The Cognitive Bias of Declinism: Chasing Truth in a Changing World

Episode #164 - Jeff Hardy Declinism Bias

00:00 Jeffrey Besecker This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Biesecker. Our burdens. Not only do we struggle to define them as a universal collective, we also find it challenging to unravel them. The sixth human mass extinction is an example of this existential phenomena. Our planet, unarguably, is in decline. Yet, as a global collective of humanity, we often find ourselves remised for an effective cure. The intractable crises of planetary survival is not without timely solutions. Yet to most people, the solutions seem strangely foreign, like science fiction. With doom and gloom, both media and science weaving a harrowing narrative of our imminent demise, the end is near. Our destruction? Inevitable. Is there an incalculable truth within this tale, or are we chasing a fevered dream? A change is at hand, yet the change to what? Uncertain. In the beginnings of an age of illusion, how is a conscientious soul to discern the truth? The only thing standing between us and non-existence? A viable solution. Frustrations expanding like the requiem of a slow dream, so too are passions for change slowly dying. Our only hope? Thoughtful action. Today we look at how a common cognitive bias known as declineism might be the only thing between the so long and hello again of human evolution. Tune in to find out how we can forgo these often debilitating limitations of declineism to forge a new dawn of change, when we return to the light inside. Fevered dreams are vivid, often bizarre or unpleasant dreams sleepers can experience when they are ill or have a fever. These dreams happen similarly to other dreams. Although they can occur during any stage of sleep, most vivid dreams happen during rapid eye movement or REM sleep. During such an episode, the individual dreamer neither fully asleep nor fully awake, finding themselves lingering in a strangely disoriented Neverland. Often when suddenly shaken back to a reality that is wake time, those who experienced fevered dreams find themselves bewilderedly disoriented. Is this fiction or is this truth? The conundrum of climate change can often appear as this fevered dream. With its impact in imminent solutions endlessly unfathomable. In a world where illusions are constantly projected into the media, converted into perceived reality and becoming cultural worldviews, how can a benign soul make an authentic choice? How can righteous laws and outcomes be designed in light of the predictable fallibilities of human perceptions, delinquencies and self-serving behaviors? As a consequence, the lies become truth and the possibility of having a global superconductive culture of conscious eroded. Life on Earth has a high probability of surviving. Even so, maintaining the dignity of all life is a completely feasible goal, in that desired change is only one action plan away. Our guest Jeff Hardy has made a career of caring for the health of others. A 50 year veteran of career facility design, Jeff has founded hospitals globally and through his service became a de facto voice for world peace. Now as an author in his book To Care for Peace, in an effort to end the sixth human mass extinction, he issues a global mandate to secure the second human evolution. Jeff, what is the sixth human mass extinction and how does it affect humanity as we exist in this current dimension of reality?

04:00 J. Hardy I would think that you can answer the first part of that question better than I. I am not focused at all on the sixth human extinction.

04:10 Jeffrey Besecker I'm focused on the second human evolution that has not occurred yet. What an inspiring way to illustrate that call to action and to effectively apply those principles. Jeff, unconscious behavior patterns and the declinism bias play crucial roles in exasperating the cycles of belief that often occur behind the theory of the sixth mass extinction. In this episode we look at one unconscious behavior pattern specifically that significantly diminishes our ability as humans to shift this cycle of evolution. The declinism bias is a cognitive bias that influences our perspective of the future, leading us to believe that things were better in the past and are getting worse over time. This bias is often caused by our tendency to focus on the negative aspects of the present while ignoring the positive aspects of the past.

05:04 J. Hardy How do you feel this declinism bias influences our ability to positively address future change? Well I would say that my perspective is to not be the deer in the headlights. And what I say to my wife and my children and my friends is don't worry, act. Get that stick out of my backside and let's aim for the carrot. And I'm much more positive driven and my career has been focused on action towards getting away from that negativity and avoiding the problems that we're headed toward extinction. I mean that's just a fact. So what am I going to do? Be the deer in the headlights or am I going to act as though while that's true, why just sit around not doing something? And so my final action in my life, my career was to go to Myanmar, which is the country that's to the left of Thailand for anybody who doesn't know where Burma is, which is quite understandable. But we went to Myanmar, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, and built a community development and health center. And by doing that, we inspired the government, the region, the state, and the villagers to do something, to grow, to become a wonderful village that was so far away from civilization that they knew of or that they knew about or that they experienced that when they saw us coming, they thought we were zombies or something. I don't know. But the key is we started a nonprofit organization called Care for Peace. And that's not just an adage that sounds good. We believe that if you actually care, then you will have peace. And so it's that whole positive energy that helps us get away from doomsday talk and doomsday feelings and gives us purpose and allows us to find a purpose in that, not just take the

07:25 Jeffrey Besecker purpose but use it. Share with us a bit of your background and how you landed in this specific direction of focus.

