One of the simplest ways to think about the meaning crisis is to ask whether humanity is going through a moment where our experience of life feels increasingly less relevant and meaningful. Do we feel withdrawn from our world? A sense of disconnection from it and others? Perhaps this is at the root of our mental health crisis’ as John Vervaeke suggests. Perhaps there are other biological factors like nervous system dysregulation at play here as well. Regardless, are we experiencing a collective felt sense of meaninglessness?
This is playing out in everything from our relationships to our societal structures. Things are up for re-questioning and re-examination, and while this can be an uncomfortable and awkward place, it can also be a great opportunity.
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Transcript
Joe Martino: Hope you’re having a good day wherever you are and, whatever time it is in your side of the world. today we’re going to be talking about the meaning crisis that is experienced, collectively. We’re going to kind of define this and get a little bit more detail into what this actually is and what we’re talking about. just a quick reminder that these early episodes, these first eight or nine or so, are going to be kind of discussing the themes mentioned in the introduction. So we’ll kind of expand upon each of these themes and that the future episodes, the upcoming episodes are, going to expand upon these in interviews and conversations. And we’ll dive to a number of different, topics that are relevant to today. But they all will kind of relate to these underlying themes. and this sort of framework of, the thesis that we’ve kind of been putting into collective evolution over the years, since we began. I’d like to begin this one with a quote from Carl Jung. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable, perhaps everything. And I’m just going to read this piece one more time. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. So what he’s trying to say here is that when we have meaningless in our lives, when we feel there’s a lack of, you know, sort of, what. Why am I doing this? What is the purpose of this? we lose an essence of life. We lose part of the fullness. We lose the completeness of what we’re experiencing. So this is a sort of a big piece to what we’re going to be talking about here. And what’s kind of going to be, a larger discussion of what has been unfolding for a very, very long time for humanity. but really coming to a head right now when we talk about this meaning crisis. So, one of the simplest ways to sort of look at the meaning crisis, which is being talked about now by quite a few people, is really to think about this in terms of exactly what that quote is. Are we losing, in some way, shape or form, on a collective level? And of course, we can think about this individually too. A sense of meaning. Why are we doing what we’re doing in life? What is the purpose of it? Are we losing a sense of what’s relevant in our world? are we starting to feel disconnected from our world, maybe our place in the world? Disconnected, from the purpose of why we’re doing things, why we’re making certain decisions. Are we becoming sort of desensitized, a little bit spiritless within, you know, the way we live our lives in this world? Do we feel sort of withdrawn from it? And in a sense, you know, another way to look at it is are we really feeling fulfilled by the nature of the way our world functions and the choices that we’re making? Do, we feel sometimes confused about the choices that we want to make, and we’re not sure which direction to take. Now, this often sounds like, well, yeah, of course, we all go through that at some point in our lives, but what’s happening now is a little bit different. We’re seeing this on a grander scale. We’re seeing this in so many different aspects of our society, and we’re seeing this with so many people all at once. We’re starting to look at, you know, the nature of our political systems, for example, and it’s starting to feel like theater. It’s starting to feel like a charade. What is going on? Why are people, like, we’re starting to see through the nature of sort of the veil that was put over it, that tries to say, hey, this is really serious, this is really important, but instead that veil is kind of coming down and we’re looking at it going, this, is kind of just like a hodgepodge of, like, theatrical back and forths. And what is the point of this? Like, where is this leading? Is this creating a better world? Is this feeling like we want to even participate in it? Right. And this sense of meaning crisis, or this sense of ultimately people feeling, you know, deeply in, a state of questioning, why are we doing this? Is becoming a very big thing that is happening right now. and we kind of have to think about this in terms of, you know, in a second we’re going to get into kind of like, what is the cause of this meaning crisis? But we got to think about this in terms of just collectively, like, the entire systems of our world right now. And sort of ask the question, are the systems that are in front of us right now, the way our society operates, when we look at the economy, when we look at politics, when we look at, media institutions, educational institutions, you know, are they really serving us the way that we thought, are starting to feel like this feels old and outdated, and I don’t even know why we’re doing this anymore. Right. This is kind of the feeling that we’re talking about here. When we get into this meaning crisis. And at, the end of the Day, like I said, I think we’re seeing this even in the political sense, where people are starting to withdraw from the political process. They’re starting to feel a little bit like, you know, what is the point if I’m. If I’m going out there and I’m making a vote? But the world just kind of keeps happening in a way that seems to have nothing to do with what my choice is or with what voices or with what our, you know, community’s voice is. Things are just happening, and we don’t seem to have any impact over it. Regardless of what we might want,
