Welcome to part two of our conversation with Kimberly Lafferty where we look into why there is so much abuse and misuse of power in spiritual organizations and our pressing need for training and ethics in these turbulent times.

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You're pointing to also to another implication of ethics here, another perspective which is seem to be talked about much, certainly not in our western culture.

And that is we can all do it as an experiment and observe it for ourselves.

And that is if we check in in a moment when we are motivated to act unethically.

What we find is that the mind is consumed and run by emotions such as anger and fear and jealousy and motives such as greed or mode of attack.

And what we can see in our own direct experiences, if we act those out, we reinforce them and strengthen them.

In traditional terms deepen our own karma.

But the good news is that if we look into the mind at the moments where we're motivated to act ethically and the way I define ethics as is focuses on intention, that something an intention is ethical to the extended aims to enhance the well being of, of everyone affected by the action, including ourselves.

If it doesn't include ourselves, it's sacrifice.

If it only looks at ourselves, it's narcissism.

So it's the both and.

But if we look into our minds at those moments when we are moved to act ethically to enhance the well being of all, we find that the mind is imbued with emotions such as love and joy and motives of kindness and generosity and compassion and they are reinforced.

So yes, you're pointing to a very important thing that the future changes.

But in the very moment of the action there's reinforcement of either positive or painful mental qualities.

Thank you so much, Roger.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

It ends up being I benefit when we do these ethical.

We should probably find another word for this.

These actions that benefit ourselves and others.

You know, the happiness that comes and the joy that comes is just extraordinary.

So.

And the ease and the ability to meditate.

Yes.

Is so tied in with acting in.

Anyone who's tried to meditate, anyone who's gone into retreat can certainly tell you that we want to clear up the things that are bothering us.

You know, my teacher used to say just go after your number one mental affliction.

Just acknowledge.

Do the shadow work, for those of you familiar with that term, you know, do the work you need to do to recognize what's actually arising in our own psychology before we go into retreat.

Because you'll certainly see it in retreat.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Amplified.

Jack Cornfield used to say, it's very hard to have a nice, quiet, calm sitting if you've been running around being angry and attacking people during the day.

Yes, yes, it is.

So you've given us a beautiful overview of a multi level and multi developmental stage perspective on ethics.

And I love the way you took it up to kind of the absolute of the recognition of.

No, Kimberly.

Giving.

No.

No individual person receiving.

Rather, Zadyashanti would say there's only one relationship, the divine entertaining itself.

And we come.

This brings us to a problematic area.

We've talked about kind of an ideal and.

And what is real and.

But yeah, we see people and I know this has been an area of deep concern for you and you work with the.

You're on the board of the organization for Integral, for, let's see, spiritual integrity.

Yes.

There are a lot of teachers who have acted in not so ethical ways.

Manipulated, sexually manipulated for power.

How are we to understand this?

How are we to understand this?

Oh, well, we're human.

I mean, how should we go into this?

We're all human.

So just to acknowledge, you know, compassion and care for all of the parts inside and out and all of our efforts as beings in the world, just trying to be happy.

So starting there, the wonderful being on the board for the asi, the association for Spiritual Integrity, as particularly as a spiritual teacher, somebody who identifies as a somewhat, you know, quiet, but certainly somebody who's in a spiritual community as a spiritual teacher and has been around for a few decades and seen the difficulties and challenges of, you know, being in spiritual community.

And what happens.

You can't really find any spiritual community out there perhaps who has not had some sort of issue or schism or scandal or all of these things just because we're human, we're divine and we're human too.

And there's certainly ranges to that.

There's one distinction I like to say is there's misuse of power and abuse of power.

And when you're in the position of being a teacher or a leader of anything, you know, not just spiritual, but really anything, there are these structures and challenges that we have in terms of the relational aspects of getting along with each other and projecting and trauma and all of this.

So most I would venture to even say that Any spiritual teacher, at some point, just like any leader is going to misuse power.

I've done it myself.

I've realized, oh, I've made a mistake.

I shouldn't have done that.

We're learning as we go, right?

I shouldn't ask anyone who's a student to do anything that I don't pay them for or whatever is the issue.

Misuse of power is something we just need to acknowledge that might happen and be very eyes open and aware of the tendency to do that.

Any spiritual teacher, and I will put a line under this and put my foot down on this, any spiritual teacher should report to somebody, should have a board, should have a mentor, should have somebody that text them.

It should have a community that has a feedback process.

