Rev Left Radio - Approaching Organizing and Spirituality w/ Rev Left Radio

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

Breht was a guest on The Heatwave podcast, the podcast of MECHA, a Marxist organization based in Phoenix. They were essential in making Breht's speech at ASU happen, and Breht sat down with them before the speech for a two hour conversation about spirituality and meditation, socialist organizing, and much more. Learn more about MECHA here: https://linktr.ee/MECHAdeASU Check out The Heatwave on your fav podcast app, or here: https://thwpod.podbean.com/ Follow MECHA on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mechadeasu Follow MECHA on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/mechadeasu/

Disclaimer. This episode will cover sensitive topics such as trauma, mental health, and the meaning of life. Listener's discretion is advised. Hello everybody. What's good, y'all? Welcome to the heat wave. I'm Chui, he, him, and thank you for listening. Today we have a very special episode. We're going to be talking about revolutionary optimism, practicing and spirituality, and acknowledging, like, the struggles that happen within organizing. But before we go into this conversation, I know this conversation is going to be on the Rev. Left Radio stream as well, so I want to set the record straight what the heat wave and what METHA ASU is about. So the heat wave is the official podcast of META ASU. METHA is a community-based communist organization that is dedicated on combating the legacies of settler colonization, such as capitalism and white supremacy by creating a movement that centers black, indigenous, queer, trans, and femme people.

We are an organization that, of course, came from the Chicano movement from the 60s, but we have now distanced ourselves from that because we recognize that a lot of the things that oppress, the people that identify themselves as Chikane have faced other contradictions. So now our organization is multinational. We strive for liberation of all people. We strive for decolonization. And, of course, we strive for the end of capitalism. So to speak to our listeners, Brett, there are people that perhaps may or may not know you.

I'm surprised if there are people that don't know you, but can you please introduce yourself and give a general rundown alike? What's your experience with spirituality? Sure. Yeah, I'm Brett O'Shea. I'm the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, and then I co-host two other spin-off shows, one dedicated to Marxist theoretical texts called Red Menace, and one dedicated to proletarian anti-colonial, anti-imperialist history, called Guerrilla History. So I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much.

This is a wonderful place. These are wonderful people, and it's a real honor to be able to be here today. As for my experiences with spirituality, spirituality can be a big term. People have, you know, sort of very visceral reactions to it at times. For some people, it means crystals and, you know, some sort of woo-woo, new age, conglomeration of pseudo-Asian philosophies and whatnot. For other people, it's synonymous with their religious tradition. So a Christian, a mainstream Christian could say that they're a spiritual person.

And for me, spirituality has always meant an inward investigation that is most articulated, and refined through the Buddhist tradition. Broadly speaking, I don't necessarily subscribe to one school. I try to learn from the entirety of Buddhism. And for me, that's what I mean when I say my spiritual engagements is a lot of meditation and the sort of psychological, spiritual and existential issues that surround that. And so just to give a brief history of my relationship with it,

it actually all started as a teenager when I went through a mental health crisis. I was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. One of the nurses there must have seen something in me or something and handed me a book on Taoism. And I was reading through it, barely understood it at first, but something there was really intriguing to me. And after I got out of the hospital, I realized that there's something here that might be able to address these deeper existential crises and feelings of depression, anxiety, angst within me. in a way that mainstream psychology doesn't necessarily do, and in a way that, like, pharmaceutical pills certainly don't do.

And so I've, you know, began meditating around that time, learning it myself, visited local Zen, you know, dojo, a Zen community center, as it were, in Omaha, and then just have dedicated my life to learning the philosophy and applying the practice. And one thing that Marxism and Buddhism both have is that theory, in praxis, you know, sort of dialectical relationship. There is a theoretical apparatus here that you should understand intellectually, but then you take that and you apply it into the real

world. And so Buddhism has always been, you know, that for me. So that's kind of my basic experiences with. And, you know, we can talk if you want about certain perhaps spiritual experiences one could have or what exactly meditation means, but for the most part, that is my experience with it. Sure. Thank you. Thank for sharing and thank you for being here. I just want to give an early disclaimer just for people that are listening to understand where I come from because I have much less experience and I come from more of a background of of mindfulness meditation that came from mostly having the ability to go to a therapist to help me throughout this I my my engagement with with spirituality has been interesting for me because

like when I, I was, like, brought up in a Catholic-ish household, but, like, I described my parents as lazy Catholics because they really did not teach me anything. They're, like, oh, during, like, Christmas, during, like, when we need to go to church, we'll take you and, like, we'll show you. But, and actually, I never learned anything. But I've also engaged with, um, with a bunch of friends that are Muslim. and they've taught me a lot about Islam from and how that like how they perceive the their interactions with with God and that that's been like an influence on how I see things so I don't describe myself with anything yet I'm still exploring but I feel like a lot of people that are listening as well are also exploring so just wanted to get that yeah no actually really quick on that point I really love that I'm fascinated don't know much about it and haven't particularly been deeply influenced by but I'm interested in Sufism within the Islamic tradition and that's the more

mystical side of Islam and I've actually done an episode with Dr. Adnan Hussein on that topic that I found particularly interesting and we're going to have a follow up on the Islamic mystic Rumi and so that would be interesting as well so you know one thing to say about all these major religious traditions in the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam all three of them have their sort of above-ground, mainstream religious component, and then all three of them also have mystical schools within them. You know, Christian mysticism, Kabbalah within Judaism, and Sufism within Islam. And when you get into those mystical traditions,

there's lots of intersections with practices like in the Buddhist and even in the Hindu spiritual tradition. So it's very interesting how all these different world religions have these components of them that seem to be, and this is arguable, but seem to be pointing at something very similar. Yeah, for sure. Thank you for plugging that in because that episode did with Dr. Hussain. That was very interesting for me, especially. It was like in the middle of the pandemic.

So, but let's get right into what we're talking about. So first thing I want to talk about this discussion is basically acknowledging, like, the struggles of organizing and how that comes, that can come from like, from just being a product of, like capitalism. So the first question is basically, how does capitalism as a detriment manifests within organizing? In a couple ways, probably lots of ways. And, you know, different organizations are going to be affected by it in different ways. And I think the only way to, to head yourself against it or to not be impacted by it organizationally is the theoretical, you know, sort of guidelines that can center capitalism as a primary thing that we're confronting and talk about how not only we can confront it or why we should confront it,

but how it changes us, how, you know, living under the hegemonic ideological apparatus of capitalism shapes us and forms us. So even when we come together as capitalist subjects who have lived under capitalism and its ideology, and we want to confront it, we are still manifesting, you know, subconsciously or not, aspects of the hegemonic conditioning that we've, that we've undergone just by living in this society, and passively absorbing its values and its apparatuses. But one of the things that it does is there's a certain liberal default. So if you're in a leftist organization, especially if you don't have a strong, solid line

and good political theory to go along with it, is there is a default to liberalism. So you could have, and I've experienced this many, many times, organizations, even organizations who see themselves as anti-capitalist, recruit members, and you'll have somebody who thinks of themselves as an anarchist. somebody who thinks of themselves as a Marxist, somebody who thinks of themselves as a democratic socialist, somebody who thinks of themselves as a liberal, old hippies from the 60s,

and all these other people that can more or less agree, like, yeah, capitalism is bad in some sense, but it's never really explained, it's not centered organizationally, and what happens in that hodgepodge, when you try to take a bunch of people's ideas and put it into one organization without good political education

and a solid line is a default, a default to liberalism and liberal ways of going about trying to address problems, which are reformist and often ineffective. Another way it manifests is hyper-individualism and the egoism that goes along with it. One of the necessary ideological functions of capitalism is to make all of us see ourselves as not interconnected beings,

cooperative social animals, but as individuals competing in the marketplace for whatever, jobs, wealth, status, et cetera. And we can walk out of the job. We can even become aware of how individualism runs rampant in our society, but it will still manifest within our organizations in a million different ways. One of the ways it manifests is, I've seen this a million times, people taking interpersonal conflict and framing it as if it's political debate. I see that so much. Instead, people are conflict diverse. They don't want to directly confront other people or work

through criticism and self-criticism. And so they will present what are really interpersonal conflicts as if they are serious theoretical ones. And that's, that is hiding the ball. It's confusing. It creates splits. And people rise or fall based on, based on that egoism and that individualism. And so, you know, those are just some of the ways. Of course, another way is that the people that are going to come together and want to confront capitalism in the first place are going to be working people mostly. And those working people are going to be subject. the having to go to work at different times. It would just your schedule, work with this schedule.

How much money do you have? Can you afford to do this? We have to put our money together to try to create, you know, whatever it is we're going to try to do. And that can become a real problem as well. And that's not anybody's fault, right? That's just us grinding it out under capitalism, trying to survive while also trying to find some free time that we can come together and try to do something about it.

And those are all ways in which the left is hamstrung. Those are all ways in which the left. has to fight against, you know, inordinate odds just to break through a little bit on the communal level, let alone the national or international level. And so this is why, you know, political theory is essential. This is why line struggles are essential within organizations. This is why internationalism is important.

And this is why being able to criticize and self-criticize and see the ways in which we're conditioned by our broader society and to be very explicit about that are so essential if we're going to succeed at any level at all. And so, yeah, those are some of starting ideas, at least. That makes me think about, like, just the example of, like, just thinking about, like, integrating, like, a bunch of people from a bunch of tendencies and there's no set line.

That wasn't, that's definitely, like, an issue that has happened within our organization and has caused issues. I would say like procedurally there's like there's been problems put front presented to other people but we just don't we don't have like the set line or the set discipline to address it front and center and that's been that's been a detriment so yeah that's definitely interesting how would you how how do you think this manifests like through social media because this I feel like a lot of the problems this is not just well it is kind of like a an aspect of student organizing at the moment or people of my age organize and social media plays a big role but from what you've seen because

I assume that you've been organizing for a long time especially through social media how has how has that unfolded there all the normal problems are amplified tenfold the individualism the egoism the unaccountability various forms of anonymity and just the idea of being able to say things in a way without immediate consequences or the social pressure that comes with it I mean these are ultimately you're playing on your enemy's terrain when you're on social media and you shouldn't you know delude yourself about that these are these are corporate profiteering processes and platforms. And their goal is to take your data and sell it for profit, and that's it.

