Alnoor Ladha: Sacred activism and contextualized spirituality (ep324)

How does viewing people as “contextual beings” help us to realize the systemic changes that need to be made? What does it mean to have spiritual and political praxis—to see the shortcomings of New-Age spirituality when practiced in silos?

In this episode, we welcome Alnoor Ladha, the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules and a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations.

Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change, and narrative work.

Musical feature: Trust The Sun by Indigenous Cloud

“We think we’re highly rational beings when in fact, we’re highly contextualized beings operating from cues, signals, and an incentive landscape in a broader system. ”

— ALNOOR LADHA

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Transcript

Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as invitations to dive deeper into the topics and resources mentioned. This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Alnoor Ladha: I always feel uncomfortable with the personal question. Partly because it's a rebellion to the Western Occidental ideas of what constitutes a person, and this focus we have on individual stories. And I know other journalists tell us that's what people are interested in, but it's not necessarily what I'm interested in. So I'll keep it brief. My parents are East African, my mom is from Zanzibar and Tanzania. My dad is Ugandan. He was exiled in '72 by Idi Amin and ended up in a refugee camp outside of Vienna for a couple of years and then randomly was shipped to Vancouver. And my mum ended up as a midwife in the UK and then moved to Vancouver to work at a hospital there. And my parents met in the '70s in Vancouver. So I'm also a third culture kid.

That experience of being the child of immigrants in a highly colonized northern environment, but also one that was very multicultural, and multigenerational—with grandparents and parents—with deep trauma, exile and displacement, and a feeling of not fitting in to to the dominant culture, definitely informed my politics. We come from a Sufi tribe and lineage, and I was deeply informed by Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam. And I will just say that one of the first teachings, within our oral tradition, is that Allah, or God, is a metaphor for the universe becoming self-aware through you, through us collectively, which is why the whole identity thing is so difficult.

In many mystical traditions, identity is the problem.

The reification of self and preference, this limited, small view and understanding of ourselves is counter to, for example, one of the main mantras of Sufism, the confession of unity. It literally translates to "there is no God but God", but the esoteric interpretation is "there is no energy except divine energy distributed equally among consciousness".

Kamea Chayne: So you often say that we are "highly contextual beings", so this speaks to your disinterest in personal stories, because you understand the self in a vastly different way than the dominant culture does. And so, how does this reframing of the contextual being challenge the identity of the self and concept of individualism altogether? And what are your thoughts on how, in the realm of social justice, a lot of people focus a lot on identity and intersectionality as a way to address the injustices. How does that tie into our need to understand that the self needs to be contextualized?

Alnoor Ladha: Another kind of critical premise in mystical thought and many Indigenous traditions is the idea of non-dualistic thought.

So these are seemingly conflictual ideas that are in fact, simultaneously true.

And so, we've incarnated into individual bodies with particular histories, lineages, ancestry, genetics, epigenetics and trauma... And all of that exists to create the complex of beingness that is you, or me, and simultaneously, we are highly contextual beings that are products of a social, cultural complex of norms, mores, historical precedents, organizing principles such as capitalism, colonialism, slavery, genocide, all of the antecedents to this moment in time. In that sense, there is no paradox and it is a paradox.

So how do we navigate living in multiple simultaneous realities? And so we can be in contexts like the dominant culture, neoliberal culture, where the smallest self is highly reified, everywhere we go... What's your name? What do you do for a living? Where's your passport? Can I see your license? The preference porn of social media: here's how I like my cappuccino and this is my favorite color. That context creates a certain beingness, which is the being of capitalist modernity, a sense of atomization, separation from the natural world, ennui, spiritual depression, and disconnection, more broadly. That's one way to see what it is to be a human in a complex social environment. But there are infinite other ways to perceive our individual experience in the broader collective whole.

