Salt Lake Dirt Podcast transcript

Hey everybody, this is Kyler Bingham with Salt Lake Dirt. I'm very excited today to welcome an author to the show. Brian Joel Jolley is with us today, and his book Evolving Awareness: Why Kindness Matters is a book I got a while back, but I really took the time to read it and I found it fascinating. So I'm very excited to have Brian on. Brian, thanks so much for being here today.

Kyler, I really appreciate the opportunity to visit and talk about my book. Thank you.

Absolutely. So I guess we could just start by giving people a bit of an idea of what the book is. It's a small book, but it packs a punch. There's a lot in there to ponder on and consider. And I found it really fascinating. I know this will likely be a book I'll come back to from time to time, because there were some points in there that just made me think of things in a different light. And I love reading books like that. I'd imagine you do as well. So let's tell people a bit about what the book is.

Yeah. So at its heart, it's really about exploring the origins of consciousness and where our conscious awareness comes from. In short, it's a product of evolutionary history: consciousness started as much simpler forms of awareness and gradually evolved over time.

And we are all connected to each other's conscious experience. The reality that we all live in has a perspective that each of us offers on that reality. So it's not something that exists inside my mind alone. It's something that I share with your mind and the minds of others, but also the mind of the person who made your shirt, or made these microphones, or built the structures that we sit in. The other lives of humans are also part of what makes up our present reality in this moment.

And it goes back into antiquity, back through evolutionary lines and earlier forms of hominids and earlier animals, all the way back to the very beginning of whenever life kicked off, those amoebas that evolved and became multicellular and so on and so forth. They shaped the reality that we ultimately now experience in the present.

So that's one major component. Another component is a much more surprising detail to me, because I didn't expect to find what I found when I started looking. We're used to the idea of stories as metaphor, right? When we talk about the story of the boy who cried wolf, it's a story about not misusing those who would come to your aid, calling for help when you don't need it, because that becomes a danger when actual trouble comes to your doorstep. So the story isn't really about a boy and a wolf. It's really more about ourselves, the nature of danger, and our relationship to society. It's a commentary packed into a little story, which is kind of a cool idea.

This book goes on to say that this idea of nature gradually evolving in awareness, being interconnected, has been told in a story, packaged into a story. Sort of like the boy who cried wolf, but in a much grander way that I have never heard anybody refer to before. It takes the biblical creation story from the first three chapters of Genesis and makes certain assumptions about what the different elements might refer to. For example, the days of creation: I make the claim that each day of creation is a different milestone of nature's gradually expanding awareness over many, many eons, ultimately resulting in self-awareness.

And when man gets a self-image, when he's made in his own image, it suggests that God is essentially the idea of nature itself. Not a man with a beard necessarily, but the collective of nature is the divine, and our consciousness comes through that divine. It looks at that story through the lens of evolution and awareness, and our responsibility to use that awareness, which is a gift of nature, to notice nature and others around us. That's kind of it in a nutshell.

Yeah, I was fascinated when reading it. I've been doing ketamine therapy off and on for the last year or so, and I think doing that really opened me up to a lot of these ideas, the shared realities and things like that.

A couple of chunks I really found fascinating just made so much sense to me. Maybe you can speak to it, and you touched on it a bit already: the concept of merging realities, that expansiveness of when you spend time with somebody. I'm looking at page 24 and 25 of your book specifically. It just made so much sense to me how they were connected. And it doesn't sound like woo-woo. It just makes sense, because when you spend time with someone, your consciousness expands. You have your lens of how you see them and what you're hearing, and flip the coin, same with them. They're taking you in. It's a really interesting thing to think about.

I think sometimes I fall into the pattern, especially doing the show that I do and talking to so many different people, where I kind of stagnate and think, gosh, I'm so boring, I'm so uninteresting, especially when I'm talking to someone else. And I'll still have those moments of feeling that way. But then probably some of these people are thinking the same thing about themselves, and I find them fascinating. So when you're talking to someone who has a whole different lived experience, it opens up an expanse of new experiences and new ways to think, if a person is open to it.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. I think of the example of two people on a mountaintop watching a sunset. They are experiencing that moment at the same time. But maybe one person's attention is drawn to the beautiful colors of the sky, and another person's attention is drawn to the smell of the fresh air and the pine trees, the decay of leaves and the soil.

