Lynne Twist Transcript: Indigenous Wisdom, the Paradigm of Enough, and the Eagle and Condor

Lynne Twist Interview

Summary

The conversation explores Lynne Twist’s unexpected call to work with Indigenous communities in the Amazon and how that led to the Pachamama Alliance. It also considers a prophecy about bringing modern and Indigenous ways of knowing into balance, and the importance of acting together for the future of life.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What does it mean to become an instrument of service?
• How can people from modern and Indigenous cultures work together?
• What is the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor?
• How can taking action on difficult problems ease fear and helplessness?

Key takeaways

• Service can feel liberating when you act on challenges instead of only worrying about them.
• Twist describes purpose as something that moves through a person, rather than coming from the individual alone.
• The Eagle and Condor prophecy calls for modern and Indigenous peoples to fly together and restore balance.
• The Pachamama Alliance grew from a call to support Indigenous people in protecting their lands and cultures.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of conversations with spiritually awakening people. We’ve done well over six hundred of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and look under the Past Interviews menu.

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My guest today is Lynne Twist. I first saw Lynne speak at the Science and Nonduality Conference many years ago and was really inspired by her presentation. I’ve always wanted to have her on, and now we’re finally doing it. I usually don’t read people’s bios because it’s kind of boring to just hear me read; I’d rather have the person tell their own story. But there are so many things Lynne has done, and I’m afraid she won’t mention them all if I leave it up to her. I just want to read her bio, and then we’ll take it from there.

Over the past 40 years, Lynne has worked with over 100,000 people in 50 countries in the areas of fundraising with integrity, conscious philanthropy, strategic visioning, and having a healthy relationship with money. Her clients include Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, the International Unity Church, Charles Schwab, United Way, the National Black Theatre of Harlem, Harvard University, and others.

She is a sought-after speaker. She has presented at the United Nations Beijing Women’s Conference—where, Lynne, I listened to your whole book, and there were some horrific stories of women telling their stories. Maybe we’ll get to those that were told at that conference—as well as the State of the World Forum, Synthesis Dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and the Governor’s Conference on California Women, among others.

A recognized global visionary, Ms. Twist has been an advisor to the Desmond Tutu Foundation and the Nobel Women’s Initiative. Lynne is the recipient of numerous prestigious honors, including the Woman of Distinction Award from the United Nations. She is a co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to empower indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to preserve their lands and culture.

In addition, Lynne serves on a number of nonprofit boards, including the Fetzer Institute, the Institute of Noetic Sciences—many of whose members I have interviewed—Bioneers, Conscious Capitalism, and Women’s Earth Alliance. From working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta to the refugee camps in Ethiopia and the threatened rainforests of the Amazon, Lynne’s on-the-ground work has brought her a deep understanding of the social tapestry of the world and the historical landscape of the times we’re living in.

So that’s Lynne’s bio. Actually, a highly condensed version of it, I’m sure, because you’ve done so many things. Do you ever get the feeling, when you hear somebody introducing you like that, “Are they talking about me? Did I actually do all that stuff?” Because don’t you kind of have a feeling that, in some sense, you’re an instrument of something much larger than yourself? You’re not tightly constricted by the confines of your individuality. There’s some larger intelligence or something that’s guiding you and that you’re serving.

Lynne: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m always sort of, “Oh my God, I must be 150 years old.” But I’ve just been so fortunate. And so, I’ll say, called. When you are called the way I have been fortunate enough to be called, you are used well by the universe. You do become an instrument of the future, of what wants to happen, of the highest aspirations of the universe.

It gives you a lot of freedom. It sounds sort of like, “Oh my God, you get burdened with all these big problems.” No, it’s the opposite. You get liberated into service, and you don’t worry about the problems anymore because you’re working on them. You know, when you sit back and look at the world and it’s such a mess, you just get scared and worry and kind of shut down. But when you get into action on the things that are really challenging all of us, there’s no time to worry. You just are making it happen.

So, as you said, I mean, I’m really saying the same thing you said. I feel that I’ve become an instrument of what wants to happen. I sometimes say that I just did say: what the universe is trying to accomplish. And this evolutionary leap that I feel very clearly we’re on as a human family—that’s our job now, to take an evolutionary leap or not. And “or not” would not be a good choice. But we certainly have that opportunity, and we’re certainly being invited, encouraged, asked, and demanded to do so.

Rick: Yeah. And I’m sure you’ve experienced that when you step forward and make yourself an instrument like that, you have a powerful wind filling your sails, so to speak. People might look at you and say, “Where did she get all this energy?” But you know it’s coming from a really deep place that you are just a representative of.

Lynne: Right. It’s coming through me, not from me.

Rick: Exactly. Yeah.

Lynne: So it’s coming through me from the natural world, from the Earth. I was just in the Amazon rainforest in August. I hadn’t been there, although that’s where we work. That’s our commitment. As you said, the Pachamama Alliance is designated and designed and devoted to empowering the Indigenous people of the Sacred Headwaters region of the Amazon rainforest to preserve that sacred place, their land and culture, but moreover, that source of the Amazon system, which is the source of our climate system.

I hadn’t been there in two years, and before that I had been going all the time. So I didn’t realize what a huge source of energy, inspiration, really unbounded, almost power came through me when I was in the Amazon, because I’m clearly an instrument of that ecosystem. The energy comes from there and comes through me as long as I’m clean and clear and open.

Rick: Yeah. Remember that prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” I’d like to actually—I’d like to start with the shift the world is undergoing. Perhaps, if you feel it’s the right place to start, you were first called to the Amazon, which is not something you had thought of doing, because you began having these recurring dreamlike visions of painted faces arising out of the jungle. I think that might be an interesting place to start.

Lynne’s First Journey Toward the Amazon

Lynne: Okay, well, if we go back to 1994, I was doing a favor for a friend, a donor who was one of the contributors to The Hunger Project. I was responsible for fundraising for The Hunger Project, a very large global organization that exists today and is working on ending world hunger. Most of our focus—my focus—was Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Bangladesh, or the Indian subcontinent and Sub-Saharan Africa, where the majority of hunger and real abject poverty exists. The organization wasn’t working at all in South America or Central America. I wasn’t even thinking about South America or Central America, and I also wasn’t thinking about the environment. In 1994, thank God other people were, but I wasn’t. I was working on hunger, really our human condition.

I went to Guatemala to support a friend who was a donor, and my friend John Perkins, who had done lots and lots of work with the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon when he was in the Peace Corps and had become a shaman in his own right. John was a wonderful friend, and he was on the board of the organization I went to help out. So when I went there, John was there. In fact, John and I led a delegation of some of the donors to this organization to Guatemala.

When we were in Guatemala, John, who’s very, very bright and very tuned in, said, “I can tell the projects we’re looking at, and the people who say they’re managing them are working with the shaman. I can feel the shamanic energies. This has a magic to it that goes beyond good decision-making, effective strategies, good development. No, there’s a magic here. I think there’s a shaman involved.” And sure enough, there was.

So we went to see the shaman, who was a Mayan shaman. John and I organized a small group of us, including himself and me, to go see this man. His name was Roberto Pose. He was a Mayan shaman, and he didn’t speak Spanish or English. My friend John Perkins needed to do the best he could translating. He spoke a little Mayan and was very fluent in Spanish while this shaman orchestrated a ceremony.

This took place at midnight on top of a kind of mesa on a mountain in the area of Guatemala called Totonicapán, near Chichicastenango, which is quite a famous place for people. But it was very rural. The shaman had built a pretty large fire and created a space for us to lie down around it. There were twelve of us, with our feet toward the fire, like a wagon wheel. Then he—there was no medicine involved—used only his exquisite chanting, drumming, and whistling. His voice was so mesmerizing. He told us to close our eyes and journey. I wasn’t really sure what that meant.

This was at midnight, in the middle of the night. It was as dark as could be, but there was a starry sky, no moon, and billions of stars because we were very far away from any light at all, except for the fire we were sitting or lying around. So I closed my eyes at his instruction. He was drumming and chanting, and the chanting was just so awesome. It was so mesmerizing and hypnotic. You can imagine that I just went into some sort of altered state, or at least I felt that I did.