And whatever keeps you on longer is going to be what they do, and that's often high emotion, anger, sensationalists, you know, very provocative stuff is what's going to trend, is what's going to get the most engagement, is what's going to get you out there if you want to be known on social media. Moreover, there's the issue of brand building on social media. people once you get in that space once your head starts you know thinking in in those terms it becomes very easy to just sort of think about what is best for you you know how many likes you know how many retweets you know how much engagement how many followers can I get how many people

can I dunk on and if you if you soak your brain in the social media algorithms for long enough I think it also disconnects you from from regular people and one of the things we have to do is we have this politic that a lot of normal people, right or wrong, and because of conditioning see as extreme, and we have to be extra adept at reaching out to people, meeting them where they are, trying to understand their hang-ups about our politics or whatever they may be, and trying to find ways to bridge those gaps. And what social media does is silo you into these pressure cooker sort of echo chambers. And people, and I've seen this a lot, where people spend so much time there they become sort of unable to talk to and relate to regular people and and and that's a real

that's a real problem so for everything that is a normal problem under capitalism and all the normal shit we drag into our organizations social media amplifies it i also don't want to say that there's no role for social media because social media also connects people we're connected through it you know the internet has brought people who you know otherwise would maybe not even know a single other person who thought like them in their community into engagement and relationship with people across the country and across the world who do believe in that and so there's real benefits there but I would think especially in the context of organizations you would want to have very high standards of behavior for your members

when they are engaging on those platforms and and real ways to try to hedge against spending all your time on those platforms yeah I definitely I've seen this time and time again where people they're very active in person they're very active in real life but then social media just takes over their life

and that just they focus all of their energy all their mental capacity towards like all these petty all these minuscule conflicts that you have with other people and that just of course like results in

to this very yeah you're you're all the time that you're spending towards just trying to one up other people um out compete basically express express your ego towards other people it's just that's and all the energy that you could have won towards other things it's just gone exactly and yeah we we talk about capitalist co-option we know how like look at um The 2020 protest, Black Lives Matter, radical, burning down the headquarters of police stations, chasing police out, like a real radical movement. And we saw how the, you know, the machinations of certain brands, you know, careerist, opportunist, as well as a Democratic Party themselves, attempt to co-opt, defang and bring in those energies to reduce them and put a lid on them. And so we know about how co-option happens. I think one of the newest and most efficient ways that capitalism co-ops, left-wing energies and movements is precisely social media.

Getting people to become individuals with profile pictures and follower counts on their for-profit platforms. It's a mechanism of co-option. Yeah, absolutely. Just the whole idea of an influencer that. Yeah. If you're on the left, you should be prohibited from buying a blue check. It should be illegal. Yes.

Just kidding. No, not just. But if you have one and you feel bad, I'm sorry. Yeah. How to, I guess like the idea of, of the fear of disappointing others, that also does play a big role in that. Like, I feel there's been moments where I feel that I just do things for the sake of fulfilling these set expectations. that I have of other people but in reality that's not a thing but I think that's just like an extension of like just like this mindset that people have to do like you have to you have to meet this number

you have to reach this goal to to increase your engagement increase your outreach increase your follower account that's I think that like it catches like the best of people yeah and yeah and these things are made to be addicting. So then you get into the whole neuroscience of addiction to these things. And yeah, you're off to the races. You know, your brain is being literally tricked to stay on these platforms for longer and longer. And you got to fight against that. Another thing I would say, this is kind of tied to it, but kind of not. But I would say this is like an aspect of you that I feel like has been very interesting because I would say the mindset that you had towards this issue parallels a lot with myself but the topic of climate despair i know that you've

talked a lot of episodes about that but um how for the listeners that don't know how that unfolded for you how's that unfolded for you how has your mindset looking towards climate grief or climate despair affected your organizing and how has your mindset changed over time? Yeah. So let's see mindset change. I'll talk about collapse, but I'll get to that in a second. The grief is a huge thing. And I realized, and I think this was also part of the, during the pandemic, but if you remember during that, I think it was 2020, there's lots of climate catastrophes. There's insane heat waves, wildfires everywhere. It was that image, if you remember from 2020 of like,

I think it was like a UPS truck at a place where there was wildfires and the sky was just blood red, you know? And then you had the Black Lives Matter movement, which we were deeply engaged in. We were in the streets. Traumatic to see videos, you know, of people being murdered, you know,

George Floyd being murdered by the state. Those videos are deeply traumatic, so you're already in that mindset. We have these historic American protests, biggest protests in American history happening. And then you have Trump in power. You have the rise of neo-fascism in the United States and abroad. And then the whole backdrop is climate despair.

And I really suffered. I really went through a period of existential crisis. And, you know, she was pregnant with our second son at the time as well, which certainly didn't help. I have three kids. So thinking about them in the context of what's coming in the next coming decades is brutal. but I really had a sort of a breakdown in a sense and I realized that that breakdown or that existential crisis could be said to be grief

that I was in a sense even without fully knowing it grieving for the lost futures of various people grieving for the tragedies that are here and now killing human beings grieving for my children and all children and the world that they're going to inhabit and grieving for you know mother earth you know the natural environment that we are a part of you know I truly believe we

we are we are inseparable from the cosmos we're inseparable from the earth we are earth becoming conscious we are the mechanism by worth by which earth becomes conscious and I think you even had a quote in here from my friend Joshua Connor Russell when we engage in environmental activism we are the earth literally defending itself and that can be very spiritually uplifting and beautiful and interconnected but also I felt and I feel as if if that's true then the earth also grieves through us you know when the earth is conscious through our eyes and looks out at its own destruction and the alienation that it's rooted in it cries out

and it cries out through us yeah so so it you know it impacted me deeply and I had to realize that I was going through a protracted process of grief and that once I completed that process I did feel more stable and more committed to the fight it didn't destroy me or weaken me or make me want to bow out, it actually had the opposite effect. And I think that when we grieve properly, when we go through those emotional and psychological and existential processes in a proper way, we can come out healthier, you know, more fully well-rounded human beings if it doesn't crush us. Yeah.

If it doesn't crush us. And then so what was the other thing about the mindset shift, the perspective shift over time? I thought for a long time that climate change was going to inexorable. and inevitably result in a catastrophic collapse of society such that it would be hell hellish, but would also present very huge opportunities for revolutionary movements around the world. And I think that's still true. But I do think that sometimes we take that too far. I think sometimes we put our eggs in the basket of collapse as the only feasible way we could ever make change.

Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as they say. And I think that manifests in a sort of collapsed fetishism on the left. We can't do shit as long as this whole thing. The apparatus is too strong, too organized, too big. But maybe climate change will be the thing that comes, wipes the board clean, and then we can really have a, you know, and I think that's a sort of nihilism and fatalism and determinism that is not helpful for us.

Yeah. We shouldn't have to wait for the collapse of human civilization. Yeah. You know, it should motivate us to get out there and to fight. and to prevent that collapse. Because we don't want to have, you know, a dictatorship with a proletariat over a heap of ashes. We want human civilization and we want to take it to the next level.

So I think the mind shift, one of the big mind shifts for me has been that shift away from seeing collapse as like, you know, the return of Christ, you know, or like the rapture moment. Like that's going to be the thing. That's the only thing that's going to dislodge capitalism. I don't want to believe that and I don't think it's helpful for us to believe that. Yeah.

I definitely agree with that I it's like sometimes like engaging with people just like just having the idea that that the the world is going to end as we know it is going to happen in like two three how many years like that that is very nihilistic either you become very you become very like a sensationalist and you very much alienate scare people. and demotivate them and which will result into you being nihilistic more demotivated to do to do anything so that's one thing that happens a lot like i engage with like people that are liberals and when i present them what i think about think about like oh this is the time frame these are the projections of like what happens with this degree of warming like that scares them it's like it makes them feel even worse than they were already feeling sex so it's so then they just check out yeah nothing i can do anyway it's coming to an end i might as well enjoy what i have left or whatever you know yeah yeah you don't motivate people on the left by fear that's what the right does yeah yeah yeah and i guess like speaking to like the podcast i we've the one thing that i feel like a lot of discussions here with in arizona is water yeah because there's always this

this discussion like on our podcast we've talked about many times that there's going to be like a day zero when we just don't have water and i don't know how that's going to turn out i don't think i don't think we're going to have like like there's besides the point of like extreme heat i feel like water is a much more existential thing that is going to present here but i don't think it's going to be like like catastrophic like in other places in the world like because one thing that really grounded me was hearing the speech from Vijay Prashad in COP 26 last

year. Yeah. Or two years ago. Over to you, Vijay, because many of us say we're fighting the same fight again and again and again. There was a conversation yesterday. Will this fight ever end? Will this fight ever end? Well, first I said, thanks for

forcing me to come to Glasgow. When I walked the streets of cities like this, you know, Glasgow was the UK's second most important city, beautiful buildings, beautiful streets, a gorgeous city. You know, it had red Clydeside in 1919, the uprising to create a Soviet in Scotland. But it was, you know, crushed, of course. When I see cities like this, I think also about the other side of it.

You know, there's a phrase from Walter Benjamin, I mean, every monument of civilization is also a monument of barbarism. I think of the famines in Bengal, the jute workers in Bengal sending Jude to Dundee through the Glasgow port. I think of human beings from Africa enslaved and brought from Ghana to the New World and all those profits getting sucked into cities like London and Glasgow. You know, between 1765 and 1938, the British Isles stole 45 trillion. The British Isles stole 45 trillion pounds from India, 45 trillion sterling from India. We never got paid for that. When the British left India, when we threw the British out, our literacy rate was 13%. So much for several hundred years of so-called civilization. Meanwhile, our landscapes were destroyed. You know, coal was

foisted on India. You foisted coal on us. You were the ones that came and made us coal dependent. And then you left and now you dare to condescend to us when I listened to Boris Johnson when I listen to people like Joe Biden when I listen even more to Emmanuel Macron all I can think of is how

condescending you are you condescended to us 400 years ago you condescended to us 300 years ago you condescended to us 200 years ago you condescended to us 100 years ago you're condescending to us today you only know

condescension because for you colonialism isn't something that happened in the past and we defeated we defeated you it's not that for you colonialism is a permanent condition and that permanent condition happens in two ways there's the permanent condition of the colonial mentality you want to lecture us you want to tell us that we are responsible for all the problems because you'll never accept that you're the one principally to blame you signed the real formula in 1992 on common and differentiated responsibilities you like the common part you like the common part you like to say we're all in this together and so on we're not in this together the united states four or five percent of the world's population still uses 25 percent of the world's resources you outsource production to china

