DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES

Episode 7 – Alnoor Ladha with Vanessa Andreotti

Alnoor Ladha | Welcome to the Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation between Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit advisory that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural interventions for systems change. You can learn more@culturehack.io. Post-production is made possible by the dedicated supporters of Kosmos Journal, whose focus is on the transformation in harmony with all of life. You can find out more at www.kosmosjournal.org. Thank you to our editor and producer Eber Rodriguez. I’m your host, Alnoor Ladha.

Today my guest is Vanessa Andreotti, who’s a scholar, activist, organizer, part of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, as well as Dean of Education at the University of Victoria. Thank you for being with us and thank you for taking the time.

Vanessa Andreotti (VA) | Thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

AL | It’s beautiful to have you in Tierra Valiente, in Costa Rica. The impulse of this podcast is to interview elders of our time, not by age, but by function, to talk about the meta-crisis, this moment that we’re in, as well as the deschooling and unlearning aspects at a cultural level.

Before we get into the content lines, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about your background in whatever way that feels comfortable to you. We don’t have to get into deep biography, but really whatever you feel will be useful for context.

VA | So, I come from a mixed heritage family, and I was born and raised in Brazil. And what’s interesting about how I came to being in this world is that my dad, who has German ancestry, had brothers who were involved in the agrarian expansion of Brazil, which meant the genocide of the Indigenous people there. And he was the youngest brother. So, he would hear stories from his brothers of deceiving Indigenous people and killing them. And he was very touched by the stories and wanted to make a stand against what he saw as sanctioned violence against Indigenous people. So informed by Western American movies, he decided to marry an Indigenous person. So he looked for it. And my mom, who has ancestry back to the Guarani people…

So, he found my mom. And it’s an interesting thing because at the same time that he wanted to make a stand, a progressive stand against Indigenous violence against Indigenous people. He also believed in the superiority of German culture. And ironically my mom did too. She really was dissociated from her Indigenous identity and wanted social mobility and security as an antidote to the humiliation that she had suffered as a child. She was born in the streets. Guarani people are nomads, and the history of that part of Brazil, the south of Brazil is complicated. So, she ended up being born in the streets and then being adopted by the person that my grandmother had been forced to marry. She had the white father, and she was really looking for that kind of security in life. So, I tend to think of myself as somebody who was born out of the colonial struggle, but with both Indigenous blood in my veins, in an ancestral way, and Indigenous blood on my hands, also from my father’s heritage.

And having been born in those circumstances, I from a very early age saw what it does, like the tensions in the household, the violence in the household was very palpable. So I had from a very early age to learn how to operate in between cultures in dissonance. And I saw firsthand the pain and the suffering of the harm that is done when one culture imposes itself as superior to another culture. As I was growing up, I was compared to my Indigenous grandmother who was extremely stubborn and outspoken and the family’s story is that they needed to right that, otherwise I would end up dying as nobody in the middle of nowhere. And throughout my young years, I had to wrestle with that all the time, and kind of, protect myself from being inculcated into all these projections and idealizations of progression and progress and what was understood as order.

I was the kid who was believed to not do well in life. They were very, very adamant in trying to get me to fit in. And I think because of a divergent brain and neurophysiology, I ended up leaving very quickly as far as I could from that family. But then I found the same dynamics in the world, and it was not until I was about 24 that I understood my family’s reality as a microcosm of something much larger that was happening in the world and decided then that some antidote needed to be found. Also because of love for my parents. I found an education, although I’m a high school dropout, I dropped out at 16 and I was a pregnant teenager, so I didn’t finish high school in the normal way. I ended up staying in the field of education for all this time.

AL | And what inspired you into the route of education? Was it Paulo Freire or another impulse? At that time in Brazil there was a revival of liberation theology, a kind of Marxism meets Christianity meets education.

VA | Yeah, it is interesting because when I ended up doing letters in education (B.Ed.) to become a teacher, this was not part of the training. At my university we didn’t read Freire. We ended up reading Freire a bit later when I was working, ironically for the World Bank in the World Bank project about training Brazilian teachers. It was in a capacity building project for English language teachers in Brazil that we started reading Paulo Freire and then the British Council, people from Brazil who were managing the project forbid us to read Paolo Freire. And then of course, that makes it all more interesting and alluring. So the progressive education that we associate with Brazilian popular education was not part of my training until after university.

AL | So let’s do the microcosm before the macrocosm of the culture. What started your deschooling journey, or depth education, as you might say?

VA | I think the deschooling journey was about holding paradox, and it started in a household where I could see the effects of colonialism and the resistance to colonialism ending up in the same soup. I had a father who was neurodivergent and had very progressive ideas, could hold progressive ideas with a very strong sense of racism as well. And an Indigenous mother who refused her indigeneity and wanted to be white. So as a kid, I knew both were wrong basically, and I had to create an internal language where I knew that narratives did not necessarily equate with behavior. I knew that people could hold multiple perspectives within themselves.