But then I was sort of bothered by my right arm; it was quivering. I felt it sort of transform into this giant thing, and I realized it was a wing. I had to extend it while my left arm was quivering. It, too, was turning into this gigantic wing. Then I felt this weird, beak-like thing growing on my face. I absolutely had to fly. There was no way I could continue lying on the ground like that. I had to fly, and I began to fly up into the night sky, the starry, gorgeous, amazing celestial sky.

I could still hear the shaman’s voice and the drum as if they were right next to me. I remember looking down and seeing the fire and the people around it. I even saw myself down there, lying there, as I flew in kind of slow motion up into the night sky. At a certain point, even though I still heard the drumming and chanting, I was now looking down over a vast, unending forest of green. It started to dawn, and it was so beautiful. It was so glorious. It was so vast; it went on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. I was flying like this in slow motion, and I was so happy. I was just in a state of bliss.

Then this amazing thing happened: These disembodied faces of men with orange geometric face paint started to float up. They had yellow, red, and black feather crowns on their heads that were very beautiful. These men’s faces started to float up from the forest floor through the canopy to me, the bird. There were three, four or five, six of them, and they were calling to the bird in a strange tongue that I didn’t understand. Then they would disappear into the forest.

I kept flying in slow motion like this giant bird that I had become. A little bit later, they started floating up from the forest again, calling to the bird in a strange tongue. This went on and on. They would disappear, they would reappear, they would disappear, they would reappear. They were beautiful. It was so hypnotic, the whole experience. I was so ecstatically happy, and I was in this mesmerized state of kind of bliss as these faces kept calling to me.

Then, at a certain point, I heard a very loud drumbeat, like that, and it was startling. I remember sitting up and opening my eyes and realizing I didn’t have wings. I didn’t have a beak. I was a human being. I looked across what used to be the fire, which had now become embers, so it had been a pretty long time, at the shaman, and he was giving me this sort of strange look. All the other people were coming out of whatever it was they had experienced. You could tell everybody had had something major happen for them.

The shaman, as best he could through John’s translation, asked us to share our journey. One by one, people shared that they had each become an animal. Every single person had become one: somebody became a wolf, another person became a snake, another person became a deer, another person became an otter. When it got to me, I shared about becoming this giant bird and having this experience, this encounter with these incredible indigenous faces. Then the next person shared, and the next person shared, and then it got to my friend John Perkins. He shared almost the same vision that I had.

The Shaman’s Message: Respond to the Call

The shaman completed the ritual, dismissed everyone but John and me, and sat us down. He told us this was not a normal vision; this was a communication. We were being called, and we needed to respond. We needed to go to the people who were calling for us.

I was just doing this trip to Guatemala as a favor to a donor, so I wasn’t interested in getting engaged there too much. I had huge responsibilities in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Bangladesh. I was ending world hunger. It was a big job. I couldn’t chuck it off, you know. So I said to John, “You, whatever it is, you do it.”

He said, “I know who they are, Lynne. I know where they are. They’re the Achuar people. They’ve had no contact with the outside world. This is the first contact invitation. It is phenomenal. It is historic. You have to go. I know where they are. I know who they are because they’re the neighbors of the Shuar that I’ve been working with. I recognize the facial markings. I recognize the crowns. I know we must go.”

He said they were in Ecuador. I said, “John, I’ve never even been to South America. I don’t speak Spanish. I need to go end world hunger. You do that.”

So he said, “Well, they won’t leave you alone until you come.” I didn’t really buy it, you know. I just thought, “Wow, this was pretty cool, but I can’t do this.”

From there, I went to Accra, Ghana, the capital of Ghana, for a Hunger Project board of directors meeting for the Ghanaian Hunger Project. We were sitting in the first-floor conference room, a small conference room at the Novotel in Accra, Ghana. I’ll never forget this. There were five men and three women in the meeting, and myself. The five men and three women were all Ghanaian people. They had just beautiful blue-black skin. Ghanaian people are very beautiful people, and their skin is very dark.

They were sitting around this table, and I was sitting in on their board meeting. I was from the global office, and this was their board meeting, so I wasn’t leading it; I was just sitting in on it. At a certain point, all five men started to have orange geometric face paint just appear on their black faces. I thought it was crazy. Everyone kept talking as if this wasn’t happening. There was no mention of it. So I thought, “Oh my God, I’m a little nuts from that thing in Guatemala.”

I did what all women do: We go to the ladies’ room when we don’t know what to do. I went to the ladies’ room. I washed my face, splashed cold water on myself, shook myself, and came out of whatever it was I was envisioning there. I walked back into the room, and everybody was normal. We were still talking. Then, within ten minutes, it happened again. Orange geometric face paint was just slowly appearing on the men’s faces, just the men.

I fell apart. I burst into tears. Everybody was asking, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I said, “Well, I don’t really know, but I’m feeling very, very ill, and I need to go back to the United States. I’ve been in too many time zones, too many countries. I just can’t stay.” I was supposed to stay a week. They were all very, very concerned for me, but I said, “Just let me go up to my room.”

This was 1994: no cell phone, no internet. I went up to my room, packed my bag, and just left. I took a taxi straight to the airport. I didn’t know how I was going to get on a plane or where I was going to go, but I had to find a way back home. I got to the airport and took the first plane to Europe, which was to Frankfurt. Then I went from Frankfurt to New York, and then New York to San Francisco. So it was a really long journey home.

The whole time, the faces kept moving toward me. Whether I had my eyes closed or open, the faces just kept reappearing: the men with the orange face paint and the yellow, red, and black feather crowns. When I got home, I was just a total wreck. I told my husband, Bill.

Rick: Let me just ask you: Had you ever had mystical or visionary experiences, or was this totally new to you, something like this?

Lynne: Well, I was on the board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. I had been chairman, vice chairman for years, and had been involved in experiments. I was open to mystical experiences. Yes, I think I was. But this was way beyond anything I’d ever known. This was too disturbing. It was scary, actually.

So I get home, and the visions didn’t stop. I tried to reach John Perkins, but he’d gone back to the rainforest, so he was unreachable. I sent him a million faxes—that’s what you could do then—and left him voicemails. You couldn’t do anything else.

Then he came home, and I told Bill that I was losing my mind. He just said, “You need to rest. You’ve been traveling too much, working too hard,” like any good husband would. But I didn’t tell him about the faces, really, because I thought I was crazy.

When John came back from Ecuador, from the Ecuadorian Amazon, he called me after getting a zillion messages from me. He said, “Lynne, I went with the Shuar warriors to see the Achuar. They’re waiting for us; they want us to bring them 12 people from the modern world, including ourselves—people who have open hearts, people who have a global voice, people who know the rainforest is critical to the future of life, people who are open to indigenous wisdom, and people who will respect the ways of the shaman.” Those were my five criteria.

John and I picked 10 people. I picked Bill—my husband, Bill—as number one, and we all went down to Quito. We traveled down the Valley of the Volcanoes, over the eastern side of the Andes, down the Pastaza River Canyon, through this beautiful corridor to the edge of the vast, incredible Amazon rainforest, which stretches all the way across the continent and is larger than the United States.

We got a military plane to fly us into Shuar territory, and then a Shuar pilot took us to Achuar territory. There are no roads where we went. A little tiny plane lands in a dirt area next to a river and then flies away, goes and gets three more people, then three more people, until the 12 of us were there.

Sure enough, they came out of the forest with their orange geometric face paint, yellow, red, and black feather crowns, and spears. They took us in their canoes up the Cupahuari River and showed us a place to camp. We didn’t really know how to communicate with them. It didn’t seem they spoke Spanish, so it was a very rough beginning. But after them watching us and us watching them, we eventually got in communication. That was the beginning of something that’s now called the Pachamama Alliance.

Rick: How did you get in communication? Just by watching? I mean, did you work out some kind of sign language or something to communicate?

Lynne: Yeah. If you’ve ever traveled in a country where people don’t speak your language, you figure out how to communicate. You just do. Sign language, talking your language and trying to talk theirs—and especially if there’s a lot of kindness and generosity, and people are really trying to connect, then you can make yourself known.

After two or three days of us camping over here and them being over there, while they kind of watched us, they killed a wild boar and invited us to feast with them. During that first real kind of breaking bread together—it wasn’t bread; it was a dead animal—one of them revealed that he spoke Spanish.

