What if the happiest humans who ever lived had no money, no government, and no ambition?
I know that sounds like a provocation. But stay with me, because over the last two weeks something has been quietly dismantling my understanding of progress — and I think it might dismantle yours too.
It didn’t come from a book. It didn’t come from a billionaire on a stage at Davos. It came from a group of people who have lived on this land for longer than any culture on Earth. People that most of the West has never heard of. And people who have heard of them have called them “primitive.”
They are the San people of Africa.
And what I learned from them might be the most important thing I write this year.
The thought experiment that changes everything
Before I get to San, I want you to try something. It’s a thought experiment, and it’s not a light one. It’s the kind of question that, if you sit with it long enough, starts to rewire how you think about civilization itself.
Here it is.
If you could go back in time and be born into any culture, in any era of human history — but you had to come back as a random person. Not the king. Not the nobleman. Not the person with the right gender or the right skin color. Just a random human being in that society. You could come back as a woman. As a slave. As a member of a persecuted minority. As anyone.
Which civilization gives you the best odds of actually being happy?
Think about it.
Ancient Greece during the age of Pericles? Maybe — if you came back as a wealthy male citizen. But there were tens of thousands of slaves who built the Parthenon, and women had no legal rights. Roll the dice wrong, and your golden age is somebody else’s nightmare.
America in the 1950s? Sure — if you happened to be white, male, and straight. Otherwise, you’re drinking from a separate fountain.
The advanced Muslim Abbasid Empire in 12th-century Spain? A genuine golden age of science, art, and tolerance. But still, constant wars and battles with Christian Spain.
I started asking this question to historians, to thinkers, even to multiple AI systems. And the answers were fascinating. Modern Scandinavia kept coming up. The Abbasid Caliphate. Periclean Athens. But then there was one unlikely candidate that surfaced again and again.
The San people. Anytime before the 21st century. In three different AI models (Claude, OpenAI, Kimi), the San Culture came in the Top Ten.
Of all the cultures that have ever existed on this planet — cultures that built pyramids and parliaments and empires — the one where you could come back as anyone and almost surely live a dignified, equal, and connected life… was a group of hunter-gatherers roaming the savannahs of southern Africa.
That stopped me cold.
Because here’s the fascinating thing. This culture is the longest unbroken culture we have, dating back tens of thousands of years. And mostly unchanged.
Writing this from Namibia & Botswana
I’m writing this from a hotel room in Botswana. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been traveling across Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe — watching wildlife that feels almost mythological, standing in landscapes that look untouched by time, and learning about a continent that many of us in the West have come to severely misunderstand. Or worse — to underestimate entirely.
Last week, I wrote to you about what female elephants taught me about leadership. About how the matriarch leads not through force but through memory. About how nature, across species, keeps arriving at the same answer: wisdom over dominance.
This week goes deeper.
This week gets uncomfortable.
Because the San don’t just challenge how we lead. They challenge how we live. They challenge what we call progress. And they hold up a mirror to the modern world that, honestly, I wasn’t prepared for.
The oldest culture you’ve never heard of
If you haven’t heard of the San, you might know the term “Bushmen.” That’s what the West has called them for centuries. But that word carries the stench of colonialism — it comes from the Dutch bossiesman, meaning “bandit” or “outlaw,” a name given to them by the very people trying to destroy them.
The San have their own identity. And it goes back further than almost anything.
We’re not talking about a few hundred years. We’re not even talking about a few thousand. Genetic evidence suggests the San lineage diverged from other modern humans somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Their culture has been continuous for at least 20,000 years. Some scholars argue it’s the oldest living culture on Earth.
Let me put that in perspective. The ancient Egyptians built the pyramids about 4,500 years ago. Ancient Greece peaked around 2,500 years ago. The Roman Empire rose and fell. The Renaissance came and went. The industrial revolution, the digital revolution — all of it — and the San were already ancient when those civilizations were young.
We built progress. And lost happiness.
