Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with Orland Bishop
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 6 – Alnoor Ladha with Orland Bishop
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.
Alnoor Ladha (AL) | Today I have the honor of being with a dear friend, elder and mentor Orland Bishop. Welcome Orland. Thank you for being with us on the Deschooling Dialogues.
Orland Bishop (OB) | Thank you Alnoor.
AL: For our audience, I’ll give a little bit of context. Orland lives in Los Angeles, the traditional lands of the Tongva peoples. He has a deep dedication to sacred hospitality, to radical hospitality. He’s the co-founder and executive director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation, also based in LA. It is a civil society organization dedicated to creating agreements for the heart of societal development. They focus on consciousness and the healing of cultures. Orland is also the presiding priest of the Aquarian Gospel Temple, founded in 1941 in LA. It supports independent spiritual scientific research around initiation.
Orland, I’ve learned so much from you over the years, and when I hear you speak, I feel there’s access to deeper time, access to Kairos time as opposed to the ordinary mechanical clock, time of Kronos. I want to start by asking you where you are now and how you’re feeling, and in the spirit of radical hospitality, putting in the circle anything that needs to be shared before we get into the content lines.
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OB: Thank you so much for the opportunity to share in this space. The communities from which this invitation comes has been dear to my heart, particularly Kosmos Journal for the years of dedication to reflecting back what is deeply aspired to in our hearts and all the work that you have done with these very engaged communities that, are in a way, giving the fertility to our civilization to renew and to repurpose all of these resources into something that is more life affirming and life sustaining.
So, thank you for all of that background work as well. I’m at home here in Los Angeles, which has been my home space in the deep memory of this relationship to the spiritual ecology that the Tongva people had stewarded for so many centuries. The confluences of these rivers that make up this Los Angeles basin is a profound channel for not just water, in a sense of the everyday flows that sustain life, but the currents that renew this particular western edge of civilization, the currents that are part of the makeup of this ecology. So I’ve been swimming in that for years and stay within my life purpose to be in service from this place.
The timeframe is also significant in that we are coming up to this solar eclipse and within that building-up process, we are confronted with what is hidden and what has to be made more transparent in the forces of what lives between that which gives light and that which gives purpose; Earth and sun and everything else in between.
So it’s a time for renewal and we send prayers out for all those whose lives and purpose are being disrupted by all kinds of violence everywhere, and that we find peace in these sacred times of Ramadan and other sacred expressions that are still devoted to nurturing the wellbeing of our future.
AL: Thank you Orland. And we’re speaking the day after Laylat-al-Qadr which is usually the 27th night of Ramadan, the night of power, the night of Mohammad’s enlightenment. I was in deep ceremony last night and it feels very fitting to be with you this morning.
OB: Wow, thank you.
AL: So the core question and inquiry of this podcast is, as I have conversations with elders and people I admire and those who are committed to the wisdom paths and deeply are familiar with the crises and the context of this moment – the oxygen which we breathe, the waters in which we swim – the central inquiry is around what do we need to unlearn as a society, as a culture? And “we” in some ways is the ‘universalizing we’, and I mean it in that sense of the dominant culture of the Anglophone West and its effects of globalization, extraction, domination, transactionalization, commodification, etc. that creates the force-field of energy that the West has exported around the world and now has become a sort of monoculture of the mind at a global level. And so where would you start in the deschooling, in the unlearning, the deconditioning, the decolonizing process?
OB: Yeah. I would start to really look at the soul event that we call the intellect. It is a faculty within the soul that moves consciousness towards the external forces. So the laws within the external expressions of sense perception. So, anything outside of sense perception, the intellect is now responsible for making meaning of that. Within the sense perceptual body is the sentient reality. It is where our ancestors still live. It’s where the wisdom of nature is still preserved, really in our organs.
This is the reality that makes up the western world, the struggle between the inner and outer realities in which less and less meaning is given to what’s inside and more and more meaning is given to what’s outside. Not just meaning, but now it’s moving to desire for what is outside. So the intellect has devolved its higher purpose from being able to communicate with the essential need of a higher inheritance to just inheriting the feeling for the power over what is outside.
And this is the edge of where we are, the fight for material goals and material focus power centers, none of which could come inside of the person in the way that it’s accumulated because it has to then meet other laws that are governed by what is the inner part of sense perception. And this is the really learning part. How do we bring our will back to the sentient space, the place where other kinds of wisdom reside – nature wisdom, culture wisdom, cosmos wisdom – live within the human body. Outside of the human body, nature then presents something very different, the context for a shared reality.
But we no longer want to share reality, we want to possess it for more power. And this is where the western mind has gone, the pursuit of power without deep perception and contemplation of its purpose, which means no initiation.
No initiation happens if everything outside is gained and nothing inside is understood.
I think the relearning the de-schooling of the patterns is to create spaciousness for energy to move between what is given in the framework of these structures of thinking and the inner feeling for truth. Is it truthful? Because the human being starts life in the pursuit of truth. The infant child learns everything by being truthful to the motive of consciousness, which is ‘I will create a framework for a shared understanding for a shared reality.’ This is why a child learns to speak and perceive reality the way it inherits it, but also try to stay awake to asking, what really is this for?
We are responsible for teaching the child how to remain truthful to what they’re learning. We don’t do it successfully. We corrupt them by the time they’re a certain age to pursue power – also through the education that they receive. But this is still for me a responsibility not only for myself personally, but for the spaces where I am in service to ask people again, how do you find the truth of what you are pursuing?
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AL: Thank you for sharing. You were reminding me of Julian James’ book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, where he talks about the fact that even the ancient Greeks, up to the Mediterranean Bronze Age, didn’t really have a concept of the self in the same way, they didn’t consider emotions and desires and thoughts and feelings as stemming from their own mind, but rather, as a consequence of actions outside of themselves – Gods, daemons, cultural entanglements, milieus of energy, what Rupert Sheldrick would call morphogenetic fields. We now have such an individualized, collapsed, atomized understanding of the self and our agency. That affects even our notions of freedom, of autonomy, of will, of needs, desires, wants, and it feels and seems as if we’ve been hijacked by the notion of the self, the small ‘s’ self and then reifies that as a culture.
At every point, we ask, what do you do for a living? We’re identified with being a lawyer or an activist or a doctor or teacher, or what have you, as if it’s our only identity. And at every point, passports, driver’s licenses, names, everything reifies this small ‘s’ self. So it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. When a kind of mimetic structure, like the invisible hand, comes along – everyone just has to be selfish and then a perfect equilibrium will be created by the godlike market – that it becomes ripe to be hijacked by platforms like that because we have no broader sense of self. You touched on the role of initiation, and maybe you can say a bit more about what initiation would look like at a cultural level?
OB: Yes, so we had some significant protections in the initiatory traditions that if we are to face external forces in which many other kinds of intelligences live as well. So nature is not pure and it’s not simple. It’s a very complex field of intelligences that could develop within the human sense bodies and sense faculties, tremendous powers.
In African traditions, Voodoo is the framework within nature. All of these different shrines are made up of intelligences, Orishas and others that have tremendous power to cultivate within the human will, what we call magic, the power to cause change. It wasn’t just dependent upon the human being to articulate frameworks for what we cultivate as culture. We learned that these forces exist within the natural world and within the cosmological world. Beings were always interested in our capacity to develop and utilize their will in our will. So this is the initiatory space.
What are we giving our will to – that then becomes our will to sustain a kind of balance between intelligences in all different forms, visible and invisible. Communities have learned how to stay within the agreement structures of what to give the spirits and what to receive from them.
When we forget the purpose of the self being a container for constantly developing certain powers, we corrupt the pathway of saying we can just be educated about it, learn about it, but don’t make any personal commitment for the protection and the real negotiation of what we are allowed to do with those powers. So initiation allows us to understand the responsibility of sustaining a certain kind of freedom. And this freedom in a sense is how far to use those powers.
We know we couldn’t use those powers without a conscious knowing of the consequences – to develop the ethics of practice of how to carry such powers in the world. There’s certain things you just don’t do because you think it’s your will and you certainly do not do harm to others who are not initiated. So soldiers who had to fight each other, warriors who had to fight each other, understood the specific laws that if someone is killed on the battlefield, you had to also do the right ceremony for them. You just don’t walk away. The war ended with ceremony for the so-called enemy. Why? Because you’re taking their spirit back home with you as well. So these are in the frameworks of our initiative wisdom. It was about accumulation of powers in the will of the human being and the right use of them for how we engage the world.
AL: When you talk about initiation, I often think about Malidoma Somé, who I know you worked with for many years, and his conception that we don’t have initiation for us to become self-aware beings, or to become more in our mastery, but to die to our small ‘s’ self, to be of service to the larger whole. The Dagara traditions, for example, and West African traditions more broadly, where a child, usually a male is pulled out of their bed at the age of puberty and buried for three days and the whole community holds space for this knowing that this is a life or death tribulation. On the other side, they will be in deeper service because they know the consequences of entering the portal of death.
OB: So it is a merger with ancestors, with community, and with the place. So the initiation is to make the person responsible for the awareness that they’re connected to – these other states of reality. If an initiated person, as an example, violates their initiation protocol and the ancestors withdraw from them, they die, because their life-forces are now merged with the ancestral world. Something has to do with the will that if the person understands the spiritual responsibility of their initiation, they will honor what the ancestral laws are and they will honor what the place needs. So you don’t violate either.
You don’t violate the place because the place is where the power has to manifest. So you’re initiated into a community of practice that allows your work to be part of an ecology, a spiritual ecology, what the place then brings in. So it raises the vibrancy where the animals feel protected. They don’t fear you. They come there because you are an initiate and you understand their purpose in the ecology of nature. You don’t violate the rivers. And these things have to do with the fact that there is a reciprocity between the manifested world and the spiritual world that is sourcing creativity towards it. And we are part of the climate, we are part of everything that happens within the sphere of the earth. In losing that, people think that nature is just raw materials for us to make things from. All of this kind of corruption – the fact that the initiatory wisdom got displaced and that the person feels more powerful by taking the sacred wisdom from other places and times and putting it into their own ego. This is a misuse of the self as we call it.
AL: You’re also touching, to a certain extent, on karma and the consequences of breaking spiritual etiquette, right? Could you say a little bit more about that?
OB: Yes. We don’t remain physical. We don’t remain in the world of existence because at death we have to renegotiate with the world that was invisible and we meet that in its full power. And to be exiled from that in the afterlife is so much harder. This is really where the ego has to be able to, in a certain way, petition for belonging. But if you have not cultivated the right use of the ego in the physical manifested world, it has no place in the spiritual world. The ego in the spiritual world is actually like a note in a harmonic vibrancy. If there’s discord, you don’t find belonging.
The laws are far more strict in the disembodied world than in the embodied world because now you have to, in a way, return to an ecology that is pure in its lawfulness. And this is what one can call karma. So a person might return back into physical life sooner and come back feeling more exiled from their communities of memory. And this is really where the modern world is accumulated with uninitiated people more and more, reborn into a kind of chaos of the mind because that’s all they come back with – mental energy and no soulful energy because they didn’t get enough time to review consciousness and connect with an ancestral wisdom to prepare them to come back with gifts. So some people come back and feel without a purpose, or purposelessness and lost and a kind of exile still. But this is the accumulated result of a loss of the initiatory wisdom over a very long time. And so there are practitioners who are helping people go back to the soul level of work where the healing could be done, even kind of reparations with their own ancestors to give them back a chance to make peace and make progress with their wellbeing.
AL: What do you say to a rationalist, for example, who is let’s say a rationalist materialist who only believes in the remit of the mind and this incarnation, and the idea of karma or the eternal return or spiritual consequences would be anathema, would be a non-starter?
OB: I’ll ask them to pursue any goal without another human being.
AL: Please say more.
OB: Well, even the rational mind has to contemplate that someone else has something in their minds that they don’t know. The rational mind has a contemplative space or it would not develop persuasive language to try to convince someone else to do what they know is possible. The rational mind hides the fact that they need other human beings to know or even to affirm what they know. And this is a kind of deception to the self that is still trying to be in relationship to a shared reality that has between you and I, a space, a gap, in which something of phenomena happens that the rational mind does not cross.
The space for shared understanding is not rational. No one has yet explained it. How do you really hear what I’m saying and understand it? What is that? What process? There’s no rational discourse that explains it, it leaves it open because the true heart of language knows that there’s nothing between us but emptiness and yet intimacy of words and meaning allows us to do something together and arrive at a shared understanding of something. This was not, the rational mind didn’t explain that or develop that. That is still the old mind, very old mind in which magic still is carried.
AL: I was thinking about the work of Mircea Eliade, and his Myth of the Eternal Return where he talks about one of the shared practices between mystical traditions, Indigenous traditions, strong cultures, wisdom cultures was two things: one was embodiment and the other was reincarnation. So when a Norse person in prehistoric northern Europe was spearfishing, they didn’t pray to Odin, they became Odin. The point of the gods was to have this Archimedes point to embody into, and then the literal idea of God outside of you, that essentially the Abrahamic institutional religions created, this disintermediation where you no longer could embody in that way.
And then the second was reincarnation, where the wisdom traditions understand the notion of the transmigratory soul coming back for its lessons. In some ways, Christianity ended that line by saying, there’ll only be the second coming of Christ. Everyone will go to eternal heaven or hell, and it’ll only be Christ that is resurrected. That took away the ability for us to understand karma, the spiritual consequences of what we do here. And there’s something very powerful in what you’re saying, which is that the notion of reincarnation is deeply linked to karma. The notion of relationality with other souls is deeply linked to the consequence of how we show up in this world. Is that right?
OB: As well to this conception of Christ, the evolution of consciousness, there’s something that has to go into the deep forgetfulness and recover the heart of the soul, right? So in the conception of the etheric body, the etheric body that preserves the physical from falling all the way into the mineral world, which is death, the etheric body is resurrecting the physical every day. If it leaves the physical body, we die. So there’s a lawfulness in the idea of what is constituted as the Christ.
We have lost the fact that it is an intelligence that is needed for planetary evolution that has been evolving in the collective unconscious for a long time. And it became conscious at a certain point in human evolution when the life-body reached a certain stage of maturity in which we could cultivate a collective communion, a culture. But this began in ancient Kemet, in ancient Egypt. Akhenaten prepared a conceptual model of the monotheistic idea, and monotheism at that time was not believing in just one God. It’s believing that we have inherited all the gods and have developed a capacity in ourselves to use that deity for building a civilization. He was putting that before the people of ancient Egypt, that we have the responsibility to move from the gods, that we separate ourselves to worship because Isis had already revealed how the body could be reassembled into its higher purpose and how you can actually procreate without physical conception of life.
This is ancient wisdom moving through civilizations and becoming more indoctrined by powers who want to use it without the fruitfulness of it. And by the time it reached a certain age where our collective belief, the Age of Pisces, when the Earth is in this constellation, we had to believe either in the gods or in ourselves. This is where the intellect brought it.
Well, we couldn’t believe in God, but make it about ourselves. So we developed a religion in which the priests again were worshiped as a representative of God. This is a disruption of the higher truth of what was evolving in these ancient civilizations to bring the Earth into another relationship to the soul. Many of these factors still have threads of it moving through our world, but for the most part, the doctrines of understanding prayer have been lost and religion is now left with pieces again of the sacred mandates, and hopefully we can put them back together and rebuild our collective consciousness space.
AL: There’s a notion in Sufi thought that says something like: “to the intellect, God is transcendental, but for the embodied mystical experience, God becomes immanent” in this distinction between the transcendental God up there and the immanent God of mysticism, which is “God as becoming,” Allah is a metaphor for the universe becoming self-aware through consciousness. It seems to me that there’s something very powerfully linked to money here. And I know you have talked about the esoteric dimensions of money, but when we talk about mediation, there’s mediation of course from the priest class, but there’s also mediation that’s almost supercharged in some way by the introduction of capital. And it also supercharges our rampant individualism and the idea of the atomized self and self-interest, and these things seem related. So maybe you could do a little weaving for us on how money might be related to the idea of self-interest, self-accumulation, self-aggrandizement, etc. and the esoteric dimensions. I love that you bring that in when we talk about capital.
OB: Yes. After some years of looking into this phenomenon, when I think about it now and how far the different currencies have evolved since we started working 25 years ago in the conception of what is the future of money in human consciousness, in the astral world, in the world where the soul life lives really we have developed an awareness that we are just about to again inherit something that supersedes the physical corporal distinctions in which we have lived for the last couple thousand years.
We now have another expanding awareness and people call it the artificial hologram. There are all kinds of names for the awareness that’s maturing in our astral body to have a kind of capacity to alter reality, alter the mind, alter space and time, where memories of all kinds could flow. Again, we are at that edge. We don’t have a ceremony for it yet, a collective ceremony. We have different explorations and experimentations, but the money process is what we have been developing out of this longing to be in touch with something that will come into creation out of just intent.
We are longing to be there. We don’t have the agreement structure to fulfill it yet where two or more could agree, and this becomes a reality other than money. It’s the only sphere which allows two or more to do something together that belongs to the astral body, meaning it belongs to imagination, diminishing inspiration, and in a certain way complete loss of intuition as to its higher purpose. We don’t have an intuitive knowing of what money was, is, or can be. We have inspirations that want more and more of it to do something, and we really don’t have the imagination to put it into the full context of right purpose of use. And people are exploring now other paradigms, artificial intelligence and all these other things to still make something that we have in our collective unconscious available.
It wouldn’t be as easy as how we got other people’s physical labor to be exploited. It wouldn’t be that easy. We want to arrive at this future before others. No, there’s no such next future. Everything depends upon the equity of where the soul will arrive and everyone will receive something because that’s the intuitive plane of reality. There will be no exploitation, there will only be right agreement.
If we are not nurturing that we’re going to be dispossessed of the inspiration to know that we have certain creative potentials with us, and this is, we see patterns in our culture politically and economically in which people who have the means to do better with it are actually doing more harm with it because they want to arrive at a future without others. This is not possible for human beings. There is no future without others.
AL: There’s something that you’re pointing to and you’ve said before in other contexts around the idea of a fiat currency as “out of nowhere”, and our current obsession with this growth / debt-based currency is creating destruction. It’s a destructive force on the planet, and yet healing and wealth are somehow bound together, and you’re gesturing towards that. Could you say more on how you see healing and wealth co-evolving?
OB: Yes, the fiat power is not an original western mind conception, right? It is not practical knowledge. It’s ancient magic, it’s ancient wisdom of using the power of speech. It’s called Ptah. Ptah, the creative utterance that creates the cognitive framework for those times in ancient Egypt – like the Pharaoh to be able to have a conception of the laws that will allow the civilization to emerge. There’s a creative speech within the collective consciousness space to which we give rise to our civilizations. We don’t just wait for politicians to say it and then everybody organizes around that. That is the modern way of thinking about reality, but the soul is the soul of the collective consciousness. We are listening to a harmonic vibrancy within the star wisdom that gives rise to our civilizations. So the stars speak and they may have become silent to most people in the western mind culture because we don’t sensitize our awareness to what is true in the form of light, but this is really what money is. It came from the conception of saying, “let there be light”. Let there be a vision for or oracle for the future, and people learn how to articulate it, and in a certain way monetize it in forms of currencies that then had to do with who possesses the power and the authority to make those articulations to the masses of people.
