Revolutionary Spirituality:

Navigating the Collapse of Empire and the Fight for Collective Liberation

So, where are we now? And where to next? I found myself writing a longer piece than intended, trying to make sense of the senseless, this fast-swirling kaleidoscope of things falling apart, illusions shattered, and new vistas and horizons opening up. Our new curriculum is arriving. The speed of it is dizzying.

To make reading easier, I’ve headlined each section, which I hope helps. Please take some deeper breaths and tea breaks as you go along.

Before entering the fray of our world in free fall, I want to call in a deep time perspective, as in the Budddhist and Vedic world view, and in particular Nataraja, Shiva–the cosmic dancer who dreams all into being and then collapses all back into source–the great void.

The one who dances the eternal flow of energy–creation, preservation, destruction, illusion, and emancipation. Round and round, we eternally participate in this dance. Dancers and dreamers in a dream inside a dream, as the dance spins its endless shapeshifting–form to formlessness to form–ever emerging from Shiva’s unmoving center. Mountain-like. Calm and peaceful, gazing out and gazing in with peerless equanimity.

It is to this center that I offer a prayer.

Oh, holy ones, be with us now at this time of dissolution. As our dream turns to nightmare, may we ever remember and grow your seed of love planted deep in our hearts. May we ever remember that we are born of the same essence, and to dust, we all return.

I heard, when at Standing Rock, a story from one of the Native warriors about a grandmother who prayed to end the Iraq war. The spirits told her it was a good prayer, but now we all need to pray.

So, with a prayer in mind, together with all good prayers here are some reflections on where we are, and where too now.

First, I’d like bring your attention to this recording + resources from our December 14th event, Revolutionary Spirituality, Gaza, Empire, and Collective Liberation co-organized and hosted by Sacred Mountain Sangha and Sacred Justice Coalition.

Why this was important to me was that it brought together voices the powerful attempt to silence. Voices we need to hear:
Maha Hussiani - Award-wining Gaza based journalist.
Lubna Masarwa - Palestinian Journalist based in Jerusalem & Dharma teacher.
Ilan Pappé - Renowned Jewish Israeli historian based in Israel/UK
Jamal Juma’ - Coordinator, Stop the Wall, based in the West Bank.
Nikki Morse - Core-organizer for Jewish Voice for Peace, U.S.
Thanissara - Sacred Mountain Sangha, Dharma teacher & activist.

So, if you have some time, at some point, I recommend tuning into this offering.

Meanwhile, back to our curriculum, which, quite frankly, is profoundly daunting. I believe we will need all we can draw on, within us and without, as a collective, to stay afloat and maintain wellbeing–a deep-time perspective, and a willingness to meet what we face. We will need each other to build communities of resilience and refuge, informed by spiritual practice, humane values, steadfastness and compassion.

A World on the Brink: Confronting Empire and Collapse

A month has passed since the election, and like many of you, I feel this ominous dread deepening as the U.S. fast unravels. With the ghoulish line-up of those taking power, we will need clarity and fortitude for what lies ahead, but also to track the possibility of something else. A revolutionary spirit is stirring on the streets and in the psychic undercurrents flowing through social media, like a long-overdue birth waiting for its catalytic moment.

We stand at the crossroads between the cataclysmic death throes of empire and the emergence of a fledgling yet centuries-honed anti-colonial rising. Understanding the uncharted territory ahead is crucial to strategizing and navigating our way forward in this shape-shifting time. For some markers, a few months ago, veteran activist Chris Hedges gave a prescient lecture, Cost of Resistance, in London, which I recommend.

While many dangers lie ahead, we must not lose sight of the wild and visionary potential unfolding before us. The deeper we venture into the shadowy caverns of our collective unconscious, the brighter our shared light can illuminate the truth of what we face and its potential to forge a visionary path going forward.

The Disease of Empire: The Unmasking of Late-Stage Colonial-Predator-Capitalism

Right now, Syria has erupted into the collective awareness, both liberatory and horrifying, deepening this profound sense of uncertainty, which is gripping the world. While here in the U.S., the aftermath of the election blitzkrieg continues its sting of defeat, not just politically but of humane values. Both events are connected to climate collapse and late stage colonial-capitalism. None of it is not a good taste. Dread, grief, confusion, anger, and visceral fear permeate the air as we question whether the world we know will endure. I’m fairly sure it won’t. Perhaps, at this moment, we are beginning to experience a fraction of what Indigenous peoples felt as settler-colonialists dismantled their worlds forever.