07:34 J. Hardy My background was long time ago. I was a hospital corpsman like a nurse in the United States Coast Guard Reserve. And during my active duty, I took care of Vietnam vets who were coming back from the war. And that is when the aha moment of the actual act of caring produces a kind of peace that is absolutely the opposite of the kind of peace we think about when we're thinking about the space between wars or after war or sitting up on top of a mountain with your legs crossed and thinking about whatever you're thinking about that is not connected to humanity and the humanity that is right there in front of you. And my background began those days in the Coast Guard 50 years ago. And then it gradually became an amazing experience when I met nurses all over the world who were feeling the same as I and doing that care and finding that peace and discovering the most wonderful feeling in the world of peace that you get when you're taking care of people. And only after my career of helping some of the richest corporations in America like Columbia, HCA, Kaiser, helping build hospitals, plan hospitals, manage hospitals, that I decided I would turn everything over and start my own nonprofit organization and help people in the world in places like Nigeria, Vietnam, Kenya, and finally Myanmar, helping them get what it was on a nonprofit basis that I had been helping people who were in the rich countries all my life. And Care for Peace did a full circle beginning that day in the Coast Guard and then finally graduating to the point where we were showing a country that it's possible to care for your people and have peace for the people. All of a sudden, the definition of Care for Peace expanded. So what my hunch is, is that if we just keep going, we should be able to do that for the world and avoid getting the sixth human extinction while we're still alive. I don't want to be there. I want to live, my kids to live, my grandkids, great grandkids to live. So that's where we're at right now and that's where it began.

10:25 Jeffrey Besecker Let's begin, if we might, by looking at a much larger assumption, if we could. Why should we focus so much energy on this phase of our conscious existence if our human state of

10:37 J. Hardy being is merely a transitory response to consciousness? That's a challenging question because it goes to who I am and what I do because that's the only answer I can give you. My answer is based on my experience and my experience is that I'm not going to sit around waiting because why sit around waiting for this sixth extinction? I'm not at that level. That's not who I am. It's not where I'm going and I just don't understand the idea that as a deer caught in the headlights, do we just stand there and wait till splat? Whatever it was that was behind those headlights plows into us. I'm not there and I can't get there. It's not who I am. Your question is challenging and I appreciate it because there are a lot of people in the world who are saying, oh my gosh, it's the cartoon with the guy holding the placard on New York Street saying the world is coming to an end. I'm saying, well, please, would you get out of the way? I'm trying to pass you. I'm not, okay, so the world's coming to an end. What do you do with the placard at night? You just kind of put it beside your bed and go to sleep and then get up in the morning and I guess the world didn't come to an end. Grab my placard, run out the street. The world's coming to an end. Oh no, I can't do it. I'm not there. Now, if you're looking at a Stephen Jay Gould answer to your question, I think that it's a marvelous question because we have to look at how did the dinosaurs get wiped off the earth? Why did a lot of animals disappear during that time? What are the differences between the first evolution, the second evolution, and the third evolution that occurred in the destruction and how the world has changed? As I say, I'm not there and I'm not the man to talk to when it comes to doomsday talk. Stephen Jay Gould did a marvelous job of chronicling and he got a Nobel Prize for it too. So when it comes to extinction, it's there,

12:52 Jeffrey Besecker I'm sure, but I'm not there. That was intentionally loaded to be that kind of expansive question that allows us to kind of frame the context of today's talk. From that perspective, even though our lives are transitory, focusing on this stage of existence allows us to appreciate the beauty of life and gain insight into the nature of consciousness. In that regard, in many aspects, it allows us to form some significance and meaning to why we're here. It also provides the opportunity to make a positive impact on the lives of others as we travel through this journey of life. From that regard, specifically, how does the declineism bias affect our ability to create a more expansive level of change throughout our lives, especially in regard of halcyon models of mass extinction?