00:05:00
Joe Martino: something else is just taking over the way our world functions. So it pulls us even more into feeling withdrawn. And again, this goes back to the question of the, you know, the chicken or the egg. Are we. Are we feeling withdrawn because of something else? Are we feeling withdrawn because of the system? We’re realizing the system is not helping us to feel included, to feel part of something, and so we’re withdrawing. Right. And that’s kind of a deeper question we’ll get into. Little bit. But, you know, we see in the way that we use social media or the way that we might get really caught up in sort of mindless pop culture sort of entertainment, there’s this sense of we’re just sort of following along with whatever’s out there, but we’re not really connecting deeply to it. We’re not really connecting to a sense of deeper meaning. When we look at a lot of the things that are happening, we get this sense of alienation, right? We’re feeling like we’re disconnected from each other. We don’t have the same level of social engagement that we used to have. And people are finding that others are very polarized. They’re attacking each other. They’re very angry with each other. We can’t have conversations very, deeply. And these are symptoms of a crisis of meaning. When we start to disconnect from why, from purpose, from a deeper sense of embodiment within ourselves, all symptoms of having this meaning crisis unfold. We begin to sort of pull back, and we become lost in what is like, a void, if you will. And, you know, one of the key things as I describe this, and we sort of feel this, and I’m hoping that this is kind of landing in a couple of ways. The key here is, like, we’re not, you know, nobody’s alone in this. This is something that is happening throughout our world right now. People are feeling this. People are recognizing that there’s something going on. It is sending people on a search where sometimes we might go into a space where we’re trying to distract ourselves a lot and we’re kind of getting caught up in that social media engine. In other cases, we’re looking, we’re seeking, we’re reading books, we’re, trying to understand new ideas, we’re looking, looking for how we can find meaning again, how we can almost bring ourselves back to a little bit of a homeostasis. So, in a sense, this search for purpose and meaning is being felt by huge, huge, huge numbers of people on this planet. So if you’re feeling these feelings, note that you’re definitely not alone in this. And there are many ways out of this process, that is necessary, but there’s many ways back to sort of the sense of homeostasis that we’re going to talk about a little bit as we continue going. But, you know, another symptom of this that people might recognize is sort of this, rise in nihilism, in cynicism, this feeling of, you know, nothing’s ever good, nothing will ever be good, and, you know, we can’t make any impact on it anyway, so, hey, just let it be. And I see this a lot in sort of the alternative community that sometimes we serve in the work that we do, which is this feeling that we kind of talk about as sort of being, you know, sort of the ultimate black pill, right? It’s people that, are in a space right now where they feel that no matter what they see in the world, no matter what they do, the people in positions of power, the upper elite, if you will, of society and the control that they have is so great that no matter what we try and do, nothing will ever overcome. And no matter what solution is presented, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to win anyway. so anybody coming forward with solutions, with ideas, with grassroots movements, will often be kicked down by this ultimate cynicism, that it doesn’t matter, we can’t win anyway. And the interesting part to this is that these, you know, truthers, if you will, or these activists, if you will, don’t even recognize this level of cynicism oftentimes within themselves, because it’s become such a deep symptom of their baseline state of understanding and their baseline state of seeing things as a result, like I said, of this, meaning crisis of being feeling detracted, feeling disconnected, from having any impact over how our world functions or over what the purpose of lives are at this moment in time. This, this cynicism just sort of overtakes the lens through which we see the world. And obviously this is not really a, you know, a useful place to be if we do want to make change, because we can’t even see what might be possible. We can’t dream up ideas. So getting back to a sense of meaning, getting back to a sense of purpose, is going to be kind of one of the foundational steps that is going to allow us to start seeing things more clearly and sort, of get, a sense of how we can come to solutions. you may recall at the beginning of COVID I made a video that was sort of talking about how Covid was disrupting our idea of normal, right? So we have this idea of, oh, this is what normal life is, this is how it should be on a day to day basis. And Covid came in and kind of just smashed that over and again. You can look at Covid and say, well, this was a huge elite takeover of our rights and our powers. And this, that whatever. You could look at Covid as a massive health crisis. And, you know, there’s different ways in which you can look at it. One of the ways, I think, and I felt this very, very early on, was that it was going to be a disruption in normal that would allow us to reimagine what normal might look like and what it might be and how that could ultimately serve us in sort of requestioning
