Vishen: Hi. I’m Vishen Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley, the school for human transformation. You are listening to “The Mindvalley Podcast,” where we’ll be bringing you the greatest teachers and thought leaders on the planet, and discuss the world’s most powerful ideas of personal growth, of mind, body, spirit, and work.
So a couple of years ago, I attended an event called Summit Series. It was a massive, massive, massive, massive event on a boat, a giant cruise liner, an original cruise liner somewhere in the Caribbean. There were some 2,000 or 3,000 people there, I forgot, mostly from Silicon Valley, and there were incredible speakers giving talks and lectures on this boat.
I attended kind of this lectures but one stood out, and it was by this guy called Tom Chi, a brilliant scientist and an entrepreneur, one of the former co-founders of Google X, and, get this, the guy who created the first prototype of Google Glass. Now, Tom is an incredible man. He’s had incredible success in Silicon Valley.
I’m honored to now call him a friend after having met him at multiple events, share the stage with him, and put him on Mindvalley stage. But what I love most about this man, Tom Chi, is that he is using his genius, he is using his brilliance to the save the planet. So here is the story. Tom was the CEO of an innovation lab in Silicon Valley.
I was actually one of the investors in this lab. But after a couple of years during this, Tom, looking at what was happening in the world today, felt that the human race is going into a dangerous stage. And if we are not taking concrete action on things such as global warming, a lot of aspects about beautiful planet are gonna be lost forever.
Tom explained to me that by 2080, the coral reefs might be completely extinct. So what did Tom do? He decided to give himself a title. That title is “Lab Director of the Planet.” So here you have this brilliant mind from Silicon Valley who decide to give up the money, give up the CEO title, leave his company, make himself “Lab Director of the Planet,” and travel around the world uniting scientists working on climate change, and helping them apply his thinking methodologies to tools of rapid prototype that he worked at Google X, so that they can better find ways to save the planet.
And this talk that you’re about to see was that very same talk from Summit Series that I saw Tom deliver that blew me away. It was the best talk at that particular Summit Series event, as far as I was concerned. Of course, I went to Tom and I said, “Tom, I want you to come to A-Fest and share this with our Mindvalley audience,” meaning you.
And what you’re about to hear is the recording of that A-Fest talk. Now, I want you to know that you’re gonna enjoy this talk in its full audio format, but Tom shared some really interesting slides to the scientific ideas of the universe that he is gonna share with you. And for those of you who are visual, you might wanna watch the version of this on YouTube.
Either way, you’re gonna gain a lot. Because what Tom is going to do in this talk is show you how we are all more connected than we think with each other, with people all across the planet, and with the planet itself. But he’s gonna do it not through any philosophy or personal growth idea, he is gonna do it using pure, mind-blowing scientific facts that are going to give you a whole new perspective of what is means to be you and just how connected we are to each other and to every other cellular being on planet Earth. Let’s get started with Tom Chi. I’m Vishen Lakhiani, and this is “The Mindvalley Podcast.”
Tom: All right. So what am I talking about today? A lot of you guys have kind of gone deep within yourselves, are part of a spiritual path. A lot of you are people that are in deep inquiry. And a thing that unites almost every spiritual path that humanity has ever pursued is this idea that everything is connected. This is powerful idea.
It’s central to so many of these systems of belief. But in the modern age, it feels almost the opposite of that, feels like everything is disconnected. And in a way, we kind of look to this idea because this idea, you know, gives us hope like, if only this was true, or maybe if this was true, then I could keep going, I could keep believing. And as Vishen mentioned, you know, my background, I have a lot of technical background.
I’ve been a scientist, I’ve been an engineer, I’ve been these sorts of things. And I’m here today to talk to you about how it actually is true, without any mysticism, without any of the cloaked language around it, or the need for faith to go believe it. I’m just gonna describe in a very practical direct terms literally how everything is connected.