My safety as a child was dependent on me reading the room and reading changes in energy and temperature of conflict and texture of conflict. So, when I went into schooling, for me, I think the gift probably from my father’s side was that schooling was easy, but I didn’t see that those narratives were things to be formative.

l was having a layered engagement with the process of education. And when I became a teacher, I could see that people couldn’t have this layered engagement, but that by having a layered engagement, they could hold themselves very differently. I started teaching in a way that would show people the layering, the layering of language, layering of identity, because I had been working with that for a long time out of survival. So, it was only later that I could articulate this intuitive process. People would say that as a young person, as a young person who had become a teacher, I was teaching very differently and I was concerned with a different pedagogical process that ended up helping people to see things in different ways and to feel in different ways in relationship to things. And later on, when I started engaging more with Indigenous communities, again out of necessity, either illness or accidents, I could see they had the language for that. And then I started to be able to articulate what that education was.

AL | Which were the communities that helped you articulate that?

VA | The first communities I engaged with were the Guarani people. So, after I had an accident, very serious accidents as a young person, I kind of lost the will to live for a while. So I was in deep depression and with lots of sequels of the accident, and I wanted to find a different kind of sense of belonging. I decided to try to look for the roots and try to understand the history of what had happened. The Guarani people were the first people I engaged with. And through this route I figured out through family relations that we had relatives in Peru and I ended up in Valle Sagrada. And the funny thing was that when I arrived, they kind of received me with the medicines and I didn’t want to take anything. I refused it for years, for years and years, because I really believed I needed to understand things intellectually.

And again, through necessity, it was only when I was 38 that I had my first encounter with the sacred plants. And I’m very glad that it actually happened in this way. I had already been trained in the Sundance before that. I had a sense of the discipline that is required for you to be able to do that. I already could articulate more of the process of what I now today call diffraction, and which is a controlled dissociation from what schooling tries to inculcate in you and being able to hold it from a different space. So, when I received the teachings and the experiences, I was more mature. I think that if it had been earlier, I might have used that as an escape from what was difficult and painful in my life.

AL | To link the teachings from the Guarani people and your experience in Sacred Valley and the medicine work and diffraction, what were the actual teachings that informed you?

VA | It’s interesting, it is a relationship with language. So, part of my training, not at the university, but it was in parallel to the university, I was already reading post-structuralist works that gesture towards the fact that language is something that mediates our experience of reality, but that they also contain and limit that experience. I had the hunch that there was something beyond language that could not be captured by language. And that language was both enabling and constraining our relationship with the world.

And in all these communities – so the Guarani, the Quechua people, and then later, Pitaguari, the Fulni-ô people, the Huni Kui people, I think the best way to summarize things is that they affirmed this sense of the umbilical cord we have with the core of the land. And land is not just land, land is our bodies, land is the cosmos. So that umbilical cord is also where we receive information from what we call the wider metabolism that we are part of.

It affirmed what some people would call the intuitions that I had, that there’s something wrong and there’s something more that we’re not being able to tap that is both tangible and intangible, but that it would be very preposterous and arrogant to think that we can apprehend this with human constructs or the human mind. And in that experience, it was very interesting, because there would be things, moments, before the medicines, before I actually had the gift of the experience, where it would be very palpable. And many of these palpable moments saved my life in situations where it was unexplainable how I would be lucky or a coincidence. I kept those memories up to the point of the experience in a chain to remind me of this other force. And I had the song for that. And then the first experience that I had with the sacred plants, the first thing I was told by the medicine was that I had to let it go.

And it was incredibly difficult. I said, but I won’t know who I am anymore. And the message was, you need to let go, it has become a crutch. You’re confusing the bridge with a path. It’s like the moon, the finger pointing to the moon, and you want the finger rather than the moon, and you have to let it go. I remember closing my eyes and saying, why did I decide to have this experience? It’s only six hours and I’m just, I’m not going to do it. And then the whole thing about time is relative, you can be here for an eternity until you learn to let go of this thing we call identity.

And the next thing I see, I find myself purging my body out. And then I had to let go and realized in the experience that I had been shown this at different points, at very crucial points in my life, including in my PhD. So I was about to be kicked out of the program and I had one night to come up with something and I had a dream. And in this dream, I dreamed in PowerPoint. I had a dream about a PowerPoint presentation that I woke up and started writing down. And one of the things was a quote with a page number, and in my mind, it was like maybe I read this book and my brain had a photographic memory of this page number, but I will put it here. I presented it and I was not kicked out, and then I decided to go to the library right after and try to find that book.

I have never seen the book in my life. I opened the book, that page, the quote was there.

AL | What was the quote?

VA | It was a quote about, I don’t remember exactly, but it was about entanglement. So, my PhD was about how education about global citizenship as it was practiced in the UK and in other places in the world, was both trying to reproduce the sense of entanglement of everybody, but through constructs that ended up reproducing acceptability. And that quote, it was gesturing towards what was intelligible at that time. It was a postcolonial book. I think it was by Leela Gandhi.