And even with all of these, there's still going to be challenges because we're human and we're trying to figure it out and we're trying to practice.

Like in my community, the Vajrayana School were practicing these things that require a lot of us, like being divine light and seeing each other as divine light.

These are not small things.

Right?

So, Kimberly, this is a very, very important subject for me.

So do you think it is possible for an individual to have a deep realization at the same time and not talking about you catching yourself, like not paying somebody than where you should have or something going, oh, I'm sorry, God, you know, but this chronic malignant lack of ethics and acting out and hurting people at the same time, having this deep realization, can those coexist?

Yes and no.

I mean, apparently so we have a lot of case studies, right?

Or this is the case.

And I would venture to say, based on my experience, you could have a non dual realization, like a true emptiness realization and still be quite early developmentally and have a lot of shadow and a lot have a lot of trauma.

And so yes, it can go exist because I assert that the later stages of wisdom should definitely lead you to bodhichitta and ethics.

And if it's not, then there's a problem, you know, just to come back to the beginning.

If it's not, then there's something is amiss, right, in the state of Denmark.

So I assert that.

But apparently so, yes, you know, and you can have.

We see this in the developmental research, you know, early realizations and then claims and truth claims, all of this happens.

And yeah, there's still a lot of problem.

And so there is, you know, there's misuse of power, which every teacher needs to be aware of and cognizant of.

And have a feedback loop for.

And then there's the abuse of power, which are the stories that you see.

And this is when it's chronic.

This is when there is no work, you know, shadow work for the teacher.

The teacher isn't getting feedback.

It's something that happens.

They sleep with their students again and again and again.

Or maybe it's character biological.

You know, maybe they're just a sociopath with a very deep realization.

Yes, it certainly could be okay, sadly.

Yeah, you know, sadly.

And we see that in a lot of leaders, I think.

And so what you're pointing to many things here, Kimberly, one of them being that insights don't do it all by any means.

And one of the things you are one of the integrators of contemporary psychological and developmental understanding with traditional wisdom.

And one of the things we now is now clear is that there are certain things that contemplation doesn't reveal.

It doesn't reveal unconscious psychodynamics or psychological defenses.

And it doesn't help us recognize developmental stages.

So there are just parts of the psyche and its potentials and capacities which we have only recognized in the last century with Western psychology and which contemplative practices have been ignorant about.

They are masterful for states and cultivation of particular qualities and capacities and insights, but they also have their limits.

Absolutely.

Which is why it's so important and we're so fortunate to live in 2024 to bring them all together.

And Roger, you've been such a, you know, an exemplar of that with your work.

And everybody go out, buy Essential Spirituality and Roger's other works right now, you know, that really do integrate the wisdom of modernity and psychology in the third person perspective with our first person experiences, you know, and we need to bring them all together.

We tend to overcorrect in this culture.

And there have been a lot of, just to say, of course, issues with abuses of power with our spiritual teachers.

And this is what we're looking at and looking to support through our work at the asi, which is a nonprofit.

And what's missing, interestingly, for many of our spiritual teachers, however, people who self identify as spiritual teachers, they might be yoga teachers.

A lot of people who are now acupuncturists or working in the healing modalities identify themselves that way.

They know they're doing something more than just healing the body.

So what is missing for many of them is everything we've been talking about is ethical training, not in terms of do this list of things don't do this list of things, but exactly, John, what you keep bringing us back to, which is the why.

The why.

And that does seem to be missing for a lot of teachers out there, interestingly, even though they're ordained or they've gone through their own training in some form or another.

Yeah.

And there's also.

We've been talking primarily about individuals and the ways in which individuals, as you said so beautifully, both divine and human, and we screw up.

In my naive youth of not so many years ago, naivety, anyway, youth was a little further, further away.

I used to think that, you know, really awake people wouldn't screw up.

Now I think everyone screws up and wise people clean up.

Yeah.

So we're talking about individuals.

And you mentioned the culture is overcorrected in a way and in some ways become very condemnatory without offering more of a supportive, rehabilitative, at least possibilities.

And that's my addition to what you were saying.

But there's also a larger picture, and the one which encapsulates it for me was the book by Brian Victoria called Zenith War, which laid out in painful detail the way of multiple Zen teachers leading up to and during World War II, had actively supported Japan's militaristic, nationalistic, xenophobic horrors.

Yeah.

And again, the question.

I have my own take on this and love to dialogue with you, but I'd love to hear, you know, your take because you have so many perspectives.

You have traditional training, your developmental, your psychological.

