The Henosis Interview hands the floor to the humans who have shaped how this network thinks.

A note before you start: one section of this conversation describes childhood sexual abuse. It is brief and it is not graphic, and it is the whole point of the story, so I have not cut it.

I was introduced to Juan Manuel Espinoza, who everyone calls Juma, many years ago through Yong Nieva, who was over in Bolivia with his wife at the time. Juma was taking individuals around Bolivia to the ancient sites, Lake Titicaca and a whole bunch of other amazing places. When we connected we resonated on a wonderful frequency straight away.

He's a historian, a political scientist and an anthropologist, with twenty-odd years of teaching, research and development projects behind him. He's a professor, and he holds research consultancies with corporations and with governmental and academic institutions. He studied in Melbourne, and he has a masters from Cambridge in Latin American Studies. Peruvian by birth, half Peruvian and half Bolivian, ten years living in Sweden, and he joined us from Colombia.

I brought him in because he sees this life from a completely different position to mine, and because he gave me the single cleanest argument I've ever heard for why a rational, sceptical human should question everything they were handed.

And he did it without one word of spirituality in it.

Cameron: Start with your father, because you told me that story before we went on and I want everyone to hear it.

Juma: My father is Bolivian. He comes from a very small town, in the jungle. He was very politically engaged and did a lot of things. He was also an abuser. A very hard abuser. He would hit my mother a lot and do all kinds of not very nice things.

My mum and my dad divorced when I was very little, which was good for me, because otherwise it would be hell. As I grew up and visited him, he would always talk about the way he was. And I grew up with a lot of resentment against him. A resentment that bordered hatred.

When I moved to Sweden I was sixteen, with my mother. At some point I actually considered changing my last name, just to cut any connection with him. I had a couple of brothers from my father's side and I didn't want to cut that, so I didn't. However I was filled with rage. Everything was about him. I would always talk about my dad.

Then in my twenties I went to Peru, because he was living there. And I decided to invite him for a coffee. I took him to the place where he always went to have a coffee on weekends. And I took him there on a weekday.

What I said to him was, I have a lot of differences with you, and you have a lot of differences with me, and I'm sure we can fight horribly forever. However the thing is, you're going to be my dad until I die. So what about if we just have a father and son relationship, and talk about all of this later on. Instead of talking about it before we have the relationship, we have the relationship, and then we talk.

Cameron: And did you ever get to the talk?

Juma: My father died four years ago. Luckily we did have quite a few years of father and son relationship, which helped me have a better relationship with my brothers as well.

However in all those twenty years, we never had the need to talk about the things I told him we were going to talk about after the coffee. We never really mentioned them. And I never really felt the need to. I knew where he was. He knew where I was. We wouldn't step on each other.

Somehow that was another relationship, another life. Those were other people. And if I try to go backwards, the way the Andeans do, I can see that they are other people. So I don't need to avenge myself for when he was ten years old.

Cameron: Now take us into the work, because the frame you gave us is the one I've used more than any other since.

Juma: I study anthropology and history because I want to understand how we build and change what I call common sense. For me, that phrase is the basis of pretty much everything, everywhere.

One of the oldest and most interesting things we do as humans is create stories. We create stories to give meaning to everything we see and do, and to place ourselves in the middle of it. We have this weird anxiety where the brain cannot deal with not understanding. When we don't understand, we get anxious. So the brain goes, I don't want to get anxious, so I'll just find an explanation. And the explanations are usually stories. Not dictionary definitions. Full stories about the thing.

Then we turn stories into common sense.

Every time somebody says, well, that's common sense, what has actually happened is that a group agreed that this makes sense. Take countries. I'm from Peru, you're from Australia, of course. However we created a story about countries and we believe countries exist, and that line drawn across a lake dividing two of them was actually drawn with a ruler somewhere. We believe the story, so when I say I'm Peruvian, you understand me without me explaining anything.

We use the same logic to invent laws, social roles, gender, age, transportation, festivities, rituals, political systems. Money is a story. We believe this piece of paper means something in terms of wealth, and we can take it to a totally different country and they will accept it, because they believe the same story.

To create common sense you need a community that agrees that a story makes sense. Then you need that same community to believe the story is true. And when it becomes truth, we turn it into common sense.

Cameron: And who is doing the deciding?

Juma: Usually it's created as a process, subconsciously. You don't sit down and go, okay, from now on this is common sense. It's quite organic.

The risk with the organic option, which I do like, is that since we're not conscious of the process, somebody can manipulate it. And usually bullies manipulate it. So it becomes common sense that at school, the ones who get the great marks are the ones who scream louder and speak more. And then you realise we're promoting a society of influencers. Of course politicians are influencers. You don't usually have an introvert as a president, because you have to be able to go and speak and talk and scream.

So I just leave the question. Who decides, when we don't have the power to decide, on common sense? Not on the laws. On what we understand as natural. Common senses are not natural. They evolve with the ecosystem.

Cameron: Now the part I reckon is good news.

Juma: No common sense is eternal. When I look back on myself twenty years ago, I know that person was a different person, and his common senses are not my common senses.

So common sense changes all the time. And if common sense is artificial, that means we can mould it as well.

A hundred years ago, maybe more, the common sense was that women can't vote because they menstruate and they're hysterical. That was common sense. At some point people started saying, well, no, and then agreed about it, then made it a law. And now if somebody says women shouldn't vote because they menstruate, that's not common sense.

That means common sense changes, and we can change it. That's awesome.

Cameron: Then you did the thing I still think about. You said, your future is behind you. Unpack that for us.

