Rev Left Radio - Karmic Law and Mutual Aid: Insights from Buddhism and Anarchism

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

David from Anarchospirituality joins Breht to discuss Buddhism, Anarchism, Marxism, and more! After an introduction section, David gives a talk on Buddhism and Anarchism, and then he and Breht discuss the talk before launching into a wide-ranging discussion on anarchism v. marxism, Kropotkin, the Buddhist conception of Karma, individual and collective improvement and struggle, Darwinian evolution, differences between western and eastern approaches to spirituality, the question of revolutionary violence within Buddhism, and much more!     Learn more about Anarchospirituality and his work HERE   Check out Turn Leftist's interview HERE   Check out Breht's talk on Buddhism and Marxism HERE   Check out Red Menace's episode on Conquest of Bread HERE   Outro music: "LIFE" by Saba   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have the owner of the famous, I think, among the left at least, the count on Instagram called Anarcho Spirituality. He's coming on to discuss not only Anarcho Spirituality, the meme page. We touch on it a little bit in the intro, but mostly to give a talk on the intersections of Buddhism and anarchism. Interestingly, much like my talk on the intersections of Marxism and Buddhism, but we both did these two projects completely separate and without knowledge of one another.

So I did it at the behest of people who invited me to ASU to give a speech specifically on the topic of Buddhism and Marxism. And I think this was a master's thesis for him where he constructed this talk in that context. And then after hearing my discussion, after I put it out on Rev. Left, on Marxism and Buddhism. We found each other in the comment sections of Instagram, decided to link up and do a collaboration. And he told me that he had this talk that was more or less ready to go and that he would like to give it on the show. And then we could have a discussion about it. So that's exactly what happens. So in this episode, we'll start with a little introduction, kind of set

the table for the discussion, introduce people to the guest, etc. And then we'll get into about 45 to 60 minutes of his talk. So he'll just give the full speech. And then after that, for about an hour, an hour and a half. After the speech, we have a deep discussion of Buddhism, of karma, of secular Buddhism versus religious Buddhism, the question of violence, the question of to what degree the left should work together across ideological lines, what Buddhism can offer anarchism and offer Marxism and Marxists and anarchists, and why we think these sorts of elements or aspects of life are really crucial to making a more resilient, more inviting,

and ultimately a more successful American left that can actually take the fight to the owning class and to those who live off the backs of other people and work towards the liberation of human beings from the confines, the prison of class society. So this is a very wide-ranging, fascinating talk, especially for those who are interested in Buddhism. In his talk, he goes into quite,

some great detail about, you know, some core concepts within Buddhism, core ideas within the tradition, and goes pretty deep. So if you're trying to learn about Buddhism, this is a wonderful episode. You're trying to explore the intersections of revolutionary left-wing politics like Marxism and like anarchism with spiritual and existential traditions like Buddhism. This is a great episode. And just a wonderful conversation overall. So we're going to get into that very shortly.

And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. We put out up to three full bonus episodes every single month now on the Patreon, as well as a bunch of other things like early releases. I upload an outline, share pictures from my life even, et cetera. So if you're at all interested in that, definitely go check out our Patreon. And for literally $5 a month, you can get all of that and more, as well as, being in the one place where I can respond because, as I've said many times before, I'm able to keep up with all the DMs on Twitter and all the emails and all of that. But the one area that I have committed myself to always responding to is the comment section of my Patreon.

And as well as I take questions from patrons, et cetera. So being a Patreon, you get bonus episodes and you get all this extra stuff as well. So if you're so inclined, definitely help us out. And if not, just sharing this episode, leaving us a podcast. positive review, these things that cost absolutely no money and just take a tiny bit of your time can also be incredibly helpful for the show's growth and ability to reach new people. All right, without further ado, here's my discussion with anarcho-spirituality on Buddhism, anarchism, Marxism, and so much more.

Enjoy. Hi, I'm Hanuman Das Dharma. This is my spiritual name, Dharma for short. And I make memes under the moniker anarcho-spirituality. And I'm here to help promote some of the ideas that are important to me. Absolutely. Well, welcome to the show. It's a long time coming because I've been a genuine fan of anarcho-spirituality on

Instagram for quite a while. In fact, I was thinking recently, I mean, if you had to, like, all the pages I've shared from, I guarantee that anarcho-spirituality has to be in the top three, if not the top one spot, because it's such a unique perspective, and it dovetails with so many of my already existing interests and sort of visions of spirituality, of religion, of Buddhism, of politics, etc. So I've made great use of it for quite a while, and then I think we came to connect through I think a random Instagram comment

where somebody mentioned Rev left. You said something kind. I happened to stumble upon it. And then I reached out to you in the DMs and we connected through that. So welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. And really it's an honor to be here because I've been a big fan myself

for quite some time. So really an honor. Hell yeah. Cool. Yeah. And I also wanted to say in this episode we're going to be talking about, well, you're going to give sort of a speech similar to I mean, very different in content, but similar to the one I gave recently at ASU, which I titled Dialectics and Liberation. I put it out on the Rev. Left feed. Many of you would be familiar with that. I'll link to it in the show notes for those interested in which I just basically

tried to explore the boundaries between Buddhism and Marxism and one of the core claims of that essay, at least, was that they share a dialectical apprehension of the natural world and that Buddhism offers an ethical outlook that can, you know, be taken on by Marxists of any faith or no faith and make our organizing spaces and our activism more broadly healthier and better for everybody involved. And that was sort of the basic premise of that. And you're going to do something similar coming from a more anarchist direction, I believe, today. So we're going to dive into that. But what we're not going to be able to do is get into a lot of your backstory. So I did want to make sure I plugged up front our friends over at the Turn Leftist podcast who had you on, I think a few months ago at this point, maybe a little longer, but people can find it fairly easily, where they had you on to sort of talk about your personal story, your background, which is absolutely fascinating. I highly recommend anybody interested in that aspect of things. And of course, you got into the, you know, you had people on the show who were a little skeptical, but were open-minded about religion and about, you know, your anarchist versus, you know, the Marxism of the, you know,

of one of the hosts, at least. So it was really interesting podcast. I'll link to that in the show notes as well for people that like this episode and want to learn more about you. But yeah, before we get into the essay itself, do you have anything you want to say up front? Do you want to help people orient

to what we're about to do or anything like that? Yeah, yeah. I think I had had this idea as a potential show that I'd wanted to bring to you for a while. Anyway, it just worked out really great that you did that episode

on Buddhism and Marxism, this talk is actually derived from my master's thesis, which I am now finishing up and graduating this year. And my master's thesis is about foundational Buddhist anarchism, basically deriving anarchism from the earliest Buddhist text. So this is a distillation from that project. Beautiful. Yeah. So for everybody listening, what we're going to do now is we're going to allow you to read your essay, basically give the full speech here and now, and then we'll spend about maybe an hour after it, just working through it. I'm going to bring up some questions I have,

maybe some critiques, and you can launch critiques my way as well, but just have a friendly conversation. Of course, you know, I come from more of a Marxist background. You come from more of an anarchist background, so we'll definitely explore those tensions and perhaps even overlaps afterwards,

but we both have a deep respect and have engaged with Buddhism in particular for a very long time. And, you know, while I tried to do an overview of the basics of Buddhism in my speech, you do a very similar thing as well and go even, I think, a little bit more in depth. So it'll be very interesting, whether you're interested in anarchism or Buddhism or whatever, this will be a fun one. So I'm going to hand over the floor to you, and then after you are done, we will get into a sort of back and forth and just kind of discuss some of the main points you had and see where the conversation takes us. Absolutely. Thanks, Brett. So, many of the world's religious traditions have influenced strains of anarchists among their adherents. However, sparse writings on Buddhist anarchism currently exist, and those writings largely seek to highlight parallels between Buddhist and anarchist ideas, drawn connections between the two disciplines by way of analogy and metaphor.

These efforts adapt and extend Buddhist themes to wider spheres than those to which they originally applied. For example, teachings about the individual, the primary sphere of the Buddhist teachings, are extended to society as a whole by way of binelior. thereby connecting Buddhism with anarchism through varying degrees of separation. Because of this separation, these forms of thought may more rightly be considered Buddhist-inspired anarchisms rather than Buddhist anarchism proper. My work endeavors to provide a foundation for a true Buddhist anarchism by deriving anarchism directly from a literal reading of the Pali-Sutis, a collection of discourses generally considered to be the earliest and most reliable records of the Buddhist teachings.

For political material, I relied exclusively on Peter Kropakin's work on anarchist communism in order to construct a more or less coherent anarchist framework from the work of one of the pioneers of anarchist thought. I limited myself to Krippakins' work to avoid venturing into debates about competing points of political theory among different thinkers. The goal was not to address or resolve questions about anarchist political thought, but rather to delineate a coherent anarchist framework to serve as a reference point for comparison. Two principal arguments emerged from this comparison. First, that because of alignment between Buddhists and anarchist ethics and its ideal state, Buddhism expresses itself as anarchist communism, making Buddhist practice a form of

revolutionary practice. Conversely, anarchist communism is the form of social organization that best allows for and encourages the development of virtues necessary to the Buddhist path, thereby creating optimal conditions for the path of awakening. The second argument identifies anarchist communism as the form of social organization favored by the Buddha, as evidenced by his structuring of the monastic institution according to anarchist communist principles, and rebuts possible challenges rooted in some of the Buddha's explicit social teachings. Unfortunately, due to the time constraints, I'm going to confine this talk to the first argument.

To be clear, some of my ideas may seem strange, impractical, or even undesirable. In Buddhist anarchism, the goal is not for communal material prosperity, but rather for material sufficiency and optimal social conditions for the liberating practice of Dharma. The effort here is not at all to begin envisioning what a functional, practical, or desirable Buddhist anarchism would actually look like in practice. My intention is really to point to our authentically Buddhist form of anarchism

by deriving anarchism directly from the Buddhist discourses to serve as a foundation for further thinking into anarchist applications of Buddhism. Also, because of my focus on early Buddhist doctrine, I warn that those who may be familiar with a more secularized, popularized, or colonized form of Buddhism that this is not what you'll be hearing about today. For if Buddhist anarchism is to be authentic, it must be rooted in authentic Buddhism. We'll begin our discussion with some of the relevant Buddhist doctrines. It is important to begin with the proper understanding of the role of experience as part of Buddhist thought. Early Buddhism is not philosophical in nature, to the extent that it is not based on reasoned deduction or induction,

speculative fancy or whimsicality. Direct experience is the foundation of the Buddhist position on the nature of reality, and if we are to take early Buddhism on its own terms, the metaphysical teachings are simply explications of the experiences that the practices are meant to provide for direct experience of. The teachings point to experiences that Adyip's have been realizing for themselves for thousands of years and which anyone who is inclined to put forth the requisite effort is, to this day, directly realizing through their own immediate experience. For anyone willing to explore the deepest levels of human consciousness and reality,

the divine eye may be open through rigorous concentration practice, the eighth factor of the eightfold path, which allows for knowledge and vision of things as they really are, revealing a deep insight faculty that is accessible when the mind is steady and unified. The practitioner looks deep into their stream of consciousness to discerning their own past and future lives and view the passing away and arising the beings in different existential states in accordance with their karma, where through insight practice can come to directly perceiving the constituent elements of ultimate reality. To quote the veneral Pahok Thayadaw, these realities are not to be known only as concepts, because that is only to know and see things as they appear,

which means we remain what the Buddha called a foolish, common person, blind and sightless, who does not know and does not see. Reliance upon direct individual experience is a critical component of Buddhist practice. The Buddha exhorted his followers, not to follow a tradition merely out of a sense of affinity or because it appeals to personal biases, but rather to test the teachings for themselves, only adopting them when their accuracy and their merit have been personally confirmed. It's important to keep this principle in mind as we proceed, since efforts have been made to modernize and secularize Buddhism,

including by removing the teachings on karma and the Sempsychic realms, which are dismissed as abstract metaphysical speculations, or accretions from the Buddhist cultural context. This, however, is a grave mistake due to the absolute centrality of the law of karma in the Dharma. When the opportunity to confirm or disconfirm the truth of the teachings for oneself through direct experiences is available, any a priori rejection of them based on picking and choosing teachings that suit one's pre-existing biases and personal idiosyncrasies represents the height

of confusion. I do want to be clear that one need not accept the views I'm about to present in order to practice Buddhism or be a good. good Buddhists, but the knee-jerk reaction tends to be more towards rejection, and so I would urge people towards an inquisitive and open stance as what the Buddha himself encouraged disciples to adopt. The discussion of the Buddhist path must begin with a cursory overview of Buddhist cosmology, the samsaric realms, as the existential situation within which sentient beings find ourselves is of paramount importance for the understanding the logic of

the path. In the Buddhist perspective, there are innumerable habitable world systems and beings of various kinds who inhabit those systems. Overlapping these systems are 31 planes of existence, including many sub- realms, where beings may be reborn in different forms of greater or lesser pleasure and pain in accordance with their karma. These planes are viewed both as mental states and as actual places, because the world of form, that is matter, is inextricably intertwined with the stuff of mind, with no actual firm distinction existing between the two. When a being is reborn in a new state, the form that they take is merely the expression of a particular quality of karmic energy existing within the stream of consciousness, and taken together, the

realms provide the opportunity for every possible form of conscious experience, from the lowest to the most exalted. The good nobody uses the analogy of radio stations. Every station is here all the time, but you can't experience a particular station unless your radio is tuned to the specific bandwidth. So, too, consciousness finds itself expressed on different planes based on the frequency of its vibration, and most of the planes aren't ordinarily visible to humans because our consciousness is tuned to a different frequency.

The four lower realms, called the woeful states, include the hell realms, which have at least 144 sub-relms, where beings are reborn experiencing great suffering and torture to atone for their previous bad acts. There's the realm of hungry ghosts, full of miserable beings, utterly devoid of happiness, or are plagued by intense and insatiable thirst and hunger, and the Asura realm, a class of unhappy demon

that is engaged in constant conflict. Also among the lower realms is the animal realm, considered to be an unpleasant birth, where, for the most part, being struggled for survival driven by base instinct is the dominant quality of experience. The lowest of the seven happy states is the human realm. Because of its balance of opportunities for pleasure and pain, the human realm is considered to be an optimal plane to learn and practice the Dharma.

It is not so unpleasant that one is wholly preoccupied with suffering, as in the lower realms, nor is it so pleasant that one does not desire escape as in the higher realms. Above the human realm are six planes of heavenly beings called Devas. Above these planes are the 20 Brahma realms. higher realms of great bliss, and finally, there are four still higher planes, immaterial realms where mind alone exists without matter. The Buddhist texts say about samsara, the cycle of birth, death and suffering, that is eternal, with no discernible starting point. The process of death and rebirth has existed forever, and will continue forever unless interrupted, and it is

this process of death and rebirth that is the cause of an inextricably bound up with suffering. The first noble truth states that, because every birth includes inevitable aging sickness and death, association with what we dislike and our inability to permanently secure what we like, as well as myriad other forms of discomfort and disappointment that are a part of existence, suffering and dissatisfaction are inherent in rebirth in any realm. So long as the compulsory cycle of birth and death continues, suffering will unavoidably arise. To end suffering, then, it is necessary for a being to escape from this cycle. In order to understand how this might be achieved, what is meant by a being must first be discussed.