Rick: Oh, there you go.

Lynne: Then we could communicate. We went to see their shaman, which was scary but beautiful. We engaged in the sacred ceremony of ayahuasca and had incredible visions. In the morning, we knew this wasn’t just a trip; this was the beginning of a whole other chapter of our lives.

Rick: Yeah. There’s a lot more to say about this, because they have these visions of what’s happening to the world, the role they have to play, and the role the modern world has to play—and how neither one can make it without the other. I’m going to want you to elaborate on all that, because I find that very inspiring, and there are so many things we can say about this.

Since the seventies, I’ve felt that we’re entering a time of huge transition. It’s going to be very chaotic, if not cataclysmic, and hopefully we’ll come out the other side of it with something far better than we’ve ever known. I’ve heard you describe how these people have the same expectation, but it’s not just going to happen automatically. We’ve got to do the right things.

The prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor

Lynne: Right, exactly. There’s a beautiful prophecy they tell in the Andes and in the Amazon called the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Condor. They say this is the time when the eagle people—which are people like you and me and our listeners here, who perceive life primarily through the mind—will reach a kind of zenith in their capacity to use the mind. They’ll even invent tools to extend the capacity of the mind. That’s probably a prophecy about computers and artificial intelligence.

We’ll be materially rich beyond any previous generation’s imagination, but spiritually impoverished to our peril, and our very survival will be at risk. The condor people, which refers to indigenous people, will live primarily through the wisdom of the heart and the five senses, and inhabit the spirit world as their primary home. They will have reached a kind of zenith and sophistication in their skills and way of life. But they will be materially impoverished to their peril in any encounter with the ego world, and their survivability will also be at risk.

They say that at this time in history, the beginning of the third millennium, this first century of the third millennium, the eagle people and the condor people will begin to fly together in the same sky, and the world will come back into balance. But the change from hundreds of years of domination of the eagle people over the condor people—which is called the five hundred years of the fourth Pachacuti—changing to the fifth Pachacuti, the Pachacuti of Balance and Light—

Rick: Pachacuti is a time period?

Lynne: Five hundred years.

Rick: Five hundred years, okay.

Lynne: A 500-year Pachacuti. The fourth Pachacuti was called the Pachacuti of Dominance and Darkness. It began right around 1492 and went to the year 2000. Then this is the beginning of the fifth Pachacuti, which is called the Pachacuti of Balance and Light, the next 500 years.

But the change from the fourth Pachacuti to the fifth Pachacuti, they say, will take 25 to 50 years. During that time, Pachamama, which is their name for Mother Earth, will humble all her creatures with huge climatic events—earthquakes, temperatures rising, fires, floods, tsunamis—to humble all her creatures so they remember their rightful role in relationship with her as we go into the Pachacuti of Balance and Light.

This time of climatic turmoil and huge crisis with our climate has been predicted for thousands of years by the indigenous people as a way that the Mother is humbling us, in some cases destroying us, but humbling us so that we will find a rightful role of integrity with her as we go into the Pachacuti of the five hundred years of Balance and Light, where the eagle and the condor fly together. So that’s very much a prophecy about this conversation we’re having—a prophecy about the Pachamama Alliance.

Rick: So, 25 to 50 years. That would put us up to either 2025 or 2050. I don’t know if we’re going to make it by 2025, because it seems to me there’s going to have to be a heck of a lot more change than we’re going to be able to undergo over the next four years.

Lynne: Yeah. So this is what they say: this is a huge transitional period, this 25 to 50 years, somewhere in there, where we are receiving massive feedback from the Mother. Massive feedback. The pandemic is part of it, they say.

Rick: Can you elaborate on that a bit more?

Lynne: Well, they say the pandemic is an announcement from the Mother. Everything comes from the Earth. Everything—this computer, the pen I’m writing with, and everything that we obviously know—comes from the Earth, including the pandemic. That virus impacts only one species of the millions of species on the planet. Only one species gets sick, and it’s us. Why is that?

They say the pandemic is an announcement. It’s not a punishment. It’s an ally. It’s halting us. It’s interrupting our way of life so that we have to stop and think and resource, reset, regenerate who we are for the next five hundred years.

I call it morning sickness for a pregnant species that’s pregnant with its own rebirth. When a woman is pregnant and doesn’t know she’s pregnant, and she’s vomiting in the morning, feeling tired by two o’clock, wanting weird things, and feeling very out of sorts, she doesn’t know she’s pregnant. She actually considers herself sick. But if she finds out she’s pregnant, then she’s no longer sick. She’s having a baby. It’s amazing—you’re still throwing up, but you’re like, “Wow, I’m going to have a baby.”

I say that the pandemic is our morning sickness for a pregnancy that we’re entering into as a species, to rebirth ourselves, co-labor, both men and women, and collaborate into the next evolutionary leap of what it means to be a human being.

All pregnancies do not produce a baby. There are miscarriages and stillbirths and all kinds of things. So we have to really realize what this whole thing is. This is a metaphor, but they say—the indigenous people say—how we hold this interruption, the pandemic, and how we hold the climate crisis: it’s not happening to us; it’s happening for us. It’s feedback so that we will make the changes necessary to survive. And if we don’t, we’ll go extinct.

Rick: Yeah, I mean, these things are happening for us, but they’re also happening because of us. If it’s true that the pandemic came from a wet market in Wuhan, the conditions in that place were horrific and horrifically cruel. It almost seems like something negative had to come out of that. Or if it came from a lab, we shouldn’t have been monkeying around the way we might have been in that lab. Either way, we create these things.

Lynne: Right.

Rick: And do you feel like people are getting the message? Murders increased 30% in 2020 over, I guess, the average or maybe the previous year. There’s a lot of people who still deny that there is a pandemic, or who deny or refuse to take things that could prevent them from getting sick. And then, in terms of climate change, it seems like half the politicians are still denying that it’s a problem or blaming it on sunspots or whatever.

We seem to be stubborn and slow to learn. What’s your sense of how optimistic you are, in light of the way we’re actually responding to these challenges? In terms of climate change, there are all these tipping points beyond which it’ll be very hard to recover.

Lynne: Well, I’m a possibilist. I stand for the possibility that this is forcing, in a very—maybe it’s harsh, but maybe much more gentle than it could be—transformation. And I think it’s happening. Just like a—you know, there’s this beautiful metaphor. You’ve probably heard this a million times, but I’ll say it anyway, because it works so well. When a caterpillar reaches a certain stage of its evolution…

Rick: Ah, yeah, Elisabet Sahtouris. I’ve interviewed her. Yeah, continue.

Lynne: It becomes, yeah—she’s the source of this insight. There are many people who say it, but she’s the one who carries it so beautifully. A caterpillar becomes a voraciously consumptive little critter. One caterpillar can consume a whole tree and becomes very obese, and just has to eat, eat, eat. And in that stage of the caterpillar’s evolutionary journey, inside the caterpillar’s now overconsumptive, kind of little monstrous body, the imaginal cells awaken. Imaginal—I-M-A, I-M—imaginal cells.

Rick: Like imagination? The cells have this?

Lynne: They’re a certain kind of cell, and they need to find each other, so they try to find each other so they can cluster. Every caterpillar does not turn into a butterfly, only the ones where enough imaginal cells cluster—and it doesn’t have to be the majority. Most caterpillars die, fuzzy little brown monsters. But if enough imaginal cells cluster, then the rest of the cells—and it’s not the majority of that cluster, just some number—the rest of the cells turn into what’s called the nutritive soup, out of which the imaginal cells create the absolutely unpredictable miracle of a butterfly, out of that brown blob. So, I say your program, Buddha at the Gas Pump, your 600 conversations—601 today—

Rick: Actually 616 or something. Anyway, go ahead.

Lynne: Okay, is bringing the imaginal cells together so that we realize that we have a special assignment, a special responsibility, and not everybody’s going to take this on. But if enough of us do, we can transform this brown caterpillar into an exquisite butterfly.