The long arc of Eurocentric colonialism and the maelstrom trajectory of the U.S. have culminated in this systemic embodiment of malignant narcissism. We are now confronted by a theocratic fascist nightmare orchestrated by psychopathic tech billionaires wielding AI as a tool of surveillance and domination. This collective force, driven by scores to settle and a chilling agenda, seeks to dismantle the few remaining guardrails of sanity and safety as they entrench their kakistocracy: a government led by the most corrupt, devious, and woefully unqualified, all the while intent on transforming democratic civil society into their personal fiefdom.

Perhaps this was inevitable: the endgame of late-stage, predatory capitalist colonialism, birthed from genocide and slavery. With Democrats and Republicans alike riding into the election on their monstrous destruction of Gaza, it could only really deliver us into this social, political, and moral wilderness.

In the era of neoliberal modernity, everything was ultimately surrendered to the highest bidder–a reflection of capitalism’s culminating insanity. Our hard-fought-for, wobbly democracy was too easily surrendered to the 0.001% oligarchic donor class. For decades, the myth of “trickle-down” economics masked the systematic dismantling of the middle class and the stripping down of the working class. Jobs were exported to countries paying a pittance for labor, leaving entire communities devastated and a vast swath of America adrift, struggling to make ends meet. Many are now forced to hold down three jobs to survive, leaving them trapped in a monochrome world of soulless emptiness and exhaustion.

When we, as citizens, felt the despair of this lonely, siloed world, it was framed as a personal failing, not the result of a system that had reduced us to mere cogs in a relentless machine. The prescribed remedy? Work harder, self-improve, and consume more to fill that gaping void. Nowhere is the absurdity of “mindfulness in the marketplace” clearer than in Amazon’s Mindfulness Boxes–small, solitary spaces in sprawling warehouses where overworked employees could cry for ten minutes. All the while, the actual Amazon–the lungs of our planet, is burning down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. While analysis offers some understanding of the groundless ground beneath us, the reality is that no political certainties remain. We are in free fall. It’s terrifying. Often, I’m pulled awake at night feeling deeply unsettled. But maybe this is exactly where we need to be. Perhaps shattering our protective bubbles of entitlement is necessary to grasp how vulnerable our living systems actually are.

As we descend further, we’ll need courage to resist, which will be easier if we don’t try and do it alone. Many people I’ve spoken to agree that now, more than ever, we must forge resilient, informed, compassionate communities to withstand the onslaught ahead.

We are now in a curriculum that is swiftly stripping away the last remaining veils–if Gaza hasn’t already torn them apart. All illusions must fall until we see the bare bones of the U.S. empire. I’m sorry that it isn’t what we thought: the Hollywood happy ending, the leader of the free world, the American dream, the land of the free. The U.S. has always survived on the vapors of its ideals, which drift unmoored from the brown and black bodies upon which this nation was built.

For the most part, the U.S. has successfully obscured the devastation it has wrought on the countless countries it invaded, destabilized, and reshaped through its global outposts and forever wars. My critique is not aimed at the American people–whose indomitable spirit, warmth, generosity, and courage I’ve loved and admired, a true spirit we now need. Rather, it is aimed at the imperial forces that have kept this nation chained to its colonial roots, never allowing it to fully leave the plantation behind. These forces have continually thwarted the U.S. from ever embodying its vision as a shining city on a hill that empowers its citizens to stand hand in hand with the free and just spirit of the Statue of Liberty.

However, it now seems we must directly feel this sheer depth of loss–not just intellectualize and appropriate blame–so we can viscerally understand what our comfort was built on. In this perilous moment, I see only one move left: to radically re-prioritize everything as we face this reality together. Being willing to feel the depth of this blow is crucial to help us unhook from our last allegiances and fantasies about American exceptionalism and its over bloated empire.