AL | That’s a good bridge from the micro to the macro because a lot of your teachings, when I read Hospicing Modernity, which I recommend to everyone, I think it’s mandatory reading, and a lot of the frameworks from Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures and this beautiful course I recently took, Facing Human Wrongs, you have managed to articulate the inarticulable in many ways, the ability to hold paradox, the ability to both be of the dominant culture and benefit from that culture and simultaneously know it’s destroying life as we know it. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about hospicing modernity as a framework for deschooling at a societal level and how this notion of depth education helps us disinvest from life-destroying ways, while also acknowledging we are entangled within it.

VA | I think for me, deschooling, it’s interesting, I’ll backtrack a little bit because a lot of the teachings that come from the medicines and the experiences of experimenting with new things or different things are unintelligible to most people, and there’s a readiness and momentum where more people become open and ready to be taking certain steps. So I can say that in the beginning I just wanted to describe everything and invite everybody. And very quickly I learned that it was not going to happen and that it would put me in jeopardy too, as people saw a little bit of it and then they wanted more, but they would come for more as an entitlement and my time, my energy, it became something that then was consumable. I had to learn to observe the context more and wait for the time when things were ready to be shared.

AL | Are you talking about bringing them into ceremony to share sacred medicine?

VA | As well, but even if it’s not, imagine that umbilical cord as an antenna, and the land itself dreaming through you or designing who you are. I had the understanding before that as long as everybody untwisted their umbilical cords, they would feel the same and they would just get there, and they didn’t need me or anybody else. At one point, I think I had to understand that colonialism and separability affects us at the molecular level and depending on how much you show and make available through the medicines or through forms of education that can bring the neurophysiology of the medicine to bear, it doesn’t necessarily lead to where you want it to go. There’s some clearing work that needs to be done way before, and that’s the role of the dietas if you do it in those traditions. I was trying to think about what would be an intellectual, affective and relational new tradition that could operate in the belly of the beast, that could try to reactivate the sense of visceral responsibility and sense of entanglement, not conceptual entanglement, the visceral physiological, neurochemical sense of awe and responsibility that we had for everybody.

So, trial and error, it was, and a lot has been learned and this then has taken me and other people now who are part of the collective into this idea of the molecular notion or the molecular materiality of colonialism in the body.

And that operates both in conscious levels and unconscious levels, embodied levels, libidinal levels that cannot be changed with the current obsolete technologies of schooling that we have that are only trying to change cognition. And that operate on a Cartesian assumption. And then if you look at it, the current intelligible politics we have, they operate in the same way. So, looking at trying to map how at libidinal levels or neurophysiological levels we are hooked to separability became one of the most important things. And then translating that or parts of that into stories and metaphors and language that could be shared with other people in a way that could also bypass the defenses of the ego. And we can’t secure, but put some rail guards on where it’s going, I think that started to shape the design of the kinds of things that we do.

But for example, right now most of the experiments of the collective are around what we call the tapeworm, and we use a lot of humor and we use metaphor all the time because that’s the neurophysiological way actually to deal with this. We talk about the six A’s and the six E’s as the tapeworm. So, the six A’s are perceived entitlements that are imprinted. We were wired to want that for wellbeing and they are entitlements. So the first A is authority, moral and epistemic authority. Then there is the entitlement to arbitrate, to justice, lawfulness, common sense. Then there is the unrestricted and unaccountable autonomy, the freedom, and that relates to emancipation and liberation as well. We can’t liberate and emancipate from the metabolism of the earth or the cosmos. So this idea of removing ourselves and being separate, it operates right, left, and center of resistance.

So, I gave you three As. Then there’s the other A of affirmation. We’re looking for this external validation, the affirmation of innocence, of purity, of virtue.

AL | Blamelessness.

VA | Exactly. And then the other A is accumulation, accumulation of capital of all kinds of different forms, but it’s grounded on a ledger that is fundamental in our calculation of self-interest. And then the last one is the affirmation or the acceleration of a single story of progress or development and civilization, be it the mainstream or another one. So that grammar of entitlements, it permeates more than just the mainstream. It permeates how we respond as well to the mainstream and how we try to deconstruct the mainstream. And then that grammar of individual entitlements leads to a grammar of political entitlements or of political intelligibility. Then it’s six Es. One is of exceptionalism. So we want the great something: group, person, to have the answers. And then exaltedness, this needs to be sung and praised all the time, and that is what is expected.

Then there’s externalization of culpability, we are not responsible for what’s the bad shit that’s going on. Then expansion of entitlements and then this escape from responsibility. So, these are the six E’s. But what’s interesting is that whenever we try to put it like this to a group of people, even if they’re invested in doing some of the hard work of what we call the composting of the shit that we have inherited both metaphorical and literal, people still can’t. That is not something that right now we can collectively grasp. And that’s frustrating because the idea of depth is; let’s go to the meta-layer because if we can intervene at that level and cause some interruption that has the possibility of ripple effect, impact is much greater than trying to intervene at the symptom level or the effect level.