They never had what we call progress. And may never have lost what we’re desperately trying to find.
6,000-year-old maps of the mind
In Damaraland, Namibia, I stood in front of rock paintings left by San ancestors over 6,000 years ago.
I expected something crude. Stick figures. Basic hunt scenes.
That’s not what I found.
These were sophisticated. They depicted animals and watering holes, yes — but they also depicted something far more startling: altered states of consciousness. Shamans in trance. Humans transforming into animals. Maps of inner worlds that were as real to the San as the physical landscape around them.
See the Lion at the bottom with the extended tail. That’s not representing a physical lion. It represents the Shaman entering the consciousness of the Lion to gain insights on the world around him. This was breathwork and trance states 6,000 years ago.
The San didn’t just survive in the desert. They built a civilization of the mind. While we were still millennia away from writing our first philosophical texts, they were already exploring the architecture of consciousness — and painting what they found on rock walls.
The moment I didn’t expect
A few days later, I visited a small San school in Namibia. I sat down to greet the children, expecting maybe a few shy smiles. Some polite curiosity.
Instead, the children rushed toward me.
They surrounded me — laughing, reaching out, completely unafraid. And then they started touching my beard. Gently. Carefully. Almost reverently, like they were discovering a new texture that didn’t exist in their world.
Image shared with respect and permission from the Ombili Foundation that runs this school in Namibia
It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. About a dozen kids, all stroking my chin, giggling, fascinated. And in that moment, it clicked:
They had never seen a beard before.
What a beard might reveal about violence
Now here’s where things get genuinely fascinating.
There’s a hypothesis in evolutionary biology — still debated, but compelling — that beards may have evolved partly as protection. Studies have shown that facial hair can absorb and distribute the force of a blow to the jaw, reducing the chance of a fracture by as much as 30%. In environments where male-to-male violence was common, this would have been a significant survival advantage. Over thousands of generations, men in violent cultures would have been selected for thicker facial hair.
So think about what it means when an entire culture barely has beards.
The San are known to be one of the least violent societies in human history. No wars. No armies. No glorification of dominance. Anthropologists who have studied them describe them as “fiercely egalitarian” — not passively peaceful, but actively committed to preventing any individual from rising above the group.
And possibly — even at a biological level — they carry the evidence of tens of thousands of years without the kind of violence that shaped the rest of the human family.
Some evolutionary biologists suggest that their faces may be telling a story their culture has been living all along.
An operating system that actually works
If you’ve read my book, The Code of the Extraordinary Mind, you know I think about human behavior in terms of operating systems. Every civilization runs on one — a set of models of reality and systems for living that determine how people think, act, and organize themselves. I call the outdated, unquestioned rules in these systems Brules — bullsh*t rules. And most of the Brules we carry about what makes a “successful” society come from civilizations that lasted a few hundred years at best.
The San operating system has been running for tens of thousands of years. And it breaks almost every rule the modern world takes for granted.
No hierarchy. The San have no chiefs, no permanent leaders, no one who accumulates power over others. Leadership is fluid and contextual — whoever has the knowledge the moment requires takes the lead. A skilled hunter leads during the hunt. A healer leads during the ceremony. Then they step back into the group. No pedestals. No thrones. No corner offices.
Men and women are genuinely equal. Not in the performative way modern societies talk about equality — where we write policies and still pay women less. In the San world, men and women hold distinct roles that are equally vital and equally respected. The men hunt. But the women are the navigators. They know where the water sources are hidden beneath dry riverbeds. They track the movement of game across vast stretches of savannah. They know which plants heal, which nourish, which kill. When the tribe moves — and they move constantly, following the game — it’s the women’s knowledge that keeps everyone alive.
If you read last week’s newsletter on female elephants, you’ll recognize the pattern. In elephant herds, the matriarch leads because she remembers where the water is. Among the San, the women carry the same knowledge. Nature keeps arriving at the same answer, across species, across millennia: memory and wisdom over force and dominance.