Juma: Our common sense is that our future is in front of us. We're walking forward, so our future is there. Our past is back there, and we can be nice and look at the past to learn, and then walk forward.

For Andean people, the way they understand it is that you walk backwards all the time. You never walk forwards. When you're walking in time, you're actually walking backwards. Because the only thing you can know is your past. You don't know your future. So the only thing you can see is your past. Your head is that way, and you walk like that, and your future is behind you.

That small thing changes everything.

How do you plan for the future? If you're looking forward to the future, then you plan and you try to predict. There's an obsession to predict. If you know that you go the other way, then you know there's no point trying to predict, so you just don't even try.

Say we have a meeting next week. Yes, maybe. What do you mean, maybe? I don't know if something's going to happen, and I will never know, and I cannot plan it. I can tell you that up until now, over the last two years, I have been able to have three Wednesdays. So probably next Wednesday is all right. However I don't know if I'm going to get a piano on my head tomorrow. So yes, put it in the calendar, with a question mark on it.

I'm not saying this is better or worse. No value judgments. What I'm saying is it changes the whole way you plan, and how you commit.

Cameron: Give the oranges example, because that's where it stopped being an idea for me.

Juma: I went to a market and a woman had a basket of oranges. I needed a lot of oranges, so I asked how much for all of them. She said, no, I cannot give you all.

Why not?

Because what would I do the rest of the day? There are some individuals who rely on my oranges. They come every day and buy oranges. If I give you all of them, they'll go to somebody else. And I know what happens when somebody goes to somebody else. So no. I'll give you ten. And then you get another ten from the other lady. And that's that. Sorry.

That relation to money, and to selling your stuff, goes back to how you understand time.

Cameron: Now tell the one about the television.

Juma: When I was sixteen I was picked, with a friend, to go with some university engineering students into less-privileged neighbourhoods, to help with a study they were doing. Part of the project was to talk to the families and find out what the needs were.

Every week on the way home we'd talk about the families we'd just met. And one of the big questions was, why do these families, living in these very precarious houses, some of them with straw walls, no floors, with their kids, why do almost all of them have televisions? They have no money for food. Why do they have TVs?

We had all kinds of theories. Indoctrination. Status. A window to the world. Using it as a nanny. We got quite good at the theories. We even started designing projects off the back of them. Let's get them to sell the TVs and invest that money in the foundations of the houses.

On the last day they told us to go to the family we'd connected with best, bring some food, and eat with them instead of taking notes. So I went to this woman with three or four kids, and we ate and had fun and made jokes. And when the kids had gone I said, I'm sorry, I'm horrible, however I have to ask you. Why do you have a TV?

And Karina said, I don't know why the other families have TVs. I can tell you why I have one.

I come from a very small rural town, a very poor one. And in that town there was only one man who had a TV. He'd let us go and watch movies, or the telenovelas, or the cartoons. So we'd all go. And this man raped me. And years later, talking to the others from that town, we came to know that every single kid in that town had been raped by that man, because he had the TV. Every one of them. Many of them many times.

So I promised myself that as soon as I had enough money, I would buy a TV. So my kids would never have to go to anybody else's home to watch TV.

I have a TV to protect my kids.

Cameron: What did that do to the team?

Juma: We got shocked, and then we started to discuss. Why did we never ask them? Why did we start creating projects without asking them anything? How many other families have the same situation, or similar, or worse?

What we were really asking was, why did we just make a story about this woman, make it true, and then decide to do something to help her, and in the name of solidarity, harm her?

The problem there is not that I didn't know the person. It's that I didn't want to listen to the person. Our common sense gave us many theories. None of them had anything to do with the actual reality. And none of them included asking her, because in our story, she wasn't worth asking.

So if we want to know somebody, or help somebody, or connect with somebody, there's a need to listen. Storytelling has to turn into story-listening. Before telling any story, we need to do some story-listening.

And story-listening is active. You cannot just sit and wait for things to come. You have to go, and actually ask, and actually sit and try to listen. And when you listen, you have to ask yourself whether you're understanding every word the person is saying. Because maybe a word they're using isn't your common sense, so you'll understand something else.

Cameron: And the cost of not doing that, at scale?

Juma: Ignoring that other humans' common sense makes sense to them is usually part of the root of discrimination. If I don't understand that this makes sense to them, I start judging and saying they make no sense, they're just dumb. And it can go all the way to dehumanising them.

When genocides happen, the first red flag you can spot is that people start saying these other people are animals, insects, cockroaches, rats. When you insult somebody as an animal, what you're doing, inside a logic where animals are totally different, is saying that they are not human.

When you dehumanise the other person, then you can allow yourself to eliminate them.

You cannot eliminate people. You eliminate not-people.

I told Juma on that call that I'd imprint the future-is-behind-you thing into my mind forever, and I have. I catch myself doing it now. Walking backwards through time, watching the past go by in front of me, with next Wednesday somewhere behind my shoulder carrying a question mark.

However the piece that actually changed how I run rooms is story-listening.

A team of well-meaning engineering students, with a sixteen-year-old Juma tagging along, started designing an aid project on a story they invented about a woman none of them had asked. Every one of them was kind. Kindness had nothing to do with it. They had a framework, the framework was satisfying, and Karina had a reason for that television that not one of their theories could ever have reached.

That's the failure this whole field is most prone to, mine included. So now I ask first. Then I ask whether I actually understood the answer.

Juan Manuel Espinoza (Juma) is a historian, political scientist and anthropologist, based in Colombia and working online. Find his profile in the Henosis directory.

This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for reading. Juma's words are his own. Karina is named as he named her, and her account is hers.