13:43 J. Hardy I don't know the answer to that question and I find it a good question to be asking. The halocene is something that is actually a new word and I'm not sure that it has even taken the meme power, the power of everybody's using the word. Because when I mention the halocene, people say, well, now what is that? Is that something that—where is the anthropocene and the other epochs, this equation? What's the difference? I'll explain. Well, it's 11,700 years ago, is the date that the scientists are putting on it, but it really hasn't taken hold because it doesn't have a foothold in our mentality yet. And I think that as we move in that direction in understanding the direction of being able to use a common word, which it has not become yet, I think that we will be discussing where we're at now, which I consider to be the suspended human evolution between the first human evolution that really ended sometime in the mid-'60s, when humans decided that they can control nature, when the mutually assured destruction became the rule of the global community that we could kill everything if we want. And that's the end of the first human evolution. And so here we are in this suspended human evolution, not really knowing what's going to happen. And not knowing what's going to happen is part of the wondering process that keeps us saying, well, do we just sit around and wait for the extinction, or do we look at potential for human-inspired, created, second human evolution? And my focus is, okay, how do we get there? Wow, that'd be great. Why don't we take this idea of the eventual extinction and allow it to kick us in the butt and say, okay, guys, until that point, if that's a foregone conclusion, fine. Until that point, what are we going to do? And that's where I'm at right now. And I enjoy the inspiration that the sixth extinction challenges us because someone has put their finger on it. That's not yet a meme, but boy, it's close to it. It's close to it. It's not in the nightly news, but I think that we're getting to the point where the global mentality is, okay, there's too many people. We have overconsumption, over-militarization, overpopulation, all these overburdening the planet. Should we just keep going? Or hey, is there something else that we could do? So that's where I'm at. Where are you at? Where are you thinking in terms of where we're going

16:59 Jeffrey Besecker as a human race? And where are we in that trajectory towards whatever the future? That whole notion of the meme or social condition in and of itself becomes a very limiting, biased framework of viewing our human existence from the ground up. I'm going to reel it way back there. Are we even human? We're going to go way back there. Are we even human? Or did we arrive here by some other means? That can be a very dissettling perspective for a lot of people to reel back. Rather than going back to some of our socially cultured beliefs, rather we go back to looking at some of our religious models of existence and how we transpired. We're starting to see some things on the horizon, I'll say on the horizon, quite literally seeing things on the horizon that suggest there are other ways of being within our consciousness. When we look at the extraterrestrial phenomena, what does it mean to be here present as a conscious being? I'm going to leave that very open because I am starting to look into and lean into some very broad perspectives on that. Openly and vulnerably accepting that acknowledgement that we may have been engineered in some regards. We may have been plunked down here by another conscious entity, another conscious realm. Perhaps part of our limitation is that view alone that we thought

18:28 J. Hardy we were here subjectively alone. I appreciate philosophy. Philosophy, in my opinion, is to go along with life, not be life. And yet there are philosophers who they eat, sleep, breathe, and survive while they are philosophizing. I am not smart enough or I'm just not there enough to be doing what you're suggesting, which I really appreciate. We need philosophy. I need philosophy because it's what inspires me now. And when I hear people talking, and if you go to a church and you listen to the religious information and discussions, you're hearing thoughts that are the reasons for us to be alive and believe what we believe. My difficulties are the only answers that I find useful or the ones that I can find and use today. An example of that would be my father-in-law, who is an ordained minister, was a SACCLEAR chaplain in the United States Air Force. And I went to many of his services, which were non-denomination but pan-denominational services, and he would always bring it down in his sermon to today. So he'd have a biblical verse that he would recite and discuss, but then he'd say, now let's talk about how we make lemonade out of lemons. I remember that was one. And I remember everybody in the pews were chuckling because he was bringing it right down to now. And that's where I'm at. I can't think about the extraterrestrial stuff or the fact that I guess the Navy is starting to chronicle all the UFOs and there's discussion about having a whole division in the military for UFO sightings and all. And I find that fascinating. I'm not against it or for it. It's just, it's great. I enjoy it. I watch the news and see the latest flash on the screen. But again, it's not my purpose in life. My purpose is to act, is to do something and to do something for myself, for my family, and for humanity. I want my kids and my grandkids to say, my father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather didn't just talk about it. He did something about it. And that's one of my spiritual goals right now. I don't know if that speaks to you or speaks to the things that you're talking about, but I think that the philosophies of life need to be part of our wondering. They need to be part of our conscience. They need to be part of what we think about as we start falling asleep at night. And they need to be part of our prayers and our thoughts. That's where philosophy belongs in my opinion and in my life.

