Stop Waiting for Life to Happen | Peter Sage | TED Talks

as a keen student of human behavior I've been fascinated by watching people over the years one of the things that fascinates me the most about us as a species is that we seem to be hardwired to disagree with each other now whether it's the social taboos of religion or politics every one of us has an opinion that we seem to defend yet I think one of the things we can all agree on is that we're living in a time in human history that is absolutely unprecedented a time that not even our ancestors could have dreamed about in their wildest dreams I mean think about that how many of our ancestors looked up at a cloud and wondered what it would be like to see life from the other side what would the Pharaohs of Egypt given five thousand years ago to be able to step onto a machine and with the other side of the world in ours Wow kingdoms yet the reality is for many of our ancestors they gave a precious gift childbirth wasn't certain for many many years in fact my grandmother on my mother's side as she died in childbirth giving birth to my mother it was very uncertain time and yeah if you could just connect for a second so the fact that some of our ancestors gave their life in agony so that we could be standing here today the question that that posed is my friends is this what do we do with the gift that we got now some of us would say quite a lot some of us say we're living in a time now where technology is so overwhelming so incredible that even just 20-30 years ago we couldn't have imagined the world that we live in today but that technology comes at a price it generates its own level of paradox one of the paradox is right now there's so much information that's out there that we are literally overwhelmed and the emotional route tends to be overwhelmed which leads to confusion which leads to inaction in other words we learn so much we do nothing for everyone second that YouTube is up right now there's between five and ten hours of new content uploaded unbelievable the other paradox that technology is bought is that in a world of seven plus billion people we're all just a push notification away from each other interconnectivity is at a time that we've never even yet had the foresight in history to ever even dream of yet in a world that is so connected at every single level why is it that so many of us feel so alone hmm you know the evidence of this is everywhere labels of ad D ADHD with information overload or prescription drugs for depression at an all-time high and one of the reasons for that is so many people I believe are drowning in technology but they're starving for something more what are they starving for well I believe that the ultimate app that you can download from the app store these days is not Facebook it's not LinkedIn it's not of a myriad of millions of different apps with billions of downloads the ultimate app comes down to love and love such an old-fashioned notion why does so many people have such an aversion to understanding what unconditional others well I looked at that and it really comes down to understanding what our first and earliest memory is you know if we go back nine months before we were born a certain event happened which unleashed one of the the biggest battles in human evolution in human history the battle to be here four hundred million to one and guess what you show up in a battle that was in the dark and uphill why did you want to be here so badly not only that but if you look under the microscope and see what the actually goes on it's not just the first person that was there is it one of them is actually chosen yes my friends you were chosen to be here but the challenge is once we're born we're born we can't do anything wrong you know we throw up on mum at two o'clock in the morning it's inconvenient but we still get love but something happens round about 18 months old where the parents suddenly realize there's a communication issue and now this it's going to ways and at that moment a lot of the parents impose their model of the world on how to bring up a child cuz nobody wants to be a bad parent but the challenge with that is this that what we do is we then say if the child behaves in a certain way we reward that with positive reinforcement and if they behave in a different way the perception of the child regardless of the reality is that we then withdraw love and that creates frustration it create frustration but it also creates the perception that love needs to be earned so by the time we get our earliest memory at about three four five six years old we've already had almost a lifetime of learning that love is conditional we have to earn it we have to behave a certain way in order to be good enough to be worthy of the one thing that we most want Wow and we then live the rest of our life projecting that into our lives and our relationships and wonder why nobody can figure out how to download what I call the ultimate app of love hmm and the challenge there is it fosters the illusion of separateness why do I say the illusion of separateness because there isn't a physicist on the planet right now that wouldn't argue the fact that every single one of us is connected at a much deeper level than we ever give credit for it's just that we don't have a reference for unconditional love based on the childhood I was having a conversation last night at dinner with dr. Raj beautiful soul and yeah there's two people that had never met that came together and we had a wonderful yet 1-hour connection where what was touched was the stuff that we're made of yeah I saw a guy who shared stories and and feeling something that you can't feel when your left brain technology drives us into my left brain why because it can be measured that's why we're taught at school left brain principles because if I take a math test and I score 75 percent you can measure that how do you measure creativity how do you measure how much you care about somebody how do you measure love and last night there was two people from different backgrounds different colors different beliefs born at different times both with different life paths on their own journey probably died at a different time the illusion of separateness just as if I was to put my hand yeah throw a saucer of milk and you were to see the tips of my fingers the illusion would be that we're separate whereas if you take the milk away we realize we're all connected allow me to give you another analogy if you take the human body between 50 to 70 trillion cells give or take some a few more than others if you go to the bloodstream and you take two blood cells white blood cell red blood cell both different colors both born at different times both have different paths in life different jobs to do different missions one delivers oxygen hemoglobin around the body the other takes stuff out of the bloodstream and dumps it into the lymph both probably going to die at different times now if these two blood cells were to meet each other in the bloodstream I would have a conversation and red blood cell goes high white blood cell how you doing the white blood cell turns around says oh my goodness a talking blood cell but if they could communicate would they not have separate senses of identity absolutely now the thing is we don't throw a funeral every time we have a blood cell die we have a different and a higher level of consciousness and understanding about where it fits into the scheme of things what if just as a possibility just as a question you and I started to realize that were just different types of blood cells in the universal body of consciousness would that upset you if it was a possibility hmm the illusion of separateness and what keeps us from that illusion of separateness is usually we're too focused on ourselves to focus on trying to defend ourselves to try and get the ultimate out which is love which is what we really seek but we can't do it when we're engaging from a thinking center rather than a feeling center hmm everything is connected