And I say that because there are naysayers. Yeah, but not that many anymore. There are people who are, you know, kind of like, “Oh, shit, what am I going to do? I don’t know what to do. I’m just going to, you know, go to sleep, or take drugs or overdose myself.” Yes, there are people like that. But there’s a lot of people like you, and there’s a lot of people like me. And I say there’s enough of us, in every country, in every discipline, in every hospital, in every school, in every university, in every company, who are doing what they know to do to create the transformation of humankind.

And I feel certain—I can’t predict, I don’t predict; I just stand for it—but with certainty, that that’s the job of our time. If you’re alive and born at this time in history, you have a role to play. It’s not necessarily a big role or a small role; it’s just your role. And if you play it, this transformation will take place. And maybe you’re the nutritive soup. Thank God for that. Whatever it is, I feel that I don’t worry about whether or not it’s going to happen. I just work on causing it to happen. I don’t have time to predict. I’m just all about making it happen, and that’s, I think, the job.

If you’re alive and born at this time in history, you have a role to play.

Rick: You’ve probably heard of those examples from nature, like 1% of the heart cells are called pacemaker cells, and they coordinate the beating of all the other cells in the heart so that it beats coherently. And there’s another example, like a laser: the square root of 1% of the photons in a laser, if they line up coherently, then the others entrain with them, and you have, like, one giant photon, so to speak, in terms of a coherent beam of light.

So, there are many other examples in nature like that, where a small percentage of the population of something can have an outsized effect on the rest of its population. Yeah, so that’s kind of what you’re alluding to.

Lynne: Yeah, exactly. I didn’t know about 1% of the heart cells. I like that.

Rick: That’s what I’ve heard. And you’ve probably heard about the whole experiment in the TM world, with getting groups of people to meditate and having some impact on the— I was in Iran for three months, you know, meditating with a group, and there did seem to be a correlation between our arrival and departure and the degree of social upheaval there, and other groups who were in other parts of the world. But anyway, there’s another metaphor you use. You’re working on a book called The Sophia Century, and there’s a metaphor about a bird with only one wing, and then the other wing is not being used properly. The bird is flying in circles, and the one wing is getting too powerful and violent and such. Let’s go into that one a little bit.

The Sophia Century and a more balanced humanity

Lynne: Well, that’s another prophecy that I love because I think it’s so powerful. It’s a Baha’i prophecy for the Baha’i people; that’s their prophecy. They say that—and I’ll just say this again—we’re in the third millennium now, and we’re in the first century of the third millennium. So, this is only 21 years into the first century of the third millennium. And when you place us in time like that, it’s helpful to see these huge trends.

The Baha’i people say that at this time in history, the beginning of the third millennium, the bird of humanity, which has been flying for centuries, has a male wing and a female wing. The male wing has been fully extended and fully expressed for centuries, and the female wing has not yet been fully expressed or fully extended. So, sort of fold it in as you demonstrate it. And so, the male wing, in order to keep the bird of humanity afloat, has gotten overdeveloped, overmuscular, and, in fact, has become violent. And the bird of humanity has been flying in circles for hundreds of years.

But at the beginning of the third millennium, the female wing—or the feminine in all of us, in men and women—will fully extend, which will allow the male wing in all of us to relax, and the bird of humanity, for the first time in history, will soar. And that’s a prophecy about this time, also.

Restoring Balance Between Masculine and Feminine Values

And I love that because it doesn’t make men wrong and women right. It doesn’t say female is better than male. It doesn’t do any of that. It just really acknowledges that we’re over in overdrive in the masculine part of who we are, including myself. And we’re held back and suppressed, and not taking seriously intuition, compassion, heart, tenderness, collaboration, community—all the more feminine, divine feminine values and qualities that are part of every human being. They’re sort of second-class to productivity and effectiveness and measure and drive.

To put these two in balance in your life, in my life, in everybody’s life, in the way we raise our children, in the way we govern, in the way we walk in the world—that’s what must happen for us to resolve the climate crisis, for us to resolve the political breakdown, and for us to really start educating people in a way that their whole—

And so I call this the Sophia Century: the century when divine wisdom, the century when women will take our rightful role in co-equal partnership with men and the world will come into balance; the century that kicks off the third millennium with a rebalancing of yin and yang; the century when divine feminine wisdom, which is what Sophia really means in the Greek terminology, is what’s guiding, rather than drive and productivity and more and more and more of everything.

We live in a world now where we have enough. We have had enough for a long time to take care of everybody, even with growing populations. We’re doing more with less all the time. So, we now live in a world where we don’t need to compete the way we’re competing. We just need to provide for each other. And these feminine values that are in you, that are in me, that are inclusive, compassionate, connected, communal, intuitive, heart-based—those values need to rise to a place that calms down the masculine, uplifts the feminine in everybody, and gives us a balanced, healthy future. So, that’s the Baha’i prophecy. I call this the Sophia Century because it is.

Rick: And it does seem that they are rising. I mean, there’s a lot of evidence for it. Women are just gaining more and more—or, well, you elaborate on how they’re rising. You’d be able to say it more eloquently than I.

Lynne: Well, there’s the women’s movement, which began long ago, when I was a young woman, actually. It has really, really, really been a powerful marker. When I think about my daughter and then my granddaughter—my daughter is middle-aged, and my granddaughter has just turned 22. She’s Black and white, she’s mixed race, she’s Muslim. She wants to be an attorney. She graduated from college with a total social justice and environmental sustainability lens on life. She wants to be an attorney and work on human rights or climate justice law.

You know, when I went to college—I went to Stanford—a lot of the women who were there, first of all, there were not that many women; it was like four men to one woman. They were there to get a husband. That was what they were doing there. And this was expensive, very high-level education that taught us a lot more than that. But now, there are more women in medical schools than men. There are more and more women in business school, more and more women in law school. It’s really a different world.

Women’s opportunities are vast. You know, we’ve just—we’ve got a mixed-race Vice President of the United States, which is such a huge milestone. So, we’re in a very different ecosystem for women, and ecofeminism is starting to rise, and economics—feminomics, feminine economies—are starting to be invented. So, I think it’s happening, absolutely. And it needs to happen more.

As the feminine rises, and not just in women but also in men, and is taken seriously rather than suppressed or considered wimpy or too emotional, we’ll live with more heart, and the mind and the heart of humanity will start to come together, just like the eagle and the condor. You know, the eagle and the condor—it’s like the mind and the heart of humanity flying together. And that’s what we really need. We really, really need that, and that’s what is happening. And we need to have it happen as fast as possible. I’m so thrilled that I’m alive to see it.

Rick: Yeah.

Lynne: We’re going, going in the right direction.

Rick: If we could take a time machine to the year 2100, when neither of us will be alive, probably, what do you think we’d see?

Lynne: Well, I think we’ll see a world that is much more balanced, with kindness and compassion and heart-based energy playing such a vital role in governance. I think we’ll have a completely different kind of education that will be experience-based, that will be nature-based. I think we’ll have—I think we’ll have a kind of gender-based, gender-equal world where men and women all have the same choices that are appropriate to their gender.

I’m just committed that we’ll have a world without hunger, a world without war. War is so obsolete; physical violence is so obsolete. And I think we’ll live in a world where we’ll top off our population at about 10 billion, and the planet can handle that. We’ll be much more cognizant about numbers—how many of us there are and how many of us procreate, let’s say.

You know, it’s a great question. I mean, I love thinking about it. A kinder, gentler world for sure, and one that’s much more aligned with the natural world, where Indigenous people are part of the, you know, kind of the elder statesmen guiding our species on Earth. And then a lot of the animals that have gone extinct will start coming back, in validation of the way we’re living. So, all those beautiful things, and hopefully I’m working towards making it all happen. And you are, too.

Rick: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s my feminine qualities or what, but I can’t walk past a worm on the sidewalk without picking him up and moving him to the grass, because he’s going to die if he stays on the sidewalk. And I couldn’t imagine myself going into the rainforest with a chainsaw or a flamethrower and burning the whole thing down. The people who are doing that—it’s kind of like, “Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.” But I should think that if there’s a sort of upwelling of higher consciousness throughout humanity, people would just recoil from doing anything like that. They wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to do it. Maybe I’m speaking too idealistically, but I’m hoping that can become more the norm, because there’s a kind of numbness or obliviousness that seems to me to drive people to behave in ways that are ultimately suicidal.