21:48 Jeffrey Besecker Our memories of the past often foggy, and our present perceptions colored by this truism. Being aware of declineism could help us remember that when we think back fondly over the past, we're romanticizing our memories. However, emotions have a powerful impact on our cognitive processes. An awareness of bias alone may not be enough to counter the effects of declineism on our mindset and overall wellbeing. Pessimistic views of the present or future may cloud our ability to make rational decisions. It may therefore be best to start by countering this negative view. Looking at that role of implicit memory or reflecting upon the past, we'll frame that a little more open, reflecting on the past, our past beliefs shaping our present perception and our future prospects. In that regard, the declineism bias is that tendency to assume that the future will be worse automatically than the present or that the implications are leading us to that subjectively worse state. In that regard, what role do you think our present level of ego development and emotional competency play in addressing these issues and how might that affect how that surfaces in the potential limiting beliefs we create around the ability to create

23:14 J. Hardy that change? That's a juicy question. Here's my visual. My visual is that I'm on a track right now and these philosophies like declineism are on their tracks that are speeding by right next to me and it's like, oh, I'm not on that track, but it's a fascinating track to look at. It's a, who's on that track and is it pulling us? Is it pushing us or is it irrelevant? Is anybody on that track or is it just a track that exists and the cars, the train cars are going at light speed and there's not a whole lot I can do about it. But I think that declineism and you talk about the past and the past beliefs are fascinating to me, especially when I look at my own thoughts, my own evolution from being a baby, crying and everything and then believing in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and then Santa Claus and then going to church and hearing some of the wonderful things that were coming out of that, the lessons, the life lessons that have been given to us from the past. The Christian religion was such an unbelievable lesson, lessons for me for the whole first part of my life and then going to college and learning about other religions and philosophies and then especially traveling all over the world building hospitals. I experienced wonderful people. My wife and I worked in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf for one year. I really got to know the Arab religions, which was at the time mostly Sunni and Shia. The people that we worked with were mostly Arabic and some Jewish, but mostly the religions that our hospital owners would be espousing. And so we learned all about these other religions that were alive today. And I talked to people who had also been born with interesting understandings of the world and how it got to be where it was at that time on that day and then how they had changed because of that gradual growth in their own spiritual development. And I think that the isms are the ones that sometimes get in our way of progressing the next step because the key to progress is to be constantly looking at the next step and trying to not be burdened by decisions that were made for you or by you in the past, even if it's the recent past. And that's where opinions a lot of times get in our way of thinking about what that next step is. So when I think about decline-ism, for instance, I say, okay, that might actually be a fact. And it's not really an ism. We're declining. Look at what's happening in the world, what has happened. So I don't even think that's an ism. I think that's a fact. And so the question then becomes, what's the next step? And if we can't look at what the next step is, then what's the point? Are we just going to be the deer caught in the headlights or are we going to say, hey, wait a minute, I'm going to step aside and let that car pass. And then I'm going to keep thinking about what the next step is because in my opinion, the next step as we are in this suspended human evolution phase, where we're actually thinking about what the second human evolution will be at my bequest, at my action, what's the next step? And I think the next step is what you're doing. It's talking about it. It's discussing this with different people and getting input from a whole bunch of different people. That's why when I look at folks like you, I realize that you're the one who has a handle on thinking about and discussing the next step, because I don't know what the second human evolution is. I'm not going to let decline-ism be a fact and say, okay, that car is coming at it, its headlights are in my eyes, what am I going to do about it? What am I going to do about it? I'm going to step aside and let it pass because we've got more important things to do right now. And that's to do exactly what you're doing, discussing what the second human evolution might be because we're in charge of it. And we need to use our knowledge and feeling and spiritual connection with God in our quest to find what the second human evolution will be.

