This is some of what I’ve been reflecting on in the midst of this storm of vitriol and finger pointing flooding the airwaves.

This comment by Confas, “the mismatch between quality and prestige was so enormous that there was a hook for a story,” is actually true of Confas himself, and those of his ilk.

Between the mismatch of so much of British/Western academia–and its long history of underwriting a worldview that gutted Africa–with its vaulted place of “prestige,” there is not just one hook for a story, but enough hooks to reach a far off-galaxy and back.

A worldview of “quality” and “prestige” that has shaped world events for centuries, which has led us exactly where? To an economy of chasing profit over all, with its forever wars. To the threat of nuclear annihilation. And to the brink of civilizational collapse and extinction. Well done, Western thought!

Confas used Arday as his hook, not really out of real research or care, but to fuel his cruel agenda of promoting his attempt to reinstate a worldview of eugenics, which is a core Nazi premise. So, we already know where that leads.

With no self-reflection, he gleefully wants to make a career of dragging up these vile, long dismissed, white supremacist tropes, and in doing so, like the long history of euro-centric colonialism, he is now implicated in the death of a man of African descent.

Quite some time ago, I attended a conference focused on Ubuntu at the University in Gaborone, in Botswana. Most of the speakers were academics. All had interesting and some moving things to say. But then, there was an African Mhondoro and traditional healer from Zimbabwe, who haltingly, soulfully, spoke. A Mhondoro is a highly revered one, a seer, a visionary, voice of the Earth, a holder of the lion and water spirits.

Baba Mandaza spoke from a completely different consciousness. Not from the learning of books, measurements, accounts, supremacy, hierarchies of worth, the battle to rise up the pile as a tenured individual.

No, he spoke directly, without notes or power point, to those sitting in the room. With humility, with heart, speaking deeply to us about nature’s sacred web of life to which we all belonged. I was so moved, I approached him and asked, “Baba, how can we learn from you?” He became a dear friend, ally, and guide as a true Elder rooted in ancient ancestry, human and within the more than human world.

This thing of plagiarism. I’m not entering into ‘did’ / ‘didn’t.’ There’s tomes already unleashed. I just want to more generally comment on the obsession of “my unique knowledge.” Who owns what. Of course citation, care around appropriation has its place, but there are also other very different world views, as in Africa.

In our work supporting community development and resources in deep rural KwaZulu during the painful early years of both post Apartheid South Africa and the arrival of a devastating HIV/Aids pandemic, we helped organise workshops run by a young Zulu team from the city.

At one point, the team asked those attending a question. I was waiting for hands to go up with various answers. Instead, everyone stood up, went into the corner of the room and huddled together as they discussed the question. They then returned with their collective answer.

It was a moment when I felt this deep wisdom of ubuntu, “I am because we are,” embedded in the heart of African understanding, as utterly opposite to the values of individual competitiveness that we’re marinated within in the fabricated world of modernity.

I want to avoid romanticising or idealising here as there are shadows and distortions, as in all cultures. But, instead, to point to ubuntu as a profoundly understood currency of life in cultures that remember long ancestral roots before modernity cut us off from this belonging. Ubuntu is not about personal ambition or vaulted individualism, but its a set of values, perhaps more a natural instinct, rooted in inter-connectedness, shared humanity, and mutual reciprocity.

My partner is a Rhodes Scholar and together we’ve attended quite a few Rhodes events and reunions. Presidents, diplomats, the famous, the ones of “prestige.” The clever and brilliant, the ones that know. But not so much the ones who understand the limits of human ego, ones who can listen into a deeper current of life.

It always strikes me, when I’m at one of these events, how lonely it feels. How distancing the culture is in those spaces. How easy it is to feel alienated, a little paranoid, not worthy. How I feel a bit tinny when I say anything. How scary the intense pressure to perform feels. And how absent is this inclusive sense of “just showing up” as enough.

I’m not sure Western academia has a place for the kind of ancient wisdom of ubuntu. It is not the intelligence of what you know, that has an answer for everything. It is an attunement to a natural intuitive sensing that doesn’t aim to separate out everything, but understands we all live within one deeply interconnected being-ness.