Gaza: The Shattered Veil That Forced the World to See

It is Gaza that changed everything. Without witnessing this, we might not have been forced to reckon so deeply with the reality that, when it comes to empire, Democrats and Republicans are indistinguishable. Both parties have driven Gaza’s destruction–a horror made possible through U.S. aid and its unwavering support. In the end, we must see the truth: Israel’s cruel, merciless army is America’s army, and therefore, is the UK’s army too.

Over the past year, the world has seen the underbelly of the U.S. and its allies in full technicolor: their duplicity, gaslighting, and relentless refusal to be held accountable. Their arrogance is astounding. The U.S. alone, with Israel, has repeatedly voted against UN ceasefires, betraying all that humanity stands for and the majority of U.S. citizens who, in poll after poll, have made clear they want an end to this merciless genocide.

We cannot call those who perpetrate daily atrocities and war crimes in any country our “leaders.” It is time to recognize that those who drive others to commit crimes against humanity are not leaders at all but parasites–feeding off the destruction of the most vulnerable.

If we are feeling the pain of loss, then it is the same pain felt by millions who were stripped, by the U.S., of their democracy, rights, families, homes, resources, freedoms, and even their lives in the name of empire. But now, it is no longer just “over there” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Vietnam, Venezuela, Haiti, Congo, or Gaza. The empire is coming home, ready to excoriate its perceived enemies, its own citizens, threatening everything we hold dear.

What does it now mean to cleave allegiance to this empire, which will beat us down until we give up? Maybe it’s time to hold allegiance to a different flag–one of all colors, representing all, dedicated to the truest, most inclusive spirit of this land.

But, for now, it’s time to dust ourselves off, reclaim our true hearts, regroup, and reach out to create alliances. From now on, we need to resist and disrupt the empire, pulling out bricks from its Apartheid wall until it collapses. We are all invited to this awakening, which first requires we pull out the needle of modernity’s craving.

Together, we can resist this descending vortex, with its distractions and cravings, and instead create a beloved circle outside the wall, where the storehouse of our untamed dreams will decolonize our minds. We now have more in common with people around the world resisting fascism, the plunder of their resources, and violent oppression. We now have more in common with the ‘Global South’ than those occupying the White House.

We should no longer identify wars by countries but by the names of the leaders who wage them. Most global citizens do not support these wars, invasions, and genocides. We’ve seen this clearly through the ongoing pro-Palestinian demonstrations worldwide, including in Israel. As citizens, we often don’t know about the wars in our name. We are not accurately informed and have no say in them. Yet we are the ones who foot the bill and are arrested, beaten, and canceled when we use our democratic right to peacefully protest their atrocities.

To underscore this duplicity, today I listened to the U.K. prime minister, Keir Starmer, while he stood in front of a bomber jet, giving his pep talk to British troops in Gibraltar, which is now, pretty much, a U.S., Israeli outpost.

It’s been a very important, busy, busy year; there’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all the time. Although we’re really proud of what you’re doing, we can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here. Therefore, it’s important to say thank you… the whole world is relying on you, everyone at home is relying on you. There’s no higher service than the service you give to our country to make us safe as a country. Thank you from the whole of the country. We appreciate what you do, we’re proud, keep on making us proud.

Starmer has consistently refused to acknowledge that Israel is committing genocide. He has repeatedly gone against the will of U.K. citizens who have clearly called for a complete ceasefire. They have taken to the streets in the hundreds of thousands throughout the year, and have shut down arms factories producing parts for the devastating F-35 bomber jets. In poll after poll, they have also made clear they do not support Israel’s monstrous slaughter.

Instead, Starmer secretly loaned out the British army to aid Israel’s genocidal campaign, providing wide-ranging AI surveillance, bomber jets, and critical refueling support. Who knows what else? This collaboration has enabled the utter merciless killing, in a litany of sadistic ways, of thousands of children, women, men, journalists, cultural and intellectual figures, and humanitarian aid workers. It has facilitated the utter destruction of Gaza—its cultural centers, hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, and humanitarian aid facilities.

I deeply feel this betrayal, so I want to record it here. Starmer’s treachery, disguising himself as a Labour leader to gain power in a party forged by the working class, is particularly egregious. It is also particularly venal, given Britain’s historical role in selling off Palestine to Eurocentric Zionist colonizers in the 1917 Balfour Agreement. Starmer has destroyed the Labour party and replaced it as a vehicle to make the U.K a U.S.-Zionist lap dog, a position that keeps the U.K. tied to U.S. forever wars, which in no way makes Britain safer.