It’s just as your friend Buckminster Fuller used to say: We’re on a spaceship together, and if we completely defile it, then we’re stuck with the only spaceship we’ve got.

Lynne: Exactly. We’re not just the passengers; we’re the crew.

Rick: Yeah.

Lynne: Yeah, yeah. He saw so many things so early on. He was a real person ahead of his time.

Rick: Yeah, I got to see him interact with Maharishi in 1971 at a symposium. It was very inspiring. And I know you had him to dinner in 1976. In fact, recount a little bit of that experience and some of the kinds of predictions he made.

Buckminster Fuller and the possibility of sufficiency

Lynne: Well, I really saw Bucky—I saw him speak first in 1976 at the Marin Civic Center here in California. I was a Bucky follower, but I didn’t really understand what he was talking about most of the time. I just loved him. He was a wonderful, short little man with a bald head and thick glasses.

Rick: Big, thick glasses, yeah.

Lynne: He was so loving. I just loved him. That talk was called the Integrity Days. He did integrity talks all over the world, and this one was in Marin County. At one point, he had a big table, like a utility table, in front of him, and he stood behind it. He always had a tetrahedron, this kind of Tinkertoy thing, on his table, and an icosahedron, another sort of Tinkertoy-like thing. I don’t even know if people know what Tinkertoys are anymore. Anyway, they were these kinds of structures.

He was talking about the structure of the universe, the structure of molecules and atoms, and I don’t know what else. It was way over my head. I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was very excited about it. Then, at a certain point, he walked from behind this table, which had these structures on it, all the way around to the front, right at the edge of the stage. He leaned down and looked at the two thousand people who were there and said, “Now I’m going to say the most important thing I’ve ever said or ever will say.” I thought, “Oh my God, I’ve got to understand this one thing.” So I sat up in my chair. I think everybody did.

Then he said, “Humanity has just crossed a threshold,” and he put his arm out like this. “And that threshold changes everything. And we’ve crossed it, and it’s recent.” When Buckminster Fuller said “recent,” he meant in the last 50 or 100 years, because he talked in those big swaths of time.

He said, “We’ve crossed it, and it changes everything. And that threshold is that humanity is doing so much more with so much less.” This was 1976. “So much more with so much less. And that is the direction of our science. That’s the direction of our innovation. That’s the direction of all of our technologies: to do so much more with so much less. We now clearly live in a world where there is enough for everyone, everywhere, to have a healthy and productive life. We live in a world of absolute, profound sufficiency, and everyone, everywhere, can have a healthy and productive life. That was not always true. Before this threshold, we lived in a world of scarcity, where it was either you make it at my expense, or I make it at your expense, because there’s not enough for both of us.

But on this side of the line, you and I can both make it at no one’s expense, because there’s enough for everyone, everywhere, to have a healthy and productive life.” He said that changes everything.

When he said “sufficiency,” “enough,” I remember having a Kundalini thing up my spine. I started to cry. I didn’t even understand it, but I had a huge physical, spiritual, ontological, biological response to this statement: that we have enough for everyone, everywhere, to have a healthy and productive life. We don’t need to compete like mad any longer. We have everything we need. From that moment on, I was changed by those words.

When he said “sufficiency,” “enough,” I remember having a Kundalini thing up my spine. I started to cry. I didn’t even understand it, but I had a huge physical, spiritual, ontological, biological response to this statement: that we have enough for everyone, everywhere, to have a healthy and productive life. We don’t need to compete like mad any longer. We have everything we need. From that moment on, I was changed by those words.

Then he said this important thing: “We won’t realize this for somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 years, because the institutions of humankind inside of which we live are all rooted in the ‘you or me’ paradigm, rather than, on this side of the line, the ‘you and me’ paradigm—a paradigm of scarcity instead of a paradigm of enough.”

He said governance is rooted in a “you or me” understanding of the world. The economy is clearly designed and rooted in a “you or me” understanding of the world. Education is rooted in a “you or me” understanding of the world. Even religion, he said, is rooted in a “you or me” understanding of the world. So he said these institutions would need to become so dysfunctional that they start falling apart and we won’t be able to fix them. Then we’ll recreate our institutions, our human institutions, from a new paradigm—a paradigm of profound sufficiency. That would take about 50 years, for all this to fall apart.

He said this in 1976. Here we are in 2021, and things are totally, completely falling apart. We can’t really fix them because they’re rooted in a set of assumptions that are now so clearly inaccurate. That’s the big lesson I learned from Bucky.

Then I began to be, I’ll say, a story carrier—a spokesperson for the distinction of sufficiency, which is not an amount of anything. It’s an experience, a way of being where you are in the experience that you are enough, there is enough. From enough, we build and grow and expand, rather than from scarcity or lack. From enough, it’s just a completely different way of living.

That became the source of The Hunger Project, the organization I worked for for a good part of my life—25 years—the source of The Soul of Money, the book you’ve read, the source of the Soul of Money Institute, and, in many ways, the source of the work we do at Pachamama Alliance. Bucky said, “We can make the world work for everyone, with no one and nothing left out.” Once he said that, I knew that was going to be the work of my life, and it still is.

We can make the world work for everyone, with no one and nothing left out.

Rick: Yeah, this might be a difficult question to answer, but if you could put it in terms of a percentage, what percentage have we achieved in terms of realizing his goal? It seems to me there’s still a lot of hunger in the world, a lot of people suffering in various ways, and a lot of destructive institutions that still seem to be going strong. So how—

Lynne: It’s a mindset, it’s a paradigm, it’s a way of living that causes the scarcity, and scarcity doesn’t exist. We make it scarce. It’s just like when you don’t think you have enough time and you race around, and then you make mistakes. When our mindset is off course, we screw up.

To really discover that we are enough and that we have enough is something—it’s a revelation. We’re not there, but we’re clearly realizing that the structured systems we’re living in now are failing us, falling apart, and aren’t that fixable.

I think that because of the pandemic, which actually halted everything, we’ve been in a pause long enough to begin to rethink and reset and redesign who we are and what we’re about. That’s in many ways the gift of this pandemic, and why in many ways it doesn’t go away: because we need to reinvent the whole world. That’s a big job.

Rick: It really is. It seems like sometimes something is really on the verge of collapsing, and then we prop it up because we feel like we’ll be in dire straits if we let it collapse. Like at the end of the Bush administration, when the credit default swaps and all that were crashing the economy. Then Obama came in and gave trillions of dollars to the banks so they could survive because they were too big to fail. He also saved the auto industry, which I think was a good thing. It would have been catastrophic if the auto industry had totally collapsed.

Now they’re all getting around to saying, “Okay, we’re going to be all electric by 2030 or 2035.” So there’s an example of something which I think is converting itself into something more sustainable. I don’t know about the financial industries. I’m not—I don’t have that kind of understanding of things, and I don’t know what kind of efforts they’re making. Maybe you do, because you’re more tuned into that world. Do you see some—give us some good examples of institutions that seem to be metamorphosing into something benign and beneficial, as opposed to the destructive role they had been playing?

Lynne: Well, there are so many examples, and we’re on our way, but we’re not there. I’ll just say I’m on the board of Conscious Capitalism, which is a wonderful affiliation of CEOs who are running their companies with values consistent with a manifesto: to do no harm, to preserve the natural world, to have social and racial equity inside their organizations, to promote and inspire and empower women. There are all these things, and the B Corps, and there’s a lot of movement—a really big movement—in business.

I would say that there’s a real transformation afoot in people’s understanding of the spiritual world. Programs like yours, and all the books that come out, and all the podcasts—people are really grappling with a much deeper understanding of what it means to be human than they have in my lifetime.

We’ve seen the end of apartheid in our lifetime; we’ve seen the civil rights breakthroughs in our lifetime. We’ve seen the George Floyd murder, which was such a game changer. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos like that had been shown, but that was the tipping point. After George Floyd, organizations all over this world started rethinking their relationship with race.

The whole movement of reallocating resources that have been going to the police, when they can’t handle homeless, mentally ill people or domestic violence, needs to go into different kinds of professions—professions where people have psychological training to deal with these issues. These are seismic changes. There’s the change in the energy industry, where solar is now cheaper than petroleum. And the whole battery thing is one breakthrough after another.