The empirical self, the sense of subjective selfhood, is an illusion, created by a complex of mind and matter which does not ultimately exist as it appears in the course of ordinary experience. The elements of mind and matter or mentality and materiality are nothing but a rapidly changing process of physical and mental factors known in Buddhism as the five aggregates or heaps. To quote Beth Jacobs, the aggregates are a category of material our minds used to construct a sense of reality. Just like constructing a building might require exterior materials, structural components, internal hardware, and surface treatments, the endless job of constructing a human sense of self and a world requires some categories of experience for material.

Materiality includes all matter, although of greatest relevance here, the human body and sensory organs, while the mentality aggregates are feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. There is no permanent soul within or among these aggregates, merely the mental and physical processes themselves. To use an updated simile found in the discourses, cars do not exist in the same way that selves do not exist. does not have any fundamental car essence that exists, apart from the wheels, engine, frame, onboard computer, and other parts that are assembled one day, and will come undone another. We assemble all these parts in a particular shape, and call that shape a car when the pieces are in place. But where does the car go once the pieces are one day scattered to the winds?

It never existed in the first place, in an ultimate sense. There is no actual enduring thing that has some inherent essence of harness that exists apart from an assembly of individual pieces, each of which is not itself a car, and each of which is itself comprised of its own constituent elements, and so is not ultimately real either. A wheel is nothing but an arrangement of rubber and metal shaped in a way that when combined just so, the concept wheel arises in the mind of an observer. And the rubber and metal is just an arrangement of certain molecules. At every level, none of these objects can be said to exist in any ultimate sense. On the conceptual level, they exist in the mind, but on the ultimate level, there is no such thing as a car that actually

exists apart from the mind that labels it as such. Like the car, the parts that comprise a human being are the five aggregates, and when conditions support their coming together, we call them a self. The conceptual and ordinary experiential reality is so convincing that we experience the self as if it actually exists in a stable and permanent fashion, but it does not. A being is nothing but a dynamic flux of processes that continue on in perpetuity. The process of awakening requires coming to experientially know and see the five aggregates as they really are, according to their three characteristics, that each is impermanent, empty of a self, and ultimately a source of suffering. Typically, the consciousness aggregate is the last holdout for the sense of self,

which is usually most firmly rooted in the experience of awareness of being identified with the one who knows. But the consciousness aggregate also has the three characteristics, which must be pursued directly through experiential realization. Through advanced meditative practice, one cultivates and sustains extremely powerful and purified mindfulness focused on consciousness itself, allowing the nature of all types of mental processes that are otherwise obscured from direct perception to become apparent. Consciousness is directly perceived to be not a single unchanging monolith, nor a smoothly flowing process, but in its true nature as a series of discrete, isolated events. To use two similes offered by Ajambram, consciousness may be compared

to a stretch of sand on a beach. From a certain distance, and through superficial evaluation, the sand looks to be a single continuous mass. However, when examined more closely, one can clearly discern that what appeared solid and unitary is actually made up of discrete isolated particles of silicate, with nothing but empty space between each grain of sand. There is no essential substance that exists between each particle unifying them. Similarly, in the meditator's experience, what is ordinarily experienced as the smooth flow of consciousness is directly perceived to be a series of discrete events with nothing linking the events together or flowing in between. That is, there are moments of consciousness, but no self that contains or possesses

them, unifying them as the object of someone's experience. Another more detailed analogy offered by Ajan Brahm is that of a fruit salad. Suppose on a plate there is an apple. You clearly see this apple completely disappear, and a moment later in its place appears a coconut. Then the coconut vanishes, and in its place appears another apple. Then the second apple vanishes, and another coconut is there. That vanishes, and a banana appears,

only to vanish when another coconut manifests on their plate. So then another banana, coconut, apple, coconut, mango, coconut, lemon, and so on. As soon as one fruit vanishes, then a banana. a moment later, a completely new fruit appears. There are all fruits, but completely different varieties, and due to the natural variance in produce, no two fruits are exactly the same. Moreover, no connecting fruit essence flows from one fruit to the next. In this analogy, the coconut stands for mind consciousness, while the other fruits each represent form of consciousness tied to sensory experiences at each of the five external sense organs. Each moment of

consciousness is discrete, with nothing flowing from one moment to the next. Ajan Bram explains further that mind consciousness, the coconut, appears after every other species of consciousness and thereby gives the illusion of sameness to every conscious experience. To the average person, there's a quality of knowing that is found in seeing, that is also found in hearing, smell, and tasting, and touch. However, with highly developed mindfulness, it can be seen that this knowing is not part of seeing, hearing, and so on, but arises a moment after each type of sense consciousness. Moreover, this knowing has vanished when another form of consciousness is occurring. There can't be two types of fruit on the play

at the same time. When consciousness is perceived in this way, experienced as a discontinuous procession of isolated events, the illusion of a self who is always present as the experiencer of experience begins to unravel. There is an instant of consciousness, but no one who is there observing it, apart from the moment of consciousness itself, which doesn't belong to anyone, is not me or mine. It's just one brief moment where awareness arises from the phenomenal flux of the universe. Through this practice, the five aggregates are fully understood in their three characteristics to be impermanent arising and passing away with blinding rapidity so quickly, in fact, that it could hardly be said that they exist at all, not a self or anything that

belongs to a self, because the procession of experience arises and passes away outside of anyone's control, driven on by impersonal causal processes among the aggregates rather than from any self-agency, and for both of these reasons, the aggregates are fundamentally incapable of providing stable happiness and therefore identification with the aggregates as me or mind necessarily result in suffering. Because there is no enduring self that dies and is reborn, no eternal essence, such as a soul, is transferred from one life to the next. There is merely a flow of ongoing causal processes of which birth and death are two phases involving the dissolution of the five aggregates in one place and the re-arisal of the aggregates elsewhere. The process of death

and rebirth can be thought of by analogy to a candle flame. A candle flame requires certain causes and conditions for it to exist, a wick and wax for the candle upon which the flame depends, and heat for the continuation of the flame itself. When the flame is transferred to a second candle, it is not correct to say that it is wholly the same or different from the first, but rather that the second flame is causally related to the first and exists dependent on its own conditions of heat, wick, and wax.

When talking of death and rebirth, then, we are not speaking of a being who dies and is reborn, but of the supporting causes for the continuation of the five aggregates that constitute a human being ceasing in one place and five aggregates arising elsewhere as a result of the causal momentum of the carmetic processes propelling forward a particular continuum of experience. Birth precedes death, and death, on the other hand, precedes birth.

The continual flow of birth and death connected with each individual current of phenomenal fluxes constitutes the transmigration of a being through some sarcastic existence, flowing on ad and finonym so long as the causal conditions that support its flow are present. The factors that approximately cause the continuation of the cycle are the presence of ignorance and craving, both of which will be discussed in greater detail momentarily in the mental continuum. them. These factors provide for the next birth and are necessary for it to manifest in a new form. To return to the car example, in some sense, one can think of ignorance as the nuts and bolts that hold the disparate pieces of the car together, without which the illusion of an actually

existing car falls apart, and craving is the gas that propels the car forward into new situations. Craving depends on ignorance in the same way that there is nothing to propel forward if there is no car. This is the meaning of the second noble truth that the cause of suffering is craving. Through the links in the causal chain of dependent origination, craving born of ignorance is the factor that propels us to rebirth with the attendant old age sorrow, lamentation, suffering, grief, despair, and death. It is this cyclical process of gift solution and becoming, not the material world that is called samsara. The permanent interruption of this cycle constitutes the third noble truth, the end of suffering. When ignorance and craving cease, rebirth ceases,

leading to liberation from the samsaric cycle and the realization of nirvana. Nirvana is a super mundane in an extraordinary state free from suffering, sorrow, and death, which transcends description or rational thought. It is the ultimate refuge, an incomprehensible freedom, the highest bliss. Realization of this state of final release from compulsory rebirth is the enterprise with which Buddhism concerns itself. Having discussed the existential circumstances of some sort of beings, let's proceed to a discussion of the workings of karma in its place in this picture. The law of karma is a natural law of cause and effect that is self-sustaining and operates independent of any other causal factor, such as the workings of a divine being.

Happiness and misery arise from and constitute the inevitable effects of specific causes, following from an inescapable natural law that dictates the acts themselves bring their own rewards and punishments. This concept is easily understood with reference to the agricultural metaphor found both in the Buddhist texts and throughout the Bible. You reap what you sow. Put simply, if you sow apple seeds, you cannot expect under any circumstances to reap bananas from that tree. Causes of a certain nature will invariably produce matched effects of

a like nature. Further, these effects are intrinsic to the very causes themselves. If someone wandered off the edge of a cliff, it would be an unnecessary logical leap to conclude that when the person broke their legs on the rocks below, that some God was punishing them for the last step they took. Rather, one can easily explain the outcome with the resort to natural law. The confluence of gravity and other necessary circumstantial conditions led to the natural and unavoidable result of the action, which follows as the inevitable consequence of the act itself. This is the correct understanding of karma. In the simplest of terms, the word karma means action or deed, and refers specifically to the volitional or intentional parts of the cognitive process, part of the

mental formations aggregate. It is our intentions that result in ethically significant thoughts, speech, and action that create carmic potentialities, where the wholesome or unwholesome quality of the intention itself determines the variety of karma produced. These mental factors arise and pass away with incredible rapidity. The commentaries say that during the time it takes to snap one's fingers, billions of these processes may occur. The three unhalsome karmic roots, called the three poisons, include greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed and hatred depend upon the presence of delusion, so every instance of greed or hatred is necessarily associated with delusion as well. Greed is the factor of attraction to physical or mental phenomena, and includes properties

such as craving, lust, central desire, covetousness, and attachment. Hatred is the factor of repulsion, including properties such as aversion, envy, possessiveness, ill will, anger, and cruelty. Intentions arising from either greed or hatred result in unwholesome karma that will produce its effects such as sickness, short life, or material deprivation in this or later lives, and lead to rebirth in the lower realms. Delusion, which is synonymous with ignorance, means not knowing and seeing things as they truly are, experiencing the world in accord with conventional conceptual reality. The state from ignorance means operating from experiential understanding of ultimate reality, to see what the mind creates as real, solid,

and existing independently and of its own nature as just a constant procession and flux of constituent elements and forces. For example, to use an analogy, ignorance is seeing, thinking, and experiencing river, whereas wisdom is seeing incalculable molecules of H2O interacting with chemical processes and the forces of gravity and hydrodynamics, knowing and seeing experientially that there is nothing but these elements and forces, and that the solid conceptual idea of an actually existing river was pure illusion. Of course, this description is metaphoric. One does not actually see physical quantum or molecular particles as conceived in the natural sciences. These elements are in fact just another conventional perception dependent on ignorance. Rather, during the awakening

process, the mind penetrates conceptual reality entirely, seeing more deeply than is possible with even the strongest microscopes and particle colliders, perceiving the ultimate substrate of all reality, knowing that at the deepest level, there is nothing that exists apart from the three characteristics of impermanence, emptiness, and suffering that mark all that exists. As can be inferred from this explanation of ignorance, knowledge-rooted consciousness is especially rare among humans. For this reason, most humans are deeply rooted in delusion, and because of this wrong view, operate predominantly from unwholesome roots. One estimate is that in the average untrained human, roughly 99.9% of consciousness is unwholesome. As a consequence,

humans are usually reborn in lower realms, which are particularly difficult to escape due to even stronger ignorance and the even greater rarity of wholesome consciousness. To quote Bikubodi, the possibilities of rebirth are boundless, yet the road to the lower realms is wide and smooth, the road upward, steep and narrow. It is of paramount importance, therefore, that we stay vigilant. The Buddha describes just how rare and precious it is to find oneself born in the human realm and the Chigdala Sita. In that discourse, the Buddha asks his listener to imagine a world totally covered with water, on which a yoke with a single hole floats as it is pushed and pulled along the surface by the wind. He asked the monks who had gathered before him. What are the chances

that a blind sea turtle that surfaces once every hundred years should surface such that its head comes within the yoke? This infinitesimally small probability is how coincidental it is for us to find ourselves born as human beings and at a time when the Dharma has been taught and can be practiced. So the Buddha implores us to use this most rare of opportunities to work towards liberation. The wholesome karmic roots include the opposites of the unwholesome roots, that is, non-greed, non-hatred, and non-delusion, which is called knowledge in this context. Non-greed refers to anything connected with gross or subtle manifestations and generosity, offering and renunciation, while non-hatred refers to loving kindness, good will, amity, pity,

compassion, and sympathetic joy. Non-greed and non-hatred root consciousness always arise together. These root produce wholesome karma, which lead to fortunate circumstances such as long life, good health, prosperity, or other positive outcomes in this or later lives. There are three ways to train in wholesome consciousness, offering, meditation, and morality. Offering is the karma of offering something to someone, which as an act of generosity is a behavior that counters the greed factor.

Morality is the abstention of certain unwholesome actions that arise from unwholesome roots, and includes right speech, right action, and right livelihood, the third, fourth, and fifthfolds of the noble eightfold path. The most fundamental moral requisites that are relevant for our discussion are the right action principles of abstentions from killing or causing harm and from taking that which belongs to others, and the principle of right livelihood that prohibits earning a living in a matter that violates either of these principles. The moral requisites prohibit the most dangerous manifestations of greed, hatred, and delusion, which will lead to painful

results and will guarantee rebirth in the lower realms if the relevant karma ripens at the time of death. Meditation refers to insight meditation and tranquility meditation, the seventh and eighth folds of the path, a discussion of which are well beyond the scope of this law. It is sufficient for our purposes to say that one cannot attain nirvana without the maturation of these forms of meditation, and one cannot be successful in one's meditation without significant wholesome karma acquired through practicing and training in offering immorality. These practices and the requisite ethical foundation for these practices must be of a high quality, be consistent, and be continuous in order to achieve the goal of final liberation. This discussion should make clear how the entirety

of the noble eightfold path, the fourth noble truth, is calibrated precisely to focus all areas of one's life pulling toward the goal of liberation from carmic bondage, as a charioteer must have all horses pulling in the same direction for the chariot to reach the desired destination. Through the ethical path factors, three, four, and five, one refines and purifies one's karma through the application of right effort. The sixth factor in daily life and during meditation, the seventh and eighth factors, which must be developed to an advanced degree for liberating wisdom to arise. Meditation practice leads to direct experiences of ultimate reality and super mundane knowledge, which is right understanding. The first path factor and the purification of our

cognitive processes, the second path factor. All aspects of the path are calibrated to work with the exact existential situation we find ourselves in as samsar beings, as seen and understood by the Buddha and hundreds of generations of practitioners since. The path puts together incredibly tightly and every element is absolutely indispensable. Let's now turn to a discussion of Peter Kropotkin's anarchist communism. I'm going to provide a much more cursory overview of Prupakkin's ideas because of time constraints and the likelihood that this audience is much better acquainted with them than those of early Buddhism. Peter Krippocken was a trained scientist who wrote extensively on the natural sciences

and ethics, which he saw as the basis for his theory of anarchist communism. Anarchist communism for Kropokin doesn't follow from utopian idealism as some would claim, but rather is logically derived from a clear and objective understanding of the human condition, in particular man's ethical nature and how best its most advantageous qualities could be cultivated and promoted for the maximum benefit of the whole of civilization. The anarchist thinker, Kropokin says, does not resort to metaphysical conceptions like the natural rights and the duties of the state. The beginning of Kropokin's effort towards a unified scientifically founded ethics was his seminal book Mutual Aid, a factor of evolution, which entailed an empirical study of the tendency towards cooperation in different forms of insect, animal, and human life,

and marked the birth of the field within evolutionary biology that focuses on studying animal altruism. The argument runs that, beginning with the lowest of creatures and progressing up through animals and to man, there are behaviors which may be properly termed moral and which contribute to the functionality and welfare of all, those feelings which restrain men from evil acts against their kinsmen and, in general, from acts tending to weaken the social fabric. Kapak can derive anarchism from these observations of the activity of the natural world by identifying the political system that would best allow for and support the expression of these noble natural tendencies. We begin with the discussion of mutual aid.

