Anyway, they were like, “We’re on episode seven and we can’t stop.” It had just been one night. So I sat down and I watched episode eight and nine and whatnot with them sort of, but it was like crack for them. Both of them know a lot about politics. I care less. I couldn’t care less. I could care a little less, but I don’t care that much. Anyway, Ro got her masters in international relations, and Karen has a PhD in social work and they’re obsessed with political things. And this show, in case you have missed it, is about a bunch of British celebrities who gather in a castle in Scotland. And there are like 19 of them to start with. And three of them are chosen. They don’t have any control over it. They’re chosen to be called Traitors. And all the others, the other 16 are called Faithfuls. And the whole game is they do various missions to try to earn money for charity, but they also have this thing where they have to try to decide who’s a Traitor. And then every episode they nail someone who’s a Traitor. They vote for them. That person has to leave. And then that night they do a murder where somebody else has to leave. It’s very, very dark. It’s a very dark sort of thing.

And I came in, as I said at the last few episodes. Now, it was interesting because the three people who were Traitors out of the 19, they were still there when it was down to like seven, eight people. These folks had sent 11 of their own off into oblivion, calling them Traitors, and all of them were Faithfuls. And that was revealed after they voted them off. It was revealed. And they were like—Oh, Ro is upset because I’m spoiling the show. All right. All right. Okay. That’s all I’m going to tell you. We’re done here.

No, I’ve told you all—that’s the spoiler, that it’s really fun. Anyway, I guess. I didn’t see it. What do I know? Anyway, my point is, I watched the last few episodes and the people on the show were having, number one, they had been thrown together in a situation that was very unusual for them as adults, let alone celebrities, where they were together in this sort of semi-isolated place and they were doing all these activities together. They would have to, I don’t know, walk an obstacle course or something. And they had to help each other, and they had to team up and all that.

So here are these people, a lot of them in their 60s or 70s, and they’re just like playing like kids. And there’s a certain rhythm to the show where they have to do the certain things, and they’re not going by the standard appointment schedule of a modern celebrity or a modern anybody.

And it struck me watching this that they were following a pattern of activity that is actually more deeply embedded in the human psyche than the whole “clock time, go to the factory, get your work done, be on schedule, be productive.” They were gathering to do things together that were deeply meaningful to them and were also communal.

And I watched it and I thought, “I think in the absence of clock time, what shapes the day is communion time.” And that’s the way it is in our family, especially with Adam. He wants to have communions at various times of day, and it has to be just so. Like he won’t sit down at the table until everyone else is sitting down, but God forbid we don’t sit down together. And he’s just obdurate on these things. And he asks for very little, so that’s how we live.

I watched these people taken out of the normal flow of life in the developed world and watched them playing these games together and voting each other off and not voting each other off and trying to figure things out and talking. And they were amazing human beings. That was really the reason the show is so good. That’s the big spoiler. They’re all really, really wonderful human beings. And you see wonderful human beings sort of opening as they connect with each other in these unusual circumstances, which are much more like the circumstances that used to shape human life.

And as they go—one by one, they get voted off—there are a lot of really intense emotions. Like people are looking at each other and saying, “If you’re a Traitor, if you betray me, I don’t know how I’ll get over it.” Now, of course, they will get over it, but you can see it’s sort of half-serious. And when people do get the negative votes, you can see it just hitting them in the heart. It’s real. You can’t be in these situations, even if they’re simulated, without getting some real emotion going. People are really sweating with nervousness. They’re really crying when they cry. And yes, they rebound, it’s fine, but they’re having a very strong reaction.

And then when they leave, they all say, “This is such an incredible experience. These are the most amazing people. And I thought I might leave with a sense of accomplishment. I thought I might leave with more publicity, something, but I never thought I’d leave with a lot more friends.”

And I thought, watching this, this is like such a great metaphor for life. We are cast adrift in this place where to our real selves, I genuinely believe, this is more like a game than it is like reality. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, they hit us really hard. But what we hear over and over again from people with near-death experiences and what I’ve experienced in my own mystical life is the second the game is over, you shake it off, bounce back, and it’s all okay. It’s like, “Wow, that was an intense game. Whew, I don’t think I’ll play that again, but wow, cool.” And I thought the point is not like, what is the purpose of one’s life? My whole career, I’ve been working with people who want to know what the purpose of their lives are, what the meaning of their life must be.

And I saw over and over these celebrities going, “I made such good friends. I made such good friends.” And I realized that’s the only way to win the game, to come together in this very difficult, very scary place where it’s dark and there’s treachery all around and people hurting your feelings and betraying you and abandoning you and all the things and to find the people around you who are going through the same game, who can support you and revealing to each other who we really are underneath the surface presentation we give to the world.