And we’re going to go do it in three simple stories: story of the heart, story of the breath, and story of the mind. So let’s start with the heart. So right now, all of us in this room, our hearts are beating, pumping blood, moving oxygen. And why do our hearts do this? Well, it’s actually to move hemoglobin around.
And it’s actually the action is not even on the hemoglobin, per se. The hemoglobin carries four molecules called heme B. And in the heart of the heme B molecule is a single iron atom, and this is the critical piece of hemoglobin because basically this iron atom is the thing that allows oxygen to bind and move all around the body and nourish us, and allow us to live, for our breath to mean something.
Now, some of you might have known that, but a thing that you may not have know is that iron only comes from one place. Iron can only be formed during supernova and in super massive stars. And it means every single iron atom that is at the heart of your heme Bs that is moving your blood right now, came through a series of a dozen stars that were formed, lived their lives, exploded, formed into new stars, lived their lives, and exploded.
We all come from the same dozen stars. Now, the story doesn’t really end there, because here’s the thing about supernovas. You got a star, it explodes and all that stuff is all over the place now. And now that all this stuff is all over the place, it actually doesn’t naturally want to come on back together and be a star again, right?
So once a star explodes, why would that stuff become another star? And there’s a couple mechanisms, but the most important one in the universe is this process called galactic collisions. Because when two galaxies collide, all this material that had been spread far apart runs into material that had been spread far apart in another galaxy, and in that process, they create something called a stellar nursery.
And these stellar nurseries are the birthplace, the workhorse where all these new stars are born. Now, we look at the large universe and we kind of think, “Oh, man. Galaxies are colliding. It’s so random. It’s so crazy.” This is not too rare thing actually. Galaxies, on average, collide with other galaxies every billion or so years.
And then two large galaxies will collide with each other roughly every eight to nine billion years. And because of that, these processes actually is kind of that central process wherein all the scattered material that had been spread into the cosmos pulls back together into stars, creates the next generation, explodes again. Oh, and this is what it looks like. So basically galaxies far apart, a little closer, start to swirl around each other, right on top of each other, and then form into something new.
And these images are not the same galaxy because this happens over, you know, half a billion to a billion and a half years, but we took images of different galaxies in order to go show all the different steps in the process. Now, this leaves at least one more question, and this is why galaxies will collide in the first place. And it’s not a random process. It’s not we’re sitting around in a random accidental universe. It actually looks something like this.
So you see all these little dots. Every one of those little dots is a galaxy. And that red dot, and really we’re much smaller than the red dot there, that’s where you are right now. That’s our galaxy sitting amongst 100,000 other galaxies. And you see these lines that are swirling together, those lines aren’t galaxies, but this is basically the path of how these galaxies will swirl together.
Now, this feature is called Laniakea. It is the supercluster of galaxies that we’re within, and it contains over 100,000 galaxies. And it’s defined by what’s called a gravitational watershed. So do you guys know that thing, like, when there’s a mountain range, like the Rocky Mountains, and then you pour a bucket of water on the east side of Rocky Mountains, it’s going to go flow down to the gulf or the Atlantic.
You pour it on the other side of the Rocky Mountain, it’s going to flow down to the Pacific. This is exactly that same thing. There’s basically lines in the universe where, if a galaxy happens to be on one side of the line, it will swirl and dance with 100,000 galaxies over here. And if you drop it on the other side of the line, it’ll swirling and dance with 100,000 galaxies over there. And this is our dance.
And I think that the structure is an incredibly beautiful looking structure. To me, it looks like, you know, the petals of an orchid that are unfolding. And over the course of the next, you know, 5 to 10 billion years, we’re gonna slide along those lines and flow into each other. This structure is called Laniakea, which in Hawaiian means the “immeasurable heaven,” which is slightly ironic because when Brent Tully and team did it, they measured it. So one last thought about this. So quick review on the heart.