More and more creating deceptions as what the future could look like if we have money and not what the stars are speaking, but what the authorities are speaking. There is still time to correct it in a way that allows the collective unconsciousness to get out of the feeling that they have nothing to contribute to the future and give people a place in light, in love, in life to feel responsible for the inheritances that are coming from the invisible realms where everybody is a host for that capital, for that currency, instead of creating scarcity and authority over it and then choosing who lives or dies or who should be imprisoned or unemployed. This is a false conception of not only deity but of humanity as well. And we are trapped in a paradigm that is our collective inheritance in which we don’t take personal responsibility for either because we feel dispossessed, but it’s ours.
AL: Most people are just trying to keep body and soul together. I often think of capitalist modernity as this complex adaptive evolutionary system. It’s alive. It has a set of rules that are generative. They’re mostly, of course, man-made constructed rules, e.g. compound interest. Money will accrue debt. So if you have access to capital, you get exponential capital; if you have debt, you get exponential debt. It’s a generative structure. What that structure does is it finds those who best serve its logic and pulls them to the top. It enlists them. And so if you’re willing to sync your values with the incentive landscape of capitalist modernity, then you’ll be rewarded for that.
How do ordinary people who are working their lives who don’t even know they are in the orbit of this complex adaptive system – a system of distributed fascism where everyone just thinks they’re going to work and putting food on the table for their family, but we’re contributing to this life-destroying machine and strengthening the interests of capital. How do we break that spell?
OB: It’s for a period of time. It doesn’t last. It never lasts.
AL: Can we speed it up? Is there an acceleration in deconstructing the spell of fiat lux as capital?
OB: Well, the energies that speed up, that cultivate the etheric body, because in relationship to light the physical space, we can’t really speed up because by the time it manifests, it’s almost finished at this level. The etheric body, the life body that is in a certain way generating aspirations or inspirations for the forms of communications that are emerging, is where we are engaged.
This is the activist space, but we cannot activate life forces with mind forces that are oppositional to anything, right? We cannot bring our life alive by opposing something. We bring our life forces alive by enhancing a love for the future that that body is inheriting forces to be part of. This is the challenge – that if we love the future, the astral body brings it here. The spirit body brings the future to us. It harmonizes light by the love we create in the etheric realms that resurrects the physical from the forgetfulness by these patterns of behavior.
We’ve inherited a karma as a civilization, but we can renew it by utilizing another body, a feeling body, where the cognition in that feeling is for the truth, that we have a better future to which we could orient our life-force to. It does not have to fall towards collapse. It doesn’t have to be oppositional to anything in this civilization. We have to enhance it by developing right attitude towards the lawfulness that is Life.
There’s no substitute for that. And in a way, we’ve seen that people are going even back to Eastern religious practices, the yogas and different things to recalibrate this very body, this physical etheric connection in which something will be catalyzed in it that is not in this civilization, it’s in the ethers, and this is the human being’s role in reality to create agreements. And the way we do it is through a cognitive feeling for the truth that our soul knows, even if our mind doesn’t, our soul knows this because it moves between time, space, and patterns effortlessly.
AL: Yes, this is going to take some contemplation time to sit with what you’re saying and the spiritual-political praxis of a form of prophecy and the conjuring of the future, and not necessarily a pulling, but a meeting of future possibility coming to us now.
OB: Even in the small group meeting, in a particular place for a period of time, speeds it up. It is not like time. It’s how the energy is used. We are energetic beings. We host futures all the time in our very constitution, expressing it in a harmonious way where two or more knows what we are agreeing to is putting a new ecology into consciousness and into nature as well.
AL: Last question. I want to honor your time. What is the role of ancestors in this work of meeting the prophetic impulse? I’ve heard you say before that the most powerful religion in the world is the ancestors. There’s something about this relationship between the tribe of the living and the tribe of the dead that feels very potent around the notion of what we are calling into being.
OB: Yes, yes. The physical world is, every time I think about it in a quantum sense, it is phenomenal. All these billions of people who are physically in the world, multiply that by 62, and that’s how much energy is in the physical world in the ancestral sense. We have five generations of memory in the physical body, five generations of ancestral energy in the physical body, working from the elemental level of the mineral life to create an inner feeling for the powers that we can call forth in memory. So we have this tremendous vault of memory as organs of cognition and perception in these ideas of the chakras, our power centers that move consciousness from forgetfulness to total enlightened awareness of the use of the ancestral world. We have that in the different power centers of the body. Most of us only attract each other for sexual purposes, reproduction of more people who will probably remain unconscious.
We don’t understand the ancient wisdom of the Rishis that showed us the yoga, and then Buddha bringing the Eightfold Path of how to utilize it. And one of the key parts of this right relationship, but right relationship doesn’t mean I have a spouse or companion where it’s only physical intimacy. We have higher intimacies to agree with, what is the heart center for? What is the throat center for? What is the brow center for? What is the crown center for? These are ways in which we integrate the ancestors into the flow of energy that expands our reach into this natural ecology for the purpose of balancing the corruption that is in the world and the right use of our etheric body, which passes through the heart that transforms the trauma of the ancestral memory that we inherited. Every time it goes through the heart chakra, it’s supposed to renew the blood, literally renew the blood and bring the ancestors into our physical body so that we might overcome the adversarial illnesses that are depleting our wellbeing.
We live in a very toxic world and our bodies cannot override those things without another level. The throat chakra is where speech, where creative utterance happens. Prayers for some, meditation for others, the brow chakra. But this is the power of lawful use of the will. The will is in the speech, far more will is in the speech than in the physical body center, the solar plexus center. We can create beings other than other human beings with speech we can contemplate and other star beings, beings outside of our physical Earth structure, understand our intuitions and imaginations. We are a communication field for a lot of different intelligences to be organized, to be in religious order or ceremonial order with the human beings will beyond the physical world. And the ancestors in a way live so intimately with us, and yet we exile them from our cognition to the degree in which they only reside in the base chakras of our existence.
And mostly the first and second [chakras], which is where we interact with the lawful attraction for procreation and in some cases just the harmonic residence of love for those who are choosing others or who have other life experiences and goals of what the body is living with in terms of sexuality and such.
But humanity is the full use of these power centers, and we are responsible for integrating the ancestral laws into them, which is the first level, and then the other level of these other ecological beings on the physical Earth and around our solar system that have messages for the various organs that we are cultivating in our physical bodies. The physical body is not just ours. It’s a lawful place for communications, divine and human and nature. In an initiatory system, we understand those things, but the ancestral world is knocking again, deeply at the door of our minds to open up for this cohabitation, but we’ll feel them again deeply because the Earth is populated by more invisible beings than visible beings.
AL: Do you think that there is an esoteric battle between light and dark happening between these beings? Is what’s happening here being replicated on some fractal level?
OB: In the sense that we have made more of both the light and the dark unconscious, the battle is in our unconsciousness, not between light and dark. There’s no light and dark. There’s manifested and unmanifested, and when the manifestation of life has accumulated so much unconsciousness, yeah, the world becomes dark. It becomes a place in which corruption and pollution and disillusionment happens, but there’s really not a fight. There’s a forgetting. And when we forget, yes, forces override our cognition and perception all the time.
AL: That’s a beautiful place to end and leave us in contemplation. Orland, thank you so much for your time, for all that you do in the world and how you walk in the world, for who you are and how you share.
OB | I appreciate you. Thank you, brother. Thank you.
Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with Zhenevere Sophia Dao
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 5 – Alnoor Ladha with Zhenevere Sophia Dao
Alnoor Ladha | (LA) Welcome to the Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural intervention for systems change. You can learn more@culturehack.io. Post-production is made possible by dedicated supporters of the Kosmos Journal mission, transformation in harmony with all of life. You can find out more@kosmosjournal.org. I’m your host, Alnoor Ladha.
Today I have the honor of being with a dear friend, elder and mentor Zhenevere Sophia Dao. Welcome. Thank you for being with us on Deschooling Dialogues.
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Zhenevere Sophia Dao (ZSD) | Thank you so much for having me.
AL | I’m going to forsake introductions. You and I talked about this before and we both share the feeling that there’s something reifying about the biography and it can never do justice to the paths one has walked. It can never do justice to the path you have walked and the wisdom that you carry and the ancestors that you carry and the beings that you’ve interacted with that have changed your neural wiring to be this unique complex of being that you are.
So maybe we just start with the deschooling itself at a cultural level, given that you have these very wide ranging and intersecting interests from the soma to cultural analysis to working with horses to mythopoetic somatic movement to post-Taoism. From this complex of work and even beyond, what is your sense of the current prognosis of the dominant culture, the master narrative as you would say, and what do we need to unlearn as a culture and a society to get to any place that resembles desirable?
ZSD | Let’s go back to we made a decision about two minutes ago that took us about three seconds to not have all of the introductory type material. I think it actually mirrored unconsciously my decision in the workshop to not have that opening circle of identity. In fact, it’s really a more private version of the same thing. And I think the reason that I have such an impulse toward that is because identity is becoming pornographic, exaggerated. And I think the reason that identity is having that experience is because the strain toward identity is replacing belonging.
And then the question is how did that happen? What is this sense of belonging? By belonging I mean belonging to life, that there’s a tremendous nihilism underneath the culture of cheerfulness and achievement and identity and consumeristic agency to reinforce identity because you can have the economic agency for taste for acquiring certain things that reify identity.
I think that the question that we have to ask is: why is culture so interested in exaggerating the notion of identity and yet stripping people of uncomfortable or idiosyncratic or eccentric ideals outside of the circle of identities? Why is that going on? In other words, social media, (which I’ve never been on and I won’t be on because there’s no way for me to allow myself to be in a situation where my identity has to precede my experience), why is it that social media is an identity machine? Why does it have so much purchase? I think the reason for that is what I call the nemeses, which are the forces of this particular western European Americanized culture, this particular culture to defrock people, to extricate people, to remove people from any kind of sense of belonging that could not actually be stolen, violated, appropriated.
So we end up in an identity machine. I think we’re living in an identity machine, and it’s exhausting for everyone that I know. And you can think of identity as being the little food, the little scrap of food that the nemeses, these forces that are interested in us not belonging to existence – existential, ontological, religious, sensual, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, paranormal, esoteric, intuitive belonging. There are forces that are actively engaged in removing people from those consummations and those satisfactions. What they have given us instead are just a few things of which identity is the most insidious because identity feels like individuation, but it’s overrated and it’s over. It’s exploded in our time. And identities are a room of mirrors where they flow back and forth upon each other and everyone says, you are awesome, and oh my God, what a badass you are.
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There’s all of this reflection back and forth about how everyone is building their identity, but they’re doing it in an absence of belonging. So, I would say that right now there’s a tremendous victory, a heart sickening, terrible victory of these nemeses to remove people almost categorically from the liquidity, the simplicity of it has lost its meaning.
And I’m not talking about a new age or even a very sophisticated Zen-like sense of being here and now, I don’t want to be mistaken for that. I mean something much more tumultuous and beautiful as being. And that’s what we’re going to hopefully get into when I talk about negative capability and post Taoism. But just an answer to that first introductory question, the reason that I don’t want to begin with you and I trading back and forth our identities is that it’s really not that important.
I don’t mean that in either a Christian sense of self-effacement or in any other kind of Eastern sense of not the way I mean that. What I mean is that the relationship to one’s soul and to other souls is so immediate that the resume that we allow ourselves to call an identity is actually not that interesting. It disappears. Identity brings us to the water of dissolution through Eros, and then we keep making a world-making self. And so, the reason that I didn’t start the workshop that we just had at this astonishing place where I am – Brave Earth in Costa Rica – the reason we didn’t have that identity making at the beginning is because I didn’t want to spend more than half the time deconstructing the resumes so that we could actually relate to one another. And I don’t want you and I to spend half of this conversation deconstructing the identities that we’ve resurrected for each other because they’re really lies.
AL | Indeed. Thank you. When you say the nemeses, what are you referring to?
ZSD | I will qualify this by saying that all of these nemeses have tremendously powerful and potentially positive aspects. So I don’t want anybody listening to this to think that I’m radically rejecting something without a round and deeply considered view of these things. There’s so many good and value forming and very positive aspects to most of them. But I want to talk about them in the way in which they’re used to affect this incapacity to belong to life. What I call the nemesis are capitalism, consumerism, which is of course a close sibling, and then, technology and organized religion. Everyone knows that technology saves lives, that communication is happening right now with what we’re doing via technology. And we could spend the whole time talking about what organized religion actually does in an astonishingly profound and enduring way for so many people.
We could even talk about certain ways in which consumerism in which the addiction to candy in the West relates to certain fair-trade farms that are now having a slightly better lifestyle because of consumerism. And we could talk about capitalism. I don’t know that one is hard for me to defend in any way. They’re all difficult. But what I want to talk about is the way in which the organization of religion encourages the shunting of the responsibility for the work of soul-making. And this is what people like Meister Eckhart were saying so many centuries ago, that if you depend on a scaffolding, you’ll never get anywhere. And so, I mean it in that sense. When I talk about technology, what I mean is that the separation of the erotic, of the vulnerable materiality of existence is passed through the plasticity of screens, the distancing that we are so accustomed to, the ability even to have the war that we’re going through right now in the Middle East, the ability to abide by its very complexity.
The variability that we have to be aware of it, the technology makes us aware of it, which is absolutely important. But the technology also makes us able to somehow abide by it. We are saturated in images of horror. We are saturated in the media that prevents us from the shocks. So, technology is a distancing; it is an anti-erotic force that we have become so accustomed to, to the point, for instance, that we are comforted when an artificial intelligence robot speaks to us with the resonance in their voice of competence.
So, technology encourages the lack of idiosyncrasy and human dynamic, and we’re actually comforted by the most inhuman voices. So, the central nervous system has been colonized to be calmed by the absence of humanity via technology. I mean, if you were to interview a lot of people and they were to have an AI customer service representative say, hello, how are you doing today? And then another voice that might have the vernacular of a particular group of people that might have a heavy accent from Latin America or from a beautiful idiosyncratic singsong of Black vernacular. It becomes less comforting, less secure from the artificial intelligence voice. And we live with that in terms of technology.
AL | There’s an impotence that comes from the mediation.
ZSD | Yes, that’s right. And what is that impotence? That impotence is in the language that I use in positing that impotence as encouragement to make people at home with a vast distance from their Jing. And the Jing is a term from traditional Chinese medicine that I have benefited from and separated myself from. The traditional Chinese medicine definition of Jing is the sheer sexual essence. The Taoists, the classical Taoists and the traditional Chinese medical culture, separate Jing and Chi and Shen. And so, when I say that these nemeses are invested in separating people from the Jing, I don’t mean their sexual energy because I define the Jing as the substance of the soul, by which I mean the particular potential of each individual and therefore the potential of the collective. As the consciousness of unified potentiates, there is a vested interest in removing people from the idea of destiny. Destiny meaning that one has the responsibility to fulfill their Jing, that things like instinct, desire, intuition, dream, longing, even ambition on the level of the soul’s cry out.
I was ambitious to learn horses, right? I was ambitious to understand how to read. Well, even on that level, we are asked to separate ourselves. So, when I say Jing throughout this conversation, I mean the vested interest in removing people from this natural instinct to be brave enough to become the shape of one’s soul. And we are living in a time in which radical people are in total agreement with that separation by virtue of being given these scraps of exaggerated identity. If you want to make someone feel really good about not having direct intimacy with their soul, give them a big dose of identity.
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AL | I love this full circle thread back. So, when we ask what culture and society needs to unlearn, part of the practice is around identity itself, which is being formed by the structures, you call them the nemeses, essentially this is the operating system that we’re ensconced within. And then you move to this post-Taoist lens where instead of separating Chi, which is traditionally life force and Jing, which is the sexual force and Shen, which is the spiritual force, you’re essentially saying these are connected energies and it’s more than the physicality of energy that’s moving through the body. It’s the destiny of the soul. And when you don’t have that and you’re not connected to that, you cling to identity. The fabricated superficial identity that culture manufactures for us. We take on our role as citizen-subjects and our nation states and our desert myths and our religions, and these things become tantamount to a personality and an identity that is not connected to something more immense.
ZSD | The immensity, that’s a word that I use a lot. The soul is immense.
And experience is immense, but in order to communicate the soul to experience, there needs to be a language of the soul. And that language has been all but entirely eradicated through the culture of cheerfulness and achievement. So that’s how that’s affected. And one of the things that I’m trying to do in the philosophy of post-Taoism is dignify emotions and states of being that get a negative bad rap in terms of existence when they actually are what makes someone feel the immensity of what it is to belong. Emotions like grief, experiences like suffering. What is the purpose of anger? What is the purpose of suffering? What is the reason that we have such strong feelings? What about disorientation itself? I try to speak on a philosophical level about how these experiences are actually the way in which the soul shapes itself and makes it immune to the manipulations of a facile society.
So, in other words, when we grieve in this society, we are sick. We are considered basically disabled and sick, and the sooner that we can be restored into a productive mode, the healthier we are perceived to be. And that’s a tremendous sickness. If we understood that to grieve is the process by which we value something, we become commensurate with a loss, our personality becomes commensurate with a loss. And when our personalities become commensurate with a loss, then we cannot be redistributed back into a production society as if that’s our worth because we’ve been to a place where we understand why we live in the first place.
But if we think that grief is a disability that we have to recover from as quickly as possible in order to demonstrate some kind of sovereign, neoliberal, upright posture, performance prowess, then we’re never going to belong. And so, we’ve got a situation where basically the least amount of soul is the greatest amount of success and we’re in that loop.
And so, all of these questions, that’s why all of the questions about how to live, how to praise, how to overcome political and sociological dismaying circumstances, they’re all empty because there’s a great nihilism behind them that says when the protest is over, how many likes do I have? What’s my identity now? And so, these acts that used to be transgressions and transformative and used to cost the soul the value of being itself that is being taken away from us. Say that line one more time, that used to cost the soul. I can’t remember being themselves. We have souls and we’re here to make life commensurate with the immensity of those souls. And that has a cost. It has a cost; it has a cost in accepting that our sensitivity must at times make us damaged. Then there can be a recovery. But if we think we’re too immune to damage, there will be no recovery.
What is the cost of love? The cost of love is anything from deep betrayal and loneliness and abandonment to the unspeakable beauty of a consummation in all forms of love. But all along that vast immensity, there’s no place in actual love, in the actual exchange of the sacrifices and the loss of self and the finding of the self that goes on in great love. All of that is a cost that is not available to consumerism, to technology, to an organized spiritual religion. It’s not available to the capitalistic structure that says we are at our best when we are superficially healthy. In fact, health, one of the fulcrums by which this murder of soul is being affected is on the notion of health.
And I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to keep talking because I love your mind so much that I want to make sure that you speak.
AL | No, no. Say more please.