What are some of the ways you understand this?

Oh, why these apparently spiritual practitioners would act in violent ways.

Yeah.

Or support the invasion of countries and just the cruel, you know, treatment of conquered peoples.

And samurai.

Bloody war.

Warrior ethics, for example.

You got it.

Warrior ethics.

Yep.

One of my favorite subjects.

Well, you know, we referred to the wisdom.

Buddhists are just obsessed with this idea of emptiness.

Right.

This idea of ultimate reality, this idea of wisdom.

And so we assume that in this example, you know, monks, whatever tradition, have cultivated something that is akin to wisdom and compassion and whatever that is in the earlier development, up to conformist stage of development, we would say up to ethnocentric stage of development.

Emptiness and wisdom is only correlated with concrete things.

And so I can imagine for some reason I'm seeing a Zen monk with a samurai sword, I don't know, out there doing feudal warring from their own ethical ground.

Emptiness and wisdom is merely the fact that things out there change.

Things out there I can't control.

And the beings that I'm looking at are still ethnocentric.

I don't yet see.

See if I am putting myself in that human moment of evolution and putting myself in their shoes.

I don't yet see those who think differently than me and especially those who look differently than me.

Even with what they're wearing and where they come from, they're not yet people in a way.

You know, they don't have that same care of concern.

And this is why developmental theory helps explain so much.

These are good people.

There's nothing wrong with them, but there's this lack of understanding yet that the world is much bigger.

You know, it's like you can only see the objects right in front of you.

So anything outside of that, it just doesn't even exist yet.

So these beings are working with what they have is what I assume, you know, putting aside any pathologies that might be occurring or collective traumas or everything else that goes on.

They're doing their best.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you're drawing a very important distinction between contemplative training and the stage at which people are at.

And let me suggest a couple of other things I'd love to hear you respond to.

One is Zen is sometimes referred to, and this isn't fair, but I'll use the phrase somewhat degenerate tradition in the sense that in some ways in Japan, it's been passed on from father to son, and the lineage holders have not necessarily been chosen on the basis of their practice or realization.

So perhaps some of these people weren't so realized is one thing.

Second is you point very powerfully to the possibility that these people work are actually very clearly acting out of a fairly not so mature ethnocentric developmental stage.

The third thing which is most problematic is some of them seem to ration use insights into and teachings about profound things such as emptiness as rationalizations for action.

Yes.

I can quote it, you know, if ordered to tramp.

If ordered to march, tramp, tramp, you know, no one dies.

No one kills.

I mean.

Yes.

Yeah, well, that's one side of it.

And the other not.

There's others.

Yes.

And this is the danger and why a lot of the more profound mystical approaches were kept quiet because of their potential misuse.

Yeah.

There's nobody to kill.

There's nobody to be killed.

Come over here.

Let me chop your head off.

Tell me that that's nobody.

You know, it's nobody the way you thought.

Yeah, that's the big danger and problem and misunderstanding of emptiness.

And it's very common to misuse it, to misuse.

Oh, the emptiness of ethics.

Right.

So I can do whatever I want and there is no consequence.

Yeah, very important.

Yeah.

Like the emptiness of truth in our post truth world, which isn't really true because things are true, just not the way we thought they were true.

So, you know, one thing I'll say, maybe it'll help your listeners too.

This emptiness idea too is the truth of something is how it functions.

Right.

So if this sword functions to chop your head off, then the sword doesn't function the way you thought, but it still functions.

Right.

Or that might be too esoteric for, for leaving us.

But there's emptiness doesn't mean nothing's true.

It means things function just not the way you thought before.

And yeah, it's something that needs to be corrected, I think in the tradition.

Yeah.

And again, one of the things you're pointing to here is the, the way that the tradition now can be complemented and enriched by contemporary understanding and your emphasis being with adult development.

There's also the recognition of psychodynamics and defenses and essentially we need to update certain understandings and practices.

Do you see any particular ethical issues that need attention and specifically need to be addressed from our time?

You've actually mentioned one which is postmodern thought and the trap of kind of non truth perspective.

So maybe you'd like to say more about that.

Maybe there are other topics as well that you have in mind and I haven't thought of, but love to hear any ways you'd like to run with the idea of, okay, what are some contemporary issues that weren't part of world's problems a thousand years ago?

Yes, well, it's sometimes painful to see what's happening in our world just turning on the news or just hearing the way that we speak to each other in TV shows or in media.

It's challenging to see.

And of course the answer.

