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
Nice thoughts, so much relevant, wishing the world could be like that all around.
Vishen, I “ate” every word you wrote. This is so eye opening. It made me think and truly question how we live and how we chase things that we think will make us happy and successful and free. But it`s actually the opposite and majority are not aware of that. We were so conditioned how to live and what happiness and success means and unfortunatelly, it is all wrong.
I admire the San and when I saw the picture with happy and excited kids around you, who feel safe, accepted, loved, seen, heard… my heart melted. Such a touching moment. When was the last time you saw such an authentic energy and sparks with western kids?
You know, Vishen, this story can change lives. It can set people free from the inner program that has been running them for years. It can show them, that the reality they (we) live in is not the only one and even more, it can show us that the way we live is just breaking us apart from each other and preventing to experience peace and freedom we all want.
So, what is the solution? Start with yourself and your community.
Such a thought provoking article!!… it got me hooked and introspect post the read.
Warm regards
BIBEK S
iNDIA
Inspiring! Some of us old hippies have had this vision for over half of a century. Human evolution is a slow process but we hold the vision of a change in consciousness through changing our own consciousness. Glad to see you are on that same path. I highly recommend shamanic healing & the more westernized psychedelic healing that is becoming popular for healing the trauma of our egocentric westernized way of life along with a meditation practice that fits for you. Blessed Be the peacemakers.
Hi Vishen, once again great overview and insights.
Being an Australian, with a deeply sympathetic view of invasion day, otherwise known as Australia day, where a holiday is given for tge date Captain Cook arrived here in 1788 and announced this uninhabited island be decreed part of the British Empire.
By international law, it was illegal to invade an already occupied country and take it over !
So , it was declared that the indigenous aboriginal population here were really not human, but closer to animals and therefore legally it could be declared available.
The aboriginal people’s have indeed been credited with being the oldest continuous living civilisation on earth, and lived in such close harmony with this land that they had developed a society where very little work was required to provide food and lodgings. They were / are indeed a very sophisticated culture with an attachment to the planet that is deeply respectful and full of the respect required to live in harmony with other creatures and life gorms , and they clearly understood the need for a humble notion of their custodianship.
I would recommend that at some point in your valuable life you give this culture some worthy and serious research.
Thanks again for mindvalley, it is a solidly entrenched part of my daily life.🙏
Thank you for this article, Vishen 🙏😊 and for sharing your travels.
If I could travel to any point in time to live as a random person in any society and have the best shot at being treated fairly…it would definitely be to a community that operates as the San people do.
One issue with Western governing systems is they were built on shaky foundations, stemming back to when leadership was fought for in battles. Changes to the system are made, but very gradually and not reflective of out evolution. The entire system needs a huge upgrade and the foundations to be strengthened.
I was just having a catch up with friends and talking politics. My question was, why are world leaders not subject to psych assessments? Every other high stress position is, such as military, high scale aviation, police force and other emergency services. We let people run an entire country and make decisions that affect millions without officially testing how mentally capable they are to handle the decisions and stresses that go with the role. If our leaders are very balanced people, our societies might then reflect that balance.
I feel there is so much collective trauma over many generations from all over the world as far as operating systems and leadership is concerned. Trauma both on the leadership side and society side which leads to mistrust and, insecurity and dividiveness. Those traumas need to be addressed so that we can move forward in a healthier, happier way.
Perhaps though, there needs to be a mindset shift to start looking at how far we have come in equality so that we can start to rewrite the narrative. While there are still gaps…compared to even just twenty years ago, things have progressed, measures have been introduced to continue bridging these gaps, perhaps we need to amplify that 😊
Looking to systems, such as the San people’s, as a model for social structure is definitely something worth doing.
Again, thank you, Vishen for another thought provoking article, I really look forward to reading these each week 😊💕
Reading this at this early hour makes my heart soar. So many of your pieces of your puzzle falling into place. Returning home to your true self. I find it profound and emitting a frequency of magnificence.
Last week reading your thoughts on Female Elephants I mentioned I always look at nature for answers, as nature is pure and it is true to itself. There is no ego, there is no power, there is no greed. Just rhythms and cycles. It just is.
Following my tantrum and outburst to the Universe asking that all important question, ‘what is the purpose to my life?’ I mentioned that quietly and unassumingly the Universe responded, not big and bright and flashy, but little pieces of insights and ‘aha’ moments. One such insight was the opportunity of a trip down to Marion Island and the Pack Ice in 2002 on the SA Agulhas, sneakingly disguised as a birding trip. 17 days and 1000kms into the Pack Ice and we would still be 1000kms from the Antarctic. We started off on calm waters protected by the Southern tip of Africa and by day 3 as we entered the 40’s encountered storms of note. In fact we were prohibited from going to the pointy part of the boat. In those 17 days there were only 3 days calm sailing – leaving Cape Town harbour, in the Pack Ice as the weight of the Ice controls the waves and returning to Cape Town Harbour. We had 90ft waves and 60knot winds – violent storms and watching the SA Agulhas cut through a 90ft trough, a spray of note reaching the bridge and then the incredible feeling of floating, the sinking of the back of the boat into the trough and watching a 90ft wave rise up above the boat.
