you can you can buy for $1.99 the entire the entire thing of 4 minutes 33 seconds which is of course silent um and and and I've read commentaries on this where people are outraged they say look just turn down the volume on your computer and sit there for 4 minutes or seconds but psychologically I think that wouldn't be the same silence this is that Silence from that from that performance you know what it's astonishing to
me that we we don't realize we make this all up we made the whole thing up you know why gold is what the value it is because somebody said so that's it you know why fuel cost what is because somebody said so somebody speculates somebody decides there's a belief enough people join in this is what a thing cost we've all decided this so an Awakening of we're repeating these cycles and we're getting kind of tired of it maybe we should do something different this time around be something different people are interested in processing meaning and
values we have to hear that it's the society the media especially that puts Ordinary People into this vain search of material goodies people didn't live this way even 50 60 years ago you know this is just a very recent phenomenon that if you have instead of one cell phone two cell phone in two pockets then somehow you'll be better off [Music] ha great I'm the king of excess I'm the sulan of sales I'm the boss of bargain my credit cards they never fail I got a 700 something on my beacon score which means I don't
own a thing and I can buy even more I'm a buffet eating tablet reading lovable guy I get the best of the best that my money can buy It's a Wonderful Life It's a Wonderful Life with my redheaded wife reded It's a Wonderful Life the average US person now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago ask your grandma in her day stewardship and resourcefulness and Thrift were valued so how did this happen shortly after World War II these guys were figuring out how to ramp up the economy retailing analyst Victor leau articulated
the solution that's become the norm for the whole system he said our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals that we seek our spiritual satisfaction our ego satisfaction in consumption we need things consumed burned up replaced and discarded at an Ever accelerating rate advertisements and media in general plays a big role in this each of us in the US is targeted with over 3,000 advertisements a day we see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in
a lifetime and if you think about it what's the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we have so 3,000 times a day we're told our hair is wrong our skin is wrong our clothes are wrong our furniture is wrong our car is wrong we are wrong but it can all be made right if we just go shopping [Music] stopping Mr Rogers who was the TV guy here in the United States said the space between the television and the viewer should be sacred [Music] [Music] it comes down to money if they
can sell it if it if it helps Humanity I don't believe that the the make or break point for anything that's done in the media for the most part 99% is about the influence on the consumer it's about can we sell it and if they could sell it and it's good for you they'll sell it but if they sell it and it's not good for you they'll sell it anyway in my world I think that matters greatly on the impact of the listener because it changes their lives one way or the other [Music] part of
the problem is people are too focused on their own their own little world their own little lives what it is they want to accomplish when in fact there's really nothing you can accomplish that feels quite as happy as doing it with other people and I so I think there's been too much of the entrepreneurial greed me me me focus in the last few decades and I do think that people have become aware that we're becoming more unhappy not just in the United States but all over the world depression rates are rising faster I don't know
that people are always aware of it until you ask powerful questions [Music] the research is so interesting on this that if you ask college students what they aspire to they talk about money but if you ask them what the best thing was that happened to them in the last month they they mentioned experiences with other people they never mentioned possessions so on an intuitive level people do understand what it is that brings them Joy but sometimes they have to find out the hard way [Music] so we're in this ridiculous situation where we go to work
maybe two jobs even and we come home and we're exhausted so we pl down on our new couch and watch TV and the commercials tell us you suck so you got to go to the mall to buy something to feel better and then you got to go to work more to pay for the stuff you just bought so you come home and you're more tired so you sit down and you watch more TV and tells you go to the mall again and we're on this crazy work watch spin treadmill and we could just stop [Applause]
[Music] I had I I had a question and the question was how much did you C them [Music] by we have actually produced more oil no no how much did you cut licenses and permits on Federal [Music] the world has [Applause] changed we must [Music] change I have written a open letter to President Obama uh Reviving that slogan you know during the Clinton presidential campaign they had a slogan called it's the economy stupid for me the slogan is it's the worldview stupid it's unless the world view changes unless the world view acknowledges listening to the
values listening to the personal meaning of life and the social meaning of life unless we do this real change cannot come so I wrote to President Obama if you you talked about real change change that we can believe in if you really want change that we can believe in please help us to change our world view well the change of man is the key to changing everything else in the world without it nothing will significant will change what we need is not just patching up not just solutions to current problems what we need is a