To me, there’s so much happening. Paul Hawken, who is a colleague and a friend, an author and an ecologist, has just written the most spectacular book yet, called Regeneration: Transforming the Climate, Turning Around the Climate Crisis in One Generation. I highly recommend that people get it. It came out on September 12. In that book, he shows all the ways we’re addressing the climate crisis, the social justice crisis, the breakdown in health, and the breakdown in governance—how they’re being addressed, how to get on board with the solutions, and how to stop whining about the problems.

The solutions and his website—the website for Regeneration—are just spectacular. If you go on there, you’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be able to see what to do with your life by getting engaged with that material.

I feel like the alternative health and complementary health sector is now almost as big as the medical sector. It’s amazing how consciousness has really changed. I was in South Africa at the end of apartheid. I was there on the last day of apartheid. I went to Mandela’s inauguration; I saw that with my own eyes. Of course, South Africa is still a mess, but people are not slaves any longer. It was the final end of colonization, really, in that way. Now we have different kinds of colonization, of course. Things are not perfect.

But it’s so important to pay attention to the progress. We’re so good at naming the problems, and we don’t really claim the progress enough. The progress is stunning. It’s spectacular. It’s amazing. Look at what happened in the pandemic. The whole human race, every single living person on this planet, had to pivot their life in some way. I’ve never seen, in my lifetime, the mobilization of every human being on the planet. That was just incredible. It shows us what we can do, even though we’re arguing now about vaccines and all that stuff. That’s just noise on the surface.

What has happened is that there was a huge intervention, and the human species stopped huge amounts of our activities for a really long time, even at the expense of economic loss and loss of life. I mean, it’s amazing what we can do when we put our mind to it.

Rick: Yeah, it was like forced introspection or something.

Lynne: Yeah.

Rick: Like a worldwide spiritual retreat. As you’re speaking, let me interject a nice question here that someone sent in. This is from Corinne in Nashville. She said, “I really appreciate your feminine shamanic perspective that is so much softer and heart-centered than most worldviews, even spiritual ones. At this point in time, regarding all of the issues you mentioned, specifically COVID and climate change, how can we serve and help you? I know we each have to do what we feel called to do, but we’d love to know how you would feel most supported and served.”

Lynne: Oh, my God, how nice.

Rick: Yeah, isn’t that nice?

Lynne: Thank you, Corinne. How wonderful. Well, let’s see. I’ll give you three avenues.

Ways to get involved

One is the Pachamama Alliance—Pachamama meaning Mother Earth—the alliance between Indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest and conscious, committed people in the modern world, like all of you, like you, Corinne. If you go to pachamama.org, you can take our courses. Awakening the Dreamer is one. Another is called the Game Changer Intensive, and now we’re developing a Leadership and Action training to get people into action in their community.

Awakening the Dreamer and Game Changer Intensive educate you about the environmental, social justice, and spiritual crises, and how to engage with them in a way that’s personally meaningful for you and personally productive for the planet. The Game Changer Intensive looks at systems and structures that keep us stuck in old ways of thinking and being that need to be dismantled and opened up. Then the Community Leadership Action training has people work on their local watershed, their local forests—things that are right there in front of their nose.

Taking any of those courses and starting to get into action in your local community would be one recommendation with the Pachamama Alliance. Of course, you can always make a contribution to the Pachamama Alliance. It’s a public benefit, social profit organization, and you can donate whatever you want. Click here.

Then the Soul of Money Institute is my small business. I’m about to lead a course on the Sophia Century called the Sophia Circle. It’s going to be small, for thirty women. If you’re interested, just go to my website, soulofmoney.org, and you can sign up for it. It’s six months long. We’re going to work on feminine values, divine feminine wisdom, unlocking it in ourselves, and recognizing how important it is for women who are awake, like you, Corinne, to get engaged in the big issues of our time.

It’s a six-month online course, followed by three days in person with me and my colleague, Sarah Vetter, to really unlock the power of women for the Sophia Century. I would love for you to take that course. You could also read my book, The Soul of Money. It’s available on our website and also on amazon.com and other bookstores and stores.

Rick: It’s also an audiobook, which is how I listened to it. I listened to the whole book while I was walking in the woods.

Lynne: Oh, you did? Okay.

Rick: Yeah, it was great.

Lynne: The third track is that I work with the Nobel Women’s Initiative. That’s another website, nobelwomensinitiative.org, I believe. We work on stopping violence against women and girls. If you go on that website, you’ll see all kinds of things that you can do. Obviously, you can donate to that as well. We’re working particularly on sexual violence against women and girls, and stopping it wherever we can.

So those are three ways you can help me, but really help yourself and our world. And thank you, Corinne, for that wonderful question.

Rick: That’s great. I’ve heard you say a number of times, both in your book and in today’s conversation, that there really is enough to go around. There is no absolute reason why people should be hungry or cold or anything else. So it seems to me that it’s a matter of political snafus or greed, where people are holding on to too much and not distributing enough. How would you explain why, although it’s possible for everyone to be well-fed and properly sheltered, so many people still aren’t? What’s the hang-up?

Scarcity, money, and what it means to have enough

Lynne: Well, we live in a mindset—a mindset. It’s almost like an unconscious, unexamined mindset of scarcity, that there’s not enough to go around. We really, really, really think from there. When you think from there, you hoard, you take more than you need, and you think consuming is the way to live. Thus, we have a handful of people who have billions and billions and billions of dollars, and more and more and more and more and more of the rest of us are marginalized.

That is the outcome of a mindset. It’s also that all of our systems are organized that way, so wealth gets drawn to the top at the expense of everybody at the bottom, and in the middle. But it’s a mindset. The Soul of Money book and the Soul of Money courses are all about breaking that mindset open so that we see: when you know that you’re enough, you have total confidence and trust in your life and in the universe, and you don’t hoard; you don’t take more than you need. In fact, you become someone who shares, who gives, who serves, who contributes, because you realize that what you appreciate appreciates. That’s a phrase I use: when you really appreciate what you have, you want to share it.

It’s really all in the way we see the world. If we see that there’s not enough to go around, then we hoard and massively accumulate out of fear. But if we know we have enough, then we share out of love. It’s very Buddhist. It’s very much what your program is about, I’m sure. Your six hundred speakers are probably all saying, in our own voices, some of the same things: what we need is a transformation of our consciousness.

Greed is really a behavior that comes out of fear. But there’s nothing to fear; we have enough, we’re okay. Obviously, there are places in the world where there isn’t enough food. Obviously, there are places in the world where there isn’t enough water. I worked on hunger and poverty for 25 or 30 years; I know that up close and personal. I know that very deeply. I worked with Mother Teresa.

At the same time, each and every human being is enough in their own right. It’s the systems and structures that are driving us to take from each other rather than share with each other, driving us to accumulate rather than allocate. I want to be known for what I allocate, not what I accumulate. Why would I want to be known for that?

At the same time, each and every human being is enough in their own right. It’s the systems and structures that are driving us to take from each other rather than share with each other, driving us to accumulate rather than allocate. I want to be known for what I allocate, not what I accumulate. Why would I want to be known for that?

A culture that’s hell-bent on consumerism and commercialism, and more and more and more and more and more, is the water we’re swimming in. We need to shift not only our mindset, but the water we’re swimming in, so we can see clearly that we’re okay just the way we are. The job now is to build caring communities that manage our resources in a way that ensures everybody has what they need and want—not way more than they want or way more than they need, but what they need and some reasonable amount of what they want.

That’s a very different world than the one we have now. But we can do it. We can do it. I’m sure that’s what you’re working on in your own right, everybody who’s listening, and I know you are, Rick, because of the kind of people you’re asking to come on your show.

Rick: Yeah. I remember when I used to teach meditation, I would sometimes say, “We don’t have an energy shortage or food shortage or anything else; we have an intelligence shortage.” But the thing is, we’re actually all sitting on an unlimited reservoir of intelligence, at our very essence and our very core. And we can tap into that.

In my own experience, once I started meditating regularly, I found this upwelling of energy and creativity. Having been a high school dropout and gotten in trouble and all, my life did a 180. I started getting productive, got a job, joined a band, and did all kinds of fun stuff.