Breaking the Spell: Seeing, Confronting, and Resisting Empire

I believe we need to see what’s in front of us with such steady clarity that the spell we’ve been under finally shatters. This is so we recognize that we will be failed by anything or anyone we give allegiance to who uses their power to drive this system of destruction. Of course, we know that we are all compromised; for instance, we are beholden to a fossil fuel economy that is driving the destruction of our living systems. However, as we work to untangle ourselves from these dependencies, we should already be withdrawing our emotional investment and fidelity to those who actively wield their power to harm others.

All of this takes courage. I am grateful that my twelve years of monastic training emphasized consciously turning toward suffering. I’ve been reflecting on how the Buddha placed the Four Noble Truths at the heart of his path to liberation. While many “new age” spiritual practices focus on happiness, joy, and love, all of which are essential, there is a tendency in our secular Dharma scene to airbrush out the central importance of facing suffering.

A deep shift happens when we confront our experience of suffering to identify its inner causes and mechanisms. We can’t always change the outer circumstances, and while we react to emotional, mental, and physical pain, the Buddha pointed to removing the extra suffering generated by that reactivity. The ability to do this creates inner space and, from that open awareness, the power to respond from wise reflection rather than our patterning rooted in fear, trauma, and the grasping and aversion of the conditioned mind. Ajahn Chah, the Thai meditation master, put it like this:

Know and watch your heart. It’s pure, but emotions come to color it. So let your mind be like a tightly woven net to catch feelings and the reactivity of the mind that comes, and investigate them before you react.

As Dharma practitioners, we train ourselves to do this inwardly. Now, we must apply that same focused awareness outwardly. The Buddha radically transformed the central systems of his time, bending them toward compassion and fairness. In that same spirit, we can learn from longstanding non-violent social justice and liberation movements alongside contemporary system change visionaries to help us map ways to dismantle the systemic machinery of colonization and oppression.

Meanwhile, as social unrest and disruption increase, so will state violence. We saw this already when militarized police violently suppressed pro-Palestinian demonstrations at universities. And as daily, academics, journalists, TV presenters, medics, humanitarians, and any speaking out, have been silenced, arrested as “terrorists,” canceled, threatened, and have lost their jobs, not only in the U.S. and U.K., but across the globe. The merging of Israel and the U.S. has deeply entwined us all with the violence of empire in its final, desperate attempts to dominate the globe.

Over this last year, the extreme genocidal violence unleashed by Israel has been normalized by those in power, making it easier to deploy similar brutality elsewhere to crush dissent. As this incoming U.S. regime has already indicated, we can expect the mass repression of “dissidents” to escalate. What was once hidden is now painfully clear: the forces shaping the U.S. have turned this country into an imperialistic instrument of military power, thwarting the possibility of a cohesive, just nation respected by its people.

Initiatives like “Cop Cities,” like the one proposed for Atlanta, are spreading across the U.S. Police forces, not only here but worldwide, are trained and militarized by Israel, which is now clearly seen as a brutal apartheid state. With this and all else going down, if you feel fear and dread, it’s completely justified. These times have become, quite frankly, terrifying. The powers that be have been openly flirting with their willingness to use nuclear weapons, revealing a chilling indifference to the prospect of millions, or even billions, dying or displaced by the escalating impacts of global war.

These ongoing wars, genocides, invasions, and political and military coups are deeply tied to the most daunting threat of our time: climate collapse. Offshore from Gaza lies an oil and gas field worth billions of dollars, resources that rightfully belong to Palestine. Yet Israel has no intention of allowing Palestinians to benefit from this resource. Israel has even declared that all rainwater belongs to them, not the Palestinians. This arrogance and extractive entitlement drives our collective demise. We should now see “climate collapse” as a politically whitewashed term and instead, each time its used, see it as muted code for what we are truly facing–mass extinction.

The stakes could not be higher. This fast-moving global war is really about who controls the planet's future. A few short years ago, around the time of the Paris Accord, there was a glimmer of hope. But now, the fossil fuel industry has made it clear they have no intention of facilitating a rapid transition to a green economy–quite the opposite. Instead of helping, the oligarchs have fortified their bunkers, kept private jets on standby, and readied militias. With few exceptions, they care little for the rest of us. They believe they can own it all.