And in saying, hey, look, notice the beautiful colors, the person who was focused on the olfactory sense gets a greater sense of reality because of the person standing right next to him. And the person pointing out, do you smell the fresh air? The person who's only focused on the sunset also gets a richer, deeper sense of the present moment, because they shared that experience and they enrich it together. More of reality is perceived through that overlap.

Every moment that you spend with somebody, your reality and my reality right now are merging in subtle ways, because we're thinking about ideas and we're experiencing the present together. My understanding of the present is augmented by your presence here with me, even virtually.

Yeah, it's fascinating. And going back to that idea of boredom, I wish I had highlighted it, but there are a couple of points in here, and I try to remember this, that the fact that we're even here is beyond remarkable. It's so easy, especially with jobs and the monotony of life and the bubble that we exist in, to lose that, to forget about that. It's not possible for me, at least, to always be in that space of appreciating nature and just being like, oh my gosh, this is kind of mind-blowing. I think when I'm doing ketamine, I see that, and I feel that detachment from ego and all kinds of different things, and every experience is a different one. But we can get to some of those places just by being mindful. It is pretty remarkable that we're here.

Well, yeah, you really touch on something that's kind of dear to my heart. I'm an amateur astronomer. I have a telescope that I like to take out and find things with. It's not a computer-based one; I have to know where I'm looking. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about the size and scale of outer space, and how much nothingness there is around the sun for trillions and trillions of miles. And the sun's only one little dot in the Milky Way, which is almost all empty space. The Milky Way is an island universe, as Carl Sagan called it, impossibly far from the other galaxies all around us.

So the minuteness of this beautiful little blue island floating in nothingness is so rare and precious. There's nowhere else life can be for trillions of miles in every direction. And here is this incredibly complex, rich, beautiful, and diverse ecosystem around the entire globe. And now it's evolved long enough that there are creatures that can notice that incomparable beauty of the natural world.

To notice and admire and be present with it is to give a sort of reverence to the very source of our own awareness. And it's all the more tragic that we're using our awareness in ways that consume and take from the rest of the ecosystem so that we can live with ease and luxury, comfort and convenience.

And it's not that those things are necessarily bad, but the way we go about doing it: if the only way I can stay warm is to take the blankets from everybody else, something's deeply wrong, right? And that's the way we've sort of been raised to live, this take, take, take from nature and consume. And in doing that, we start wrecking the ecosystems that are all around us. I saw a story just this last week that tens of thousands of penguins starved to death because they couldn't find enough food. Well, that's because the next layer down on the pyramid couldn't find enough food either, and it's working its way up. We're standing on top of this food chain, and we're facing ecosystem collapse because we are consuming the resources that the rest of nature needs.

We've got to find a way to break this cycle, or we're going to go, as the story says: in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die. Once we start being selfish as a species and competing for more and more and more, and there's never a limit to what more is, we risk running ourselves headlong into extinction.

Yeah, it's pretty heavy stuff. But the subtitle of the book is Why Kindness Matters. What I found really interesting about the book is that it does propose ideas and different ways of thinking about things, but I wouldn't call it a self-help book. It has a philosopher's edge to it.

When you think about kindness, or at least how I have in the past, it's good. Some of us are built to show it, maybe more so than others. Some have to work on it, some don't care about it, and we're all kind of mixed in together. But I love the concept of that being woven throughout the book, and how important it is, why it matters. So maybe you could speak to that component, kindness itself. I found it fascinating, because really it's something small initially, something kind you can do without it costing you much in the beginning. If you make it a pattern, it's just the way to go.

I was a high school teacher for a long, long time, and I moved on to another career path in education this past fall. I dealt with a lot of people, students and colleagues, who would constantly talk about how smart they were or what degrees they had, and they were just kind of assholes. And I would tell them, I don't care about all that. It doesn't make me value them as a person. If they're an unkind person, I don't want to be around them. There's no magnetic force. You could be a person that people are drawn to, or that they get pushed away from because they don't want to be around that energy. So kindness is super important to me, like it is to many people. And I loved how it's woven throughout this book as being maybe even more important than we realize.