What these people had that most of us don’t have is that time away from the pressure of modern life. I’m always talking about the fact that our life today was shaped by the factory, by the factory whistles that blew at five o’clock in the morning to bring every single person in the village out of a healthy sleep and out to their job in the coal mine or the button factory or whatever it was, where they had to punch a clock and they had to account for every minute and they had to make a certain number of buttons or mine a certain amount of coal.

And nobody was there because it was their heart’s desire and nobody was there to find out more about the other people. In fact, the more you found out about the other people, the more you would be chastised for not working at what was serious, at the real purpose of the game, which is productivity and the amassing of material wealth, right? Wrong!

None of those people were earning money, but they took the time to treat this part of their lives as something they would invest with full energy and commitment and connection just to play it. But in the meantime, to be free from the tyranny of the factory whistle and able to talk to each other, able to spend time together. I frequently feel like I don’t…like people ask me, “Do you want to go out to lunch?” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I really, I don’t have time.” And I think, “Why don’t I have time?” Well, there’s morning communion. First thing when we get up, our family has morning communion, can’t skip that. There’s coffee, there’s love.

Okay. And then there’s connecting with the people from my workplace, which we’re friends. And then we go on our community or I talk to my Wayfinder coaches, we go to Wilder community, and there are people there that I love that I want to commune with. So we do that. Then we have to start family time at 4:00 because that’s Adam’s communion time and we better be there or we’re going to hear from Adam. And then that goes on until we have dinner, which is very ceremonial. Then there’s the time after dinner when there’s the departure rituals for bed. Then there’s Trinity time when the three of us sit together and watch shows like Celebrity Traitors UK. There’s just not any time for like factory work in there.

And when I think about it, I feel like people are like, “Why can’t you just go to lunch with me?” I’m like, “I have too much communing to do, but if we’re going to commune, I’ll make time for it.” Because I realized that the only way anyone has ever won the game of life is to play it with a full heart, knowing it’s a game, and learning to love along the way and saying, “Gosh, I hate to be leaving, but I made such friends.”

And as spirits, I sometimes think, “What is the point of being here?” And I think it’s because consciousness wants to know itself in new forms and have new experiences. And I believe all that. But as a human, the new experience we’re meant to have is community. Right now, the world is very close to political and ecological chaos, and it could just topple the whole thing, the ecological systems, the political systems all over the world, they could just collapse. Or, at the point of chaos that can lead to collapse, there’s also the possibility that a very small nudge toward coherence—I’ll tell you all about this later. It’s amazing. I just read the evidence today. A very small nudge toward coherence can send the whole system into a realization of its underlying patterns in nature. And it starts to create a coherent unity of function in what was a chaotic system.

If you can go into the game and not be deluded into thinking you can lose if you don’t segregate yourself from other people and try to win over them, if you know that what you’re here for is the experience of the play, but more than anything else, to find the unfolding of another person’s light, to watch and share, to take time away from the productivity schedule and reveal ourselves to one another, to enjoy each other, to laugh with each other, to set up tasks, yes, but mostly as the route to shared endeavor, which is the dawn of intimacy, to do it all, to say, “I played the game, I loved the game, when I couldn’t get anywhere else in the whole universe, in all of history are these friends I’ve made.” Your family, your pets, your loved ones, your favorite trees, your community.

If we do go into increasing political chaos, it is community, history shows, it is community that will save us, the community around us. And if we don’t go into collapse, I promise you, it is the community that will exalt us. You win by connecting.

I was a self-help author for 30 years. I missed the whole thing. You don’t self-help. Community is the healing balm for the human race. So that’s what I have to say about how to win the game. Also, you should watch the show, Celebrity Traitors UK. They’re not even paying me.

All right, so to the questions. A question: “I’d love to know how to create communion with people across contexts. Families do it in rhythm, but how do we do that with others?”

Well, you have to get proactive, especially with these magical technologies we’re using here. I called this The Gathering Room, just hoping people would gather, and I didn’t do anything to publicize it. I just wanted to see if people would come together and we have. Here we are. That wasn’t good enough for us, though. So Ro and I started an online community. That was not a thing 20 years ago. Now it’s a thing. There’s this beautiful technology that exists to allow us to interact across the globe with a fair degree of real intimacy. It’s so beautiful.

Or you can get creative about organizing places to show up with people to play the game in new ways. Create a safari seminar in Africa, whatever. Whatever excuse you can give to bring people together in a space that you know is going to inspire and delight, be proactive.