and then you say china is the carbon polluter china's producing your buckets china's producing your nuts and bolts. China is producing your phones. Try to produce it in your own countries and see your carbon emissions rise. You love lecturing us because you have a colonial mentality. Then there are colonial structures and institutions. You lend us money and every time you lend us money, which is our money, which is our money, every time the International Monetary Fund comes to our societies and they tell us, here's the money we are giving you. We are giving you. No, it's our money. You give us our money. You give us our money. back as debt and then you lecture us about how we should live it's extraordinary it's not just a

colonial mentality it's a colonial structures and institutions which reproduce themselves year after year after year and let me tell you something the climate justice movement not clued enough on this not clued enough on this the climate justice movement is a movement that says we're worried about our future what future what future children in the African continent in Asia in Latin America they don't have a future they don't have a present they're not worried about the future they're worried about their present your slogan is we're worried about the future what future that's a middle-class bourgeois Western slogan you got to be

worried about now 2.7 billion people can't eat now and you're telling people reduce your consumption how does this sound to a child who hasn't eaten in days. You've got a clue into this, guys. You've got a clue into this. Otherwise, this movement will have no legs in the third world. No legs. Later, I'd like to tell you about the International People's Assembly,

a network of 200 political organizations that we're setting up rooted in the global south. We want to tell you what our issues are. But are you willing to listen? But that speech really, like, made me realize, like, I've seen it from like my relatives like they're struggling with water back in Mexico like and and people are people here in the West are thinking about all the future save the future when literally people don't even have water now elsewhere right so like I from seeing that

seeing this whole change of like of framework and understanding like like just studying more about like how the projections of climate change is going to affect us in comparison to the rest of the world I started thinking I changed my mindset towards like yes climate change is going to be bad for America that is for sure people the working class is going to pay the biggest price here but there's already a global working class global peasant class that is already paying the price and that should be that should be like a motivating force for for people to just recognize because yeah it's it's not gonna like how climate change we see it like the the world's going to break up apart and whatever right that's not going to happen but it's going to

still be it's still going to be catastrophic. Just that we need to recognize our global positionality of it.

Right. One thing that the climate change discourse might do for somebody mentally in the imperial core is to start

getting, and not hopefully not communist, but just regular people better than us. And I think when collapse happens, when things get

really scary, a lot of people they don't suddenly become more open. They close down. They get scared. Fascist governments have more of a momentum behind them. And it could be very much,

you know, all against all, or countries against countries. And so that's a fear of mind that people will psychologically adapt that mechanism when they see increasing disasters, particularly in the global South. Instead of saying like, hey, all the wealth and power up in the global north and the imperial core, we can certainly use that money instead of, I don't know, funding a trillion dollar a year fucking military empire, we could start to make sure people have good water access and can help against flooding and can be relocated in humane and decent ways

instead of what's going to come if there's not enough of that global cooperation, which is mass migrations from the global south and the global north. And what happens when you have mass migrations? You have the rise of reaction of fascism. We saw it with the Syrian Civil War as just a fraction of a fraction of what could happen

under climate change. And so that's why I also think, of course, an internationalist approach for organizations and movements like ours is increasingly important. And, yeah, I worry about that. And for some people, the end of the world is already there. If you're a farmer in Madagascar, you know, the apocalypse is upon you.

It's not something that's happening in 30 years, you know? So, yeah. So how does, how has line struggle affected you mentally within like organizations have you witnessed like why struggle affected other people? Yeah, it becomes a very difficult thing. A lot of people are not good at what they perceive to be as conflict.

And so instead of sitting in the discomfort that can come from somebody challenging ideas that are core to you, what a lot of people do is they take the attack on their ideas is attack on the self, you know, and you get that hot feeling. And it's not just some ideas you're critiquing that we're working out together, you're attacking me as a person. People feel that way, whether that is conditioned or just, you know, humans and social

animals, trying to figure out where they stand amongst their social peers, whatever it is, that can be a real problem. So what tends to happen is not robust, healthy, internal debate handled well such that the organization can get through those contradictions and move on to a higher level. What happens is interpersonal beef, rivalry, splits, break, downs and disintegrations of organizations. I've seen that firsthand in my city over several years, that exact thing played out. And a lot of times, line struggle, as I said earlier, it can be incredibly important. But this is where Mao, for example, talks about contradiction, antagonistic

versus non-intagionistic contradictions and the importance of self-criticism. People will often treat non- antagonistic contradictions as antagonistic in their line struggles, in their organization, and that can destroy them. I've absolutely seen that a lot. But also it's an inevitability that those things will happen if you don't have an organization that is ready to politically educate new members and already has a line that they're working with and trying to establish and develop. When you don't do that or you hold that off until later, the consequences are much,

much worse. And so organizationally, you should go into organization with that already in mind. And I think if you can notice the ways in which you might be conflict diverse, the ways in which you personalize people attacking your ideas, and to see how that feels and to see what that makes you want to do, you can maybe be better equipped to understand how it plays out in other people's minds and hearts and try to hedge against that a little bit as well. But, you know, these things are not easy, and it's more than just our conditioning. I think it's human to act in these ways. And the ego will want to defend itself when it feels it's under attack. And so when the ego is in a defensive posture, it is not in a posture that is amendable to healthy working through of problems or whatever. Once it's in that posture, it's ready to just run away, fight, flight, freeze, whatever it may be.

And so that's a problem. And those things can be headed off by good organizational structure from the get-go and not putting off those issues until they become real problems. absolutely when you talk about antagonistic and non-antagonistic conflicts when you talk about like non-antagonistic conflicts becoming antagonistic are you talking about like sex within or more broadly no more broadly than that I was thinking I don't know something like you're in an organization you're trying to do tenant organizing and you know one person's an anarchist and one person is a Marxist and then you have a debate about the Bolsheviks, right? That's a non-antagonistic contradiction between you and that person and that organization. That organization doesn't depend on what you think about Stalin and Trotsky or, you know, the

Bolsheviks. And so those are important. You can have those discussions because there's theoretical stuff that comes out of those in organizations. But I've seen those non-antagonistic contradictions be treated as if they are antagonistic and then destroy an organization who's doing something like tenant organizing where it doesn't fucking matter. You know? Am I allowed to guess that?

Yeah, yeah. But it doesn't matter half the time, and that's what I mean by that. But what did you mean when you're talking about, like, like, sex within organizations? Or what were you thinking in terms of that? Okay. So I feel like within organizations that I've been part of, antagonistic relationships that are actually antagonistic are treated as non-antagonistic. Oh, I see. Like, I've seen where people, like, within any circle, men have the inclination of, like, of,

just speaking, just speaking, just having much more confidence, much more comfortability to talk about things. Totally. And whether, whether, you know, that is, even with, like, the actions of, like, implementing the respect of other people, like a stack system, people and men still feel very much, much more comfortable with that and take space, which, like, this, This doesn't just play with generals and within an organization.

This also plays with the colonial question. I've encountered many organizations where they talk about like cellular colonialism as something that has happened in the United States, but the contradictions of it are in the past or they're just not that relevant in the discussion. and or they just frame it some something else and they don't really identify or try to put it to the importance of other things absolutely and i've witnessed many like just conversations within organizations that just like it's it's something you know it's it's happening but hey we we got more important things to think about at the moment so that's that's one problem I've encountered those those are two antagonistic problems which are that are treated like as

as non antagonistic at all right and I feel like I think that mostly of course that comes from the same place that non antagonistic problems become antagonistic it's it's a just a focus on egoism a focus on individualism and and and frankly a compromising of of what you actually supposedly believe in. Absolutely. And that is a detriment to the left and has pushed many organizations back. Absolutely.

That's a great point. Yeah. So I was saying earlier how non-intaginistic contradiction can be treated as antagonistic fallaciously, but the reverse is also true. Misogyny in organizations is a great example whereby it's just like it's not that big of a deal. We have bigger fish to fry.

You know, don't let this stop us. But no, it actually is stopping you. by not addressing it. So that's one of the ways in which real antagonisms within organizations that need to be resolved are treated as if they're not that important. Settler colonialism is another one. The contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat

is filtered through in the colonial context the colonial contradiction between the colonized and the colonizer. And so if you're serious about class struggle, you're serious about understanding contradiction and the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, you have to understand that that,

contradiction is filtered through the lens of settler colonialism such that the main contradiction in society can be that between the colonized and the colonizer. And to not take that seriously, to disregard that or to say, hey, that's just something that happened in the past. You know, we're working right here. We had to focus on class struggle. It's you're actually, you're actually debasing yourself a little bit. You're actually not focusing on how class struggle actually works and how it actually manifests in the settler colonial context. So those are, those are two wonderful examples of that what about when it comes to line struggle how does how does the idea of burnout or overinvestment play rule yeah i'm not sure about how that relates to to to line struggle

in general um i mean do you want me to give like further context yeah so when there's been discussions that I feel like I've engaged with people is that there's certain times when people get into organizing spheres and then they very much spent all their time like all their

they just don't have like a personal life in a sense and they treat their organizing as the thing that their whole life is centered around and that becomes comes from that focus of thinking that organizing is their whole life, they have this expectation of other people. They're doing the same thing.

And then from that, they get frustrated and they develop this sense of the implicit superiority. Like, I do a lot of all these things for all of you. And all of you don't recognize this. What is what's going on? and then from that over time some people either they became they become very sectarian or they just get burnt out right they just get they just get eaten from from just organizing so much and not setting these these healthy boundaries of other things in their life so it's a great yeah it's a great point balance is so essential and one thing i've noticed and you know this this happens

more than we think. People can use even organizing as an escape from their own lives. People use drugs. We know that. People use distraction like entertainment. We know that. People use the internet, God, we know that. People can also use organizing as an escape from their own problems, their own internal investigation, their own interpersonal relationship with their family and friends, and can put themselves fully into it such that it becomes a detriment. They're off balance. They get burned out. And they have this toxic effect on other people at times as well. And so I think that's really, it's really an important part of, I mean, individually, you have to take responsibility for your own self and the balances of your own life and try to

parse things out in a way that actually works for you and can work for the long term. But also organizationally, there's probably a lot of obligation and responsibility that organizations have to try to identify those sorts of trends within an organization when they happen, create maybe even like one thing that we've experimented with in the past in Omaha, you know, was doing, as an organization, making sure we planned things to do that were more or less fun, that we could all get together and just be friends, just be human beings for a while, and then we can get back to work after that. It could be going, we had fun doing karaoke, stuff like that, just fun events.

And that can be one way organizationally where you can kind of hedge against burnout by making certain events, fun, bringing you together as members, as friends, and going through, like, having fun experiences together can kind of be a release of certain forms of stress that come with organizing, et cetera. And I'm sure there's lots more creative ways organizations can hedge against that as well and the various forms that it takes. Because burnout, you know, one thing that happens in organizations, for example, that's kind of related to this, is let's say you have, you know, a mother in your organization, you know? And you have like a 19-year-old, you know, college student with less responsibilities in the organization.

