Oh, too loud? Not loud enough? Okay, thank you.

And I go to a place where I’m looking at this all as consciousness playing with form and having experiences. And as I like to say, the soul is here for adventure and is not afraid to suffer. So it really is a sort of article of faith for me that no matter what you’ve done, it wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t wrong. You can’t do anything wrong in a place where you’re just there for the experience. And I know there are moral issues, and I’m not saying that there are no ethics in the world, but I am saying if you look back on your history and you think, “I’d be a good person except for this or that,” or, “It would all be great except for this one thing,” no, it is great even with what you’ve done and even with having done the wrong thing.

And the thing that matters is that you are standing in this place now, but from this place, God drew a circle, so you can literally go in any direction. Throw in three dimensions, say you’re encircled by a sphere, and you can go in any direction from there, literally anywhere in the universe!

The question then is: What is the best next step to take? And I have been reading my social science books and I have been nerding out so hard, and Ro has been rolling her eyes. I think Ro stands for Rolling her eyes because I got all excited about this thing called the “adjacent possible.” Those of you who were in the Wayfinder’s Compass this morning have heard this before, but you’ve got to hear it again. It’s not a mistake. It was meant to be. The adjacent possible means something that can happen but hasn’t happened yet. And the conditions for something to be possible have to arise as things change. And then there’s a moment or maybe a long period where they’re possible but they haven’t been conceived of yet.

So for example, there were people who thought Leonardo da Vinci made up a model for a submarine in Italy in the 16th century, but the technologies that would’ve made it possible to build the submarine were not yet available. They didn’t have that kind of metallurgy. They didn’t have that kind of knowledge of physics. So he invented this thing, and it went uncreated because it wasn’t possible yet.

But then there came a time when all those technical skills were available and all that scientific knowledge was available, and people started making submarines. And what happens, typically, is that when knowledge and technology and the available means of doing something have arisen, people all over the world kind of start popping onto it. Like the theory of evolution—it popped into four or five different minds in different parts of the world at the same time. Darwin’s the most famous, but the fact is that several people all over the world who were working on the issue of how species are created, they also went, “Oh!” when they realized that the Earth was much older than the Bible said it was. And they started to look at the pressure of survivability on populations of animals. So they thought the information was there and they finally could come up with the theory of evolution. So they did. It was the adjacent possible.

So right now, I feel that there’s an adjacent possible by which those of us who have faith in the human species and want it to continue for a long, long time, we want our children’s grandchildren’s grandchildren to live in a beautiful whole healthy Earth with all kinds of other beings living in harmony with them. And it hasn’t been going that way since, well, for the last 5,000 years. No, make that 10,000 years when humans came across the land bridge from Asia and apparently wiped out all the megafauna in northern America. That was a big extinction event that they think is traceable to humans. We can create an extinction event, can’t we, y’all? We really can. But are we in the adjacent possible? Or is it adjacent and possible for us to fix everything that is broken right now, given the technologies we have and the ideas that we come up with? I think there is.

Whenever I am close to a best next step, the hair on my arms prickles a lot. I feel sort of guided to certain books. I get obsessed with songs and I look them up and the lyrics give me ideas and I am drawn to certain other people. Now this is very important because when there’s a big thing that wants to happen, the information necessary and the ideas necessary to come up with it are hidden in a kind of mosaic. There are all these little bits of it, the little bits of the picture, and they’re hidden in different human individuals: in our experiences, in what we’ve read, in what we’ve thought about, in what we’ve, the work we’ve done in our lives, our emotional—everything is equipping each of us with fragments of a mosaic that only make sense when we come together.

So I’m talking about this, I know it’s all very abstract. That’s why Ro said, “Don’t talk about this on the podcast.” And I was like, “But I’m a nerd.” And she said, “You are.” So I’m talking about it now. But I’m not only a nerd, I am a woo -woo nerd. And the woo-woo part of me has been feeling an adjacent possible that is pushing really hard. Like all my life I’ve felt that we have to combine forces to create solutions to the pressures that are on human beings right now. Not just the climate crisis, but injustice and racism and the materialist patriarchy that keeps people in poverty, the extinction of all the species we’re “extinctifying.”

So I have a feeling it’s about to pop into reality. And the way this happens is by something called a “liquid network.” A liquid network is any place where things flow easily, one to the other. And one of the interesting forms of a liquid—now I’m panicking that I’m too nerdy. A liquid network is a city. So for example, you get a bunch of people at the framing of the American Democratic experiment, the founding fathers, they all have little pieces of the puzzle of how ethics can go in a different direction. They’ve studied the governing systems of the great nations of the Native Americans, especially in the northeastern part of the United States. They’ve got different ideas about government and justice that come from that. They’ve had different experiences in their backgrounds. They come together physically in one place, and something explosive happens. There’s an actual number that you can use to calculate how much faster creative inspiration flows when people start to combine.