Really, if it was not for this, then the galaxies would not regularly collide. The galaxies do not regularly collide. We could not get so many generations of stars. Without those generations of stars, we could not accumulate the amount of iron that would be required to go create something like the Earth. And without that iron, we couldn’t move the blood that moves in every single one of our heartbeats right now. And in that way, from the very beginning, every one of our heartbeats is directly connected.
Second story. Okay, this is the story of the breath. Now, breathing is just one of these amazing pleasures in life. We do it unconsciously, but it can also be one of the most grounding, connecting things, just directly as a human being. But this thing that we take for granted is actually not a thing that was possible on this Earth three billion years ago.
Because three billion years ago, the composition of the atmosphere was something like this. Actually, we had about the same amount of nitrogen in the air, but we had almost no oxygen. We had 0.05% oxygen in the atmosphere, definitely not enough to support any of the breaths that we take today. And instead, we have a crap ton of carbon dioxide.
And what it actually meant was the Earth was basically entirely inhospitable, except for the tiniest, you know, a handful of single-celled organisms, that kind of figured out like in rock crevasses a way to exist. Now, lucky for us, one of those organisms was an organism called cyanobacteria, also called blue-green algae.
And you guys will probably come to like these guys by the end of the talk because they figured out this cool trick, which as far as we know has only been figured out one time in the entire history of the Earth. They figured it out this trick called photosynthesis. And with that trick, they are able to take sunlight and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, a thing never been done before and never been done since.
And given that, on the Earth three billion years ago, they started doing their trick. And little by little, producing oxygen, producing oxygen, taking all this carbon dioxide that was stuffing up the atmosphere and converting it little by little into oxygen. And this is how patient they were, basically took a billion years for that oxygen to go build up in the oceans before any of it started poking up into the atmosphere.
But even then we weren’t done. Because as it poked out into the atmosphere, the Earth just immediately absorbed it. So if you’ve ever seen like iron oxide, like the rusty colored hills, that’s actually oxygen being bound into the Earth. So they had to work for another billion years putting oxygen out without it accumulating into the atmosphere as the land started to suck up all this oxygen.
And once two billion years have passed of that, finally oxygen was able to begin accumulating in the atmosphere. So about 700 million years ago, something magical happened from the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere. And this chart shows the rough range of the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere over the last three billion years.
Enough oxygen got into the atmosphere that the ozone layer formed. And the ozone layer, you maybe don’t know it, but the ozone layer was a major breakthrough. Before that, you know, so much ultraviolet light was coming from the sun, it would blow apart any life, right? The only sorts of things that could exist before the ozone layer were these single cellular and very simple multicellular life.
There was no complex multicellular life before the ozone layer. Ozone layer forms, and shortly after, complex multicellular life starts to proliferate in the seas. You know, 100 million years after that, the first plants get on to land. You know, the sun was pretty harsh, there was literally nothing living on land until this happened, right? And then everything else that you know about biology, everything that you know nature to be happened after that.
So basically, here is the ozone layer, and here is all the stuff that you’ve ever heard of, right? So it is all due to the work of these tiny bacteria in the ocean chugging and chugging away for billions of years. And those bacteria actually never left us, because sometime along the way, plants got smart, and through a process called endosymbiosis, they actually captured those bacteria for their own good.
And all the green that you see in plants are actually the direct ancestors of these bacteria from three billion years ago. They’re called chloroplasts, now that they’ve evolved inside of a plant in an endosymbiotic way. But really, you probably ate some of these guys today. And from the beginning, not only did they create our atmosphere to now and into the foreseeable future, they are the other half of our lungs.
Every single time we breathe out, one of these guys is going to take that in and breathe it back to us. And without that, you know, clearly, there’d be no way for us to take a single breath. And through this process, through this sort of grit, if you will, of this organism, all of our breaths are connected.
Now, one other thought about this, so let’s say you were one of these organisms, and it was two billion years ago. And you get born into this world, and you live for a couple weeks, and then you die. It would be really easy for you to think that your life didn’t really mean anything at all, where you were born, you breathed, you know, swam around a bit, and then after two weeks you died, and the Earth seemed to basically be what it was before.