I think we all know how people feel if they’re exhausted and they’re not sleeping well. It’s hard to do anything or accomplish anything. But if you’re really well-rested, you go at the day with enthusiasm and accomplish a lot. My experience is that it’s possible to retune your makeup so that you operate that way more naturally and automatically all the time. Your life becomes, as that phrase in the 23rd Psalm says, “My cup runneth over.” You begin to feel so full that you overflow. And if everyone were doing that, we’d have this mutually reinforcing abundance in the world.

Lynne: That’s right. That’s what money is actually designed to be. It’s a current. That’s why it’s called a currency. It’s designed to move, not to be held and hoarded, but to move. I really love what you said. That’s so true.

Rick: Yeah. Now, a question came in that’s a little bit similar to the last one, but maybe you can put a different spin on the answer. This is from David in Berlin. He’s asking, “Could you elaborate on how we can help ourselves to step into our personal service? I experience it as very difficult to clearly understand and develop my service. Thank you so much.”

Lynne: Well, I’m going to tell a story. That’s probably the best way to answer that question. Thank you, Mr. Berlin. Dave?

Rick: David from Berlin.

Lynne: David from Berlin. Yes. Well, I’ll just say that one key to all this is gratitude. I once had a wonderful conversation with Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk from Austria. He has a website called gratefulness.org. He’s in his nineties, and he’s just the most amazing guy.

He writes about gratefulness; that’s his signature subject. I once asked him, “Brother David, what’s the difference between gratitude and gratefulness?” He gave me the most beautiful answer, and this might be helpful to you, David. He said gratitude has two great branches: one is gratefulness, and the other is thanksgiving.

Gratefulness is the experience of life when the bowl of life is so full that it’s almost overflowing, but not quite. The bowl of life is so full that it’s kind of bowed at the top, but not yet dribbling over the edges. That’s an experience of the great fullness of life. And when you’re in the great fullness of life, you’re one with God, one with the universe, and there is no other; it’s all one.

That’s so fulfilling that the bowl of life starts to overflow, and that puts you over here on the other branch of gratitude, called thanksgiving. When you’re in the branch of gratitude called thanksgiving, the bowl of life is like a fountain; it’s overflowing. All you want to do is give and serve. You’re so grateful to discover there’s an other, so you can give and serve and contribute and share.

That’s so fulfilling that it puts you in the great fullness of life again, and you’re one with God, one with the universe, and there is no other. And that’s so fulfilling that the bowl of life starts to overflow, putting you over here in the branch of gratitude called thanksgiving. You’re delighted to discover, “Oh my goodness, there’s an other,” so all you want to do is give and serve and share and contribute. These are the two branches of gratitude. You can live in these two branches, and it’s so powerful to live in them, as Brother David does. All of us can.

But sometimes, when the bowl of life gets so full, almost overflowing, we think, “Oh, I’ve got to get a bigger bowl,” rather than realize this is enough, and out of enough, natural bounty or natural abundance flows. Abundance is different from sufficiency. This is sufficiency. This is natural abundance, which flows from sufficiency, never from lack, and not even from more. Real sufficiency flows from the profound recognition of enough.

There’s a beautiful definition of the word “sufficiency.” It’s actually a principle I kind of made up, but I think it’s a principle. It’s this: If you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, it frees up all that energy tied up in the chase to turn and pay attention to what you already have.

When you pay attention to what you already have, nourish what you already have, make a difference with what you already have, and share what you already have, it expands. I’ll say it again: When you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, it frees up oceans of energy to turn and make a difference with what you have. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. This is another way of saying, “What you appreciate appreciates.”

When you pay attention to what you already have, nourish what you already have, make a difference with what you already have, and share what you already have, it expands. I’ll say it again: When you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, it frees up oceans of energy to turn and make a difference with what you have. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. This is another way of saying, “What you appreciate appreciates.”

David, what you love, what you long for in the world, where you feel hurt in the world, what you care deeply about, where you see the world longing for your participation, and what you’re drawn from your heart to do something about—put those two things together, and you’ll find your path of service.

As I think Albert Schweitzer said, “The only ones of us who will be truly happy are those of us who’ve sought and found how to serve.” Just get involved in whatever makes your heart sing, whatever touches your heart, and keep engaging in things until you find, “This is it. This is mine. This is why I was born. This is why I’m here. This is what I stand for. This is my dharma. This is my karma. This is my service. This is who I am.” I’m sure you’ll find it because you’re longing for it and asking for it. So it will come, and it’s probably already there, right in front of your nose.

Rick: That’s great. People who are just listening to the audio won’t have seen this, but as you were saying that, you were gesturing. When you were talking about trying to get more, you gestured with your hands as if reaching outwardly. But when you were talking about what you already have, you gestured toward your heart, inwardly.

I was thinking about that as I was listening to your book. There are three myths in your book: “There’s not enough,” “More is better,” and “That’s just the way it is,” right?

It’s like I was thinking about how people ordinarily seek fulfillment. Ordinarily, it’s something outside of themselves: a partner, a car, a job, a vacation, or all sorts of outer things that we experience with the senses. But when you adopt an effective spiritual practice, you discover, “Whoa, there’s this deep reservoir of fulfillment within me.” I’m not even experiencing anything right now; I have my eyes closed, and yet there’s this upwelling of bliss, happiness, and fulfillment.

That gets integrated and stabilized over time. I think when it does, life comes into balance: you can still enjoy the outer stuff, but you don’t crave an excessive amount of it because you’re already fulfilled. And being already fulfilled doesn’t deprive you of motivation, because if you are full within, then, as Brother David was saying, you overflow. Your fullness can bless or enrich others without being depleted, because there’s no limit to that inner fullness.

Lynne: Absolutely, yeah. The three toxic myths of scarcity, what we live in—the consumer culture, the commercial culture—tell us that there’s not enough and we’re not enough until we acquire something more. That’s myth number one: there’s not enough.

The second is “More is better.” That’s just an unquestioned answer for everything: more and more and more is better. The culture is so intensely focused on more and more and more that we don’t notice what we already have. We just don’t even see it.

I like to use the examples of the two huge growth industries—waste and storage. They’re poster industries for a culture that’s lost its way. We create so much waste, and there’s no waste in nature; we create waste. And storage is just this huge industry. Why does anybody need storage when, in fact, we have homes? We have another home for the stuff we can’t fit in the home we already have. It’s just crazy.

So the first toxic myth is “There’s not enough.” The second toxic myth is “More is better.” It’s a toxic mythology: more, more, more. And the third is “That’s just the way it is,” which is a source of our resignation, our giving up and giving in and buying in, you could say.

When you realize that there’s enough—that you’re enough, there is enough, we have enough—that’s a very different space to live in. It’s so fulfilling to let go of the myth of scarcity. But it’s the culture we live in, so it’s always going to come and haunt us. We don’t need to buy into it.

Rick: No, but we can change the culture, and hopefully we are changing the culture. I watched the little animated cartoon thing on the Pachamama website about this young girl who was wondering. There was a vision of two possible scenarios. One was this toxic city with all the smoke and everything, and the other was this beautiful green city with farming and people riding around on bicycles and stuff.

Anyway, she got involved and took the courses, and one thing led to the next. Then it kind of led to a conclusion of several things that you would like to accomplish. One was to amend the Constitution. They showed her clipping through all these brambles with clipping shears in order to get to the Constitution to be able to amend it. So, what amendment to the Constitution are you proposing?

Lynne: Well, we propose that corporations not be considered people.

Rick: Aha, that would be a good one.

Lynne: Yeah. And that—

Rick: So you can’t buy politicians with money and be secretive about it, and so on and so forth.

Lynne: Exactly. And also, in the legal system, it’s not one person going up against a whole corporation. Corporations are non-entities, non-living entities. We also recommend that money get out of politics altogether, that the Constitution really needs to be amended, because it’s no longer “We the people”; it’s “We the money.” That’s how people get into office, and all of our elected officials spend, you know, 50% of their time raising money for the next election. They can’t do their jobs now, and then they’re beholden to all these big financial entities. So really, we’ve lost our democracy to money.