Everything is shared. When a hunter makes a kill, the tribe moves its portable shelters to the site. They feast together. Then they move again. They’ve been doing this for 10,000 years. There is no accumulation. No identity tied to what you own. No hoarding. This isn’t poverty — it’s a design choice. The San solved an equation that modern economists are still struggling with: beyond a certain point, more stuff doesn’t make you happier. They figured this out before the wheel was invented.
Insulting the meat
Now here’s the part that really broke something in me.
The San have a practice that anthropologist Richard Lee documented called “insulting the meat.” It is, without exaggeration, one of the most brilliant social technologies I’ve ever encountered.
Here’s how it works. A hunter goes out. He tracks an animal — sometimes for days. He makes the kill. He comes back to camp. And instead of being celebrated, instead of anyone saying you’re incredible — everyone, including the hunter himself, downplays the kill.
“That? That skinny old thing? Barely worth eating.”
“Look at that pathetic animal. You call that a hunt?”
And the hunter joins in. He laughs about his mistakes. Jokes about how the giraffe nearly trampled him because he tripped over his own feet. He makes himself small — on purpose.
This isn’t cruelty. It’s not false modesty. It’s a social technology designed to prevent the most destructive force any community can face: unchecked ego.
An elder from the group explained it like this: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way, we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
We cool his heart and make him gentle.
Forty thousand years of social cohesion. Built on a single insight: ego is the enemy of community.
Now hold that in your mind. And think about the kind of leaders we celebrate today.
The ego problem we refuse to see
We are living in an era that glorifies the opposite of everything the San built.
We amplify ego. We reward dominance. We build pedestals for individuals who speak about power as though volume equals vision. We have world leaders who threaten to wipe out entire civilizations and face no consequence.
In the San culture, this doesn’t stand. It can’t stand. Their entire social operating system is designed to prevent exactly this — the elevation of any single ego above the group.
Last week, I wrote about female elephants and how nature chose wisdom over dominance. This week, the San are showing me the same pattern, but in human terms: civilizations that glorify ego eventually collapse under the weight of it. Civilizations that regulate the ego endure.
So I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable question: What if we have this fundamentally wrong? What if the future of humanity isn’t in glorifying certain individuals, but in equality? What if the world needs less of the strongman archetype and more of the leadership model that nature — and the San — arrived at independently?
Less ego. More community. More women in positions of power. More leaders who foster connection rather than division.
The San figured this out before the Bronze Age. And we still haven’t caught up.
The fire, the dance, and the oldest technology of consciousness
One evening in Namibia, a San guide walked me through their shamanic healing rituals. And it felt like stepping into another dimension of human experience. I didn’t witness the healing, but my guide explained it to me via a mural on the wall of a San School in Namibia.
The San have healers — both men and women — who enter altered states of consciousness through what’s known as the trance dance. Women sit in a circle around a fire, clapping and singing medicine songs that they’ve known since childhood. The healers dance around the periphery, sometimes for hours, until a spiritual energy the San call n/om rises through their bodies. It starts in the belly, rises through the spine, and then the healer crosses over into what they describe as another reality.
My guide described a ritual where…as the “patient” goes into a trance, the healer heats a knife in the fire until it’s red hot. He then plunges the knife into the patient and pulls it out. When the knife is pulled out, there is no scar, there is no wounding. The patient also experiences no pain. The illness is then healed.
You will see this in the mural above. One shaman gently caresses the woman while the shaman behind her is about to plunge a knife into her.
In this state, healers touch the sick and draw illness from their bodies. They mend disputes. They restore the social fabric of the group. The San describe it as “arrows of sickness” being pulled from the community and flung into the darkness.
My guide explained to me that his grandfather, a San shaman, still performs this healing ritual today.
By the time San adults reach maturity, roughly half the men and a third of the women have become healers. This isn’t a priesthood reserved for the elite. It’s distributed. Communal. Available.
The rock paintings I saw — 6,000 years old — depicted exactly this. Shamans in trance. The boundary between human and animal is dissolving. Consciousness expanding beyond the body.