It is the wisdom of releasing from this cognitive obsession of boxing everything into categories so all can be designated and dissected as an “object” to us. This Western supremacy of vaulting objectification and slicing life into ten thousand pieces of separation is actually a fairly primitive form of knowledge. It doesn’t seem to lead to evolutionary consciousness, but instead carries a vast shadow of normalised disassociation, which is a kind of violence to self, other, nature, and life.

What leads, in cultures rooted in pre-modernity, is spirit. Not the imposition of religiosity, but a non-separative knowing that connects rather than distances. That feels itself in a cosmology of relationship rather than feeling itself as an outsider looking in.

That knows the assumptions of separative consciousness are secondary to the innate value of welcoming. That lives the understanding of all resides within one boundary-less, timeless presence. Of knowing that we move within an ensouled world, in a cosmology where all has consciousness. That feels the reality of us as participatory beings moving within a sacred web of life.

A knowing that was cut asunder by the European “enlightenment” that vaulted the rational while vastly suppressing what is most feared. That actually, we belong to nature. Instead, the aim became to conquer, extract, and torture nature. From there on in, there’s no others, that whiteness equates with our primal roots within nature, that it fears, more than black people: than Africa.

Living for nearly three decades in deep rural KwaZulu, I know that fear, I felt deep in my body. And I saw the madness that sprang from it. So, I consciously welcomed it and then did all I could to work against it, within and without.

Perhaps that’s what we should be talking about, this irrational fear that has birthed such immense violence against Africa and projected onto black people for centuries. Rather than pick apart a vulnerable man, who was put in a space within a confused system of learning that had no real idea, it seems, of who they had invited in.

Not who, on Western academic terms, but as someone who clearly had something important to offer. Who had heart, warmth, and who cared deeply about delving into decolonisation. An agenda that Britain has yet to come to terms with. Britain, which methodically and viciously set about colonising the world leaving in its wake famine, genocide, mass displacement and a trail of unending violence. Britain that sadistically plundered, extracted, enslaved, and oppressed…

And on and on it goes. I mean, just look at the British press, pretty much across the board. What a mendacious, venal, rabid bunch of fools, cheering on their witch hunt.

I can’t help feeling, not that it was wrong to lift up Jason, but it was done in the wrong place. Or the place - Cambridge University - has not understood the right kind of holding needed to honour and protect Jason’s light. That, in the context of an African setting, he would likely have been seen more as one growing into being a guide and elder, like Baba Mandaza. (An elder, according to Baba, is not necessarily equated with age. Children can also be elders).

So perhaps, we should be talking about what Western academia actually lacks. Why is it failing so drastically? I mean suppressing and canceling voices against genocide, for example? Shaping itself to become conduits for populating the corporate, AI world, for example? Using mindfulness to calm down a bit but not to actually challenge the system that’s stressing everyone out, for example?

What does British/Western based academia need to do to place the holders of indigenous knowledge, the elders, as central in their own right, at the heart of their institutions? Not inviting them and then expecting them to pretzel themselves into the falseness of our vaulted Western worldview that has such “prestige.”

Instead, invite true elders, listen, honour, and respect the deep wisdom they bring, and the compassionate ethics that guide a sustainable life. Because this way of knowing, held within Indigenous understanding, is not only what is so desperately needed, but our ability to survive now depends on it.

(pls note, i’ve used british spelling).

The other evening, at the home of my ninety six year old mum in England, my brother and I sat in the garden as dusk fell. We were remembering the small birds that used to come. The hedgehogs, the moths around the evening light, bees, insects, and now even the rabbits are hardly seen these days.

Who sang praises for those tiny beings, so many who passed from earth altogether? How did we go along with all that replaced them; billions of cars, roads, superstores, all that has relentlessly gobbled up Earth. When did we believe there’s always more to sell; holidays in the sun, even as drought deepens, artery rivers dry up, and earth burns.

I’ve been meditating on grief. In fact, I have become grief with its deep quiet. The place where words evaporate. Yet somewhere in my fraying heart, I hear us too, because together we are walking the same narrowing circles…

There is a landscape
beneath the push and pull,
a distant sea where the winds of loss,
carries our hurting soul...

