Rhonda Fabian

DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES

Episode 7 – Alnoor Ladha with Vanessa Andreotti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AL | What was the quote?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AL | Blamelessness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VA | And you can see the damage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AL | The dissolution of identity.

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

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

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

VA | To integrate.

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

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

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

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

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

AL |    Do you want to say any closing words?

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

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

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

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

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

VA | How I’m special!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

VA | I love talking to you.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.