#009 – We are often conditioned to believe that there aren’t choices or that there is only one “right” answer. This kind of thinking often locks us into seeing limitation and lack instead of a future full of infinite possibility. On this episode, we spoke with Cassandra Vieten, who is the Scholar in Residence at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. We covered a wide range of topics from how do science and faith coexist to the waves of change rippling through our world today. Join us on this week’s episode as we expand our own capacity to dream in imagining a world of what is truly possible as we ask the question, “What if?”

Notable Quotes

“The way we use language can shape our reality and our abilities.”

“If we’re trying to look into the nature of reality and human potential and what’s possible, there are many ways to look into it. One is through science, which is a very specific, structured way of doing it that’s supposed to eliminate as much bias as possible and look at things objectively and repeat measurements to see if they are reliable and they stay over time. That’s the job of science. But it doesn’t mean introspection, that religious systems for investigating our inner world or even our outer world or even that art and theater aren’t explorations of what’s possible in who we really are. All of these approaches are teaching us something about who we are and what’s possible.”

“Science kind of holds reign in a certain way for maybe half of the population and religion holds reign for the other half of the population. Neither one by themselves are adequate.”

“About 400 years ago, a philosopher named Descartes, helped us out of the Dark Ages by saying, ‘Look religion doesn’t want us to look at the body. It doesn’t want us to do autopsies. It doesn’t want us to measure whether the sun is the center of the galaxy .  . . because it is worried that faith is going to be destroyed by measurement.’ So Descartes said, ‘How about if science takes the natural world and religion takes the inner world? And we just don’t bother each other.’ That was when the Enlightenment came.”

“There aren’t as many pathways for inner development. In indigenous cultures, inner development and external development were completely intertwined.”

“What if it wasn’t this way, but it was that way?”

“There’s a cultural immunity to change. Even an intellectual immunity to change. Just like in your body, the culture tries to maintain homeostasis and tries to keep the dominant beliefs as long as possible even if they’re wrong. It’s only when a certain number of events or observations finally pass a threshold, a small group of people start to say, ‘Wait a minute. This is not right. This does not match.’ Usually what happens then is the vast majority of people squash that small group. ‘You are messing up the homeostasis. We might be super unhealthy, but at least we know what the heck is going on.’

Then the events keep happening where they reach another threshold and finally they come out together to say, ‘This is wrong.’ That’s when things do change. It’s the only way that things have ever changed is for people to stand up to that immunity and finally overcome it. It’s a strange analogy to be using during a pandemic where we don’t have any immunity, but we are breaking down some of our immunities to change and being overcome by a different way of looking at things.”