And that, you know, that college student, I'm just using these as archetypes examples, you know, might want to do this or that or keep going or let's do another meeting or let's, you know, work through this or let's stage this event and not necessarily take into account how that impacts, you know, the other person with these other responsibilities. And I actually have seen that as well. And it obviously disproportionately falls on the women within organizations a lot of the time. So those are things to definitely be on the lookout for and to work against organizationally. And then just individually, like I said earlier, trying to strike that right balance. And you can get feedback from your comrades in an organization, from your family within your family unit, from your friends, and kind of see, am I striking this balance correctly? Do I feel as if I am and do the people around me feel as if I am? And I think that's important.

And organizations can go a long way with helping their members to try and do that. But it's a real problem. It's a real problem. People burn out all the time. I feel the intensity of it at times as well. Everybody does. I think if you get into organizing at any real level, you will come face to face at some point

with the possibility of your own burnout and your own dejection in the face of it, you know? Absolutely. How does conflict avoidance within an organization when engaging in line struggle result into alienation? Yeah, I mean, one thing jumps to mind is that people who are less able or less person the personality is less inclined to be assertive

can sometimes feel like they get steamrolled by others who are so you could be in an ostensible line struggle but the sides aren't even you know some people like and then it's also like a disparity of knowledge so you know people are really well-intentioned in an organization they don't know as much about the theoretical stuff but a couple people really do and they're the hardcore

sectarians, you know, and they want to make sure that we're carrying out line struggle in a proper way. Other people aren't equipped for it. Don't necessarily want to admit that. Nobody wants to admit. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't really know what my position even is on this. And I think that can happen a lot with conflict avoidant people, you know, or even in the disparity of knowledge between different members within a group. So if you're a conflict avoidant person, somebody else in the organization with an opposite line is much more assertive, then the lion's struggle could result out in a way that doesn't actually, it isn't actually a consequence of who's right and what's actually more effective for the organization.

It's a consequence of who's less conflict avoidant, who's more assertive, who knows more theoretical words that they can throw in, and then you split up an organization between that, and that can become very unhealthy, that can make people feel very alienated. Maybe I don't know as much as this person does, but I don't really agree with them, but I don't know how to phrase my disagreement. And then you start to become an alienated. Well, maybe it's best if I don't even engage in that. Maybe I just just not even go to the next meeting.

Because I don't really want to go through that. It makes me feel feelings that I don't like. So, you know, that happens a lot. And I like how you kind of phrase the liberalism, the default to liberalism, when there's like not enough and the devolution into commandism when there's too much of these fights or disparities and inequalities. within an organization. And so you've got to kind of thread that line.

And you have to create context in which line struggles can be carried out in a way where everybody feels that they're heard, that, you know, they're safe, that they can even exercise and get better at the capacity of asserting themselves. And really good organizers will be able to detect those disparities before they erupt into real problems and try to solve them in a humane and decent way. I mean, that's what organization is. organizational leaders, how can I effectively organize people? You have to be a people person. You have to understand all sides of a certain debater, whatever, you have to understand how this person's conflict avoidance

might mean that they don't get enough of a say in a line struggle, and then you compensate by stepping in for them, right? These are how really effective leaders operate within organizations. And if you are somebody that's in a leadership position in an organization, you would do well to really try to build up those capacities within yourself i would say this is like the hardest thing to address within an organizing circle but how has past trauma of yourself and others unfolded and affected within your organizing do you have like an example when i think about this i'm thinking about like discussing like I think like

whether it's just like procedural like I've had like the whole I think a lot of the I don't know how I don't know what I was thinking about this question I think

when I was thinking about this question I was thinking about like how people engage with like certain topics and then they just can't engage with it because they just it's it's a too difficult topic to talk about with them or um like whether something within the organization reminds them of like previous trauma so like engaging in like a discussion um this is this has happened within our organization where where I unconsciously raise my voice

or I just speak loud and that's that that becomes trigger something for people. Absolutely. How, like from what you've seen, I don't know how to phrase this in a way that's like, that's not,

that's specific. But, um, shit. Within, organizing and line struggle how has how have you wrestled with the trauma of yourself and of other people's when trying to decide on actions decide on the most littlest of things and the biggest of things yeah it's a tough one because i don't know if i have a lot of experience applying that stuff to an organization or working through it organizationly or even have the experience of people within organizations telling us that here's their traumas and

here's what here's what sort of you know triggers them or whatever um i would say that insofar as we all have various forms of we could call trauma there's a lot of things that fits under that umbrella um it serves us well to be conscious of that you can kind of get into like psychoanalysis here and talk about the shadow side or elements of your past that you try to repress within yourself and I think repression of anything is always going to lead to that thing coming out in an unhealthy or more neurotic way and that can obviously happen in the context of organizing when the stakes are high and the emotionality is high I mean you're in situations so like there's been situations where we've we've been traumatized in the process of organizing yeah

we had a rally in 2017 where we were confronting a lot of these you know neo-fascist Trump supporters as Antifa at the time. And we, the police crackdown was completely one-sided and brutal on us. Pepper balls, physical assaults, really getting fucked up. And, you know, a lot of people, some of the younger people had not experienced that level of violence and insanity. Bangs going off and people getting hit with pepper spray, huge horses, getting corralled by horses. That's a violent situation. We had a trans member of our organization get arrested, dead named, and put into the side of the jail that was not the gender that they were identifying with.

And like it actually almost even makes me tear up a little bit now because I do, I just remember that that sort of crying and the fear that came along with that for that person. and I don't want to give any information, of course. But kick that person completely out of organizing. Never saw him again. And there was only so much we could do as an organization to try to help that person. But, you know, you can even see now in my reactions, like you can get traumatized while doing this stuff.

And it's really hard organizationally to prevent that. And, you know, when you're in the hands of the police and the state, you are utterly helpless. And that alone feels, incredibly dispowering and alienating. So that's one of the ways that trauma manifests, and I just don't have a good answer as to how to address that, other than the multifaceted work that we all have to do on ourselves,

therapeutically, existentially, and then, you know, trying as much as we can within organizations to try to account for that, but it's certainly not easy. And a lot of these events that you go into, sometimes we weren't really expecting that. You know, this was not an expectation of ours that it would happen this. way. And so that was probably a lack of foresight on our side and what that could mean for people. I mean, even, you know, my wife was arrested at that and was the first time she was manhandled

by a police officer, a full grown man. So yeah, those things are incredibly difficult. And there's no good way around them, but trauma absolutely will impact your organizing, whether that's previous trauma you're bringing into it and getting triggered in the context of trying to organize or the very real trauma that comes from organizing itself or you know we talked earlier about the trauma of the 2020s and watching video after video of innocent human beings being slaughtered on camera that that hurts our hearts you know and a lot of us don't deal with it and and that can come out in other ways as well unhealthy ways neurotic ways toxic ways even so I don't have a great answer other than to point towards all the trauma that we all have to know probably a dispiriting answer

but that's the best I can do. Thanks for sharing. I think to talk about like just shifting towards like spirituality, talking about trauma, that's, I think the thing that really like is troubling to even talk about the S word spirituality.

Yeah, yeah. Because I feel like that's like the number one form of trauma that I'm, exposed to from people spiritual trauma yeah spiritual religious trauma and it's just like it's a very like talking about religion talking about spirituality talking about talking about the concept of god and higher being oh yeah that is just like for many people it's it just reminds them of of of a past that they just don't want to think about totally and I guess like that that's that's why it's like I it's so it's difficult to talk about that thing in within circles of of the left and and and and of course like the left the left is typically the circle that goes against institutionalized religion so historically for sure yeah I think like the and this is like one I don't know if you have like really an answer to this but like how

do you how do you bring up the topic of like spirituality in a way that still respects and acknowledges people's past experiences with it sure i would say organizationally i haven't really had that discussion i cannot say that in an organization that i've been in we've sat down and we've talked about and tried to integrate spirituality writ large into our program yeah um there was a time in which we were doing some physical activity together and a bunch of these sort of like challenges that we would do as a group physical exertion and taking care of each other out in like a you know camping situation hiking situation in the winter for example just to kind of build up resilience and fortitude um and um i don't know where i was going with that i just lost

the train of thought um oh okay and in that context there was a lot of talk about like oh brett you're in you've meditated for a long time maybe you could just integrate some meditation techniques and it never ended up happening but that was the closest we ever got organizationally to talking about it. Now political education which I take as a form of the organizing I do and political education I do

came out of organizing directly. That can be a little different because we talk about those subjects and I'm not sure that that's a really good point about people's religious trauma and being able to talk about it. I mean I don't know I wouldn't say I had religious trauma but I had a deep reaction to a certain

period of my young life where I was in the Catholic Church. Nothing bad happened to me or anything, but I rebelled against that hardcore and became like a new atheist in late teens, early 20s, the really annoying type, you know, for whatever. It was my hill to die on for a while. That was probably alienating to a lot of people. But then I came back full circle and realized that the religious impulse, the spiritual impulse, the human relationship to the infinite, to the mystery of the cosmos, to the mystery of our own consciousness and our own existence, these are deeply human questions. And there's a lot to be said there.

And the atheist who just handwaves it all away as superstition and ignorance, I think, is just as ignorant as the people that they're claiming to disparage. But I think ultimately, I don't know how to heal people's religious traumas. I think spirituality, authentic spirituality, is different than religious dogma. A lot of the religious traumas people experience is by taking their religion, turning it into a dead doctrine, a dogma. and then beating other people over the head with or getting beat over the head with this dead dogma. And I see spirituality as the antidote to that as this living expression of the infinite as this deeper and deeper attempt to know yourself and your relation to everything else internally, you know, through certain spiritual practices as fundamentally different from the very type of religion that traumatizes people.

And then another point that comes up in these conversations is that, you know, you mentioned how, a communist in the past have been very hostile to religion. And for good reason, they're coming out of feudalism pretty within living memory almost. The monarchism and the divine right of kings and the suffocating, you know, power of the church. You know, these were things to rebel against at a certain time. But now I think things have shifted a bit. I don't think religion is as much of an antagonistic contradiction with our politics as it once might have been. those perhaps in places and at certain times it could be but ultimately I think religion is a terrain of struggle that the left should operate on

so instead of having this dismissal of religion what you do when you dismiss it and you say we're atheists as communists in the past have definitely done is you hand over the entire religious terrain to the right and say we're not fighting on the terrain we're rejecting the terrain we don't have anything to do with it so then all people have is the right to go to and the right welcome with open arms yeah come on over we'll talk to you about God So the religion, whether it's a specific religion, whether it's a spiritual practice, whatever it may be, is a terrain of struggle the left should operate on.