The principle of mutual aid as a factor of evolution is succinctly stated thus. Those species, which best know how to combine and to avoid competition, have the best chances of survival and of a further progressive development. This principle was in fact observed initially by Darwin in the study of the sources of evolution and adaptation in the natural world, although this point was almost immediately ignored by proponents of his theory, who instead emphasized the brutal competition for survival. Popkin cites Darwin in the descent of man, where he points out that in countless circumstances and countless animal species, competition between members of those species disappears and

is replaced with cooperation. That cooperation leads to the emergence of intellectual and moral traits that optimize the collective for survival. Darwin intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike for the welfare of the community. Where sympathy among members of a particular community was prominent, those communities flourished and produced the most offspring. Thus, whereas many later interpreted Darwin's conception of survival of the fittest as implying a direct and continual competition between members of a species over resources and reproduction, Copacan seized upon Darwin's observation of the importance of mutual aid in many

countless species and built upon them from his own extensive study of the natural world, arguing that mutual aid is at least as important a factor for evolution as that of competition and that in fact must play a more significant role in evolution than competition insofar as cooperation leads to greater welfare for the community with the least expenditure of energy. In short, while Darwin was certainly correct to argue that the fittest survived, What's frequently overlooked is that sociability rather than competitive strength is often the factor that makes a species most fit. Kapakin Marshall is an impressive array of evidence from the natural world to support his argument.

He traces the presence of mutual aid from ants, bees, and other insects to various species of birds, moves on to cataloguing such tendencies among larger animal species such as societies of rodents, including squirrels, raks, marmots, and prairie dogs, and pack animals such as the robux, swallow deer, antelopes, gazelles, and ibex. He discusses elephants, hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, monkey and primate species such as chanpanzees and baboons, and the hunting associations of pack predators such as wolves and other large mammals, among others. Rupakkin concludes that there is only a small number of unsociable species, and the tendency towards sociability is the dominant force driving a species' success.

The discussion proceeds to an extensive cataloging of the propensity towards mutual aid from primitive man on through the 1800s when Prapkin was writing. Grapakin begins with prehistoric man, listing archaeological finds from the Neolithic era that suggests communal living and congregation, such as the discovery by archaeologists, of hundreds of stone tools and implements scattered across hundreds or thousands of feet and in patches up and down the coast of Denmark, suggesting that the region was densely populated with tribes living in close proximity and communal coexistence. He continues to discuss the anthropological record related to studies of the Bushmen, the Hantats, Pappas, Eskimos, and others.

Kropokin then discusses at length how these tendencies continued through later stages of human social development. Kropokin attributes the development of the urge toward mutual aid to the base instinct to gravitate towards pleasure and avoid pain, where behavior is useful to the preservation and welfare of the community are rewarded, while those inconsistent with communal welfare are punished. Through the practice of mutual aid, one can rejoice in the satisfactions and joy of stowing life around you by giving oneself to one's fellows to the highest degree in the spirit of community, equality, and sharing. Sociability leads to feelings of compassion, which Caputton calls solidarity among community members, which forms the basis of mutual aid.

Through communal living, sociality is engendered and transforms into feelings of benevolence, sympathy, and love, which let express themselves in the broader and more encompassing mutual aid instinct. Moreover, for communal living to be successful, a sense of equity, and when equity is disturbed, a practice of justice that rebalances the equilibrium are also necessary, which express themselves and the principle of doing to others as you would have them do unto you. It is these feelings and instincts, he argues, which give origin to human morality, the sum total of moral feelings, perceptions and concepts, which Kropotkin turned the physics of human conduct, the fundamental rules of all moral teachings. Thus, Kruppakin argued that ethics developed from the conditioning

imposed by the reward system that underlies the practice of mutual aid in early human communities. Returning to our chronology, Kropokin identifies a period of decline in mutual aid emerging in the 15th century, when feudal lords began constructing states where through cunning power and exploitation of growing divides within the cities themselves, the lords managed to appropriate for themselves more expansive personal domains. Periods of invasion and conflict led to increased centralization of power, and the church, sensing the changing social tide, lent its support to the already powerful lords. The trades became more exclusivist, the privilege of certain families, fueling a transition from communalism towards individualism. Moreover, an ideological ship

given by the intelligentsia, aristocracy, and the church occurred over several hundred years, promoting the idea that salvation would come in the form of a strongly centralized state under a semi-demand authority. For the next 300 years across Europe, there was a systematic weeding out and destruction of all institutions that exhibited the mutual aid tendency. Lands were confiscated, and the cities divested of their sovereignty. What were previously independent functions of federated towns and guilds, such as courts and administration, were appropriated to the state and the organic holes of the organizations

were destroyed. Contrary to the contention that the transition toward privatization was a natural byproduct of evolving economic conditions such as the rise of art-scale agriculture, across Europe, there were several hundred years of struggle by the peasantry against aggressive efforts by the ruling class to hoard and privatize the land. Those among the privileged classes who were able seize as much land for themselves through forced legislation or manipulation, systematically destroying all vestiges of communal ownership. Despite regular peasant rebellions, the nobility seized communal revenues and together with the church appropriated communal lands. This absorption by the state of all social functions necessarily resulted in unbridled and narrow-minded individualism, resulting in a legacy of privatization and individualism that now dominates European, social, and economic relations. This history forms the basis of Kropokin's anarchist communism. For many thousands of years, hundreds of millions of people maintained and supported themselves

through systems of communal ownership of the land and the instruments of production, which were destroyed from without in Western Europe, through the forced creation of land monopolies by the government in favor of the nobility, middle class. The forced privatization of production meant that everyone must accept their subservience or die of hunger and has resulted in production tending not towards satisfying the needs of the community, but instead toward the maximization of private gain for the relative view. In Kropotkin's article, the modern state, he makes clear that the singular objective of the state is to deliver the mass of the population it controls to groups of

exploiters to ensure to them the right of exploitation. Power and abuse of power go hand in hand as inseparable parts of the same authoritarian whole, focused on the simple-minded pursuit of private wealth for a fraction of the population at the expense of the great suffering masses. Instead, building on the scientific foundation of his investigation at the origins of mutual aid and human ethics, Gropotkin asked in his essay, modern science, and anarchism, which social forms best guarantee in such and such society and in humanity at large, the greatest sum of happiness, and therefore the greatest sum of vitality? His answer was an anti-statist and anti-authoritarian non-hierarchical society in which the consumption of commodities,

their exchange, and their production, was communalized, according to the idea of free federation, resulting in the abandonment of central and municipal government. In essence, a system that promotes the well-being of all by harnessing the best human tendencies, those towards cooperation and mutual support, in a system that combines the economic collectivism of communism with the non-hierarchicalism of anarchism. In Kropotkin's conceptualization, anarchism is an outgrowth of the natural sciences. and embraces the entirety of human social living, including their economic, political, and moral problems. He declares in the conquest of red, anarchist communism calls for the socialization not

only of production, but of the distribution of goods. The community would supply the subsistence requirements of each individual member free of charge, and the criterion to each according to his labor would be superseded by the criterion to each according to his needs. If equality and well-being are the goal, then communism leads necessarily to anarchism, and anarchism leads necessarily to communism for each counteracts inequality and oppression in its respective social and economic domain, and the one cannot fully eradicate inequality without the other. In such a society, education would be universalized, affording workers the opportunity to learn the

trade that most appeals to them and work in the manner they desire, to contribute what they most enjoy and feel most able to produce without asking leave of master or owner and to share freely in the products of their efforts. With the focus of work shifting to ensuring the provision of necessities rather than the production of surplus value, combined with technological improvements, Kapakin predicted that time spent working would radically decrease with a concomitant increase in time for leisure and free pursuit of personal interests. Kapakin also argued for the abolition of the wage system as essential for the eradication of economic inequality.

Kapakin considered the coercion integral to wage work as the main spring of capitalist depression. Capital's faculty of absorbing surplus value was a result of the accumulation that was explained by the force position the worker is placed to sell his labor power. Capitalism impoverished workers, but it secured their enslavement through dependency. For as long as the worker continues to be paid in wages, he necessarily will remain the slave or the subordinate of the one to whom he is forced to sell his labor, be the buyer, a private individual, or the state. In other words, wage work is a form of slavery and theft, where the worker is forced under a threat of starvation to sell his labor for less than its worth, allowing his exploiter to

appropriate for themselves that which they did not produce. Moreover, this anti-wage analysis follows from the understanding that the wage system is also rooted in an individualistic logic that is unjustified by objective fact, premised as it is on artificial and entirely arbitrary means of conceiving of dividing and attributing value. There is no invention or economic activity that could rightly be considered as belonging exclusively to any one individual or group. Society is thought of as a whole, each part of which is so intimately bound up with the others that is service rendered to one as a service rendered to all. Due to the incredible complexity of interrelationship in modern industry, no person can rightly claim the fruits of labor as his own. It is worth quoting one of his examples, but at length to illustrate his point.

If you enter a modern coal mine, he writes, you will see a man in charge of a huge machine that raises and lowers a cage. During eight or ten consecutive hours every day, he must keep the same strain of attention. Should he waste three seconds at each touch of the lever, the extraction in our modern perfected mines would be reduced by from 20 to 50 tons a day. is it he who is the most necessary man in the mine, or is it perhaps the boy who signals to him from below to raise the cage? Is it the miner at the bottom of the shaft who risks his

life every instant and who will someday be killed by fire damp? Or is it the engineer who would lose the layer of coal and would cause the miners to dig on rock by a simple mistake in his calculations? Or is it the mine owner who has put his capital into the mind and who has perhaps contrary to expert advice asserted that excellent coal would be found there? And Moreover, is the coal they have extracted entirely their work? Is it not also the work of the men who have built the railway lines to the mine and the roads that radiate from all the railway stations? Is it not also the work of those that have filled and sown the fields, extracted iron, cut wood in the forest, built the machines that burn coal, slowly developed the mining industry altogether, and so on. It is utterly impossible to draw distinction between the work of each of those men. One thing remains to put the needs above the works, and first of all, to recognize the right to live and later on the right to well-being. for all those who took their share in production. With the abolition of wage work, as well as the ranks of middle men

and wealth-appropriating bourgeois parasites, economic efficiency will be maximized, manufactured scarcity will be abolished, and the people's time will be freed up for their own personal pursuits and pleasures. We must recognize Krapakin for claims in the conquest of bread that everyone, whatever his grade in the old society, whether strong or weak, capable or incapable,

has, before everything, the right to live, and that society is bound to share amongst all, without exception, the means of existence it has at its disposal. Moving into the synthesis, here is my argument in sum. The law of karma is the operative component of the underlying structure of reality that leads to the emergence of the tendency towards mutual aid and in turn the ethical tendencies that mutual aid developed into. In other words, the tendency toward engaging in mutual aid and developing ethical behavior

are the visible manifestations of the underlying law of karma, which is set up in such a way as to reward pro-social behavior by conferring evolutionarily advantageous benefits as its result. Taking Kropokin's theory as correct on its face, in its assertion that anarchist communism is the form of social organization that best embodies, encourages, and harnesses the tendency toward mutual aid, it follows that if mutual aid and the ethical tendencies it evolves into are aligned with and express the law of karma,

then anarchist communism is also the form of social organization that would best support the cultivation and expression of wholesome karmic tendencies and therefore the development and practice of Dharma. In this case, it could be said that anarchist communism is the ideal structure for the practice of Dharma, and that when Dharma is rightly practiced, it leads directly into anarchist communism. Kruppaken argues that an anarchist ethics must be rooted in and followed from the material conditions of the natural world.

Given the Buddhist characterization of the law of karma as a natural causal law, this law provides a clear and persuasive explanation for the evolutionary emergence of mutual aid and the moral sentiment. The law of karma explains and subsumes mutual aid and itself is, in essence, the most perfect and complete anarchist ethic. Trapakin describes ethics as the physics of human conduct, but ethical principles themselves cannot serve as natural laws. A particular act, whether moral or immoral, may have its consequences, but there must be another underlying property or law that ties the ethical or unethical quality of the action to its appropriate consequence. If acts of generosity, for example, reliably and naturally lead to greater social

cohesion and reciprocal benevolence or generous acts, it is not the generosity itself that leads to those results. The generosity is but one variable in the larger equation that outputs a reciprocal positive act. The reciprocality implies a principle or law at work in the larger dynamic beyond the generous act itself that determines how the act is received, proceed, and reciprocated. Ethical acts or dispositions are properties of this system, but require a deeper unifying structure to explain how they interact. It is karma that provides the mechanism, whereby ethical actions are associated with their appropriate consequences, and which serves as the substructure that explains not just what is, but how and why it is. To draw an analogy to the

law of gravity, one can observe the operation of gravity in that massive objects are visibly and measurably attracted to other massive objects, though the curvature of space-time that constitutes gravity itself is a separate factor from the objects at the curvature impact, that the objects may be consistently demonstrated without exception to adhere to a set of fixed laws that describe the operation of gravity is consistently observable and empirically verifiable. But the relationship between the objects is not a part of the objects themselves, but of the underlying structure of the field in which they move. It is my argument that the law of karma is one example of such a deep underlying law that explains the existence of certain

observable natural phenomena, in this case explaining why behaviors term moral are prosocial and why mutual aid leads to the survival and welfare of the species. Directing mutual aid principles on top of the law of karma shows that the form of behaviors that Krapakin identified as emblematic of sociability are also incidentally the types of behavior that spring forth from wholesome karmic roots, thereby assuring beneficial outcomes from such behaviors in accordance with karmic law, while the inverse is true for antisocial behaviors. Kapakin explains the mutual aid instinct and its evolution into ethics as a manifestation of the base urge to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Karma is the underlying law that

rewards sociable behaviors and punishes antisocial behaviors. Through the trial and error and classical conditioning, all animal species as well as humans, were able to determine for themselves what sort of behaviors lead to prosperity and welfare, and these discoveries would have conditioned them towards acts that create wholesome karma, which is necessary for beneficial outcomes, such as material, abundant, health, and longevity. Looking more deeply into the working of karma and the source of ethics as described by Kropokin, there are still more parallels. The impulses that Kropokin identifies as underlying the ethical principles are wholesome, non-grud, and non-hatred, rudy consciousness. Kropokin's assertion,