We in the West tend to dismiss this as superstition. But I’ve spent two decades studying consciousness, meditation, and human performance. I’ve built Mindvalley on the premise that transcendent practices — the Silva Method, meditation, altered states — are not fringe experiences but essential human technologies. And what the San developed isn’t primitive. It’s the original technology of consciousness. It’s been running, unbroken, for longer than any other system on Earth.
We think we invented mindfulness. The San have been practicing it for 20,000 years.
What I learned building Mindvalley
This brings me to something personal.
When The Code of the Extraordinary Mind hit number one globally in 2017, I had a choice. I could lean into being “the guru.” Build the personal brand. Become the center of the platform. Every incentive in the modern world pointed that direction — because our systems reward exactly that kind of ego amplification.
I chose to break the model.
Instead of positioning myself as the singular voice, I opened Mindvalley to hundreds of teachers. Different perspectives. Different modalities. Even ideas that conflict with my own. Because I believe that truth doesn’t belong to one person. It emerges from many.
Compare this to the guru model that dominates the personal development world — where a single personality becomes the brand, the doctrine, the untouchable center. Some of those gurus built grandiose names for themselves and then turned up in the Epstein files. That’s what happens when ego goes unchecked. The San would have seen it coming.
That decision to distribute authority rather than concentrate it changed everything — not just for the company, but for me. Because the moment you remove ego from the center of leadership, you create space for something the San have always known is more powerful: community.
I am because we are
There’s a word that echoes across southern Africa. In Botswana, they call it botho. In South Africa and much of the Bantu-speaking world, it’s ubuntu. The translation sounds simple, but it contains an entire philosophy of what it means to be human:
I am because we are.
Not “I think, therefore I am” — the Cartesian formula that built the entire Western model of selfhood on the isolated individual mind. But something fundamentally different: I exist because of my connection to you. My humanity is not mine alone. It is something we create together.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it like this: “Ubuntu is not ‘I think therefore I am.’ It says rather: ‘I am a human because I belong. I participate. I share.'”
The San embody this more deeply than perhaps any culture in history. When a healer enters trance to draw out sickness, they’re not treating an individual — they’re healing the community. When the tribe insults the meat, they’re not putting down the hunter — they’re protecting the collective from the cancer of ego. When men and women share leadership based on who holds the right knowledge for the moment, they’re not being “progressive.” They’re running an operating system that’s been tested and optimized across more generations than any civilization on Earth.
The future is moving toward them
Now layer something else onto all of this.
AI.
Over the next decade, we are heading toward a world where work becomes optional for many. Where universal basic income shifts from theory to inevitability. Where ownership starts to lose its meaning because access becomes abundant, and the cost of goods approaches zero. Where the game we’ve built our identities around — accumulation, status, dominance — begins to dissolve.
In other words, whether we realize it or not, the future is starting to look less like modern capitalism and more like a campfire in the Kalahari.
Shared resources. Fluid roles. Community over status. Identity rooted not in what you own, but in who you are to others.
We are drifting — some of us kicking and screaming — back toward something ancient.
And the most important thing I can tell you for the next ten years is this: be careful who you follow. Avoid egocentric leaders. Vote for people who foster community rather than division. The world doesn’t need more strongmen on pedestals. It needs more leaders who understand, at a bone-deep level, that their power belongs to the group.
The San knew this before they had a written language. We’re going to have to re-learn it with all of ours.
The question that won’t leave me
So I sit here in Botswana, about to fly home. And one question keeps looping through my mind, and I can’t make it stop.
What if the most advanced civilization in human history wasn’t the one that built the tallest buildings, the fastest computers, or the most destructive weapons?
What if it was the one that figured out how to keep every single member of the group — regardless of gender, regardless of role — fed, healthy, equal, and connected? For longer than any other culture on the planet?
What if we didn’t evolve forward, but sideways — gaining technology while losing something essential about how to be human together?
We optimized life. And forgot how to live.