transformation a fundamental transformation which means a change of values the change of thinking change of Consciousness change in a way the human being thinks and [Music] acts the world views affect the engine of civilization it affects who we each individually think who who we are and how we behave and our moral sense business it affects everything an experiment was done by two social psychologists where they they did the following they took a bunch of students and they had them read one of two passages one of the passages was description of who we think we are
and then the key phrase in this this paragraph Was you're nothing but a pack of neurons that were basically all material substances in which case everything you think you are all of your thoughts and emotions and all of your interior life is nothing but a pack of neurons and then they gave the students the opportunity to do a couple of experiments where they had they could cheat if they wanted to and what they found was that the students who read the passage you're nothing but a pack of neurons Che did significantly more if your worldview
says that there is no inherent meaning in anything and ultimately the universe is a pointless object and when you die you're dead and there's no nothing else going on then it it changes your sense of how do I need to live right now well I should get everything I should get right now I I should cheat if I have to whereas if we had a different model which said maybe you're part of some gigantic living system with some kind of inherent meaning and all the rest it could have consequences not only for yourself but for
your loved ones and everyone else all the problems that we're facing right now they're not problems they're actually questions who are we who do we really choose to be how do we choose to relate to life itself how do we choose to relate to all the different elements of Life the environment the planet itself obviously the people why are we here and where are we going from here what is the the meaning of my life we're in a transition stage where the old answers are no longer sustainable and that's why we're facing the crisis we
face so there's a population in a state of flux saying the old stuff doesn't work and we're ready for new answers that will create a newer more sustainable civilization simple point the old civilization is no longer sustainable the answers are flawed new new answers are in and we're in the moment of taking those new answers and weaving a new culture the will support those answers and support ourselves at this critical point in time uh we have to redefine what it means to be human uh we have to choose a new identity literally choose a new
identity and recreate ourselves a new as a Humanity recreate ourselves as a brand new uh kind of of living organism a brand new kind of species and and recreate the organism as a cluster as a group rather than as a a a um scattering of single individuals we have to change our thinking about who we are in relationship to each other we've been living in a competitive Society for too long and this the world we see is the result the ego the competitive ego what we have to do is learn how to cooperate and drop
the ego and realize again that that if we have people in one country that are very poor and people that are very wealthy the wealthy are going to have to get big armies and big fences to keep those other people out it's not going to work with the divisions of society that we have today and the stratification man has to go through a change to realize that his life should be lived for the unity of mankind and that we're all like one man in one heart and we're sharing that desire sharing that thought we're on
Mutual connection making mutual concessions in reciprocity like cells of a living [Music] [Applause] [Music] body it's so simple but we make it so difficult and it's these hard things these challenges these horrible things we see are there to urge us to be better than we are and I think until we we start seeing that they will continue no matter on all levels we look at our economic crisis we look at our ecological crisis we look at our spiritual crisis and we say I don't I'm not happy society's not happy what's wrong with us so that
is the trigger we have to have problems to have Solutions problems create creativity there's no such thing as a problem a problem is essentially a transition so I see the crises of today as a transition point for Humanity I see them as not necessarily something that's out of the ordinary again and again in nature from the very most ancient bacteria to more recent species they go through a juvenile phase of hostile competition to establish themselves and then they discover the economics of Cooper ation and when they find that it is cheaper and more efficient and
more beneficial for everyone to feed your enemy rather than fighting them then we are on the way to the new civilization we're all looking [Music] for the wonderful part about nature being fractal is that we can use patterns in nature to understand other patterns that exist because patterns repeat themselves so now if you want to look at a pattern that's playing itself found on this planet right now that would give us insight about what is going on so I say look inside a caterpillar that's growing and a caterpiller represents let's say 7 billion cells living
under the same skins each cell is a citizen and guess what they're like people like us they're working every day cells in the digestive system are taking the food and braking it down and making products out of it some cells are the motility cells they those are the cells that move the caterpillar around the structures of like our highways with with trucks and vehicles carrying materials all over the place something like that cells of the immune system are taking their job of protecting the system respiration systems making sure fresh oxygen is being delivered all so