However, while this incoming regime will put us all in grave danger, it also offers us a rare opportunity to see, with crystal clarity, the agenda and intent of those who seek to run this planet solely for their own crazed ideologies, eccentric aims, and narcissistic benefit.

Behold this psychopathic, heartless gaze of the deadly machinery of oligarchic colonial capitalism. Behold its decaying, soulless, craven, narcissistic, violent, and ugly face. Behold its utter lack of beauty, grace, sanctity, poetry, love, and wise counsel.

This is a machinery designed to destroy and desecrate all for profit and power. Behold it all–and resist.

Unmasking the Shadow:
Breaking Free from Wetiko, the Cannibalistic Mind Virus of Colonialism

Gaza is a global watershed revealing where we stand regarding the system of empire. Our only hope now is mobilizing a revolutionary spirit informed by ethics, justice, and equity. From this spirit, we can move toward hospicing the final violent gasp of empire while salvaging and uplifting whatever we can save. Right now, while this collapse is freeing us from our last illusions, we must make a clear intention to reject the incoming agenda that seeks to destroy all humane values.

And what is this system? African American author, feminist, and social activist bell hooks named it clearly: a system of domination that perpetuates internalized oppression by shaming us out of standing up and speaking the truth. She exposed not only the system’s nature but also its insidious grip on our ability to resist.

Often in my lectures, when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of
what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic
and not the system they describe.

How is it, then, for us? On one side are those driving genocide. For them, there is no bottom–no moral guardrails, no empathy. They will turn vast swathes of the planet into deregulated corporate fiefdoms, enforced by apartheid, imperialism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and endless, senseless wars fueled by manufactured racism, fascism, and predatory capitalism. To do so, they will extract every last drop of water and all last resources, including our human labor and sick and dying bodies, to turn a profit.

On the other side are those who work to uphold human dignity, cherish humane values, and foster equity, fairness, compassion and inclusion. They stand for universality, environmental and animal rights and the rights of nature, justice, self-determination, truth, global reparations, and radical decolonization. I don’t see any grey areas left to linger in.

In Rilke’s poem The Beholder, he speaks about the importance of being defeated. The popular translation is, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater things.” However, the poem’s actual wording is “by greater beings,” referring to the line, “whoever was beaten by the Angel.” We haven’t been defeated by “greater beings,” but the U.S. has been sorely defeated–defeated by what?

Author Daniel Quinn observed, “The new world fell not to a sword but to a meme.” The First Nations people of America have a potent term for this dynamic: Wetiko. In this context, a meme–an egoic inflated idea made popular, like Brexit’s “Take Back Control” or “Make America Great Again”–morphed into a malignant virus. Wetiko is a sophisticated diagnosis of the dynamics of evil, rooted in the egoic split within the psyche between “me” and “them.” At its core, it reflects a deeper inner fragmentation–a split from our own shadow, which instead, is projected out onto the “other.”

This process of inner splitting–denying our own shadow and projecting our raw, unhealed wounds without conscience or self-reflection tends, in turn, to morph into sociopathy and psychopathy. This psychological profile is one that late-stage capitalism nurtures and rewards. Those who rise to the top in this system are almost always self-obsessed, emotionally stunted, devoid of empathy, and incapable of inward reflection. They cannot identify with or feel compassion for those they perceive as weaker or more vulnerable.

Instead, they are given free rein to project their unresolved hatred, disgust, rage, lust, and vacuous greed onto the world around them. Some may veil the deceit with high sounding ideals and transactional gestures of camaraderie, but overall, the drive is the same. We too, to some extent or the other, have this disease. The difference is in our ability to carefully self-reflect and through that process consciously choose a radically different path, one devoted to compassionate service.

Carl Jung developed his ideas about the danger of this Wetiko collective shadow, as an archetypal force that can overpower civilization, in response to the rise of Nazism and the wars of the last century. He analyzed how negative projections onto others can spread like a virus, contaminating an entire nation and driving it into psychosis. (This differs from a “psychosis” which is actually a spiritual emergency, a temporary break from reality which, if well-handled, can lead to positive transformation. Whereas the psychosis I am referring to is a psychological pathology born of a conditioned apartheid mindset).