But what you wouldn’t have known is that every single breath that you took contributed to the possibility of countless life after you. And I think this is a valuable meditation because a lot of times in our own lives we are kind of struggling with, “Do we have this purpose?” And just wanna give you the thought that maybe the purpose of your life is longer than your consciousness lasts. The purpose of your life exists on this time frame that you will not be able to understand, but is more fundamental, more deep because of it.
All right, third story. This is the story of how our minds are connected. And I’m not gonna go into like a kind of mystical woo-wooed territory about like ESP and all sort of thing. Other speakers can talk about that. That’s really fine. Instead, I’m gonna talk about very concretely how all of our thoughts and minds are connected.
And I’m gonna do it through the story of this instrument, piano. Now anybody who’s seen somebody who’s really great play the piano, you just know that this is a magical thing, right? Basically, people can create joy, they can express pain, they can express so much complex the inner motion. They can do with force, they can do it with subtlety.
This instrument is a powerful, powerful instrument. And the people that play piano, professional musicians, or musicians of any stripe, if you were to kind of scan their brains and kind of see what’s going on, you actually see a good chunk of their brains, when they’re doing the stuff, is being dedicated to how to play the piano.
So their structures, you know, that are related to the movement of the fingers across the keys. There are structures that are related to music theory and how to relate that to what the piano is capable of doing, the motion of the pedal, and so on and so forth. So, of course, you know, if you do this sort of thing, you know, if you play the piano, you have these structures in your brain.
And all the people that play the piano have, you know, this kind of parallel structures in the brain that allows them to play the piano, of course. But I think that you may not have thought about this process is that before the year 1700, this was a set of patterns of the brain that was just not possible.
Because in the year 1700, the piano was invented. And literally, this type of beauty was not possible until that year 1700. And it took a bunch of centuries after that for people to develop all the different styles of piano playing for us to achieve the level of beauty that we have arrived at with the piano. Now, what does this mean for us?
Well, number one, it means that there’s a set of people that invented it, and their patterns of thoughts propagated forward and opened up the bound for many other people to go play around with this instrument. And that propagated forward for many other people to develop interesting styles and be able to teach other folks that then studied piano.
And really, this piece of work allowed us to open up entirely new vistas of human experience and possibility. And those thoughts were directly connected in a chain of possibility. Now, in the larger scope, I call this phenomenon the “palette of being.” Because what happens is every single one of us is born into a world where particular things are possible, right?
So you might be born into a world where it’s possible to become a pianist or a musician, it’s possible to become a computer scientist, it’s possible to become a dancer, it’s possible to become all these things. There are colors in the palette that you can go dabble in and paint from in order to create the masterpiece that is your life.
Now, the thing beyond that, which I think is way more profound, is that the colors don’t stay stable. The way that you live your life, you can add colors, right? The people that got together and took their mechanical engineering prowess and invented the piano, they added a color. It meant that every bit of civilization afterwards now has a new color to work with.
Outside of people that have invented things, just sometimes your way of being adds a new color, right? Kind of an aside., it’s like, I remember when Lady Gaga was coming up, I was like, “That’s so Madonna, what she’s doing,” right? And it’s because like Madonna came in here and she like just was a particular way. And then a generation later like somebody could look at that and he’s like, “I like that.”
And she’s not, you know, exact copy of…nobody will ever be. But she decided to use some of those colors that did not exist before in order to go paint with and do something phenomenal. And this is actually the opportunity of all of our lives to be able to not only deeply embrace and play with all the colors in the palette of being, but through what we create in this life, through our relationships, and through just our basic way of being to add colors to this so that future generations are able to invent, live, be in a different way with each other.