So if a city—I wrote this down so I would get it, I would not lie to you. [So] a city that is 10 times larger than another city isn’t 10 times more innovative. It is 17 times more innovative. And a city that is 50 times bigger than a town is 130 times more innovative. Now what this means is not only that different ideas are coming out of the population, but that each member of the population is more creative because you’re bumping up against more different ideas. Have you ever noticed that you think in fresh new ways when you’re traveling, even though you’re also losing your passport and things aren’t going well and you don’t get enough sleep? Still, all the innovation, all the different new things that you’re bumping up against, they have a strong impact on you, they open your mind.

So these days, for about a month and a half, no, a little more than that, like six months, I’ve been thinking there’s a feeling of the best next step. I’m feeling the best next step. And I’ve been doing self-help all my life. I’ve been writing self-help for 30 years and coaching people in a self-helpy way for 30 years. And over the last year or so, something bubbled up to the surface and it said, “Make a liquid network, bring the people together.” And the interesting thing was that Ro was having the same impulses, and we would talk about it because whenever you talk about something, you’ve brought it into community, it starts to develop faster.

And so now there are these technologies that you can use to create a digital community where people can be together the way they might be together in the town square of Philadelphia where the founding fathers would gather to have a beer or coffee or whatever. They think that coffee really inflamed the Enlightenment because people would get together in coffee shops and drink caffeine. And some people thought, “Oh, the caffeine stimulated their minds and they came up with more creative ideas.” But a sociologist way of looking at it says “No, they had to be in the same place to get coffee, and so they were bumping up against each other and having caffeine. And that combination just can’t be beat.”

So we’ve talked—Ro and I came on here and we got excited a few weeks ago and we said we’re making this community. It’s called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And the thing I want to—the reason I’m telling you about it—two reasons. Obviously I’d love it if you came over because we could have an actual two-way, 1500 different people communicating and sharing information. It’s much more of an egalitarian thing. It’s not me talking to you and getting questions. It’s everybody talking to everybody. And that’s a liquid network. That’s when people start to create things at an explosively accelerated rate.

So of course I’d love you to join it, but the reason I’m so excited is that it comes through you. I’m going to quote Dylan Thomas, one of my favorite lines, he calls it “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” So you see the little crocus, the little green fuse in the winter, and then out comes a purple or a white blossom through the snow, through the green, and it’s powered by the intelligence of nature itself. And when you feel that coming up through you, it’s breathtaking and it’s beautiful. 

And Ro was telling me she felt it when we were in South Africa, and our friend Boyd Varty said—she said, “What is the mission of all of us who want to fix the world?” And he said, “At this point I go with Terence McKenna’s dictum, and that is simply: Find the others.” And she said she felt that force that through the green fuse drives the flower. I’ve felt it zillions of times in my life and it’s moved me to write books and create coaching things. This idea of making liquid networks, though, if you can make them, like keep your eyes and ears wide open and your soul wide open, because as you start communicating more, there’s something brimming to the surface. The adjacent possible is all around us. It’s in all of our brains, but only in different little pieces of the puzzle. And I really believe that a hundred years before we were born, God drew a circle around the planet where we’re all sitting or standing or lying down right now—this moment—we are all in that circle together.

And after 60 years of thinking I had to do everything alone, I know that the liquid crystal part of me is going to flow right into community. How do I know? Because this feeling only comes when that’s happening. So right now I’m going to do the Space and Silence and Stillness meditation, but what I want you to allow is any sense that something wonderful is coming, that you will be able to take a next step into something that you’ve been preparing for your whole life, something delicious and delightful and exhilarating and new. It’s the best next thing. We’re all in the same circle. We can step together. We can step separately, but only if we tune in to the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. So let’s do that now.

I want you to start, let’s intend, set an intention that this meditation, which is the same weird little meditation we always do, this meditation will open a path in our consciousness that shows us our best next step. Each of us, all of us, every possible combination of any of us, ooh, it gets so complex, but we’re not the ones running the Rubik’s cube, the intelligence of nature is. So let’s feel for that and dedicate this meditation to allowing it.

So right now, get calm, breathe out long, slow breaths, relax your body as much as you can, and trigger that sense of open focus by asking the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the very center of my head? Can I imagine dropping a plumb line down all the way down my spine? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the space that takes up the vast majority of the matter in my body? Can I allow the space within me that is brimming with consciousness to take the best next step forward for me? For all of us here, for every sentient being, can I imagine the stillness that will watch with complete absorption and delight as this plays out? Can I hear the silence that is ringing with joy to see us taking these next steps? Can I imagine this joy, silence, stillness, space within me, continuous with every other person on this broadcast and reaching out to every being on the planet and reaching out to the far ends of the universe? It’s all intelligent, it’s all alive, and it’s what we are: space, silence, stillness, and in that the joy of movement and action and matter and the sound of the hallelujahs.