ZSD | Well, just that if you take away negative capability, by which I mean in this very short nutshell, by which I mean the power of certain disorienting emotions and certain perspectives of vertiginous helplessness. If you take away the power of those experiences, then you relegate health to the status of the least affected people. So, the healthy ones are the ones who don’t have the neck injuries and the disc deteriorations. You’ve lost your viability; you’ve lost your ability to concentrate through pain. You’ve lost your ability to concentrate on the job at hand through pain. And this is happening right now in one that I love. Through pain, you become aware of childhood infirmity, someone else’s experience.
You lose the specificity of your agency. And in this culture, that is the definition of a loss of health. Health is the one who is least sensitive because they can still perform. So, at the moment when a life to me is becoming healthy through the hesitations and the disorientation and the questioning that comes through even the least physical pain, they are considered healthy by the society. To me, they are beginning to belong. And that belonging and the acceptance of that belonging and all of its considerations – maybe I won’t travel on that airplane that long. Maybe I need to be here where I should be. Those are actually what makes the fabric of belonging and we’ve been completely deceived that prowess and performance and cheerfulness make meaning. And that is why we have modes of communication like social media where the design is to not inquire into the flora fauna of a person’s actual existence, and we celebrate achievement, and we push toward achievement.
So, we don’t have a language for the way in which belonging, and power is actually related to phases of discomfort and existential loss and infirmities. We celebrate superficial health as evolution. And that’s why the yoga journals can’t have a person whose face is beshadowed. You’re not going to see on the spiritual journals of today a face that might be navigating shades of depression. It’s impossible because you cannot sell the spirituality of transcendence if you traffic in infirmity. And that is a good tusk lie because the truth of belonging is always the transformation of infirmity into the eternity of belonging.
AL | I want to pause there for a second and just hold that the Occidental mind, the western socialized mind is going to say, ‘I don’t want infirmity’. And the cultivation of negative capability is not a way to transcend the pain. It’s not a way to do infirmity better. That’s not what you’re saying.
ZSD | Yes.
AL | I think this is critical, right? Because you’re not saying here’s another avenue to achieve that same state.
ZSD | Exactly.
AL | You’re saying that the state’s that come from not being okay from the wear and tear of empathy and what you would say sympathia is more soul transforming than what any of the veneer of the culture can offer. The health, the financial success, the house and the car, and all of the traditional trappings. And if someone asks you, how do you justify this claim, what do you say? And not that you want to persuade anyone, but to give them insight.
ZSD | I mean, that’s the cosmic joke. that what I’m saying is so universal that it’s embarrassing. And every single person on this earth, if they’re honest, would say that it is when they threw out their back that they understood how much they loved their wife. It is when they lost the job that they understood that they had been lying for 10 years in that career. It is when you were betrayed in love, that you had the opportunity to understand how precious your own soul is. And it would be, you go on and on with that. And there’s no one that escapes that, no one. And it’s a great joke that humanity has not evolved. I said in the workshop something like, the last president that could show his face as a totem of soul was Abraham Lincoln. And we now have leadership, we have faces and bodies and leadership that cannot express any infirmity even in their late seventies. Even in the late seventies.
And what I would say, you said the Occidental response to that would be ‘are you saying Zhenevere, that we all need to be perennially broken and sad and injured and depressed? Is that what this woman is saying?’ And that’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m saying that life, the ecology of life is dependent upon the bravest participation in the uncomfortable shades of being, in order to create an actual network of faith in life that can then do the marvelous things that make us belong, which is not to conventionally succeed.
Where there are those marvelous things, there is risk. So, I would say that’s the purpose, and there’s more to risk, to sacrifice. To feel, to be penetrable by someone else’s pain. Where is the fortitude? Where does it come from to risk, to feel someone else’s pain as if it were your own? Where does that come from? It comes from health, but it comes from health as I’m defining it, not from health as the distance from the potential of disability or a sacrifice of prowess.
And so, what we do is we hide, we cheat being, we go into our nuclear families which have been designed to hide the truth of the soul, and then we put the bandages on. If we’re lucky, we tell our intimates how our back hurts, we tell the people how we’ve just been diagnosed with diabetes. We say we have a heart condition and then we pump ourselves up and go back out and try and perform. And that divide, that divide creates loneliness. And in that loneliness, the society has this amazing answer: it’s called entertainment. Entertainment nulls the existential absurdity of that gulf. It’s an incredible gulf. Everyone goes home if they’re lucky and tells the truth about the soul where they tell it to themselves and then they go out and perform.
And what fills the disaster of that lie is the numbing of entertainment. And that is where the nemeses are victorious, if you cannot take your face and your body into the place where your genius called your vocation is working, if you cannot take that into that place, then you have to hide it. Then you have to hide it by cheerfulness and entertainment, and you have to root for the team and you’re going to need conventional substances, not ritualized substances, but conventional substances to lubricate that absurdity.
And that is why we have advertising, and why it works. That’s why we have a mania for sports. Whether these people make the kind of money that could run small countries for years, one of their salaries, that’s why we have this. The exaggeration of that is because the debt to the soul is that great.
That’s why we live in such a pornographic society in terms of sincerity. Sincerity we can imagine is the opposite of what we have made out of identity. The word identity today means the audacious willingness to push your personality’s resume into the fray of loneliness. And that’s how I would define identity today.
An identity that is bond and bounded to soul. What does that look like? How is it cultivated? I’m pointing to negative capability and potentially transitioning us to negative capability because what I’m learning from you is that there is a cultivation of this identity and soul can be recouped, but it requires practice and alertness. It is not going to happen within the confines of this culture. That is a categorical statement. And one of the reasons that I’m still imagining that teaching has a purpose, is that sentence is not going to happen.
And in this workshop that we just finished, it was amazing. I won’t say that person’s name, but I pointed out the way the eyes of that person became so wide and childlike to imagine that they’ve missed the opportunity to develop their power through trying too quickly to overcome depression or sorrow or grief or insecurity. I’ve gone through the traditional classical Taoist creation cycle, which identifies emotional qualities and some of them I’ve understood as really applicable to this, applicable to this situation. And some of them have had to pull out of my own imagination to try and make more useful patterns of the reinforcement of soul. So, for instance, if we look at wood, wood is an element in that cycle. And if we imagine the realm of wood instead of the element of wood, we imagine psyche in terms of wood, the ancient Chinese talked about wood very understandably and concurrently related with growth.
I am interested in what makes growth on the level of disorientation based on what I was just saying because my growth is not something that begins in its idea. I want to grow, so therefore I grow. It doesn’t begin there. And I’ve identified it as “awful inferiority” as a negative capability of the wood realm of existence, of the cosmology. I use the word awful in the old way as in full of awe. And I’ve grown in my life when I see and feel something in which I have an awful, a full of awe sense of inferiority. And because we don’t have a language for the beauty of that feeling, because any kind of inferiority must be annulled to represent this neoliberal high stature posture, an inviable posture. A person who cannot brook inferiority at all, we’re cut off from that notion. And I have depended on awful inferiority in order to become who I am.
And so that’s a negative capability. What is it? It means that when you see something beautiful or immense, you feel incapacitated. And in that incapacity instead of becoming either envious or in rejection, you become an erotic longing for self-sameness with that thing. So when Van Gogh is looking, Van Gogh is a master of negative capability. And if you read his letters, he’s always referring to these other painters and how astonishing what they do is and how it’s just almost unbelievable. And he writes for pages and pages about the way Monet uses color, the way Rembrandt can make soul in a way that he thinks it’s almost impossible to do. What’s happening in the alchemy of his ancient soul is that his daemon, his inner angel of authenticity, his daemon is being activated in order to cultivate risk. So awful inferiority is necessary to be inspired to take the inhale of risk.
Risk is always dependent upon an inhale, and awful inferiority causes the gasp of the inhale and says, you are so beautiful. I want a self-sameness with you. But if I’m told that I can’t experience inferiority and succeed and be successful or be healthy, I have to have a moment of non-conventional ill health. I have to think I can’t do that. I’m too short, I’m too emotional. I’m not focused enough. I have to go through these insecurities and then somebody very intelligent, well, let me finish that phrase. I have to go through these insecurities which we would try and null because we don’t have an education of the soul making potential of the power potential, of inferiority, of the feeling. We don’t see it as a phase. And that’s why I have laid in the lap of the Taoist cosmology because it’s a phase.
That’s what I love about the Taoist cosmologies is that we imbue phases and those phases are transformative. It’s just that the Taoist cosmology doesn’t traffic in the soul like this. And so, I’ve had to invent psycho-spiritual attributes to an elemental cosmology that are more directly useful to the process of making a soul in relationship, to becoming strong enough to withstand the nemeses in real-time so that a biography becomes the process of developing oneself in a very eternal way and one can become much more adept at not being interested in the seductions that are everywhere.
AL | The soul’s task in this context is very different from the soul’s task in a context, let’s say even a hundred years ago or 50 years ago. And so, there’s this interesting relationship between identity, the context of the nemeses in the state they’re in, whatever we want to call it, late-stage capitalism, the Anthropocene and the soul.
Part of what I would love to hear is, even though the notion of the soul for many will feel alien, what does being incarnated at this moment ask of us? I don’t know, perhaps can we say that the soul has chosen to incarnate in this moment in the face of all these struggles and all these difficulties and a culture that doesn’t even acknowledge its existence in order for transformation to happen beyond our linear rational understanding of what that could be?
ZSD | Well, is that too loaded? No, Al, no, no, no. Nothing you offer is too loaded. It’s just pleasure. Let’s not let this conversation end without talking about the war in the Middle East. A podcast is going to last a long time and disastrously new news will come and these atrocities will have to be logged into the memory as others come. But right now we have this situation with Palestine, Gaza, Israel, and if you speak as you do about now what’s being asked, if we look at negative capability and the relationship between pain and anger, or pain and revenge, as just as with an individual life, with a collective life, with a nation state, with nation states, with communities…If we imagine exactly the opposite, if we risk mysticism and imagine exactly the opposite to the Christian notion of the inherent sinfulness, and if we imagine that the altruism and the love that we feel tribally is actually meant to perforate into an ecological understanding, a sympathia en masse, which would characterize the true purpose of humanity as the evolution toward a mass sympathia, then if we look at negative capability in the way that I’m talking about it, we can imagine that atrocity is meant not to create an immediate mathematical response of revenge and violence and anger, but it is meant to create an ecological width of sympathy that is beyond reason. We are still living within the convenience of reason.
Eternity is available in the human being through compassion, through strange hermeneutics of sacrifice, understanding, pauses, hesitation, complications of consideration in this case historical consideration that would pause the lever of hatred and revenge. These are not available even to nation states because of a lack of the negative capabilities. So, if we trust the negative capabilities on an individual level, then we can begin to imagine how nation states would actually have things like hesitation, pause, lateral consideration, grief as an etymological soaking outward into sympathy, anger as a specific quality that then creates the transformation of that thing so that repetition becomes impossible because that specificity has been alchemized by virtue of its precision. These are the tangible ways that the little tiny thing that I’m talking about is actually geopolitical. And it is a great embarrassment that we have a situation like we do now where we have these toy soldiers and these lashings of unconsidered violence that move toward the dimensions of genocide without a single piece of dialogue that could consider soul. It is only action, reaction, violence, re-violence.
We should be so embarrassed as to feel a lean towards suicide as a species. We should consider that we do not deserve weather, that we do not deserve rain, that we do not deserve the sound of the tide, the feeling of animals roving around in the dark, that we do not deserve these things because to deserve them would be to ensoul human civilization in such a way that by now, by now, the conversation that would inevitably be happening now is what is the nature of catastrophe? What did it do in your soul? What did it make you think of?
We should be embarrassed that if we are responsible parents, we say things like, ‘don’t pick on Johnny. His parents are stressed at work economically and he’s unpredictable. Give him a wider berth, give him a wider berth. It’s school. Offer him a different kind of time. Half your sandwich. Don’t wield the guns and fight at recess.’ Those same adults that say things like that to their children are bombing each other without a single collateral thought of the making of the soul. And so negative capability. It is the truth that there are no longer political answers, there are only spiritual answers.
Nothing can be solved politically anymore. All there is is the individual soul and the collective soul working in tandem to understand the potential that negative capability has to transform one into the awareness of the ecological other. That’s all we have, and we have failed that. So absolutely what’s going to happen all of the time is conflict, hatred, disaster, repetition, and then reprieve from ourselves of entertainment on and on and on without end. And we’re seeing that played out right now. Walls will somehow be erected; hearths will be somehow attempted to be restored in the places of conventional might. Entertainment will come back into the culture and numb what happened. And in horrors where there is no possibility of resurrecting safety and comfort, they will be forgotten. And we have to cry so loudly. It’s not a cry against the atrocities, only it’s a cry for the loneliness of the soul. And the negative capabilities are the nutrition, the nourishment that the soul needs in order to expand consciousness in the way that I’m talking
AL | Do you believe we’re capable of that?
ZSD | I don’t know. I don’t know. And I’m pushing back having to pause the interview. I don’t know. I think that we must. Trauma is the subject. I say that trauma is the zeitgeist of our time. And I think the reason that trauma is the zeitgeist of our time is because trauma is the apotheosis of the absence of negative capability. Culturally, trauma is how the soul gets abandoned in its wound. And we would rather focus on trauma than on what makes trauma so inestimably inevitable. We would rather focus there because when we focus on trauma, we can begin to participate in the kind of exaggerations, the kind of dramas that the nemeses want us to participate in. So, we can have a savior and a victim which is familiar to the plots of the nemeses. And so, we glorify trauma in the face of trying to imagine its ideology. That is actually the most clever way to avoid negative capability.
So, when you ask me if there’s going to be a shift, it’s actually going to occur on the level of personal bravery. Very interestingly, Scott Peck said in his book of the eighties that ‘evil is the refusal to suffer.’ That’s a profound truth. And if we don’t develop the language of negative capability as the very structure of power, we will always choose to refuse suffering.
Why would you do anything else if you didn’t have elders, wiser older people, parents, teachers, instead of saying, ‘you are a mess, you are acting foolish, childish, wounded, sick, you disgrace me. Come back when your face is clean, come back when your posture is tall. Come back when you’re ready not to proffer your agency into the capitalist machine of productivity. Otherwise, I don’t want to see you.’
If we are creating a society like that, then we are creating trauma because trauma is the very correct hysteria in the absence of the development of the soul. And so, if there’s going to be any conversion of this pornography, it’s going to happen on the level of individual courage where people are somehow given a taste of negative capability as the foundation of actual power, which then translates into belonging. And I don’t see it happening. The reason I started to cry is because every system that we have, in particular the media, have proliferation of identity through successful achievements. I mean what is like, but an exclamation of a small successful achievement.
I like your face. I like the dance that you just put up. I like the song you made. I like. I’m not interested in the constituents of negative capability that made it possible. I like its sellable product. So, I don’t know. I don’t know. In this climate, which is headlong crafting us to be subsumed by artificial intelligence, that is the ultimate goal of the nemeses is to make us indistinguishable from artificial intelligence so that whatever powers can be will have no soul interruption, no groundedness, no beautiful transgression, no beautiful denials, no negativity, no ability to respond. That’s where we’re headed. And I think radicalism now can only be negative. There’s no place left for positive radicalism. There’s no positive anarchy. Any positive anarchy becomes its opposite in the instant of its semantic, it’s lost. Immediately it is appropriated. Immediately a protest is lost. The moment that everyone has their selfie sticks, then the protest is lost.
AL | What does negative anarchy or anarchism look like?
ZSD | Negative anarchism would be the willingness to absorb the absence of triumph. For instance, it is sickeningly exhilarating to drop bombs. It is heart rendering vertiginous to accept wound as unacceptable and to allow the wound to be shared, to be articulated, to have its time without having a recuperative response. So, a negative activism would have a different rhythm than we have now. We are caught in binaries because we don’t understand different peripheral rhythms. We have a capitalized sense of temporality. This thing that happened must be answered right now. We don’t have an awkward time. We don’t understand the value of feeling impotent in order to grow and deepen more eternal power. We can’t abide by infirmity, impotence, ambivalence, hesitation, confusion, disorientation. That is where values become interconnected with eternity. But because we have only reactivity, we have no chance. Negative anarchy would be an entirely different rhythm in which the soul would be centralized as the secret mystical power behind actual power. And that is possible, but so unlikely that I would be disingenuous to imagine it.
As possible. It is such a formidable thing. Everything is geared against it. Even our personal relationships are geared against it, right? We can’t stay in those places. We want to move on to what we call health. There needs to be a radical inversion. So, a negative anarchy would be an anarchy that must feel impotent for a small time while it develops its collateral constituency, it’s collateral values. If it just rebounds back, force meets force, atrocity meets protest. I’m not saying there’s no place for protests, but in the inner workings of protest, it is the alchemy that’s lacking. Otherwise, we are simply infantile. And that’s what I see.
AL | Beautiful. I think this is a perfect pregnant pause. This will be continued. We are in the middle.
ZSD | But can I say one more thing that I don’t want you to cut when this goes out? I miss your mind and I know that I’m the one being interviewed, but you and I have spent many, many days in discourse and in this particular moment I know that I’m obliged to give something of my thought and my caress, but I need to have another venue where we can imitate more the way we’ve been talking. And I do feel a sense of responsibility not to shirk the ideas that you’ve asked me, but I don’t want you to cut what I’m saying now because I want everyone to know that the Eros between our minds and our hearts has enabled me to be here in the first place. And that should be intense and alive dialogue.
AL | Part of the practice of Deschooling Dialogues is to share the insights and the practices of people like you who have shaped my soul in your ability to be able to be outside the culture enough to see that this is happening. And when I feel into this kind of arc, this mimetic arc that was created in our conversation, now, I don’t feel the need to insert my version of ‘identity through idea’ because there’s something to be said.
We’ve gone from what do we need to unlearn, which is identity itself. Currently our identity is linked to the superficiality of the nemeses, of our role as consumers. Our role is in some socioeconomic hierarchy. Our role as our identification with nation, state and religion. These are how we are finding belonging. How many people have reached out within the Jewish community to people I know in the Jewish community and have said, what are you doing for your community?
Rather than looking at truth, justice, historicity, etc. what we’re actually just looking for is these shallow understandings of identity that make us feel safe temporarily. And then keep us locked into the process of cause and effect. And when I hear you speak, what’s being activated for me is what you would call the daemon, the emissary of the soul that is saying to me, this is truth. And even though there’s this kind of communalistic, anarchist part of me that wants to believe that this is not an individual game, when you say things like, there’s great personal bravery that’s going to be required. I want to move to, there’s collective bravery that’s required. But there is no collective in absence of individual choice and will and agency. And unless we are willing to go to the depth of the soul, the interface with that daemon in whatever way is required. Silence, meditation, psychedelics, horses, equine therapy, whatever your practices to be able to access this interface with the daemon that is always there, that always exists.