00:10:00
Joe Martino: and giving us a moment to move out of everyday frames of thinking and being and go, what, what might I actually want to do? Was normal really that great? was normal really that fulfilling? Now that I have this opportunity to look back at normal, do I want to go back to it quite in the same way? Obviously there’s a very loaded question with a ton of pieces involved. But we started to see within 2021 and 2022 what is now referred to as the great resignation, which is this moment in history where we’re seeing record numbers of people resigning from their jobs. So again, this is not people getting laid off, there’s not people getting fired, because of economic situation, so on and so forth. This is people voluntarily saying, I do not want to work anymore. Now some of them, and we noted this in some of the data, ended up going back to work in new jobs, right? So they said, you know what? Enough’s enough with this job that I hate, that I don’t like. I’m going to go do something that might be more fulfilling. And another subset of people just never entered back to the workforce. Right. Which is why some. Some of the unemployment numbers are so high. It’s not just that there’s economic disparity right now, but there’s also this feeling that, some people are voluntarily not wanting to work. And this is happening in record numbers around the world. Here’s, a graph just representing the United States. You can have a look at it here. But you see in 2021 and 2022 there, we have record numbers here in terms of people having this feeling. And again, when you’re thinking about a time of crisis, you would think nobody would want to quit their job, nobody would want to stop. But I’m positing, I’m arguing here that we’re at a time where people are so detracted, they’re so looking for a more meaningful existence, a more mean, meaningful life, that they’re taking decisions that may not be, as. As expected, we’ll put it that way. There’s a. There’s a search for deeper meaning. so I think that was a. An interesting piece to this. And as I mentioned before, you know, what is the order of causation here? Why is this happening? Are we. Are we going through a meaning crisis? Because we’re going through a mental health crisis. Right? So that’s to say, like, well, we have all this anxiety, we have all this depression. We have all this, all these feelings of just not quite feeling. Feeling right as people. And therefore we’re losing a sense of meaning, we’re losing a sense of purpose? Or is it that there’s something deeper going on, there’s some lack of fulfillment on a deeper level that is eventually sort of producing this anxiety, this depression, this sense of, I don’t even know why I’m doing what I’m doing anymore. And then it kind of pushes us down into that. And I would say that the order of causation here is not 100% clear. There’s a lot of layers to it. There’s a lot of pieces to it. We’re going to talk about embodiment and getting right down to nervous system health as it relates to this question as well, in future episodes. But ultimately there’s. There’s not a lot of clarity around what exactly is happening, but there is enough to talk about this idea that we feel ultimately collectively stuck in a rut, in a rut of experience. It’s like we’ve outgrown, the way we’re living our lives on the planet right now. We. We’ve outgrown the way our societies function. And people are sort of fed up, in a sense. And this meaning crisis, which may have been building for many, many, many decades, and some people argue, even centuries, is sort of, you could argue, crescendoing right now. And we’re in a moment where the nature of the decisions that we make can happen so fast. Like, we can use social media, we can use the news to share information at record speeds. And all of this can be happening through a lens of disparity, through a lens of disconnection, through a lens of reductionist thinking, which can then create mass decisions, mass actions that are not really coming from a holistic place, that are not really coming from a clear place. So we are having this meaning crisis at a time that arguably is crescendoing at a moment where we also tend to have our worst ways of actually communicating and making sense of our reality and sort of making holistic decisions. So we’re in a moment where, yes, this is, to an extent, a crisis. Not one where we have to run around the streets and freak out, but one where it should be drawing us into a sense of, of how are we going to solve this? How are we going to get back. Back to embodiment? How are we going to get back to a space where we can look at this, in a way that’s effective? So, I want to kind of say one more thing before we move on here. is this idea of a meaning crisis and what needs to happen to sort of solve it is not going to come down to a singular solution and one person is going to have the answer, or there’s one modality or something that’s going to be, you know, what’s going to bring everybody back. I, know that’s kind of tempting at times for a lot of people to say. Here is the answer. There’s. There’s going to be a multitude of factors and a multitude of practices and a multitude of things that are going to play within how we’re going to come back to a place as humanity where we become more embodied, we become more clear and wider in our lens of the way we think and way we see the world and the way we’re going to move forward. and I kind of want to sort of circle this
