From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I do not talk about life and death – I talk about birth and death, they are opposites, and life is simply a continuum of both, and you cannot have one without the other.
One of the most precious aspects of Glastonbury is specifically that we can't put our finger on it. It's evolved slowly over 50 years to become what it is today – we've tried things that have worked, some have not, and allowed it to evolve.
Those cycles don't exist – that's not what history is like. Disasters keep coming along at random intervals, they are not normally distributed... That's hard for our brains to deal with… we don't like the idea that history is just a lot of random shocks without any predictable features.
Consciousness is any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. It's what goes away when you fall into a dreamless sleep or go into general anesthesia, and what comes back when you wake-up or come around.
We are no longer sovereign-islands protected by fortified walls and arbitrary map-lines- we are an interconnected global family who depend on each other in incredibly profound ways.
When discussing consciousness with my three sons, I describe it as an emergent phenomenon. Imagine 80,000 people in a stadium, each one representing a neuron. The collective roar you hear when you approach the stadium might be likened to consciousness.
Excellence is not about perfection, it's about consistency and the relentless pursuit of something better. Every dish is an opportunity to elevate the craft.
Only one second in time you can find peace – now. There's only one second you can be happy – now. There's only one place you can find peace and happiness. Where you are. This is it, it's not out there somewhere, it's in you.
While pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Painful events are a given in life, but the transformation of this pain into enduring suffering lies within our control. The critical aspect isn't the adversity one faces, but how one responds to such adversity. This reaction, rather than the events themselves, forms the narrative of our lives.
For a long time there was a kind of cultural chauvinism: the idea that if you just played Mozart to people in the Amazon or to hunter-gatherer groups in the South Pacific, they'd instantly recognize its greatness, maybe even see God. But of course, they don't experience it that way at all.
After each strike the drone would be updated with information about the actual destruction caused. If it did more damage than expected, then it could use this information to restrict its choice of weapon in future engagements.
One can certainly live their life happily, here on earth never looking up or contemplating what's out there… but for many people (myself included) when you become aware of how much is out there? You feel this compelling pull of curiosity to understand.