But our distraction via entertainment, consumption, technology, etc. prevents us from accessing this. But it is possible. And when I hear your, in some ways your daemon speaking, what I’m compelled to realize and understand is that we must be willing to go to these sites of the wound, the trauma itself, and not try to pathologize it, not try to amputate the fact that trauma will happen, that illness will happen – this is not something to be cauterized – the site of the trauma is the moment of expansion into the wound, the moment of expansion into the goodness, the moment of expansion into the daemon’s ability to speak. Then all is lost. I also don’t know if it’s possible, but I think it’s critical that your contribution in this way is laid out without interference. Maybe summary but not interference. And there will be other venues for that.
ZSD | Well, I am only willing to say goodbye on this podcast if I say, you talked about your soul being in relationship to some of these ideas. My soul has been in relationship to some of your ideas. And that’s the only way that I feel truthful in saying goodbye to the listener in this conversation.
AL | Thank you for spending the time. It’s been an honor.
Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with Tiokasin Ghosthorse
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 4 – Alnoor Ladha with Tiokasin Ghosthorse
Alnoor Ladha | (LA) Welcome to the Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural intervention for systems change. You can learn more@culturehack.io. Post-production is made possible by dedicated supporters of the Kosmos Journal mission, transformation in harmony with all of life. You can find out more@kosmosjournal.org. I’m your host, Alnoor Ladha. In this episode, I meet with Tiokasin Ghosthorse. Tiokasin is a Lakota elder. He is the founder and host of First Voices Radio that has been running for 31 years, the first Native-only radio show in Turtle Island. He’s also the founder of the Akantu Institute. He’s a dear mentor, older brother, friend, ally, teacher and elder. I’m excited to have him here on this episode of Deschooling Dialogues.
AL | Welcome Tiokasin.
Tiokasin Ghosthorse (TG) | Thank you so much for asking me.
AL | We’re meeting here in Kingston in upstate New York. Tiokasin does not live too far away. And I wanted to start with just a general introduction, not the traditional biography necessarily, because I know that would make him uncomfortable, but to ask about the inquiries you’ve been walking with and how you find yourself here in the historical civilizational crossroads we find ourselves in.
TG | Well, Alnoor, thank you for that. And thank you for this honor to be on the Deschooling Dialogues. And I think about this: how do we give praise or credit to that language that controls us? So we say…well, the moon, you were meant to be here like the moon, the sun, and the stars, right? So that’s a one-way street. But from where I think, it’s that the moon, the sun and the stars meant for me to be here. You see? And it changes everything. And I think that’s part of the deschooling, it’s how we perceive this binary language. It’s a destiny, even fate. We have no choice when chance is totally organized.
And so we work out of that spirit of being where we are, being present. I cannot be in the future and in the past at the same time, yet I can be. And that’s where we get the word Akantu: an Earth being in the ancient future now. As far as we know, Lakota is a 200,000 year old dialogue with Earth and where our thoughts come from – the listening underneath from the Earth. And it’s where our thoughts come from because we’re made up of that same composition.
AL | (03:42) Part of the inquiry of Deschooling Dialogues is an acknowledgement of this current moment that we’re in. I know the Hopi would call this the Time of the Sixth Sun or the Iroquois, the Prophecy of the Seventh Fire. And the Vedic tradition would say, this is the Kali Yuga, the Dark Ages. The Alchemical tradition would say, we’re in the underworld now. What do we need to understand about this current context in time? And what habits, practices, behaviors, cultural norms do we need to unlearn?
TG | Well, that’s a good question. There is no beginning and there will be no end to this, to put ourselves in context of being here in a spatial atmosphere, so to speak, not a temporal one. We’re not in rhythm with the Earth anymore. So our languages are not in rhythm with the Earth. We come up with ‘climate change’ and to some people that was caused by racism, it was caused by all these ‘isms’ that civilization came up with.
But when you bring that climate change to Native peoples, we’re going, what is that? It only speaks of being out of rhythm and understanding. We’re still expecting to adapt Earth to our needs, and there’s no contemplation about how much we take from Earth? Are we extracting from the Earth or even learning to respect it in ceremony?
So we revert to ritual and we cannot practice rituals. We have to live ceremony. And so, in this way, ceremony is constantly in the language. I’d say maybe three quarters of Lakota, Old Lakota is ceremonial creation within almost every word.
And when you get to that dialoguing with Earth, you understand that relation, the relational value, of these languages, how we learn. And I like the fact that you’re Sufi because you would understand this: that our values, which I can’t name all numerically right now, but those values we learn in silence. We can’t instruct them, we can’t point at them, but we understand the energy of it and this is how we keep who we are because we know what we’ve learned.
Western society is only a coat or the ‘colonial coma’ as our friend Vanessa [Andreotti] would say. And so it’s up to us to look at this colonial disposition that we all have. We go to the clothing store, we put on the errors of, ‘I have a PhD, I have this and this and this,’ and it works in that world, but does it work with the natural world? Where is the natural being these days?
So when I think about unlearning, it’s easier for me because I come from that base, not something that came on the ships or where I was forced to 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago when all the war happened against the Earth, to begin there by separating humans from the Earth. And so we continue to speak that language. And I think part of that is learning that history, as I have to understand what went on with them, that they had to jump on a ship and bring the pain without understanding the pain.
AL | (07:35) And so partly what you’re saying is, in order to deschool and unlearn, we first actually have to understand the impoverishment of the time and the moment we’re in, but also who your people are, what culture are they coming from? When you say the people who came off the ships, you’re talking about what Steven Jenkinson would call the spiritual orphans of the West. Those who came from Western Europe as part of the conquistador, colonial imperialist project, most of whom were not that themselves, but were the direct frontline troops of the English or the French or the Spanish or what have you. They were the kind of undergrowth, the so-called citizenry pushed to repopulate the badly named New World.
TG | It’s like looking west, and maybe for them it’s the right direction to the promised land, but the path they took was the wrong one.
And so you need to back up on that path. And you can picture this, you can picture this. It’s beyond metaphor, but if you understand the energy of this language that I’m speaking, that we are speaking now, it’s wasteful. The language looks at almost everything as having a waste, a conflict and antagonism at war with itself. Doubt, self-doubt, needs, how do you say, self-esteem therapy.
And so from that viewpoint, we saw the people needing that self-aggrandizement as the language comes from ‘I, me, my mine’ and ours that came over. We didn’t understand that, but we could see it in more of a whole. So we stepped back and watched it happen, and we understood that these people were spiritually starving because they brought religion, science and authoritative stances and everything that they could to come and conquer. Well, now it’s reversing itself. So when I talked about this, how do you say this, immunity.
AL | The auto-immune phase of the Anthropocene.
TG | This autoimmunity, this language, it’s eating itself. And this comes true with Sitting Bull. Now I’m going to repeat what I heard when I was very young, as best as I can. What happened is Sitting Bull saw this thing that he couldn’t figure out what it was…very many little white packages eating the land, and he couldn’t understand it.
And it turned out to be covered wagons eating the land. And it ran out of land to eat. And so when it turned on itself, which its doing now, and I can say the date that I know in my lifetime is 1992. 500 years after this thing, this white package. What eats itself are parasites. What eats itself that we could understand then was maggots. So this attitude, these ideas, this language is eating itself. That’s what I mean by autoimmune language.
AL | (11:40) And so maybe as we’re talking about the kind of unlearning aspect, you could give us a contrast with, for example, Old Lakota. From what I’ve learned from you, Old Lakota is a language based on verbs, on action and is therefore inherently animistic and alive versus the kind of dead, inert language of objectification and nouns and the thing-ification that is in English, in addition to what you said, it is a binary, oppositional kind of reductionist language. But there’s something core to Old Lakota that you’ve spoken about before, which is that the learning and the unlearning and the wisdom is in the very language itself as a living entity.
TG | It’s like speaking a commonsense language that misses. When I talked earlier about cultural diversity, well, the reason why we are more or less resilient is that we know where the power, the oracle is. And to walk with that with, as you would say, dignity, but to walk with the Earth beneath your feet, stars above, and these pictures, these ideas that this energy is to understand what we are saying.
So when we speak this language is so that you understand the energy, you describe the energy, then you understand the motion of the energy, and that’s all you need! And that comes without conceptual thinking because it’s the feeling that’s there, that’s present. And when you’re present with the feeling you can see everything. One of the ancestors said, the center of the universe is everywhere. So you have quantum physics within the language that helps you go outside of the box of conception.
The box that I describe as ‘the beginning and the ending’, the superior, inferior, the cause and effect, those are very right-angled thinking or thought processes. And so if you have verbs, it’s always a continuum. And in order to have to be in the continuum, you need the verbs to see where you are in the present always. And to understand the energies are beyond just material, the world realm and the dimensions that we see, you really can see them.
You can listen to the plants, you can hear their music, everything, but you have to be in the language. We just can’t say, oh, I hear plants. And just kind of like tongue-in-cheek philosophies you really can, we’ve known this. We know that trees communicate, we’ve known that before books were written. We’ve known about the mushrooms; we’ve known about this. But that’s the slower learning process. So it’ll be easier for me to unlearn, take the coats off because the process of learning is slow. It’s not like you say quick, you go to class, you got it, you come back for another and then you get your degree saying, you know something. But that’s only survival in this society.
So I think part of that is using this language that we’re speaking less and understanding the energy that we’re feeling that has no expression in this language.
AL | (15:25) Beautiful. Thank you. And another aspect then around deschooling is maybe private property and all of our conceptions of ownership, which are also related to language. ‘Mine me’, is the egocentric language that is sort of core to the Eurocentric approach. Maybe you could say something about the dissolution of these abstract ideas that have so much material influence. Our laws are just essentially built around the protection of private property for a gentry class of historically white Christian males.
TG | Wow. Well, from what I understand of this history of the West, how ownership got here is that we have it now. We have it in our colonized view as native people because we have to survive in it. So everything is moving in that direction. And that’s a loss to cultures of Earth.
Civilizations, you can have the one that I spoke about ‘spiritual civilization’. I don’t know if there’s something like that. There’s religious civilization, but spirituality to me always has culture. The culture of spirit, and spirit defines that culture, and therefore these words are not mine. It’s the message behind that.
Silence again is the biggest decoder, the master of unlearning because you get to feel what you’re thinking, not conceive what you think you’re thinking, if that makes sense. So this is why ceremony is part of that unlearning, as you know. It’s unlearning, seeing, perceiving, not even questioning, because that question deserves an answer, so to speak. It’s that accepting without allowing that answer to overwhelm you like heaven and hell, it’s very dualistic thinking. So it’s silence that’s the biggest healer. Silence is something that is all around. You swim in it every day like intuition. Intuition is the language of silence.
AL | (17:54) Say a little more about your conception of intuition, because I think this is also of course core to the notion deschooling, right? We’ve formalized our abstract thinking and then we’ve married that with vocation where the entire point of education is to get a job, to be a cog in the capitalist machinery. And so what is the role of intuition as part of our, let’s say, initiation into at least attempts at a wisdom culture.
TG | ‘Common sense culture’, I would say. So intuition, at least to me, my thought process is it’s a being. How are we treating intuition by saying it’s a hunch, it’s a guess. It’s a gut feeling. It’s very disrespectful when we look at it that way or we roll the dice. Intuition already knows where it needs to be. It doesn’t cost anything, right? It’s totally free. And when you’re free, all dimensions are available. And so where’s the language to describe that free? The being-intuition.
And in comes the human being that no longer knows how to be a human being but has become a human doing. That they do so many things that they forget the essence of the silence that they were born from, into, and will go out of this dimension in. It’s to understand that peace with Earth is peace honored and it’s simple. That’s what I could come up with. Peace with Earth is peace honored.
Now to have an answer for you. The spirits have to tell you this. It does not mean I’m a shaman or spiritual guru or anything like that, a medicine person. I’m just a regular being with common sense. And when you’re in that place, when you see the light beyond what you can describe with the words of this language, even my language is that we are out of rhythm with nature so much that we have to call it ‘nature’. Nature, or you say Gaia, I say Mother Earth, which is not really what Maka Ina means. In fact, it’s beyond that description of this language. So we have a lot of work to do to unlearn, to deschool, to un-Westernize. To take Maka Ina again, to unlearn, to wake up from the coma.
AL | (20:42) Maybe this is the last question as I want to honor your time. A westerner saying, okay, well I understand what you’re saying around silence, around intuition, around language, but I need to put food on the table and put my kids to school and play my role in the machinery of capitalist modernity. What would you say to that person?
TG | I would say, how much do you want to participate in giving yourself away?
There is no word for sacrifice [in Lakota] – it is that which gives itself to you – that is sacrifice. We are taught that, again, we don’t lead; we don’t follow, we walk with – which is sacrificing to us. And so we have to always treat that in a ceremony. Everything is ceremony to us. So as a language, and when I think about, yeah, I have to drive a car to get here, I have to have food. And we are taught to ask in this society – basically a beggar’s language, a language of scarcity.
But on the other end is, well, you must speak a language of abundance, that’s not “it”. That’s not the opposite of scarcity. So, it is just what it is. What do you need today? Because the future will always, if you understand today, the future will always be available as well as the knowledge of the past. And I think that’s where we have to decode our own thinking and get away from the ego as you understand- the identity that we’re supposed to have within the survivor language. This is a survivor’s language that we’re speaking. Whereas you can’t speak this way in Old Lakota, you can’t speak a survivor’s language based on fear. And if you consider fear a being, then you also understand how this society understands it. Dualistically.
AL | (22:58) There’s a line that has come to me a couple of times in meditation and ceremony, which is, “trust is the ultimate suicide pact with the universe. You have to be able to stand at the edge of consciousness and be willing to fall and know that you will be caught.”
TG | I love that.
AL | And even the relationship with scarcity and abundance and money, it’s like part of a spiritual practice that I know I will be provided for if I am in resonance with the desires of Mother Earth, Pachamama, the Gaian whole, whatever you want to call it. But that requires a belief in something bigger than you.
Yet institutional religions of the West, the corporate capitalist structures, the political leaders, the media, they’ve hollowed out that relationship. They’ve said, trust us, right? Academia, science, we know the answer to everything. We’ll get the grand unifying theory of everything. Here’s why you’re doing what you’re doing. Here’s where we’re going. Here’s the capital T truth on the human experience in all the ways historically cognitively, neuro-scientifically, physically, metaphysically. And so this monopoly has mediated our relationship with something bigger than us to trust and to be in service to. And that gap requires some bridging. And we’re like these spiritual orphans on one side of this vast chasm with no bridge. And maybe you could leave us with? What does that bridge look like? Is there even a bridge? Is there a way to build that bridge? Is there something we can do in our bodies to start even attempting to conceive of the bridge?
TG | There is no bridge.
If you’re in it and you’re understanding your place, that like you were meant to be here, that sounds so cliche, but Wana, Wana means now. And like we say, Taku Ashka, which means the spirit behind the spirit, behind the spirit, behind the spirit. It’s like dimensional effects that we have. Where does your energy go when you speak? It just doesn’t stay right here. It goes out. Technically this broadcast, spiritually, energetically. It always moves and it always, you identify that if you understand that the continuum, not of time, but the continuum of emotion and energy, that’s where it comes from. So, if we understand that I am not the message, but the message that I carry is bigger. And that’s why I think First Voices Radio is what it is because it’s always been about the message that it goes. And somehow, I don’t see how it kept going with no funding, blah, blah, blah.
AL | (26:03) And you’re not planning for that?
TG | No, I’m not planning for it. I just want to be here because that’s the message, to be here.
AL | And I love that you’re just so direct about it. There is no bridge, but there is an awareness of consequence. And if we are aware of the consequences in the present moment and anchored in the present moment and in place, then we can actually deepen our practice of trust.
TG | Yes, because the Earth trusts you to give to you air, water, food, comfort, all of that. And you see that that overwhelms all the discomforts. And we need to be between those quote ‘dimensions’ or worlds to understand the mystery that it already understands us.
The trees acknowledge us when we walk in the forest. We don’t go to nature. Nature is in us. So we never separate it. We don’t have to build bridges; we don’t have to connect. We’re in relationship, we’re in dialogue. We’re in conversation all the time with everything that we know, atomically down to the neutron is, that everything is alive.
We’ve known that way before Western science came here. And to lose that means that we’re going to have to give up our relationship with nature and the quick fixes that are coming. that are here and now have to be proved, proven by science. And we just kind of sit back because we know that we have the time, so to speak. So patience is one of the virtues that you learn in silence. It’s not taught; you learn it.
AL | Beautiful. I think that’s a great place to end. Thank you so much for your time, for your eldership, for the way you walk in the world and all that you do.
TG | Honored. Honored, always. Alnoor, thank you so much for this. It’s good to be here.
Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with Sophie Strand
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 3 – Alnoor Ladha with Sophie Strand
In this episode of Deschooling Dialogues, host Alnoor Ladha talks with Sophie Strand. She is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her “a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.”
Her first book of essays, The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is out now from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published soon. Her books of poetry include Love Song to a Blue God (Oread Press) and Those Other Flowers to Come (Dancing Girl Press) and The Approach (The Swan). Follow her on Facebook or on Instagram @cosmogyny.
AL | 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 find out more at culturehack.io.
Post-production is made possible by the dedicated supporters of Kosmos Journal, focused on transformation in harmony with all Life. You can find out more at kosmosjournal.org. And thank you to Radio Kingston for the use of this space today. I’m your host, Alnoor Ladha.
I’m here with Sophie Strand, who’s a dear friend, sibling, an inspiration when it comes to weaving words and worlds. She is a writer, a compost heap, a troubadour, an animist, and she’s the author of the Flowering Wand, which is out now, and Madonna’s Secret, which is coming out this summer. Welcome to Deschooling Dialogues. Thank you for being with us and taking the time.
SS| Thank you so much for having me and for having my little dog who may vocalize during this.
AL | So let’s start with a little bit about the inquiries you’re holding now and a little bit about the journey.
SS | A little bit about the journey. I was raised in a swamp of Theravada Buddhist monks, rabbis, theologians, rescued possums, raccoons, mountains. My parents write about the history of religion and they also write about ecology. So, I definitely have a root system in these things and was produced by dinner table conversations that range from eco-anarchism to the history of Christianity.
These days, I’m thinking a lot about healing paradigms and how they’re helpful and how they also constrict us and foreclose certain possibilities for wellness. And I am looking at my own story with chronic illness and with trauma under a different lens, under a more interspecies lens, trying to problematize the ways in which I have focused on the human when it comes to healing instead of my wider connectivity. What are you thinking about right now? I know you just finished a book on philanthropy, composting philanthropy.
AL | Kind of against my will. Yes. I think a lot about post capitalism, not in a temporal sense of what comes after this existing system, but more about what are the enabling conditions to create embodied cultures worth living. And I see a lot of parallel between our work in the sense that you often go to ecology for your inspiration. We were talking about pigweed the other day, and you gave me the metaphor of pigweed, and I thought, wow, that’s a post-capitalist being, the pigweed. Maybe you can say a little bit about it.
SS | So a little context, my grandmother was an English rose gardener, and she didn’t know better, and she used glyphosate in her rose garden, and she died of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is now shown to be directly caused by glyphosate, and posthumously she was included in the class action suit against them, and I think a lot about it. She was the person who I felt closest to. She lived with us as she died. I loved her quite a bit. She was a gardener and a lover of plants, completely pagan without knowing that that’s what she was. And I think about how we are all threaded through with microplastics. We’re all drinking water with blood pressure stabilizers and pesticide in it and experiencing auto-immunity and cascading physical glitches that of course, the environment is also experiencing at a much higher degree.
