Amanda Scott

And some indigenous cultures, time runs backwards and we're living the present so that its impact on the past is

is healthy.

And I think I had quite a fluid brain, and my brain did not compute either of those, and I realised how much I live in linear temporal time.

Can you unpick either of those, or were they just ideas that flowed through?

So let's unpick that because I wanted to move into language and our attempts to decode the languages of other species.

But just let's have a look at that phrase of what ought to be because the verb is carrying an awful lot in there.

If I let it settle in like a pebble drifting down through water, different parts of me snag on the ought and it settles down into

I think, for me, and I want to know if it does for you.

What are my values?

What do I live by?

What do I live for?

Because I suspect we could ask politicians in our current dominant culture that question, or we could ask a mother with a newborn, or we could ask someone at the end of their life.

Or we could ask someone who lives quite connected to the living world.

Or we could ask someone whose job involves, you know, basically staring at a screen all day.

And the ought would arise from what is driving the dominant parts of them at the moment.

And I talk about IFS therapy a lot, but I still think I talk about it a lot because I think it's incredibly useful.

And Dick Schwartz says almost all of us, almost all of the time are walking around in a state of internal civil war.

And different parts of us will answer that question differently.

And until or unless we can, I think, get to the point where we've at least declared an inner truce and hopefully brought all parts of our system into a degree of coherence and self-led confluence and connection with the web of life and with other people,

then the answers to that question are not necessarily going to lead us in a seven-generation way.