A talk with no stage, recorded under old trees
For years I have wanted to give a talk of my own, the kind where you stand up and say the thing you have been carrying for a long time. I kept waiting for the right stage. Then I came across the creator behind Ageist Love on YouTube, who records her own talks on her channel, and it made me realize I did not need to wait for anyone to hand me a microphone.
So I started from where I live: the jungle. I sat on a rock with a tree growing out of it and asked myself how long that tree had been there. Long before I was born. Long before any of us were. And yet we behave as if we are the most intelligent species on the planet, as if we put ourselves on a pedestal above everything that was here first.
If any of us could be gone in a moment, why attach ourselves to things that have no meaning for how we grow? That question is where this talk begins.
// The middle path
Buddhism is not about shaving your head
A lot of people think Buddhism means becoming a monk. For me it has always been about intelligence: seeing life clearly and choosing how to live it. The core of that is the middle path.
In his first sermon, given at the Deer Park near Varanasi, the Buddha taught that there are two extremes to avoid: a life devoted to sensual pleasure and a life of harsh self-denial. The path that leads to wisdom and peace runs between them. Buddhists call it the Middle Way.
You can live a life of luxury or a life of hardship, and you may go through both. But the experience I want, and the one I think most people want, comes from staying in the middle. And this does not only apply to a single life. It applies to a whole society.
Look at how we argue today: left brain against right brain, good against evil, far right against far left. Each side pulls toward its extreme, and the people caught in between end up attacking one another. Staying in the middle is not weakness or indecision. It is the only place where all of us can live on this planet in harmony, without trying to conquer each other to prove whose worldview should lead.
Nobody is perfect. We do not have perfect behavior sets, only good ones and bad ones, and we always have a choice.
// Unhealed cities
Unhealed people build unhealed cities
Throughout my life I have met many people who were unhealed. I tried to heal them, believing that if I helped others, they would help themselves and then help others too. Over time I learned that I had to start with myself first.
Here is what I mean by unhealed: self-sabotaging. When we are unhealed, our minds are so clouded that we cannot even hear the birds talking to one another. And because we are unhealed, we build a world of unhealed people, who then keep unhealing each other. It behaves like a virus that has started attacking its own body.
Our cities are the physical shape of that pattern. Most of them were built from a low level of consciousness, with little thought for the people who would live in them and even less for the forests, rivers and animals that were there first. When you see that clearly, you start to accept something uncomfortable: the cities we have today are obsolete. They are not sustainable, and patching them will not change what they were built on.
I want to be clear that I am grateful for technology. Without it, I could not record this talk in the middle of a jungle and share it with you. We are the most abundant generation of human beings that has ever lived. But we have to ask an honest question: did we build this technology in harmony with flora and fauna, or did we sacrifice them to get here? We are now realizing that we cannot keep building forward without learning to breathe together with nature again.
Sri Lanka already knows that this is possible. Our ancestors built village tank cascades that stored water, fed rice fields and sustained wildlife at the same time. I wrote about how we want to bring that wisdom back in the Purana Gama Protocol.
// Money before vision
A company was meant to be companions
There is nothing wrong with making money. The problem is that we have put money before everything, and above all before vision. We have been told that money comes first and abundance follows. I see it the other way around: abundance starts in your heart and your mind, and then the world manifests around what you see.
The word company comes from the Late Latin companio, built from com, meaning together, and panis, meaning bread. A companion was literally someone you shared bread with. A company, at its root, was a group of people who ate together.
Think about that the next time you hear the word. A company was meant to be companions bringing something up together. When you build companies only for the sake of money, you lose track of why a company exists in the first place. Then we wonder why so many of us feel stuck in a loop of survival, working just to keep working.
I also see a lot of division in how we think about the future. Division is, in a sense, a divided vision. When our vision is divided, people find it impossible to coexist, and there are always those who will exploit our hearts and minds to keep it that way. But underneath it, the vision is shared. Every human being wants to live well, to travel freely and to be at peace with the people around them.
That is why MyCity is built around shared ownership rather than shareholders. If you want to see how that works in practice, read about our decentralized ownership model.
// Stewardship
Caretakers of the world, not owners of it
When I look at creation, at history, and at the Bible, the Hindu scriptures and the cycle of consciousness, I see the same lesson repeated in different languages. We were placed here to take care of this planet and to experience it, not to use it up.