00:15:00
Joe Martino: back to how collective evolution started way back in 2009, which, you might recall, we talked about, this idea of a shift in consciousness. Now, a shift in consciousness was, you know, sort of this feeling that, you know, let me, let me backtrack for a moment before we get to the shift in consciousness. What kicked off the 2009 creation of Collective Evolution was this feeling within myself that there was something not quite right with the world. There was something that wasn’t feeling, you know, fully there for me. And I was going on a search. I was trying to understand why I felt that way. I perhaps was going through a little bit of my own meaning making in the process and trying to understand, you know, what my feelings were within my body, within my mind, about the state of the world and what I felt was possible and why they didn’t align. And as I did that, I came in contact with someone who became a mentor of mine, Franco DiNicola, way back in the day. And, he presented this idea of a shift in consciousness, this moment where humanity was kind of again, crescendoing up into, this state of being where we were starting to go. We need to re examine the way we live our lives, the way we understand ourselves, the way we, sort of make sense of our reality, what is the nature of our reality in that sense. And this shift in consciousness was kind of moving from this sort of individualistic to more of one oneness or more of a holistic view of kind of how we play within our society. And as we go through this shift in consciousness, there’s enough events in our. In our world, there’s enough events in our. In our being that sort of ask us to, or push us to question this more deeply. So the more destabilization there is, the more apparent, chaos there is. The more change there is. the more it forces us to ask questions, the more it forces us to stop in our tracks and look back and see what’s going on. And I very much resonated with that idea of shift in consciousness. But there ended up being a lot of sort of, you know, New Agey concepts that were brought into the fold over the course of time that, I tended not to resonate so much with, especially as we were getting into the sort of the 2012 documentary I’ve released called Collective Evolution 3 the Shift. And it was kind of within that that I started to diverge from a lot of, I think, the noise that was being added to this, shift in consciousness story. and I started to say, well, how can I look at this question more clearly? What is really happening with this shift in consciousness and what’s going on? And you know, this was. And what can we do about it? Right? This was the Search I ultimately went on when I created collective evolution and kind of led all the way 15 years later up until, where we are now. And just for some reference, like, what do I mean when I say some of these New Agey ideas that can oftentimes get confused with what I’m talking about and what I’m presenting here? it’s just ideas, for example, of like, okay, well, there is a shift in consciousness taking place and you know, the energies, the cosmic energies of our galaxy is going to create the shift for us. Or there may be a single event, there may be a solar flash, for example, that’s just going to change humanity’s consciousness all at once in this rapture like event that, is going to kind of do all the work for us. And you know, when it comes to that solar flash idea that has kind of overtaken this, in a lot of New Age circles, you know, I sort of see this as this again, the savior’s coming. you know, we don’t really have to do anything. We can just kind of be here. And this moment where, this idea of how are we going to change our reality can just be fixed with a single event. We don’t actually have to engage in this. We don’t actually have to be part of it. It’s just going to be fixed in a, in a single event. So that’s an idea that oftentimes comes in and I think muddies the water around what it is we’re trying to, do with this, with this process that’s unfolding and then likewise with the cosmic energies. You may remember from, my 2012 TED Talk, my, TED, I talked about research that I had done, through Alexander Chizzewski, who looked at the impact of solar flares and basically cosmic energy on human consciousness. And he has a very compelling, body of research to kind of discuss that. And I do believe there is a somewhat of an impact that occurs from a consciousness, point of view when you’re talking about, things like solar flares and you know, electromagnetic fields essentially from space, I do believe that is happening. The problem that I see is that so many people will get so caught up in believing or focusing all their time and energy on what is the energy of the planet right now, what’s going on, what’s the next wave of energy? And