Fascinating and quite mesmerizing.
One day something caught my attention as I sat captivated, entranced, hypnotized almost, I became conscious of the all the sea birds following in the wake in these raging storms. I sat up and asked one of the Ornithological guides how much those small pigeon sized birds weighed?
He replied, ‘2.5-5kgs’
I asked, ‘and how much does this boat weigh?’
He didn’t know. I had seen this information somewhere so went down below on a hunt to find it. It was not on the public notice board giving us information about our adventure and what birding delights we had encountered and when we were expected to see the first Iceberg. Not feeling discouraged I went to my cabin and scrounged around the trip information sent to me initially and I found what I was looking for. That stopped me in my tracks. I looked and something magical happened – not that I realized it then, but a transformation on how I saw things was being ignited and jump started. Something inherent that had gone cold like a flat battery not being used and needing a little help to get going again.
I went back up to the heli-deck and sat in my chair staring in awe at the sight unfolding behind the ship. The birding guide asked if I had found what I was looking for.
I replied, ‘Yes. The SA Agulhas weighs 6123tons’.
That this hunk of iron was being tossed around the ocean like a leaf in the wind, and could easily sink like a stone, disappearing, into the dark cold depths, forever, yet those 2.5-5kg sea birds could sit on that 60knot wind and skim the tips of those 90ft waves with hardly a feather being ruffled. Just another day at the office. I realized that I was being shown something special. The Antarctic is inhospitable to man, a cold frozen chunk of land, yet every year seabirds, petrels albatrosses, penguins, whales…. go there to breed in the 3 short months of what they call summer. I believe I was being shown how ‘The Universe works with no influence from man’. It was showing me that I need to look beyond the Western allopathic route of healing. Look back at the natural talents that I knew I had but had let lie dormant as it wasn’t what society wanted. (taken from stories from ‘Finding Jenn’)
I discovered too, something intriguing some 10 or so years later about my paternal grandmother, which you have highlighted here. My paternal grandmother was very guarded about where she came from. All we knew was she was born near Walvis Bay, South West Africa (Namibia). Well, with the great grandchildren needing to do projects of family trees, and the fad and craze to find your roots, etc – we discovered as a whole pile of ‘skeletons’ fell out the closet and cupboards, finally understanding her forced silence due to the times and what was politically correct and accepted. We discovered that her mother and grandmother were Khosian San.
Another piece of the puzzle, brick in the wall falling into place, enhancing the natural way of working with nature, of energy healing, inherent understanding of plant medicine. That we arrive with nothing, bare as a baby’s bum’ as they say and we leave with nothing, also bare, as a tree in winter, as we dissolve back into nature. We only take our wisdom and our energy.
Thank you for sharing your insights, for arriving full circle, for acknowledging and for being willing to look beyond what is presumed to be normal.
I look forward to hearing how all of this new found insights merge and take shape as you move forwards in this crazy world of artificial, governed for so long by power lust and greed.
I love the deep inner reflections you’ve written about recently. I’m curious what changed for you that has made you ask these rich, deep questions?
Spirituality is asking something more than it’s currently offering, and I wonder if the San gave you a clue? What if you leveraged the connections of the Mindvally community to create a powerful impact on the world? Not through courses or certifications, but as the collective coming together to act as a hive toward a powerful, collective outcome?
So much of the current spirituali path is aimed at the individual. What if this is flipped and we aim at the collective? I am because we are…
Vishen, This hits me deeply in so many ways. I wonder about their practices around birthing, as this is a place we have departed as western cultures away from millenia of women’s wisdom birthing and feeding infants. Outside of this blog forum, I have sent a more detailed message on Six on this topic. You have moved me to action here with this post. Thank you.
Wow, what a beautiful piece! The part about being careful who we follow is the most important lesson of this article. Thanks for bringing a story about an ancient, yet advanced civilization, back to this relevant point. I appreciate your choice to not be the ultimate guru and instead focus on building community. I’m doubtful that your vision of AI will workout for the best of communities however. We need people with your vision to help us write the rules and agreements that AI should follow. I hope you will give this endeavor some serious thought. In any case, thank you for creating Mindvalley.
Best,
Dave Paprocki
Vishen, I have been a small part of Mindvalley for years. I have certainly watched your growth through the years. Your life story is very interesting.
