The Palette Of Being

Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn’t exist for people 5,000 years ago. It was a colour in the 'Palette of Being' that you couldn’t paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another colour that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We’re born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colours of being that are around us at the point of our birth. But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new colour. And that might come from the invention of a new thing: A self-driving car; a piano; a computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being.

It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world through the creative process of mixing together. all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the 'Palette of Being' for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we’ve talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, but we think about this universe as we’re this tiny, unimportant thing, there’s this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there’s the biosphere, and inside of that, that’s society, and inside of us, we’re just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there’s nothing really special about us.

But the 'Palette of Being' says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet and the universe itself. And if it’s a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we’re going to do that, the manner in which we’re going to do that. Because we’ve been given this amazing gift of consciousness. And because of this gift, we have the ability to deeply understand our connectedness, in the way we haven’t seen other animals having the opportunity to do so.

And because we can deeply understand our connectedness, we’re the ones that have the decision on how we’re going to go use that knowledge, how we’re going to go use it to build our societies and to shape our lives. I think the reason that all the spiritual traditions have got this concept of 'we are all connected inside of it' is because the societies that actually deeply adopt this idea are the ones that over time deepen their level of consideration, deepen their level of expression, deepen their level of understanding for each other. This is the reason that this idea pops up over and over at the core of spiritual traditions. And I hope through this talk you see that the reason that it appears at the core of science is it’s actually something that is just literally true of the physical universe at every single level of organization and every single manifestation of matter, energy, and life. So I’d like us all to come together with this knowledge and understand this truth about how the universe is, that because our hearts, our breath, and our mind are connected in this way, we need to challenge ourselves to understand what it means to live from this truth.

Tom Chi has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysical researcher to Fortune 500 consultant to corporate executive developing new hardware/software products and services. He has played a significant role in established projects with global reach (Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Search), and scaled new projects from conception to significance (Yahoo Answers from 0 to 90 million users). His current focus is delving into human development issues with social entrepreneurs around the globe and rebooting the fundamental frameworks of entrepreneurship itself.

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