And I don’t think we are even close to the root cause, but this is at least a layer that we’re trying to design experiments with that can help people see that there are other ways of being well that are not attached to the six A’s or the six A that are different kinds of politics that we can enact together without the six A’s that may be unintelligible for other people, but that can move us in a very different direction. Especially, as we face the storms that are coming, which are the consequences of hundreds of years of separability affecting and us accelerating the breaching of the boundaries of the planet.

At that point, if we had a different way to coordinate, the storm itself will allow us or teach us how to be differently. I don’t think before we can face it differently, any predetermined or predefined alternative experiment is extremely important still because it’s through their failure that we’ll be able to figure out what doesn’t work. So, it’s kind of the ground that we were not starting from scratch, but there’s this pivoting away from separability that is necessary. And I don’t think, because it’s not a cognitive thing, it is a neurophysiological thing. It’s a reset of our chemical setup that needs to happen, probably when we are really faced with the consequences of the harm that we have created.

AL |    One of the metaphors you use in the book is, I think it’s a Brazilian saying, that only when the water gets to your waist, you learn how to swim. And is that your sense on how wide scale, societal level deschooling will happen and we will have to face what’s coming collectively?

VA | I think that’s one of the necessary conditions. I think unless we are at the point where we have no other choice because colonialism is delicious. So what is imposed through schooling, all the six A’s and the six Es, they work, they destroy the planet but not the planet. They destroy the possibility of our lives and other species lives, the viability in the future of this life, but at the time they feel like it’s the right thing and it’s the most sane thing to be done.

AL |    Also another major metaphor in Hospicing Modernity is the house of modernity. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that because that is the broader context in which we are finding false refuge.

VA | We try to change the house in many different ways. So, the house has a foundation. The foundation is separability, which is the separation between humans and nature that then creates all the rankings of species that it renders, land as property, and creates rankings and hierarchies for species, cultures and individuals. And it also removes the intrinsic sense of value of life. So it’s kind of an inculcated worthlessness, which schooling does very well, and then you have to be producing value to be deserving of being alive. But there are also two carrying walls, the carrying wall of the modern nation-state that professes to protect people, but actually protects property and capital and property owners and where the protection of people only happens when there’s interest convergence between the protection of capital and the protection of people. Then the other carrying wall is the carrying wall of enlightenment, rationalism, and materialism that then presents this universalizing single story of progress, development and civilization that then creates the epistemicide that  subjugates or kills the possibility of other stories.

And then there is a roof. Today, it is the roof of shareholder, speculative, algorithmic capitalism. That is, we say in the book that it is structurally damaged and of course damaging, but because of the anonymity in capital creation and the fiduciary obligation that corporations have to bear in banks, financial institutions have to the shareholders of profit. It really doesn’t close the equation of what happens within its own house. The house is cracking and falling apart. And then we are faced with both understanding how the house was created and it’s sustained by violence, expropriation, destitution, genocides and ecocides. But then once we are faced with, so the house is cracking and falling apart, do we renovate the house? Do we expand the house? Do we find another kind of house? Do we learn to live without a house? Do we find another planet? All these questions then are placed around the house, but we also have to be asking, so, by living in that house, the ways we ask the question are already conditioned by the kinds of things we see as normal or real or ideal.

And that’s where I think most of my interest, which is not something I can talk about with everybody and might go in the second book and came through the medicines themselves, is; beyond our constructed sense of self and community, who are we, and what is really the thing that binds us? Like that sense of tethered entanglement that can mobilize the sense of visceral responsibility not as an intellectual choice or a matter of convenience. It’s a matter of deep, deep concern for both invisible and invisible matter, the mystery and the motion of the whole of the metabolic whole, not only of this planet, but the metabolic whole beyond it. And wisdom traditions are generally concerned more with that, but the kind of schooling we’ve had has fixated on a very narrow boundary form of intelligence that is about optimizing for goals such as utility maximization or profit maximization. And if you’re in that narrow boundary intelligence, if you’re exposed to wisdom, what happens is that you put that wisdom in a box and you want to understand it conceptually as an intellectual thing rather than as a lived thing. So, people who go and try to understand from or try to learn from Indigenous communities, they’re looking for concepts rather than the lived experience of being entangled. And the other thing they look for, which is super interesting, is the experience of elation, right?

So, they’re looking for, we make a distinction between joy and pleasure, but if it is something that you’re already kind of, it’s a predetermined form of relation, call it pleasure, they want the pleasure and the power of the oceanic feeling that arises when you feel part of everything, but then you are feeling part of everything beautiful without understanding that you’re also part of the broken, the ugly, the messy and the messed up of everything.

And how is it that we protect ourselves from that sense? And I think the separability part, especially this inculcated sense of worthlessness that is reproduced, as I said, very well in schooling by ranking people against each other and in education focused on mastery and that sense of worthlessness that we can’t deal with because then it becomes a seesaw, you’re either great or you’re crap, right?

AL | It’s the bell curve imposed at large.