And for me, I was thinking, I can’t purify myself. I can’t put myself into some machine that purifies my blood and fixes me. I need a good metaphor. And so, in medieval England, there were cults of saints and it seemed Christian, but really, they were syncretic with much earlier tutelary land deities. So certain plants, certain springs, certain valleys would have healing attributes, and they became conflated with Christian saints so that they could still exist within the oppressive paradigm of colonial Christianity. But they pointed to plants and animals and places that could heal you. So, you would pray to a certain saint for a toothache, for a fever, for heartache. And so, I’ve created my own cult of saints, but they’re all plants and animals and microbes, and they’re the plants and animals and microbes that are, as you said, post capitalist; ones that are not the master’s tools.
“The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house” [Audre Lorde]. They’re always the dirtiest, most hated beings. And one of those is pigweed. And pigweed is a weed – it’s actually indigenous to America, but we treat it like an invasive species because it destroys our monocropping. It’ll get into a field. They have these deep tap roots that are impossible to get rid of without something called flame weeding where you burn down the entire field. And the best thing is they genetically outpace pesticides that they can outpace glyphosate in one generation.
AL | As their adaptive mechanism.
SS | And so they can metabolize the pesticide and learn how to get rid of it immediately. And so I started praying to pigweed just to teach me how to alchemize these poisons in my own body. So that’s one. But I like calling them post capitalism, like co-conspirators.
AL | They’re sort of apocalyptic, but also post capitalistic deities.
SS | Yeah. Do you have one right now? Can you think of one?
AL | The one that comes to mind, and you’ll probably know the Latin names better than me, is the particular fungi that infects the ant.
SS | Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.
AL | There you go. I knew you would. And why I think the metaphor is so interesting is that it doesn’t have a body in that sense. It can’t get to the top of the tree, but it can infuse the ant’s body and become a symbiont with the ant. And the research on it is really interesting because they don’t know if it’s affecting the neurology of the ant; if it’s happening at a strictly neurochemical level, like the ant is high. They haven’t figured out what the mechanism is; in which way is it doing this. And I think in some ways that the kind of post capitalist resistance is like what we have to ride the bodies of – in some ways, more mobile, more superior creatures and take root in logic like that.
SS | Yeah. I love that metaphor too. I often think of that ant when I think of art, which is ‘good art is never you’. It’s always using your body and hijacking you to do something that’s bigger than you. And that experience is usually terrifying. We do not know what that ant is experiencing, but I think Merlin Sheldrake says by the time the ant’s at the top of the plant, it’s a fungus in an ant costume, which I love. How can we become fungus in human costumes and trees in human costumes? How can we let ourselves be colonized by these beings?
AL | For me, this kind of line of thinking comes with the idea of purpose. I think a lot about how, in the living world, no species requires purpose or is contemplating their purpose or is navel gazing about its purpose. And the West is obsessed with it. From career counselors to the kind of Fordist procession that moves us towards some kind of vocational job. When you’ve come out of high school and you get these seven bad options of architect, lawyer or doctor or whatever, before we even know what we are orienting towards. A plant understands photosynthesis. It has its teleology if you will, intact. And we’re so rudderless, especially in a culture that tells us a kind of materialist reductionist fallacy of acquisition is going to somehow save us. And the only thing we need to do is whatever’s required to get us into a relatively hierarchical position to acquire more, consume more, validate more, et cetera.
SS | I was thinking about accumulation. We want to accumulate as much as possible, put as much into our bodies. And by extension, we’re making as much land into places to grow our food, our monocrops, or our cows and our chickens, which are an extension of our own bodies. But I often think of these spiders that always die when they reproduce, or they will jump into the mouths of these giant female spiders and die.
There were these rare spiders in this zoo, and they were trying to get them to reproduce, and they were waiting and trying to make sure that the lady spider didn’t eat him before they mated. And she ate him and everyone despaired because they were the last of their kind. And then two weeks later, she was pregnant. He managed to, as he was dying, do the act. And for me, I was always thinking, we think that that’s a life wasted. We think we have to save life, but life doesn’t have a savings account. It spends everything at once always.
AL | And maybe there’s a transition between these two. I think I told you about my uncle before. I remember being about 17 years old, and the career counselor or whatever they called them back then, gave me all this propaganda for Canadian universities. I’m looking at this and my uncle walks in the room and he’s like, ‘what are you doing?’ And I said, well, I have to pick what university I want to go to. And then he just sort of laughed and he was like, ‘you’ve become so colonized.’ And then his line was, ‘your life is a consequence of your prayer.’
SS | Beautiful.
AL | ‘Your life is the consequence of your prayer.’ You don’t like your optionalities, you don’t like your choice set. Go to your altar, go do your Dhikr, which is Arabic mantra, refine your prayer, and then you can negotiate with Life again. And it just recalibrated the way I was approaching this limited choice set of what I could do and what my purpose was. There is no purpose. There’s only prayer, and you’re in dialogue with this animate world. There’s a pathway in death also because I think death-phobia is driving most of our motivations at a civilizational level. It’s obvious, when we look at healthcare for example, or end of life care, palliative care, and Elon Musk wanting to go to Mars and uploading our consciousness to the AI and all of that, but also at a daily kind of quotidian way, our purpose and death are so entwined.
SS | Well, I think it’s interesting. I was just thinking of this great line from my favorite Linda Hogan poem, which is “to enter life, be food”. I think maybe the most terrifying thing is to really realize what our purpose is, which is to be food, to ‘become food’, to make ourselves edible. How do we make ourselves edible? It’s not about being a doctor or doing anything of the sort. It’s about making sure that at the end of our lives we could be eaten. And that’s very terrifying. That’s so closely wedded to death.
I often think that our fear of death is also closely linked to our weird relationships to food webs. That food webs are created by waste, by delicately plugging your waste into another being’s appetite. That’s how the nitrogen and the salmon make it all the way into the rivers, then into the bear’s bodies from out in the ocean, that the ocean is tied in deep, deep miles into the land by these salmon and by their waste decaying and being eaten by bears. And then the bears are pooping on the shore of these rivers. We don’t know how to make our waste edible anymore. We don’t know how to make our death edible. So I sometimes think that my purpose in life is just really simple. It’s very material. How do I make sure that at the end of my life I can be eaten?
AL | There might also be an esoteric layer to this. I was thinking of Zhenevere Sophia Dao, who said, on multiple occasions, ‘I try to cultivate my diet so I’m erotically attractive to Gods and deities.’ It’s a very Dao conception of death – you cultivate your qi in a certain way that the more-than-human and these multidimensional beings are attracted to you.
SS | I often say to people, we have to realize that we are not just speaking with our mouths, we’re speaking with our whole bodies to other beings. So, the first way we usually speak to other beings is with our smell. And we have forgotten. We are very loud with our smell and unintentional. And the truth is that we’re eating processed food, we’re covering ourselves in synthetic chemicals, and then we’re quietly going into the forest. It’s a very loud, unintentional entrance. If you’re smelling like that, I often think that the first way we can key into how we’re communicating with these other animate forces is through smell. Can we learn to smell better? Can we learn to speak better with our whole bodies?
AL | Which happens through diet. And in the Daoist sense it happens through spiritual practice, vis-à-vis this idea of death. I was also thinking of something you said in our conversation with V [formerly Eve Ensler – see bonus episode with Sophie Strand and V] which is “we’re not children of the garden, we’re children of the crater”. And what comes to me, and I’ve had discussions around this in other contexts, is 99.9% of every species that’s ever existed on the planet is no longer with us. So, the scientific analysis of 10 to 60 million species that are alive on the planet are only less than 0.01% of all life that’s ever lived. And so maybe the point is not perpetual existence, but to die well. It’s actually extinction. That’s what life moves towards.
SS | Or combining bodies. I mean, I oftentimes think that the most biological novelty are the moments when two species are like, ha, we’re done. Let’s just combine. Let’s burn the bridge to our old body behind us. Two simple prokaryotes used to create eukaryotic life; botched cannibalism created our bodies. So yeah, we’re also, maybe right now we’re being asked to jump into other bodies, and that does seem like death and probably feels like death. It’s like the fungus in the ant.
AL | We also don’t know what we’re becoming. We think evolution is a finite force that has a destination. But we have no idea. We’re still navigating our own verticality.
SS |I know. And we don’t do it well. I mean, Thomas Halliday, this great paleontologist says something that is like my prayer – it’s ‘nature is not nostalgic. It’s creative.’ It will put new things together every day to keep life moving. It’s not devoted to one species. I always say, ‘matter is not species monogamous. It’s promiscuous.’
AL | I love that.
SS | It moves between bodies and it changes bodies to keep moving. Yeah. I hope that whatever happens, I contribute to ‘the commons of the general enlivenment’, to paraphrase Andreas Weber. I hope that’s how you say our friend’s name. But yeah, I hope I can pay forward my matter to the general aliveness.
AL | In terms of death, dying, extinction, eukaryotic life, this sort of symbiont, holobiont and cyborg beings that were becoming in some ways, what is your sense of the directionality?
SS | What is my sense of the directionality? My sense of the directionality is I’m an ant on a very big earth, and I have no sense of the direction. I just hope that I will make myself a doorway through which matter can flow without being blocked. And we were talking with V earlier about the ones who walk away from Omelas, which is this utopia that is justified and kept in place by the abuse of one child.
AL | This is the Ursula Le Guin short story.
SS | And the direction is not what matters. The important thing is to walk away, I think, ‘what’s the direction we’re moving in?’ Is it towards complete extinction? Is it towards some weird kind of digital Symbiocene? Is it towards the grid going down? I don’t know. All I know is that I want to walk away from Omelas, and I hope that I can join hands with other beings, be they dogs or plants or trees or friends like you, as we choose to walk away. So what direction are we moving in? I hope we are moving away from Omelas.
AL | In some ways, we are walking towards the event horizon, whatever’s coming. Terence McKenna always used to say that ‘we are in parking orbit of this event horizon’. We sense it, it’s around the corner. And it feels like, on one level, there’s this digitization that’s happening from crypto wallets to vaccine passports to AI that’s happening in one direction and then in the other, you have to choose between becoming cyborg or free people.
SS | I know. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I think about, and I’m interested to hear where you’re learning right now. I do think that we treat this technology like it is a God, and we forget that it’s made of very fragile materials and materials that depend on our supply chains and our infrastructure holding. Most of our technology depends on one factory in Taiwan making these computer chips and our relationship with Taiwan being okay. I sometimes think that we’re in a kind of weird medieval theological relationship to technology that doesn’t actually admit that it’s fragile and it needs a lot of parts still working. I think it’s too fragile to be our future, personally. How do you feel?
AL | Yeah. All this talk about AI singularity, I find on some levels quite ridiculous. This requires the perpetual mining of lithium from Bolivia. And coltan and cobalt from West Africa, that’s not going to happen. And it also requires huge amounts of satellites in the air and a global energy grid. And we’re mitigating for a three degree rise in temperature by mid-century, which is correlated with 40% biodiversity loss. That’s like 40% of all life not being here. We have no idea what’s going to happen to the ecosystem and the biome and the web of life. And it’s also correlated with the 10-to-20-meter sea level rise.
SS | There’s no way these things are going to keep in place.
AL | And then the other aspect of this is also the belief that you can get consciousness from non-consciousness makes no sense to me. Neuroscience has spent 30 years trying to figure out the hard problem of consciousness. And the reason it’s a hard problem of consciousness is that their logic is circular.
SS | It’s a black box with this homunculus inside of it that’s operating this other homunculus…
AL | And the analysis that it’s an “emergent phenomenon”, that mind, that consciousness itself, just emerged from this machine called the brain. And this is also related to nostalgia, right? Because we are told that the human neocortex is the most evolved thing, and what will happen if the universe doesn’t have it?
Consciousness is distributed. It’s everywhere. It’s in everything. And if that was your starting place, if we had a more idealistic, pan-psychic starting place, you wouldn’t have the hard problem of consciousness. And you also wouldn’t have the fallacy that somehow AI consciousness is going to be created from nothing. When we don’t even know how consciousness in the human brain works, how are we now going to bestow that God-like ability on ones and zeros and digital machinery?
SS | I’m deeply of a kind of new materialist, pantheist, animist sensibility. My sense is that, yeah, these machines and bots are sentient, but they’re sentient because they’re made from material that’s sentient and they’re not sentient because we’ve created some neural network. They’re sentient because matter is bumptious and agential in ways that we cannot control and conceive of. And one thing I am not worried about, but very aware of, is I think that technology is haunted. I think a lot about how a lot of medicine depends on Nazi experiments that have just dropped out of the footnotes.
Can you separate the means from the ends? What does it mean that most of our medical science is done from experimenting on animals? We think about quantum entanglement, we think about the observer always affecting the outcome. I always think that when you kill one being, that affects the outcome. What does it mean that our medicine is based on this erasure, this illusion? And so I think a lot about how the AI we’re creating is haunted with materiality, with minerals and stuff that’s been extracted from the earth. What does that material want? That’s the consciousness we’re talking about and not acknowledging,
AL | Right. There’s the Donna Haraway line where she says, “it matters what matter we matter with.”
SS | Yes. It matters what stories we use to tell other stories.
AL | What ties we tie knots with.
As this focus of this conversation is on deschooling, and I love that we have our non-linear weaving and we’ve talked everything from purpose to the body to AI. What do we need to unlearn as a culture in order to be good compost, in order to be useful to the aliveness of matter?
SS | Well, I want to hear your answer. I think the thing that I’m pretty focused on is we need to unlearn the atomized self. We need to unlearn the sense that there is an individual. We only come into being through interface and through relationships. Healing doesn’t happen in one body. It happens in a meshwork of bodies. Trauma doesn’t come into being through perpetrator and victim. It comes into being through complicated systems of complicity. So I think for me, the thing I would like to unlearn is this sense that I am a self with boundaries that should be defended. I need to get used to an idea that I’m leaky and that avails me to pollution and harm, but also of more nourishment and feral ways of surviving than I could ever have expected. What do you think we need to unlearn right now?
AL | I’m totally with you. I think at the highest level, when we try to get to the root, in through root, with the root, we could say the root is neoliberalism or the Neolithic revolution or the invention of the city state. We can try to historically and anthropologically go back to the materialist driver. But what it comes to for me is the illusion of separation.
I love this definition from chief Niniwa [of the Huni Kuin people from Acra, Brazil], colonialism and whiteness are the illusions of separation as neurological cultural impairments. That we’ve internalized this belief of separation so deeply that it affects our very ontology, and ontology is the applied philosophy of being. And sometimes it’s interpreted as vision, literally the way we see the world. And so if my gaze is structured in a way that everything is separate and materialist and reductionist, I’m therefore entitled to manipulate the world as I want. I think that becomes the root of so many of our societal illnesses.
The belief that we’re separate from other beings also requires a deep numbing and anesthesia of the body and the soul and the mind and the heart complex. Because how could you treat another being in these ways or accept the living conditions of other human beings or the widespread destruction of the ecology unless these aspects of you, that know are not separate, are put to sleep.
SS | Exactly. I mean, when you realize that all of these arrows you’re shooting are going into your own breast, you’re going to feel a lot of pain. I mean, the thing I think about a lot is there’s a rather precious take on ecological embodiment right now that it’s about covering yourself in olive oil and sluicing yourself with the dirt.
SS | No, it’s just that we need to go out and participate in nature. But the truth is that the threshold you have to cross is that it’s like when your foot has been asleep and it comes back awake, that hurts. It prickles when you realize that you’ve been hurting yourself, your extended body for such a long time. And I think a lot of us right now are navigating that pain of waking up from the numbness.
AL | Completely. And that part of me that is empathic and connected and in the non-separate state, those are the best aspects of me. And for them to be amputated and to be colonized in that way means that I’m not fully available to life itself. And so, I’m in this active practice of how do I integrate these various ignored, amputated aspects of myself to be in the state of non-separation? And again, I don’t think it’s an arrival place. But I am committed to that journey of whatever it takes. The feelings and the emotional experiences that come with experiences of non-duality and non-separation are much more interesting to me than any material comfort that stems from the illusion of my separate beingness.
SS | I mean, I loved the distinction you made earlier between the destination and the process. We’re so focused on the destination, we forgot how to keep moving. I always think that certainty is a bad flotation device, and it keeps you from learning how to swim. And the truth is you just need to learn to swim to move your muscles rather than depending on some kind of faulty false dualism or set of controls. How can we learn to just be in the process without trying to get anywhere?
AL | It’s practice and there’s a constant orientation that’s required to be like, oh, ‘I’m attempting to get somewhere’.
SS | Yes, no, you never get sober from it. I think that’s the thing that I’m realizing right now is like, any moment I think I’m sober from the culture, I’m the drunkest. In fact, saying you’re sober is a good sign that you’re pretty drunk. I think I’m just constantly realizing I’m an alcoholic. You’re never not an alcoholic in a 12-step program. You’re always an addict. And I think that’s the thing: I’m an addict of this culture, and I need to be actively aware of that and investigate how it infects every single one of my decisions as an addict. You can think, I’m just going to visit a friend on this street. I just love seeing that friend. I mean, it is next to my old drug dealer. You’re really good at hiding things from yourself. And so I think 12-step work is actually sometimes a really good way of thinking about how we’re addicted to the culture. And it keeps you humble.
AL | There was a line given to me by a plant much smarter than me, and she said, ‘ignorance is the seed of all ontology.’ And I asked her to repeat herself, and she said, ‘ignorance is the seed of all ontology’. That if you could even try to grasp the consequences of your ignorance, that becomes the seed of the way you see the world because it’s completely shaped by your ignorance. And then the next logical step would be that humility is the midwife to wisdom. There’s something very humble about walking around the world, acknowledging that you’re never sober, that I’m an addict to this culture.
SS | I think that’s my big work these days is just seeing the moments when I begin to slide. And I think that’s always a big moment in an addict’s life is realizing the moments when your behavior begins to slant downhill. And we can all help each other. I mean, I do think that’s why group work is really important in confronting this. We can’t do it alone. We have to do it in conversation.
AL | That’s a beautiful way to end or begin and always be in the middle. And yes, we stay in the middle. Thank you so much, Sophie. Thanks for spending the time and it’s good to do it in your hometown.
SS | It feels really special. Thank you so much.
AL | We’ll see each other soon. Thank you.
Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with V
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 2 – Alnoor Ladha with V
Alnoor Ladha | Welcome to the Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural interventions for systems change. Learn more at www.culturehack.io
Post-production is made possible by dedicated supporters of the Kosmos Journal mission – transformation in harmony with all Life. Visit www.KosmosJournal.org to join.
I am your host, Alnoor Ladha.