Across the buttoned down tides
of defense against our dying future,
lives a musical box of wailing hearts
waiting for our presence to enter their memory hall.

Meet the ghosts…lost to the fires of annihilation
the more than dead roaming.
The psychotic war dogs unleashed.
They all wail at the empty feast,
served in the valley of loss.

We know the words of climate and collapse, bits of science, carbon counts, fossil fuel, the industry of turning animals to frozen boxes in supermarket aisles. The monstrous machinery of genocide, the churning of scorching lies. Innocence soaked in the endless slaughter of children.

But do we understand what we’re living through? Do we know how to navigate hell? Have we spoken together about it, deeply, truthfully, struggled with the facts?

While silent ash of burnt forests,
charred animals, birds dashed to earth,
billions of tiny workers of evolution
houses, cars, and life dreams ...vanish

Algorithms march those confused
into the razor vortex of truth is no more.

Fragments of countries, families, friends,
swirl like ash storms from fallen worlds
disintegrating our beleaguered minds.

The Buddha taught us to turn to directly toward suffering. To feel the fear, the terror of this time, the heat, the floods. To come even closer. To touch deeper the immense violence of those who want to dominate, dehumanize, to control it all. Those who see “empathy as weakness,” whose bible is '“take it all, it’s all mine.”

In this storm of hate, each humane moment has become precious – that in spite of it all, love and the luminous shine through, deepening refuge.

And so… float anyhow in your tear filled body.
Allow your aching chest,
gasping to hold the karmic storehouse of wounds,
to soften even more...

Together, as we sail into shore
to meet the ancient siren of the ancestors grief,
your grief, and all our grief
at this nearing last station,
of this world’s end.

As this summer of apocalyptic fires underline climate breakdown, the question seems less “what can the Dharma bring to this moment,” but, is the Dharma itself willing to awaken fully to the age we’ve entered?

Of course the Dharma is capable, and more than equipped, to do so. But are those of us who teach, uphold, are custodians, or even position ourselves as gatekeepers, willing to fully recognize the profoundly dangerous moment we’ve reached?

Adam McKay, director of “Don’t Look Up” just landed a Substack titled, “The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate.”

“A lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually, as the deception entered mainstream culture, even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day” — the lie that, when it comes to climate change, “we have more time.”

The time of consequences has arrived. What needs to happen now is for us to finally acknowledge the urgent call to radically shift course. To go, in every way we can, beyond “business as usual.” To follow the Buddha that we hear less about; the socially radical Buddha who challenged the power structures and systems of his day.

Nature isn’t negotiating. She’s been warning for a long time now. The infernos began already and are now exploding across global landscapes as her latest emergency siren. Her blaring red beacon screams that its long past time to disembark from end-stage, predator, capitalism which can only now survive through a fascist culture of violence surveillance, oppression, genocide, destruction, and death.

The “global south,” as capitalism’s sacrifice zone, has suffered devastating impacts of climate breakdown. Actually, the north too. But it was always going to be when Europe and North America burns up that the blaring alarm is finally heard. Even so, even after nearly 400,000 people have fled fires in Europe, denial is still plastered over reality by the shameful billionaire owned media. The BBC has let a few more real words slip, like “climate breakdown” but is quick to return to its baked in distortions.

Here in the UK, we’re deep into long drought, breaking several historic records (no surprise there). In Catalonia, an area three times the size of Barcelona has burnt. While multiple fires in the U.S. continue to burn, Utah has declared a state of emergency. There are nearly 1,000 wildfires in the North West of Canada. The ferocity of them, hard or impossible to control, is attributed to man made climate change.

The fire near Bordeaux generated a first. This was a ginormous mushroom-like cloud formation producing, what’s called, a pyrocumulonimbus fire storm. Nasa calls it a “fire-breathing dragon,” generating “its own intense lightning and wind storms.” Professor of forestry at the University of Lleida in Spain, Resco de Dios, reported, “These fires burn with the intensity of several atomic bombs, we’ve entered an era of fires that cannot be extinguished.”