all the cells have jobs the caterpillar is growing if you were in there and a reporter you look around go yeah the economy is going great guns it's growing every day everybody's working full employment this is the kind of thing we love to see how much are we growing every day some per every day and then the caterpillar reaches a certain stage of growth and at that stage of growth it just it just stops eating it can't take in anymore at this point it's reaching a maximum size then if you're a cell inside that Community
imagine what would happen that you're on the job and all of a sudden there's less food coming in and you're a digestive cell you say well man the work is slowing down here the factory is slowing down then all of a sudden it gets to such a low level that many cells get laid off of the job now their cells not working why there's not enough food coming in to keep them all working and as the food shuts down then the other jobs are affected because if there's no food then there's no energy and all
the systems start laying off cells and pretty soon there's massive chaos under the skin of a caterpillar why the system sto growing the cells are out of work nothing is evolving and the thing is falling apart if you were a cell in that caterpillar body at that time you would look around say oh my God our world is coming to an end and yet in the midst of those billions of cells in among them are other cells that genetically identical to them no different but they think differently they respond to the signals differently these cells
have the interesting name called imaginal cells and these imaginal cells come up with New Visions and what happens is in the midst of all this chaos when all the other cells are running around thinking the end of the world is coming the new imaginal cells are laying out new ideas New Visions a new plan a new scheme a new way of life and around these ideas the cells re organized and they start to create new massive organizations to create something much more fabulous than the previous system A system that is much more sustainable a system
with a higher level of evolution and that system they're constructing called The Butterfly so there's a transition from an old world of caterpillar with an old belief system and an old way of life that was no longer sustainable and therefore you have two choices in this world right now you can retain your caterpillar us and go oh my God the sky is falling and be in fear or you can say the caterpillar is going I want to build the butterfly why because if I become active and you know positive in the process of building the
butterfly I'm engaged I'm working we're creating the future if I sit there and bemoan the loss of the caterpillar then I'm making myself sick and everything around me why I'm not contributing to our Evolution and so where are we we're at the Dem rise of the caterpillar stage of civilization and the rise of the [Music] butterfly what we have to recognize is that all this crisis ET is not outside of Consciousness it is also inside of Consciousness there there is a there is a plan to this madness U if we look at biological evolution all
uh big evolution is preceded by a catastrophe so um this is evolution of the human being that is going on right now from being overly concerned with the negative emotions and the rational mind to listen to the values love beauty Justice truth goodness we need to hear that but how do we hear that without the panks of [Music] suffering I believe the issue is how can we cause the largest number of people to understand that we are in fact all one to understand our Unity the environment has to be changed so that we are supported
in a way where we respect each other while our value systems have to understand that we cannot survive any longer through our logical reasoning with the competitive mentality that's been perpetuated for so many generations if the environment continues to reinforce this selfishness it's going to be that much more difficult to climb out of it so if we create an environment that helps us to have the courage to give and it rewards and reinforces giving then I think we move much more quickly into that type of bestow mentality what we're beginning to see now is the
fall of all the major institutions whether it's economy politics Education Health Care every fundamental level of institution in the world so there's going to have to be changes at every level and it starts with education and awareness why because the knowledge we bought into of who we are and why we're here turns out to be archaic beliefs that are not supporting our survival we have to go from our old limiting beliefs that brought us to the current state of the world rewrite those beliefs so that as we take the next step forward we do so
with new awareness new power and a new understanding of where we want to go so we need to change [Music] education just imagine what would happen if we Chang our environment completely what if we would constantly hear in the news through ART entertainment advertisement that we're all interdependent that we're all interconnected as one integral system how would our world look like how would you relate to all the others in that system [Music] you would suddenly begin to feel that you relate to others as somewhat close to you you will be less concerned about how do
I exploit the other how do I manipulate others take advantage of them you'd begin to see that the other person is somehow close to you you'll have some Affinity towards the others like they belong to you you'll start considering them just like you think about your children or your family them into consideration when you think about doing something in life you think how will it affect [Music] [Music] them so that is the kind of change we need to go through and it can happen to us through the proper environment that we create for ourselves [Music]