And instead of being against religion, we should find ways to articulate religion in religious traditions in ways that very easily coincide with our goals. You know, I might not know a lot about, I was raised in a Christian culture. So that's what I'm mostly more than Judaism or Islam. I know Christianity pretty well. And I know that there is plenty within not only the Christian religion, but the fuck. the Gospels, the message in life of Jesus Christ himself that is not as completely in line with socialist and communist politics and utterly antithetical to hardcore reactionary, fascist, or even capitalist politics. And the fact that we've abandoned that terrain and we've handed it over to our enemies is a situation where now we have to dig ourselves out of a hole because a lot of people now associate like the message of Jesus Christ with right-wing evangelicals or the prosperity gospel preached at these mega-churches.

And so that's what happens when we abandon that terrain. So we should fight on it. We should claim it. And I think there's equally as much stuff in Islam. And I know there are Islamic communists and progressive Muslims that do this exact thing within that context. And certainly it's true with Judaism as well. You know, I think with every, I always say this with every religion, there's a political spectrum there. You know, there's hardcore right-wing fundamentalists, you know, and they're super progressive and liberatory-minded people and a lot of people in between.

And so instead of chopping off that poll and giving the right. the win, we should fight on those terrains. And if you have religious people who are deeply committed to their religion saying, hey, you know how you're dedicating your entire life to following Jesus Christ? Well, let me show you why, you know, this message of Christ is perfectly in line with our socialist politics and how it's actually antithetical to these right-wing, bigoted, you know, politics that you hear on Fox News or antithetical to this free market, hyper-individualist, you know, ideological hegemony that we're conditioned with under capitalism,

We have real debate to win. I think the cards are on our side in a lot of these debates, and we should not forego those, but we should actually challenge the right and the center on the religious terrain. So I think, like, one other aspect I do want to think about, because, like, I have encountered people that do talk about this. What about the aspect of the aspect of, of like sometimes talking about like religion like religions of like an other context

especially like Islam or Buddhism some people feel this sense this kind of comes from like a perspective of like orientalism how orientalism in the sense of cultural appropriation yeah okay yeah like they, it feels like they like obviously, well this is, when I, when I think about like orientalism with like Islamic tradition and like people

just co-opting it, a lot of people online of Islamic circles talk about like Andrew Tate. Yeah. And how he basically like, I don't know if he like converted him. Like he reverted to Islam. But I think he said something like

that and he just used as a as an excuse to objectify Muslim women so and then saying that his reactionary misogyny actually is perfectly in line with Islam which yeah if I was Muslim I would take that as insane offensively yeah yeah so I feel like sometimes talking about like faiths of like that are that people have to be like defensive about whether it is with Islam or like just talking with like with Buddhism like like when when when I first like listen to you talking about Buddhism in your podcast like back in like I think it was perhaps 2019 2020 and I didn't really know about Buddhism at all yeah I was like this this this kind of feels like like it just reminds me of like when when I heard like Steve Jobs

talking about Buddhism right right and like how all these these Silicon Valley people talked and I just kind of dismissed it. But then recently, now that I've gone much more serious about spirituality, now that I've looked at it, my opinion is not the same at all. So how would you navigate with that topic? Great, great question. And I actually have people, you know, like white people from the West that say, I love this tradition, but I've been called out, like, you know, expressing or sharing something with Buddhist or whatever it may be. You know, some people have called that out as cultural appropriation. I would just say there are as obvious. legitimate forms of cultural appropriation where you're demeaning a culture, you're using

it as a mascot, you're taking this imagery without respect and using it, you're profiting off of it without respecting or engaging in the struggles that come with that identity or that group. So there's absolutely forms of cultural appropriation. But I also believe that on the other end, these traditions are universalist traditions. The Buddha and Jesus were not just talking to the people that were in their country. You know, they're talking to the whole world. Muhammad is the same, you know, I would say every religion. is largely open to everybody in various forms and there's different ways of doing that.

But these are universal paths and traditions that have cultural starting points and that were deeply shaped by those cultures. And you can't just extract something like Buddhism, take it over into hyper-capitalist America and say, hey, if you meditate on your lunch break, you'll be more productive. That's cultural appropriation.

You're lopping off everything beautiful and interesting and fascinating about not only the tradition itself, but the cultures they come out of, and you're just using it in this very utilitarian way. This is now just a tool for us to do something else. That's disgusting. But I think that if you're

somebody in the West, you can absolutely engage with the message of the Buddha, because the Buddha was talking about the human condition. And same with Jesus. I don't care what part of the world. You could be in the furthest part of the world away from Christianity's dominance and still find beauty and meaning within what Jesus has to say about the human condition.

and how to overcome it. So, you know, I think it's important not to remove these traditions from their cultural contexts and as much as you possibly can understand that tradition in relation to its actual the cultures that it came from and respect those cultures. Because I think if you do it the right way in a respectful engagement, it can open you up to a whole new world. Because through my, you know, I'm trying to get out of suffering, so I get into Buddhism because it offers me a realistic path to try to deal with some of this stuff. And then I'm introduced to Chinese history.

I'm introduced to Taoism and Confucianism. I'm introduced to how Buddhism manifests in Korea, how it manifests in Thailand, how it manifests in Japan, you know, how the migration of Buddhism through China hit with Taoism, created Chan Buddhism, then migrated to Japan where it became Zen Buddhism. That's beautiful. It's dialectical. It's evolutionary. That's a beautiful thing. And I learned a lot about those traditions and those cultures through that investigation. Now, as a westerner, somebody raised in the U.S. under Christian religion, there's lots within Buddhism,

especially older texts and certain things that they used to illustrate their points that are very alien to me. And that's going to be sort of inevitable. And so there's something that is to be said for cultures or traditions that started in a different culture, coming to a new culture and morphing and evolving along with that new culture. And I think Buddhism is a beautiful example of that. You know, Buddhism started in the Indian subcontinent in northern India. It spread all over Asia. You know, when it got into China, it wouldn't be like, hey, this is an Indian tradition

and culture. We shouldn't say anything about it. You know, we shouldn't culturally, of course not. This thing moves in there, and then it takes on a Chinese characteristic, and the beautiful flowering occurs of the various forms of Chinese Buddhism. And then it goes to a different culture, interacts with that history, that culture, the tradition's already existing there. Something beautiful unfolds.

Same with Islam, same with Christianity. You know, these were, at some point, new ways of thinking, new religions that were moving into cultures with different histories, different traditions, different religious impulses that were alien to it. And instead of, in some cases, it probably dominated and destroyed those earlier existing ones, but in a lot of instances, it mingled with them and evolved. And if we see these religious traditions, not as siloed into cultures forever, but as living, morphing, evolving traditions, that, of course, are going to come into contact with different cultures and change, but in beautiful ways, as long as you respect the deep core that's there, we can open ourselves to it. We should, of course, be aware of cultural appropriation. We should engage with these traditions as respectfully as we can. We should learn as much about them as possible.

But I also would not want to foreclose on that, because I think at some point, and this is kind of provocative, but if you take the cultural appropriation logic too far, you start to agree with, like, white nationalists. Like, this is our culture. this is our religion, keep out, you know, and don't you dare, you know. And we should live like, black people should live with black people, white people should live. Well, I mean, eventually you get there if you take that logic too far. So we got to find a middle way, as it were, between the extremes of cultural siloing and don't touch and how dare you. And, you know, the opposite end of that spectrum.

So, yeah, I think, but that's a very good question and something that if you're going to engage with something like Buddhism, take it seriously, respect the cultures it comes out of, learn about those cultures and those histories along with the philosophies and the spirituality of the thing you're studying. And that can hedge against a lot of the most more grotesque elements of Orientalism and co-option. Yeah, absolutely. So when it comes to speaking more about like practice,

like spiritual practice, what have been the forms of spiritual practice that you've witnessed, that you've engaged yourself, and how has that? that affected you, the process? Yeah, deeply. The forms of spiritual practice that I really engage in, and I've tried other ones for sure,

but it's the down-the-line Buddhist meditation. You know, it has different iterations. There's Vipasana versions of meditation. You know, there's Zogchen versions of meditation. Every different school of Buddhism might emphasize a little slightly different thing about meditation or the way to practice it. But if you engage with it enough,

you understand that there is this way in which meditation is fundamentally about turning awareness back on itself, about quieting the mind and becoming very interested in investigating how the mind works, how it generates emotions, the links between thoughts and emotions, how thinking produces the feeling of a thinker, or this, you know, we call it no self in Buddhism, this, you know, the illusion of self is this product of incessant thinking. And when you can quiet down, stop identifying with your thoughts, but treat them as objects, right? Because when we are talking to ourselves in our heads, we're identified with it. We're thinking, it's us talking to ourselves, you know?

Now, this is really my internal voice talking. And the brain just, it's a linguistic organ. It spits out language. You know, like if you sit down in a silent room by yourself, what will the brain do? And I talk about this in the speech, it just will start talking to itself. And if you pay attention to how it talks to itself, a lot of that is blabbering nonsense. A lot of it is like half-remembered jingles. from a commercial he saw like 20 years ago

and like a thing you're worried about doing next week and this embarrassing thing that happened to you in fourth grade. The mind is just a mess. It's all over the place. And when you're identified with it, you're lost in the delusion. You're just, you're in this sort of trance.

It really is a sort of trance. And then when you can become aware of those, that thought is not me, my brain just produces thoughts like an engine produces smoke, you know? And I don't have to identify with those thoughts. I can watch them. I can become interested in them.

There's certainly a place for thought. In Buddhist Enlightenment, it's not never thinking a thought again, which I thought as a teenager when I first got into it. I'm like, oh, yeah, enlightened people must just turn off the voice inside their head forever once and for all, you know. And I've been kind of disabused of that notion. But the ability to be quiet for periods of time internally, to not have the internal chatter.

You begin to see how what you took to be yourself was a product of incessant chatter. And you become more and more aware. of the ways in which you are not synonymous with that chatter. By going through that process, you unlock the experiences. I'll put it that way. And these experiences are going to be different. But when you do this process long enough, things start to happen within you.