All right folks, let’s look at the questions that you have been sending and the Gracious Badger has been fielding. Gemma says, “Hi, Martha. What’s my best next step for dealing with my toxic mother?”

Oh, I think a step away. Yeah, it’s pretty simple: “No, I won’t be there,” if you don’t feel like it. If you do feel like it, you show up and she says something toxic and you say, “Wow, that was toxic.” You tell the truth. How’s that? Hit her with the truth. Not hit her—offer her the truth. It’s wonderful. It will send your family running full speed away from you. I’ve tried it.

Okay, Maria says, “What if there’s something we’re feeling, like it wants to be and it feels right, but creating it requires rational planning and organized work. How does one marry the feeling and the thinking part?”

Sorry. Oh boy. Not now. Hello? Okay, sorry. It wanted you to join my network, Roey. It stopped The Gathering Room for that. Okay. If you have to connect rational thinking and action with inspiration, stay in the inspiration and then feel the pressure of frustration. Like today, Ro has been making graphics for the community space using an AI bot that makes pictures, and you tell it what you want it to draw and it draws it. And then you say, no, change this, change that. And it’s really fun. But for some reason, this bot has decided to include little circles with 1, 3, 5, and 7 in them everywhere. I don’t know why it’s so delighted by them. I guess they’re all prime numbers. They’re the first odd numbers in the sequence of numbers. And I think the AI bot is just in love with these numbers, and we have to think of a rational way to work with the technology to make it so that the images look the way we want. That kind of frustration sends you on sort of rabbit hole chases to figure out how to rationally do something. We had to rationally figure out how to use this technology, rationally figure out which host is best, rationally call people, do the calls. But here’s the thing, Maria, there’s this excitement behind the frustration. The reason it’s frustrating is that the green fuse wants the flower and the force is driving it, and you can almost feel it in your body.

And during times when I’m taking a best next step, I often sleep a little less, but I’m not tired. I have better health. There’s just this incandescence that comes with the time has come to take the step. And I really want you guys to feel that, you all to feel that. It is scintillating. Yes, it is. I’m going to use that word scintillating. Okay? So that’s what you do. You do all the rational planning, but you do it with a feeling of something so scintillating that it makes it all delightful.

Flo says, “Is this similar to the butterfly effect?”

So the butterfly effect is taken from a short story by Ray Bradbury where a guy goes back in time and they say, “Don’t touch anything, you’ll change the course of history.” He says, “I promise I won’t touch anything.” He comes back, he goes through some misadventure, they have to bring him back to consciousness, and when he comes back to consciousness, all the surgeons operating on him are like giant cockroaches or something. It’s been a while since I read it. And he’s like, “But I didn’t touch anything! I didn’t touch anything!” And then he looks on the bottom of his shoe and there’s a butterfly. He stepped on a butterfly 300 million years ago, and it changed the history of the world. Also based on chaos theory where somebody says if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, it changes the weather on the other side of the world. It’s so complex. Chaos theory is just a mathematics of probability, not of absolutes, all of—I’m just in a nerd space, y’all! You’re just going to have to forgive me. 

It’s different from what I’m talking about here because it’s about making small changes and them having big results. It’s related, though. So when you take a best next step, it may be tiny, it may look very small to you, but the effect of it can be vast. It can change the weather on the other side of the planet, it can change history. So my belief is that when you take the steps of your life by following this feeling of inspiration, following the feeling of creative drive, the creative force flowing through you means that you will take small steps that have huge results. So thank you for relating, Flo, for relating the butterfly effect to the adjacent possible and the liquid network and all the other little fun words that we’ve come up with here so that now I’m seeing us all stepping forward and connecting in a way that makes a vast change, even if there are only a few hundred of us right now. Woo! It’s huge. If we all take just the littlest step toward each other and let all of our information, all of our energy connect.

Tana says—oh, hi, Tana from the STAR. How are you doing? “I feel like I’ve been trying to find my people for years and still find myself in too much isolation with too little connection. I’m quite exhausted at this point. What’s the next best step to here?”