But the blueprint for something better has been here all along. In a place where children have never seen a beard, because they’ve never needed protection from each other. Where a hunter comes home with a kill and the first thing his people do is laugh at him, because they know that the moment his ego grows, the community dies. Where healers dance themselves into another dimension to keep their people whole. Where the oldest woman in the group holds more authority than any king, because she remembers where the water is.
I am because we are.
Maybe it’s time we remembered that.
If this sparked anything in you, take a moment to leave a comment below—I read them all.
Vishen
PS: Everything I wrote about in this newsletter – community over ego, shared learning over guru worship, the idea that human beings thrive when they grow together rather than alone — that’s exactly what Mindvalley U was built to be.
Every year, we bring together people from over 100 countries to live, learn, and grow side by side for two full weeks. Not in a lecture hall. Not behind a screen. In person. Families, entrepreneurs, artists, seekers, all eating together, learning together, raising their kids together in a pop-up community that, honestly, feels closer to how humans were designed to live than anything the modern world typically offers.
There are no pedestals at Mindvalley U. No single guru on a stage telling you what to think. There are hundreds of teachers, dozens of perspectives, and a community that operates on the same principle I saw in the Kalahari: I am because we are.
This year, we’re in Tallinn, Estonia, from July 20 to August 2, 2026. If anything in this newsletter stirred something in you, this is where you come to live it.
Featured image shared with permission from the Ombili Foundation (instagram: @ombili_foundation_namibia) that helps preserve San Culture.
264 Responses
Truly beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I know you will keep in sharing these revelations. It’s a turning point for the world, and I hope this time it takes the right road.
My God. This piece has me absolutely shook. I opened it 3 days ago and keep coming back to it. As a woman in a deeply patriarchal society, this San way of life resonates not just cognitively but intuitively as well. And as someone who has been studying the mind-body connection for a while, it makes me wonder.. isn’t it scary how the analogy of ego can be applied to the way cancer happens in the body? The way a single cell chooses self-interest over the health of the body? The answer is right there. Anyway.. I must say.. that in this age of endless noise in the name of information, this is exactly the kind of content we need to read and re-read and sit with and ponder on and then let it guide us towards change. Thank you so much, Vishen sir, for this article, for Mindvalley and for all the work you do. You’re such an inspiration!
All my life, I’ve been searching for this one answer.
Ever since I was a child, I felt deeply that there had to be another way for society to exist
a way in between, where we can truly live in community.
Your blog, this story…
it finally gave me the answer I’ve been longing for.
I can’t fully express what this moment means to me.
I feel a deep sense of gratitude
not only for discovering this culture in South Africa,
but for you sharing your experience so openly, allowing it to reach me in this moment.
It truly means more than I can put into words.
Thank you.
I loved this blog. It touched me deeply and resonated so much with what I’m going through right now. Thank you for sharing. Vishen, you are my inspiration; you also reflect the kind of person I want to become.
Wow.What an amazingly beautiful and profound story. I feel it in every fiber of my being. This was delicious to read. I agree with every point you make about what we can learn from the beautiful ancient San culture. And what’s interesting is you can actually feel the joy of each and every child in the photo. That speaks volumes concerning the success of an entire culture. Thank you, thank you, thank you Vishen for blessing us with the story. Thank you for being you, a beacon of love and compassion for humanity.
The San cool the heart. Surgical culture heats it. This piece named something I’ve been circling for years — thank you.
That’s the most beautiful story I read for a long while! Thank you! I didn’t expect this from a man like Vishen honestly. He’s still a ‘rich leader’ personality. It warms my heart to see he is not living in fear and spreading trust instead.
I am so impressed with this group of beautiful humans. I do hope that we can survive the egoistic structure that we have built. The AI does not scare me as much as the billionaire class who now dabble in policy & politics. They seem determined to live lavishly at the expense of us all. It seems we are waist (or waste, depending how we view it) deep in the system that feeds the machine (ego, greed, power) and we either get out soon or it will destroy us and our gorgeous planet.