Kamea Chayne: So do you think that the systems that we've created, based on reductive understandings of the self and misguided understandings of our "human nature", empower and reward those who actually have lost their ways and sense of wholeness and interdependence—while simultaneously marginalizing and depriving those who have a more holistic valuation of the diverse currencies of life beyond the symbolic monetary currency?

Alnoor Ladha: Definitely. I'd say part of stepping back into the broader context is to understand how the operating system of late-stage capitalism works. It's a complex, adaptive evolutionary system. It's alive, not in the sense of an ecosystem being alive, but in the sense of artificial intelligence. We've created this market system, we've plugged in certain rules: money is debt, there is compound interest, so if you have capital, you can acquire exponential capital, but if you have debt, exponential debt... Certain attributes and human characteristics are valued, so if you're a white male, you're seen as the echelon of that hierarchy. There's no historical lens.

Part of the violence of neoliberalism is this belief that individuals are pulling themselves up by the bootstraps—as opposed to them actually being beneficiaries and heirs of the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, genocide, resource extraction, exploitation, dispossession, etc.

When we don't have a historical context and we over-attribute benefiting from the market system as almost a sense of valor, then we reward those who best serve the logic of the system. Then the question is: What is the logic of the system? And you just have to look around us. It's short-term, extractive, life-destroying... It rewards greed, psychosis, cannibalism, etc.

It's the opposite of a merit system; it's like, how good of a servant are you to the logic of life-destroying capitalism?

Kamea Chayne: There's often this binary of a good person or a bad person, or a hardworking person or a lazy person, but we have to recognize the larger systems that we are a part of. This really challenges those individualistic judgments of the self, because based on different contexts, it brings out different parts of who we are.

Alnoor Ladha: Yeah. I would say, if we were going to draw a common denominator from 30 years of the social sciences, it would be that we are highly contextual beings.

So for example, the famous Stanley Milgram experiments—when somebody in a white lab coat tells you to shock someone to the point of death, because they're an authority figure, most people are likely to do that. Even the Good Samaritan studies, for example, when there's a moral philosopher going to give a talk about being a good Samaritan, and in the experiment, they get a phone call that tells them they're actually half an hour late instead of two hours early, and plant a bleeding person as they are rushing to the lecture hall... most of the time they'll walk by that bleeding person. And that's how context-dependent we are. We know from behavioral economics and behavioral psychology that we have all sorts of biases.

So we think we're highly rational beings when in fact, we're highly contextualized beings operating from cues, signals, and an incentive landscape in a broader system.

We were hunter-gatherers for 99% of human history, we were living in small tribes and bands of about 150 people, they were largely matriarchal, there was very little hierarchy, you were having about two thousand calories a day. Right now, we're working 10 to 20 hours a week. And Marshall Sahlins, the anthropologist, calls us the original affluent society. All of this is not to say that human beings are inherently good or bad, but that we're products of the context in which we embed ourselves. So we have agency, control and power through the creation, maintenance and refinement of culture.

Kamea Chayne: I think it is really important to understand this alternate story of our "human nature" that isn't this grim view that sees us as naturally greedy, selfish and brutish. That sort of logic is what justifies the current system. That people need to be told what to do, that we need hierarchy to keep people in place, so people follow the rules, so that we don't descend into chaos...

I would love to move into sacred activism. You've mentioned before that for you, it's really engaging and embarking on your political path that really reactivated your spiritual path, which speaks to how the inner work doesn't need to precede the so-called "outer", or more tangible work. That it can and needs to happen in tandem. But how do we make sense of this, given how seemingly soulless and devoid of heart our political systems and those in positions of power are today?

Alnoor Ladha: There's this linear conception that especially most apolitical or nonpolitical people have, which is, "I'm going to do my inner work, and then I will then proceed to helping others.” This kind of messaging is articulated throughout the culture. You get on a plane, and you hear, "Use the oxygen mask for yourself"—even if you have a young child beside you... It's part of capitalist modernity and this idea of the self as the unit of understanding reality, and the self first.