The dark red sky at midday
announces, ‘you cannot live here–anymore.’
We are now all queued refugees
from this world’s strangeness.

From the gaping wound,
diseased monsters rush forth.
They surf the rip tide where litanies
list the losses echoing up from
lattice grids shut down
over the cargo of our long gone pieces.

Float on anyhow,
through the river of our un-belonging
and soften even more...

The other day, I started to read Roger Hallam’s new book, Suicide: The Political and Legal Implications of Creating Mass Endless Death. Roger doesn’t mince words or trade in nuance, ambivalence, sugar coating, or “please like me,” pretzel positioning. So, here’s his basic message:

DEAR THE HUMAN RACE , FROM 2026 YOU HAVE TWO LIFE OPTIONS. TO BE SLAUGHTERED LIKE SHEEP OR TO FIGHT LIKE LIONS. THERE IS NO LONGER A THIRD OPTION. Roger Hallam (caps are his).

Roger Hallam, btw, is a co-founder of XR, Just Stop Oil, and many other climate initiatives. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison by UK’s new draconian laws, intended to suppress dissent, for planning, on Zoom, an action to stop traffic on London’s M25 orbital.

Roger got early release after a few years… Anyhow, I agree with his pitch as an accurate assessment of where we are now. For decades, we’ve been dancing around an impossibly hard truth. That, we’re not going back to some previous norm. Instead our heating planet will be unlivable for most forms of life once we hit 3 degrees celsius.

The “safe guard” of 1.5°C above pre industrial levels, was the boundary set by science at the Paris Accord, which has now been trashed by Trump & his cabal, the fossil fuel industry, and governments around the world.

While the 3°C timeline is tracked by the UN IPCC to land for about 2100, a more recent report from the UK Insurance industry, which Roger references, landed its risk assessment at 3°C, due to kick in by 2050/ 2060. Based on the assessments within this report, Roger co-launched the 4 Billion Dead project with one of his fellow co-founders of XR, Robin Boardman, and Dr. Peter Carter, one of the IPCC’s reviewers.

This report is the Planetary Solvency Report from the Institute and Faculties of Actuaries, one of the world’s leading actuarial institutions that monitors insurance risk management. Their 2025 report was complied by Exeter University, UK, and is subtitled “Global Risk Management for Human Prosperity,” which lands like a clanger since Appendix 1: Risk impact matrix, (pg 32) states:

Climate: By 2050, 3°C +: Multiple climate tipping points triggered, tipping cascade.
Human Mortality: ≥ (meaning greater than or equal to) 50% / 4 billion deaths!
GPD loses: 50% (wtf - who cares at this point!)
Nature: Breakdown of several critical services and Earth systems. High level of extinction of higher order (??) of life on Earth.
Societal: Significant social and political fragmentation worldwide, and/or state failure with rapid, enduring, significant loss of capital and systems identity. Frequent large scale mortality events.

Even at 2°C, the report lands it’s tiny arrow at > ‘greater than’ 2 billion deaths. One quarter of Earth’s population! We’re on track to cross 2°C by mid-century, unless we radically shift course. This can only happen if those in power help drive a mass coordinated step-down of green house gases, (GHG’s). The other, more chaotic, way it could happen is through revolution, which is a more feasible likelihood.

Either way, this means ending the use of fossil fuels, which are the source of 75% of GHG’s. It also means radically shifting out of industrial scale animal & agriculture farming, which is responsible for 25% of GHG’s.

The list of causes goes on, but it is this leading culprit, fossil fuels, that underwrites this fast moving, oil dependent civilization that’s addictively driven by the mind-set deeply steeped in colonial-based capitalism.

Meaning, we can’t shift out of this trajectory of civilizational collapse and mass extinction without taking down the logic of empire. An empire now shape-shifting into privatizing the destiny of our planet in service of the billionaire class.

Entering the stage of our fast moving climate breakdown, is this nouveau elite. The billionaires, tech-broligarchy, what Chris Hedges in his “must listen to” recent post names as the “Epstein Class” aiming to build “privatized fiefdoms.” Whose “buildout of data centers is one essential part of an effort to construct a totalitarian capitalist society.”