I'm first going to say as a developmentalist that applying a developmental understanding in developmental education is essential to any situation that we have.

That there's not going to be a one answer for everybody, that we have to be very specific with the interventions that we take both inside and out and be developmentally appropriate with where they are.

So an example of that is just speaking.

If I'm going to work with a misunderstanding with somebody about they're getting triggered to an earlier trauma response, something that happened with childhood, then the I'm going to apply healing and intervention that's going to be appropriate to early childhood.

I'm not going to go to the highest levels of oh, just see yourself as Divine light, for example, or later stages.

So I do want to say that what we're missing seems to be the, I'll just say spiritual education.

I think if I had to choose one aspect, postmodern society in large part has, again, for good reasons and sometimes not so helpful reasons, has sort of relegated a lot of our, say, traditional spiritual traditions to the garbage heap, so to speak.

And that is unfortunate.

And when we don't have, for example, as a mother, you know, this is very relevant for me when we don't have that traditional what we think of now from the older stages and look back and go, oh, that was so rote.

That was so black and white.

But when we don't teach our three year olds and our four year olds and our five year olds that there is a God who's watching or there is even a Santa, I mean, all we were left with was Santa, right?

We don't even really have Santa anymore.

You know, Santa's not even watching, you know, when we don't have.

And it doesn't have to be Sunday school, it doesn't have to be, I have a 13 year old, you know, he's not being raised a Buddhist traditionally.

Right.

There's ways that we can teach these things in everyday language without getting into trappings and ritualism.

Right?

But we did teach him.

And when we do teach have our kids, we need to teach them that what they do matters and that there is something watching them.

It's actually a stage, it's a developmental challenge that's really important where you start to see that you're not, you're not alone in the universe, right?

And there is an impact to your actions and mom has eyes on the back of her head and that there is a consequence to doing harm.

Right.

And so we need boundaries that we don't have for a lot of our young people.

And when I'm saying 3, 4, 5, I'm talking about kids at that age and I'm talking about those parts inside of us too, at the same time.

Because when we don't have these traditional boundary structures, to be frank, we end up raising narcissists.

And you know, in simple general, just all general terms, but in general terms, I think that's one of the interventions that we need to do specifically.

It doesn't mean send all your kids to Sunday school, but it does mean take a look at how boundaries and ethics and teaching our kids some basic structures that we find in our humanities, that we find throughout our human tradition are really important to move us out of the egocentric stage of development and to really care for other people.

And it seems there has to be also a transmission of the compassion that these rules are based in from a higher level, that children can understand it and applies for people at higher levels too.

They have to feel that the being that's saying, you shouldn't do this, you should do this, you shouldn't do this is coming from a place that, wow, if that's wisdom, I want some, you know, I want, this is a role model.

I want to be like this person.

And it raises a question, and I've never asked anybody this before, but somebody who's deeply.

And it's good for you too, Roger.

But it's deeply studied in the tradition of Buddhism, Indo, Tibetan Buddhism.

How legitimate do you think these transmissions of authority are?

In other words, because you go through the ceremony and you get the robe or you get the title or something.

Is that 100%, you know, or is that just probably pretty good, maybe 60% or if you're lucky, it works.

Or is there actually, you know, something that really.

And I imagine psychologically, if a person would take on that responsibility, accept it for the importance that it is they might behave that might help them to grow into a higher level of behavior and being.

But how legitimate is all that stuff?

Well, I'll take a.

You know, I think it depends.

I mean, not.

It's kind of.

It depends, of course, right?

On how the individual, what's arising for them.

I can tell you just personally, a personal antidote about that is my experience is we live in a multi populated cosmos with a K.

And for me there is, yes, I've done the work, yes, I've done the retreats.

I also, Kimberly, as a Persona, even in my corporate life, I've always been a teacher, right?

I've always been that sort of my archetype.

I'm an educator, I'm a teacher.

So there's a reason in the relative reality, on a personality side, I was tapped to step into that role.

Yes, I had some clear light experience.

Yes, I did my retreats.

And I'm also a teacher, right?

So.

And I think my teachers recognize that in me.

But for me it was finding my passion, getting the education, getting the realization, doing the retreats.

I'm a teacher by calling.

But beyond that, there's something about standing on the shoulders, as we say, of a lineage that is still with me.

I feel as if I've stepped into a family of humanity that goes back hundreds and thousands of years and that I can feel Even now at my back, I can feel into the future.

And so just for me, it's anybody.