that benevolence, sympathy, love, and compassion are the foundational principles underlying all of human morality align tightly with the wholesome sources of karma. Benevolence relates to a stir of generosity, the wish for goodness for others, and loving kindness, sense of friendliness and goodwill that is assuredly wholesome. Love, of course, is an expression of non-hatred and sympathy, Propachan himself suggests, arises from the compassionate earth, which is also non-hatred rooted. The expression of these wholesome intentions will lead, according to karmic law, to individual well-being and communal harmony, and therefore the welfare and survival

of the species. Sociability is the most important factor in survival, reproduction, and evolution, because it is an expression of wholesome karmic roots, the immediate and direct cause of beneficial outcomes. So, following from Kapitan's conclusion that anarchist communism is the form of social organization that best encourages and provides an environment for the flourishing of mutual aid, it follows it if one sought to devise a form of social organization that is an ideal environment for the cultivation of wholesome karma, that society would be organized along the principles of anarchist communism as well. Let's address the karmic drawbacks of privatization and individualism first. If collectivism,

cooperation, and mutual aid are aligned with and provide for the expression of wholesome karmic roots, it should follow that individualism and predatory forms of competition are aligned with unwholesome karmic roots. And in fact, it can be seen that to the extent that a system encourages privatization and competition, rather than cooperation, it is encouraging thoughts, speech, and actions that flow from unwholesome karmic roots. To the same extent that the underlying impulse is, beneath the mutual aid are aligned with wholesome roots, an opposite system depends upon opposite intentions. First, individualism is rooted squarely in ignorance. The belief in and reification of a separate

self to benefit at the expense of others is one of the most foundational forms of ignorance. A system that is predicated on an every man for himself type of attitude would consistently, and on a systematic basis reinforce individual delusion, further entrenching the I, me, and mine attitude. Every participant in such a system must be consistently focused on themselves and their self-interest as separate beings or else perish, since no one else is looking out for them, thereby firmly rooting participants in the system in a deeply delusional conceptual orientation towards themselves and the world. Next, with ignorance as the predicate, the false belief in an eye leads unavoidably to greed and hatred. The person caught in the delusion of separateness

in a zero-sum economic system must immediately begin to seek more for self, advantage which necessarily comes at the expense or disadvantage of others. As the greed factor strengthens, immatures into a sense of chronic lack and deficiency, the attitude of never having enough. As the deluded self takes more and more, it expands its sphere of influence into other people's space, creating schemes whereby that which rightly belongs to others and to the community are appropriated to satisfy the greedy impulse. Through ignorance, the exploiter identifies with and clings to property and, well, manifestations of the form aggregate as me and mine, clinging to self and what belongs to self, leading to a further proliferation of unwholesome tendencies such as

ingenious attachment and possessiveness. Grapakins' review of the historical record ably demonstrates the relationship between privatization and greed, showing how the subversion of institutions built on principles of mutual aid followed directly from the intensification of individualism and the greed factor among the already privileged nobility, who were driven to appropriate the commons for themselves through violence and manipulation. It also bears mentioning that the process whereby the community was just possessed against its will of its shared claim to the land directly implicates the moral precept against theft, a heavily grade-rooted unethical act. Moreover, the system that developed

where lords extracted absorbent rental payments from those who used freely till the land for their own benefit, in order that the peasant might continue to work the appropriated property for their sustenance, which developed into the wage system, is also a form of theft. What previously belonged to the peasants, the entirety of their production, was cut into factories as those who stole the land continued their efforts to reap where they did not sow. One who is compelled under duress through threat of eviction and starvation to toil for wages, that the original thief can extract surplus value from the worker's labor from the sweat of another's brow, is the victim of an ungrown and continual theft that follows through to our current day and has yet to be

rectified. The principle of non-greed and its expression in the moral precept against theft are anathema to enclosure and the wage system that resulted from the forced privatization of the commons. Finally, privatization also leads naturally to the arisal of hatred-rooted consciousness. The willful denial of the fruits of the earth is some who can no longer freely secure for themselves the minimum need to survive, because others hoard it for themselves violates the principle of non-harming. While the few enrich themselves from their greed and theft, they callously disregard the welfare of those from whom they have taken, often building resentment towards the poor and indulging and self-justifying rationalizations

to excuse their actions. While the rich live comfortably off the workers' labor, they condemn the lazy and convinced themselves that the hungry starb due to their own sloth or ineptitude, rather than from the fact that the rich have appropriated from them that which rightly should belong to all, creating the circumstances themselves. The hungry man starves because the lands his ancestors killed were taken from him, but his efforts now yielding meager rations rather than the full bounty of his work. While heavily focused on me and mind within a competitive paradigm, one also falls prey to petty jealousies, covetousness, and conceit arising from the constant need to measure one's position relative to the status of others. Competition leads to winners and

losers, and so those immersed in the pursuit of competition and personal wealth maximization harden their hearts for the hard-tunged disadvantages of those below them while looking upwards covetously at that which they do not yet but wish to one day possess. Privatization and economic individualism are incompatible with fulsome karmic roots, instead depending on the strengthening of ignorance and with it the factors of greed and hatred. So how does communal ownership and communism create karmic benefit? Well, first, one may ask, why should one be concerned with identifying a social structure that would best maximize wholesome karma?

The obvious importance follows from an understanding of the rarity of a human birth, of course. The Buddha implored his followers to make the best use of this life, to stay vigilant and to work diligently towards liberation, lest a moment or a lifetime of heedlessness lead to eons of agony in the lower realms. Because of the extreme rarity of the opportunity, the Buddha exhorted followers to cultivate a sense of urgency for reaching liberation in this life, and so any help or advantage potentially obtained in that endeavor must be highly valued. Human beings, teetering precariously as we are on the border between the higher and lower realms, can't afford to structure social relations in such a manner that incentivizes, if not that depends upon the cultivation of unwholesome

mental states. Conversely, to the extent that a social structure could be organized in such a way that the opportunities and incentives to cultivate and operate from wholesome mental states are maximized, and additionally to the extent that it can allow for a maximum of free time for the practice of Dharma, such a structure would be an optimal accord with the Dharma. The development of morality and the associated wholesome mental factors during daily life, and the available is for free time for study and the practice of meditation are both critically important to liberation. An anarchist-communist form of social organization is the form that best satisfies these criteria. In contrast to the mentality of privatization, which dependence upon the conceit

and delusion of IME and mind, and structurally reinforces greed and hatred, a collectivized property system whereby the free use of the resources of nature are not regarded as belonging to anyone in particular can work to counteract ignorance, thereby opposing a major source of unwholesome karma and the associated opportunity for the revival of free. An approach to economics rooted in wisdom is reflected naturally in the collectivized understanding of value and property found in anarchist communist theory. The matter in which Kapakin analyzed production in his coal mine and other examples is an antidote for wrong views and is in alignment with ultimate reality.

In the anarchist communist conception of production, it is understood that no individual's contribution can be regarded as distinct from the contribution or value inputted by every other individual and the larger context itself. If there's no me or mine, value cannot be assigned to my labor and wage-based. compensation draws false and arbitrary lines around different facets of production. By seeing production as a complex web of interdependent parts rather than as discrete stages, anarchist communism is in much closer accord with the Buddhist understanding of reality, and is simply a concrete macroscopic expression of this truth.

Not only is there no intrinsic value to what is produced, apart from the entire matrix of causal factors that contribute to its production and valuation, but there's no me or mine apart from that matrix as well. In such a system, no need think of themselves or what ought to belong to them. Therefore, regarding all production as being a shared product of all of society based on the premise of a shared commons of knowledge, property, and effort aligns closely with the Dharma and affords participants in the system the opportunity to shape the mind in accordance with the Dharma. Instead of focusing on competition, workers can cultivate a

hive mind attitude towards work, relinquishing control and self-will in service of the larger interest and pursuit of liberation. A communist approach to work and property also provides an opportunity for the cultivation of non-grade factors. When all work for the benefit of all, one can do one's work mindfully, skillfully using the opportunity to create a focused attitude of offering and generosity throughout the process. Under a capitalist and privatized system, the worker does not own or control what he produces, and therefore he cannot give it away. He is a cog in the larger system of production and distribution. If one must sell their labor to survive, it cannot be said that what the worker produces for the capitalist is in any

way in offering or an active generosity towards the owner, because it has performed under duress and not from a wholesome root of generosity and the desire to give and be a benefit to others. While the worker's time on the job could be used to further their practice of Dharma, instead much of their day is wasted merely earning their sustenance. In an anarchist communist system of organization, a worker performs his duties to benefit the community, and the worker also actually has a decisional stake in what is produced, meaning that when the products are given away, the worker actively participates in that act of generosity, unless if the proper attitude is cultivated, the worker can spend most of their day cultivating wholesome karma.

The worker can perform their duties focus on how they are of benefit to others and all the good that will come to the community from their efforts and may glad in their heart with wholesome qualities such as loving kindness and sympathetic joy by rejoicing in this fact. Also, where the requisites of life are being freely provided, one has no occasion to approach work in a heavy-handed, greed-oriented way. There is no occasion for possessiveness when nothing besides personal property can be privately owned, and no need to grasp for more when there are ample resources freely available at any time. This eliminates two of the primary systemic factors that lead directly to the arisal of grief. The cultivation and perfection of non-hatred rooted consciousness also leads to the obsolescence of the state, where members of the society are committed to practicing kindness and passion and forgiveness, the penal system of retributive justice must be abandoned, and with it the coercive machinery of the state, such as police and prisons.

Law and order become redundant for people who order themselves according to principles that are supportive of social harmony. Finally, the focus of anarchist communism on satisfying needs rather than the maximizing profit also means that the minimum amount of effort necessary would be invested in labor, freeing up the maximum amount of time for dedicated spiritual practice. Every year, many millions of tons of money in food and unused clothing and other miscellaneous products end up in landfills because of overpopulation and the unwillingness of the owning class to give the products away for fear of depressing prices. In a society that is training in non-greed and where production is

tied to actual material needs, the appropriate amount of work will be done each day, giving people significantly more free time, which they can use to practice meditation and other forms of spiritual practice. In this way, anarchist communism is optimally calibrated to support the maximization of Dharmic values. Well done. Absolutely beautiful. Yeah, I love, love, love that speech, that essay. And what really struck me about it initially was that you and I both really get at some of the same core ideas and arguments from our very different angles and articulations. And more than that, you know, you and I wrote these totally separate from knowledge of the other's work. So this is a dissertation. Am I correct in your context? Master's thesis, yep. And

then I was invited and asked specifically to do a speech on a topic by some people associated with ASU, the topic being Marxism and Buddhism. And so that was sort of the catalyst to me writing out a dialectics and liberation. So yeah, absolutely wonderful. I did want to make one quick correction just for your benefit at the very end you said every year many millions of tons of uneaten food and unused clothing and other miscellaneous products end up in landfills because of overpopulation but you meant to say overproduction and the unwillingness of the owning class i just that's kind of a hot wire for some for some folks to hear the term overpopulation but yes and if if i said that that was absolutely my mistake that was the only mistake though production absolutely

Yeah. You read all of that. You read all of that. I was reading along with you and you and you hit everything else. I just wanted to make that point. But yeah, really, really wonderfully. Yeah. One of the things I wanted to focus on as our conversation begins here is the idea of karma. And I think there's a lot of misunderstandings that abound with regards to what karma is and what it means. I think a lot of people in the colloquial sense sort of think of karma as some supernatural force. that balances the scales of justice in the human world or even more concretely a monotheistic god handing down punishments and rewards based on his judgment of one's actions. But what you articulate really well in this essay is the fact of it as a natural law of genuinely just cause and effect in the Buddhist sort of comprehension of this idea. Do you want to say anything about the misunderstandings of karma and the ways in which the misunderstandings of karma can lead to really grotesque sort of views of people's, you know, real-world material suffering? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the biggest misunderstandings or misuses of karma, I should say, is so sometimes you find in Buddhist cultures people who will kind of rationalize the suffering of others, right?

I had mentioned in my talk that karma leads to differences in material circumstances, difference to the quality of someone's health and personal circumstance. And so sometimes people will hear that and think that it sounds very victim-blamy. And sometimes people will hear that and say, okay, well, I don't have to involve myself in the suffering of others because it's their karma and that's just playing out. And so this is just a completely wrong approach to karma for a number of reasons. So first, there is no room for arrogance and self-righteousness. In our eternal wanderings in samsar, we've all been up and down in every conceivable situation.

So today it may be them suffering, but unless you escape, tomorrow it's sure to be you. So you might be doing a little bit better right now, but you're sure to not stay in this position forever. And so it says in the Degrauta Suta that whenever you're, you see someone in misfortune or misery, you can conclude, I too have experienced the same thing in this long course, and one should always contemplate that fact. So more than the point, if I have indifference, if I'm hardening my heart to their struggle, or I have ill will towards them, such as enjoying their suffering or thinking that they deserve it, some form of enmity, disgust, or disregard, these are all hatred-rooted consciousness. If I cling to

what's mine, thinking, I deserve what I've got, I've earned it, I should keep it. I shouldn't help. They don't deserve my generosity. These are greed-rooted consciousness, and regarding oneself as superior is conceit, another unwholesome form of consciousness. So these responses are certain to put you in their exact situation or worse at a later time.

But if I respond with generosity, compassion, loving, kindness, and sympathy, I will help myself as I help you. Karma binds some sariq beings to solidarity and struggle together, or else we reap painful consequences for our selfishness, and arrogance right so so the only appropriate response from i think a correct understanding of karma um is to help is to lend a hand is to do what we can because all the alternative is we're actually creating unwholesome karma for ourselves and we're going to swap places right so so there's there's incredible solidarity and brotherhood um for all some psalic beings we are we are

siblings in birth death and suffering yeah beautifully said and one of the ways that i I sort of approach this is from the angle of my own personal suffering, which is to say that when I suffer, let's say, you know, I lost my father in the last year or two. At a very early age, he was only 55 due to alcoholism, his death was brutally violent, et cetera, right? I suffer deeply in the wake of his death. One thing you can do, and some people do do do,

I think especially teenagers do this, but some adults as well, unfortunately, is to kind of convince yourself that you're unique, suffering is so deep, it's so unique. It makes you a special person that you suffer in this way that other regular people can't even comprehend. That's a very narcissistic and immature reaction to one's suffering. But as I have done spiritual practices, I've suffered spiritually as well as just materially and physically in this world. I realize that the loss of a loved one ties me deeply to the human condition because all of us lose someone or something that we love. And so it's when I'm,

when I am grieving the loss of my father, yes, there's the particular loss of this particular being that was particularly close to me. But if I can get out of my own way, if I can quiet down this ego reinforcing internal dialogue, I can feel that suffering to be something that not only human beings, but sentient creatures of all sorts, even those we can't comprehend alien life, right, suffer in a similar way. And so I find the suffering in this particular way to connect me to the whole human condition to all sentient beings and to, you know, it's not about my ego and me as an individual suffering this loss, but it's me participating in the great ocean of tears that is the human condition. And that makes me walk away from that grief feeling not only much

more connected with anybody that grieves for similar things, loss of a loved one, but actually I think also more able to help and offer solace to those who are going through that exact form of suffering, you know, turning suffering into not only connective and solidarity, but also into love and compassion for anybody else who goes through it. Yeah. And I think like one of the hallmarks of true spiritual growth is being able to let go of these like egoistic judgments about others and others' conditions, thinking that like we're on some place of moral superiority looking down and it's for us to discriminate that this person deserves help and that person deserve self-help. I mean, in my understanding, this is very aligned with the teachings of Jesus

as well. We just said, don't judge and help everyone in need, right? Over and over and over again, don't judge, help everyone in need. So it can be a powerful spiritual practice to work on that quality of mind that wants to discriminate in those cases, that wants to lay judgment or question, are they trying to get over on me, something like that? You know, it's a beautiful practice, a beautiful heart-centered compassion-based practice just to kind of let go of all of that. And if you see someone in need, give them a hand. Absolutely. Right?