And I've really gotten the sense at the deepest parts of my spiritual practice where I am being done by the practice. Something is flowing through me. I am not sitting down and making anything happen. I am not on a spiritual path. At a certain point, you begin to feel as if there's something moving through you and you are sort of superfluous to this process, you know, as it were. So that's impacted me absolutely profoundly.

It's shown me how so much of the suffering that I encounter myself, how every existential crisis I've ever had has all been tied fundamentally to the sense that I am a separate little self somewhere between behind my eyes, in between the ears, looking out at a world that is fundamentally not me. I'm placed into this world, and I'm trembling little thing looking out, and one day I'm going to be utterly annihilated, that causes immense amounts of suffering, you know. But ultimately, through Buddhism, through Buddhist practices, and other practices as well, in other traditions, you can come to no longer identify with that trembling little voice in your

head. It's still needed. When you go to the bank and you're asked what your social security number is you know you're going to need to come up with that you're not you're not you don't all of a sudden become like some blob you know that doesn't know who they are or anything but it stops being a master and starts being a servant it the ego and the voice in your head that's a tool that can be picked up and used when necessary and when it's not necessary it's set aside we're never trained that so we don't turn the thing off it becomes our master and all sudden you're laying in bed and you turn all the lights off and it just goes crazy and you're just thinking of every possible crazy thing that's happened to you. Every terrible thing. What is anxiety, if not, incessant

concern about the future and what's going to happen and how all things can go wrong? And then you get yourself worked up into a tizzy, you know? Depression is often a feeling of identifying with this moody voice in your head that says, you know, life is shit. You're not worth anything. You know, you're just a pile of shit anyway. There's nothing worth doing. Once we start identifying with that voice in all the little ways in which it works and all the ways it's been conditioned, creates a lot of suffering for us. So spiritual practice is fundamentally about altering your relationship to yourself, your own consciousness, your own existence, seeing through the illusion of that little

trembling, incessant, chattering voice inside your head, being able to set aside, at least for moments at a time, and seeing what is there and who you really are in lieu of that little voice. You know, who am I really when I'm silent? You know, when I'm not talking to myself in my head, I'm not projecting and reifying an idea of who I am, who am I in that moment? And you can come to some really stark and beautiful conclusions by engaging in that practice.

So it's transformed to me in every single level. You know, it helped me grow up. It blew open my heart to the point where, you know, I just feel insane compassion and love for complete strangers in a way that I never did before I started engaging with this practice. Tears, I cannot watch another person. and cry without feeling that on some level that's a product of my you know engagement with these practices um yeah just and the benefits are and i'm no one to be very clear like and this can be a

weird conversation about enlightenment who is and isn't nowhere near you know i'm just a dude trying my best using these practices as much as i can uh do not claim any accomplishment do not acclaim any enlightenment whatsoever um and we can there's debates about what enlightenment even is but the spiritual practices in and of themselves are incredibly, incredibly beneficial. And I truly think with the right practice for the right person and hopefully even with a good teacher, this can be beneficial to everybody in really profound ways. Wow. Yeah.

That hit a lot of points. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Yeah, um, so being a radical empath is the answer. Yeah, and there's a whole meme about people that call themselves empaths. There's a whole meme about like dudes who never felt empathy and they take mushrooms one time and all of a sudden feel empathy for the first time. I am a bodhisattva. Um, so these things can also be cartoonish and we can make, we don't take ourselves too seriously.

Um, but yeah, yeah, it's interesting. How has, uh, nature? helped you along the way with this because I know it's very interesting because like me listening to your show has really like re-enjuvenated like my appreciation of nature. I love that so much. Thank you so much for saying that.

So how has nature played a role in that? Well, first of all, the imagery, let's take something like Zen Buddhism. To engage with Zen Buddhism is to engage with some of the most beautiful poetry and writing about the natural world, imagery, metaphor is used, and just Zen Buddhism alone, it's going to drag you into nature in some level. Nature is the way things actually are when you're not talking to yourself in your head. So once you can get some internal quiet, you can really relate to nature in a whole new way. One of the things that you go out and spend some time by yourself

in nature, the momentum of the ego and the social roles we play will still drag on for a long bit of time. You're standing in front of a beautiful mountain. We've all had this experience, even of hiking to a peak, and you get there and you kind of, on some level, expect this ecstatic. But you just talk to yourself again. It's like, my legs are kind of cold and my foot hurts and, oh, I can't wait till later tonight. We get to go to that new restaurant and try that food. Oh, this walk back's going to suck ass. Meanwhile, you're like looking at this beautiful sunset, not even really engaging with it. So, you know, when you start, when you can start quieting your mind a little bit, nature really pops. And the vividy and beauty of nature really can

can grasp you, but I would even take it further and say, even aside from any spiritual practices, go out, if you go out and spend a lot of time in nature, by yourself, I mean, you have to probably do this for multiple days in a row to get the benefits. Something shifts within you. All the social roles you're used to playing, all the small talk, getting your coffee in the morning, talking to your coworkers, 24, you know, all these social relationships were embedded in. We're playing roles. You know, I'm putting on the mask, and this is not in a cynical away. This is what we do. I'm a father and then I'm a co-worker and then

I'm a neighbor and then I'm a son to my mom and a sister to, you know, a brother to my sister, etc. All these roles and we're constantly shifting between them and we're great at it. You're human beings. You go out in nature for long enough and you don't have those pressures infringing on you.

It alone is enough to kind shed some of that role playing, some of that mask wearing and you can really get in tune with yourself and become like child. And become like childlike and awe of the beauty and complexity of nature all over again, outside of any practices just by immersing your mind in nature without having to perform socially for anybody. I think it's a completely and profoundly healing place to be.

And insofar as you're engaging in spirituality to heal or to suffer less, it's a natural, natural friendship and companionship to do it out in nature. And I started a lot of my meditation. I live with my parents when I started. I don't want to be walked in on or here, there, whatever. You know, I just wanted to, like, kind of go out into a place where I could be by myself and I'd go out to the banks of the Missouri River and, you know, summer, winter, whatever, find a rock, nobody's out there, just sit down for a long time.

And I really learned how to meditate in that context of going out into the woods, into, you know, the banks of the river and sitting down and getting really quiet inside. And a bunch of amazing things happen or can have. happen. One of the things is which if you go into nature by yourself and you sit down and be quiet for a long time, nature floods back in. You know, when you're walking down a trail, the little squirrels and the mice and the birds, you know, they flutter away. Keep distance. This is a loud, you know, person tromping through the thing. This could be a predator. You go down and you sit really quietly. All of a sudden you'll see a bird land on the, you know, branch next to you. A little chipmunk walk up, smell your, you know, boot and walk on. You know, like, you start to feel yourself to be one with it. And you can, you can start to start. to behave and operate in nature in a way that you're not trampling through and you know forging a path but you're actually working with nature and being quiet in

your own mind letting nature fill that void where usually your own chattering mind usually is it can be profoundly spiritually invigorating but also just existentially therapeutic yeah yeah that i i i recently relistened the the episode you did with mexie where it gave that same explanation about like how nature just comes back that's like that's something that i like it's so profound like really you just you become one with it absolutely it's just like that is like a feeling you just people like people are associated that oh human in nature something that is like completely separate you have to uh there's this economy that we have to handle nature and like um like that the academy tries to address it in a sense that like oh we have to there's

different ways of looking at nature but but i've always like that that's kind of ridiculous because like we're part of nature we just obviously have like um there there's been many ways that have distanced ourselves in it yes and just like having that thought of like just being having that reemergence is just like it's it's an experience that is like unlike it absolutely and and that fundamental alienation that we feel from the natural world that results in the mindset of its man versus nature that is that is the psychological dichotomy behind literally colonialism yeah it's it's the psychological you know momentum behind climate change and in eco you know side eco collapse mass extinction

nature we're not nature become conscious working in harmony and utterly dependent on everything nature gives to us including ourselves we're something else placed into nature fighting it trying to tame it trying to beat it into submission you know and part of the colonial forging of racism is you know this this this slur of calling indigenous people savages even women were seen as nature right they were seen as synonymous with nature and and men and the intellect of men, you know, the enlightened mind was the thing that had to go out and tame and dominate it. So you can see how that's not only a very unhelpful way to think and an incorrect way to think, but it's behind everything that's terrible in the world to some degree, you know,

whether that's settler colonialism, whether that's the destruction of the natural world, whether that's just a society in which every major city you go into, there's people sleeping in the gutters. Yeah. You know, and Phoenix is no different. Oh, yeah. Seattle's no different. I've been to many cities.

Omaha is no different. It's a smaller city, so not as much of it. But that's alienation. Because when we're alienated from nature, we're alienated from ourselves. We're alienated from one another. And so that breach creates misery and suffering on world historic scales. And I think part of the period we're in right now as a civilization and as a species is coming back dialectically to understanding our utter connectedness

and our embeddedness within nature and I think us on the communist left and even perhaps Buddhist or people that are engaged in spirituality that can see this interconnectedness have a real role to play in re-centering that non-dicotidating that dichotomy. In Buddhism when you get to quiet the mind enough and this is also core to the Enlightenment experience

is the experience of non-duality, the collapse of subject and object. So you are no longer in here talking to yourself, looking out in an alien world, but you literally experience, not intellectually, in your bones, as if there is no separation. There is no subject and object.