Yeah. So going into the idea of the different days of creation corresponding to milestones of expanding awareness: starting with the very simplest forms, internal awareness, eventually developing external awareness, and external awareness developing the ability for instinct. When I say awareness, I sort of just mean nature writ large, all of nature's abilities combined into one. At first, awareness was simple, and as it evolved it got more complex, until humans evolved and the idea of self-awareness emerges: the awareness that I am having this egoic experience, that I can see and perceive and remember the past and anticipate the future. That's the sixth day of creation, right? That's the sixth milestone in the Genesis story.

And the seventh milestone, the next milestone of expanding awareness, is to go beyond ego awareness and be aware of what's around us, the experience of others and the other parts of nature, the other living systems, and to say that that is important. The way my reading of the story puts it, this seventh milestone is holy. This is the seventh day. The seventh milestone is for ego-aware beings to expand their awareness beyond themselves, to notice that others are having their own egoic experience, and to desire less suffering for the living things around us.

And in order to do that, I can't change the world economy by myself. I can't do anything to affect the price of bacon or whatever. But what I can do is be kind and aware of the people around me, the animals around me, the living things around me, and experience them with a sense of empathy, of compassion, of a desire for their experience to be as free of suffering as possible, because I know what suffering feels like for me.

And by extending that kindness, we inspire other people to be kinder and gentler. In my experience, kindness is almost always returned. Not literally always, but almost. When you're kind to the person at the checkout counter, or kind to the server, the bus driver, or the mailman, kindness is usually what is returned. And every act of kindness sends a ripple out into the world and into that shared reality. If we can inspire others to be a little kinder to their friend or their child or their spouse or a bus driver, maybe those ripples will add new ripples. And if we get enough ripples going, we make a wave.

And that's how we expand our awareness, just by having a little compassion for one another. If that can grow, that is the seventh level of expanding awareness. That is what is holy. That's what this story, by my read, seems to be suggesting is the goal for self-aware creatures: to expand our awareness through kindness and compassion.

Yeah, I love it. It just makes so much sense on all different levels. And you feel better too. It makes everyone feel a little better in those small moments. If I look at any given day, maybe I have a bad day or whatever, I try to focus: what was the good point? What was the low point? At the end of the day, a lot of times it's just an interaction with a stranger, someone you'll never see again, and they were kind to me or they did something, and it slowly, subtly shifts my perception and maybe I have a relaxing evening. But it's so true. A small interaction can really go a long way.

That's one thing I loved about being a teacher. You'd have kids years later shoot you an email or reach out online somehow, saying something appreciative. And they'll recount a story, something I said or something that happened in class, and I have no recollection of it. But it influenced that person enough that it stuck in their memory and made them feel better. That's a pretty cool thing when you get to hear that back. We all have that happening, but a lot of times, depending on our career or whatever, we don't always get to hear those things. So I was always really appreciative of that.

One thing I thought was so cool: I read the Genesis-ish account with a lot of interest. I love that, and I find it really cool. I don't know a ton about your background, but I know you grew up in a religious household and you were in that faith tradition up until your early thirties, I believe. And I really find it cool, because a lot of times when people leave religion, myself included, it's a process. We probably all go through it, where there's a lot of anger, almost discarding everything about it. So I really appreciated reading this and knowing just a little bit of your background. I haven't read Genesis in a very long time, and I was reading this with such interest and then seeing the reframed version of the scripture. It shifted a lot of how I thought about things, and it gave me a whole new appreciation of that account, which I had kind of written off and discarded. I don't know if you could speak to that a bit. I like that approach, and I want to be more like that in my life.

Thank you. Yeah, I'd be happy to. I grew up as a Latter-day Saint. I was an LDS member, went on a mission, married in the temple, and throughout that process, members get exposed to the Genesis story quite a lot. It's the central teaching in the temple ceremony that they're encouraged to go to regularly. I graduated from their seminary program that they have for high school kids, and I was intimately familiar with that story.

And then when I was 33, my faith underwent a severe transition, and I considered myself an atheist and a strict empiricist: if I can't measure it, it doesn't matter. And exposure to a couple of books really made a huge difference. Since your audience are readers, I'll just mention them briefly. One is a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It's essentially a conversation with nature, and it was integral to my creating the book that I wrote.

Another one is called A Brief History of Everything, by a guy named Ken Wilber. In it he explains what's called the four quadrants. It talks about the subjective experience of an individual, the subjective experience of a group, and then the objective experience at an individual level and the objective experience at a group level.