And it really, like you said, does connect you to fellow beings in the ocean of suffering. Absolutely. Yeah. And another thing is instead of a lot of people, especially young lefties of various sorts, will very much want to sort of save the world. And you're going to run up into the brick wall of being not able to do that. you're not going to be able to satisfy or to solve everybody's suffering. You're not going to be able in and of yourself to, you know, protect everybody to heal

everybody. One of the things that I've done that sort of humbled me is to say I'm not going to be able to save the entire world. But what I can do is in my personal life, whenever I have an opportunity to generously act in the service of somebody else, irrespective of my particular egoic wants and desires in that moment, well, I don't really have time, well, I wish I could do this, or I don't want to give that money because I can't even afford to help that person, you know, irrespective of my own desires to just generously and automatically help as much as I can. So you can't save the

whole world. You can't save everybody's suffering that you see on TV, but you do have a sphere of personal influence, your family, your friends, your community, the people you pass and talk to every single day, and when any opportunity for you to let go of your ego and your own selfish interest and to generously open your heart and lovingly help another human being when that opportunity arises, I think that is a great spiritual practice and to keep that at the forefront of your mind as you walk through the world and always being willing to open your heart and to help when and where you can, I think is a humble and also really important spiritual practice. Yeah, I absolutely love that. And it's part of some of my favorite advice that I give

to people in my one-on-one teaching when I'm confronted with someone who is feeling really overwhelmed. And this is likely coming from, you know, chronic doom scrolling or following the news. And you're just kind of watching these things happen in fears that are far beyond your personal influence. And everything's going the wrong direction. So this kind of, this cultivates this sense of helplessness that can be really cutting and really uncomfortable to hold. And exactly like you said, a lot of times my advice for these people is to focus on your personal radius. Focus on situation to situation as you go through the day, doing the best you can within your sphere of influence, right? Because you often feel hopeless or helpless or powerless

because you're focusing on spheres in which you are hopeless and powerless, right? Where do you have no potential for impact? So a good way to counteract that is just to focus, like as you go through your day, being mindful, paying attention, like just making sure that everyone you encounter is left better for having encountered you. Right. And then you can at least, rejoice in your own good qualities knowing that you're doing the most with what you've got and that that can be enough. Right. Yeah.

And when you do good things and you have a feeling of reinforcement, a good feeling, some people will cynically say, oh, that good feeling is your own ego, your own ego interest. You only do good things because it makes you feel good. But no, I always say it's a mutually reinforcing pro-social benefit of both people being

uplifted by an act of solidarity. and love and interconnection and compassion. It's not a simple thing where you hoard the benefits for your own ego. Like, I'm a good person. Look at me. It's like you walk away feeling good because you did a good thing. And in some weird way, carmically, universally, you are being rewarded with this positive feeling.

And that is, you know, even in evolutionary terms, reinforcement of pro-social behavior. You know, you can explain it scientifically. You can explain it carmically, whatever. But it's a positive thing that reinforces pro-social behavior and should not be seen as the goal in and of itself or as an ego thing that you can sort of appropriate for yourself, but as a blossoming of goodness that occurs when people are generous and loving and open-minded and have an open heart.

Yeah, absolutely. I don't think the feeling of goodness from doing something good, I don't do that as an egoistic function. As a matter of fact, like, Buddhism asks us to rejoice in our own goodness. Like the training and morality is really like one of the first steps on the path is to start to kind of straighten up our relationship with the world. And there's a certain joy and peace of mind that comes from living a blameless life. And the Buddha said that this is wholesome. This is one of the higher joys.

This is a better joy than, you know, sense pleasures, like, you know, seeing pretty sights and feeling pleasurable touches. Like the feeling of living of a blameless life is a wholesome, is a virtuous thing to cultivate. And there's nothing wrong with that. And it actually plays a really important part in getting to the later stages of the path where the quality of your life is going to be reflected in the quality of your mind. And if you're running around creating problems and harming people, you're going to have problems and harm on your own mind. So this necessity to kind of simplify and to purify your relationship with the world

is reflected in your mind, which allows you to access some of the deeper meditative states. Yeah, yeah, very well said. So I'm going to give like two kind of examples of karma in this cause and effect way playing out. One is very acute and obvious and one is a little bit more subtle, which you point to in your essay. So the first example, and I'm just picking this sort of out of the hat of my mind just because it's something that I've been following recently. It's a recent story. I mean, you could come up with a billion different examples.

But in the comedy world, there's a controversy going on right now with a, and this has been going on for a while now, but is reaching new heights of a comedian named Chris Delia who, you know, was a very popular stand-up comedian for a while and is now coming out that he was behaving absolutely immorally behind the scenes with women in particular. There's allegations of, you know, messaging underage women. There's allegations of, um, cult-like behavior where he's trying to, you know, basically create a sex cult and abusing women in the meantime, et cetera, right? So now the, the, the, the karmic sort of display here is that's all coming out. So now he has this entire thing where he's losing his career people won't other comedians won't fuck with them he can't go to venues people are blocking him from that he's at the lowest rung of the comedian respect world

and he's losing friends and everything like that right and um and this is an obvious example of mere cause and effect it's not that there is some god up up in the heavens necessarily there might be i'm agnostic on that um but handing that karma in this sense is not some supernatural force handing down punishments for his behavior but is literally the carmic outflow of actions with, with ill intentions that he took in the past, coming to the light. So, you know, if you behave in those ways, you might think, I'm not caught, you know, I'm not going to be caught, I can keep doing this, et cetera. Eventually, because of your own actions, this is the result of those actions, right?

And so that's an obvious example of behaving immorally, thinking you can still get all the goodies that you want out of life, but those actions themselves catching up with you, becoming known to other people and that judgment coming back on you. That's like easy cause and effect an obvious example. A more nuanced example that I think you mentioned in your essay is your talk is the desiring machine that Buddhism really wants to point to and talk about. How satisfying desires only lead to more and more desires, right? So you have a desire to be wealthy. You start hoarding wealth. You start satisfying that desire to hoard wealth. The desire doesn't go away. Oh, look, I got wealth. Now I don't desire wealth anymore, right? What happens actually is that is that oil gets poured on the fire of desire and that desire for more and more and more becomes compulsive. So like in a real way, the goal is not to satiate your every desire, but to literally liberate yourself from desiring, from the, the desiring spiral, the mechanism of desiring and then you satisfy the desire and then you desire more. That entire sort of process is what you, you

you are aiming to liberate yourself from and hedonism is this idea that by satiating all my desires i can somehow find happiness or contentment or at the very least endless pleasure but the very machinery of desiring creates the suffering that will inevitably come back on you one way or another and i thought you made that point very well and that's very much in line with karma as this natural law of cause and effect yeah absolutely um you know the the budd had talked about a number of different spheres. So the commentaries point to three areas that the Buddhist teachings apply to. So happiness, peacefulness, and welfare here and now, a beneficial rebirth in the future, and total liberation. These are kind of like the three ways you could divide up the teachings.

And yeah, the teachings on happiness here and now. We don't need to think of karma as being even this kind of like abstract metaphysical force, even if it's not controlled by anyone, the consequences of our actions are visible here and now. And even if, to take the example of this comedian, even if he didn't get caught, he has to carry the worry and the potential fear of getting caught. Exactly.

Right. And so having to carry the possibility of being caught is itself going to be something that is going to prevent peace of mind and the ability to kind of settle down. Right? So you put these objects. in your mental space right and so if you're running around lying cheating and stealing you now have to suffer the consequence of worrying about being found out lying cheating and stealing you got to worry about

the jump out boys when you walk down the three you know you got to look both ways when you step when you step out of your front door right these are just direct causal relationships we don't have to get abstract in terms of understanding that there are certain subsets of actions and thoughts and forms of speech that will lead reliably to more contracted and uncomfortable states of mind. And there's other modes of thought, speech, and action that will lead to open, spacious, and relaxed states of mind. And it's kind of parsing this distinction where Buddhism then can say, okay, well, this is what's wholesome.

This is what is upward leading, what will have good results here and now and in the future. And these are the kinds of things that just, that just kind of lead to decay of social harmony and balanced and personal peace of the mind. All right. Now, I do want to move on from karma, but before I do, I just want to make one more point, which is something you touched on in your piece as well, which is this idea of sympathetic joy as a practice. And what I take this to mean, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of sympathetic joy is taking explicit pleasure in the success and happiness and good fortune of others. those of course it's easy to do with people you really love but people you don't like people

you don't know um you know i think the the ego contraction that can sometimes occur when you see somebody else doing something that's successful or puts them in the spotlight or whatever takes the form of envy of jealousy and you don't really fully admit it to yourself but you feel weird when you're scrolling through instagram and you see somebody maybe even a little younger than you doing crazy things or having a lot more money or a lot more success with the opposite sex or the same sex, various things that could make you, or, you know, seeing a friend who you've grew up with become, you know, successful in some way. There's this part of you that kind of cringes, that kind of contracts, that kind of feels as if I am being implicated and not being worthy enough

because, you know, I am interested in that thing, but I can't do it as well as that person. Or, you know, I would like to live that life or I would like to travel there, but I can't, you know, I would like to make money as being a Instagram influencer. They can do it. But I, you know, so this contraction of the self that is rooted in the comparison between you and the other makes you feel negative feelings, impacts people's mental health, etc. And I found that sympathetic joy is not only a concept, but an actual spiritual practice where you can in the face of good fortune for others, practice first being aware of that part of you that contracts into envy or jealousy or comparison, being aware of that.

to free yourself from it and then going out of your way to try to encourage and share in the joy of other people. I think it is a, I think it's tied to the, to the karma thing. I think it's tied to compassion and helping. So when somebody's suffering, you clearly sort of want to help them. When they're having a good time, when they're being joyous, they're not suffering at all. That's kind of a little different thing. And being able to take genuine joy and somebody else's success and joy, whatever that means. I'm not talking about wealth building or success due to capitalist standards. I mean, whatever that means for whoever we're talking about, being able to practice taking joy in other people's successes, I think is a spiritual practice and can really help on this front. Do you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sympathetic joy is one of four of what's called the heart practices. The original term is the Brahma Viharas, which basically translates to the abode of the gods.

So these are the emotional, these are the emotional frequencies that the gods live in, basically. And so we can cultivate these in both daily life and in meditation practice. And it includes also loving, kindness, compassion, and equanimity. And so these practices can actually be developed to an incredibly profound extent. And there's really interesting research that's come out from MRI scans of highly accomplished meditators, the things that they see their brains doing because they'll not only switch on the appropriate regions of the brains for the emotions they're supposed to be feeling while doing these meditations, but also increase the intensity of the frequency of their brain waves. Many times over, I think if I recall correctly, I think Mingyar Rinpoche talks about being in the MRI for these studies. And basically they told them, okay, turn on compassion.

And then they counted up until 10. And then they said, okay, turn off your compassion and count back down from 10 to 1. And so in the focus group, basically there was no correlation. You had like college students who had done like a two-month mindfulness course. And so their brainwaves had no correlation with what they were being asked to do. But when Minger Rimperset was asked to do it, basically the regions of his brain that were appropriate for compassion all switched on, dope means being released, all this stuff. But then increased the intensity of his brainwaves 7 to 800 percent.

percent over the count of 10 and then decreased it back to baseline under the count back down to one. So this is an intense form of personal training that really can lead to an incredible degree of self-mastery over subjective experience, really quite profound. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's fascinating. And that leads very well into this next point I want to make. It's not really, it's not really a critique. It's sort of something I wrestle with as somebody interested in Buddhism as well, so I'd like to get your thoughts. So recently, especially online, there's been a debate on the left. It's an old debate, but it recurs every now and then about the trueness or falseness of religion. And there's people arguing, you know, hey, I understand that, you know, we have a

different approach to religion than they did 100 years ago, but we can't forget that religion is fundamentally false, right? It's the opiate of the masses. It's tied with power and all these other, you know, structures of domination and oppression. And the epistemic claims made by mainstream Christianity or Islam or Judaism or whatever about the nature. of the world are demonstrably false and we shouldn't forget that. Other people push back of actually you're making a category error about what religion is.

Some people think it's an impulse. Some people think it's a language with which humans wrestle with their existential situation. So there's many ways we can take this argument, but the basic criticism of the falseness or trueness of religious claims don't necessarily impact Buddhism

like it does the other three monotheistic mainstream versions of of those religions, right, which are often very much about a set of claims. When I go ask my neighbor, are you a Christian? And they say yes. What they mean is, I believe a certain set of claims about Jesus being the son of God, having resurrected, and will come back. So these are claims about the nature of the cosmos in the world that are objective claims that I believe in. And that's what makes me a Christian. Buddhism doesn't have that. Buddhism can have that. There are very hyper-religious expressions of

Buddhism, which seem to be arguing for some specific claims about the nature of the world, but in general, especially the meditative practice itself, is a experiment you run on yourself. It's skeptical from a baseline, right? I'm not believing anything you're telling me. I'm going to try these things out myself. It's replicable inner experiments. So a Buddhist master would say, if you do this practice, this practice, and this practice, these will be the sort of subjective experiences and results that you can find, and then you can go and test that. Is this true or not? It cuts through illusion and ignorance and delusion. As you look inward, it's a sort of scientific investigation of what is actually happening here and now inside of myself. So it has that edge

to it. And the direct experience cashes out any claims. So you have a claim about enlightenment or about a state of mind. And here are the practices you can run. Now you can run them yourself. You see, does this cash out into this? It's not exactly. as simple as that as some of these interstates are very nuanced and complex and the language we have to describe them can often be limited or if available at all. But more or less, there's a realness, a validity of a verification process that can occur within Buddhism. But I am skeptical of claims, scientific, metaphysical claims about the nature of the world, that people forge purely from subjective experience. So you could have a subjective experience,

right, where you're wash in love, which I've genuinely had what I believe to be a spiritual experience where my ego was disintegrated in a river of love and there was just love where I used to be. And that is a beautiful, profound experience. But then to go on and say, the universe is love. Or love is the truth at the fundamental bottom of everything. In reality, love is actually the thing that undergirds everything. Right. And okay, I'm open to those ideas. I'm agnostic on them as an epistemic claim about the literal state of the of the universe, but there is this sense in which, and that's, there's

many more claims that are made like this, but you could even get into the realm of reincarnation or as you were talking about realms as literal places and, you know, take those as claims about the nature of the cosmos, objective, almost scientific claims about the way reality

really is, even though we could never fully, we could never ever know whether these, you know, and correct me if I'm wrong, if these realms exist or in the Christian context, if heaven and hell are real, right? We can't know them from where we are here. So making a hardcore claim about them seems precarious at best. And I feel like the best epistemic orientation to these sort of claims is just agnosticism,

because I don't know and I can't know. So therefore I should remain agnostic. But I'm also skeptical of secular Buddhism, right? I'm sure you share this, this idea that we can just get rid of all the cultural hangups and some of the less convenient ideas in the Buddhist tradition, fully secularized and scientific eyes, Buddhism. That kills something beautiful in Buddhism as well. So what are your thoughts about any of this?