What I have noticed in people is that by engaging in the messiness of being a citizen, not just a consumer, and engaging with the external world, it then reflects back the things you need to work on. There's this old Buddhist line that says, “Enlightenment doesn't happen in a cave; it happens in the mouth of the lion.” As you're getting chewed up and consumed and spat out, that's when your spiritual lessons are applied.

It's not that useful to the world to have all these new-age people and Vipassanā retreats and 40-day cleanses—if they're not coming back to apply those teachings, to help create post-capitalist futures and adjacent possible realities. That would just be spiritual narcissism.

This is not to say that there's a way to do it. Rather, the spiritual and political praxis is a discursive process that is self-informing and self-reflexive. The application of spiritual work is accelerated by having a point of view on the current context, by knowing what you stand for and what you stand against and actively trying to build those futures.

Kamea Chayne: This really clarifies for me how troubling it is that we've seemingly created this split between the binary of the material and the spiritual, and even the definition of materialism is valuing the material over the spiritual, which frames them as mutually exclusive, rather than a call to reintegrate and make them whole again.

I'd love for you to expand more upon the idea of how decontextualized spirituality might lose its deeper purpose, and also what it means to practice spirituality in the context of greater traditions, cultures, and community—while recognizing that a lot of the sacred texts guiding different forms of religion and spirituality were written in times that are also out of context with the present moment.

Alnoor Ladha: I think it depends on what your tradition is. I come from a mystical tradition that prejudices Gnostic experience, and gnosis is like a direct relationship with wisdom, a direct relationship with the divine. It's not to say that we completely shed the past. It's just, we're informed by the past as one omen. In my particular lineage, I grew up reading the Koran and the Hadith, and I take them as one omen, and the fact that I chose to incarnate within an Islamic line perhaps means that I take some of those omens more seriously than I would with others.

But I'm also really open to what intuitively resonates with me. So I have a lot of Daoist beliefs, I read a lot of Daoist literature because there's a lot of resonance in Daoism for me. Is it my "lineage"? It's not. But if you're actually Daoist, you don't even necessarily believe in lineage, because the Dao is similar to Allah and Sufism; it's consciousness itself becoming self-aware. So it cannot be defined, nor understood.

But if you're in, let's say, a non-mystical tradition, a more institutional, rigid religious form, it does become more difficult, because now there are certain dogmas that are passed from generation to generation. And then the added layer of complexity is that there are certain traditions that are very contextually relevant, like Indigenous traditions that have this unbroken 10,000-year, 20,000-year, direct line to the wisdom of place, and they have a relationship with the local deities and local gods, and understand the multi-layers of reality that the plant kingdom, or the mineral kingdom, or the animal kingdom is speaking to them.

And then I look at the Judeo-Christian Islamic traditions that have become more calcified—when I read their texts or see their practices, I don't find them personally that relevant. And I also see people who find ways to reinterpret them in relevant ways.

I think if you see God as something outside of you, that is ever-present and static, then tradition has more hold on you than if you see God as something being born through consciousness itself, as God is waiting for us to create it, and that maybe even the concept of God is a product of desert myths in a certain time and in a certain way, and that if we avail ourselves to what divine emergence may be, that we may walk away from all tradition that we've been previously taught. At least personally, I want to keep myself open to that possibility.

Kamea Chayne: So all of this has been about spirituality that might be absent of the context of the material realities. And there's also the flipside of this, which is when a lot of activists focus on trying to seek material changes for beings that are very much struggling with oppression and deprivation today, but have not allowed that to reflect back into their deeper spiritual work. So how might a lack of spiritual practice for activists set the stage for us to become more easily co-opted or go off track, being seduced by the same sorts of rewards from the system that we want to move away from?