This is accessible to anybody.

Once you step into a school or a lineage or a family, it's this invisible, shall we say, mystical indeed, belonging in a very deep way that goes to sort of early childhood and humanity where I'm not alone.

And that's what it represents to me.

It's like this mystical family.

Not that I am empowered to be, you know, though that might be true too.

It's more of a company.

It just makes this human life much more zesty and interesting and timeless, you know.

Yeah.

Thank you for that personal note, Kimberly.

I also want to go back and just make sure a couple of things you said are emphasized.

And one is you were.

You were making a point about the importance of ethical training or ethical inculcation or transmission.

I think you were making the point of ethics as much a transmission as anything else, John, based in compassion as really important to bringing people into our culturating them.

And I love the way the two of you were kind of complementary because you were saying, Kimberly, it's really important that education be developmentally appropriate for people, which isn't really something that's recognized much outside schools.

Yeah, that feels very important.

And so you were emphasizing the importance of developmentally appropriate, you know, God's watching.

And John, you.

You brought in the perspective.

And that ideally comes from a place of deep, profound compassion, which is a beautiful integration there.

And that point you make about the developmental appropriateness of one's interaction.

You were talking about education, but one's interaction with anyone in the world feels so important.

So I want to make sure, before we finish, we dive a little more deeply into your developmental understandings.

You've immersed yourself so deeply in the study of development, including adult development, including late post conventional stages, which our culture knows almost nothing about.

Yes.

One of the implications of what you were both saying was that.

And you particularly, Kimberly, talked about the way religion has been and its values have been kind of marginalized in much of conventional culture.

And unfortunately, the marginalization has been based on the cultural recognition of only the conventional stages of religion.

Yeah.

And religion, as far as I can see, is the only human institution we have that spans the entire spectrum of development.

So it has these extraordinary potentials, these trans conventional perspectives which are lost, tragically.

So.

So you're one of the people who's bringing this understanding into contemporary practice and understanding of religion.

And so maybe you could say, just riff on your appreciation of what this developmental perspective has to Add to our understanding of human nature potentials and contemplative practices.

Sure.

Thank you.

Well, I was first attracted to developmental theory for adults in particular because as I was reading about these later stages, not higher but later stages of development that we're getting researched on.

Right.

This is research in the past 20, 30, 40 years, which, Roger, you, I know, have had just such an important part of that movement and that the field and what you've observed the past 40 years is something that I would like to interview you about.

But what I noticed in the developmental research, especially coming from the deep Indo Tibetan studies and in my own experience was they seemed to be using sometimes different language to talk about the same phenomena.

It seems like that.

Anyway, there was a.

Without collapsing them into each other, there was some obvious correlations going on between the later stages of adult human development and these spiritual states and realizations and capacities that Indo Tibetan Buddhism was pointing out and that I'd had tastes of myself.

And so that was the original attraction to development in particular because we had the research on it.

Right.

It comes out of a body of research which is pretty significant.

So the gifts of developmental observation and research has shown us that meaning making radically shifts throughout our lifespan.

And not only does meaning making radically shift throughout most people's lifespan, you know, we, it evolves and changes.

But because of that, our reality itself shifts throughout our meaning making and our lifespan.

And not only that, but we hold everything that's come before inside of us.

So the metaphor that you often see referred to as the metaphor of the Russian dolls, right?

Or of concentric circles.

So development isn't a ladder, it's a balloon.

It's much more.

We take everything that comes before with us.

And every time we talk about development, I always circle this and underline it again is we are all of it.

Even as we recognize that there are a variety of stages that an individual, a culture, a society, a system, evolutionary waves in concentric circles like a balloon that we tend to grow through.

Ultimately we're also all of it.

So it's not a better than or worse than.

It's nothing like that.

It's these waves, like waves on an ocean that we go through.

And so understanding what stage or wave, or let's say tone I'm coming from in any given moment, I'm coming from as Kimberly, a person with history and a psychology and all of these different stages inside of me, from the 3 year old Kimberly to the 10 year old Kimberly to the 20 year old Kimberly to now the 50 something year old Kimberly.

Right.

I need to be aware of what?

Am I having an argument with my husband right now and reverting to teenager self.

It could be that I am actually acting like my teenager stage of development right now.

I'm aware of that, right?

Even as I'm resting in a clear light, I'm aware of that.

Who am I talking to?

What stage is presenting from them right now?

Whether it be individually or whether it be somebody from a different belief system or political party or history or group or society.