VA | So in educational processes, how do you give a little bit of the rainbow for people to feel a little bit like that? We can, but you use that not as a way of escaping the difficult parts, but as a way of expanding your capacity to hold the difficult and the painful without feeling overwhelmed, immobilized, without demanding quick fixes or to be rescued from that discomfort. How do you find the joy and the struggle of composting rather than wanting to arrive at a place of the already composted and ready to just see the beauty of things without realizing it’s the whole shebang, it can’t be separated?

AL | What has worked as an activist, an organizer, someone doing pedagogical experiments to shift people because as you say, it’s molecular, it’s cellular, it’s so deep, our sense of entitlement to certainty, to hope, to “it’s all going to be okay”, to control to what’s my purpose and my part in enacting solutionism. And all of a sudden, you’re asking people to address the full spectrum of complexity and collapse, and also take full responsibility and to re-tether to the metabolic whole. And I don’t want to make a generalization, but my sense is most people are not currently capable of doing that, and partly because the culture infantilizes us and there’s no incentive landscape that rewards sobriety, accountability, responsibility, maturity, et cetera. So what works?

VA | What works? I think we in depth education, the first step is start with the diffraction. So understanding that you’re not who you think you are, that there are many more layers to you than you actually know, and that can be scary, but it’s also quite, in terms of the pressure cooker we’re in, it can be associated with release. So one of the ways we talk about it is that modern schooling, when faced with the multiple moving layers of complexity of things, it teaches us to collapse everything into one layer, to impose a narrative of coherence, to edit out what doesn’t fit this narrative and to police these borders. Now, in the context of hyper complexity that we’re facing as we face the consequences of separability and approach the collapse of the structures that are familiar, this becomes a pressure cooker. And the more you try, the more complexity comes, the more you try to suppress and repress and police, your internal infrastructure is not going to be able to hold it.

Chief Niniwa Huni Kui from the Federation of the Huni Kui people of Acre, Brazil talks about collapse. He says, everybody thinks that collapse is going to be around you. It’s like a lack of access to something, water, energy or whatever. And he says, we are worried about the internal collapse that happens when the psychological and emotional infrastructure and relational infrastructure you have cannot, there’s such a dissociation from the reality, that you’re going to lose your mind or it’s going to be a global mental health crisis, and the children are going to be the canary in the coal mine. And we are already seeing that in schools.

When I work with teachers, the entry point is already; the waters are high. There’s so much emotional dysregulation and behavioral dysfunction, not only amongst the children, it’s in the sector, that it becomes easier to say, you are in the pit, let’s try something else. Here’s an oxygen mask, let’s see if it works for you. And if you can breathe better with diffraction, like the bus metaphor, for example, just giving voice to different parts of yourself and allowing you to have multiple contradictory emotions at the same time already releases a bit of that pressure.

And from that, trying to layer the language then layer reality and layer politics so that you can work with contradictions, paradoxes and intentions in a very different way. At least you can hold. So once people start to feel that if from that narrative of coherence they were saying, I’m overwhelmed, I can’t, I can’t, can’t anymore, I’m exhausted, that with some of these tools, you can actually start to see things and move things in a different way. Because part of the problem too is that our imposed sense of separability, it’s also something that focuses on forms. Modernity is trying to create a perfect society. So a static form is the priority, whereas if you shifted to diffraction and complexity, you’re going to be paying much more attention on movement, how everything shape shifts and on helping things move in certain ways. So people learning, the first thing is to learn to do a little bit of that internally and do a little bit of that in your interpersonal relationships.

And once people see that there’s more movement coming, more breathing, more air, then they can start to take the next steps. We have a compass that we talk about, which is called SMDR, emotional sobriety stability or steadiness, depending on the group, we use one of the words, but I like sobriety. Then relational maturity, relational, we use the term relational. We talk about emotional intelligence already in the mainstream, but we don’t talk about relational maturity, intelligence and wisdom, which are about deeper manifestations of trust, respect, reciprocity, consent, compassion, accountability and kindness. We are not in a culture where there’s any reward for us to focus on these things. And that’s the relational maturity bit. Then there is intellectual discernment, which is the capacity to observe the complexity within and around and the tensions and the paradox and the contradictions without collapsing it into coherence. And then there, there’s intergenerational responsibility not as an intellectual choice and not only towards human relations, but towards everything.

We’ve been testing how to sprinkle that with the directional compass, but without over- determining the journey or the destination. So, figuring out a way to accompany people’s processes of redirection and recalibration without telling them what to think and what to do, which is super counterintuitive to the mainstream politics, the politics that are intelligible. So, I’ve been recently saying, how to express what the politics of complexity sprinkled by SMDR looks like. So it feels like you are in the storm trying to remain in the eye of the storm. If you walk too fast to get caught in the vortex, if you walk too slow, you get caught in the vortex and you are learning to walk the tightrope between hopelessness and naive hope or desperate hope while you’re practicing capoeira and juggling knives, trying to self-regulate and do ceremony at the same time.