There’s an organization called Move to Amend, which is really brilliantly looking at the Constitution and asking what amendments we could make to this brilliant document that would get money out of politics and tame corporate power, so that corporations are not running the government, but people are. So that’s really about amending the Constitution. Move to Amend is a wonderful organization, as is CELDF, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, I think it’s called. There’s a lot of people working on changing the very fundamental laws.

In Ecuador, where we work, we worked on something very, very beautiful: Under the Constitution, nature has legal rights in court.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Lynne: Our river system can be defended in court before it gets damaged. That’s another thing we feel: living entities need to have legal protection. But corporations are not living entities, and they get protected more than nature does. So there are a lot of things about law that can make a very, very big difference in changing the way we live.

Rick: Yeah. It seems like a catch-22 in a way, because all these powerful money interests are controlling the people who would have to change the Constitution. They’re not going to want to change it, because they’re getting the money from these interests. But a lot of impossible things have happened throughout history. The Soviet Union fell, and slavery was ended. Women were given the right to vote, which is a no-brainer, but for most of our history, they didn’t have it.

Lynne: Gay marriage.

Rick: There you go. No one would have predicted that it was going to happen as soon as it did, but it did.

Lynne: Right. There are a lot of things we’ve seen. We’ve seen miracles in our lifetime. We just have to keep realizing we’re making progress rather than falling backward. We’re going forward.

Rick: Yeah. And I just want to interject here, because sometimes people wonder, “Well, what is all this about? I thought this show was about spirituality. Aren’t you getting all into politics and economics and all this stuff?” But my conception of spirituality is that it’s a holistic thing. It certainly includes the transcendent, divine realm and all that, but it also includes the world in which we live, which is also divine. The great spiritual leaders, most of them that I can think of, have not only spoken about that kingdom of heaven within, but they’ve been quite outspoken about treating each other fairly, feeding the poor, and making the world a better place. So, in my book, that’s definitely part of spirituality, and I think you’ll see it that way too.

Lynne: I do. I don’t think we can ignore it. Politics has such a dirty name now because of all the things we’ve seen in the last few years, but it’s a very noble thing: taking responsibility for governing ourselves. And we need to do it with a spiritual root. Otherwise, we won’t do it well. So spirituality needs to be part of that conversation, and that conversation needs to impact the way we look at our spirituality. As you know, because you’re doing this wonderful show, you can’t just meditate everything away.

Rick: Yeah.

Lynne: It certainly makes a huge difference in keeping us centered, so that we work from a place of wholeness, respect, and depth when we’re working on the things that challenge us. But we can’t do it without coming together in community and being engaged from a taproot of spiritual power. And our love for the natural world is so key here. I was just watching a very beautiful video by Joanna Macy, the great ecologist and Buddhist scholar. She’s very clear that love is the driving force that will heal this planet and heal our relationship with the planet. The planet will be fine, but our relationship with the planet needs to come from love. That’s one dimension, one beautiful dimension, of what it means to be spiritual.

Rick: Yeah. On the point of not meditating things away, there are a couple of verses in the Bhagavad Gita. In one, Krishna instructs Arjuna to be without the three gunas, or to transcend. But then three verses later, he says, “Okay, now, established in being, established in yoga, perform action.” Get out there and do something with this inner reservoir that you’ve tapped.

I think someone like yourself has really been doing that all your life, and it’s inspiring. I just listened to your talk at the Bioneers Conference. I’m not sure what year it was; it might have been around 2010 or something. You gave this beautiful talk, and you were crying. There’s something so spiritual about enterprises like that to me; they’re really essential. If we don’t save the world, we’re not going to have any world to live in, should we become enlightened. Improving the world is part of the package of developing ourselves spiritually.

Lynne: Yeah, it’s pretty important to have a world to be spiritual in.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely.

Lynne: Our Indigenous partners, you know, that’s where they come from. They live in a deep spiritual relationship with life, and they don’t really live in the material world very much. They live in the spirit world, with their dreams and their plant medicines and their relationship with the spirit of the rainforest.

I was once walking behind a Sápara man named Manari Ushigua. He was walking very silently through the forest, and I was following him. He had a machete and was cutting a path for us. At a certain point, he stopped and said to me in a very soft voice, “Do you feel them?” He looked around like this, and I thought, “Who?” “Do you feel them?” he said. We were very alone in this vast, vast, beautiful rainforest. I didn’t know what he meant, so I just waited. “What do you mean?” And he said, “The millions and millions of souls.”

For him, every leaf, every branch, every ant, every termite, every snake, every monkey, every flower—everything—had a soul. “Do you feel them, the millions and millions of souls?” I started to cry after that, because I realized, “My God, I didn’t. I never realized that they have a soul too.” I was so moved by that.

From then on, when I’m in the forest—and I’ve been working in the rainforest for a long time—I actually connect with millions and millions of souls. If we think about life that way, that’s the way they live in this spirit world of souls: everything has a soul, and everything deserves our respect, our reverence, our love. I never forgot that. It’s life-changing to be with Indigenous people who are so connected to their ancient traditions and their spiritual power. It’s amazing.

Rick: And I would go so far as to say that not only does biological life have souls, but mountains have souls, the sun has a soul, the Earth has a soul, and everything is imbued with spirit.

Lynne: Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And when you see life that way, it’s so fulfilling. Everything’s so abundant.

Rick: Yeah.

Lynne: It’s extraordinary.

Rick: It’s all just one kind of unbounded ocean of the Divine interacting within itself.

Lynne: Absolutely, yes.

Rick: Well, I promised you we’d keep it to about an hour and a half, and we’ve reached that point. Are there any really pithy things that you feel we didn’t cover that you’d like to say, or anything you’d like to say in closing?

Closing thoughts

Lynne: In closing, I’d like to say that anyone listening to this program is someone who’s awake, who’s on a spiritual path, who’s intrigued and engaged with how they can make a difference with their life, and I want to bow to that. I want to bow to you, Rick, for hosting a conversation today and all the conversations you’ve had, which I’m sure draw the best from people. Certainly, you were really effective with me.

And then I want to say that I think we’re poised and engaged with the greatest transformation in the history of our species, and it’s such a privilege to be alive and participate. Whatever participation people have chosen, thank God for your participation. Thank God for your energy, your love, your spiritual power, and for staying connected to this kind of conversation, which affirms us and keeps us on track at a time when we’re going through some sort of huge transformational change, almost like a wormhole. We’ll make it if we hold hands and stay together, like the imaginal cells clustering.

We’ll make it if we hold hands and stay together, like the imaginal cells clustering.

Thank you for including me, and thank you for being so engaging, respectful, and fantastic.

Rick: Well, thank you. The pleasure is mine. You’re working on two books, as I understand it: one about living a committed life and the other about the Sophia Century, which you spoke about earlier. Is that right? Two books?

Lynne: Yes, yeah. One book’s—yes. I haven’t started Sophia Century, so that’ll be a while. But A Committed Life is underway and will probably come out next year.

Rick: Okay, great. Well, when you publish them, if you’d like to do another interview, just get in touch and we’ll do it.

Lynne: I would love to. Okay.

Rick: So, thanks so much, Lynne. It’s really been a pleasure. The whole week has been a pleasure, listening to your book and listening to some of your other recorded talks. Every week, when I interview a guest and prepare all week long, I kind of get to know them by tuning into their work. It’s really been a delight getting to know you. It’s been so enriching.

Lynne: Thank you.

Rick: It just kind of lights up my life.

Lynne: Thank you so much.

Rick: All right. Well, thank you. And thanks to those who’ve been listening or watching. The next interview is going to be on Saturday. It’s going to be a real gear shift from this one. I’m going to talk to an old friend who is very skeptical about everything. He’s written a book called Tempted to Believe about why we believe what we do and whether we really have justification for believing many things. You know, looking closely, do we really know that something like reincarnation could be a thing? How do we know? Stuff like that. So it’s going to be a lively kind of debate, probably, because I believe a lot of things that I haven’t necessarily confirmed. But anyway, that’ll be the next one, and many more to come. Look at the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com. You’ll see what we’ve got scheduled. We usually schedule about two months out. So, thanks for listening. And thanks again, Lynne.

It’s been marvelous.

Lynne: Thank you. Bless you.

Rick: Have a good day.

Lynne: Okay.