Oh, my God. There's so much in there that I want to respond to. Really great question. A couple of responses. And I think I'm going to give you a couple of responses that if I don't forget them, by the time I get to them, they'll probably get to conflict with each other as well. Okay, so one response is that. that Buddhism teaches relinquishment of all views,

even including views about things that Buddhism claims until one can corroborate for oneself. It's interesting, and I think the Mahi-Nidana Suta and the Diganakaya, someone asked the Buddha what the source of or the cause of violence is. And he said, in regular people, it's craving for sense pleasures. It's wanting more for me, basically. But in holy people, in spiritual people, aesthetics. He says it's clinging to views. Violence comes from clinging to views among spiritual

people. And this is the Buddha talked from 2600 years ago, before Christianity, before Islam, before the mess that we've seen. So, I mean, really quite, quite prescient. So Buddhism asks us not to cling to views. It asks us not to debate people in anger and these kinds of things just to investigate for ourselves. Another answer I want to give, is my impression that to a large extent, based on my research, the, or almost a complete extent, the kinds of things that, like, Christianity, for example, says will lead you to hell.

And I'm not talking about, like, homosexuality or any of the bullshit that we see in Christianity. I'm going to know what Jesus actually said is, like, bad, and what Jesus actually said is good are the same kinds of things that will lead to lower rebirths and higher rebirths, according to Buddhism. The only thing that really contradicts there is that Christians make the claim

that heaven or hell are eternal but on what basis like you point out they don't actually know so the response from Buddhism is just that yeah you could be a good person and wind up in a heavenly realm but it's not eternal because nothing in samsara is eternal and so one day you'll be

reborn so there can be a lot of alignment between the traditions another really interesting thing I've seen a lot of Buddhist monks dismiss mystical experiences in other traditions as particular meditative attainments within the Buddhist path because there are stages of meditative attainment that are incredibly blissful that are the experience of like being bathed in love and like these kinds of things and so these monks say yes they're just in this state

and so to your point about about people draw inferences or deductions, metaphysical deductions from these experiences. So this was going on a lot in the Buddha's day. And so there were very accomplished teachers who the Buddha himself had studied with initially who were teaching these states, things like the realm of nothingness, the realm of neither perception nor non-perception. And within this bracket of experience, there's also a realm called the realm of infinite consciousness. And so this is a highly advanced meditative attainment where one has an experience that has no parallel in ordinary human experience and that leaves an after effect or imprint on the mind that creates an impression of all things

being imbued with living consciousness basically. And so my understanding is that like this is where like the Upanishadic and like early kind of Hindu mystical tradition got its views about the nature of the Atman, the eternal soul and the ultimate Brahmin, the, cosmic consciousness. And so the Buddha had these experiences and he said, no, there's more. And so something that one can do later on in the path when one is practicing the insight portion of the path is go back using the modes of consciousness that produced those mystical states and doing insight on those modes of consciousness to break them down into their constituent components of the three characteristics of impermanence, non-self, and suffering. And so, so,

it's actually part of the later Buddhist path, depending on which tradition or which teacher you're practicing under, but this is something that definitely happens under Pha-Oc-Siodas tradition, one of the Burmese meditation masters, is you will break down these mystical experiences to see the truth of their impermanence and insubstantiality, to understand that they don't actually point to anything ultimately real, and that basically Nirvana, final liberation,

is the only ultimate endpoint there. Yeah. That's really interesting about the not clinging to these experiences. It's something I remind myself as well because once you have the experience of, let's say that one moment where my spiritual suffering opened up into this immense feeling of love, the moment that moment ends, it just becomes a conceptual idea in your mind. You make sense of it with reference to your already existing beliefs, etc. And then why in that very process you sort of lose the thing that was there in that moment. And so if you cling to that experience, try to get back to that experience. You're sort of, you know, on the hamster wheel of desiring and conceptual thinking, et cetera, that creates suffering in the first place. But, you know, you can see somebody like a medieval Christian who has an experience through, let's say, deep prayer of profound love flowing through them. What will they do? They will interpret it immediately in relation to their already existing belief about God and Jesus. And I just came into contact with God's infinite love. Therefore, I know

without a shadow of a doubt that this religion is true and you know and all this stuff, which I always, I always found that very interesting. And the other side of this is, oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, sorry, I just wanted to like I thought I would, I forgot one of the, I just wanted. No problem.

That's why I write some down. Yeah, I, I also do want to be charitable to the other spiritual traditions. But my assumption so far, and my master's is in interfaith. faith theology. So I'm in training to become an interfaith minister. So I include a lot of syncretism and I include Jesus' teachings and some Hindu teachings as part of my own set of spiritual practice. It's very universalist. And so I don't feel like I can or it's appropriate

to kind of dismiss the experiences from these other traditions through the lens that Buddhism provides us with. You know, Buddhism does not posit the existence of an eternal, monotheistic kind of God, I'm not fully convinced. I've had my own experiences. All I can really say is, you know, maybe I'll know more as I progress more on the path. But, you know, so far as like the origin of religion, I think we can presume that these traditions came from people who are having authentic spiritual experiences, authentic mystical experiences, that, you know, Jesus was on another level, you know. And so my, you know, whether he was the literal son of God who was sent here to die for our sins. And these guys, I mean, that's kind of later theology that I don't think

he really laid claim to himself. But yeah, there are also very, very high saints of other traditions who have very, very profound teachings. And that I think I accept on their faith, on their face, and just don't feel an urge to try to dispute through the lens of other traditions. Totally. Yeah. Very well said. And I know like we probably won't have time in this this conversation, but I'd love to have you back on because I know our view of Jesus, as heterodox as it may be, to mainstream Christian thought is something that you and I also dovetail on quite a bit. And I draw immense inspiration from Jesus as a mystical or spiritual figure, even if I don't believe the specific claims that mainstream Christianity makes

about who he was and what he represents, et cetera. But I mean, I'll still find myself moved to tears, like hearing a snippet from the Gospels or, you know, something like that. Even just a depiction of Jesus can sometimes move me to tears. And it's like, in many instances, if anybody had this internal subjective experience in the face of, you know, this thing of relating to Jesus, they would take it as a conversion thing. Like, oh, I need to convert to this religion because it's moved me so deeply. I have those feelings in relation to Jesus and stories about Jesus, but can't quite make that jump to belief claims, but still see him as fundamental to whatever spiritual path I may be on.

The last thing I want to touch on, though, before we move into the question of violence, which I know we wanted to touch on. One more point about realms as literal. This may be the secular Western, you know, type in me, the sort of, yeah, the secular, scientific-minded person that I tend to sometimes be. But I will naturally want to psychologize, you know, instead of literalizing these realms within Buddhism, psychologize them. So the realm of hungry ghost isn't, for me, at least, an actual, it could be, I don't know, I'm agnostic on these claims, but not a literal place where you go are reincarnated into, but is the experience of hardcore addiction, right? Or even like not hardcore addiction, just addiction in general. We all have, or at least the capacity within us, if not the actual lived experience,

of being a hungry ghost, of never being able to satiate your compulsion for a thing, a chemical or whatever else it may be. What do you think about the psychologization of things like this? And is this just the secular scientific Western part of my mind trying to grapple with the Eastern ideas and trying to fit them into my box instead of meeting them where they are? Yeah, that's another great question. So the most straightforward to answer is if you read the poly canon, at least in my mind, it is abundantly obvious to me that the Buddha is talking about actual objective realm. There's been a tendency in modernity, the modernization of Buddhism to talk about them in terms of psychological states. In my mind, it is more than obvious that the Buddha talks about these as objective places. That having been said, there is a place for thinking about them in terms of psychology.

And in fact, in some of my teachings, my full-time job is teaching at an inpatient addiction treatment center. and I actually do have a group that I teach sometimes on the realm of the hungry ghost, using the teachings from Buddhism as a lens to help patients think about their own psychological processes. And I do present it as more of a psychological thing. Now, I think the place, the way that that gets extended is so you can imagine that if reincarnation or rebirth is something that actually happens, if you spend your life living in what feels like a realm of a hungry ghost as being a human inactive addiction, you have now cultivated and strengthened those qualities of mind so that when the mind stream re-expresses itself in the re-arisal of the five aggregates in another realm,

you're going to be on that kind of vibrational wavelength because that's what you've strengthened and cultivated. So you could be living it here, and if you're living it here, you might be sending yourself up for later experiences of it. Same thing if, like, you know, you're, you know, a neo-Nazi who's just strengthening the hatred factor in the mind. It's these things that, it's these tendencies that we build up, these mental habits that sprout in, that are karmic potentialities that lead to rebirth if they're the ones

that, and so, so the more we are cultivating these unwholesome tendencies, the greater the likelihood that the karmic potentiality that sprouts in the next. rebirth is going to be one of these unwholesome tendencies that will express itself in that kind of way. But, you know, as I mentioned in the talk, you don't need to accept any of this stuff that I just said in order to get into or practice or use Buddhism, right? If this sounds all very hokey to you, put it aside, right? There's, I just, that's just kind of why I dangled it out there that's like, well,

if you're curious, you can actually corroborate this for yourself if you get far enough on the path. But until that point, the best approach is probably one of an open mind. Just, okay, so this is the teaching, but you don't have to accept or reject it. And the Buddha didn't ask you to accept or reject it based on what he's saying. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really well said. And it kind of, yeah, bridges that gap between the reality of these psychological states, hell realms and hungry ghost realms, but also linking it up with at least the possibility that these things actually exist. And I do agree with you that when the Buddha is talking about them initially. He's talking about them literally. He's not meaning psychological states. So I find that

helpful and interesting. Well, let's go ahead and move into the question of violence. When I gave my speech on Marxism and Buddhism, this question came up. I was unable, unfortunately, to get the Q&A segment, but I loved the questions that were asked after that speech. But one of them was about violence with regards to the Buddhist perspective. I know Buddhists are quite well known for taking nonviolence to very extreme extents. I mean, Jainism as well

where, you know, killing of bugs is not even permitted and there's a part of me that had, you know, mowing my lawn. I feel the, the moral depravity

of slaughtering innocent bugs and stuff and I don't like it. When I see a spider, I won't, you know, I won't kill it if I can at all avoid it, even though my daughter

and wife are pushing me to commit acts of horrendous slaughter against spiders. But what do you, how do you think of violence in the context of Buddhism? especially in the context of Marxism or anarchism,

which at least believe in the possibility of revolution, which in almost every instance historically involves at least some degree of violence against one's oppressors. So what does your take on violence? I would actually like to send that back to you first, being that you're the Marxist, which kind of inherently involves violence as part of revolutionary struggle, how do you reconcile Buddhism with your Marxism? And then I'll give you my answer. Sure. Yeah, on that front, it's difficult. One, I'm not a perfect Buddhist. So, you know, like the eightfold path and the things you're supposed to do, I don't always do them right. You know, right speech, for example. I'm a shit talker. Sometimes that comes out in the worst part of me. And, you know, I'm not able to, you know, eat a full vegan diet. So there's death and murder involved in my consumption of just food, just eating regular food. So, you know, with all that said, I don't pretend to be perfect in this front. But I always think,

and my response to this question is always first and foremost highlighting the daily grinding violence that upholds the current status quo. So it's not like we're coming from a position of nonviolence where then these revolutionaries are enforcing violence on us, right? It's much more there's the unacceptable violence of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism that exists every single day and is a basic foundation and pillar to the basic functioning of the system as a whole. And so revolutionary violence in that context is it needs to be contrasted with the amount of violence already built in. For some people in this system, violence is at arm's length or further away. You live in a gated community. You have disproportionate police protection if you need it. You could live your life so protected from the depravities of life that you can convince yourself that you're a nonviolent person.

But I think violence is part and parcel of this system. It creates huge amounts every single day of utterly unnecessary suffering. And I do think that if it takes some amount of violence to throw off the oppressor or to transition to a better state of affairs, a different and better status quo, that in some instances it can be justified. In the same way that if a serial killer is, you know, kicking in your door, to harm your family, you have every right under any ethical guidelines that are coherent to any degree to use violence to protect the innocent, to protect your own life, to protect your loved ones,

etc. So if we're able to use violence to protect the lives of innocent people, which I think most people would accept as an unfortunate but true part of reality, then I think collectivizing that and zooming it out, you could see in some circumstances revolution, violence being an unfortunate but necessary part of the stopping of a much bigger and broader daily structural violence that is already in existence. That's kind of a first pass at that. What do you think? I love that answer. That's a great answer. So, yeah, okay, so I don't see the Buddhist text really struggling with moral complexity in that way. To my knowledge, nothing that I've come across involves, you know, someone coming to the Buddha and putting

to him the question, like, well, can I kill if there's a serial killer trying to kill my family? The ethical advice that the canon provides is very black and white. And all of the Dharma makes so much sense to me that if you weren't able to respond with violence when protecting the vulnerable and innocent, this would be like the one area of the Dharma that doesn't make sense, right? But it's not explicitly stated. So what's explicitly found very clearly is that you shouldn't kill. It's the first precept. It's found throughout the text that any harmful behavior or killing is absolutely prohibited. So that much is quite clear. But there is more nuance that you could pull out of the discourses. So basically, there's kind of, so far as I know,

two sources of violence that the Buddha talked about. So one of them was violence stemming from the human defilements, violence stemming from the three poisons, from the latent tendencies of mind that express themselves in unwholesome ways. And a second category that may be less obvious is violence that arises from circumstance where someone is kind of pushed into a situation. So an example of the violence stemming from defilements is like you have like in the Aganya Suta, this is Dignacayana number 27, if everyone wants to look it up, you have what's kind of like

the Genesis mythology of Buddhism. And basically it attributes the arisal of the state to the advent of private property, which flows from greed arising in the mind of beings. Basically, it describes some state where there was like a perfected, where there was perfected morality. So this was a stateless utopia. And greed entered the mind of, one of the people and it was actually one of the beings. These were kind of not exactly human beings, but they descended in some sense. And so basically they were kind of hunting and gathering sort of and enjoying the produce of their fruits. And then one of them had to thought, well, what if I were to store up my grain for

tomorrow? And so then they start dividing up the commons. It's really very much similar to what Krapakin described. They start dividing up the commons and then someone who has property over here, looked at someone else's property and says, okay, I'm going to take from them. And so this led to a, so the arisal of greed led to the collapse of,

of ordered society and the need for the people kind of collectively coming together and trying to create some system of government, basically to moderate, because in a realm that is governed by craving, you're going to find a lack of ethics, and now we need something to kind of impose order. So that's one example of like the violence,

that stems from the defilement. Violence that stems from circumstances, a good example of this is like the Chakavati Suta, and this is a myth that the Buddha tells to his listeners. That's really, really quite fascinating. Basically, you had a king who was not a Darmic ruler. He was slacking in certain respects. Specifically, he stopped providing for the poor and the needy.