well we have this negative emotional brain circuits of competitiveness and greed and and jealousy and anger and what have you but we can also create a reality in which we make positive emotions for ourselves and in our relationships and we can create positive emotional brain circuit brain circuits that we have created by voluntary acts of loving deliberately by practicing that will then mify the negative emotional brain circuit so we can overcome our based [Music] desires we began to think of emotions as having a kind of collective identity uh as if they're emotional stampedes in human
populations a kind of a Quiet Riot that uh that is just below the surface at all times because when we mapped this network we were able to find clusters of happy and unhappy people in the network and we were able as well to show that happy people are able to influence others to become happy and that happiness can spread from person to person to person to person and it's this kind of view of of the human superorganism that has really started to change the way we think about ourselves as human beings we are connected we
are connected in ways that these other social species are like schools of fish and flocks of birds animals have this so-called primitive people have this we have seem to have lost this through our intensive egoistic orientation if you recover this connection then we will behave with greater solidarity to each other we will extend our solidarity that exists in a family we can extend it over larger areas ultimately to the whole Human family and to the living [Music] environment we can encourage people in all walks of life in all kinds of organizations to uh come to
the notion of true Global family and implement the kind of world we really all dream of what has increasingly been found is that the happiest people have vibrant social networks they work hard at cultivating the relationships with other people so it's the it's the togetherness the bringing people together that brings people the most joy and some way science has always recognized that everything is always interconnected but but it that everything is also interdependent and you can't study everything all at once so science has been very good at sort of slicing up the world into little
pieces and then diving deeply down each little piece and that becomes a discipline and it's very easy to forget that that piece actually is still connected to everything else we conveniently forget it which creates something which is ultimately a whole system but it becomes fractured and maybe that some small percentage of of scientists are are naturally uh drawn to this idea of how how does the thing that I'm studying fit in a larger context and so for scientists who think about that they eventually get to the idea if they push it far enough that the
universe is really just one big thing if we ask the question why are we here as human beings the answer is then left to something as simple and disastrously bad as there's no reason for us to be here we're just accidents of genetics and therefore we could do anything we want because we weren't intended to be here in the first place so we have a pretty big disregard to our relationship and the world around us and the nature that we live in because we believe that organisms just got here by accident when you look at
the planet Earth you find that we live in a very narrow zone of that supports life a perfect combination of gases in the environment a perfect temperature in all this and it stays constant which has been a very unusual event of how can a planet keep a constancy in a world where everything is dynamic around it the answer is because Nature has created one organism after another organism to keep the environment in balance and compensate for the ranges of activities that occur around us so we keep up what is called homeostasis very simple example is
this when the world was primarily plants the environment which had carbon dioxide and some oxygen in it when they first started later became depleted of carbon dioxide and oxygen increased because the plants were using the carbon dioxide continuously and releasing the oxygen continuously and the balance shifted and there was so much oxygen on this planet that the planet was flamable so at times lightning strikes would hit and burn up all the oxygen and burn up the planet like was not sustainable so nature created a balance and the balance was called [Music] animals animals breathe in
oxygen and release carbon dioxide which is the complete reverse of what the plants were doing so why is this relevant because when you put animals and plants in the same environment as the plants take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen the animals take in oxygen and release carbon dioxide this creates a cycle and a balance in Germany so animal introduction was not just a random event it was required to keep balance in now look at life as a seesaw that goes up and down and I go like this as I put one organism on one
side it throws the balance off and tilts a seesaw this way so nature puts another organism on this side to bring the balance back so I said where are humans in this seesaw and why is that important because humans have so much power that if we're not clear of what we're doing we can take the Seesaw and put a little weight on one side and shift the entire balance of Nature and then we have to learn to come back and shift the balance back again well without our awareness of how we fit into nature we
lost sight of the fact that every other organism has been involved in keeping the environment more stable we weren't to manipulate the environment [Music] but if the balance now shifts way off because of humanity then it means that nature will no longer support human life on this planet it says that we have upset the balance of the environment and are causing our own Extinction so the writing is on the wall we have to work collectively to create Harmony Back in the environment when we become aware of this we can engage in that activity as the