Our culture will not hand this to you. Our culture will only hand you another contract for how many hours you’re supposed to spend at the factory work bench or whatever it is, the production line. So don’t think that it will come floating your way. Go out and swim to it, make it, create it. It’s wonderful to create it. Creativity is like the next best thing to community. Community creating together—now that’s something.

Okay. Question: “How do we tell the difference when the ego or my internal guidance is talking to me?”

Internal guidance is always calm. It’s always peaceful. Even if it’s scary, it’s peaceful. And ego is always a little bit frightened or a little bit hysterical. So yeah, the quality of peace is what we’ll tell you.

Question: “How do we change this so- called game? Is it communing and heart coherence in our own small spaces? What about actions on the greater political arena?”

As I said, this is about how creative can we get? There’s 136 of us here on the line right now. How many forms of communion could we create right now? Each of us could create something different. And here’s how I would start. I would start by saying, “What do I love most?” I love to paint and draw. Okay. I’ve never done a paint and draw community online or in real life or anywhere else, except I taught as a teaching fellow at Harvard, which was the only job-job I ever loved. And so I’d go there right away. I’m looking across my room in a canvas that’s one millionth finished and I’m like, “Yeah, that would work.”

What is it that gives you joy? What is it that gives you delight? It will give other people delight as well. So do it to share, do it for fun. The people who made that game, I’m sure they wanted to make money, but they’re all entertainers, the people who made it. In order to make the money, the interesting thing about creative pursuits is you have to give people joy to get money. You have to give them something that brings in their attention if you’re going to create something that is productive. So it’s sort of in the factory model, but mainly it’s in creating communion that these people designed this show and presented it. And it was done with great goodwill, great compassion. And so the energy of it was really powerful.

Whatever your creative skill is, use it to bring people with similar interests into a group and share the joy of creativity that common endeavor builds community. So anything you do together to make something creates community and that it is just, it’s the best.

So let’s see. I already did the ego or internal guidance—that’s just peace. Question: “How to introduce communion to one small social writing group?”

Create a task, create an experiment, create a writing exercise you all do, and then send it to the next person and make them read the work of the person next to them in line. Whatever. Games, games, games, games. Play. It has to be playful. And we play games and games have at least two things. They have an objective and they have some kind of rules. So the objective of Celebrity Traitors UK was to get to the end and find all the Traitors or to be a Traitor that survives or whatever. And then the rules are you can’t talk to this person. You have to go to a discussion table at this time. And between themselves—the goal, the objective, and the rules—create a kind of space where communion can occur as you all move together toward whatever has been set up as the objective.

And nobody really cares about the objective. The football team does not roll up the turf on the other person’s goal and take it home with them to have the grass in their house. It’s just to get that ball over the line. And 10 minutes later, it literally means nothing to anyone. So it is the goal and the rules themselves that create a container for communion. A game is communion. That’s why sports movies are so awesome. It’s about the connection of the people who are playing the game.

Question: “How to let go of people who are not good for the community, or for you, when you realize they are there only for personal gain and have no intention to give when it directly doesn’t serve them?”

Basically react to them the way you naturally would. Don’t wait to get so angry that you want to get explosive and argumentative. It’s just that when somebody gives no communal energy, you don’t feel inspired to give any communal energy back. It becomes very tiring.

There’s a very delicate and precise balance in the human psyche called the norm of reciprocity. And it means that when you’re consistently giving to someone who doesn’t give back, the energy of the exchange just disappears for you. And you end up really not… I’m sure some of you have had this in jobs where it’s not giving enough back. It’s giving money, but it’s not enough to pay for your one wild and precious life, right? So as it gives nothing but money back, you can’t keep up the energy to keep putting your wild and precious life there. It wants to pull away.

And when you allow yourself to pull away from someone, not cruelly, but just according to the law of your natural—I mean, five-year-olds do this. It’s one reason that they, when psychologists test groups to see how effective they are at a task, five-year-olds win by a country mile. They haven’t yet grown in the social rigidity that says, “I have to give, I have to treat all members of the group exactly the same, no matter what I’m feeling.” They just do what they want. If they’re bored talking to someone, they walk away, right? And they find someone who is interesting.

If you let yourself follow those endogenous, those inborn patterns that make you want to move in certain directions and do certain things, then it’s very fascinating how the energy of community brings people into communion, into connection. Or if somebody is really, really, really on a different wavelength, like a psychopath or something, there’s no payoff energetically, and it sort of withers like a plant. And I’ve seen this hundreds of times in groups that I’ve worked with in seminars, in crowds, and all kinds of things.