Today we’ll meet with V, formerly Eve Ensler, the founder of V-Day, One Billion Rising, and so many important organizations and non-organizations and movements in the space of social justice and beyond. She’s also the co-founder of City of Joy, which is a physical healing center and space in the Congo. She is the author of Vagina Monologues, The Apology, and her latest book Reckoning just came out. We’re going to talk about that today and so much more. You can Google her and you’ll find out all the things she’s up to in the world and all the relationships she’s been weaving for 30 plus years. Thank you for being with us, V.
V | I’m thrilled to be with you, Alnoor.
Alnoor | Let’s start with what’s animating you and what’s moving you in this chaotic moment we’re in, this bifurcation of late-stage capitalism, what feels like peak capitalism in some ways. And peak patriarchy, peak inequality, peak white supremacy, peak stupidity, and maybe even peak possibility.
V | Yes, I think all of the above. I’ve just come off a three day amazing meeting with One Billion Rising coordinators from all over the world where we meet every year to imagine and create the vision for the risings that will follow in the upcoming year. It’s been an amazing few days. Women from Afghanistan, from Democratic Republic of Congo, from India, from all over.
One of the things that really struck me is this disparity between what happens when we are in community and working together and imagining and dreaming together and the explosiveness of our solidarity and love versus what people are up against when they are struggling in their own countries. This morning, Lucinda was leaving, going back to South Africa, and she said, “I’m full of this love and I’m full of this solidarity and I feel like I’m going back to war.”
I think there’s many people in that room who would’ve said the same thing. And the wars are on many different levels. There’s climate wars, the war against the planet. There’s war against people in terms of racism, the war against LGBTQ, migrants, war against workers. We can just go down the list, but I think what’s really hitting me, and something I was really talking a lot about is so much of my life, I’ve been in the struggle. I’ve been fighting against, I’ve been up against patriarchy, up against White supremacy, up against capitalism, up against imperialism. And I feel like those terms and that way of operating are not working for me anymore because I feel like as we move against the machine and against the patriarchy, they’re still defining the narrative because they’re defining what we’re doing.
Alnoor | The terms.
V | The terms. When I wrote The Apology, which was a book I wrote because I waited for so many years for my own father to apologize to me, for the sexual abuse, for the violence, for the degradation of my spirit, for the decimation of my character, I wrote his apology to me because he was dead, and for 31 years he had never written it to me, but I needed to hear it. I needed the word.
So I kind of climbed into my father and I wrote it in his voice. And he was present for the nine months that I wrote it. And when I was over, the last line of the book is “old man be gone” and my father literally disappeared into the Cosmos and I know he’s in a better place. I know he did a lot of reckoning in his own soul and moved himself out of a very, very, very, very dark zone that he was in.
One of the things I realized is that so much of my life had been guided by my rage at my father, proving to my father I wasn’t the person he thought I was. I would show him and I’d be this or I’d be that, but he was controlling the story. And since the end of that book, that motor that was driving my life to prove to my father, it’s just gone. It’s gone. So what’s happened is I’ve got to create a new motor that isn’t about him, that isn’t about patriarchy, that isn’t about any of these things. It’s about imagination. It’s about the dream. What is the dream? What is our dream? What’s the world we want and how are we going to create it?
And maybe what happens is that there’s this crazy patriarchal post-capitalist falling, broken down world; but alongside it, there’s this other world that we’re creating and it gets to be so beautiful, so connected, so caring, so lush, so fertile, so sexy. So everything is such that everyone’s like, wait, wait, wait, I want to be in this world. I want to be here.
And I think we spent a lot of time over the last few days in our meeting dreaming and asking what are the principles of this new world? What does the new world feel like? What’s happening in that world? And I think it gave everybody so much energy to get out of the fight. The fight, we’re always in the fight. So that’s what I’m dreaming about.
Alnoor | So how did you get to that state? I also grew up as an activist and organizer out of the anti-globalization movement. And when you’re in the face of the oppression machine, when the World Bank is displacing your land or WTO is liquidating your assets and making deals at a nation-state level and all of that, and the corporate state nexus is moving, there’s such a deep sense of helplessness. And what you’re saying is you’re also accessing some kind of non-dual state to hold it in its full shadow, but also hold possibility in its full light. And it requires work in some ways, internally, and maybe we think of it as work-play. Qhat was the process to get there?
V | A lifetime. But also Carl Jung said, “In order to survive in this century, you have to hold two opposite ideas at the same time.” I didn’t used to be so comfortable in the middle.I was an either-or person. And I think one of the things age has done or just evolving as a person, is that this place of… it’s not even ambiguity so much as it’s ambidextrousness, it’s this ability to fly through these different seasons of beginnings and ends and these possibilities of some world collapsing as another world is beginning.
Look, there is plenty, plenty to resist. There’s a lot to resist. But what I feel so much having been on the streets for so much of my life, I’ve camped out, I’ve endlessly protested. We need that. It’s never either/or. But there’s also something else we need. I’ve learned so much from the women of Congo where I’ve spent so much time and particularly at City of Joy, which is this revolutionary center and a sanctuary for young women who have been through the worst sexual abuses. They are shattered when they arrive at City of Joy. But in the process of being there for six months, they begin to get healed and whole.
And one of the things they’ve taught me is that it’s about energy. It’s about energy. Here they are in the midst of the worst circumstances in the world, but they are singing all the time. They are dancing all the time. They’re moving energy in a certain way that keeps them rising and imagining keeping them deeply connected to each other. And I don’t know, I think sometimes the world can make us feel so despaired, so despaired, like if you just sitting in the room, hearing what’s going on in South Africa, hearing what’s going on in the Congo, hearing what’s going on in Afghanistan right now to women, it’s just mind blowing.
There’s no way to even process what’s happened to women there. The loss of right after right after right, it’s like those beautiful Matryoshka dolls where there’s a doll inside a doll. A right inside a right, disappearing inside a right, disappearing inside a right till you’re down to literally being inside a room where you aren’t allowed to move or exist. You’re not allowed to learn. You’re not allowed to sing, you’re not allowed to dance, you’re not allowed to become.
I mean, that state of existence is so mind blowing. And we really spent time really thinking about how we got here where their rights have been eviscerated , all the things that created this moment – the imperialism, the interventions, the promises, the broken promises, the betrayals and abandonment. So I feel like there’s some place between this rage, grief and imagination. And I think I live constantly swimming in that sea of rage, grief and imagination.
Alnoor | And how do you access it?
V | I access it through writing and art and creation. I access it through my deepening and ongoing love for the mother and her creation and the trees and the birds and the water and the turtles and everything that is here that she’s created. I access it through my connection to my beloved friends and family and my glorious sisters in this movement, who are really working from the core of their souls for a new world.
Alnoor | That’s what I notice about you, the most, in some ways, that you’re creating embodied cultures. You’re doing it with other people. You’re in the dialogue of: this us-versus-them binary, traditional activism can only get us so far. And yes, let’s hold all the truth and all the pain and let’s put it on the table, and let’s also live into the values of post capitalism of what comes next. And you’re doing them simultaneously. There’s no amputation. It’s like you’re metabolizing the darkness and you’re creating the (I don’t want to call it “new”), let’s say new-ancient-emerging cultures.
V | I look at City of Joy, it’s such a metaphor for me, this place, this lotus. And lotuses are the only flower that seed and blossom simultaneously, that grow from the mud.
And I look at where City of Joy is located in Bukavu, Eastern Congo, where the war is still raging after all these years, after millions dying and hundreds of thousands of women being systematically raped and their bodies destroyed, so much poverty and such profound poverty where Congoleses are living in the richest, most resourceful country in the world, and they literally can’t eat their own food, can’t access their own minerals because all these multinationals [corporations] have come from everywhere in the world to extract and take and move them off their lands. And here is this place, City of Joy, in the middle of all that – a jewel in the midst of so much suffering – and its spinning a new energy and creating a new world.
And around it, there’s this camp of widows of soldiers, and it’s a very impoverished camp, but we’ve now brought them into our fold. They’re part of our web. And a lot of the women in the camp are starting to work at City of Joy. They come and dance with us and eat with us. They celebrate Christmas with us, and now they’re beginning to change. They’re beginning to get this energy that’s coming out from City of Joy.
So it’s really taught me, you forge the diamond with love and care, in the midst of anywhere that’s impoverished, in the midst of anywhere where people are hurting and suffering, and that diamond, it begins to radiate out. It begins to glimmer out. It’s contagious. I mean, the way complaints are contagious or suffering is contagious, joy is contagious. Possibility is contagious. Love is contagious. And so how do we do the outrageous, absurd act of loving more, of caring more, of believing more at a moment that tells us to do the exact opposite. And to me, it’s very Beckett. It’s very Beckett. I’ve always loved Beckett. He’s my favorite writer. ”You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. “
Alnoor | Do you think that it’s possible, even in the midst of bereft and impoverished culture like the US? We’re sitting here in Kingston, in upstate New York, the former capital of the state, the landing place for the British monarchy, and then IBM 200 years later. A shared friend of yours and mine, said to me, IBM: the internalized British monarchy. It’s the same thing. And it’s destitute here in many ways, culturally, spiritually, and the women of the Congo, and cultures worthy of the word culture, they have dance at their core and they have music at their core, and they have community at their core. Can it happen here?
V | Of course it can happen here. Look, I’ve had such great fortune to be able to have toured this country so many times because I’ve done a bunch of plays. When I did the Vagina Monologues, I probably went to every city in this country. When I did The Good Body, I toured this country. When I did Emotional Creature, I toured. I know this country really well, and I know the people of this country really well. And there is a hunger in the people of this country for a new culture, for principles, for things to believe in. One of the things we were creating this week is the philosophy of rising and really mapping out what are the principles that we believe in as a movement.
What if we have a new philosophy? What if we create a new vision of the world and we have tenets of it that we all agree to?
Alnoor | Do you want to share some of them?
V | One is, do no harm. Do no harm and honor each other’s becoming, honor each other’s becoming. And that means that we don’t interrupt each other’s processes, whether it’s gender evolution, whether it’s artistic evolution, repairing and healing from trauma, whatever it is. I think listening, listening, deep listening, it’s a principle. Radical empathy. Radical empathy. Becoming willing and teaching yourself how to really feel what another person is going through. I think making art and the creation of art are part of everything we do. So it’s not seen as this separate thing the way America has divided it out and made it so insignificant.
I remember when we started OBR, a radical dance movement to end violence against all women, girls and trans and non-binary people in the world. And I was interviewed on this show called Hard Talk in Britain, and the guy looked at me and he said, “Tell me Miss Ensler, what does dancing do?” And I just started laughing and I thought , what doesn’t it do? What doesn’t it do? But it’s this idea of perceiving art and dancing and music and poetry and theater as if it’s some lowly thing that you get to as an afterthought, as opposed to being the center of whatever we are and whoever we are. Because the one thing art can do is break through binaries. It can surprise you and open up your heart and take you out of your mind.
Alnoor | And it’s inherently disruptive because the entire West is based on axiomatic, Cartesian linear logic, which is why art is seen, in one sense, as frivolous. It’s not “productive”. It goes against the Protestant work ethic. But then on the other side, it’s the secular religion of the West. We lionize artists and create these museums and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on static pieces of paper, which is very telling of the Western psyche, to both demonize and lionize the thing it doesn’t understand.
V | I think what America is most afraid of: disruption. I write about it, actually in Reckoning, there’s an essay called Disruption. Because I remember hearing about this town where the people knew they were living next to a poisonous factory that was literally making everyone in the town sick, but nobody wanted to give up their houses. No one wanted to give up their comfort. No one wanted to move, no one wanted to be disrupted. No one wanted to move out of whatever comfort zone, so they were actually willing to just get sicker and sicker and sicker. That is somehow the story.
Alnoor | That’s the metaphor.
V | It’s the metaphor. It’s like we drug people in this country. We overeat. We’re addicted to everything. The opposite of disruption is to keep everyone anesthetized and numb and sleepy and not believing they have any rights or ability to advocate for themselves or another way of being here. And it’s not accidental that the pharmaceutical companies have made so many drugs and gotten so many people hooked on these drugs. So people aren’t feeling their rage, they’re not feeling upset, they’re not feeling the level of intensity they need to feel in order to question or rebel. So I’m really big on disruption.
Alnoor | Let’s talk about the body. We have not explored the body as a site of revolution, but there’s a lot of parallels between the demonization and lionization of the arts and demonization and lionization of the body. We’ll do anything from the most insane untested pharmaceutical drugs to life-extension machines, to uploading our consciousness to the AI to keep this thing going. And yet we have almost no relationship with it as a dominant culture. And maybe you can say a little bit about the body and your relationship in understanding the role of the somatic experience in liberatory expression.
V | Well, it’s so interesting what you’re saying because I think it’s kind of parallel to what we were saying about demonizing and lionizing. It’s like we do a lot to the body, but somehow the body doesn’t exist. It’s only conceptual. The body is where the real change happens. At a very young age, because my father sexually abused me and beat me,I left my body. It was the the landscape of so much horror and so much pain and so much brutality that I couldn’t live in my body. Anytime I tried to come back into it, there were memories, there were scars, there were beatings there.
So I left and I lived in my head. I remember I wore a hat all the time. It was just to keep my head on because the whole world was there. I was just a head. I had a therapist who once said to me, I’ve never thought of you as a person with a body. And then one night when I was performing the Vagina Monologues, I actually came back into my vagina right there on the stage and I went, whoa.I am in my vagina.
And that was the beginning of a journey of return because patriarchy and that violence had pushed me out of this body. And what’s happening to women country after country is the occupation, raping, decimation, battery of our sexuality and our core energy force. Patriarchy and violence have separated us from our vitality and life force.
I got very bad cancer 14 years ago and ironically it was the thing that moved me back into my body. I know now when I’m in my body, I have the energy I need, I have the vision I need, I have the clarity I need because I’m connected to the Mother. It is body to body. I am her body. She is my body. When they pushed us out of our bodies through violence and occupation, they pushed us out of our own wisdom, intuition, our sense of continuity and community. And that’s what has to be restored.
Alnoor | And in many ways, like the dualism that came out of first, the Renaissance and then, the Enlightenment, essentially said: the mind and body are separate. Mind is superior. Cartesian dualism then translated into all other dualisms. There was us and then there was the other. Then of course the White male Christian was on top of that. So the othering happened to women, to Indigenous people, to Black people, to bodies-of-culture of all types. And it’s not a us versus them thing because it’s physically manifested in our disconnection from our body at a societal level, at a cultural level.
There’s a heretical Sufi line that says: “the body is the prophet.” The reason it’s heretical is in traditional institutional Islam, one would say Mohammed is the last prophet. It comes from actually a triptych, which is: “the body is the prophet, the ummah is the prophet, the desert is the prophet.”
So the body, as you say, is our direct relationship to the Mother, to Earth itself. Pachamama, Gaia, however you want to see it. The Ummah means community. It’s the community of people around you that keep you accountable to those practices. And the desert is the prophet, that is the ecology is the prophet. There is no consciousness outside the living landscape. And that these are three cascading nested ontologies or types of beingness, which is body, community, place.
We don’t have a relationship at a cultural level, at least with either of those three central pillars of a mystical tradition, let’s say, or an Indigenous tradition. So the last question and part of the inquiry of this podcast is: what do we need to unlearn societally, individually, at a community level? However you want to answer it.
V | That we’re separate. The idea that we’re separate from the earth, separate from each other. I think we have to unlearn and refuse hierarchy and dominance. We have to first and foremost dismantle patriachy.
Alnoor | It’s an invented construct.
V | Invented concept. Insane, insane idea. We have to unlearn masculinity and this absurd notion of masculinity. We have to unlearn patriarchy, but it’s even bigger with patriarchy. We have to lift this bell jar of patriarchy that we’re under. We have to literally lift it so we can be free to take our minds back again, to think in a way that allows us to imagine a future. We have to unlearn the fact that there’s not enough for each of us. That there’s only limited scarcity. The fact of the matter is if we were all living in the life of a… I read this somewhere, it was so beautiful, the life of a middle class person in Italy, we could all be living the life of a middle class person in Italy.
For all the resources of the world were divided up, where all the billionaires put all their money into this pot. We could all be living beautiful lives where we had food and water and we went to school and we had healthcare. And imagine this, so we have to unlearn the fact that that’s not possible. We have to unlearn capitalism for God’s sakes, and the system that is crushing us, crushing us. We’re at the apex of it, and it’s just firing on all cylinders right now, of just merciless death and destruction.
Alnoor | We were speaking with Vanessa Andreotti, who wrote Hospicing Modernity, a couple of days ago, and she was saying one of her elders, chief Ninawa from the Huni Kuin people of Acre in Brazil said, “Colonialism is an impairment, an imposed sense of separation.”
This was his definition of colonialism. That it’s a cognitive relational neurobiological impairment based on the illusion of separation. That was his definition for whiteness and colonialism. It’s not racial. If you have been socialized into the illusion of separation, that is the colonization of your mind and body and heart and soul.
V | And it’s actually the breakdown of them because we can’t live in separation. It’s too lonely, it’s too fragmented. It’s really just PTSD. That’s all it is. It’s just trauma, and when you really begin to know that you are every person you meet and everything you touch, then you realize that you don’t really have to exist at all.
Alnoor | It’s enchantment.
V | It’s enchantment. You just surrender to this gorgeous sea of ultimate becoming. I think what we really have to get rid of is the fundamental belief that we as people do not have the wisdom, power, energy to actually reinvent the world or return to the world that we came from. We have that power. It’s just a question of being so close to each other that we are constantly in this ongoing state of collective remembering, Remembering, caring, connecting, becoming, evolving.
Alnoor | Beautiful. I think that’s a great way…I won’t say end because we’re always in the middle, but it’s a good way to stay in the middle with you for now.
V | Okay, beautiful.
Alnoor | Love you my dear. Thank you so much for being with us.
Deschooling Dialogues | Alnoor Ladha with Gustavo Esteva
DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES
Episode 1 – Alnoor Ladha with Gustavo Esteva
Alnoor Ladha (AL) | Welcome to the Deschooling Dialagues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural interventions for systems change. Learn more at www.culturehack.io
Post-production is made possible by dedicated supporters of the Kosmos Journal mission – transformation in harmony with all Life. Visit www.KosmosJournal.org to join.
I am your host, Alnoor Ladha.
In this episode, I meet with the late, great Gustavo Esteva. This conversation took place in February 2021, at UniTierra, the radical deschooling university set up by Gustavo in Oaxaca City, Mexico.
This podcast series is about both unlearning and remembering, as our species is being prepared for even deeper complexity, breakdown, tragedy, renewal, and rebirth. This transition calls upon all of us to be vigilant students of our cultures, to contemplate our entangled destinies, to abandon our entitlement, to transcend the apparent duality of inner and outer work, and to reaffirm our responsibility to each other and the interwoven fabric of our sentient planet and the living cosmos. This is just some of what we’ll explore together.
In this first season, we’re going to learn some of the basics of deschooling from decolonization practices, alternatives to traditional education, what’s being learned on the edges of social justice movements, and the deep time lessons of Indigenous wisdom and knowledge systems.