primary direction of human [Music] civilization can we as a global tribe get our act together fast enough to be able to change our Behavior our Collective Behavior fast enough there is a great potential because it's not that if everybody has to change at the same time but we talk about is a critical mass you don't know how many people have to change for it to spread but the fact is that when people begin to think differently begin to act differently that has an effect on others it sprs scientists at RPI have found that when just
10% of the population are deeply committed to an idea their idea will always be adopted by the majority of the society now what's interesting is their mathematical model shows that it's like a spontaneous that is below 10% there is no visible progress however above 10% the idea spreads like wildfire I don't think it's going to occur first on the whole among the leadership neither political or business leadership I think there are always exceptions and there are very enlightened political leaders they Enlighten business people but on the whole these people have too much stake on the
present system and they're afraid of change because their own base of power and wealth lies in maintaining the current system so the change has to come from elsewhere I don't think it can come from the very poorest people the very poorest people maybe two billion people in the world try to survive somehow they have to get the food and the housing and the job and the health care and the education that is a minimum requirement we can't expect it from that well maybe two 300 million people who are really the wealthy and the and the
uh the leading classes it has to come from those who are in between who have a choice who are becoming increasingly concerned and who know that something needs to be done and the hope is that they will wake [Music] up if there are people who are aware that the world must become integrated then the question is can they come together can they make the initial step towards this I think the problem with with global crisis is that from each individual's point of view it becomes difficult to know how what do I do about it when
I say my ego and transform my ego it's an illusion how can I transform my ego when I'm dependent on so many other OS so because of the efforts of a few changes will start occurring how because the pressure evolutionary pressure is acting on everybody it's just that they don't have the right context all they need is a trigger the trigger will be provided by this operation of people who are working together to develop positive emotions so they affect a much bigger number than is indicated by the little community that started it so one little
change in one little Community can affect a much larger human community and the interconnectedness that we have through the internet interconnectedness of the ego all of a sudden without even knowing that it is doing so will change and establish itself and therefore changes can come very fast the basic idea is that there's this vast fabric of humanity stretching endlessly into the distance I'm connected to you and you to others on out endlessly your actions can influence the actions and feelings of others around you which in turn then can spread to still others and then to
still others if you tell someone they don't influence anybody they're not going to do anything but if you tell them to influence a thousand people they'll change their lives and that's why I think it's so critical for us to understand first and foremost how and why we are connected thinking people they can see opportunities in this so we have to do this collectively we have to do this collectively through dialogues first between two people through relationships between two people and then generalizing it to a whole family to the entire Community to bigger communities to the
country to the entire world change the society to recognize that we cannot do this this by ourselves we cannot do this alone it's actually very simple what we have to do it's just getting people to to identify with it and see the benefit of of what that offer is the offer of working together and how cataclysmically better life will be materially and spiritually [Music] so the lack of connection between people causes all the sadness in the world no question about it we are at Crossroads Crossroads and it's not going to be decided by Fate it's
not going it's not a destiny we have we have at a point where the future of humanity is going to be decided about how people think about it today and how they behave awareness Awakening these are the key terms we have a chance to change one thing we have to recognize is that to change is no longer a question whether or not change is coming the only question is whether it's coming unexpectedly and abruptly on us so that we can't do much about it we become victim of it or whether we can anticipate it create
those major changes that will bring about a better future and that is the unprecedented task of the generation non living [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the brand new world we got a brand new method for the boys and the girls cuz the way we were living don't work no more divided into artificial classes rich and poor individual success at the cost of others it put us here where it's brothers killing brothers yeah and then we left with lots of crying mothers it's turned people into ha instead of lovers it seemed egoism brought us
happiness now everybody depressed and laughing L yeah but homie now we pass this and it's time to spread the love to the masses and our task is to fix our glasses then we'll feel obliged to love everything alive now is the time we got a choice either we live or we die we got to [Music] try good for the [Music] world humanity is at a Crossroads I don't need list the problems man you all know [Music]