now how do you move forward in life to be able to live from that place rather than get swamped by the overwhelm well sometimes it takes tragedy sometimes it takes a significant emotional event September the 11th 2001 my neighbors remember where we were on that day just notice your emotional connection to the date itself I myself was in Hawaii at the time on a seminar with Tony Robbins I was part of the leadership team and you know we were facilitating a nine-day event called life mastery and what happened happened at about two o'clock in the morning local time so we woke up to that news and we realized that we had 2,000 people about to wake up to that news from 80 countries including Palestine Israel Afghanistan many from the US on over 100 from New York how'd you obviously get the people into the room so that they can understand yeah makes try and make sense of what was going on and Tony would come out and hopefully reframe and D frame some level of meaning so that we could ya have some level of certainty as to how things were going to continue or not I'm also need an amazing job it was so hearing some of the stories that came out of the room that day that was so impactful one of them I remember clearly there was a woman who stood up and she Terry says you know now I know the reason why I'm here she said two years ago said my fiancee was killed in a car crash but the meaning that I choose to took out of that was that love isn't for me never get too close to people in case it's taken away said six months later 18 months before she met a guy and they started dating but she kept her distance and it got to a point where he wanted to take the relationship to the next level but she wasn't comfortable and she says you know some I know I want to go to the seminar in Hawaii and he wasn't really that agreeing but she says I want to go anyway there's a reason why I want to go he says I now know the reason I came says last night I was listening to one of the speakers one of the speaker's was a woman called Cathy Buckley a beautiful beautiful woman now Cathy story is incredible she has a great message she was born 50 years ago hard of hearing but at the time it was misdiagnosed and it was misdiagnosed because in those days we just didn't have the ability to look too far ahead like we do today to stuck here not enough here and so she was put into a special care where she wasn't really given the love that we so crave as a result of that and she developed poorly she was introverted and she couldn't really communicate very well in her teenage years she was abused by members of her family in her twenties she got cancer she managed to get over that and then a little later in life she was lying on a beach and a lifeguard run over her face and a 4x4 and we think we have problems and Cathy stood up and says you know something I'm I can't rely on life giving me what I think life should own me because it doesn't work that way life is a mirror my friends it'll reflect black what you put into it you get angry with the mirror it has no choice but to get angry back why because outer world follows in a world not the other way around and when Cathy finally understood that she been complaining at the mirror whole life wondering why she wasn't getting what she wanted she took a stand she learned how to communicate she found out she had a gift for making people laugh she stood in for a friend at a comedy night at a local bar she won the night she went to the regional final she won that she went on to produce a book she got her own show she turned her life around and really became an example for so many people but a message was very powerful her message was this that you cannot drive through life King in the rearview mirror you're gonna crash and miss the signal you cannot dance through life with a ball and chain of your past around your leg it just doesn't work and this lady in the morning of September they never got up and says when I heard Cathy say that I knew what she meant I found my breakthrough I knew what I'd been doing I ran back to the room and I called my partner and I left a message on his voicemail that says hey honey I'm coming home after the seminar I see what's happening let's get married and the next morning he called her I left a message on her voice mail from the hundred and fourth floor of the World Trade Center to say that the building had just been hit I was filling up with smoke and he thought he was going to die but he didn't care if he was gonna die because having listened to her message if that's what it took to get to the place in his life where he could feel like that he'd died happy man now I listened to that voicemail I could hear the people screaming in the corridor and then the line went dead and he went down with the billing and this woman stood up in front of 2,000 people with every rights to turn around and say you know something see I told you so life's doing it again this just validates everything that I've just lived for the last two years but she chose not to do that she says you know something I've played that game yeah it's a tunnel with no cheese says instead the meaning I choose to take out of this is that life is precious that I'm going to live every single day squeezing every single drop out of every moment that I can you know why because if I'd had done that two years ago I'd be married by now and she inspired me in two thousand other people to step up and live from a place over the next nine days of that seminar with more passion more commitment to playing fallout more commitment to serving and communicating with each other than we could ever have done and people say to me you know where were you on 9/11 I say I tell them the story I also say that out of all of the growth that happened through that experience out of all of the lessons that we took all the transformation that we saw to day 9/11 was probably one of the most incredible amazing and uplifting and inspiring days I've ever had the privilege of being able to live but the message was clear it never matters what happens to you in life my friends that's a story that's what keeps us here instead of here the only thing that matters is what we do with the story for some people divorce is traumatic for others it's freedom it's how you write the school story how do you hold the pen now if we can come from that place if we can start letting go of the chains of our excuses and playing small and embrace the potential that we have as people life opens up then we can start to use technology for what it was designed for to further the human potential to further the human spirit not hide behind it and from that place we can start moving forward it doesn't take a lot leaving your phone downstairs at night so that the first thing happens when you wake up is you get in touch with how grateful you want to still be rather than check your email before your feet touch the floor to be able to sit across from somebody you love having a meal without checking your phone but we never communicate while you fuel your body about how grateful you ought to be in that moment that night like I was with dr. Raj precious moment doesn't take much to be willing to step forward and say you know something here's Who I am faults are all vulnerable vulnerability authenticity I don't care if I risk losing connection or not I'm going to step up and be Who I am and from that place you'll find the paradox is that we get more connection because that's really what people want is it not you see from that place my friends from that place we can start the next journey of human transformation we can soar to the daring heights of the next epoch of human development through hard not just technology and with that we can move forward unshackled from the stories of the past with that we can leave a legacy that our ancestors can be proud of and that my friends is an idea worth spreading thank you you

Channel: Peter Sage

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Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2016