28:28 Jeffrey Besecker Our emotions, especially those we label negative, have a strong impact on our decision-making, making it difficult to make rational and logical decisions. In that regard to counter-declinism, we can try to remind ourselves that nostalgia warps our view of the past, and negative bias does the same for our present. What role or what effect do you feel experiential learning might have in

28:55 J. Hardy limiting that ability to view a new perspective that might lead to that change? Well, the question has the answer in it. I mean, what is the perception? I mean, I accept the question hypothetically because what do we do with negativity? Well, my kid came up to me once, he was six or seven years old, and we were headed to the sea world. And he had seen photographs of this gigantic whale jumping up and splashing and then jumping up again, and then coming up to the edge of the water and kissing a selected child. There were 2,000 people in the audience. Well, my son came up to me and he says, the whale won't kiss me. The whale won't kiss me. I said, well, there's only one way to guarantee that the whale will kiss you. And so we got a big piece of cardboard out, we got a felt-tip marker, put a big heart on it, and we wrote, kiss me, kiss me, all over the card. And so we went to sea world and he went right up to the front of the audience and he held his sign up. And Ed McMahon, the guy who used to be Johnny Carson's sidekick, was the one who was the emcee that day. And when he came on out, he said, well, I guess we know who the whale's going to kiss today, won't we? And my son got the best lesson in the world, which is, don't be saying negative things and don't think negative things. Turn it around. Convert it to something that you can use. Use is very important. Use, to me, is more important than anything else. Democracy is only useful if it is based on common sense. So you can look at anything, any ism that's out there. And if there isn't a way you can use it, then what's the point of having it? And that's where declineism is wonderful because it reminds us, hey, we better do something

31:10 Jeffrey Besecker about it. We better use something if we can't use it. So I say, okay, declineism, yeah, well, you know what? The whale won't kiss me. I'm going to turn that one around. Been doing some interesting study. I'll say study and observation on the Gaia channel lately on sacred geometry and the power of harmonic frequency. You know, the frequencies we put out in our actions, our emotions, our being, and how there is very hard scientific evidence of how we can shift those frequencies just like a magnet, very much like a magnet, same principle, to attract those things toward us that we desire, those things that are truly beneficial. An episode is in the works down the road on this very podcast looking at that. So in that regard, as we look at things from a larger geopolitical and social scale, these unconscious patterns that we view from our past often compound those implicit biases that repel our ability to affect that change. We look at some of our modeled behaviors or model beliefs about consumption over consumption, deforestation, forestation, how we use things, as you mentioned, matters. Pollution, you know, there again, are we

32:35 J. Hardy being economically and socially mindful of our patterns of how we utilize our resources? Touche. I flashed on an experience we were designing a hospital that was in Cambodia, and we found out about a hospital that had been designed around Feng Shui. And I realized that you can take some of these spiritual connection to geometry and to mathematics and science and convert it to architectural design that is very important to the spirituality of the people who use that architectural facility, design facility. And I realized that that's one aspect of taking something that is existing and converting it to something that's positive. And then when I hear you talking about the deforestation and some of the negative things and how we're going to turn that around, this is a Feng Shui that we are working with right now trying to figure out. And one of the things that I thought was fascinating about China was how they could take 500,000 people and say, okay, you guys, you're going to plant trees right now. And they planted trees. I just find that to be a wonderful thing. And by the way, I don't look at countries. I look at the global situation. I look at because the second human evolution has to be a global, not a internationalist movement. It does have to be globalist. And I don't think that when we use the words globalism and globalist right now, we are incorrectly using it. We are using that word incorrectly. We are thinking about multinationalism and multinationalist, but we're not thinking about global, looking at things from a global standpoint. And to be able to get to the second human evolution, we're going to have to forget what country is involved in something. We have to look at what's happening to humanity, with humanity, for humanity at this moment in time. And that's where I look at China and people will say, well, what about the one child policy? That was horrible. I said, yeah, but it didn't work. And we learned something from that. That was an experiment. And thanks to John Meacham, the incredibly wonderful Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the American Gospel and many, many books that are about Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, you name it, he has really brought some thoughts and ideas into our common understanding. And I think one of the directions that he's helped us with is where we really take what has been brought forward and look at what it is from a global standpoint, such as the crisis against humanity, what Prigotsin is doing to represent Putin over there in Ukraine, where he's a diabolical and a very evil human being. And so we have to start looking at what are definitions of evil and what are definitions of what's right, what's wrong on a global standpoint. That's wrong. That's what he's doing is wrong. But it's called the experiment. And John Meacham talks about the American experiment. And so this is all experimental and it's okay if we label it, as I just did about Prigotsin, that this warmonger, this horrible person who's leading these armies for Putin, I'm probably really at fault at saying he's a bad guy and evil. There might be something wrong about that. I doubt it.