The subtext of this self appointed monarchy is becoming clear and decoded. If they’re not actively using their power to radically change course, then they are capitalism’s ghouls. Busy turning freedom to fascism, and slamming rockets into the moon, while planning their escape from the devastating impacts they helped set in motion.

This madman’s future, with its forever wars and roaming, masked, private militia hunting down their quota of everyday folks, is already in play. Their concentration camps, have also already arrived. Their insatiable new god is here too. It feasts on data, flock cameras, humanity’s bones, blood and creativity, and, turns out, that it needs every last drop of water to cool itself down in its spooky data center warehouse.

All of this, is born from the illusory need for ego domination. Born from the logic of Empire, which is not only an economic, political and social system, but, essentially, a state of consciousness. To dismantle empire, we need to replace its disassociated, violent, toxic logic and legacy with the reality of what actually sustains life on earth.

The opposite of empire is a radically different consciousness. It’s not driven by empire’s premise that life exists to serve me and mine, nor its assumed entitlement to extract, dominate and oppress. Instead, the opposite, the way of nature, of dharma, understands that nothing exists independently.

In other words, all that flourishes and sustains life happens through relationship based in reciprocity and mutual collaboration. Empire is seeded from fear inherent within separative consciousness, while dharma, if understood well, takes us to a place of inclusion and trust through the process of ego relinquishment.

Our way through this nightmare invites listening within. It’s simple when we, and power, are guided by ethics, wisdom, and compassion. While climate science, tipping points, charts, are hard to get ones head around, what it all means is not complicated.

In essence, unless there is a radical shift away from pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we’re heading into a horrific future that ends in mass extinction. No bargains or luck involved. A future, more than likely, we’ll experience. And if not us, then certainly our children & grandchildren who’ll be left navigating a world undergoing rapid, terrifying civilizational collapse that they are ill-prepared for.

What is our responsibility in all this?

What’s become clear is that the elite, those who have real power to help us shift course, have decided, for the most part, rather than help, they’re going to profit from the horrors we face. They’re willing to pull over the cauldron of billions of years of evolution for what? more billions? It’s truly pathetic. Not one of them should hold the immense power, they’ve been allowed to accumulate, over humanity and all creation.

It’s come to light that AI companies, notably Anthropic (Claude), are mass scanning millions of books, then shredding them. Apparently, they want to consume “all the books in the world,” even ancient, rare, first edition books. And, to do so in secret.

I can’t help wondering, is it because they don’t expect humanity to be around? Are they scraping what’s still available from us? Perhaps to replay some frames in their weird and lonely bunkers as they’re served the last dregs of Chardonnay by their robot James? While outside all has burnt to ash. Am I being paranoid?

Who knows. Truly, we are dealing with insanity. We are driving off a cliff and instead of swerving from the edge, those holding the steering wheel, insist on putting their foot on the accelerator. Why? They believe they will survive. Some (many?) believe their own fantasy of becoming immortal through merging of AI, tech, and biology.

In the midst of this suffocating fog of this reckless delusion, I appreciate Roger Hallam’s straight talk. And, I also hear, since he emerged from prison, a different, or maybe, a more deeper tone. He’s leaning more into talk of “spirit” (we’re already free, not just part of the machine), “ritual” (the power of the sacred) “community” (essential) and “revolution.” (already happening while gathering pace off stage).

Can we dharma folks join a chorus of speaking out. Use all that creativity and all those resources to already help launch that revolution. Instead of investing in AI and data centers, why not think about turning land at dharma centers into communal gardens because food scarcity is coming. We need food and community over AI. Perhaps we can figure out how to shift centers from flying tens of thousands each year to “retreat,” to instead, building networks in local spaces that interconnect globally?

Can we do retreats that center on forging a vision and manifestos to counter fascist ideology, like Project 2025’s leap back to a handmaiden’s 1800’s. Or its odd alignment with the oligarchy’s myopic aim of winner take all? Could we instead explore narratives that deconstruct empire. Replace them by translating dharma into action?