Alnoor Ladha: We just have to look around, and we're seeing it now. Basically for the left, God died in the 1800s, when Nietzsche declared his famous statement (and Marx was deeply influenced by Nietzsche and Hegel, and other materialists). So what's happened with the left also, or rather progressive struggles, let's say, is that there's this desire, an appeal for their overlords' approval. They want to fight rationality with rationality, and logic with logic.

All of a sudden, we look at the climate movement, for example, and its enormous failure over the last 40 years. It's a direct result of this limited, materialist, rationalist need to win arguments and debates... Not that they're not rational; they're trans-rational dimensions and aspects of collective discourse. And then we look at what's happening with the New Age community, for example, or other types of sort of emerging spirituality, or even traditional spiritual impulses and institutional religions... there's very little political understanding or contextual understanding.

So there's this strange chasm between those who have a deeper understanding of coevolution, becoming, multiple layers of reality and mystical truths, etc., and have had embodied experiences of these things, that have sort of elevated the state of consciousness... With people who are doing the important, essential work of being activists. These two worlds need to come together.

If our political work is not informed by a deep love of nature, of reality, of the world as becoming, as the universe as becoming, then we degrade into the state we are now: identity politics, cancel culture, pronoun police, the reification of identity, the increase of separation. And we're seeing the effects of it all around us.

And a dear friend that I know you have interviewed on the show, Bayo Akomolafe, often says to the activists that part of the crisis is the way we are responding to the crisis, as activists. We think we're the solution, but we're actually contributing to it. It's also true for philanthropy, for the NGO industrial complex. It's definitely true for social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism and that whole murky world of emotional alibis, rationalizations, and capitalist apologisms.

What we're seeing is people are starting to understand that we are being initiated into non-dualistic thought, that the inner work and the outer work and the inner structures and the outer structures are fractals of each other. They're mirroring each other. The reality we want to see in the external world is not going to be manifested if our daily reality is hierarchy, separation, anger, and violence.

Kamea Chayne: I would love to expand more on the NGO piece. Within the environmental movement, when people recognize a need to go beyond individualistic activism, a lot of people are called to turn towards supporting the major environmental organizations, who many believe to be the ones best equipped to lead the greater movement towards collective and systemic change.

But through your experience in the space and observation of how the nonprofit industrial complex fits into our current economic and political system, how do some of the major environmental nonprofits actually play a role in upholding the current capitalistic system that we have—and may therefore act as barriers for us to move past this and create the deep transformations that so many are yearning for?

Alnoor Ladha: Even before the NGO industrial complex is the philanthropic industrial complex.

Philanthropy is an externalization of capitalism. A few people have amassed so much wealth, they've written the rules—the nonprofit 501(c)3 rules, for example, in the U.S.—and they are determining the agenda for civil society.

And the way the structure of that system works is so nefarious; if most people understood how the philanthropic sector works, they would be in shock, in awe, and aghast.

So what ends up happening is the rich people set up these foundations. They put, let's say, one hundred million dollars, or a billion dollars, into a foundation. Their only requirement is to give 5% of that money. And so they put that endowment into equity markets, fossil fuels, and destruction of the planet, and they get their 5, 8, 10, 12-% return. So their power keeps on growing, and they get a tax break on their direct income, their personal income, from that 5%, so they're financially benefiting from it. And then with that 5%, they're controlling civil society.

And the NGOs? They're just downstream from that. So, how do NGOs get funded? They're all getting funded by foundations and philanthropy, maybe some government funding—which is not so much better because the difference between corporate power and government power is not separable now. It's a government-corporate nexus that is dominating traditional halls of power. The job of the NGO is to appeal to the all-powerful philanthropist who is never going to challenge the system.

I don't know many environmental organizations that are saying, “Climate change is created by capitalism”—even though it's irrefutable. It's just a basic starting point for good public discourse about what do we do if we have a fossil fuel-based extractive system that's spewing carbon into the atmosphere, externalizing all costs, acidifying oceans, destroying ecosystems, biosphere collapse, etc., all for the profit motive. That's what's happening.