And so theft starts showing up in the kingdom. And the first couple of people that steal, they're brought before the king. And he says, well, why did you do this for? And they say, well, I was hungry. I couldn't eat. And he said, okay. So he gives them some food. And word gets out in the kingdom that if you steal, you'll get fed.

So more stealing arises. And so the king's like, well, fuck this. You're just taking advantage of me now. So he starts executing them. But it was too little too late. And so the people, instead of becoming terrified at this state repression, they'd say, well, what if we took up swords and we start executing the people that we're stealing from so that they can't point us out and we can, you know, and we could fight with other people for more resources.

And it leads to this spiral where all of civil society basically completely collapses. And like the takeaway here, the Buddha in this story emphasizes not the ills of the people, but the failure of the state to provide for them and the fact that even intense state repression is not going to get in the way of someone's survival instinct, basically. And so as the suit to progresses, he repeats over and over and over again, the failure to feed the poor led to killing, led to fever, relying, sexual immorality, and the complete collapse of society repeatedly says it all stems back to the king's failure to feed the poor. This is where it all went wrong. And so, you know, it's, it's thing that like if you're

a position where you are potentially controlling society, you have an obligation to make sure that everything is good, or you can expect violence, right? And it's going to be your fault, basically. And then in another one, you have the Buddha advising King Pasanati of Kossala. This is one of the big empires, the big monarchies in this region. And King Pasadenae was concerned about a potential war within just Ajata Satu of Magada. So this was the other main empire. And so

Ajada Satu was the aggressor. And Pasanadi was like a virtuous king who was a close disciple of the Buddha. And he ends up having to fight off Adjada Satu and defeats him. And the Buddha basically

acknowledged that this was sort of a necessity of the ruler to have to go to war in this way. And in his analysis of the situation, he talks about Adidasaitu, really in karmic terms, a conqueror will bring about his own defeat, basically. And so it kind of implies

that Agadishaitu's karma was acting through King Pasaneda, and so kind of absolving him of responsibility for that. That all having been said, there's also a text in the San Yuta Nakayo, where a warrior

is basically bragging that if he dies on the battlefield, he'll go to heaven. And the Buddha says, no, whether you're the victim or the victor, the type of consciousness that leads to the death of another can only lead downward. So what I take from this and where I ultimately come out, I'm essentially fundamentally pacifistic for this and for other reasons. I think, you know, there's a place for defensive violence if, you know, if in the case where you know you are threatened or your movement is threatened but that shouldn't

be the primary tactic in my view um where i so i think so budd isn't acknowledges the practicalities of reality and that if you know if rulers are in living up to their side of the bargain right what can the people do but react to that situation that's kind of beyond their control and so this isn't this isn't violence springing from the defilements it's circumstances that you've kind of been boxed into. So that having been said, I think that the karmic situation is very dicey. And in terms of what's justifiable and what's excessive, you know, so I would personally much rather see a heart-based revolution, a movement founded on love, a movement of

attraction based on virtue rather than imposition through violent efforts. Yeah, well, yeah, and I think that also leads to a point where we do agree on, which is this individual and collective element of change. So on the revolutionary left, whatever shade of left you are, we're obviously all focused on outward revolutionary change. We want to change the politics, the social structures, the economic institutions, the whole way of organizing society we want to change through revolution. Ideally, that is our, that's why we're on the revolution. left. But I think something that often hamstrings us, and this is from my own experience in left-wing organizing circles and just from a cursory survey of the history of the left in the United States at least, but around the world for sure, is that one of the things that prevents that or acts as a limiting factor on our organizing abilities is precisely this lack of trying to do the work on ourselves. So you'll have people with huge egos. that care more about being right than they care about the functioning or success of the organization.

You'll have particularly immoral actions, sex crimes, assault, people using left-wing politics and organizing as a sort of Trojan horse to try to, you know, fulfill their sexual fantasies. A whole array of bigotries brought into it delusions. And this can, and often does, undermine and undercut any attempt by the left to organize themselves and to try to change the outside world. So how do you see this relationship between the individual and the collective? And what would your argument be to somebody who is on the left, but is skeptical that they should waste any time trying to work on themselves

because that is just individualism and what we need to do is organize for political struggle? Absolutely. So that really cuts to the heart of the logic of anarcho-spirituality entirely, that the inner liberation and outer liberation are, extricably linked and relate with each other dialectically. So if you have people who within their organization can't get along, can't make decisions together, are, you know, canceling their friends because, you know, I don't know, a misspoken word or some offense was taken or something.

Like, how do you expect to have abolition of police and prisons? How do you expect to have someone kill or rape someone? And have you say, yeah, we should rehabilitate. them, if you can't look at your comrade and forgive them for saying something that offended you. You know, like kind of a good example of this is like I posted something fairly recently that was basically supportive of voting. I think it said, you know, handing free reign to people who want your friends dead isn't

as cool as you think it is. And so, you know, in my opinion, of course, I absolutely abhor the idea of voting as an anarchist, at least in this, you know, government system, but at the same time, like, the way things are going now, it absolutely makes a difference whether a Ron DeSantis is governor or some corporate Democrat is governor. That makes a huge difference for the trans and LGBTQ people who cannot survive in Florida now because they have a Ron DeSantis instead of a corporate Democrat. It's not vote blue no matter who. It is, there's an important harm reduction argument to be made here. Right. And so that was out what I was getting at with that post. And some people were commenting like, oh, I'm just going to unfollow you because you're liberal views and like this kind of thing. And I unfollow that other account because they were posting similar liberal crap. It's like, like, so you know my politics, right? This is an account called anarchist spiritual. You know I'm an anarchist. You know where I stand on these things. And you're going to basically remove me from your life because I expressed one view that you nominally disagree with without even actually hearing what my perspective there is on it. Like how are you.

going to have a society that's operating based on like consensus and egalitarian principles if you can't even hear someone express a view that's contrary to your own without losing your shit you know and so from in terms of like the Buddhist analysis like um there's a beautiful verse in the damapata that says hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is vanquish this is eternal law right so you can't get to a love based society through hatred You can't hate your way into love. You can only get to love once you let go of hatred. And that can take place now.

It could take place some point in the future, but we might as well start now so we could get good at it. Because if you're driven primarily by hate or other kind of mental defilements, like when suddenly you have the opportunity to make more free decisions, you're going to be continued to be dominated by the defiled. So if we want, if we want freedom, if we want equality, we need to be treating people in these ways now because abolition begins at home. We need to be deconstructing a lot of this conditioning that we've picked up from neoliberalism

and capitalism and the authoritarianism of our society that we then internalized and are turning around on each other. We need to be learning how to act from the Brahma Viharis, from compassion, from kindness, these kinds of things. That's definitely the position I take on that. Yeah. And one of the things that happens with egos in, organizing circles, I've seen it a lot, is there'll be fundamentally interpersonal disagreements

that get dressed up as high theoretical disagreements. And that's why we must split. That's why I must end this organization. That's why I must call out all my comrades. And if you don't have the sensitivity and the ability to look inward and see how your own mind and ego sort of contracts and reacts to the people around you and how it tries to cover up its tracks and tries to, you know, hide its pettiness in like moral righteousness and I'm justified and this is what you know understanding those mechanisms within yourself obviously eases those the ability for those unwholesome states to take you over and it also allows you to understand other people where they're coming from when their ego start to act up and you can navigate them in a more healthy

constructive way that doesn't end with the ruin of an organization or a friendship or whatever so being able just the peer ability to be aware of your ego and when times call for it to simply set it aside or not let it become a problem for other people this that one capacity in and of itself could do so much good in left wing organizing spaces so and that's to say nothing of these other higher sort of capacities that can be cultivated through these spiritual practices but that's another reason why I think this work on ourselves is an important factor you can't just turn away from the outside world and simply and merely only work on yourself, there is that tendency within spiritual communities to say, I don't want to dirty myself with politics. I don't want to engage with all of that. That's all just illusion anyway. What I'm going to do is just completely focus. There's a sort of narcissism and a lack of responsibility that comes with going too far in that direction as well. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Yeah. I mean, to quote, heck not hot, and I don't think I

I'm going to quote him accurately here, but he says, like, you know, if you look at our weapons, if you look at our bombs and guns, if you look at them deeply enough, you'll see your own mind reflected back. The hatred and the fears that produce weapons, right, you're going to find within your own mind. And so if we manage to, like, fly the bombs and guns out into outer space and rid the world of weaponry, sooner or later, we will make new bomb. because the germ, the seed of the bombs is still present in the human psyche, right? So all of the problems that exist in society today are just the expression of these defilements made manifest in the material world. And so if we don't want to reproduce these structures, right, sooner or later, they will pop back up unless we work on ourselves. And so it's not, so it has to happen in dialectic, right? The social context will inform and influence what's coming up from the mind, and what's coming up from the mind is going to be shaping the human context and the social situation.

But we can't ignore the one and focus entirely on the other, because even if we got some wonderful, perfect utopia just by the snap of the fingers, right? If you imagine like just taking a random selection of Americans with how polarized people are today and dropping them in some sort of utopian society, it would be hours before they were squabbling and creating more problems again, right? So we need to level up the qualities of our own consciousness if we really want to create and keep a better world. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Well said. And one of the practices I do is whenever there's something about somebody else that just irritates or repulses me, instead of, you know, getting really comfortable in that self-righteousness and that judgment and seeing myself as superior to that person, I immediately sort of use that as an alarm bell to look inside, say, what about that person is mirroring something within yourself? You know, you can even talk about this in psychoanalytic terms of like the shadow side of yourself. when you see something in somebody else and you just want to lampoon them and, you know, just tear them down. It's almost always something within yourself that you don't want to look at and you want to project onto somebody else, punish them, you know, tear them down as opposed to actually dealing with that part of yourself. So like when I see somebody like Trump who is like the perfect embodiment of just an ego monster, like this is like, you know, the opposite of the Buddha would be somebody like Trump where the ego is the only thing functioning. You know, it's easy to joke and clown on him and hate him. But I also sometimes will be like, where's the Trump and me? You know, the part of me that is narcissistic.

The part of me that is always thinking about me, me, me, not other people. You know, the part of me that wants to be seen by others in this certain light. Like, that's an interesting practice that you can engage in and sort of try to work through some of your sort of shadow side, while also maybe even cultivating some compassion for really unsavory people. Not that you shouldn't confront them politically, not that you shouldn't struggle against them. Hitler deserves to die, you know, but at the same point, I think there's something beneficial in trying to identify the Trump within you, the, you know, the asshole within you, the ego monster within you, as opposed to merely condemning everybody else for their shortcomings, right?

Yeah. Some other helpful reflections. So one helpful reflection is, you know, if you have conviction that actions have consequences that the law of karma is something that's actually operative, then if you see someone who's causing suffering for others, they will reap the fruits of their action. And so from that recognition, right, people harm others from deep ignorance, right, from a failure to apprehend how reality actually works and an inability to align their conduct with the Dharma. And so if someone is harming someone else, I see that and you can have compassion

for them because they're setting up their own suffering and the suffering they're inflicting on others is coming from their own place of suffering, from their own defilements. So the defilements are running rampant and controlling their mind and they're passing that on through their own active harm. And so they're suffering then because the defilements are uncomfortable mental states, and they'll suffer in the future because of the karma for what they're creating. Another helpful reflection is to kind of break down the compactness and the solidity of the other being in the same way that we want to reflect on ourselves to break ourselves down into the five aggregates and break down what appears to be this compact self.

We can use the same reflection on others. And so particularly challenging person, instead of focusing on them, I focus on the causes and conditions that produce them because I think that we're all kind of doing the best we've got like racists don't come from nowhere no one is born a racist right racists are created by causes and conditions and one day the causes and conditions may shift and they'll no longer be racist right this is another why another way that I feel kind of against violence is that like you know these things come from ignorance so these are suffering people right if they're ignorant they're suffering. And so, you know, we've seen, like, you know, research shows that, you know, one of the

best ways to get rid of racism or homophobia is to have these people actually meet one of the people that they hate. A lot of these people are just being created by Fox News and these conservative pundits. Like, if you look at, like, the situation with trans people now, like, people do not actually know what trans people are and what the facts are around transition, and gender affirming care for children. People just don't know. They think that apples are oranges or hot dogs, something completely different.

And they didn't invent these ideas themselves. They've been told this stuff, right? They are victims of the disinformation. So they're not bad people. They are misinformed because of the informational environment that they happen to be surrounded in. And so when I could look at people in this way, it really makes more room for compassion

and more room for kindness and non-hatred when it's you know when I can stop putting these things on the person as a solid entity but understand them through the matrix of causal processes and influences that have structured who they are today and that very easily could change tomorrow right yeah yeah it's what we're interested in as Buddhist or as those on the revolutionary left is not morally punishing those who we see as outside the boundaries of moral righteousness but of altering the underlying conditions, which gives rise to so many people who are immoral, who are ignorant, who are deluded, who are greedy, et cetera, right? Capitalism, for example, is a sort of set of

conditions that incentivize delusion, hate, and especially greed. You know, resource scarcity, the hoarding of wealth that makes people fear that they'll be impoverished and that drives on an urge to want to greedily take everything for, you know, me and mine, don't tread on me. That entire sort of mentality arises out of certain conditions. And instead of just wagging our finger at the person who's saying stuff like that, we should always first and foremost acknowledge the underlying conditions which gives rise to that way of relating to oneself and to others. And in our revolutionary processes, attempt to change those conditions to give rise to new forms of behavior. We'll often hear the human nature argument, for example, right? By the people on the right saying communism is against human nature. Capitalism is aligned with human nature. The truth is, human nature is the full spectrum of everything humans can possibly do. Communism and capitalism are both elements of human nature. Greed and delusion and ill will, as well as loving compassion and sympathetic joy and enlightenment. These all are the human condition.

They're all a possibility within the realm of human nature, and it's a matter of creating conditions that give rise to and incentivize certain ways of being that are pro-social, that are beneficial, that are carmically, you know, good as opposed to those that perpetuate and entrench things like greed, delusion, and it will. So just the underlying conditions is a very big situation, is a very big concept within Buddhism. And it's also really big within Marxism and anarchism as well of understanding the conditions as opposed to moralizing the individuals who are mere products of those conditions. Yeah, absolutely. absolutely yeah and and and to the point about like you know that human nature is this full range you know Buddhism and spirituality is about is about taking responsibility for what range you're operating in right the fact that we can we don't have to be victims of circumstance

and that we can train ourselves to be better in the future than we are today you know and also to your the initial question about the left like another helpful Buddhist reflection is to put ourselves in other people's shoes and reflect on how we'd like to be treated. So if I was a racist person who had any doubt in my ideology, would I want the alternative to be hostile to me or be welcoming to me? Right. And so, you know, I think we need to create an atmosphere or an environment on the left that is full of kindness and very welcoming and is enticing for people to want to join and become a part of, and that oftentimes things that the left involves itself in

are extremely polarizing just in the approach rather than kind of being warm and comes from kind of an atmosphere of hostility. You know, if we're, you know, language policing, ordinary people who maybe aren't up on the social justice lingo, you know, we're not presenting ourselves in a way that they're going to become part of us if we're just kind of like just throwing our shit on them we should be welcoming and compassionate and understanding and help people make the transition to the left instead of digging our heels in digging trenches and saying you're all a bunch of bigots because you don't you're not using the right word or whatever

the case may be right i i try and model this in my own content moderation like anyone that is familiar with my page like you'll never see me calling people's name calling people names or um attacking them personally or coming from anywhere other than a place of understanding your compassion because i'm trying to model that way of communication that gives people an open mind and makes them likely to actually consider what i'm saying and potentially accept what i'm saying right if i'm just going to be like you're an asshole you're a bigot and you don't understand what it is that you did wrong you're going to be like, well, fuck this guy. Absolutely.