And that’s exactly how it feels. You have to be all the time present to what’s presenting both within yourself and around you rather than in an idealization of the past, of the present, or of the future. Understanding that hope, the kind of hope that people want is a reassurance of futurity, a reassurance of continuity. But the kind of hope worth having is that we can actually learn, capoeira, tightrope and juggling knives together in order to compost the harms that we have inherited and that we continue to contribute to. So hope in that thing is very different from hope that somehow the problem is going to be solved by somebody or it’s going to go away. And that in this process we’ll find a way to support each other in the coordination of this but guided also by the non-human relations that will come through that umbilical cord and will make themselves intelligible.

AL | There seems to be a set of factors that support this process. One is a willingness to deconstruct identity. For people who are happily affirmed in their monolithic identity of self, very identified, this is going to be a difficult process. There has to be some willingness, there has to be some sense of community. Elders, guides, others who have walked this path and are also axis of the willing, let’s say, right, a relationship to the ecology and the land and the broader metabolism, the umbilical cord, and also the ability to access non-ordinary state to a certain extent state outside of the culture. So you’re at least aware of what the culture is doing to you, how colonization is working at these cellular, molecular interpersonal levels.

VA | And you can see the damage.

AL | And then we talked about the role of sacred plants and ceremony, and maybe I’d be explicit with it and say a master plant like ayahuasca, it’s had a huge role in my deschooling and unlearning, and I know for you as well. And yet what the dominant culture will do is co-opt those traditions and turn it into another self-help tool so we can be better citizen-subjects of capitalist modernity. And so how do we address the dissonance with trying to create a kind of sense of cohesion around these factors around community ecology, relationality, access to the more than human, and the culture’s desire to consume subsume, co-op destroy, etc.

VA | Instrumentalize everything and weaponize everything. It’s a hard one, and I have some ambivalent feelings about it, because my first sense is that there is an ethics that is generally when capitalism mediates these relationships, it gets really undermined and there’s a clearance that needs to happen when people before people, or not before, but in parallel to people encountering these other states that then redirects.

So, with the Huni Kui for example, we have had several conversations about how if people are looking for the oceanic feeling of being in the womb, the direction is youngering and how in the community the whole thing is about eldering. It’s the direction, not towards the womb, but towards back to the earth, towards death. So how you are going to be reincorporated into the whole rather than going back to not having any responsibility and having another adult looking after you and having the world as your oyster.

So if that is what you’re looking for in the plants, that’s how you’re going to interpret the message. And there is a discipline of interpretation that goes with, they call it the visions, right? And there’s a different relationship with language that goes with that too that we do not have access to in western culture. This idea of language that indexes is still logocentrism, it’s still very, very strong in the interpretation of things. Whereas if you see language as another entity, operating not necessarily only or exclusively as an intermediary, but as something that plays with you, that moves you. And if you don’t have a totalizing and universalizing a desire for knowledge to be socialized, to be totalizing and universalizing.

If you don’t have a desire for concrete reality, you have a very different relationship with what you see, what you’re being shown by the teachers, by the plant teachers. So if you go into the experience without that ancestral training, and like the Huni Kui have now talked about it, we have a project called University of the Forest, and the five faculties that were chosen for the digital campus of the University of the Forest were the faculties of respect, reciprocity, reverence, responsibility and regeneration, which were perceived by the Huni Kui as the faculties that we have lost. We don’t have discipline in these faculties. And they’re translating that in ways that we understand in the system of a university, both as faculty, as capacity of, but also as communities that would teach you to be reverential, for example. Or what kind of reciprocity is not dependent on the ledger, right?

So there’s so much that we need to remember because, ancestrally, I think, if we were to depend on an uncontrollable sense of land to survive, these are faculties that need to be there from the outset, otherwise you’re dead, right? It is the separation, and the urbanization, and industrialization, corporatization, and individualization of things that have redirected us towards a different lethal path because without these faculties, we actually will destroy our possibility of existence, as we are already destroying the possibility of existence of so many other relations.

How do we redirect from youngering to eldering is one of the things that needs to happen also in this relationship, once you open up to, once you cross these liminal thresholds, how can I say this? The other side of it is also not in balance, because we’re part of it. It’s also a disease. So, it’s not like you go into this subliminal space where there’s only elation and beauty, there is imbalance, and you are open also to that imbalance.

That journey of crossing liminal space needs to be super careful and you need to do that with people who know what they’re doing. Otherwise you are bringing stuff between worlds that might not be only for your benefit too. And apart from that, you’re bringing all your delusions about self-importance and your arrogance. There’s a lot of training going on at these borders that can become very dangerous and very destructive, I think. If we’re not doing this with trust, respect, reciprocity, accountability, compassion and care. So it is hard. And, at the same time, I always remember, when I was trying to challenge this politically very strongly, I was told by a Maestra that the plants are their own beings and they go where they want to go. So, it’s not for me to decide and control and legislate where things should be. They have their own agency, conscience, and will.