In the Bible, Adam is placed in the garden to work it and take care of it. He is given stewardship, not a license to destroy. In Sri Lanka we have our own version of that story. Tradition holds that on a Poson full moon day more than 2,200 years ago, King Devanampiya Tissa was hunting a deer at Mihintale when Arahat Mahinda called out to him. The monk stopped the hunt and taught the king that the birds and the animals have as much right to live on the land as he did. Mihintale became a sanctuary, and many Sri Lankans consider it the first wildlife sanctuary in the world.
Adam was given the authority to be a steward of the world. Now what should we become? Stewards of the world.
From a Buddhist perspective there is another reason to care. We believe we will be reborn here. The world we damage today is not only the future of our children and their children. It is our own future too. When you hold that in your heart, you protect the whole world, not just your island.
Sometimes I look at a tree and want to build a little platform in it so I can sit with the monkeys. I see the elephants and want to ride with one, not as a tourist attraction, but the way Mowgli lives in The Jungle Book, connected with the animals around him. People sometimes call that kind of thinking delusional. I ask a different question: if we have all read about Adam living in that kind of garden, why does wanting to live connected to nature sound crazy? The fact that our world pushes us away from it says a lot about who is leading the world right now.
// Waking up
From unconscious abundance to conscious abundance
As long as we live unconsciously, we will keep dividing ourselves into the poor, the middle class, the wealthy and the elite. Becoming conscious starts with something simple: understanding how long you are actually here. Most of us will see perhaps fifty summers, fifty springs, fifty falls and fifty winters. When you count them, it becomes much harder to waste them fighting each other.
I call what we have now unconscious abundance. It is temporary. Life keeps putting us through experiences that make us more conscious, and the more conscious we become, the more we put our wellbeing in harmony with flora and fauna first.
Technology can help us get there. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook gave some of us the ability to influence others, and with that comes a responsibility to use it to help people listen to one another again. And look at where I recorded this. Why can't we all sit here with our laptops and do our work in the middle of nature? We should be able to travel anywhere in the world with a clear conscience. If we cannot, something is wrong with how we have built it, and it is our job to find out what and fix it, starting with our own faults before pointing at anyone else's.
I believe Sri Lanka is waking up to this. We are getting there.
This is the first of my From the Jungle talks. Follow along on YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram. If this talk speaks to you, share it with someone who carries a similar vision.
Cities built by healed people, in harmony with everything that was here first.
That is what I am building with MyCity: city infrastructure for people who want to live, work and travel together, owned by the people who use it, and built with nature instead of against it. It starts in Sri Lanka and is meant for the whole world. Read where it is going on our vision page, or the story behind it in why I started MyCity.
// Common questions
The middle path and healed cities: frequently asked questions
What is the Middle Path in Buddhism?
The Middle Path, or Middle Way, is the teaching the Buddha gave in his first sermon: avoid the two extremes of chasing pleasure and punishing yourself, and walk the balanced path between them. In this talk I apply the same idea to society, where living in the middle means not being pulled to the far left or the far right, so people can live together without attacking one another.
What do you mean by unhealed cities?
When people are unhealed, they tend to self-sabotage, and the systems they build carry that pattern with them. Many of our cities were built without regard for nature or for the wellbeing of the people living in them. I see them as obsolete and unsustainable, and I believe the next generation of cities has to be built in harmony with flora and fauna.
What does stewardship of the earth mean?
Stewardship means looking after something that is entrusted to you rather than owning it outright. In the Bible, Adam is placed in the garden to work it and take care of it. In Sri Lanka, tradition holds that Arahat Mahinda stopped King Devanampiya Tissa from hunting at Mihintale and taught him that animals have the same right to the land as people do. Both point to the same idea: we are caretakers of creation.
What is From the Jungle?
From the Jungle is a series of talks I record outdoors in Sri Lanka, with no stage and no audience other than the trees and the birds. Each talk is about how we live, how we build and how we can create a better world together. You can watch them on my YouTube channel, @SkylordZx-XYZ.
How does this connect to MyCity.lk?
MyCity.lk is my attempt to build city infrastructure with the consciousness this talk describes: places to live, work and travel that are owned by the people in them, built with each other and with nature rather than against them. It starts in Sri Lanka and is meant for anywhere in the world.