It’s really fascinating when we’re in our integrity and we do what we feel what we really feel, know what we really know, say what we really mean and do what we really feel good about. It tends to work itself out really well. And optimally what happens is that the person who’s not in harmony with the group starts to pick up the harmony and it changes us and we become something better than we were. And I’ve seen that happen. I’ve felt it happen to myself.

Okay. Someone says, “How do we change this so- called game? Is it communing and heart coherence in our own small spaces?” Oh, I read that already. “Actions in the greater political arena.”

The game is what you love to play. I love painting as a game. You might not. You might love soccer as a game. You might love demonstrations as a game or coordinating to help to do neighborhood watches or to feed the homeless or the unhoused people or whatever it is. The way to go into the greater arena is the same as the way to go into your own joy. You have to follow what feeds your energy. It’s all about this reciprocity. Go toward what gives you energy and you will give it energy. And you will find people there. Some of them will be there because it seems like a good thing to do. They’ll fall away pretty quickly because you can’t keep up the energy. But those who are there for the same reason you are because their hearts are in it, you’re going to love each other. And you’re going to find each other and you’re going to connect with each other and you’re going to leave with good friends, good friends. That’s how I feel about… I am so introverted. I do not like parties. I do not like groups, but oh my God, when you put me in the middle of a bunch of people who want to save the world or mystics or Wayfinders or whatever, I’m like there!

And I have made such friends in those spaces and that is my forum. Right now the book I’m writing is my action on the greater political arena. Writing is one of the things that floats my boat.

Question: “How do I overcome fear to find my community?”

We’re going to do that in a second because we’re going to do our Stillness, Silence, and Space, meditation, and that is going to bring us down out of fear and regulate our nervous systems. And that’s the way we connect with other people. That’s the way we feel better about moving forward.

Someone else says, “I feel safest when I’m alone though. I got hurt in big groups and often picked on. How can I trust a group of people again that I won’t get left out?”

I’ve gotten the everloving crap kicked out of me by, I mean, emotionally, physically, any way you want to look at it. I don’t really trust people either. That’s why I find particular individuals I really, really like and start to build on that. And the only thing that creates trust is consistency over time. And some people will betray you. The traitors must leave. Some people will not betray you. And after you’ve tiptoed out 15, 16, 18, 15,000 times with a person and they’ve never hurt you, trust grows in. But you can’t get that to happen without playing. Just taking a few steps out and seeing. And then wherever you feel like it’s still okay, you go there.

Okay. Final question: “I feel guilty for slow-fading certain friendships as I try to walk a different path. Wayfinder here. A part of me feels a little high-horsey because I question if it’s my ego at play, how to discern?”

It’s what I was saying about energy. You cannot fake the energy of enthusiasm. So if you have to tolerate something, that is not the optimal way to play this game. It is not the way to spend your one wild and precious life, the one you’ve got now, and to move away, to move toward what is passion and joy for you, what is playing the game. And the friends you meet there that feel like true friends, that is the same action as moving away from the friendships that don’t have that substance to them. So yes, you are going to slow-fade people. You’re going to ghost people because we don’t have time to interact with everyone equally.

We’re here—we’re not just randomly walking around—we’re here to play a very exciting and beautiful game, which is how much joy and how much good can we experience and deliver to this particular reality, this particular planet at this particular time? And the only way to win is to leave with a lot of friends. It doesn’t matter if you get voted out early, if you lose for some reason, according to the rules, if you don’t walk away with the prize, the prize isn’t even real. We’re doing it for charity. The reason we’re here is to play and to love.

And the combination of those two creates community, and that’s what’s going to save everything in the days and years and decades to come. So now right at the end, a little overtime, I’m going to do just a minute of our Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation because that’s a way I play the game that is powerfully bonding even over time.

If people want to have longer meditation at four o’clock, we’ll be doing one. Ro is reminding me, if you want to have a longer meditation at four o’clock, every Monday I do a 30-minute really meditation in the Wilder community. And if y’all are in there, you can come on over and meditate.

But let’s do Space, Silence, and Stillness right now. Start by taking a really deep breath and letting it out, shake out any tension, and start by asking yourself the strange and unnecessary question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Just repeat it a few times. You don’t need to answer it. Just focus on it. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the base of my neck? Can I imagine the space between the base of my neck and the center of my heart? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms that make up the whole volume of my body? And can I imagine the reality that that space is continuous with the space in which every other person in this gathering is held?

Can I imagine the stillness under the actions of all our lives? Can I imagine the love that is all of this together? I say imagine, but it is true. We are that space. We are that silence. We are that stillness, and we are all together right now. And that is how you win. I love you and I’ll see you later. Have a wonderful time till The Gathering Room meets again. Bye!