So closing on the arc of this first bit, I’ve covered three different arcs how the heart, the breath, and the mind are connected. And a thing that I often get when I talk about the universe at large is actually people feel really small. They feel like, “Man, all this stuff is happening. And the universe is so huge, and I’m nothing.” But not only is that kind of depressing, it’s also factually not true, right?
Because what happens in your life? In your life, the way that you live is going to affect your friends and family. The many friends and families that interact with each other are going to affect the way that society moves forward. The way that society moves forward is directly going to affect our relationship to the environment.
And the way that the environment evolves can directly affect the physical biosphere, the physical substrate on which biology lives upon. And if a little organism like cyanobacteria, through a couple billion years of patients, could completely change this world from smoking, lifeless, to green, and beautiful, and incredible, do not underestimate what you as human beings can do with that same sort of patience and that same sort of dedication.
That was part one, you can probably clap. All right. So I kind of covered the whole history of the universe and life. So we’re gonna kind of zoom in. We’re going to zoom in to just people because Mia asked me to try to make this practical for people. This is about your quest. So let’s talk about us for a second.
So number one, what are we, right? If we’re gonna talk about us like our lives, what exactly are we? Well, we’re made of about seven billion, billion, billion of these. So that is an image of an atom, specifically a hydrogen atom, and it’s probably appropriate because about two-thirds of the atoms in our body are hydrogen atoms.
So in a way, there’s nothing to be surprised that, like this is literally us all the time. So this is maybe the least remarkable thing. But a thing that might be remarkable about this is, if we were to look into the atom and try to understand it, the things that make it up, the protons, electrons, you know, I wrote underneath how long they exist for.
A proton exist for 10 to the 32 years, electron exist for 6.6 times 10 to the 28 years. I know that doesn’t mean that much for people that are that scientific. But just for reference, the universe has existed for this much time. The amount of time that an electron last is going to be a billion, billion times longer than the universe has existed.
This means all the stuff that you are made of right now is effectively immortal. It’s a mortal at like a level of comprehension that you cannot even begin to start wrapping your head around, because it has a level of stability which is actually much, much longer than the length of the universe so far. So that’s part one. We are basically a vessel for just this immortal stuff.
Part two is, what exactly do we do with us immortal stuff? Well, effectively, we are a continuous flame of inner becoming. And I did this calculation, they are pretty fun to do. But basically, I guess I have a different sense of fun than everybody at school.
In a given day, you basically bring in a little more than a kilogram of solid material, two and a half kilograms of water between what you drink and the water in your food. And you actually also interchange almost a kilogram of air. And what it actually means is that 7% of your body exchanges out in a single day.
That means yesterday, 7% of you, that was you yesterday, is not here anymore. And like the stuff that you are right now, tomorrow, 7% of that is gonna be gone. And you may not know, you may not have a sense of what 7% of the body is, but basically, that’s roughly the mass of your arm. So every single day one of those is leaving, and one of those is coming in, right?
And it means that over the course of two weeks, you actually exchange out an equivalent to the entire body mass of your body. So these are the atoms that are coming and going and, you know, the scientist in the room will say, “Well, you know, that’s not all the atoms, of course. It’s gonna be highly leaning toward the water, and it’s going to lean toward carbon dioxide.”
Yes, it is true. But even the stuff that is seemingly more permanent, like the calcium in your bones, and all that sort of thing, 98% of all of that cycles out within a year, right? So you think that you are you, but really from two weeks ago, you kind of aren’t.. And definitely from a year a year ago, you’re definitely not.
And we’re constantly in the state of inner becoming. And what are we inner becoming with? We’re inner becoming with this. So this is the whole Earth, and these are just the winds, right, at two different altitudes above sea level. And you can see like the brighter areas are moving at 150 kilometers per hour.
What this actually means is that the breaths that you’re taking right now part of that was literally on the other side of the planet four or five days ago. It also means that the stuff that you’re exhaling right now, you know, four or five days from now could be becoming a flower in Germany or the Sudan.