AL | I think what we share is a concern. We acknowledge the importance. I think psychedelics, especially ayahuasca, can play a critical role in composting the shit and hospicing modernity and disinvesting identity. Every mystical tradition aims towards this transcension of subject-object that takes years of practice, meditation, yoga, silence, dance. And the plants give us access to this very quickly, which is both helpful potentially and also potentially very dangerous when uninitiated people, who have a tendency towards youngering, towards regressing into the childhood pleasure, instead of awakening to responsibility, let’s say. And at the same time, it’s not ours to regulate, but there’s an etiquette and an ethics that we would like to promote in that space. And part of that is sitting with Indigenous elders in intact traditions that culturally hold these medicines, as well as, you sort of touched on this, the manner by which we approach, because if we approach with our entitlements, we replicate those entitlements and we actually pollute the morphogenetic field of sacred plants.

And then to come back sort of full circle, and maybe we close this way, you touched on a lot of what we need to compost and unlearn around the six A’s and the six E’s. And then you mentioned this word, remembering. Maybe that’s a good place to end is maybe you can say a little bit about it at a cultural level, at a societal level, what’s your sense on this process of remembering and the aspects of this remembering that are going to be critical as we deepen into the catastrophes and the storms and the meta-crisis?

VA | It’s interesting because the word actually comes from a metaphor from Eduardo Duran in a book on postcolonial psychoanalysis, that’s my shorthand. And Eduardo and Bonnie Duran talk about, so there’s this body, which is the whole and one arm trying to sever the other arm. Cash Ahenakew uses this metaphor a lot. And while one arm is in necrosis not knowing what to do because it’s trying to dismember, so, the remembering would be a reattachment of the members of the whole in that sense. So, there is also the memory side of it, which is another layer. But I think the way that I relate to the word is that the tethers that bind us to everything, may be strained, but they’re never not there.

And nurturing these tethers as a function of responsibility is the process of remembering. They’ve never been disconnected. We can’t. The same thing with belonging. People say the most important thing is belonging. But belonging only belongs to separability. Once you are aware of the tethers, even though they’re strained, there’s no fundamental sense of unbelonging. You’re already there. What then is needed is the healing and nurturing of the tethers. And if it has the connotation of memory is that the body still remembers the wholeness of it, and the body has the intelligence and wisdom to reattach or to attach, and to go through its own cycles of life and death. So that sense of remembering is kind of the ability to hold and be in service of the whole rather than the seemingly detached parts of the whole. And that’s what makes it difficult, because it’s easier, the detachment, or the perception of detachment, because it is never detachment, it’s the easiest thing to do.

Because it’s never detached, then what you do is dissociate. And that dissociation is what strains the tether. It’s not, it is a kind of lack of attentive attention to how this is part of the same thing. So that part, I think as we started talking about where we need to go with this is kind of over here, but as a society, as we start to face the widening of collapse, understanding that collapse happens all the time for privileges to be maintained, so as we face the erosion of the buffer from collapse for certain societies, we are ready to hear a little bit of this, but we can’t hear it all. It just doesn’t land. Especially the dissociation. The dissociation of the, what word did you say about identity?

AL | The dissolution of identity.

VA | Yeah, the dissolution of identity becomes a disillusionment and disenchantment with a self-image that was created that then is protected as property aggressively. I’ve heard now recently somebody who was trying this process but who had also been abused in a relationship and gaslighted that it feels the same in many ways, because we are questioning the sense of self that you have that then protects you from abuse of the tether and then you get stuck in a context where the medicine can also become poison or you perceive the medicine as poison.

The more we have in society the sense of a heightened sense of abuse and a heightened sense also of self-victimization as currency that can be mobilized, as leverage to entitlements, people are getting into a space where these kinds of teachings do not penetrate. And I’m really worried about that because you can see the tendency for that in a stock market of diversity becoming very present.

AL | This is also the threat of materialism is the more we reduce the world to its material constituent parts through rationalism and separation, the more disconnected we are. And then the cycle continues. And then we’re more entitled to these material constructions we call identity, which are reinforced through preference. And if we look at something like social media, which is essentially preference porn, here’s who I am by how I like my coffee, and this is where I go to hike on Saturday mornings and it’s all construction of identity for external validation. And it makes me think, we were talking about Bernardo Kastrup’s work earlier, the notion of analytical idealism. And what he says is that what we’re more akin to is disassociated alters the way in DID, in dissociative identity disorders where people have multiple alters, altered personalities, not altar like prayer altar, but altered identities. And our goal in some ways is to reassociate our disassociated alter.

VA | To integrate.

AL | Yes, but you first have to acknowledge that there is a larger metabolism, a larger animistic cosmos that you are reassociating with. And the blockage of that through materialism, through reductionism, through the disenchantment of mystery is preventing us. And so in this sense, the spiritual and the political are so linked because outside of some deeper spiritual understanding, some loyalty to something bigger than our small ”s” self-identity, we don’t have our marching orders. We are just atomized individuals trying to self-maximize. And there’s a bifurcation happening. There’s an extreme version of that happening. And there’s also those who are reanimating their mystical life force.