what’s it going to do? Is it going to tear down all the systems? Is it going to change everybody and this sort of becomes this again? We’re sitting back, we’re allowing this narrative of the energies on the planet are just going to change everything for us. And we don’t really need to be engaged, we don’t really need to be involved, we don’t really need to do anything. and what I’ve seen in those communities and in that stuff over the years, is a lot of people aren’t doing very well. They’re not feeling good, they’re still stuck in a lot of, mental health suffering. They’re still stuck in not being able to engage with our existing systems, not being able to make ends meet, not being able to do all these things because, there’s this sense that, you know, whatever shift is taking place, well, it’s just going to happen and I can just kind of
00:20:00
Joe Martino: just sit back and do my thing and I don’t actually have to be part of anything or I don’t have to actually explore, what I want to play with on this planet or do. And so the reason why I wanted to make that differentiation for a few moments there was just to kind of say like what I’m talking about and those ideas are separate things and I don’t want them to get, confused because this has happened to me bazillion times over the last 15 years. but I do believe in a sense that there is a shift in consciousness. And I still think that, this is, you know, an important piece to look at. And so ultimately, you know what I, what I’ve kind of created this sort, of a clearer explanation, at least in my mind, around what the shift in consciousness is. It’s like an evolutionary pressure that’s at play. There’s something that’s pushing our consciousness along that makes up a small piece to the puzzle that’s creating a sense of feeling within people that says, you know what, it’s time to reimagine a lot of what we’re doing here. There’s something that doesn’t quite feel right and it’s not just driven by depression per se. There’s something within the I’m experiencing my everyday life that is, we’re ready for something more. We’re ready for something a little bit different. And this is going to require, ultimately the shift in consciousness is going to require a deep level of our engagement, a deep level of us to re examine, to get back into our bodies, to get back into, a present moment, to sort of examine what is it that we’re doing here and how can we do it differently and there’s a ton of tools that are going to be involved in how we go about doing that. and that’s essentially sort of the updated way in which I’ve sort of clarified the idea of a shift in consciousness over the years is just to say, like this evolutionary pressure, I think, is there, enough to open a door. And we still have to take the steps towards that door, open that door, walk through that door, create that new world, if you will, or create the change in our society that we know might be possible, or reimagine the way we can live, in society. That’s all the engagement piece. It’s not just going to suddenly be manifested before us. I mean, not in the way I see things, not in the way I, sort of, I guess following my own impulse and intuition on this. I don’t feel like it’s going to happen in that fashion. And so, you know, interestingly, where I came to this concept of a meaning crisis, ah, was as I was exploring this idea of a shift in consciousness over the years and putting it out there, you know, obviously it got a little bit hijacked, at least in my perspective, by sort of the New Agey words and the New Agey terms. and, you know, eventually, earlier on this year, I came in contact with the work of a University of Toronto professor named John Vervek, who talks about the meaning crisis. And I started to recognize that this concept of a meaning crisis was talked about, you know, in philosophers of our past. you know, Carl Jung, Nietzsche, you know, they had, they had spoken about this idea of meaning and various places in which we have lost meaning and how we regained it and how changes in the way that we’ve lived in society and big changes that occurred in the way society functions, all sort of correlate with these moments of meaning crisis and these moments of reexamining how we make meaning as human beings and the story we essentially tell ourselves that makes that meaning. And so, I thought that was a much better way of framing this shift in consciousness at the moment, because, it just seems right now that the idea of a shift in consciousness is not as widely palatable, given all the sort of connotations that have been associated with it. So that’s why I’m kind of choosing this idea of a meaning crisis. And, as John Vervaeke sort of describes the meaning crisis, just to summarize a little bit here, he says the meaning crisis is at the root of modern crises of mental health. The response to environmental collapse and the political system. We are drowning in bullshit, literally meaninglessness. We feel disconnected from ourselves, each other, the world and a viable future. So again, it’s this idea, you know, he summarized it very well here, but it’s this idea as we were talking about earlier, where people are, they can’t see a future for humanity. You know, I was speaking in a high school a couple years ago to a bunch of kids and a whole bunch of them came up to me at the end and was like, what do we do about climate change? We’re not going to be around in 10 years, these sorts of things. Yes, some of those, kids maybe were