And no one's talking about that. They're talking about reducing carbon in the atmosphere, or whatever their particular issue is: let's conserve oceans, let's conserve this species...

Conservation is meaningless without changing the structure of capitalism. No environmental work is contextually relevant if it is not dismantling the existing superstructure.

Kamea Chayne: Yeah, not to mention the simple substitution for "renewable energy". That's a whole other topic.

Alnoor Ladha: Right. And you have these NGO workers getting paid high salaries, in very comfortable positions, whose main job is to appease funders, whose main job is to just become richer, right?

The system rewards that psychosis: The person who's a billionaire, who wants to double their wealth, is seen as ambitious and entrepreneurial, instead of a hoarder and sick. Those are the people who determine the agenda for the NGOs.

The reality is that these people are not interested in building post-capitalist infrastructure. They're interested in being as comfortable as they can for as long as they can, although they know the science and what's coming down the pipeline for us as a species. They're just doing what they can to survive.

We can have compassion for that and see that as everyone is trying to survive in the midst of capitalist modernity and the end of time, or you can also see it as, I wouldn't choose that archetypal role or a way to spend my time, when we may be the last humans left.

Kamea Chayne: I've often struggled with what it means for us that most philanthropies are at the same time investing their dollars in upholding the current system, whether it's the fossil fuel industry or big finance, the major corporations, and so forth, while at the same time funneling a little bit of that money to support the work that is, at the surface, working against the powers that need to be dismantled, but that they at the same time are supporting. It's embedding us further into the status quo, rather than truly supporting us to shift away from it, because if they truly were interested in that, they would be supporting things that would be cannibalizing themselves, that would eventually render them obsolete.

Alnoor Ladha: Right. That's not their perspective. They call it philanthropy, which means love of humanity, but that's just doublespeak.

The existence of philanthropy, created by the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, etc., was created to control civil society, to amass more wealth and more power. That's its role.

And the role of the NGO-industrial complex is to be the prophylactic, to maintain the existing system…

and as is the job of social entrepreneurship—to make people feel better about what they're doing in the midst of the destruction, and to find their seat to maintain their comfort in the midst of what's going down right now.

Kamea Chayne: Right. And so through the NGO industrial complex, the North Star that's often pinpointed as the goal that we should work towards, is what, for example, the United Nations and other non-profits will call "sustainable development". And the idea of development is closely aligned with the idea of growth and progress. So I wanted to hear your thoughts on whether we might have innate desires for growth, development, and progress, that have just been hijacked and disoriented to serve the growth and progress of a system that is disconnected from our collective wellbeing. Because I can see how growth and development could be life-enhancing if we oriented them towards things like intimacy, vitality, spirituality, and diversity.

Alnoor Ladha: I think we have to understand that the whole concept of international development and aid, for example, comes from both deep colonial structures and Christian missionary structures. So it's essentially a white European colonizing belief that other human beings are less than human, and we, therefore, have to develop them into our vision and understanding of what it is to be human. That's its root.

And the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the other organs of neoliberal extraction and control come from post-World War II, post Bretton Woods understanding of how we develop the world in our image, how we grow the global economy so the West can continue its colonial and neocolonial pillage without sacrificing anything. That's what they mean by that, and by growth.

They're not talking about the growth of the spirit, or growth of biodiversity, or growth of intimacy. They're talking about economic growth

And if 93 cents or 94 cents of every dollar ends up in the hands of the top 1%, of course, they're going to have no other incentive scheme, except to grow the global economy, because it's hardwired to benefit them.

Even the notion of progress comes from Western European enlightenment logic. That was this strange confluence of evolutionary thought, that human beings were the sort of peak of the species on this planet, that we are the apex of evolution, that time is an arrow, linear... therefore, everything we do must be the best it's ever been.