I feel a wisdom led, matriarchal and patriarchal society that values humans based on those qualities rather than gender alone will thrive. However it happens, we would all do well to read this article and know that gender wars, religious wars, technology races, oil greed, climate crises, etc are all examples of the divisive rhetoric designed to make us detach and separate from our communities. The power play is real in our current world. I would only ask individuals to assess their own contributions to the collective in a way that doesn’t involve them looking for recognition.
We can take this life and mold it like clay if we all decide to. It would require throwing away all of our “programming”.
Thank you for this opportunity to see our world differently and for the hope it has inspired.
My dear Vishen, your letter is the first in a very LONG time that felt very authentic to me. The past few months I was a little confused, to say the least, in what direction my “top 5” community is leading to. This letter was from the Vishen that has changed my life !
The story is so so so accurate and important. I am very happy you shared so much wisdom in this article, and I thank you for spreading this type of mentality mind shift. This world needs drastically LESS EGO !!!! Ego rules this planet, and through our amazing digital new world, the ego found a perfect stage. Sending much love and light xoxo
You made me cry!
That’s not how we live in the United States.
May this be the sign on the way to create mindvalley community hubs. Experimenting with this and crossing it: western and eastern and ancient technology.
In a San based OS system.
The most advanced longevity, learning and “new business” communities on this planet.
A swirling swarm supporting each other in such profound ways… Creating “new systems” for tackling the most profound issues of this time.
Concrete:
Plans on how to effectively build small environmental friendly communities in the most cost efficient manners.
Then a strategy on which people to involve. Practical politics.
Then building one hub after another small centers for people to learn, meditate and build the new planet structures.
Also cooperating with other communities who are attempting this.
The essence:
Instead of one person fighting with the help of mindvalley authors certifications etc. which is already awesome.
It’s about building small organisms of a few people working as an organisms under the mindvalley flag with certain goals on how to transform humanity in very concrete ways.
Such as new sustainable living places. Ai based agriculture/permaculture.. And new ways to harness energy.
Also with a concrete commitment to serve locally. They are responsible to have kind of a hotel/seminar structure so people can come for small… Locally organized mindvalley experiences/ learning events for people locally. Though the online platform with local human support of committed mindvalley trainers.
Looking forward for these hubs to emerge one day. 🛖 ❤️ 😊 🙏
Love your content Vishen.
Hi, I didn’t read all the remarks and don’t know if the following has been already mentioned but, I know AI can have an excellent and broad perspective however I would extend societies that are well adjusted and happy, to several traditional tribal groups around the world who continue to live according to what is sometimes referred to as the original instructions like the Dagara people of Burkina Faso, as another group of many, and that happy group would only include those remaining untouched by the toxicity of colonialism, drugs, greed and all that, sadly which many but luckily not all San have been lost in. Love this article, thank you.
Hi Vishen,
This resonates more than 100%. Like a flock of birds in the sky, similar dynamics.
Similar to how I felt in my first Joe Dispenza retreat. My ego fades out, dissolves and I feel whole, I am the whole with everyone else and connected with our hearts and cumminicating as such. This is how humans are suppose to be.
We will come to live this when the ego has played it’s last part.
Thank you Vishen!
Thank you for this, Vishen. I was always someone who wanted to leave my community and familiar surroundings to move to other places, experience other cultures. There’s something in me that struggles against the idea of a collectivist society, and yet, I know this is the way for us to survive and thrive.
The only question I’d like to have an answer to right now is, how do we deactivate the nuclear arsenal and all the harmful technology that keeps controlling the planet and its people? I’m not putting my belief in doomsday honestly, but if those technologies and mindsets aren’t let go of without a fight, even communities like the San will find that their world is not liveable in. Do we know how we’re navigating this phase yet?
Thanks for sharing this. As promised at the start of the blog, this fundamentally alters how we approach thought and connectedness. I am going to have a deep conversation with my community about this.