mistaken a little bit about the way that was presented in the media, but the general sense is they’re in a feeling where they’re not sure what their future looks like. And I think a lot of people are having that feeling. And this is not even just from a climate perspective, but also from an idea of can we even see what a potential future is anymore? Have we become sort of blinded as to where we’re going and why and how? you know, ah, do we even have any part in that? Right? This is the meaning crisis. This is what’s happening, is this detraction. We’re just kind of mindlessly living life. And as Verveki puts it, the world is filled with bullshit. Right? This is the idea of. And again, this isn’t from a judgmental point of view, this is just taking a step back and looking at it and saying, what is all the stuff on social media? Like what is all the stuff in our pop culture? Like what is this bringing to us in terms of a deeper fulfillment, in terms of a deeper purpose. Sure, it may provide for a moment
00:25:00
Joe Martino: a little bit of I guess a moment for us at times to sit down and watch something that allows us to relax, to relieve some stress. But we’re so engaged with this meaningless nonsense. Not to mention the fact that if you look at the news, there’s just so much hyperbole, there’s so much opinion, there’s so much I guess bad, poorly thought out ideas that we’re just getting so confused. I mean, I hear on a regular basis for the last year, I don’t even know what to believe anymore when it comes to news and media. Right. This is what it means to be surrounded by bullshit in virtually everywhere we look. We don’t know what we’re doing and why. And this is a collective issue, that’s going on over and over again and as we sort of, like I said, continue this podcast and some of these early episodes, I will be bringing in this sort of, this ide idea of embodiment and how this goes right down to our nervous system, deep biological level of where this is playing out. Again, to ground this in reality, to ground this concept in reality. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more. We’re also going to get into how consciousness plays a role in this and sort of how it’s driving where we’re being asked to re examine our worldviews. So we’ll get a little bit deeper on that as we as we go. But you know, the question becomes, what do we do about this? What do we do about this meaning crisis that’s, that’s taking place? This, this feeling of, okay, there’s a lot of cynicism, there’s a lot of disparity, we don’t really know what’s going on. It’s hard to make sense of the world. we don’t know what direction to take. It can feel very dark, very lonely to be in a place like that. And like I said, a lot of us are in this place right now. and I think we’re seeing it on the faces of politicians, we’re seeing it on the faces of celebrities, we’re seeing on the faces of people we see in the news and media. We’re seeing it on our friends faces, we’re seeing it on our family’s face cases. People can recognize this, at least from the people I talk to, all over the place. They may not frame it as the meaning crisis, but they feel that something’s not quite right. Ah, and that a big change is happening. and you know, a lot of the way we’ve structured our work over the last 15 years has been again, trying to solve this issue, if you will, or at least make a contribution to that. when we were talking about the shift in consciousness and stuff, you know, by trying to bring wisdom back to the picture, right. We I think we’re coming to a time where we’re realizing that our world has become very reductionist, very material, very scientific, driven, but from a dogmatic point of view. And we’re lacking wisdom, we’re lacking this, this deeper sense of what at times religions brought to the table. Now of course there’s a whole bunch of, you could say baggage and nonsense that goes along with religions that kind of confuses the whole process. But there, there is wisdom there sometimes. And I Think, at times because we’ve stripped out the purpose of religion because so many people are starting to feel, you know what, I don’t resonate with these religions because of all the nonsense around them. sometimes by moving out of that, we’ve lost, ah, a connection to a deeper wisdom. And I think on one hand there’s a sense that we’re looking for that wisdom again, but we also recognize that it’s deeply missing from our society. So I think we’re coming to a point where our scientific worldviews are showing to be, limiting, showing to be not, complete. there’s again this sense of we need this wisdom. We need almost this spiritual component into our understandings of life to really grasp them. Because this reductionist scientist worldview is not really cutting it. And we’ve seen, I mean, this is where it has led us. We’re here now, right? So we know that this is not necessarily serving us. And we’re kind of going to this mode of look at where this worldview is leading us. We’re destroying each other, we’re destroying ourselves, we’re destroying the land, the world, the planet that we live on, from the standpoint of just degradation of environment, degradation of forest, degradation of water quality, degradation of air quality to the point where there may come a time where it’s not even going to support our lives. Right? And so how is this worldview so disconnected that we’re killing the very thing that we require to. To be sustained? Right. There’s a deep, deep lack of connection