Yet, I think one of the things we can all agree on is that we’re living in a time in human history that is absolutely unprecedented, a time that not even our ancestors could have dreamed about in their wildest dreams. I mean, think about that. How many of our ancestors looked up at a cloud and wondered what it would be like to see life from the other side? What would the Pharaohs of Egypt have given 5,000 years ago to be able to step onto a machine and be on the other side of the world in hours? Wow.
Yet the reality is, for many of our ancestors, they gave a precious gift. Childbirth wasn’t certain for many, many years. In fact, my grandmother on my mother’s side actually died in childbirth, giving birth to my mother. It was a very uncertain time.
And you know, if you could just connect for a second to the fact that some of our ancestors gave their life in agony so that we could be standing here today, the question that that poses, my friends, is this: what do we do with the gift that we got?
Now, some of us would say quite a lot. Some of us say we’re living in a time now where technology is so overwhelming, so incredible that even just 20-30 years ago we couldn’t have imagined the world that we live in today. But that technology comes at a price; it generates its own level of paradox.
One of the paradoxes is that right now there’s so much information out there that we are literally overwhelmed, and the emotional route tends to be overwhelmed, which leads to confusion, which leads to inaction. In other words, we learn so much we do nothing. For every one second that YouTube is up right now, there’s between 5 and 10 hours of new content uploaded. Unbelievable.
The other paradox that technology has brought is that in a world of seven-plus billion people, we’re all just a push notification away from each other. Interconnectivity is at a time that we’ve never even had the foresight in history to ever even dream of. Yet in a world that is so connected at every single level, why is it that so many of us feel so alone?
You know, the evidence of this is everywhere. Labels of ADD, ADHD with information overload, or prescription drugs for depression at an all-time high. One of the reasons for that is so many people, I believe, are drowning in technology but they’re starving for something more. What are they starving for?
Well, I believe that the ultimate app that you can download from the App Store these days is not Facebook, it’s not LinkedIn, it’s none of the myriad of millions of different apps with billions of downloads. The ultimate app comes down to love.
You know, love is such an old-fashioned notion. Why do so many people have such an aversion to understanding what unconditional love is? Well, I looked at that, and it really comes down to understanding what our first and earliest memory is.
You know, if we go back nine months before we were born, a certain event happened which unleashed one of the biggest battles in human evolution, in human history—the battle to be here. 400 million to one. And guess what? You showed up in a battle that was in the dark and uphill. Why did you want to be here so badly?
Not only that, but if you look under the microscope and see what actually goes on, it’s not just the first person that was there, is it? One of them is actually chosen. Yes, my friends, you were chosen to be here. But the challenge is, once we’re born, we can’t do anything wrong. We throw up on Mom at 2:00 in the morning; it’s inconvenient, but we still get love.
But something happens around about 18 months old where the parents suddenly realize there’s a communication issue, and now it’s going two ways. And at that moment, a lot of the parents impose their model of the world on how to bring up a child because nobody wants to be a bad parent. But the challenge with that is this: what we do is we then say if the child behaves in a certain way, we reward that with positive reinforcement, and if they behave in a different way, the perception of the child, regardless of the reality, is that we then withdraw love. And that creates frustration.
It creates frustration, but it also creates the perception that love needs to be earned. So by the time we get our earliest memory at about 3, 4, 5, 6 years old, we’ve already had almost a lifetime of learning that love is conditional. We have to earn it. We have to behave a certain way in order to be good enough to be worthy of the one thing that we most want. Wow.
And we then live the rest of our life projecting that into our lives and our relationships and wonder why nobody can figure out how to download what I call the ultimate app of love. And the challenge there is it fosters the illusion of separateness.
Why do I say the illusion of separateness? Because there isn’t a physicist on the planet right now that wouldn’t argue the fact that every single one of us is connected at a much deeper level than we ever give credit for. It’s just that we don’t have a reference for unconditional love based on the childhood.