And this is not like theoretical. This is literally exactly what’s happening. Part of you today was these plants a couple days ago. Part of you tomorrow is going to be them, you know, both locally, just around you in the next couple minutes, and within the next couple days, literally everywhere on the planet.
And this is how much we are interconnected with our planet. This is how much we are constantly becoming our planet. And our sense of separation from the planet like we need to protect nature, or humanity needs to have its priorities, we are that, right? So to the extent that humanity is a priority then that also must become a priority.
Now, this is all stuff that is true. And I know that once I did those slides it’s like, “Oh, they really like the slides,” but then I was like, “Oh, I did not answer Mia’s question at all.” What the hell is with the quest, right? I did enjoy the calculations, but what was the quest? But this is all the stuff that we are, and now what are we supposed to do?
And I thought actually after that description, some of it kind of feels a little ungrounded because in some ways we’re immortal, right? We’re literally made of immortal stuff from moment to moment. In other ways, we’re so ephemeral we can’t even conceive of it. We are the Earth, and the Earth is us in a very short amount of time constantly every single second.
But it actually turns out that there is something that remains. It isn’t all just like a bundle of flux. And just to give you a sense of it, here’s a simple chart. So basically, as life propagates forward and does its thing, it gets to operate with things like cells at the level of an organism, at the level of ecosystem.
And the wisdom of all the things that life does, accumulates in a couple places. It accumulates in DNA. It accumulates in epigenetics, in order to lead to different types of epigenetic expression. It accumulates in behavior that’s passed down from one parent organism to a child organism.
So basically, all the stuff that we’re doing, even though it’s constantly in flux, actually something is accumulating. Basically, life will work with these things and accumulate as these things. And just as I talked about the palette of being, the same is true with the mind.
The way that we think our world views, the way that we organize our societies actually accumulate into something, right? And actually, all these are in quotes right now because we don’t really have very good language for this yet. As a discipline, this is pretty new territory for the human race.
So at sometimes, we call it “collective consciousness”, sometimes we call it “society’s source code.” I’ve heard it referred to as psychological or psychic DNA in order to be paralleled to physical DNA. But the reason I wanted to give this talk really is that the people in this room are literally a part of creating this new territory, right?
You guys are both the students of all these technologies of the mind and all these technologies of being. And you are also the creators and teachers, many of you, of the same. And I kind of sat back and I tried to look at all these teachings, and as with all things, I tried to make some sense of it.
And this is the best sense of it that I could make so far. Because this is new territory and effectively what we’re doing as a tribe, as a group of people, is we’re consciously building a new tool kit for the psyche. Now as I looked at all these teachings, there’s both just beautiful teachings all over the place, but sometimes you hear these teachings and they sound contradictory.
Or sometimes you hear a teaching and literally the teacher will say a thing that invalidates or obviates another teaching, and I was like, “Well, is this really true?” So I stepped back and I made a map of the entire space. Really, there’s four different places where the teachings land. One is in the realm of serviceable discomfort, right?
So basically, you’re sitting on the couch, and there’s like teachers that will come in and be like, “Come on, get off the couch,” and you are, “Oh, okay.” And then like as soon as you get off the couch, you’re like, “And here’s how we’re going to get things done. Here’s your calendars. Here’s a…” like all these productivity people, right? It’s a little bit uncomfortable. “Here’s how you do your marketing funnel.” “Okay, great, great.” But I’m saying, you know, it’s a little uncomfortable, but like when you do it, it’s of service. This is serviceable discomfort.
Then there’s disserviceable discomfort. What this is is these are the people that work with the ways that we are disserviceable to ourselves and society, and are super uncomfortable about it. So when people carry a huge amount of personal shame, and that’s an example where it’s really disserviceable to you, it’s really disserviceable to society, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable, right?
And you have folks like Brené Brown and other folks that are really just diving into that and saying, “Let’s go work with shame. Let’s really bring it out into the light. Let’s try to, you know, create healing there.” There’s another category which is disserviceable comfort. And these are the realm of addictions, right?