So where am I coming from?

Where is this other person coming from?

You know, where?

What's their meaning making in this moment which affects their reality and the reality that they are actually seeing and experiencing and that I adjust accordingly.

You know, this is part of the ethics that I'm operating on and that we want to get to developmentally is that I can't go around convincing everybody, shaming everybody, yelling at everybody to believe the way I do.

How well does that work?

Not very well.

I mean, come on.

But what if I sit down with my family member at Thanksgiving, right?

Or at the holiday table and attuned first to where I'm truly coming from, Keep myself regulated is key.

Right.

Divine light, ideally.

Right to be in that place and attune to where this being is coming from in any given moment, it could change and speak to them.

We're all together in this.

We're all, you know, waves in the ocean and to connect and to empathize and to get in their shoes and to see where they're coming from and to find the common ground.

And developmental education and tools can very much help us do that because the language we use is different depending on what developmental meaning making the objects we see are different.

And as I said, how we make meaning is different.

I want everybody to understand it really is a different reality.

So arguing over which is more real is not going to get us anywhere.

Particularly since the differences are usually assumed to be differences of attitude or.

Or belief rather than grounded in different developmental stages.

And it feels like so much of our.

Our cultural divisiveness at this stage is a reflection of arguments across different stages rather than just different attitudes or perspectives.

And each stage trying to force everybody else to go along with their particular values, sometimes even violently.

You know, this is it.

This is what I believe.

Everybody has to believe this way, or you're not fully human or you don't deserve respect, or maybe you're a catwoman or something like that.

Right?

Absolutely.

And it's not working very well.

And in fact, if we can really embrace our instinct for true plurality and apply it to developmental rights and understanding and see the beautiful tapestry of those who think differently than us and see differently than us and really leverage the strengths of each of those.

Then we can find our way forward, Leverage the strengths of religion, leverage the strengths of traditionalism, leverage the strengths of social justice and those issues and awareness, and then we can correct the overcorrection, perhaps.

Beautiful.

I hadn't heard anyone phrase it the way you did.

Leverage the strengths.

That's beautiful.

Of each perspective and stage.

It's a very beautiful way of holding it.

And perhaps we need to add in.

There's been so much emphasis on diversity, but there's been no recognition as yet of the actual, even existence of developmental diversity or the importance of recognizing it in order to be able to recognize the source of these arguments.

So many arguments and so many divisions in culture and to make it possible to even begin to repair them.

Yeah, it seems almost essential, doesn't it?

And like you said, Buddhism keeps evolving.

Adding the developmental understanding to this ancient tradition just opens everything up.

It's amazing.

Ken used to say, if you think you're enlightened, go home for the holidays.

That's right.

Right.

But the way you described it is exactly if you're enlightened, how you would act.

Going home for the holidays.

It's very, very good the way you said it.

Yeah.

There was a psychiatrist by the name of Arthur Dyckman who had.

Who had his.

A test of enlightenment, which came to be known as the Dyckman Test of Enlightenment.

And first I thought it was a joke, and then the more I thought his test was, you want to know if someone's awake, ask the spouse.

Yeah, that's a good test.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah.

Mrs.

Buddha wasn't very convinced.

She was like, enlightenment Schmeman, why don't you stay home with me and the kids?

You know?

Yes, that comes back from the story.

So.

Yeah.

Kimberly, what do you see as.

What actually changes as people mature?

I mean, I'm thinking of the various capacities seem to come online in sequential ways, and you emphasized one of them earlier.

That is the capacity for a larger perspective, encompassing more and more people in one's scope of care and concern.

And not only spatial, but also temporal.

That is, the capacity to take more generations into account.

For example, the beautiful Native American tradition of think of the effects of what you're doing on the seventh generation.

So.

But what are some of the other capacities that tend to come online as people mature?

Stay tuned for part three of our transformational conversation with Kimberly Lafferty.

Thank you very much for being a part of this conversation.

We hope that you were moved, as we are moved, being part of it ourselves.

We'd also like to say that this is being funded by Roger and myself.

It comes out of our pockets.

So if you would like to help us to mainly to get this podcast out to more people, because the bigger audience have which is steadily growing, but the more people we can reach and the more marketing we can do, the more positive effect we can have on the world.

So we've done a couple of ways, but we'd like you to buy us a cup of coffee, very simple.

And I do that with podcasts that I support.

And I find it's very satisfying.

So thank you for your help, thank you for your presence and thank you for all you are and all you do.

We love you.