Richard Taite

We've gone down a pathway of mistaken identity that happened starting 2,500 years ago with Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, who said our mental lives are only up in our heads.

That was wrong.

It's much bigger than the individual brain.

And, you know, I've gotten a lot of pushback, but, you know, I think it's just more emotional than anything else because it's not academic, really.

You know, what concerns me most is that our modern culture has given us a message that who you are at your core is your individual identity.

you know, Richard, you're Richard, Patricia, you're Patricia, I'm Dan, and we're in these separate bodies.

And that's where we have our subjective experience, our perspective, what we act on behalf of agency.

And if you put all those together, it's the acronym SPA, the SPA of who we are.

And I think that that message, while you may say, of course, who you are, your identity is the individual, that's who you are.

But if the self is actually this spa of experience, we are missing out on the relational aspect of who we actually are.

And that relational aspect has a feeling to it, a subjective experience, a perspective.

And even when you act on behalf of something.

So I think that's actually one of the biggest traumas is the unrecognized lie that your full identity is your individuality.

And when we try to live through that, people are not only disconnected and alone, they find it hard to find joy and happiness and a feeling of belonging.

You know, I think there was a time not so long ago, a few hundred years ago, when people started thinking in these kind of reducing kinds of ways.

It certainly happened in science, but it also happened in modern culture where we could say who you are is just this bodily skin encased vessel.

and you need to live life according to that master belief that you are your body instead of as you beautifully just said and the wisdom traditions of indigenous cultures and also deep contemplative practices when you do deep meditation inward you realize whoa

Inward is just part of a much larger story.

And indigenous cultures from all over the world have been teaching this for thousands of years.

And modern culture has just forgotten that truth.