Eric Oliver

Most of our ancestors lived in very small tribes, tightly bound by custom and tradition.

They didn't worry about what made them happy or how they would find true love or what their purpose in life would be because all of those things were arranged for them.

Who they were, who they should love, what they should do, all of those things were prescribed by custom and tradition.

And so the best thing they could do was simply to go along with that custom tradition because in return, the tribe would protect them and nurture them and keep them going.

It was only around 300 years ago, with the birth of the Enlightenment, the rise of market capitalism, the rise of liberalism and liberal democracy, where we prioritize individual rights and liberties, that this modern notion of self, this individualized, autonomous, seeking one's own purpose in life self, really came to displace that old meaning of know thyself.

I think it probably hit me first when I went on my first long meditation retreat.

And so I went on this silent 10-day meditation retreat.

And at one point I was thinking during the retreat, it's like, oh, I want to meditate because I want to be a better person.

And if I could just meditate somehow or another, maybe that will make me a better person and all my problems could go away.

And I realized that there was no person really that was there because when I quieted my mind down and I was just there in my own conscious experience, there was no single, stable, solitary thing there.

It was more like a diffuse cloud of energy that was constantly in flux.

And I realized that, oh, these thoughts that I typically identify with, this ego, this feeling of Eric, professor, guy, American, et cetera, all those were just kind of ephemeral flotsam kind of on the surface of this much bigger roiling stew of energy that was in a lot of ways very ineffable.

Well, once we start looking at our evolutionary lineage, we come to some kind of disturbing qualities about ourselves.

For one, everything that is alive on this planet traces back to one common ancestor that lived about 3.7 billion years ago.

And scientists have playfully named this creature Luca.

And Luca had the seeds of genes that are in every little living thing today.

And so one thing that means is that

In a lot of ways, everything that we see that's around us are cousins to us.

We're all part of the same underlying life force that started burning in this creature that lived 3.7 billion years ago.

And everything that we are is, in a lot of ways, an elaboration on these self-processes that started with Luca.