that is gone there. or I should say more clearly, there’s a deep connection there that is gone. And, And so I think when we bring wisdom, Wisdom back to the table and we have this discussion of why wisdom is so important right now and why it’s going to be a key ingredient is, you know, we kind of got to move from this, this egocentric sort of point of view of how we view our lives, how we view the world, to more of a holistic. A deeper understanding of oneness, a deeper understanding of how we share this place, a deeper understanding of how we impact each other, a deeper understanding of the necessity for meaningful social connection, with the basic biology of our being and who we are and kind of getting out of this materialistic, drive to I create so I can have money, so I can have a house, so I can do this. And it’s about me. It’s about me. It’s about me. To more of, you know, how am I part of A community. How am I part of a community within nature? Right? What is, what is humanity’s place within nature as opposed to, we are here to dominate nature, we are here to control nature and be at the top of the food chain. Again, we’ve seen where that has led us. And that’s the sort of the individualistic point of view, the egocentric point of view, moving, moving back now,
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Joe Martino: bringing in the wisdom, saying, hold on, what is our actual place in, nature? So we see so far this question of wisdom and this question of reframing our place within the world. These are a couple little details. and then, you know, we’ve talked about this from, you know, since the beginning of collective evolution. How do we bring, how do we bring more wisdom? As in, like, what’s our job as people? Creating content to bring more wisdom into society? And you know, as, you know, with our trajectory, we’ve done a lot in journalism. And our current journalism project is called the Pulse. And that project there, I mean, we try to bring wisdom into every single piece, every single video we put out there. most people, again, this problem we’ll talk about in the social media section of this. But most people are headline readers today. So we’re reading a headline thinking we know the entirety of what someone is trying to say based on a headline. But if you read our articles, most of the time we get into these deeper questions, these deeper reflections, these deeper, pointing to, you know, what is this saying? What is this saying about the nature of us, the nature of our reality? We try and bring in that peace where we’re cultivating a sense of wisdom, a sense of questioning, not from a particular, sort of belief system, but how can we cultivate this wisdom? In the search for wisdom, as we explore our current events, as we explore what’s happening in our reality, we’re looking for what’s the matter? What’s behind the current events? What is the human condition behind that? What is the lack of wisdom showing us behind why these current events are happening the way they are? That’s what we’re trying to do, to sort of contribute wisdom to the journalistic space. and of course, you know, this, this whole idea of sort of lack of wisdom and getting into this sort of breakdown in sense making that’s occurring across the planet right now is one of the challenges, is that, you know, the very thing that makes us very brilliant as people, that allows us to have intelligence, that allows us to do incredible things, like create technology and Innovation and all these different things. You know, it’s our brain, it’s the way we can think up, can put creativity and logic together and do really wonderful things. that thing can also work against us. When we start losing that sense of wisdom, that sense of balance, that sense of embodiment, we become so reduction, reductionist, in our focus that we no longer can see clearly the whole. We no longer can see, you know, that what our bodies might be saying, what our sensations, what our feelings, what our emotions might be saying, saying, instead we’re just, we’re purely cognitively focused, in a way that is not necessarily advantageous to us having a full, fulfilling and meaningful life where we can thrive. So bringing the wisdom back helps to keep that cognitive reductionist focus sort of in balance and in check. And of course, you know, one of the deepest aspects of, to bringing that wisdom back is embodiment coming back to our bodies, coming back to ourselves, you know, be gaining that relationship again. Re regulating that nervous system. As like I said, we’re going to talk about in some future episodes episodes and you know, here we’re getting again into. These are going to be some of the tools and the practices that are going to help us build a foundation for making meaning again and then allowing that meaning making to then create a new society. And so regulating our emotions, getting back in tune with our emotions, getting back in tune with our bodies, getting back in tune with who we are and how we sort of form this foundational worldview about ourselves are all going to be key. How do we become more present when we’re engaging with a piece of news? How do we become more present when we’re engaging with people around us as opposed to just trying to cognitively, you know, one up the person we might be having a conversation with. which has become a very common thing in sort of the individualistic worldview where it’s like no, it’s about me proving my point as opposed to how do we synthesize