36:45 Jeffrey Besecker The full picture all the time. Sometimes there are subtexts there, not to be inherently defensive of the man, but defending the theory and concept. What is he pushing back against in that globalism? Ultimately, his charges, from what I perceive, against globalism. Might he be alluding to being in a much broader loop politically? There are very real imperialistic factions of globalism that are seeking to dominate us as species, that are seeking to work for their own benefit and gain, are seeking to work geopolitical and social agendas that are harmful and destructive to the human race. Might there be some truth that he is, in his own way, battling back against those forces and we're only programmed and conditioned to believe he is now the evil

37:36 J. Hardy dictator trying to thwart something less nefarious? Yeah, that's scary. The reason why I say that's scary, it reminds me of a conversation I witnessed. Well, it was inspired by one of my college professors who said, okay, well, what would have happened to the human race if all those people in the Stalin murder were still alive and all the people that were murdered, Mao and Hitler, were still alive? What if one person pointed it out and one of the students pointed it out? Well, yeah, you have to also include what modern medicine has done to increase the population of the world. So yeah, I mean, you've thrown out a very important challenge to this whole discussion

38:21 Jeffrey Besecker about what's ultimately right might presently be wrong out. There's always multiple sides, multiple dimensions to that being, to that existence. And it's not even about two sides to every coin. That's right. The coin itself doesn't actually even have two sides when we really focus on the dimensionality of it. And that's going really broad. But we program ourselves again to those biases of only seeing those limited views, those black and white perspectives. A lot of times there again, we're going back to those conditioned beliefs and those implicit biases of our own memory, of our own experience, of our own reflection even. Sometimes we're not seeing any further than the nose on our own face, our own ego development. We by and large are conditioned as a society not to move beyond those first, second and third perspectives of ego that place the self first. I see a proliferation and growth in some of those conditioned beliefs now where we are turning even deeper in developing that concept of self, rather than being able to step back into those fourth perspectives and beyond of selflessness to see from someone else's view, to see with equanimity, to consider multiple frames of

39:44 J. Hardy perspective. Very good. I think that the key is that when I hear you say, see, see, just with your eyes, that's an action. That's something that you are doing. You aren't closing your eyes and just relying on everything that's already in your brain. You're seeing what's out there. We have to do some failure avoidance when it comes to new information. We have to make sure that we allow the new information to come into our sensoria and allow it to merge and challenge what's already in our brain. In that process, we are allowing the movement of ideas to continue our challenge is to take new information and allow it to wrestle with what's already in there. One of my favorite expressions is that the process is the solution. It's not the system is a solution. The system like the AT&T commercial that says the system is a solution. No, the system is the result of a process. You have to look at what the process is. When I'm listening to your challenges today, I'm hearing in everything that you have challenged, I'm hearing an underlying question. What's the process? Where are we in that process? Where are we taking it? When you talk about the sixth human extinction, I'm hearing, are we close to the end? Is the end near? Is it that guy in New York with the placard walking up and down the street saying, the end is near, prepare for Armageddon or whatever? Or do we have some time? If we have some time, what are we going to do with our time? Are we going to be the near with the headlights pointed at us? Do we just stand still or do we move? I think the process here is the solution. I really appreciate your challenges because every single one of your challenges has a process attached to it. What we have to do with processes is figure out where we are in the beginning of the process to the end of the process. That's not always easy because we are biased. It's a word said many times today. What's our confirmation bias? What's our bias to any kind of a movement that we will need to go