The objective experience at a me level would be how tall I am, how much I weigh, what my cholesterol is. These are empirical things about me that can be measured and probed. But the subjective experience of what it's like to be me, how I feel when I'm looking up at the stars, or what it feels like to hold hands with my sweetheart or to spend time with my son, I can't put probes on those. That's where all the meaning in life is, this part of life where you can't really put probes on it. So these books led me to think very differently about empiricism, and how empiricism can throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And as I started to think about this old story, because of Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael, I started to wonder what else in that story could be read in a more metaphoric way that made more tangible sense. The reason I call it Genesis-ish is because it's a very old story. It's been translated a couple of times through languages over thousands of years. And just like old stone carvings that are very, very old, they wear down and get blurrier over time.

It hit me that I could look at the meanings of the words with much less rigidity, without the English words being, according to Webster, precisely these words. A very old story wouldn't align perfectly with English. You want to look at it with an "ish." Each word, each phrase, each term gets sort of an "ish" to it. So I called it Genesis-ish. If you kind of squint at this story, there appears to be a line of meaning beneath the surface that has something to say about consciousness, and the responsibility of the self-aware to use that consciousness to notice nature, to care about nature, to tend the garden, the garden being all of the life on earth.

And when mankind decided, hang it, I'm going to start owning the earth for myself, that's when we sort of turned our back on nature as a species. Keep in mind, Homo sapiens like you and me have been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe 200,000 or 300,000 years. And I can't imagine that individuals like us spent thousands of generations not doing anything. Then suddenly, around the time of the agricultural revolution, we started to make our mark on the planet in a way that took the resources for ourselves.

And this shoehorns right into Daniel Quinn, who was talking about the Cain and Abel story, where Cain was a tiller of the ground and Abel was a keeper of the flocks. They both put their sacrifice on the altar, and God accepted Abel's sacrifice, because the pastoralists just live with the land. The agriculturalists take the land. They are tillers of the earth. And they say, well, I don't care what's growing here. I don't care if the bunnies need it, or the bees, or the sage. I'm going to grow, I don't know, alfalfa, or I'm going to grow apples, whatever. The point is, I'm going to take it for myself, for my ease, an extra bounty for myself, without regard for what loses out when we take more from nature than our share.

And so God condemns the sacrifice of Cain but accepts the sacrifice of Abel. And historically speaking, it was in fact the pastoralists that got pushed out by the agriculturalists in that area. In that sense, Cain slaying Abel is the agriculturalist pushing out the pastoralist. And I thought, wow, that's a cool way to think about that story. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it that way.

So I started working backwards earlier in the story, because these are the children of Adam and Eve. What could Adam and Eve represent? If Cain and Abel are groups of people, what about Adam and Eve? Could these be groups of people as well? And as I started to work backward, the whole thing kind of snapped into place. I swear it has a layer of meaning from whatever civilization wrote this story, and I'm sure it predates the Hebrews. It was probably passed on as an oral tradition before someone wrote it down. It says we have a responsibility to nature, to care for it. And if we start taking more than we need, it has language like: because thou hast done this, thou shalt not eat of that tree. Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.

It's saying that humans were living on this planet where food just grew on the trees and in the ground, and there was enough to eat as long as you lived in balance with nature. But if you start to claim it for yourself and say, well, I'm going to grow whatever I want, well, by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou go, and you're going to find thistles and weeds, and the only thing you're going to have to eat is what you grow right out of the ground. Because you no longer live in harmony with nature, you don't know how to find the resources you need in a sustainable way. And this decision is what I think is the fall of man: the fall of our species out of an alliance with nature, deciding that we own it instead of recognizing that we belong to the earth, which is what I now think.

Yeah, it's fascinating. You mentioned briefly before we went on air that it kind of started as backyard discussions, chatting with friends. And then again, that shared reality: you're all talking, and I just think it's so interesting how an idea can become something, and then it grows, and you fertilize it, and it becomes something that really makes a lot of sense. And now it's a book. So talk to me about those initial thoughts. Why even go there? How did it even come about that you started thinking this way?