I want to say that I found your blog very interesting, not only about the San people, but your own connection to them. I checked out all the words and photos more than once.
I loved that the San lived how they believe and have been doing that for thousands of years. Awesome people. Then I read about you with the children and the fun they had with your beard. I really looked at those happy children, then I realized they were very well dressed and very different from their parents. They weren’t at all part of the San that you showed. So I checked out the Ombili Foundation, Namibia, they shared the photos, AI was full of information about Ombili Foundation. Something about three men (they are named) who gathered this group of San and relocated them to some sort of “safe” compound. And now they are “teaching” the children, what? It seems to me that the people you wrote about lived the life they wanted and believed in and now they have been relocated? and now not able to continue the life style they loved.
This really is bothering me as it is a similar and familiar experience that was put on the Indians in the US. They were moved, killed by new germs and viruses , children removed to “educate”, etc.etc. I am not trying to be negative, and after reading all the comments you received, it appears I am the only one who sees this discrepancy. : (
A very interesting and thought provoking article.
I too looked at the photo, and felt the discrepancy – though unlike you I didn’t follow it up, thank you for doing that and sharing. Far too often colonizers (usually European) forcibly removed children from their families for ‘re education’. It is still happening, for example – Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russians.
It is amazing how long the San have maintained their culture but I am very fearful for their future.
Eliza is very eloquent. After everything you taught at the Summit, I hope I am correct in believing that you spent maybe an hour recounting to Eliza, all your thoughts and interpretations of everything you saw during your Africa trip. Or more likely, 10-15 minutes at the end of each day. She then composed this newsletter article in your voice, which you read, approved and posted with few, if any, corrections or amendments. She’s good. I can’t remember the last time I read an article this long from beginning to end.
Hi Vishen,
Your last two posts about the elephants and the San people were
deeply beautiful to me. Thank you.
Connection first, all else second is what comes across to me about these two posts.
Personal, highest self and community, environment – all of connection. I think this is what makes us truly happy.
Archbishop Tutu talked about Ubuntu quite a bit. He said when he went to a local village the greeting was,
“How are we?”
That’s connection, and I believe it does rate first place for happiness and wellbeing perennially.
Thanks again for highlighting and sharing this. 🙂
Fantastic article. Can we ensure all “world leaders” read this? I’ve always loved the idea of everyone being equal. What a wonderful way to live. I do wonder what it will take for all of civilisation to live this way of life – where everyone could feel truly safe. The world would become a much happier place
Love this deep contemplation! This article kept me thinking deeply about progress and redefining success. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
I love this so much, “I am because we are.” It really encapsulates so simply and beautifully the idea I have been trying to participate in my whole life.
I have tried in various ways to live in community but have not achieved the feeling of integration and connection I yearn for. I’m not giving up though and this is another reminder it is out there and I just need to keep searching for my people 💙
Yes, it’s easier with your people, but it really stems from inside yourself. Live and be as though you were in an equal and reciprocal community – people will follow your lead
Hi Vishen and Mindvalley community,
Reading this brought a deep sense of resonance. My purpose centres around connection, which is why I moved into community organising. Yet over the past 5 years I’ve realised something uncomfortable: even progressive and justice spaces often replicate the same “us vs them” dynamics the broader system thrives on — showing up as groupthink, alienation, and an inability to truly listen across difference, even when community and inclusion are part of the vision.
Your emails about the female elephants and about an AI-fuelled future both landed with me. Building a ‘modern’ world where leadership is more fluid across contexts, centred in community benefit, and culturally embedded across generations would be transformative.
But the AI future also raised unadressed questions — such as, what happens to the 185 countries without universal basic income at the outset, to whether it meaningfully addresses the climate crisis within a consumer driven system it may actually accelerate.
Which brings me back to what feels fundamental for us to thrive: the conscious practice of managing ego to cultivate collective wisdom across generations, reframe leadership, and come together in difference for the benefit of all.
So my question to you, Vishen and Mindvalley community, is: in a world where even leadership and managing ego have been commoditised, from your perspective how do we build these practices at scale — especially across communities that don’t have access to spaces like Mindvalley or may not share the same worldview?
I am so glad that you have “discovered” the San, or KhoiSan culture while in Africa. I have known about their culture all my life and have studied it at the university of Cape Town to Master’s level. The oldest art piece discovered and dated to 77,000 years is in the national museum in Cape Town.
This, to my mind, is proof of a developed consciousness. Trance dancing had it’s part to play as well. I would love to tell more, but that will be another thesis.
I loved your article. For sure this is the way of the future. Building community regarding each other as equals. No hate and destruction.
You always spark something in my soul. Reading this piece today change my perspective about many things.
Thank you for always transforming our mind with this insights.