I was having a conversation last night at dinner with Dr. Raj, a beautiful soul, and you know, there’s two people that had never met that came together and we had a wonderful one-hour connection where what was touched was the stuff that we’re made of. Yeah, I saw a guy sharing stories and feeling something that you can’t feel when you’re left-brain. Technology drives us into our left brain. Why? Because it can be measured. That’s why we’re taught at school left-brain principles.
Because if I take a math test and I score 75%, you can measure that. How do you measure creativity? How do you measure how much you care about somebody? How do you measure love?
And last night there were two people from different backgrounds, different colors, different beliefs, born at different times, both with different life paths on their own journey, probably to die at a different time. The illusion of separateness. Just as if I was to put my hand through a saucer of milk and you were to see the tips of my fingers, the illusion would be that we’re separate. Whereas if you take the milk away, we realize we’re all connected.
Allow me to give you another analogy. If you take the human body, between 50 to 70 trillion cells, give or take some—more than others—if you go to the bloodstream and you take two blood cells, white blood cell, red blood cell, both different colors, both born at different times, both have different paths in life, different jobs to do, different missions, one delivers oxygen, hemoglobin, around the body, the other takes stuff out of the bloodstream and dumps it into the…
Both probably going to die at different times. Now if these two blood cells were to meet each other in the bloodstream and have a conversation, and the red blood cell goes, “Hi, white blood cell, how are you doing?” the white blood cell turns around and says, “Oh my goodness, a talking blood cell!”
But if they could communicate, would they not have separate senses of identity? Absolutely. Now the thing is, we don’t throw a funeral every time we have a blood cell die. We have a different and a higher level of consciousness and understanding about where it fits into the scheme of things. What if, just as a possibility, just as a question, you and I started to realize that we’re just different types of blood cells in the universal body of consciousness? Would that upset you if it was a possibility?
The illusion of separateness. And what keeps us from that illusion of separateness is usually we’re too focused on ourselves, too focused on trying to defend ourselves, to try and get the ultimate app which is love, which is what we really seek. But we can’t do it when we’re engaging from our thinking center rather than our feeling center.
Everything is connected. Now, how do you move forward in life to be able to live from that place rather than get swamped by the overwhelm? Well, sometimes it takes tragedy. Sometimes it takes a significant emotional event.
September 11, 2001. Many of us remember where we were on that day. Just notice your emotional connection to the date itself. I myself was in Hawaii at the time on a seminar with Tony Robbins. I was part of the leadership team and, you know, we were facilitating an event called Life Mastery. What happened, happened at about 2:00 in the morning local time, so we woke up to that news. We realized that we had 2,000 people about to wake up to that news from 80 countries, including Palestine, Israel, Afghanistan, many from the US, and over 100 from New York.
Our job was to get the people into the room so that they could understand, try and make sense of what was going on, and Tony would come out and hopefully reframe and deframe some level of meaning so that we could have some level of certainty as to how things were going to continue or not.
While Tony did an amazing job, it was hearing some of the stories that came out of the room that day that were so impactful. One of them I remember clearly: there was a woman who stood up and she turned around and said, “You know, now I know the reason why I’m here.”
She said, “Two years ago, my fiancé was killed in a car crash, but the meaning that I chose to take from that was that love isn’t for me. Never get too close to people in case it’s taken away.” Six months later, 18 months before the seminar, she met a guy and they started dating, but she kept her distance.
It got to a point where he wanted to take the relationship to the next level, but she wasn’t comfortable. She said, “You know something, I know I want to go to the seminar in Hawaii,” and he wasn’t really agreeing, but she said, “I want to go anyway. There’s a reason why I want to go.”
She said, “I now know the reason I came.” She said, “Last night I was listening to one of the speakers. One of the speakers was a woman called Kathy Buckley. Beautiful, beautiful woman.” Kathy’s story is incredible. She has a great message. She was born 50 years ago hard of hearing, but at the time it was misdiagnosed.
It was misdiagnosed because, in those days, we just didn’t have the ability to look too far ahead like we do today. Too stuck here, not enough here. As a result, she was put into special care where she wasn’t really given the love that we so crave. Because of that, she developed poorly; she was introverted and couldn’t really communicate very well.
