MD: Sanity is, in part, defined in terms of having a sense of who you are, where you’ve come from, why you’re here and what you can contribute in a way that’s deeply, soulfully meaningful to you and also reflected by others who say, yes that’s who Barbara is, or yes, that’s who Michael is. For humanity as a whole, sanity is knowing our larger collective story, including how we can be of service and be a blessing to the larger body of life--by becoming an immune system. I believe our role, our destiny, is to protect, foster, and defend the health and well-being in the body of life in the same that an immune system does. This perspective gives us a vision of who we are and why we’re here that’s large and majestic, even heroic.  Young people are craving such a vision.

There was a time in my life when I thought the best we could do was to do less bad. Well, finding courage to do less bad is a pretty uphill battle. I mean, people don’t get fired up each morning to do less bad or to get other people to do less bad. But this new way of seeing our deep time past and who we are—that we are the Universe becoming conscious of itself, literally—and recognizing how interdependent and interrelated we are, gives people a sense of belonging, hope, and inspiration when they look to the future. It gives them a sense of living with challenges, pain, difficulties, and the inevitable breakdowns in our lives and to relate to those things from a place of trust, hope, and faith. When we look over the course of deep time past and we realize that the main thing that has driven the process of evolutionary creativity is chaos, breakdowns, and bad news, we begin to trust the difficulties in our own life. And when we look ahead a few decades and see the challenges coming down the pike, we can look, not with a sense of dread or overwhelm, but from a sense of possibility and curiosity. We’re inspired to be in action, to be part of evolution becoming conscious of itself, and to do our part from a place not of fear but of possibility, trust, and inspiration.

SOM: In your book, Thank God for Evolution, you talk a lot about “night language.” How do you define day and night language and how do they affect our world view?

MD: Day and night language reflect our day and night experience. All humans have had a night experience different from our day experience. We do things at night that we don’t do during the day. We fly, turn into other creatures, walk through walls. We do all kinds of bizarre things. In fact, if we could do during the day what we do most nights in our dreams, we would be having “supernatural” or “miraculous” experiences every day. But we don’t call them supernatural or miraculous because (if we are sane) we easily distinguish our day and night experiences. Day language and night reflects this. Day language is the language that describes what is measurably so, what is physically, consensually true.  It’s scientific, testable, measurable language—the way we normally talk to each other during the day. But we also add night language components, that is, interpretive components, because facts in and of themselves just kind of sit there. They don’t inspire. They need to be interpreted to be inspiring, and there’s never only one right way to interpret any set of facts.

Night language is the realm of interpretation. For our dreams to make sense, they must be interpreted. Night language is also the realm of poetry, myth, symbol, metaphor, and traditional religious language. It’s the language that inspires; it touches the heart, moves the soul, brings us to tears, and calls us to awe. That language is not mathematical. It’s more metaphorical. I don’t know of a single example where a people’s creation story that explains where we came from, why we’re here, where everything is going, and why we’re special as a people doesn’t have a blend of day and night elements.

For example, when you have gods and goddesses, angels and demons, talking  animals, and so forth, you’re in the realm of night language. Snakes and animals can talk to us at night. But we don’t experience that during the day. So having some sense of day and night language means that the only time we would call our dreams bizarre is when we judge them by day standards. For people to reject traditional religious language and stories—say, the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the garden with the snake talking—there are some who just reject that story outright and say it’s completely fiction, it’s just ridiculous. And then there are those who interpret it as total day language reality—“No, it’s scientifically true. That snake really did talk.”  Both are missing the point.

Virtually all scriptural and sacred stories worldwide use a blend of day and night elements. To interpret such stories as literal is to completely miss the point. They’re saying something true, yes; they’re saying something often profoundly relevant for how we are to live our lives and thrive and survive and how to be a functioning member of society. But to interpret them literally as day language is to trivialize them. This distinction is important because only when we distinguish day and night language will we see the promises of religion fulfilled. All religions make promises, but they make them in night language ways. So people who expect “the second coming of Christ” to show up as a 6-foot, 180-pound man coming down magically on the clouds are expecting the promise that was made in night language to show up in a daytime way. It will never happen. Such a religious vision may be speaking deep and profound truth, but if you’re expecting it to show up in a day language way, you and your descendants will wait forever. And that’s one of the reasons why religion has become trivialized. We’re not going to recognize how these promises are showing up in the real world if we’re expecting them to show up in that kind of unnatural, otherworldly way.

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