I really appreciate your reads. Your mind is evolving in the most beautiful way. We think alike. Equality, peace, love and resources for every person on Earth is the world I see. I’m a man who is willing to follow a baby, a girl, a woman, a blind man, an elder and anyone who can point me in the direction of peace, love and equality.
Keep being and shining the light Vishen, it’s getting brighter and brighter. The dark places in the world are beginning to see the truth and the light.
Dear Vishen, I am new at Mindvalley and I have not participated in your programmes yet, but I read al lot for you and I watch videos.. Also I read your emails! Thank you so much for the article! I truly enjoyed it! This kind of information makes you thing about humanity, our beliefs and our way of life… I have a vision… And this is to make a home for elder women –my friends and anyone who wants to live with us-, so we can live together and help each other. This will be an organized place –field in a village, where each person will have their own space –small house, caravan, prefab, whatever- and there will be a large common area for tasks such as cooking, washing, and generally a place to meet and socialize and of course for self improvement. There will be a garden and a space to grow vegetables. There will be all kinds of trees, dogs and cats and chicken for eggs! I have spend a lot of years learning how to grow my own vegetables, how to grow trees, how to preserve my food without needing a refrigerator and I have learned a lot and have a lot yet to learn! So this example of yours is very inspiring and I thank you for this.
With love, Matina
Hello Vishen,
What a beautiful story about an equally beautiful reality! Thank you very much for sharing the profound influence the precious San people and these transformative experiences had on you and your life, very generous to say the least.
What struck me very strongly are the ‘bookend questions’ in your post:
1) “What if the happiest humans who ever lived had no money, no government, and no ambition?”
2) “What if we didn’t evolve forward, but sideways — gaining technology while losing something essential about how to be human together?”
Our greatest challenge,and opportunity, as a species, I feel very strongly, is to set and meet the objective of becoming the happiest humans who ever lived, in the context of inevitable progress in technology, etc. Such progress is our destiny, I also feel. I would even go so far as to say that progress is our reason for being here, our common purpose, so to speak. The progress of what, however, is the key question. Misguided answers have gotten us into all sorts of trouble as is so evident.
I further believe that the central problem with our current views on human progress, as reflected in what you said so eloquently in this post, is that we have lost touch with what real success, real progress is; we lost touch with what it means to be truly human as is reflected in the San’s operating system. Happiness has become subordinate to all other forms of achievement in so many contexts.
What we need now is a new operating system for humanity that is founded upon a San-like way of being and that operates in the contexts of modern humanity. This has been the focus of my work for over 30 years now, and for various reasons, I am just embarking on putting my thoughts out into the world now. A large part of this long timeframe was getting my own ego out of the way, about making what I do, be about humanity’s betterment however that happens vs. about me being central to it in ways.
To conclude, thank you also, Vishen, for all you are doing in this vane and with Mindvalley, the latter being a powerful platform that is, and can even much more so, be at the front and center of such a movement toward a glorious future for humanity, I feel….
How fascinating.
What a wonderful question that started that journey.
A snall detour… but just isnt it a wonderful ability…
To question…to be able to find fascinating curious questions to ask…which then lead us on adventures to placs we never even knew existed. …..and AI helps answer those curious questions faster.
And back to the San people … now i feel like hopping on a plane and doscovering them for myself. What a beautiful world we live in.. with people i need to start having the courage and confidence to neet more people like for real.
Thanks Vishen…for making the world just a tad more magical and fluid…
Oh and dont get me started on Ego.. and our society today!!!
Happy adventures to you .. and all !
Most important post to date, yes, especially considering your ability to reach thousands of people. (I had the idea to project this message onto the moon but couldnt find anyone to assist unfortunately. True story.) However, this post is still about US…us, the lost western world and how we need to remember and get back to the place before we lost our way…yes, it is…but it will take a little time. Perhaps long after the collapse of all systems that were never sustainable. (Only healthy ecosystems are). In the meantime, how can we thank THEM for holding the space and keeping the memory alive all this time so that we have something to connect to and return to!???!!??! How do the very people who have gifted us with that moment of awakening in their presence – in that ancient vibration that triggered a memory long lost – get something in return? Or is it still all about us?