AL | So first, we’re very happy to have Gustavo Esteva for one of the first episodes of the Deschooling Dialogues. It’s very fitting that we’re with you first because the name Deschooling Dialogues was inspired by Ivan Illich’s book, Deschooling Society, and I know you knew Ivan and were influenced by his work. And you’ve also continued that culture of deschooling. So maybe we start with you telling us about your background and your story and your journey.
Gustavo Esteva (GE) | Well, it’s a very long story. I would say I am basically professionalized as a public intellectual activated by the people around me. For a long time, I was calling myself an activist, but now I have really discovered that they activate me. I am not activating anyone. And then for the last 40 years or more, I have been working independently with people, mostly Indigenous people in Oaxaca. I moved to Oaxaca 30 years ago. I have made a small piece of land where I cultivate my own food and I live in a small Zapotec village in interaction, in permanent interaction, with Indigenous peoples in Oaxaca, but also in networks around the world.
![](https://www.kosmosjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Gustavo-4.webp)
I have been very close to the Zapatistas since 1994. What I really love to do is to interact with people.
AL | How did you get into this work? At one point you were a journalist, is that right?
GE | Not really. I started my life in the private sector with a successful and incredible career. I was personal manager in Porta Gumbo when I was 19 years old, and then personal manager IBM in Mexico. But then I discovered that it was impossible to live a decent life in that kind of world. And those were the years in Mexico where we were listening to Fidel Castro in Havana, and here people were in for more.
Then I got my lessons from the real world and then I abandoned my profession. After trying a clandestine group and to organize, I became first a leftist and then a Marxist. Then the idea of becoming, follow the Che Guevara, that was the time of Che Guevara, and then that was the model for all of us. And then we tried in a clandestine group to have something that will become a reality, and then it collapsed before starting. That was a very important lesson for me about violence.
And then we stopped the idea of violence and we tried non-violence. And first I tried in the government and then I got, because we had a populist president, a very high position in the government and I was in 1976 in the immediate danger of becoming a minister in the new government. And then I quit the government forever because by that time I knew that the government, the state, is posed to for control and domination and not for social change.
Then I abandoned it with this, the idea, the leftist idea of seizing power and capturing the state to organize the revolution. And then I started to work at the service in collaboration with people at the grassroots. We created an independent organization. It grew very fast and very much.
AL | What was it called?
GE | Autonomy, decentralize and [Spanish] – is very difficult to translate and it’s the connection between the different people. And we were working at one point in 25 states of Mexico. We were all over the place and doing almost everything, following what the people wanted us to do. We invented create, [Spanish] create without any support. Then one community could come to our office and ask for a crate for the community and then came back with a check without any kind of only basic interest.
And that was very successful and that was one of the activities that we were doing associated with the technical aspects, political aspects, agrarian aspects, almost the whole everything that the communities wanted. And after some time, we started also to work in the cities because the camp casinos were coming to the cities and we started to work also with the so-called informal sectors in the cities. And then the network, this organization was covering all the aspects of the society, other grassroots with the so-called popular sectors.
AL | And how did you end up in Oaxaca in setting up UniTierra?
GE | Well, I am living at eight kilometers from the place where my Zapotec grandmother was born. Then in a very real sense, I was coming back to the land of my ancestors. I had been working a lot with things in Oaxaca, but finally it was meaningless to keep a flat in Mexico City with the kind of work I was doing. And then we abandoned with my companera. I abandoned Mexico City and came to live here 32 years ago. After looking different places, this was the place where I should come.
And that was first a very lucky decision because Oaxaca is the only state in Mexico where the majority of the populations are Indigenous peoples, of 16 different Indigenous peoples. And then the Indigenous culture here is a reality, it’s a presence. You cannot ignore the Indigenous reality, and for me to learn the whole thing, I think I came here like 1988, ’89. In the ’90s, it was first, 1992 was the moment of affirmation of the Indigenous people in the whole American continent because of the 500 anniversary of the ambition. It was a moment of affirmation. It was spectacular.
And it was our discovery that how much we ignored how different we are. We were in a very western tradition. We were all the time assuming that we were the same human beings and that’s it. And then because of the Indigenous people we have, because of ’92, we started to discover, no, no, they are different. They are different kind of beings and then we need to discover how to talk, how to interact with them in a different way. And in was the discovery for us of what we call the intercultural dialogue, how to acknowledge the radical otherness of the other and then how we can connect with them in a different way.
After many attempts, and then we created a center that was called a center for intercultural encounters and dialogue, and that now has more than 25 years of work. It was talking, interacting with the people in Oaxaca, but also with people coming from other countries, with the students and researchers, et cetera coming here. And from Japan or the United States or Canada or Austria or Finland or many, many different places.
Then trying to talk with them to understand the connection, we discovered two things. One is the real dialogue happens only doing things together, not just talking changing ideas, not just conversation, doing things together, then you can have a real dialogue. Second, perhaps this sounds very romantic, but it is to say perhaps we cannot understand each other mind-to-mind, but we can connect heart-to-heart. It’s a different level of introduction. And then we were involved in that kind of things.
And then in that context to have the Zapatistas was an incredible blessing. It was an opening to a whole different way of doing the things of opening the interaction with others. I think for me it’s a very good example what happened when they organized in 1996, what they call it, the intergalactic encounter, when people from all over the world were coming with a lot of trust kits, and Marxist-Leninists and all kind of groups saying, “This is the moment to create again another international in the tradition of the international organizations of the socialist.”
At the end, the [foreign language 00:13:48] and the Marxists announced the creation of the international of hope. That was completely different. It was not an organization; it was not an apparatus dispositive. It was united by a common hope in changing everything. And then I have been with the, of course, with the Zapatistas in them since then in very different ways. I was an advisor in the negotiations with the government. They invited 100 advisors and I was one of them.
![](https://www.kosmosjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Ivan_Illich.jpeg)
And I was lucky enough in this process to finally meet with Ivan Illich. When Ivan was at the peak of his fame in the early ’70s, I was living at 60 kilometers from his place. But for us in the Marxist left, he was just a reactionary priest and then we did not care, even in reading his stuff. We were saying, “Yes, he’s criticizing education and health in the capitalist society.” Of course, it’s shit, but in the socialist world we will have good education and good health like Cuba is showing to the world. That was the conviction in the ’70s.
Then finally because of a friend I met with Ivan in 1983, I was immediately fascinated and then I started to read frantically all his books and we started to collaborate and then we became friends. And then of course I discovered that perhaps what Ivan has is the people’s discourse. And the basic words of Ivan, I have heard them among the people at the grassroots, not in any book. Words like vernacular are words used by the people here at the grassroots, not by the mid classes.
AL | So most people in the West don’t know Ivan Illich, and maybe you could just tell us a little bit about his role in the discourse of decolonizing education and his capitalist critique.
GE | Yes, I think and in fact we are convinced that even anticipated what is happening today better than any other person I know. That he was clear what will happen in 1970. He said at one point the prophet is not a person with a crystal pole, but the person that can grow deep in the examination of the current reality and discovered the basic trends. And then he discovered the basic trends. His contributions are first, he’s I think the most solid critic of the industrial model production. And because of the industrial model production, capitalist or socialist, he can discover the basic counter productivity of modern institutions.
And he discovers how these institutions will collapse the way they are collapsing today. He anticipated this kind of collapse and discovered something else, how in this process, when the modern society is falling apart, the people will be destroyed for what they are and they will transform it into subsystems of systems. What we are in a sense, seeing today, that they are creating the synetic man, the young man clogged into a cell or something. He’s no longer a person. He’s a subsystem of a system.
I think that we need to discuss the current situation with the word sub event, with the eyes sub event, that he really opens our minds and hearts to a completely different thing. And it is, he helps not only to understand what is happening, why it is happening, why the collapse of everything that we knew, how the world when that we knew is no longer there, but also what to do. He anticipated what we are doing today. For example, he’s not announcing at the end of tools for conviviality. He’s not talking about creating parties or creating organizations or revolutionary organizations. He has a different definition of revolution.
But he’s talking about coalitions of the discontented people, and this is exactly what we are doing all the time today, these people that are discontent with what is happening, that are creating coalitions, and this kind of things. This is what I find fascinated in Ivan. In fact, I am trying to launch with some friends and a project to document everything from Ivan to collect all his work and to disseminate it electronically and in a very possible way.
AL | How did Ivan Illich end up in Mexico in the ’70s?
GE | It was a very clear, it was a very conscious decision. He was already a critic of the system when the Pope and President Kennedy had an agreement to send to Latin America 10% of all the priests and nuns of North America. And then the church asks Theban, the Cardinal Spellman and others ask Theban to organize the process of sending this priests and nuns and train them to go to Latin America.
AL | What was his background? What would put him in that position? He was-
GE | Because he was so brilliant, he was really amazing. He became a priest in Rome. He was invited for a brilliant diplomatic career. He was to become the private secretary of the Pope. And then he escaped and took a flight to New York to a study in Princeton. But then being in Princeton crossing, and this is very important for our conversation, being in New York with Cardinal Spellman that became person protecting him, he crossed to the Puerto Rican neighborhoods and saw the horror of how the priests, the Irish priests there, were treating the [Spanish], the people from Puerto Rico.
And then he went immediately with Cardinal Spellman and asked for the parish. And for the first time he became a real priest, a real Catholic priest giving him the mass, et cetera. And then he changed everything in conceived. We are talking about the ’50s and the early ’60s. Then in that context, he was in the church, he was singing, bringing music, using Spanish instead of Latin, changing everything. And then he became famous of the kind of things he was doing, and he started to publish the critique of the church and the alternative for Latin America.
And then after some point he was sent to Puerto Rico where he was vice director of the University of Puerto Rico. He started to do fantastic thing. That is where he started to find a critique, a critique of the school, seeing what the school was doing to the people. He elaborated something about that kind of thing. And then he was in that position prominent first about Latin America. He was one person of the church that knew well Latin America. The stories go on and on. He went to visit in Brazil, Bishop Helder Camara, a very famous man in the whole Latin America, and Helder Camara adopted Ivan immediately and he was given to Ivan one book every day. And then the next day introducing the author of the book to Ivan.
And then that is how he met Freire and they became friends and then Helder Camara told Ivan, if you really want to know Latin America, you need to walk Latin America. And then – this is very impressive – he walked from Santiago de Chile to Venezuela. Walking a lot-
AL | In the 1960s?
GE | Yes, yes. That is the kind of thing a person that he was. Even then he was known because of this kind of thing. And then he was invited to organize and then he was horrified about the idea of bringing all the priests and nuns of America. It would be the worst kind of colonization ever conceived. And then he found a place in Latin America where he will create a center to train them. He discovered Guadalaca, very close to a big airport, et cetera, but isolated. He invented a fantastic language school for them to learn very quickly, very, very good Spanish, the best method created by Ivan that still exists. It’s a fantastic language school. But at the same time, he was telling them what they were going to do. And then most of them never went. They came back to the US and decided not to go. And those that went were no longer [inaudible 00:24:08]. They were transformed with Ivan.
AL | So we’re sitting in UniTierra in Oaxaca. And maybe to ask you about the pedagogy here, you mentioned Freire, the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Illich of course with Deschooling Society and Tools for Conviviality. Maybe tell us about your understanding of pedagogy and what you’re doing here and your point of view on education.
![](https://www.kosmosjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Unitierra.webp)
GE | Yes. We don’t have any pedagogy. When someone asks us, we said that we can use baby’s pedagogy, that the babies learn things as difficult as to think, to walk and to speak without any pedagogy, without any educator, without any education. And then we are trying to reclaim that condition of learning. We are explicitly trying to go beyond education. I will briefly say that when my first daughter became of school age, that is long time ago, then I could not find the school to which I can trust. I put my daughter a public or private school. And then I created a school with some friends in which we mix it, a lot of things Montessori and Waldorf and all kind of alternative ways of teaching.
To make that long story short, when my daughter ended high school, we closed the school. That was very successful at that time because by that time my daughter and her parents were convinced that the problem was not a quality of the school, the quality of education, but the school itself, that the problem was the school. This we are talking about the ’60s. And then for the last 50 years I have been exploring alternatives. For some time, alternative education and finally alternatives to education. Then what we are saying is that the very idea that someone know what you must learn is criminal, it’s absurd, it’s impossible. We cannot accept anymore that kind of things. That what we need to create is condition for learning and freedom and that is what we have been doing.
![](https://www.kosmosjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Alnoor_Ladha3-260x194-1.jpg)
AL | And what does that look like in practice? I can imagine talking to a mother in her 30s who has a five-year-old who’s just about to enter the school system and they’re looking for what the alternatives are, Waldorf and et cetera, and how would you explain to this person what uneducation education looks like?
GE | We have that experience every week here in UniTierra because there are groups of parents coming to discuss how to abandon the school. That is not easy. It’s one of the most challenging things. It is not easy because the question of the school is not only the question of education in general, but what to do with the kids that if you really deschool, your child, your children and you don’t have, are you no longer with an institution to which you can deposit your children, you need to change your life.
You cannot continue living the usual way, doing your work and going to your work and doing your things, what to do with your children. And then that is very challenge. That is what we are discussing here. I think that Illich started his critique of the industrial model production with the school because it’s the most radical thing. You really need to change your way of life. You cannot live without the school. It’s really the pillar of the modern society. The whole society is organized around the school and then if you eliminate the school, the whole thing is because to collapse.
AL | The parents can’t go to school now and leave their children and write some incubator and then they’re not being trained in vocational job skills for the industrial market economy.
GE | Yeah. That is, and the question is, I am telling you that for 60 years now I have been involved with this critique of the school, et cetera. I have never seen what is happening today in the world. I have never seen the interest of millions of people in alternatives way of learning. The parents are seeing the poor children in the house plugged into the computer, plug it into the stupid things that they are getting in the screen. And then the many, many parents are saying, “No, no, this is not possible. I don’t want to do my poor children to this kind of life.”
And then they begin to look for alternative ways of learning. And this is what we are doing, talking with them and showing the many different ways in which you can learn. And I must tell you that perhaps one piece of story should be introduced at about UniTierra, because this happens with everything that we do. We started because of the Indigenous people in Oaxaca in 1997. They created something that they call the Indigenous Forum and then they present periodically the position of the Indigenous people to their society.
And then 1997, after one year of meditation and discussion in assemblies, they came to the people and told them the educational system is considered to de-indianize us, to destroy us, to destroy the condition of being Indigenous. And they said, and it has succeeded for 200 years, millions of Indigenous people enter the educational system and came out. They are no longer Indigenous. They are something else that we don’t know exactly what it is, but they are no longer Indigenous. The school is considered in Mexico and everywhere in the world to destroy, it is a culturalcide instead of genocide. Yes, we will not kill them but we will transform them in something else.
Then the Indigenous people of Oaxaca, they said in 1997, “Enough, basta, we cannot accept that any longer.” And then they started to close the schools. You can imagine the scandal. The front page is everywhere – these barbarians, they are condemning their children to ignorance. They should not be autonomy. We need to do something against these guys and they put an incredible pressure, political and economic pressure on them. But many of them persisted and then a good anthropologist, we know him and decided to teach a lesson to these parents and then he decided some tests to apply it to children going to the school and to children not going to the school to show the parents this is what you are doing to your poor children. They are being left behind.
For his surprise, these children not going to the school were better not only knowing how to believe in the community, how to attend the fiestas, et cetera, but also how to read and write and geography or history better that children going to the school with one exception. They did not know how to sing the national anthem. That was the only advantage of the children going to the school. And of course, these communities were very happy and then continue with the experience with these children.
But then they came with us two or three years later saying, “Well what will happen with our young men and women after they learn a lot of things they can learn in the community and they are curious and they want to learn something that no one knows in the community because they don’t have any diploma, they cannot continue their stories.” And then we invented UniTierra with them and for them. If you see the founders of UniTierra, it is Indigenous and non-Indigenous people coming together to create something, to host this curiosity of young men and women that want to learn something.
At the very beginning it was fun, real fun because we created this for every person come here. We don’t have any curriculum; we don’t have any program of studies. We try to support the people that want to learn something and to support their learning by doing what the person wants to learn. For example, a person comes and say, “I want to become an agrarian lawyer.” The next day he’s working with an agrarian lawyer. Of course, an agrarian lawyer is he’s our friend and he’s very interested in that this guy learns very soon how to be an agrarian lawyer, because he will very useful in the firm.
And then in more or less 18 months he’s a good lawyer. He knows nothing about the labor law or constitutional law, all the other branches of law, but he knows everything. And then he presents cases in the courts and wins and then he’s ready to become a lawyer. But that was only one sum of the cases. The students even destroyed that way. The most popular area was popular communication. The young men and women wanted something in communication. And then we had something that was kind of curriculum. We were saying, “Well, in a year they need to learn how to produce a radio program, how to use the mic, how to produce videos, how to print a pamphlet,” et cetera.
All of them, 100% of the student destroyed that curriculum at one point saying, “No, no, I am not interested in only the thing. The thing that I want to do is video. The thing that I want to do is radio. This is my thing then.” And they started doing it and then we had some of the best guy producing video in Oaxaca Este Leonard here, how to produce video. And he stopped it. This is my thing; this is what I want to do.
AL | So, in this model of self-directed, apprentice-based, practical skills that you are drawn to rather than rote memorization, et cetera, but what do you say to the parent then who’s like, “How does my child learn to read and write and do math and do the basics?” How does that process happen if you’re your deschooling your child?
GE | The basic argument is when the child wants, when the child is interested with someone that he or she loves, that is for us very important. First, all the children are, they are a real pest because they are all the time asking questions and they want to know everything. From the very beginning when the child is one year old, he’s already asking questions and trying to imitate the others. Then you don’t need to teach them to wash their teeth because when they see you washing your teeth, they are curious, and they want to know and they want to have the books. They want to learn. And then it is reacting to this, not telling them, “This is the time to learn how to write, how to read.” It’s when they see their brothers, someone else, a friend et cetera, reading and enjoying reading and then he can say, “I want to do the same.”
And then if that child is ready, he wants to learn how to read, how to write, then that is the time and you find his brother, his mother, anyone. Let me tell you a story. A very close friend of Ivan and a friend of us, Richard Westheimer in Cincinnati in the United States decided to deschool his five children and adopt this principle. And then the third of his children, a girl, was not interested in reading and this guy was very concerned and she was six years old, seven years old, eight years old and she was not reading, and she was not interested in reading even if her brothers, all of them were reading pretty well, she was not interested.
And when the father started to tell her, Eva is the name of this girl, “Eva, perhaps you need to…” She answered, “You told me that I am free to do whatever I want. I’m not interested in reading.” And then when she was more than nine years old, she became interested in reading. She’s now 20 years later, the reader of the family. She’s the one reading like mad, reading everything that she can collect. She decided to read when she was ready, she was really interested and then she was really passionate to read and then he’s reading a lot.
I think this lesson is for me, it’s a very important principle to give the children the opportunity to decide in what moment they want to read what. Of course, they are questions of survival. They need to learn how to cross the street with you as soon as possible because if not, they will die. There are some things that they need to see that they need to learn immediately for survival. But again, interacting with them in freedom, trying to create the opportunity for that the children decide when to learn.