In her teenage years, she was abused by members of her family. In her 20s, she got cancer; she managed to get over that. Then a little later in life, she was lying on a beach and a lifeguard ran over her face with his 4×4. And we think we have problems!
Kathy stood up and said, “You know something, I can’t rely on life giving me what I think life should owe me because it doesn’t work that way. Life is a mirror, my friends. It’ll reflect back what you put into it. You get angry with the mirror, it has no choice but to get angry back. Why? Because the outer world follows the inner world, not the other way around.”
When Kathy finally understood that she’d been complaining at the mirror her whole life, wondering why she wasn’t getting what she wanted, she took a stand. She learned how to communicate, discovered she had a gift for making people laugh, stood in for a friend at a comedy night at a local bar, won the night, went to the regional finals, won that, produced a book, got her own show, turned her life around, and became an example for so many people.
But her message was very powerful. Her message was this: you cannot drive through life looking in the rearview mirror. You’re going to crash and miss the scenery. You cannot dance through life with a ball and chain of your past around your leg. It just doesn’t work.
This lady, on the morning of September 11, got up and said, “When I heard Kathy say that, I knew what she meant. I found my breakthrough. I knew what I’d been doing. I ran back to the room and I called my partner and I left a message on his voicemail, saying, ‘Hey honey, I’m coming home after the seminar. I see what’s happening. Let’s get married.'”
The next morning, he called her and left a message on her voicemail from the 104th floor of the World Trade Center to say that the building had just been hit, was filling up with smoke, and he thought he was going to die. But he didn’t care if he was going to die because, having listened to her message, if that’s what it took to get to the place in his life where he could feel like that, he’d die a happy man.
I listened to that voicemail. I could hear the people screaming in the corridor, and then the line went dead, and he went down with the building. This woman stood up in front of 2,000 people with every right to turn around and say, “You know something, see, I told you so. Life’s doing it again. This just validates everything that I’ve lived for the last two years.”
But she chose not to do that. She said, “You know something, I’ve played that game. That’s a tunnel with no cheese. Instead, the meaning I choose to take out of this is that life is precious. I’m going to live every single day squeezing every single drop out of every moment that I can. Do you know why? Because if I had done that two years ago, I’d be married by now.”
She inspired me and 2,000 other people to step up and live from a place over the next nine days of that seminar with more passion, more commitment to playing full out, more commitment to serving and communicating with each other than we could ever have done. People ask me, “Where were you on 9/11?”
I tell them the story. I also say that out of all the growth that happened through that experience, out of all the lessons that we took, all the transformation that we saw, to this day, 9/11 was probably one of the most incredible, amazing, uplifting, and inspiring days I’ve ever had the privilege of living.
But the message was clear: it never matters what happens to you in life, my friends. That’s a story. That’s what keeps us here instead of here. The only thing that matters is what we do with the story. For some people, divorce is traumatic; for others, it’s freedom. It’s how you write the story. How do you hold the pen?
If we can come from that place, if we can start letting go of the chains of our excuses and playing small, and embrace the potential that we have as people, life opens up. Then we can start to use technology for what it was designed for: to further human potential, to further the human spirit, not hide behind it.
From that place, we can start moving forward. It doesn’t take a lot: leaving your phone downstairs at night so that the first thing that happens when you wake up is you get in touch with how grateful you are to still be here rather than check your email before your feet touch the floor; to be able to sit across from somebody you love, having a meal without checking your phone but being able to communicate while you fuel your body about how grateful you are to be in that moment.
That night, like I was with Dr. Raj, was a precious moment. It doesn’t take much to be willing to step forward and say, “You know something, here’s who I am, faults and all. Vulnerability, authenticity. I don’t care if I risk losing connection or not. I’m going to step up and be who I am.” From that place, you’ll find the paradox is that we get more connection because that’s really what people want, is it not?
From that place, my friends, we can start the next journey of human transformation. We can soar to the daring heights of the next epoch of human development through heart, not just technology. With that, we can move forward unshackled from the stories of the past. With that, we can leave a legacy that our ancestors can be proud of. And that, my friends, is an idea worth spreading.