Because it is not serviceable to yourself or the world at all, but it feels really comfortable. Like, wouldn’t it be much better to just be higher? Wouldn’t it be much better to just sit on the couch and just watch, you know, binge on 10 shows in a row? And wouldn’t it be more comfortable to be a workaholic instead of ever seeing what you’re doing?
Our addictions feel comfortable to us, and there’s amazing teachers and people that are building a new consciousness tool kit around helping people in that zone. And then the last zone is serviceable comfort. These are the things that we can do that both are useful for the world and make us feel good.
So things like meditation, or restorative yoga, or dance, like these sorts of things just feel amazing, and they are also serviceable to the world. So, I created this because I know all of you have both learned from these sorts of people, and many of you are these types of people. And I think a map like this helps us to be more disciplined about the way that we’re collectively creating a tool kit with each other.
Like, we don’t need to be fighting over these lines. Like really, every single tool that we can make for people in any of these places is something that adds to the totality of how we are going to evolve consciousness together. I’m gonna go leave you with one thought, which is, beyond what we add to the tool kit, every one of us lives a trajectory on this.
We might start in, you know, a sense of shame, and then we work, and then we find a little bit of serviceable comfort, but it wasn’t, you know, we really hadn’t released the shame. Then we are back in addiction, and so on, and eventually we escape that through a couple cycles of that.
Or maybe, you know, we’re there and we’ve bounced between shame and addiction for our entire lives. And when we teach these things, and like when people are marketing these things, they’re always like, “Oh, well, you’re gonna live your best life and all that sort of thing.” And I think actually there’s a lot to that. It’s a beautiful intention, and for many people, it really does do that for them.
So very exciting work in that regard. But I’m gonna leave you with a thought, which is, even if the person that at hand would never become conscious, if their life really was just this trajectory between shame and addiction, shame and addiction, may eventually overdosed or left this life for committed suicide.
Even that is something that expands our consciousness in a way that serves, right, because the friends of that person will go recognize what these patterns do to a human being. They feel that pain and they carry that forward in service to all the other people that they interact with, right?
And a lot of the teaching that we’re trying to do are really effectively compassionate teachings. Because what it is saying is, you know, sometimes, even if you are like the Dalai Lama, and you’re pretty darn chill and you’ve done a lot of work on yourself, you’re still gonna have a lot of discomfort in your life.
You’re still gonna have a really tough life. But really, what we get to teach is, can we be conscious in present in that process? Not so much like, can you nail it and make a billion dollars and, you know, be on the cover of what have you, right? Like, those things are temporary and illusory.
Like, these sort of things that we do which is the deep work of being inside of ourselves, living our lives with full presence, are the things that are contributive to the collective consciousness and the expansion of consciousness in the universe. And even the ones that do not get a chance to live that consciously also do so as well. They’re worthy, and we see them, and in the process of seeing them, our consciousness continues to expand. Thank you.
Vishen: I hope you enjoyed that talk. Many people tell me that they wanna listen to that over and over and over and over again. And even memorize what Tom said because these are such great parables to share with our friends, with our family to help teach them the idea of unity and connectedness.
I do wanna recommend that if you’re really into this talk, check it out in YouTube, so can also see the slides from Tom. Just go to our A-Fest channel on YouTube. And for those of you who would love to actually come to A-Fest, which is the event Mindvalley puts on, where we bring in amazing speakers like Tom Chi, check afest.com, A-F-E-S-T.com.
Put in an application, it’s like 10. So it’s a world-class event, but because of the sheer demand for people to attend, it’s application days, and we bring in influencers from around the planet, and put them in front of men and women like Tom Chi, who help them become better human beings. So that collectively, we can help spread and lighten their ideas. I hope to see you at A-Fest Sunday. In the meanwhile, I hope you enjoyed this “Mindvalley Podcast.”