Yeah, no, that's a great point. I know, like, one of the things I had to do is more and more and more give up on Twitter, in part and large part, because the way it's algorithmically structured, what gets attention and what doesn't is really inclined towards intensity of moral condemnation, of sharp outrage. And I found myself, like, scrolling through the tweets of reactionaries, I would, I could not abide by right speech, right? Like, I would just get into the comments and start saying cruel shit.

And I realize, like, oh, I'm algorithmically being primed against something that is a moral thing that I take seriously, which is right speech. And I'm not able to do it on this platform in any consistent way because it just takes one bad mood, one lapse of awareness. And I'm in somebody's comments talking shit. So I realized I had to sort of extricate myself from that entire arena in order to preserve this sort of moral, deal of trying to do right speech, you know, among many other things. And of course, the hostility on the left, you know, speaking of compassionately understanding something, to be on the left in the U.S. is to be under assault from all angles. It's to be called a child, a utopian, a dreamer, a stupid, an apologist for genocide, a wannabe tyrant, right? Like, if you grow up in America with any

real left-wing beliefs, you are going to be met with this hostility every step of the way. And so there's the way in which I understand this certain sort of hostility on the left, which can often be defensive in nature, you know, maybe preemptive, but still ultimately defensive, whereas I know I'm going to be met with hostility by everybody. So I'm just going to lead with hostility in the first place. I'm going to show my swagger and my confidence and my ideas, you know, which are inevitably going to be attacked. So I kind of, you know, compassionately understand it, but you're 100% right. We should be above that. We should offer warm, welcoming community without being naive, right? Without being so naive and starry-eyed and bushy-tailed that we really do let in predators or people who have no interest in redeeming themselves, right?

Hardcore neo-Nazis and stuff. While at the same time trying to maintain a general openness to vast majority of people who are not evil, but maybe ignorant of our ideas or, you know, fence sitting or maybe they don't want to admit it, but they're kind of open to something. And if we're just warm and inviting enough, maybe we can break down some walls and at least get them away. from the most noxious politics, if not move them all the way to where we happen to be on the left, right? Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. You're 100% that, you know, the anger and the reactivity is justified.

It's just not helpful. It doesn't actually advance the cause. It doesn't actually make anyone safer or freer. It just kind of leads to the polarity of the discourse, you know? Like, it's obviously understand, especially someone, you know, with marginalized identities who has felt like they're under attack by society further. entire life, right? That reactivity is totally understandable, but it's not helpful, right? And so it's this idea of hatred doesn't cease by hatred, right? You're hated, so you return hatred. Sooner or later,

someone's going to have to stop hating if you want to get along, right? And me as someone on the left, my proposition is just that we should do it first. We should create a welcoming environment. We can't wait for them to do it because how is that practice for us? right our practice should be building a movement that people want to join that's welcoming um and yeah so so it's really it's really a practical consideration it's not that it's not understandable it's just you know it's not going to move the ball forward yeah definitely absolutely crucial point there well let me ask you we only have about 10 more minutes um and then i think our time is up i just have to go get my children from school actually but i did want to touch on this we've obviously

heavily focused on the buddhist part of this essay um but i kind of want to on the politics a little bit um you know anarchism the way especially the way that you articulated here i i disagree with almost nothing of the basic you know summary of what anarchism is how the basic of anarchist communism as a goal aligns with with buddism on your page anarcho-spirituality you're very open to other left tendencies you're not a dogmatic sectarian who hates everybody who isn't an anarchist which made it very welcoming to somebody like me who is not an anarchist um and and Of course, for those interested more in Kropotkin on Red Menace, we recently, a few months ago, covered his famous text, The Conquest of Bread. I know you talk about mutual aid in your essay, but we did cover that.

So anybody interested in learning more anarchist theory, definitely check that out. But yeah, just kind of interested on your thoughts of why you chose anarchism over Marxism, maybe what kept you from embracing Marxism and pushed you towards anarchism. And then if you have time, maybe something you appreciate about the Marxism. tradition from an anarchist perspective. Sure. So why anarchism instead of Marxism is kind of a long question that gets into my own personal history and background that we probably don't have time to get into. But would you mind if I responded more to the point of creating a welcoming environment

for non-sectarianism on the left? Absolutely. And broader acceptance of other leftist movements. So, you know, the right is having unite the right rallies, right? They're getting together based on their commonalities. And fascists have infiltrated every level of U.S. government from local school boards for the Supreme Court to the presidency in Trump, right? They are moving the ball forward very, very quickly in their field. And it is my opinion that we on the left need to find whatever commonality. we can agree on and move forward on that basis that like when I see people fighting online about like you know how could you support Marxists like they killed us in like 1918 or like whatever it was you know like dude you need to get past that because like these are your closest comrades to you're right you know so so we need we need it's my opinion and some people may hate me for this

we need to be able to work with everyone up through liberals who are willing to work with us to get the numbers and the movement and the momentum for our movement to protect trans people, to protect women, and to fight the class system, all of these problems that are just intensifying today. We really need some unity, some solidarity. We need to be able to put these differences aside and stop squabbling over whatever the hell and figure out how we could move forward. One of the organizations that I do mutual aid with is just a broad leftist organization. It's called Karp in Philadelphia, if anyone's interested. But they include everything from anarcho-primitivist, anti-siv anarchists to straight-up social Democrat liberals.

And we work together. We support the community. We do what needs to be done. I've never seen a fight in the group chat on ideological basis. Like, we can do this. We can move past these ideologies and sort that out later. But I think that the exigencies of the circumstances require that we find as many ways as we can to work together through whatever methods are available to us. And yeah, so on that note, Marxism is great. I don't have anything bad to say about it. I love the economic analysis.

I really appreciate the fact that something like 40% of Gen Ziers like Marxism, think that Marx had a better, what was it, that Marxism would lead to freedom more than like following the Declaration of Independence. I forget exactly what the poll was or whatever. But like, if you're getting Gen Ziers onto the leftist cause, like, fuck yeah, let's do it. And I also really appreciate it. I believe it was in that episode that you did on the conquest of bread.

Towards the end, you said, why can't we work with these people? Why can't we approach revolution such that like if a Marxist, you know, dictatorship of the proletariat is what is going to win out tactfully, why can't we do that and also create pockets of autonomy, zones where anarcho-communists can start experimenting with decentralized and non-hierarchical organizational models because that's where Marxism wants to lead anyway, right? So why can't we work together and draw on the strengths of each offset the weaknesses of each and find ways to work in synergy with one another to promote and support our revolutionary goals? Absolutely.

Yeah, and part of that I think comes with not super clinging to your ideas. So you need to be right, right? If I'm not saying, like, I know Marxism is true, and if you critique Marxism, you're critiquing me, and I have to go on the defensive, right? If you let all of that go, it's not so much about I have the right ideas and they have the wrong ones. It's like, this is where I'm coming from. This is my perspective. I would like to learn from this person, see what their perspective is. You know, me and you could, it could be as simple as different influences growing up. That, you know, as far as why you win anarchist and I win Marxist, right? Personality traits even can sometimes dictate which way somebody goes. And I'm not trying to say

that there are no differences and there are no important differences, of course there are. And at certain periods of revolutionary struggle or process of transition, those differences can really sometimes, and have historically come to a real contradiction that needed to be worked out. But when we're on the back foot, when we have no power whatsoever, when the people, when the fucking fascist and capitalist and imperious have all the power, all the wealth, all the control, me are telling some anarchists I could, you, right? If I looked at you and said, I could never work with. you because you know you're a priori rejection of the state conflicts with my knowledgement of the state as a tool that we can you know to build class power therefore you or you might as well be a fascist to me as far as my ability to work with you and that's just insane and successful politics is about coalition building around shared interests based on where you actually are in material reality here and now and we're in no position to hyper divide ourselves our already tiny little grouping of people on the

revolutionary left, to splinter off into a million little subsex, which just become subcultures. At that point, you are now turning politics into subcultures, because you're saying the purity of these ideas are more important than the effectiveness of class struggle, and I am not willing to, I'm not willing to set aside my dogma to have actual material gains. Therefore, we're just a subculture at this point. And I think that's delusional, and we have to get over that. But again, without having to pretend like we're starry-eyed. naive children who think we can all get along all the time and nothing is really the matter

and left unity for left unity's sake, that can also be naive and that could lead to a bunch of errors as well. So it's about kind of the middle path, right? Striking out this balance between the two egregious errors on each side. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with all of it. Beautiful. Ideological purity tests and all these things. Yeah. I get that a lot on my page whenever I espouse something that's like outside of just like anarchist orthodoxy. I just say, listen, like I'm really not concerned with being an orthodox anarchist for dogmatic you know for the sake of dogmatism like I'm interested in what needs to be done right now and what works and if for example voting helps you know trans kids be able to transition and not kill themselves I'm going to vote I don't know why it would even be a consideration right and if you're

somebody that says voting doesn't matter then why would you care if somebody votes if voting doesn't matter and it's all bullshit then whether somebody does or doesn't vote is immaterial to you should not get all worked up and be like how dare you you're a liberal but i get i get a very similar thing anytime i have anybody on the show that is not died in the wool marxist i will get at least somebody emailing me or messaging me being like you're a liberal you had an anarchist on you're a liberal you had a democratic socialist on you're not even a real revolutionary you you know take the revolutionary out of your name you're just left radio and it's like okay all right weirdo you can't you can't you can't even organize a picnic but okay you know go on in your little sump culture yeah but yeah so i don't know i think we agree on that well my friend i think

we're at a time for today um i would love to have you back on i know there's many more things even on this list that we didn't exactly get to let alone other topics that you and i could can tackle together but thank you so much for coming on thank you for sharing that that talk with us i think it was beautiful really well written it dovetailed with so much of the stuff that i put in in my speech i just found it really really wonderful and you and i definitely share a similar spirit when it comes to politics and spirituality. But before I let you go, though, can you go ahead and plug not only the main account for anarcho spiritually, but importantly, the backup account, let people know where they can find

it, and then also maybe plug your Google drive of recommendations you have for anybody who want to learn more about Buddhism? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So the main ways to find me, so I'm anarcho spirituality on Instagram. I also have a backup account that is anarcho. dot spirituality. And so basically, I have to switch between the two because of community guidelines violations. I have to let the accounts cool off. So the main account is actually on ice until I think August based on my pattern of guideline violations. And so I'm mainly

posting under the backup now. So my best recommendation, if you want to get my material and contact me, is to follow both because I'll be going back and forth between them. Also, In the profile portion of the pages, there's a link to, I have a link tree. There's a lot of really terrific stuff there. So within the link tree, there is a Google drive full of strictly spiritual resources that are organized by tradition and topics. So Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, whatever the case may be. A lot of really, really excellent books about where to get started in practice and just

the ideas and everything, all very progressively oriented stuff, of course. Then I have a second drive folder called anarcho-spirituality resources, which has, to my knowledge, the biggest centralized collection of resources at the intersection of revolutionary politics and liberatory spirituality, a lot of really terrific stuff on like Christian anarchism and Muslim anarchism, Jewish anarchism, and also Marxism from these traditions as well. So there's a lot of that on too, also queer liberatory stuff. a variety of other things. Also, you'll find information there for my personal one-on-one teaching. I call it spiritual mentorship. But basically, I teach on a basis that comes from the Buddhist tradition. It's called Donna, which means generosity.

If you're familiar with gift economy principles, it's basically that. So I don't have formal rates. And if you're able to contribute more, that's great. And that'll pay for and offset people who can contribute. less or nothing at all. There's no rates for what I offer. It's up to you to determine for yourself what your means are and how much you want to support me and my ability to make teachings and spiritual guidance available to other people who ordinarily can't access those kinds of teachings. And so you'll see there's a file there called what do I offer and what is Donna

that explains the payment system or lack thereof and also explains what my areas focus are. I focus on spirituality for addiction recovery, spirituality for atheists and agnostics who want to work on themselves anyway, Buddhism, Christian mysticism, different yogic traditions. So there's a lot there. So you can find all that in the link tree and also links to other podcasts I've done. Cool. Absolutely. I'll link to all of that in the show notes. People will be able to find you very quickly. I'll also link to my talk on Marxism and Buddhism and then the Red Menace breakdown of Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread for anybody that wants to do follow-up investigations into those things.

Well, my friend, I really mean it when I say that I appreciate you coming on. I've been a fan of your page for a long time. I encourage you to keep up the great work, not just with the page and not just with political education, but literally in your day-to-day vocation, you are bringing compassion and healing to people through Buddhism and through your own experiences. I find it incredibly laudable and, yeah, admire what you do. So keep up the great work, and I will absolutely have you back on soon to discuss so many other things that you and I are both interested in. So thank you so much.

Absolutely. And thank you for having me on. I got angels running away. I got demons hunting me. I know Pop with 25 I know Jesus 33 I tell death to keep a distance I think he obsessed with me

I say God that's a one I know she would death for me They want a barcode on my wrist To auction off it cares that don't fit their description Of a utopia Like a problem won't exist if I just don't exist If I grew up without a single pot to piss and pardon me Forbent in Congress got the nerve to call itself religious

Rich just getting richer we just trying to live our life Life. Mama mixed the vodka with his sprite. They killed my cousin with the pocket knife while my uncle on the phone. He was going for more to have my life. He got out of year and then he died. I was on the road. Talked to my father on the phone.

Left the city when I was just for none of them would get alone. Mama begging hippo in the coast. I was chilling with my niggas poop. Now they're trying to take it. Life don't mean shit. To a nigger that ain't never had shit. Yeah. Light don't mean lit in the dark fight don't mean fish.

Oh, ice don't see. Ice don't see. Ice don't freeze. Ice don't freeze. Light don't leave. I don't mean like to me Tell me it'll be okay Tell me happy a day

Tell me that she might babe Then I won't be alone Tell them I'll be okay When they acts like day Tell them that we're the same Tell them that we're not safe I got my granddad is old I'm at war that's on my mind

I see Walter by they cool Wish I could switch you with mine I'm not worried about no rap shit Distractions always the time I still go to social functions even though I'm so anti No I'm no Rihanda the court gonna throw it like Donovan down a bit I just been modeling my whole career As in Park was in studio monitor shaking I raised the apartment to bondo with profit in the maid with the maid and I locked it Amount of time the same amount of time you was rocking so stop comparing me to people know I am not them

A lot of people dreamin till they shit against that's life my mom mix and rockin with the sprite kill my cousin with the pocket knife While my uncle on the pole he was gone from what to have my life he got out of year and then he died I was on a roll talking to my father on a phone. Left the city when I was just poor another, then we'll get along. Mama begging him for winter close. I was chilling with my niggas poop. Now they're trying to take his life.