One of Jung’s key realizations was when our unprocessed shadow is projected onto others, particularly when we feel threatened, we lose the possibility of insight, restraint, and transformation. Without those moderating self-reflective processes, we are prevented from containing the contamination and transforming it at its source, our own mind. Instead of resolving and integrating our shadow, the projected malevolence occupies space within our mind and energy system, waiting, like a vampire, to land on someone else. Jung’s overall insight regarding this dynamic and its collective impact is profoundly pertinent to this moment in history.

In the unconscious of every individual, there are instinctive, primitive propensities charged with considerable tension. When they are helped in one way, or another to break through into consciousness, and conscious discernment has no opportunity to intercept them and transmute them into higher forms, they sweep everything before them like a torrent–and turn men into creatures for whom the word “beast” is too good a name. They can then only be called “devils.” To evoke such phenomena in the masses, all that is needed is a few possessed persons or only one. One of these complex-ridden individuals, who sets himself up as a megaphone and revels in demagoguery, is enough to precipitate a catastrophe.

Those using the enormous power invested in them by empire to consolidate total control are deeply infected by the malevolent “genius” of Wetiko. Their actions aid, abet, and drive the machinery of social and political collapse, genocide, ecocide, and extinction. They have catastrophically weaponized the deep unconscious currents of fear, angst, resentment, anger, and unhealed generational trauma within the collective. This vortex of fury is then unleashed of the most vulnerable to deflect from the vast inequities of class, instead inflaming racism, homophobia, and misogyny.

In other words, if we don’t take responsibility for illuminating and consciously processing and integrating our shadow, we can easily be manipulated and land up harming ourself and others.

Those who hone the art of manipulation, on the one side, they are violent, chaotically dissociated, rapacious and consumed by rage; on the other, cold, fascistic, cruel, arrogant, and controlling. They are experts at exploiting unprocessed emotions, projecting these feelings onto the most defenseless while mastering the arts of narcissistic sadism.

All of this is being rapidly normalized while humane values—kindness, compassion, mutual respect, dignity, and care—are being increasingly discarded and relegated to the margins.

Wetiko stalks those most susceptible due to their profound loss of heart and soul. Once infected by this fast-replicating mind virus, they in turn consume all in their path. This virus's core intent is to dominate others' life force, which is why Native American scholar Jack Forbes identified the Wetiko virus as cannibalistic in his book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Imperialism, Exploitation, and Terrorism, linking it to the expansionist, ever devouring march of colonialism,

Ultimately, even the infected “host carriers” become victims. The price paid by those who surrender their souls to this fiendish trickery is to become, as observed by the native people of these lands, icy-hearted. In the end, the native people could only understand the extreme covetous violence of invading Europeans as a people badly infected by Wetiko. Those under its spell are severed from their humanity, empathy, and compassion. To lose everything, even our lives, is devastating, but to lose our soul is to be cast into a wilderness from which it is hard to return.

Wetiko perfectly describes how rapacious colonial capitalism sustains itself through the myths of hyper-individualism, endless growth, and soulless consumption. Until recently, this system was fueled by the unquestioned right of those in power to plunder and subjugate. In the last few years, this far-reaching virus has replicated at quantum internet speed, dissolving boundaries and collapsing time, history, and perspective. It has normalized the worst while elevating a culture of lies, deception, distrust, and disdain for moral conscience. In their jealous rage, the infected are driven to demonize and destroy the best, the most truthful, the most soulfully beautiful.

It is Wetiko’s willing hosts who drive the monstrous destruction of Gaza. This enormity of atrocities, each worse than the last, has left the world feeling as though it is losing its mind. From Gaza and the less visible atrocities across the globe, we can only conclude that those who have the power to stop this horror but refuse to do so are enemies of humanity and of life itself.

Right now, as the circle of warmongers tightens its grip on humanity, we must remember one truth: we do not have to accept this path of devastation. The disease of Wetiko cannot be cured with more bombs, torture, violence, and sadism.

It stops when we stop and we force those perpetuating this nightmare to stop. At some point, humanity must decide: will we sink to the depths of our unworked-out shadow, leading to total extinction? Or will we own our pain, do the arduous inner work of healing, and liberate ourselves, and each other, from these endless cycles of generational trauma with its violent and murderous momentum?