The picture painted is very romanticised because it does not talk about the many displaced San and other indigenous peoples all around the world who were robbed of their orginal way of living and with that, happiness (as we call it).
Most were chased off their land, killed, marginilised and looked down upon until today – yet many of them welcome us, with love and compassion, perhaps the most forgiving hearts that exist, gift us with their presence and ancient wisdom in the frequency that radiates from their bones, their wombs connected to the heartbeat of Mother Earth and through their ancestors presence. When is the information no longer extractive and another form of exploitation? How can we humble ourselves and ask how we can finally give back what was taken from them so that they can guide us – our planet, our humanity – back home? Help them thrive again, give them back the land that we stole from them so that they in turn can look after it again? Give them something back for all the information we extracted from them to (for example) get a phd for the same knowledge they hold without needing a title?
Indigenous people deserve a space to heal from the trauma we inflicted upon them which is nature or rather, their ancestral land. But of course now I am speaking on behalf of them and how dare I know on their behalf what they need!
Fact is that they held space for our planet for thousands of years, and waiting for us to come (back) to the party for a very very long time. The indigenous people are our only hope for our planet and „to walk us home“ if we are lucky enough for them to say yes (to us and to collaboration) after everything that we did to them. It is our obligation, our duty not only towards them but towards Mother Earth to allow THEM to return to stewardship and guardianship of our beautiful planet – as this is what they do best. Only they can do it the way it was always intended to – with (at least) the next seven generations in mind. So let’s come together and make this our number one priority! Make THEM our number one priority for the greater good of it all. What you have seen, Vishen was a minority group of happy San who are allowed to live the way they used to, therefore just a fraction of the truth. The people we labelled poor and primitive are the very people who, if anything, have become even more resilient through their struggles and therefore have much better survival chances than any of us westeners will ever have in challenging times – especially those living in cities who have forgotten it all and can not even light a fire (when the power goes off). Food for thought. And no, I definitely do not have all the answers and am just as guilty as everyone else but a heart that beats strong for the indigenous people (in case you haven’t felt it yet) and while I feel very overwhelmed by it all, I do know that change starts in a caring heart.
If you are still in Africa or planning to return, let‘s talk about the Congo Basin next – and extremly important area on Earth if we want to survive as humans on this planet.
This is gold. Community and equality as practiced by the San and other African tribes are earth connected and feel truly impressive to me. I was first impressed by a story about an African shaman who came to the US and observed people in mental hospitals. The way he spoke of their experience struck me. This was just prior to the start of my plant medicine journey back in 2013. I eventually hunted for that story and was guided to Malidoma Some’s book of Water and the Spirit. The description of community, grief processing, earth connectedness, healing and magic were so different than our western perspective, but it felt to healthy and well. In my core energetic trainings my teacher would talk about the Guru on the Mount complex and how ego based it was. We also covered The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel VanderKolk which really drives home the crucial aspect of community for wellness. I was also impressed by Matt Khan saying [paraphrasing] that Guru’s have disciples, teachers have students, but masters create other masters. I loved that perspective. In my continued learnings and in the way I engage with my clients these principles are foundational. I always remind clients that I am just like them. We are all in this human experience together and we are here to support each other into wellness. I need my support as much as anyone. I enjoy the ancient Mayan phrase In Lak’ech meaning I am another you. Recently I saw the documentary Ghost Elephants about tracking elephants with master trackers in Angola. They discuss some similar principles around their culture and I noticed how beautiful they all are. I’ve recently been seeing things about mewing and the face shape of a well supported person is beautiful. These African tribes have that naturally. Good posture, beautiful body and facial structures. I can only assume that this is based on the wellness inherent in their culture. A lot of random pieces, but all aiming in the same direction of community and egalitarian lifestyles.