VA | And there is a tendency to reanimate the mystical life force without paying attention to the radical sense of unknowability, right? So, you see more and more mystic traditions going back to the box.

AL |    And becoming co-opted to achieve some end state of enlightenment or nirvana or moksha or whatever.

VA | Or the oceanic feeling of the womb again. And it’s so sad because if you think about the whole with these multiple, and kind of beyond what we can fathom, possibilities of wellbeing that we could be actually actively seeking or experiencing not only with each other, but with the whole, with all the intelligences and wisdoms around us that are not just human. We would have such a richer life and be a form of life that promotes and sustains life rather than one that limits and constraints and chooses a narrow path that is already placing us on the path of premature, agonizing extinction. The “agonizing” is an important word there because we have, even if we can’t avert this, we still have a choice of how we go. That is, I think the part, if all the calculations point to this is it, it’s going to be a shit show.

And I believe that some of the consequences we’ll have to face and unfortunately the most vulnerable will pay the price. And yet, but then even there we have a choice. And then what, educationally, we will have to interrupt in terms of how we’ve been schooled, what exiled capacities we’ll have to reactivate, and what directionality, because it’s not form again, it’s not, ‘we will become this’. No, we will enter the motion in a different direction, in a life-affirming direction, and in a direction where I’m not calculating my value based on whatever traits and entitlements we construct or we can uphold or accumulate.

AL |    Do you want to say any closing words?

VA | I don’t know, I think that’s it. I love talking to you about these things. It’s very rare that I can talk to somebody who is outside of the collective, because in the collective we have our own vocabulary and dynamics, but these interfaces of different collectives that are creating experiments are extremely important.

AL |    It’s an honor to spend time with you. And when you said this last thing, it touched me multiple times when I read it or heard it, which is accessing exiled capacities. There’s something in that that I think is very potent. When we step away from our perceived entitlements and sense of privilege and desire for mastery and certainty, something else will open to us. And we also can’t do that in order for that to happen.

VA | Yes, and the moment you describe it, it’s not it too, right? It’s like the daot. It’s funny, I could be talking about that for a long time, because we don’t have time to debrief these experiments, but we have been mapping, we can see when it’s palpable, you can see when people are accessing it outside of the ceremonies. So if we are a collective neurophysiological body, if you learn to access it, you can, like the bacteria that have this in their DNA and they can’t pick it up to broadcast and other people can receive it or not and learn to broadcast it as well.

So in certain group contexts you see it, you see it happening, but then when you observe closely the languages and vocabularies and psychodynamics that people have to access it, they tend to translate it back into an individualistic language. And that has been one of the most difficult things for us. So how do we forefront the vocabulary so that when you have the experience, you are not going to do that and you’re going to be able to have at least part of your bus invested in a context, invested in a process that doesn’t instrumentalize these exiled capacities back into the advantages you have in the pursuit of your self-interest and perceived entitlements. It’s hard.

AL | It’s hard. It’s ongoing, continual work and the inner/outer mirroring is constantly happening. And the hard part of inner outer/mirroring is when the culture is so sick and so ill and so reinforcing of individualism, then even deep internal experiences get turned into “this is my superpower”, this is my attribute, this is what I’m good at, etc.

VA | How I’m special!”

AL | As opposed to this is an aspect that can help me be in deeper service of this moment, of the communal whole of the transition.

VA | There’s this deep, deep sense that people look for, of internal exceptionality, probably to justify existence that gets in a way of understanding it as you’ve just touched something that is both part of yourself and beyond yourself. It’s part of something you’re a part of, it’s something you’re nested in that is holding you, that is not yours, it’s not your property to keep.

And so many things that need to be composted at the same time; the sense of possession, sense of possessiveness, arrogance, the desire for validation that takes up so much space and time and energy of everybody. And then you have a little bit of a clearing where something magical can happen and amplified during the ceremonies, and still people come back and reinterpret it back if that clearing, if the rail guards are not there. So we are concerned with how in Western culture, because one of the things we were taught by the Huni Kui too is that of all beings, human beings are the youngest of all cultures, Western culture is the youngest, and right now it’s a teenager with a machine gun ready to do harm to others and to oneself.

And in Indigenous education you can’t teach directly, you can’t tell, you have to create the conditions for epiphanies to happen. So if you’re an uncle or auntie culture, you can’t just say, look, you are a teenager with a machine gun. So figuring out how. if education is this process of intergenerational and interspecies sharing of relevant information and wisdom, how to create the conditions so that we can operate at probably neutralize lots of the symptoms of separability that people are holding long enough for them to have an experience and then support them on the other end to not translate back this experience in service of the disease itself. I think this can summarize more or less what we’ve been talking about in the collective and why it’s so difficult to talk about this with other people.

AL | Thank you. And I think that’s also a beautiful definition for elderhood: to help create conditions for epiphany without direct pedagogical instruction.

So, thank you for the work you’re doing in the world and thank you for how you go about doing that. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you.

VA | I love talking to you.