Community. Community. I just wrote a book, right? It’s coming out in January, and the last chapter is like, it’s so not me, because my whole thing was always go off by yourself and meditate, but I just reread the last chapter for the editors and it’s like the whole thing is about join something, join with other people, connect, connect, connect. It’s like Forster said, “Only connect and your life will solve itself.” And you can. So kind of come over to our community, our community, Wilder—sanctuary for the bewildered at wildercommunity.com. You can find the link in the bio. Not the link to the space, but the link of the first to know when it goes live, which will be any day. So if you can’t find it in our community, find it in another one. They’ll start popping up like mushrooms because it’s possible. It’s become the adjacent possible. It’s actually the present possible. Now it’s jumped the fence into the present possible from the adjacent possible. And the feeling that you’re isolated and you’re frustrated and you want company is the drive, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. So open your intention for it to come to you and be interested that today I’ve just offered you a lot of advice about how not to be isolated and then go with what feels right to you.

Okay, Diana Galactic says, “Hi, Martha. How can folks who are in urgent need to get income be open to the next best step without getting snagged by fear? Sometimes I hear this from clients and I struggle with what to say to help.”

Yeah, this is a difficult thing to solve, to tell people, because you can’t test for every given person’s next, the results of their future actions. But what I can tell you is that “Do what you love. The money will follow” is an axiom that has proven true in my life and the lives of a lot of other people around me, but that you have to do what you really love. And that means knowing what you really love. And that means living in complete integrity and speaking the truth not only to other people, but to yourself. Find out what is true for you, and then figure out where the force wants you to go. And then there’s a love. It’s like falling in love and my experience of it, all I can say, my experience of it and my observation of other people doing it is that money follows that energy. So God bless you to get rid of your fears. Your culture has filled them, filled you with them, but they can be overcome by integrity and trust. Go forward.

Okay, let’s see, somebody whose name I can’t pronounce says, “What about when you strongly felt you were taking the right next step for you, that you had been preparing for all your life, but it didn’t turn out well at all?”

Oh, that’s happened to me lots of times and it was always the best thing that could possibly have happened. You have to eliminate some of the infinite possibilities and you have to learn which of your desires are actually conditioned into you. And I’ve many times gone to places where I finally achieved what I thought would make me happy, or I got right next to it and failed at the last minute, and I always thought it was a catastrophe, and it always turned out to be like jumping on a trampoline. I’d go way down, and then it would throw me way forward into things that I couldn’t have imagined before my supposed failure.

Oh my goodness. So many questions. We have three. I’ll do three more. Becky says, “Just thank you all for being here. Send me some good juju for an IVF egg retrieval this week. I love you all.” Becky, I have been there with people. I’ve been there in my own family. Ro was there. I know that horrible/delicious fear/hope, and I’m holding that energy for you. Yeah, that’s another thing. We can literally be present for each other, even though we’re far apart. So this gathering together here, Becky, I’m sending you, and by the way, anybody else out there who’s having medical problems, who’s having emotional issues, who’s scared to death, who’s sick of life, I’m sending you all love, hope, vivacity, whatever it is your heart desires, I can hold that for you. The results of our egg retrieval is screaming in the hall outside me outside my room. So yes, it can work.

I’ll do one last question from Cleo. Cleo Etoile. Cleo, the star. She says, “I am one of the Other Butterflies,” which is a word that Ro and I used in our podcast about people who are a bit different. You can look it up on the podcast. She says, “I’m one of the Other Butterflies and still learning how to connect and feel safe with others, and also frequently have empty elevator experiences where I live as I keep growing. Love the idea of Wilder, but also have a low tolerance for screens and have to minimize my screen time so I don’t get sick. Any ideas?”

Yeah, put it on audio. Make a few friends, get on an audio conversation. Just send each other comforting little things that you can read out with technologies that are available for free that you can download to read text out loud to you. And be selective. That’s the thing. You don’t have to, like I hate parties and I hate large gatherings, I hate them. But if you’re in a place where information and energy are flowing and you don’t have to do the cultural things of small talk and whatever—who was it who wrote, Sylvia Plath wrote, “I wasn’t good at small talk and large talk was not encouraged.” We’re hoping the Other Butterflies make their way to this community because we all are weird like that. And it’s really fun to be with other people who don’t have fun being with other people. 

Ultimately, we do need each other. We do keep each other joyful, keep each other happy, keep each other loved. The most solitary of us still needs love, but love without threat, love without force, love without all the particular manners of culture that we’ve learned wherever we grew up. This is a gathering of the soul, of souls of all of y’all. And if you don’t like it, you leave. It’s super simple. And if you do like it, you know you’re staying with other people who like it for the same reasons you do.

But all of us can do this. It’s not just our community. It’s every one of you feeling the adjacent possible, feeling the best next step, and then taking it and making it real and going through the frustration and the delight and joy of going from the circle that has been written around us right now to the next wonderful spot. I love you all. Thank you so much for joining me on The Gathering Room. Take your best next step and I’ll see you everywhere. Bye!