This is the Bill Gates, Steven Pinker arguments of, "Well, there's a microwave in every house", and they'll doctor the numbers to make it seem like poverty is decreasing. And it's like, well, you're so deeply incentivized to believe that, as white males who are the heirs and beneficiaries of this current system.

We may have a microwave in every house, but 200 species a day are going extinct, we're in the midst of the sixth great extinction, and we have 60 harvests of livable topsoil left.

What are you measuring, and why, and for whom does it benefit? These questions never get asked.

And the doublespeak of progress, growth, and the U.N., is somehow a benefit to human beings… the UN is just an organ of the state-government nexus, amassing more power while trickling down a little bit of aid and charity to be a prophylactic, and a bandaid over the destruction that the Western way of life and globalized industrialism is having on the rest of the world.

That's all it is. And it gives a few thousand people jobs that make them feel important at cocktail parties with other one percenters and people who don't know better.

Kamea Chayne: So much to question. You've said before that we're going from a human-centric to an omni-centric universe, and what it's allowing us to do is also to see the interconnected nature of all of our problems.

What does this mean, and through this recognition, if the dominant guiding vision of "sustainable development" needs to be challenged and reoriented, what do you feel that our Earth whole is calling us towards right now?

Alnoor Ladha: It's a big question, and it may be the question for which we incarnated for... on one level at least. I think there are maybe three levels that we could approach this.

At an individual level, what is being asked of us is to dissolve our identities and our egos, and to decondition and decolonize our heart, mind, body, soul complexes, from the psychosis of 5000 years of totalitarian agriculture, hierarchy, patriarchy, white supremacy, separation from the natural world, and separation from each other. That is the work of a lifetime, and there aren't many left, so it's imminent, and that inner work needs to happen now, by any means necessary, whether that's psychedelics in a container that respects those traditions and the plant teachers, is holistic, not frivolous and not consumptive.

It also requires us working at a community level, building new neural nets, and being in the practice of what it is to be a citizen of our times, to be good students of our culture, to understand the impoverishment and the sickness and the psychosis of what this way of living has done to us. And as a community, it requires us to start becoming aware of the consequences of our actions and to really spend time in contemplation, dialogue, and discourse with other human beings—whether they're from our same socio-economic racial groups, or ideally, more diverse groups—to really understand what it is to have the experience of being in another body, and how capitalism has treated that those particular bodies: Indigenous, Black, Brown, female, marginalized bodies of all kinds.

We need to do that decolonization work in community format, because without understanding that, the new post-capitalist infrastructure, the emerging frameworks are going to replicate the hierarchy, the patriarchy, the separation, and the violence.

We have to be in deep contemplation about how the superstructure is working, how the oxygen is affecting our lungs, and then be committed to disidentifying from that dominant system, and rebuilding new and ancient systems that are imbued with these values.

We can call them post-capitalist values, but in some ways, they're universal values—of empathy, altruism, solidarity with life, being, intimacy, connection, and nonviolence.

And then the third level, the superstructure: It's to actively integrate our internal work with changing external structures and systems, to opt-out of state-based capitalism, to bring in new rules at a global level. Even short-term gaps, like a universal basic income, or social income for Indigenous peoples or activists, shorter workweeks, degrowth economics, cooperative ownership structures, land commons and land back movements and stewardship of the land, mutual aid networks. There are a plethora of post-capitalist alternatives that already exist. And by supporting those, by actively challenging our governments, by withdrawing support from the neoliberal state government complex, that itself is a deeply spiritual act—and is also required.

Those are just three. I'm sure there are multiple levels of energetic spiritual investment that could be made in reimagining and creating these adjacent possible futures that we want to live and see in our lifetime.

*** CLOSING ***

Kamea Chayne: What's an uplifting social media account or publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?

Alnoor Ladha: I'm not so loyal to publications, but a book that's had a huge influence on me is Columbus and Other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes, one of the great First Nations thinkers in the U.S.. That book is profound in understanding where to go, in understanding the disease of cannibalism that is capitalism, that is the distributed fascism where we all just take care of our own little self-interest and backyard.