Here is our choice: allow these malevolent forces to run wild or rise up together to dismantle a system that rewards the worst and undermines the best.

To dismantle apartheid, we must be mindful of our susceptibility to this inner disease of splitting, denial, and projecting onto others. We are all vulnerable to Wetiko. However, it cannot take root in those who take responsibility for their shadow dynamics; those who remain true to their deepest heart, soul, and ethical commitment to serving all life.

Wetiko cannot stick to those who practice a true path guided by the spirit of love, informed by inner reflection and guided by wisdom. Those who are genuine and authentic walk a true way.

A Path Beyond Destruction:
Revolutionary Spirituality and Collective Liberation

We will never go back to yesterday again. We have lived yesterday once in our lifetimes. We are encouraged by spirit to be visionaries, to look beyond to the future–not to go back to yesterday. To prepare our new world for future generations. We must have a vision for the future. We’re not here for ourselves but to plant seeds for the future. How do we want our future to be? We do not want to leave chaos. Mother Nature is our life; if we tamper with her, we tamper with our future. Be a living prayer. Establish an altar to bring you close to the creator and ancestors. Make your life a living prayer.

Baba Mandaza Kandemwa, Zimbabwean Elder, Spiritual Guide,
Mhondoro–holder of the water, earth, lion spirits

This reminds me of the biblical saying from Proverbs, “Without a vision the people perish.” The difference from then to now is that I believe our vision must be forged from within the collective, not given down from the “solar heroes” of old.

Preparing this Saturday’s event, we hosted a Zoom call with our guest speakers. Jamal Juma’ who currently lives in the West Bank, said spiritual people should be revolutionary. From Jamal’s comment, we framed our event with the idea of Revolutionary Spirituality.

This seems important as not all revolutionary uprisings are successful. Chris Hedges addresses this dynamic in his talk (highlighted earlier), offering both warning and hope. There have been many revolts, but the revolution we now need isn’t just overthrowing political power (which is difficult enough), but it is a revolution of consciousness.

Any systemic change has to be underwritten by a shift of consciousness where we ultimately understand that in reality there are no rigid boundaries or separations. All the separations, race, class, gender, geography–all of it–are created by the human mind. We toil under a whole range of illusions, and it is these too, that must be dismantled to enable a collective liberatory force where we simply see each other as all resident within one mystery on one Earth.

Of course, there are differences, and boundaries, but they are approximations, not actually reality itself. Like the Buddha, we have exhausted the extremes of excess and deprivation, we too, like he did, recognize that we need to find another way forward.

To suffer defeat is not the end. Instead, it marks the beginning of a profound shift in focus and priorities. It is the beginning of a different path. An ancient path that we must now walk, away from distraction, division, hatred, and destruction. A way that takes us deep enough to know that allowing real love to enter us will always break our heart open, again and again. It does so, so we can stay honed to what’s most important. And that true joy accepts suffering and fully embraces its curriculum.

A path that deepens into our embodied presence through the heart’s dedication, the mind’s wise reflection, the bodies fortitude and service to nature's exquisite, sacred web of life. Such a way dissolves the learnt divisions within ourselves and between each other.

By listening beneath the waves of differentiation, we will reconnect to our deathless heart, where all resides in its seamless, timeless, boundless awareness, to be known, contemplated, healed, transformed and liberated.

These are the landscapes of our inner garden from which will emerge the actions that we will take, which, perhaps only we can do in our own way. And without which, the world will be poorer. I don’t know what we all need to do, none of us know that, but I do know that together we will know. And together, we have a better chance of building a revolutionary spirituality and of succeeding.

Homage to Shiva, the one now is rising to enact his world dissolving dance. May we honor it all.

Nataraja,
Lord of the Dance
dancing the heart of each one.

Tell us, what is freedom?

Why worry, why strive?
For I am arrived.

I am Shiva

What do I care for life or death,
for illusion or enlightenment?

I am constant,
I dwell in my own heart.

I am Shiva
in whom nothing is
and nothing is not.

I say,
this world turns
just for the love of it.

Thanissara - Garden of the Midnight Rosary, 2002