Yeah, so it was a discussion I was having with a friend of mine named Kevin. We'll hang out in the summer on his patio and play cornhole and talk and laugh and tell jokes and stuff. And as I started to talk about it, it was Daniel Quinn again, this Cain and Abel thing. I started unraveling it, going backward, thinking about the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from that story. What could those represent?

And again, with that "ish" idea, the tree of the knowledge, the word didn't have to be knowledge. It could have been awareness. And I thought, well, that's interesting, the idea of awareness in a story. If I'm right about expanding awareness, there would be the tree of awareness, and then good and evil could just as easily be life and death.

And I was reading a Joseph Campbell book, a book of discussions with him. In it he mentions that in some cultures the serpent represents the ego; it's a symbol for the ego. And as I thought about the serpent and the tree of the awareness of life and death, the ego would be something that wants to continue its own life, its own ease. It's a very selfish sort of entity. In its conversation with Eve, it says you won't die if you eat of the fruit. You'll become as the gods, knowing good, and you'll see that it is good to make you wise and good to the taste.

It's actually pretty powerful to just take the resources you want. It's effective, and you can live a life of ease and luxury, right? And that's a very selfish notion that is born ultimately from being afraid of our own mortality, from fearing death, because we're these ego beings. We don't know what happens after we die, and we're terrified. And that's what all the religious wars are about. I saw a post somewhere that said if the atheists were successful and took away all the religions, and we got rid of all the religions, they would just spring up again. Because at the core of it is the fear of death. It's the fear, and the desire for certainty over what happens next, that really gets us to behave in selfish ways.

And that's why eating of the fruit, becoming selfish in our fear of death, is the sin of origin: the foundational sin that all the other bad behaviors we have toward each other and the rest of nature come from. It comes from that fear of death.

Anyway, as we started debating and talking through this stuff, I went and opened up a Bible: what does it actually say here? What's the order of things? I started to think about the way that awareness could grow in these expanding rings. So I went to chapter one, and it starts with everything in darkness, but the Spirit of God moved upon the water. And then it discovers that there's light. Before living things could sense light, light did not in any real sense exist in our reality, because it was totally unperceived. And as nature grew and crawled onto the land and evolved fish and birds and animals and ultimately humans, this expansion keeps going.

And the order of the days corresponds really neatly to this inside-out expansion of awareness. I was just shocked. The more I read with that in mind, the more verses that were always confusing and kind of meaningless to me suddenly had real relevance. A story that I used to find baffling, I now find deeply meaningful on a personal level. And it doesn't require belief in a deity. It doesn't require an interventionist God. It just asks for our awareness of ourselves as part of nature, of belonging to nature, that all of nature is part of one big living organism.

A squirrel is part of the forest. If you are going to call a forest a forest, a squirrel is part of it, a tree is part of it. You can't break it down into constituent parts and look at the forest. The forest is all of it. We are all of it. We're part of it, and we're pretending that we're not, because we've walled ourselves off and insulated ourselves from the natural world in a way that I think is to our detriment as a species.

Yeah, definitely. I definitely want people to check the book out. So where is the best place people can find it? I know you have a website, Make Less Noise, which I love that name. MakeLessNoise.com. I'll have a link to that. Is that the best place for people to go to find out more information?

You know, I was really resistant to putting it on Amazon. I tried a couple of other print-on-demand services.

It's hard, man. I talk to a lot of authors.

They were slow and unreliable. So if you just go to Amazon and look for Evolving Awareness, I'm the only result that comes up for that specific name. And if anybody is interested in talking about it, talking with me, shoot me an email. Go to MakeLessNoise.com; my contact information's there. I'm happy to respond to emails and questions. It's a topic that I've found really rich and enjoyable, and it just became a passion project that I had to get out of me. There's no agenda, there's no religion to join. It's just something I thought was cool.

It's very cool. It's not often you come across something that's a totally new idea to me, and I was just so excited reading it. I'm like, oh, this is so cool. It really resonated with me. So I'm excited to go back into it and meditate, or whatever you want to call it, on it. There are some really fascinating things that make a lot of sense. I'll have links to where people can find out more info and get the book. Anything else you want to say as we wrap up here today?

No, I think we've given your listeners plenty. And I'm so grateful for your time and interest in this. It's a fun thing to share.

Thanks, Brian. This was fun.

All right. Appreciate it. Thanks.