There just is experience, you know? And it's not me having the experience, me appropriating the experience. It's just experience unfolding. And there's no me inside and no world outside, the boundaries become blurry, fuzzy, and then eventually, for some people,

can dissolve away entirely. And that is an experience within Buddhism called the non-dual experience, the experience of looking out at the world and feeling yourself to be, feeling in your bones, yourself to be other people and the natural world around you,

looking up at the night sky, not feeling, I'm just a little nothing, a little ant, looking up at the enormity of an indifferent cosmos, but looking up into the, cosmos and saying that's me you know that's me and that is a spiritual um accomplishment the world accomplishment is a little shitty there but you know that's that's an expression of the authentically

spiritual that's it or can be one of them wow um speaking about dialectics yeah um i know you love talking about how does how can you um how do you um how do you um how do you you balance like the ideas of like dialectical materialism with with this i don't know like change of perspective like this this different outlook of like the buddhism stuff yeah yeah well that's going to be the huge part of the speech the speech i'm going to get very much into exactly that um but i believe and the speech will hopefully cash this out um that buddhism while it might not be dialectical materialist because the materialist is in the materialist part of historical and dialectical materialism is the assertion that things there's no supernatural or metaphysical explanation we can

understand nature on its own terms we don't need to reference something outside of nature to make sense of it right so materialism could be in the darwinian conception of life evolution via natural selection it's a dialectical process and i'll explain that deeply in the speech itself it's also a materialist one because it says this is the laws of nature. They're knowable and they occur and there's nothing outside of nature that we need to reference to explain them and they produce everything that we see around us in the form of fauna and flora, all life forms on earth. And so that's a completely materialistic explanation of life and it's dialectical as well. Now Buddhism and I think a lot of spiritual traditions, especially in the east, I think Taoism

and some forms of Hinduism also do this, are very dialectical. They can be very, be agnostic and often are with regards to the ontological status of idealism versus materialism. You know, is the primary reality, ground of reality material, things that we can study scientifically or that are just in the natural world? Or are they idealists, something having to do with consciousness and ideas above and beyond material, right? So if you're somebody that is religious and you believe in a God, you know, then some articulations of that are like we are in God's mind, right? And so that can that can be an issue. But I would say that Buddhism and a lot of Eastern philosophies are dialectic, even if they're agnostic on the materialism versus

idealism part. And in philosophy, this is called monism. Monism is like neither, we're not saying that material is primary, nor are we saying consciousness or ideas are primary, but we're saying they're both expressions of something even deeper, you know, equal expressions of it. So the claim is that nothing in Buddhism is antithetical to materialism, right? It doesn't need to be. There are religious ways Buddhism manifests in the ways like, you know, devotional, spiritual. There is a heavy, you know, there are different forms of Buddhism that kind of have like a traditional, almost Christian approach to understanding their religion. But that doesn't, it's not all of Buddhism, of course. And I would just, my main point here is not to get too far afield, is just that

dialectically, Marxism and Buddhism both share a dialectical apprehension of the world and concepts like no self, like dependent origination, like impermanence, like non-duality in Buddhism are all deeply dialectical. And then, yeah, the materialist part we can talk about and we can disagree on perhaps, but, you know, that comes later. So Marxism and Buddhism are dialectical. They apprehend the world in that similar way. And I think that's incredibly profound to find those over. overlaps and those synergies, and to see what else we can make of them. And I try to explore some of that in the speech later. How has this practice unfolded with your relationships, with your family, with your friends,

with other people that are in organizing circles? I mean, it's, I feel like if you engage meaningfully, authentically in spiritual practices of this sort, it fundamentally alters who you are and how you relate to yourself, and thus who you are. and how you relate to others. So by no means it makes you a perfect person, an infallible person, a perfectly moral person, absolutely not. We're still human. You're not going to meditate your way out of being a human being.

But you come into contact with your mind at such a deep level, and you understand, once you understand your own mind, you understand profoundly how other people's minds work. Once you understand your own ego, you understand how other people's egos work, and the practice of meditation of setting aside your ego. ego, of not taking it seriously, of using it as a tool, not being dominated by it, creates a space in which you can relate to other people much more patiently, much more compassionately, much more honestly. You're not trying to defend a position. You're not trying to defend your own way of viewing things. You're letting that go. You're openly communicating. You're being honest.

You know, I really take that more and more seriously as I get older. Being honest with people. you know um and i the big thing of course is putting your ego aside being able to engage with people in a way that you're not having to defend any delusions or you know defend your pride or save face but you're trying to work on the problem and and i've found that once you're able to do that on your side you create the capacity on the other side to do that if you meet if you advance with ego and pride you will be met with ego and pride if you advance with him humility and vulnerability and openness and egolessness, you can be met with that same energy. And so whether I'm talking to my wife about a fight we're having or talking to my kids about

something they're doing, if I'm in that right mind state and I'm doing things in a properly ethical and spiritually reifying way, it just shifts all communication and all relationships in the direction of more positivity, of more health. And as a father, you're also setting an example to your kids. So by being able to be vulnerable, by being, you know, openly compassionate towards complete strangers, by showing how, you know, me and their mom can openly and effectively communicate in a way that solves problems and doesn't leave anything on the board, you know, as hanging as resentment or whatever, I'm hoping that that at least sets them on the path to being able to do that themselves. So you can actually break cycles of trauma, of dysfunction within

your family, which my family has plenty of, you can kind of break some of those cycles by doing the necessary spiritual work on yourself and then trying to live, embody those spiritual realizations you might get, embodying them and creating, making them a part of who you are and leading by example. And other people, I'm fascinated by just showing a little vulnerability, the toughest person, the most stoic person in the world. Once they see you being vulnerable, they're 100 times more likely to be vulnerable themselves. And that alone is a huge benefit in interpersonal relationships of any kind.

What are other things that one person can do to improve their well-being in organizing spaces, whether it could be spiritually or just in general? Yeah, so there's lots of ways to take this. One way I think people build up respect for themselves and respect for others is by learning how to take care of themselves. And this means, you know, as simple as, And I always say the four foundations of health, the four pillars of health, consistent, sleep schedule, whole food, nutritious diet, near daily exercise, and meaningful social relations.

So first and foremost, whether you're an organizer or just a human being, look at those four things, sleep, diet, exercise relationships, see where you're lacking and see where you can figure something out to improve those areas of your life. Right there, you're dealing with the core foundations of physical and mental and emotional health. And that's going to create a platform for you to do other things. I think being able to be by yourself is a crucial capacity to have. A lot of people are, if you're never by yourself, you're always playing social roles. If you can get comfortable with being by yourself, I used to, for example, not because I didn't have any friends, but because I was consciously, I enjoy my own company and wanted to do that more, go out to movies by myself, go out to eat by myself,

go out camping by myself, build up that capacity to be alone with yourself, and I think that translates into lots of other healthy character traits that manifest throughout the rest of your relationships. For example, a lot of people today are lonely. They want, they're trying to find a partner, somebody to be with in this epidemic of loneliness, and they're always kind of thinking, if I could just have this person, whatever I could be happy, I could be fulfilled. What I need is just to find the person that can complete me. What they often neglect to do is finding out who they are. Spending time on themselves.

Go out and be by yourself. Build that capacity to be alone with yourself, to know yourself. And that's going to create the sort of character that people are going to be more attracted to. Spending time in nature, of course. It builds respect for nature. It invests within you. You get a sense of investment in the maintenance and health of the continued health of

the natural world. And it builds your connection. your emotional and physical connection to the natural world. So those are all important things to do. If you have, and this is hard in this for-capitalist, for-profit health care system of ours, but if you have certain traumas,

certain childhood traumas, for example, which a lot of us do have, dealing with that in this healthy way as you possibly can, not trying to find not repressing it or trying to find distractions from it, but finding hopefully a therapist or somebody that can help you work through those problems, get that shit under control so it doesn't continue to dominate you in ways you're not even aware of. And then once you handle some of that other stuff,

you can then maybe dive more strongly into organizing on the political side or spiritual practices on the religious side. So those are definitely things I would encourage people to do and get them put out on the right path. But certainly I think meditation is uniquely effective at introducing yourself to you, learning about how the mind works, dealing with your emotional baggage,

and not making it other people's problems, which a lot of people do, projecting their own insecurities or their own issues onto other people, onto the whole world around them, and never dealing with it themselves. These are ways that you sort of lower yourself. and another thing is also facing your fears. So this might sound obvious and even cliche,

but when you're scared of something, when you're anxious about something, you have two options, cave to your anxiety, cave to your fear, turn away from it, refuse to engage in it, and you become a lesser version of yourself,

a more scared version of yourself. If you're scared of something, you're anxious of something, to face it head on, to challenge it, to use that fear and anxiety as a little alarm bell saying, I have some work to do,

you know and to to develop the sort of character that can face your fears and your anxieties and tackle them becomes incredibly important for the vicissitudes of life building the the fortification and the resiliency within yourself to overcome your fears to deal with heavy shit you know to to not be backed down by your anxieties can can build a resiliency that can better equip to you to deal with the ups and downs of life because you can run from your fears and from tragedy and from despair all you want, but life will find a way to shove your face in it. So if you run and you don't build up the capacity to deal with it, you distract yourself, you use substances to escape, whatever it may be,

you lower your capacity to deal with the inevitable tragedies of life, you know. And so finding ways to build resiliency, overcome fear, face your anxieties. For example, public speaking, people are mortified by it. I have my daughter. She's going to go to high school soon. and is actually stopping doing things she loves because she is so self-conscious and so insecure of being put on the spot and that fear of having to get up in front of a crowd and possibly humiliate yourself is so daunting she'd rather stop doing things she loves.

And I tell her, no, like, if you're scared, if you get anxiety about public speaking and you really want to like tackle life and become the sort of person that can deal with it, you should find ways to public speak. And even let yourself fail, you know, let life destroy you and rebuild you. Not being scared of failure is another huge thing, whatever that means to you. Because for every one success you have in life, you'll have three, five, ten failures. And so instead of letting failures dissuade you from trying, you know, make you give up, make you contract and be some lesser version of yourself, say, yeah, I failed.

I'm a human being. Of course I'm going to fail. Failure is the road to success, whatever that means for you. So I don't take failure personally. I take failure as an opportunity to learn, to reorient myself, and to try to. again. And those are just core human things outside of politics or spirituality that could benefit a lot of people. And those people, a lot of people don't have that, don't have somebody to tell them those things, and they go online, and they can become very susceptible to people like Andrew Tate,

like Jordan Peterson, if your personality is so inclined in that direction, these more or less charlatans that try to offer ways of, you know, growing up, of dealing with the shit in life, but offer it in obviously skewed and sometimes very unhelpful ways especially Andrew Tate who's like pure misogyny I'm sure Jordan Peterson might have said like clean up your room Bucco and somebody clean up their room and felt better but I don't take that away from him

but when when you don't do those necessary things you also become more susceptible to charlatans of various sorts and influencers or whatever you know so yeah wow when you when you talked about

your daughter like talking about like basically shutting off like all things in life i basically had that same thing with speaking yeah with public speaking like i say like well it was mostly like coincided with a lot of other things sure but like from that i just felt like very like i couldn't talk to anybody yeah because because because when you recoil from the thing that scares you you you don't solve the problem you exacerbate it yeah now you're now you're now you're even less likely the next time to be able to speak and then now it's not just public speaking it's social interaction in general and then you turn away from that and then you become more isolated and lonely so face it go through it you know and that's always that's always the

better approach yeah i guess like the other point that you're just talking about like you being susceptible to falling into people that are charlatans i think like just like the the the goal of achieving or like striving to find like a mentor a mentor of one that you won't like overly glorify but you will understand that this person has their defects but you can learn from them totally and have many mentors yeah have many mentors from varying ages varying contexts varying perspectives 100% like i i remember there's like this one time like we have like a homie of ours with with mecha his name is simon seillo and he's a uh kind of describes himself as like a guerrilla journalist or a guerrilla writer and he like he spent he spends a lot of his

research upon um like the the organizing left in in southern in central mexico especially mostly because of inspiration from from the sapatistas but one thing that really just like he told me that i just could not forget was like if you don't have a mentor that is younger than you You are, you are completely, you're going to be disconnected from, from the struggle. That's interesting, yeah. Because if you don't talk to younger people, you won't understand what's going on. Totally. Because young people are connected to, you know, to the present day, mostly.