I think the work of Hakim Bey, as a kind of mystical anarchist. Temporary Autonomous Zone and Immediatism are two books that come to mind that are powerful and profound.

Also, a lot of Sufi poetry has had a big influence on me: the work of Rabia from Basra, the 8th-century Sufi mystic, and Hafez and Omar Khayyam, and others in that vein.

And also, a lot of modern, feminist, posthumanist thinkers like Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway is kind of required reading, at least the first chapter. The work of Donna Haraway, of Anna Tsing, of the whole movement of radical feminist thinkers in that vein.

And also a lot of anarchist literature, the work of Gustav Landauer, Kropotkin and Proudhon, and other radicals of the 18th and 19th century, the Europeans who rebelled from the dominant system, and then a lot of mystical writers as well, especially in the German tradition. Hermann Hesse’ The Glass Bead Game is one of my favorite books of all time, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Thomas Mann as well.

And the last one I have to say is Albert Camus, a patron saint of mine. And The Myth of Sisyphus, I also think is high Sutra, and required reading.

Kamea Chayne: What personal mottos or personal practices do you engage with to stay grounded?

Alnoor Ladha: There's a powerful Sufi proverb that I sit with, which is: You are entrusted with everything and entitled to nothing. It's attributed to the great mother saying that to her children, to us.

I see entitlement as the dominant core wound of the Occidental culture and the Occidental mind. And maybe it's a trinity: entitlement, victimhood and control. That's the holy trinity of capitalist modernity, and it manifests as victim, perpetrator and savior.

I try to contemplate why I feel entitled to anything, and just really contemplate the sheer consequence of what it is to be a privileged person in a dying planet, like why do I feel entitled to two thousand calories a day? And even contemplating the sheer amount of work that's required, the fossil fuels, the globalized supply chain, just to prop up one Western life. Who got to decide that?

Kamea Chayne: And what has been some of your greatest inspirations in recent times?

Alnoor Ladha: The rise in social movements that are expressing this interconnected nature of our struggle, whether it's Occupy Wall Street, or La Via Campesina, or Ekta Parishad, or MST in Brazil, or Standing Rock, or Extinction Rebellion, or Fridays For Future. These are white blood cells—they're expressions that the system is not working for the majority of the planet, for the majority of humans, for life itself.

It doesn't matter if you're working on a pipeline in North Dakota or land rights in India—the root of it is a globalized, extractive capitalist system rooted in values, of separation, of otherness, of hierarchy, of patriarchy, white supremacy.

As these movements slowly come together and start seeing how there's a constellational worldview holding these things together, and [as these movements] activate their spiritual traditions and their lineages, there is a possibility on the horizon for something more than the Elon Musk, Bill Gates version of the world or the colonization of Mars. The resurgence of Indigenous cultures, as well, is a reminder that we will not be given another planet for the pillage and destruction of this one.

Kamea Chayne: Alnoor, thank you so much for joining me today. There's so much still that I'm going to marinate on, so I really appreciate it. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?

Alnoor Ladha: Be good students of the culture.

We spend so much time in the world of self-help. If we spent a commensurate amount of time understanding how the global economic system is destroying the potentiality of life, destroying biodiversity, and destroying our souls, we'd be in a better position to act.

If any part of us still wants what the dominant culture is selling on tap, if we still want that Wikipedia page, to be a famous author, to make a certain amount of money, to have that house or that car or whatever, then we are not contextually relevant beings. We are not in service to the unfolding that's happening. If we are still enmeshed in the incentive system of a life-destroying structure... And that takes practice, it takes rewiring our desires and what we've been programed to believe.

It takes deep decolonization, and it requires the expansion of empathy so the circle of life goes beyond ourselves or our community and is engaged in a living planet and a broader omnicentric cosmos.