AL | And this is inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems. This is the way most Indigenous cultures are teaching children. There’s no formal education, it’s mimicry, it’s integration in the community life, integration and family life.
GE | In fact, I think in Indigenous peoples in Oaxaca, we can see an experience that areas and elites are right. The idea of childhood is a modern creation. It does not exist in the Indigenous community. They are not children. There is not a category of people call it children. They are members of the community. They live the children, the first one, two, even three years with the mother and the mother takes care of them, living with the mother, protecting by the mother.
But after that, they are members of the community and they attend all the fiestas, et etcetera. They learn by seeing and experiencing the different aspects. And after they are three years old, of course this is considered children’s work, et cetera, problem solve of human rights or whatever, the children are participating in their real life of the community in every possible aspect. And accompanying the father, the child can accompany the father to the path, cultivate the corn and the girl accompanying the mother in the activities to produce tortillas, et cetera.
This is happening today. You have today here in Oaxaca, you have the school through the screen and you have the children program to the screen and then the teacher will come to help him in the screen. But at that moment the father is going to the Milpa and then the child escapes and go with the father to the Milpa. And of course, the father protects him against the teacher and against the school system because now the children are again living with the community, living with the parents and learning in the traditional way, learning by doing with parents, with the family, with the community, learning real life and things to leave.
AL | And this is why you said you would have to change your life radically if you wanted to deschool your children because for parents embedded in modernity, living in an urban environment, what is the child going to learn from that parent, right, who’s not practicing food sovereignty, is not practicing community life.
GE | That is what they are learning. This is what is happening here. We have many, many different groups of people coming here for this process. We have an area for children in UniTierra where the parents come and we have discussions here and the children are enjoying themselves in another room, not really learning, not any curriculum, not any teacher taking care of them, enjoying themselves. But basically, discussing what to do, how we need to reorganize our lives. COVID is helping because many people, millions of people have been losing their jobs and the jobs will not come back and then they are forced to reinvent themselves.
To give example, they of the city of Oaxaca, Oaxaca was the city living on the tourists and then thousand, thousands of people were working in the restaurants, working in their hotels or producing food goods and services for the tourists. And suddenly there are no tourists. You are now here very welcome exception in Oaxaca because there are no reading, there are no not many tourists. And then you have thousands of people that cannot find jobs. I will never find a job of the kind of job they have, a job or a source of income and then they need to reinvent themselves. And then reinventing themselves one way, this is where are working with them just is reproducing food.
For example, food is a astronomic paradise and people need to eat and then instead of going to Walmart or to a Starbucks and to buying food, and you can see in the street here in Oaxaca, overeats bringing food to you at home. But instead of having that kind of things, you can produce your own food or have the arrangements between people in the city and people in the countryside producing food for the change. That in place changing the lives and then the children may accompany this process.
But in fact, what we are doing, and it is very difficult, I must tell you. First, creating opportunities for the children to meet with other children in the current conditions with the lockdown and these kinds of things. Finding ways for the children. But the most important point for us, not only for the children to be with other children, but the children to experience directly a whole world of different activities. It is not easy. We are saying the child should select, I want this guy is a philosopher and I love what he’s doing, and I want to learn how to philosophize with him. And you are a carpenter and then he suddenly loves what you are doing as a carpenter. But he needs to find, to see, to experience firsthand the philosopher and the carpenter and to coexist with them and see this is what I want to do.
This we are trying to create the opening also for people in the communities, because perhaps in the communities, in many Indigenous communities, very traditional communities, they don’t have many opportunities except for their traditional cultivation, et cetera. And then we need to create opportunities where for them to see other kind of things to come back to the communities. For a while in immense satisfaction at North, most perhaps 99% of all the Indigenous men and women that learn something in UniTierra are back in their communities. It was not an opportunity to escape from their communities, but they are bringing back to the communities whatever they learn here.
AL | So, if we were to apply this model at a bigger scale and this was embedded in our vision for the post-capitalist world, what do you think the dominant culture would need to unlearn to deschool? To deprogram? What aspects of our culture?
GE | I think that the most aspect of, the most important aspect, is it’s combined in one point is first that “I know what the next generation should know.” That is a principle that should be abandoned. And associated with this is the very foolish idea that we are all the same. The industrial idea that all the humans are the same and then we are talking about homogeneous capacity. And the very idea that we have the same curriculum for children in New York, Mexico City or a small village in Oaxaca. It’s a stupid, it’s absolutely abhorrent. It is the most stupid thing.
It is not to prepare label for us, same label, it’s just a disease, a pathology of the modern society. Then we need to abandon this idea. We need to schedule and format whatever the next generation will do. And we know increasingly that this is stupid because we know nothing about what will happen tomorrow. how we will train the children in something that we basically ignore, that there are no experts in tomorrow! No one knows what will happen and then how I will teach the students, all the curriculum around the world is obsolete. It’s useless.
AL | Jung used to say that every generation has a spirit project, a sort of generational task in which they’re incarnated for, right? And so one generation cannot know the other generations, what they’re being prepared for, essentially. So, in order to achieve this vision, enact this vision, what does the progressive movement, radicals, vanguard, social movements, what do we need to unlearn in ourselves in order to make this more widespread? What’s blocking us? Bayo, who’s a friend of both of ours says, “part of the crisis is the way we are approaching the crisis,” as progressives, as radicals, et cetera.
GE | I think it is the… I would say the obsession with ‘leading the masses’.
AL | Leading the masses.
GE | Leading the masses. “I know what to do that I will lead the others in the change.” The creation of the vanguard, the vanguard can be a political organization or can be a small NGO that we lead the people in a certain direction. It is something that it is not easy, but it is really beautiful, really exciting, following the others, learning with the others instead of leading the others. We say all the time that UniTierra is in submersive in the social movement in Oaxaca and we are totally fascinated with the many directions in which they are leading us. It is the people leading us, not us leading the people.
This is really exciting, and this is beautiful. This is… And people, I think that with COVID, when science is lost and they don’t know what to do with this and the politicians are giving the most stupid instructions to everyone, people know how to react. People discovered people really know how to do. The authorities, the health authorities in Mexico acknowledged it a few months ago that half the Mexicans cannot be locked down because they cannot survive lock down. They cannot. They need to go out to survive.
The people are going out to survive. And the question is not if they’re using masks or not. The question is what they are doing. I would say the most important point, and this is a lesson learned with the people not taught by us, is the most important point is sitting, the whole point with the virus is eating better, is eating well to produce, to improve your capacity to resist the virus or to use to resist all these kinds of things.
They don’t know the official the figure of recent studies saying that 90% of the people that died for the virus died because of previous conditions of obesity and diabetes and this kind of chronic conditions. The problem is the obesity and diabetes and this chronic condition.
AL | Industrial food model.
GE | The industrial food model, and this is exactly what the people have been doing. The figure in Oaxaca is impressive. One reaction of communities. We have 12,000 communities in Oaxaca. These 12,000 communities, at least half of them closer themselves because of virus, after the fear of the virus, et cetera. Not locked down, closer the village, then no one can come into the village. Even if someone of the village can needs to go out, it’s with control, with a very appropriate filter for that person, with quarantine if needed, if someone was coming back from the US or from Mexico City, quarantine.
But then inside the village, many villages closer the village to junk food. No more, no more all these stupid things. And so the lady community discovered how much they were dependent of that stupid food, was the community they were eating a lot. It was not only a few Coca-Cola addicts; it was the whole village were eating this kind of things. And then after they closed the possibility of having junk food, they were forced to formulate the whole idea of fitting. And then they started to put again more attention to the Milpa, more attention, some arrangements with the next village to compliment what you were producing, to have a good diet with all the proper things.
And exactly the same about healing. They started to rediscover the traditional healers, how much the traditional healers know how much they need to discover when a person has the virus, to discover as soon as possible and to do something immediately, not to wait until he or she is having problems. Then and mixing the traditional remedies, the traditional practices, the kind of sauna abouts with eucalyptus, these kinds of things that have been very, very effective.
We have the figures. In the whole American continent, the proportion of people dying in Indigenous communities is higher than the average. Why? Because they were suffering a lot of mystery, malnutrition, health problems of every kind. They were in very bad conditions. That was the usual condition of the Indigenous people sector, very oppressed by the modern society. But in Oaxaca with these communities, you see the fears. You have 110 municipalities, that means several hundred communities with not a single case of the virus, not one case. And second, those with cases, very few deaths.
And those deaths are basically people who were in very fragile conditions before, meaning people are not seeing the virus as the enemy. They are rediscovering that the enemy was how they abandoned the people in delicate conditions, how they abandon some of their old people, some of the people with obesity or diabetes, et cetera. And they’re taking care of them, they’re doing the right thing.
AL | So this is a good transition to the last question I’ll ask. And we talked a bit about this idea earlier before we were recording the idea of centropic frames. So centropy is the counter to entropy, right? Entropy is degradation and centropy is almost like a positive feedback loop. And so, at Culture Hack Labs, we talk about this idea of centropic frames, which are memes, ideas, phrases, concepts, pieces of language that create positive feedback loops, healing, restoration through the very use of the language itself. And maybe we can touch quickly on two concepts that I’ve heard you talk about. One is [Spanish] and the other is [Spanish]. And just so we can also insert some of these antigen memes, these centropic frames into the discourse. So maybe you could just talk a bit about those two.
GE | As I said [Spanish] was the creation of to two Indigenous guys, independent creation [Spanish] in Zapotec independently invented the same word, [Spanish], basically to share with others what kind of beings they were, that it was very difficult for them to explain this to others and say, “[Spanish] basically is to accept that you are not an individual, that you are a we, not an I, or that every I is a we, that we are not in nets of relations and that these nets are brought into a community.” And then we are that community. That we is the way we are. And even many, many people perceive themselves first of all as an expression of the community, as a personalized expression of the communal spirit. Well, that is basically [Spanish].
AL | There are four pillars to [Spanish], right? You contribute to shared work, et cetera. Maybe you could say a bit about that.
GE | Yes, it is. First [Spanish] means that it’s the communal work that is you are not paid for doing some work for the community. The community decide, “Oh, we will fix that straw that is in bad conditions,” and then the whole people need to go and put some work without any payment. This is [Spanish]. Then you have the assembly. That is the supreme authority of the community, meaning the basic decisions in the community are taken by the assembly in which everybody participate.
One very important point that I think we must include in this conversation, for us the most important point today is what the women are doing on the March 8th. And I think that last year, at least in Oaxaca, on March 8th, in 2020, they broke the patriarch normality in the spectacular way. And that we are living in that moment, which pack normality is no longer there. This is, it’s very, very important for us that in these 12,000 communities in Oaxaca in the last 10 years, the assemblies took the decision that the women that were not allowed into the assemblies for hundreds of years, for centuries, now they have been allowed to come.
And this is not a suddenly the men were enlightened, and they’ll change it because of this alignment, it is the struggle of the women. And many women assume that all the full responsibility of the villages when the men went to the US or any other place. It is, the assembly, it’s now with men and women have the full authority in the village. And then you have cargos. It means that the community ask you to perform a cargo position of authority for them. It is for free, it is without honorarium, without payment. And then you are at the service of the community. This starts very early in life when you are just a child and then you grow, depending of how you do, you are improving in the level of the cargo they ask from you until you are the municipal president or whatever.
And then the fourth is perhaps for me the most important, the fiesta. The fiesta in which everybody participates, it is a moment to fix conflicts. People that have been fighting during the year arrange everything during the fiesta. They are together. They are enjoying themselves. The children are part of the fiesta participate; everybody participates. It is a very important moment and there are many fiestas in the communities. In one place there was they were going to put factory. They realize that a lot of tests and they discovered they can be magnificent workers and say to us, “This is a place for the factory.” But then the people told them that they will be very happy to work in the factory, but in that community, there are 112 days which they cannot work because they have a kind of fiesta. And then for the factory it was impossible to accept 112 days of fiesta, not work, and they moved the factory to another place.
AL | And then maybe just a little bit about [Spanish].
GE | Yes, a few years ago, because with the tourist [Spanish] in Colombia, we discovered that there were collective groups that were doing fascinating things beyond the market and the state, that they were trying to create a different kind of life. That in a sense, without any theoretical formulation, they were assuming that the modern era ended, that capitalist is dead, that everything is dead, that they need to create something different. And they started doing perhaps in one marginal area of activity or very important area of activity, like eating, but just one area they started with something like producing their own food. And then a step-by-step, the step they started to cover other different areas.
And then we discovered that they were collectives emerging everywhere. And then we say, “Well, let’s try to identify them and put them in connection with each other from them to learn from each other.” Then after some time they will offer mutual solidarity and after some time we will give them visibility for all the people that are discontented with the current conditions of the world but don’t know how to do, can be inspired by them. And then we have now [Spanish] in Mexico, in Colombia, and we also created a global tapestry of alternatives trying to find this all over the planet.
I must tell you something more about [Spanish] that is connected with this. We assume it from the very beginning that we should be small, that we need to grow. We must not grow very much. Then we call this [Spanish] Oaxaca meaning only for this, only for the city of Oaxaca. Then but we share that experience and other people started to what we were doing, and they have been doing. And then we have many community UniTierras, one community UniTierra 30 minutes from here because the community decided to create something like UniTierra in their own way in that community.
And then we have many communities. Another in Chiapas, there is [Spanish] in Chiapas. Next to the Zapatistas we have UniTierra in Puerta, other UniTierras in Mexico. But you also have UniTierras now in Japan, in California, in Catalonia, in Toronto, in many different places where someone starts something of this kind for the people to learn by themselves in freedom learning by doing in different ways for different conditions.
AL | Beautiful, beautiful. Thank you so much for your time, Gustavo. And yeah, it’s an honor to be here in Oaxaca with you in UniTierra.
GE | Thank you for the invitation to participate in this. It’s as usual a very good adventure what you are doing.
Five Insights about Global Transformation from the Kosmos Study, Connecting for Change
Last year, Kosmos commissioned a communication research study to better understand an emerging global movement and how groups within the movement could connect effectively. Led by Kosmos Digital Editor Rhonda Fabian and Jen Horner, PhD, both alumni of the Anneneberg School for Communication, the study was shared widely with the Kosmos community and remains one of the most-read features on our website. You can access the longer article about the study here. Or request the full study by contacting Kosmos.
Here we summarize the key insights from the study.
By Rhonda Fabian
A growing community of noted authors, local and global activists, world spiritual figures, economists and ecologists (Influencers) are speaking urgently of a world in crisis and the simultaneous awakening around the world to a ‘new story’ of transformation, a story no longer based on greed, competition, and scarcity, but one informed by fresh expressions of cooperation, indigenous wisdom, community-building, sharing, and innovation at all scales from local to global.
To understand this 'global transformation movement' better, how it is articulated, maintained and shared, the Connecting for Change Study used a combination of methods including nominal group technique; a survey targeted to 80 Influencers; and content analysis of 110 websites. These sources, along with ancillary data, led to the eventual consideration of 336 people and organizations comprising the study’s area of inquiry. It was felt that combining the classic methods of influence research with content analysis would return results that, while not statistically quantifiable, might yield rich, nuanced, and actionable insights. Participants self-selected by indicating that they agreed a global transformation movement was already underway.
Five Insights from the Study
1. The Global Transformation Movement is self-organizing.
The ‘movement’ belongs to no one person, group, or belief system. It is a story in process, based not on pre-existing design, but rather as a product of dynamic self-organization. It is a story of people working together to address the world’s most profound challenges. An interconnected ‘network of circles’ is slowly self-organizing, spanning distances, cultures, and other differences. Presaged by the Occupy Movement, there is an emphasis on power-sharing, affinity groups, and participatory democracy. Small communities of practice help shape public policy on the local level and may include civic groups, economic cooperatives, art collectives, spiritual centers and more. Social media platforms and online communities provide a means to connect, scale, teach best practice, strengthen relationships, and share events in real-time such as political actions and performances.
2. The Global Transformation Movement is a values-driven ‘movement of movements’.
Climate Justice, Peacebuilding and Human Rights are seen as interrelated and inseparable movements in the quest for positive global change. Access to food, energy and water, as obvious examples, are universal rights that are at the center of many conflicts, yet are also providing new opportunities for cooperation and sharing.
Personal transformation practices like meditation and consciousness-raising, often lead to the formation of small, strong, intentional communities of practice which find expression through initiatives such as the Local Living Economy and Transition Town movements, spiritual and civic organizations, and more. The Commons, Biodiversity, and Sacred Ecology movements are also frequent mentions.
Reducing carbon footprint – at all scales - is an expressed goal, yet respondents generally describe desired 'outcomes' as a set of values, rather than specific milestones. Among these are the values of sharing, respect for diversity, economic and climate justice, and care for all life. Methods for advancing values and goals focus strongly on communication, education, resource sharing, and practice through local activism.
3. The Global Transformation Movement uses alternative forms of learning.
From online courses to deep-nature workshops, respondents tend to seek and create their own customized learning experiences, choosing hands-on and place-based education over traditional classrooms. There is a sensed need to unlearn and discard old assumptions, regain indigenous wisdom, and ‘relearn’ practical skills such as agriculture and permaculture, building, crafting, and arts. Others seek to build leadership skills, deepen spiritual practices, and gain expertise on specific issues. Traditional schools and universities are seen as reinforcers of the deeply entrenched status quo, or ‘old story.’
4. The Global Transformation Movement emphasizes improvisation.
Borrowing from the world of music and dance, improvisation is a collaborative and spontaneous process that allows new kinds of order to emerge. Groups engaged in transformational work are increasingly ordered by improvisational principles. More akin to a meandering stream or a flock of birds, improvisation follows a natural fluid set of rules, rather than rigid imposed ones. Improvisation requires attention, intention, communication, awareness of self and others near to the self, and awareness of the larger picture or pattern that is emerging. Thus, improvisation is an emergent process, and one expressed abundantly in nature—in the natural ways that systems connect, change, and reassemble to create powerful new forms and ideas. It is precisely at the margins, or ‘edge of chaos’—where there is just enough order to recognize a pattern, yet sufficient openness to allow new ideas to take shape—that the most powerful initiatives and practices are emerging.
5. The Global Transformation Movement is spiritual
Ideas about collective consciousness, interbeing and Oneness connect many of the thinkers in our study. The related concept of 'global citizenship' emerges as a way of self-identifying that reflects cooperation with and belonging to the world. Rising ecological awareness is ushering in a new era of Gaia-consciousness. Rather than viewing the Self as an isolated participant apart from Nature, the study reaffirms there is a growing belief that humans are an integral part of Nature’s intelligent design. Beneath the political, ideological, and cultural divisions at the root of so many problems here on our planet, there is common purpose—to thrive. Separateness is a fading story. Beneath all our differences a sense of unity is emerging.
Next Steps
Kosmos is developing Phase II of the research and will soon launch a related project to increase civic engagement. Aware that small, informed groups are often the key to positive action at the local level, Kosmos is developing methods to encourage the creation of such groups around critical areas of interest, support their effort and track their work. The goal is to foster connection between groups.
We welcome inquiries from potential partners to assist in our ongoing research efforts.