And they keep you on your toes. You can age out of youth culture and then you become like the curmudgeonly old person as you get older, more stubborn in your views, more disoriented and disgusted by the youth. youth but that's because you're becoming alienated and not because they're doing anything wrong yeah so staying tapped into youth culture respecting it seeing what you can learn from it still even if you're 20 30 years older yeah that's a very healthy way of looking at things yeah I mean I learn from my kids every every day they test me in ways that I could never imagine being tested and they get you can look at that as an annoyance but you can also look at it as like they're teaching me they're my teachers too

yeah yeah absolutely and also like I guess, like, three things that I kind of like, I just, because recently I did a lot of, I like bingeed your podcast just in preparation for this. But I, I listened to the, uh, the three episodes you did with Joshua Con Russell. Mm-hmm. You're in the four hour long ayahuasca episode, which last of me, last of me the whole weekend to listen to. Hopefully you found something in there. Yeah, I did. I, it was, it was, it was enlightening. Perfect. But I got three lessons.

Listen to your body. Encouraging and practicing gratitude. And like you said earlier, we are nature defending itself. Yes, yes. Would you want to speak more about like those three things specifically? Yeah, all three of those are great. Gratitude is huge. Gratitude is like a safety balloon or whatever.

If in the midst of mental health issues, in the midst of depression, crises, anxiety, to consciously remind yourself, force yourself to think of all the things you're grateful of, all the ways in which you are so blessed. It can really cut off and blunt the worst edges of even a bad day, but especially, you know, sort of downward mental spirals where your net, your self-talk becomes negative, and then your actions become negative, you withdrawal and then you're kind of going down to be able just to like kind of put your hand out and say stop for a second is being is is consciously thinking about what you're grateful for and all the blessings that life and the cosmos and your family and your friends that you have and you know

it might not be perfect there might be a lot more of there might be things in your life that are genuinely shitty and unfair and bad and you have to deal with that but it never hurts and always helps to consciously remind yourself of what you are grateful for because all of us have something to be grateful for, even if it's just the love of a single other person in the world, you know, somebody that puts up with you and cares about you. That is a infinite source of gratitude, you know, for you to plunge. And it can really, it can really make the difference in those downward spiral moments in particular. But I think even as just a normal sort of practice you cultivate to try and whether it's journaling or in the morning or just once in a while

sitting down and consciously thinking through and listing all the things you're grateful for can be can be very very helpful what was the first one you said listening to your body listening to your body absolutely anxiety um is one thing that really gets stored in the body it's this nervous energy um and you can feel that anxiety is not a wholly mental phenomenon, it's a very physical one. You feel physical symptoms. People with anxiety will often report like pain in their chests. You know, one time I had an anxiety attack, I went to the hospital. I thought I was going into cardiac arrest. I was like a healthy 19-year-old but I didn't understand the connection. I was like, no, anxiety is up here. Like I would be

like an emotional state. This is a physical sensation. Of course they're deeply and utterly connected. And when you are not properly taking care of your body, it does keep the score the body will remind you of your excesses or what you're doing that's that's not right or whatever and i found for anxiety for example you know just physical exertion of that energy is so helpful and kind of ridding the body of the anxious energy um i've struggled with anxiety my whole life and really learning that you know like when i always say this but like you know when animals get into like a kerfuffle or a fight or they narrowly escape some tragedy or whatever all animals they'll do this shake after like an intense thing it's literally the

them shaking off that excess energy, what humans do is take it into our mind and focus it back on ourselves and the mind starts to devour itself and you get into those downward spirals. So that's just one way in which like physically exerting that energy through just being active and going out, going on a hike or playing basketball with your friends or whatever on a routine basis can really kind of get some of that excess energy out. And you find yourself after an exercise feeling much more calm, much more comfortable. your own skin, you know, content. And, you know, evolutionarily, we're not programmed to sit and tweet all day, you know. We're not programmed to sit in cubicles and work on Excel sheets all

day. We're not. We're meant to go out and hunt and gather and get food and be in communal relationship with our loved ones and our community. And in so many ways, you know, today makes that incredibly hard. And if people aren't tapped into that, they can get very lost. You just go from your job where you're sitting in front of a computer all day to the phone on the way home, to the computer screen to the Netflix screen. And you're like, why am I depressed? I'm looking at the answers all the time. It's like, yeah, yeah.

Like, you need to get up and you need to get out in the real world. You need to have real life connections. And yeah, you can't do things that are antithetical to your evolutionary nature as an active human being on the planet and expect to be okay. So, you know, those are all ways. And, of course, with grief, it's a very physical experience. I lost my dad last year. And I was surprised by how physical grief is. Again, just like anxiety, you kind of think it's in a mental and it's an emotional state.

It's a physical, a process, you know, and I felt the physicality of grief in my body. And it once again taught me the lesson, the mind, the body, the spirit, they're deeply interconnected. Take care of all of them is taking care of, taking care of one of them is taking care of the other ones and vice versa. So that's another way in which, you know, the body kind of keeps the score and listening to your body can be very helpful. getting in touch with it, you know, not seeing it as a vehicle. We're driving around, but as part of who we are and deeply connected with our mental and emotional health. Do you want to wrap up the episode on addressing like we are nature defending itself? Sure, we can do that.

Yeah. Just talk about that. Yeah. This is scientific. It's not just like a spiritual woo-woo thing. Scientifically, we literally are inseparable from the cosmos and the earth that we arise out of. We are not as our sort of man-vers-nature-psychical. psychology will often portend, put into the world that is not us and have it to deal with it

until it wipes us out. We're not put into a hostile cosmos, you know, that we're going to be ripped out of at death and, oh, that's a tragedy. We literally are it. How could we be anything else? How could we not be, you know, the earth coming alive through us? Because without, you know, the earth gives rise to all the plants and all the animals. Evolution takes place in profound relationship to the natural world and its patterns and its evolutions, and we literally are it. And that despair and that rage that we feel watching the natural world get decimated for profit, watching beautiful forests get cut down for profit, watching the oceans get littered in and huge garbage patches, you know, because of a consumer lifestyle that sees ourselves

is fundamentally separate from the earth such that we can use it and abuse it. These are highly detrimental things. And so understanding ourselves as the universe becoming conscious, you know, and all sentient life is like this, the universe and earth become conscious through the squirrel. And that's one way of being conscious, through the spider, through the bumblebee, and through the human being. And if there's aliens out there,

they are their planet becoming conscious, and they're also the cosmos, becoming conscious from that. perspective maybe they have eight senses and we only have what five or whatever they have eight and they can now be conscious on a whole new level our grief our pain our our triumphs these are also the universe's griefs and pains and triumphs we are the universe feeling those feelings so when we actively understand that embrace that and then seek to defend the natural world of which we came that literally we came out of the soil of this earth you know we're not put we're not from somewhere else we are the earth um it really invigorates you to defend it and to see yourself

literally not metaphorically as the earth coming to its own defense as a healing mechanism that the earth has you know sort of given rise to that corrects the excesses you know of the thing the earth gave rise to humanity and our psychological delusions you know and so we can both be deeply human deeply earthly and deeply cosmic all at the same time and we can realize that we are this whole thing becoming conscious here and now in this form as bread and that form is chewy and we can take that as a responsibility

and like yeah we are it and you are and me we're the same thing we're just manifesting from different it's like a puppet show like a finger puppet show you know you open the curtain and there's like four different people they're all separate you know then you like look deeper the structure is one thing we all come from the same hand and we're just we're different forms right now and and that deep deeper interconnection

transcends our separateness and that can unify us with one another and that can unify us with the natural world and make us feel more at home in this world you know make us feel we're not we are not a drift we are perfectly at home in the universe and on earth and to really feel that in your bones is a is a transformative experience wow do you have anything anything anything A closing remarks you want to make? That's kind of a good closing remark. Yeah, but I would say just like, thank you so much for not only having me here. I mean, you're giving me and my wife this beautiful opportunity to see a state that we've never seen, a desert we've never seen.

We are deeply, deeply have gratitude. We're grateful for this. And it really means a lot to us. And I'm honored to hear how you say that the show has positively impacted you and made a difference for you in a positive direction. And it genuinely means the world to me. I don't get tired of hearing it. And it's just deeply meaningful to me. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me here today.

Yeah, thank you for being here. Like, when the idea, when one of our members brought up the idea that, hey, we should bring over Brett from Rev. Left Radio over here. I was like, ain't no way. That can't happen. Like, because, like, yeah, the show has really impacted me a lot. I wouldn't say, like, the show changed me because, you know, if you look at it. It's one factor among a billion.

Yeah. Just looking at dialectically. Yeah. Multi-causation. Yeah. Yeah. But it was definitely helpful throughout, like, these four years I've been listening to. Five years, four or five years, someone like that.

Like, I, ever since I started listening to it since the Zapatista episode, it's, I, I can't imagine where I would have been. And probably I'd probably be somewhere close to it, but it definitely was helpful. And yeah, like I've mentioned throughout this whole episode, this show has really changed me. It has really sharpened my perspective on many things and has grounded me throughout. And I feel like that's just an experience that a lot of people feel. And I feel like you might run into people that also feel the same way later tonight. So I just wanted to just straight up to say thank you. And yeah, thank you for being here.

Yeah. Thank you. The love and appreciation is mutual. So just to wrap up all things for this episode, I just want to plug in that we do have a community garden, the Vilma Espin community garden in Central Phoenix. We meet up every Saturday at 4 p.m. And we basically maintain our garden.

We learned a lot about how to do gardening and create a community from that. and if you want to find out more information about that garden or just METHA in general, you can follow us at Instagram at METAUSU, and yeah, do you want to plug anything in? Yeah, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary LeftRadio.com. It has all three of our shows, socials, whatever. Sure. Yeah, you can find everything we do there. For sure. Thank you.

That's all, everybody. The show continues. Venceramos. Bencinemos. Yeah, pop it up, pump it, oh yeah, pump it up, yeah. Pop it up, pump it, oh, yeah, pump it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it, pop it. Why ya? A few, I'd

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