Living in Japan and married to a Japanese woman really opened my eyes to community. I experienced culture shock twice in Japan. The first time was on first arriving there. Everything was so different, and I had never been to a truly foreign country before. It was a comparatively mild shock. The second, much bigger shock happened a year later just as my Japanese was starting to get good enough to give me a glimpse of how truly different the Japanese look at the world. I woke up to how I just assumed there was only one world view. I really thought everyone looked at the world the way Americans do. That is so not true! The Japanese do not view the world as a bunch of individuals making their way, they instead see the world through a much, much more group focus. The purpose of life is not just a selfish pursuit of individual happiness. I don’t think either the American or Japanese perspective is wrong. From what I could tell there is a mix of profound benefits and costs to each. But what it did was to open my eyes to how differently people can view this world.
I have been involved in cohousing most of my life. Cohousing’s goal is to save the world one neighborhood at at time. A bunch of people decide to live together so they as a group buy some land and hire a developer to build the houses. I’ve helped build a community from scratch, and I’ve lived in two different cohousing communities. I’m currently helping to develop a third. Living in community just feels better. But most people don’t know this. Americans in particular have forgotten how to get along with other people. We use our wealth to isolate ourselves. That isolation protects us from the inevitable conflict that arises when people live in more intimate connection. But then we end up so lonely. It is not worth it. We don’t have to live so isolated. But it takes work. I noticed when people (including myself) move into cohousing there are a whole set of skills to learn. A deeper connection to community is something we all are longing for but have mostly forgotten how to do.
I have a personal growth mindset. What do I mean by that? I believe that living is something that we can get better at. There is a real savor to getting more skillful with all the things that come. We contain vast multitudes. How we chose to be moment to moment is governed more than we realize by personal preference. There are areas within us that we feel more comfortable hanging out in. But it is possible to go to the other places even if we mostly chose not to. And it is perfectly OK to not venture into those other areas. But it is important to know that is a choice we are making.
I have experienced immense, astonishing change. When it happened, everything felt different and yet in some important ways nothing had changed at all. I was still me but now living in that bigger place of possibility. And just to be very clear my imperfections did not get wholly washed away in each transformation. What I call my “bullshit” is still very much here. It just weighs on me less and less, and I get increasingly skillful in navigating through it.
My passion for following the Truth led me early on to fall in love with science. What I love best about it is its hard discipline. It demands so much. You are called on to abandon even your most cherished theories and models if new, contradictory evidence comes to light. This ability to admit you are wrong is so critical to getting to Truth.
I started out as an atheist, because of course I did. I was a scientific rationalist. Religion seemed mostly like superstitious nonsense. And yet there were these strong hints that maybe just maybe I was missing something. I tell my waking up story here, but the key point is that when I got really honest with myself, I had to admit that I am deeply spiritual. We all are, but most of us tend to forget it. We have brief moments, maybe in nature, maybe at a birth or death, where we know that we are all part of something much, much bigger. But then we forget and fall asleep again. I was starting to wake up more. Not always – I would go long stretches before suddenly I would wake up again, and I would always be surprised. How could I possibly have forgotten this! How could I not always embrace this joy? Why would I ever forget this? But forget I did, and the cycle would continue. Gradually I started to forget less and less. There is so much joy here that it can be overwhelming and it took me awhile to learn to accept even a tiny fraction. But along with this joy comes a longing. I want other people to find this. I want others to step into the joy that is just there waiting for them. But how? How do I help people find this place within themselves? I just didn’t know.
Then I found psychedelics. As I was coming back to normal space from my very first guided journey I knew I had finally found the answer. Medicine work, if properly done is a safe way to let people directly experience what I am talking about. This work is going to change the world. Why am I so confident about this? Because it already did once. The 1960’s was a fascinating decade. It started out as a conformist continuation of the post war 1950’s but ended up radically changing the world. Think of the difference between early Beatle songs like She Loves You in 1963 to I am the Walrus in 1967. Only four years apart and yet these songs are in completely different worlds. And it started with psychedelics, like LSD and Peyote. This medicine is so powerful that it can cause damage if not treated with the proper respect. Many people hurt themselves and there was a strong backlash. But therapists have shown that if done with profound respect and care, psychedelic therapy enables life changing transformations. People who have struggled to heal for years and years are now finally finding their way to internal peace. I believe in this approach so much that I trained to become a Medicine Guide myself.
While I was participating in all those workshops and having those spiritual breakthroughs I was ashamed of being a software engineer. It seemed like that kind of work is so different from what is actually useful. I thought the world needs more therapists and gifted workshop leaders, not more computer programmers. And it does. But then I had an epiphany — my engineering mindset is what I have to offer the world. The world needs many things right now, and it turns out that engineers can offer something as well. I am under no delusion that this is the only useful mindset. But it is a useful way of looking at the world. We might actually need more of it. I will talk about that next.