as a group, how do we synthesize as a collective. so again we’re going to be presenting a lot of different tools, we do in our work already, within our Explorer Lounge, which is our membership, we touch upon some of these things. There’s going to be a lot more tools coming to the picture there. But one of the last things I kind of wanted to say here as we cap this off is just this discussion of it can feel like a lot, right? It can feel like a lot to Talk about this meaning crisis, to talk about, trying to wrap our minds around reshaping our society to solving some of the biggest problems that we have. And in a state where we’re in a meeting crisis, where we don’t know how our action, how the button we’re about to press is even going to make an impact on our reality, or whether or not that button we’re about to press is going to make an impact on our reality. Right? Because again, we feel detracted. We feel like we don’t know our place in things, to an extent, so it can feel overwhelming to wrap our minds. And this is where sort of, again, that expansion into a collective. Right, and this is the thing that, you know, oftentimes makes me emotional when I think about it. It’s this concept of when we begin to expand our, worldview to, you know, to understand that we’re collective and that this meaning crisis problem and creating a new society that can thrive has so many layers to it, it has so many pieces. But we’re a collective, and people are going to be drawn to, you know, the things that they’re excited about, that they’re passionate about. And as long as we’re drawn to it from a place where we’re. We’re including this connection, including this wholeness, including this groundedness
Joe Martino: included, you know, this embodiment, and this desire to synthesize together, to come up with things together as opposed to dominate and compete with each other. Right? As long as that’s the sort of the driving force, we’re going to figure this out together. We’re going to come up with, you know, the solutions to move forward together. The challenge is when we start having individualistic groups or, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, for example, who are presenting the Great Reset, saying, well, no, this is what we propose. But nowhere in there are they asking humanity, hey, what. What do you want to do? What do you think we should do moving forward? Right, but this is where the engagement comes in, right? Because not only do we have to engage, but we have to engage from a place that isn’t, you know, emotionally unstable, that isn’t extremely angry, that isn’t extremely judgmental, that isn’t extremely, you know, sort of erratic in the way that we move. That’s, that’s trying to just get my message, my individualistic, you know, point out there. We need to engage in a way that is. Is more holistic, that is more, embodied and calm and present. so there’s. There’s a lot of personal work, transformational work that you know, needs to go into all of us to kind of prepare this, this underlying state of being that allows us to move forward. And by no means does this mean we sit back and wait for five years. No, no, we can get started now. We can still engage and we can still, you know, push back, to an extent on some of these ideas now, but with, with the framework of self reflection, with the framework of embodiment, with the framework, a lot of things that we’re talking about here. and so I think this is how we’re going to, we’re going to come out of this, to an extent. And I know I’m not presenting an idea, this is the path. It’s more like there’s going to be a lot of pieces to this and there’s a lot of people that are motivated by this and there’s a lot of people that want to come up with something. So, I don’t think there’s a reason, I don’t feel this personally. I don’t feel a reason to feel despair about where we’re headed and where we’re going. I’m very inspired by it because I believe in the collective and I believe in where we’re going to head. you know, together as we, as we, we bring a wholehearted good faith effort to solving many of the challenges that we have today. but it will require a transformation within ourselves to not only solve the meaning crisis, but to solve many of the challenges that that we have before us. that the meaning crisis might be, be creating or vice versa. So, that’s it, that’s all for this episode. again we’ll be creating a few more of these early introductory episodes as we go and then we’ll be interviews and conversations around a ton of relevant topics, more specific and deeply related to these underlying themes as we continue forward. Thanks so much for tuning in. Well, that’s it, that’s all. I hope you enjoyed the show. As always, I want to thank the members of the Explore Lounge who are helping us to continue doing this work. If you want to support this podcast and all of the work we do here at the Pulse and Collective Evolution, consider becoming a member of our Explorer Lounge. As a member you get access to exclusive video content content. You can watch all of these episodes ad free and you get access to our private social network where you can discuss and learn about many topics with a like minded community of change makers. It’s truly an incredible place to be. Not just for the benefits that you get, but you’re directly supporting our dedicated team here at Collective Evolution and the Pulse. Visit Explore Lounge 1. That’s one to learn more.
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