42:15 Jeffrey Besecker into the next step? Perhaps, and this is throwing a broad spectrum consideration out there, the depth of the concept of our humanness is that next phase of evolution. What we've constructed our meaning to be human might itself be a flawed process. There again, a lot of that concept of ego development is ensued in that principle. Me first, part of that model automatically negates and rejects our unity and connection with other beings on every level of consciousness. The moment we separate from that, we've already extincted our existence from a much broader collective of energy and being. Yeah, couldn't say it better myself. Well done. It's broad scope philosophy if you want to call it that. I don't mind stepping up to that ledge and looking over and saying simply to ask the question is the process. I'm going to reel back a second here. You mentioned relying on our eyes as sense. Now from recent study I'm doing, discovered a principle that says our eyes, our basic five senses are a secondary line of sense that overrides automatically our energetic sense of consciousness. We don't see first with the eyes is the new concept behind that. We see and sense first with the energy and then look for a program meaning we believe through the eyes. Concept that's already created and imprinted in our mind and then we look for evidence to validate or verify our constructed reality of truth. Again, that's another direction we hope to walk down later on with an episode we're putting together to bring more meaning together with this. All of our solutions don't always transpire in the present. We have that kind of aspect of moving toward that future where that reality surfaces.

44:13 J. Hardy Good. So I'm going to reel back. I know we've went down a lot of curves here. Yeah, but you know, I mean, you just put your finger on it and I really appreciate it and I think that must have been the concluding sentence here for our, except my dog.

44:35 Jeffrey Besecker From that perspective, I know we've went really broad today. If you could offer three very pertinent tips to Dan, how we can change that framework to have a more constructive positive outlook and positive model for change to create that second wave of human evolution. What might those be?

44:54 J. Hardy Well, I think first you have to focus on yourself and that's what I'm trying to do and then focus on your neighborhood and I think we're all doing that by trying to sort our garbage and then start or just continue the discussion and continuing the discussion is probably the most important thing that we're doing right now. That's what you and I are doing right now. So three things, work with yourself and I think that we need to start looking at what the words are that we use and if we need to start using the word globalization in the way it's supposed to be used, which is not internationalization or nationalization, but globalization, then we need to look at what the answers are to the challenging questions of the day, what we need to do and I think that's starting to happen. I think as we look at global warming, we are starting to look at what we need to do to either arrest the development of global warming or stick our heads in the sand like the ostrich, but I think that the whole process that we're doing by discussing it really needs to reach a crescendo point where it's loud enough that our leaders, chosen or not, need to get their acts together and help us get our act together with them. I don't know if that's the answer to your question, but I think that keep talking about it is really, really important and keep thinking about what you can do to just move the discussion forward because we are not going to define the second human evolution on our own. It's going to have to be a global effort and it only has just begun and when I wrote the book, To Care for Peace, I wrote that book that would have tools for people to use in that discussion because that's my role. My role is as a facilitator of the discussion and that is no different than your role in this discussion because you are doing much more than I am right now. Well, thank you. Well, you are and taking the negatives and the worries and the problems that are there and stepping aside from the lights that are glaring in our faces, that's what you're doing. And I laud that. I laud that. I think that I can't do a podcast. I don't have that makeup. I've always been a facilitator and an amateur philosopher, if you want to call it that. A lot of the stuff that I'm coming up with are philosophy-based, but really philosophy-based on what we need to do now. It's focused on the next step. How are we going to get to the second human evolution? Okay, well, let's talk about it. That's what I'm doing. What you're doing is you are leading that charge. You are leading that talk and that's more valuable than I can tell you. I hope that there are a lot of people like you who are continuing this discussion,

48:12 Jeffrey Besecker but all I say to you is please keep doing what you're doing. Thank you from the universe. Thank you. Namaste, the light in me, knowledge is the light in you, Jeff. I think the key essential point you've made today is that ability and potential in how we frame things and the energy behind how we voice that. Looking at that idea of globalization is a very neutral, discerning kind of step back that nullifies our ability for action and authority. When we look at reframing that with something perhaps like unification, it's a very action-driven motion behind that act of unifying together, coming together to create that kind of energized and empowered pathway brings us all back into that one source of all being, no matter what we call that source. Thank you for bringing that to light today. You truly have inspired me with this conversation. Well, no, the other way around. Thank you. I'm just playing off the energy you fed into this, my friend, and it's all brought me to a really wonderful place of inquiry to look at this on a much broader scope. So thank you for that. And thank you so much, Jeffrey.