Book Excerpt

Our Story

The words you are about to read will transform our world and your life. I say this with a deep personal respect and desire for the truth. In the pursuit of truth, I have come to depend on history and science. Science has exploded with amazing new insights that have dramatically upgraded our understanding of reality. History tells us the complex stories that humanity wraps around these evolving truths. The great struggle of humankind is the painful process of updating these stories to fit new and undeniable truths. The truth will set you free, but at a price. The price is that we must collectively give up the old stories that no longer serve us. We love our stories often more than we love our very life. Our stories can be a comfortable and safe place, or the genesis of bitter and devastating conflict. The future of this planet is dependent on our ability to adapt our stories to new and expanding truths. This book creates the context to do just that.

What separates humanity from every other species is our ability to cooperate on a massive scale. This capacity has allowed us to dominate the physical world. This cooperation is always based on the intersubjective stories we create, disseminate, and have mutually agreed upon. Credit cards are an excellent example. There are virtually no places remaining in this world where you cannot procure significant goods or services with a worthless five-gram piece of plastic. Credit cards are an amazing bit of international cooperation. Everyone believes the story of the credit card, and this story is secure for the foreseeable future. What are the human costs of our more controversial stories? There are two very different stories we must confront immediately: The stories of the past that are filled with intractable conflicts, and the story of the future filled with rapid change.

As we move through the 21st century, the pace of change is approaching the speed of light. Humanity must adopt a new story that fits this new reality. The past stories that held the fabric of our society together are not just fraying at the edges; they are disintegrating into tattered, useless rags. The old-world order is rapidly becoming irrelevant at best, and is more commonly destructive. As centuries-old religious conflict persists, automation, digitization, artificial intelligence, robotics, and a host of other new technologies are disrupting the status quo monthly.

To maneuver this rapid change, we must adopt new and more accurate ways of processing life. We must take a deeper look at the true nature of reality to determine what really works. The gaps created by this rapid transformation cannot be filled with solutions from the past. We are experiencing deepening conflicts and a loss of trust at every level of society. Racial, gender, economic, religious, intergenerational, societal, and environmental battles are being waged daily.

Despite the challenges, there is reason for optimism. A new look at science and an alternative look at history offer overwhelming evidence that human beings are the great transformers, the great expansionists of life. Humanity is clever, and above all else, committed to its survival. The question we must confront is not if we will survive, but how? What new story will we create? Will it be inclusive and based on truth? The answers are up to you. We have the ability to provide food, shelter, clothing, education and healthcare for everyone. Unburdened with the concerns of survival, my hope is that the world will continue to expand into a new age of cooperation, peace, and creativity.

I am not a scientist nor an historian; I am a teacher. This is not a science book nor a history book – it is a call to action. Given our new realities, it begs the question: What will our new story be? In this book, I propose the framework of a new story that has the potential to transform humanity. My hope is that it inspires you. If it moves us forward with a new, more accurate and compelling story, I have done my job.