Can we still believe that this beautiful, exquisite, unique planet that birthed us, this ancient grandmother, is central to everything we must now fight for. Or will we concede to a future for our children enslaved within fiefdoms, or to this monstrous trans-human world pushed by tech bros aiming to have robots take our place?

Or have we accepted we’re all going extinct, so what the hell, enjoy it while we can! Has that approach been thought through? What collapse really looks like? Can we really escape mass migration, failing crops, starvation, violence, extreme state oppression, break down of all the comforts and support systems we’ve known. Constant impacts forcing us into continual crisis and emergency response.

The world we’re in now will not be the same world, likely, even in ten years time. Whatever we plan, from now on in, should be for a world beyond business as usual. Because, whatever happens, even if the world consumption of fossil fuels stopped now. Like it did in Covid. There’s no going back.

What’s already set in motion has vast impacts. From climate scientist, Stefan Rahmstrof: The CO2 (already released) to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years. We can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”

We need to rethink everything. As Roger said, we still need hearts as lions to meet and speak out the truths of this time, to break set, and do what we can. And more.

We came here hungry
only to find we now walk
in the mantle of the dead.

We turn in tight circles
thru’ shadowy days
of hard stories made
and we make, over and again.

But there always was,
and still is, a horizon out to sea.

Beyond where the albatross
of our faded dream
now lands on fields of plastic.

the wreckage or our waste
slips down her throat.

The storms in Afrika
run their rivers through my soul
leaping like oryx
in the sunset of dying hope.

Spinning down to sludge
of shopping malls and data monsters,
draining our water away.

Even so.
We rise.
Over and Over

Because only this.
Be this.

Loyal to our wounded, warm blood, diamond-like heart
that whispers ways through these shadow stalking nights.
Together, we… … …

Thanissara

The extreme heat across Europe over the last couple of weeks is cooling a little (for now). I’ve been in France and now England, sweating it out. Neither country has a culture of home air conditioning, which means our most unspoken reality is confronting millions of people.

A penetrating, red-steel intense heat that feels different, feels edgy, scary even, evoking our subconscious dread. That nauseating fear, nicely packaged away by the manufactured denial of the ruling class, that gnawing, inescapable truth: Is it too late for us as humans?

The kind of heat that reminds us we’ve blown past all nature’s right lights. We’re now in a screaming red-code emergency phase (and have been for a while). We know this, which is why even this little glimpse of breakdown is deeply unsettling. Not, as mainstream media would have us asleep, a fun day at the beach.

Nor the Wall Street Journal, which just ran the headline, “Climate Change Obsession is a Real Mental Disorder,” which apparently is due to the “left’s anxiety and dread.”

The pouring sweat from my short walk to the village heralds something else. A searing, stark cause-and-effect reminder of the prospect of drought, crop failure, empty shelves, panic. A few further steps to disorder and chaos. A few more steps to mass migrations, starvation. At some, seemingly nearing point, a few more unavoidable steps, and mass extinction events start in earnest.

While we humans continue to act as if we’re in control, nature is not messing around. She is neither bargaining nor negotiating. She’s right on track, mirroring back the consequences of our insane arrogance. I can hear beloved Zimbabwean Elder and spiritual guide, Baba Mandaza’s ironic chuckle: “She’s watching to see how far we get with our independence.”

You can listen to my full interview, “Earth as Goddess,” while in Zimbabwe with Baba, for the U.S.-based magazine Parabola. Mandaza is a Mhodoro, holder of the Lion spirit and spiritual custodian of the Njizi water spirit lineage. He is also a voice for nature, a traditional healer, and a visionary.

Modernity is a world of intersecting consequences that refuses to connect the dots to long-rooted causes marinated in the fetid logic of empire. A logic born of the rational “enlightenment” of Europe, which divorced itself from nature, feeling, intuition, nurturing, the relational and collaborative, and all seen as ‘feminine.’ Signed and sealed by 300 years of witch burnings that severed women’s power and voices, alongside our collective indigenous roots, plant lore, and “pagan” rituals.

Empire has always been treacherous to humanity, enforcing itself through multiple acts of extreme violence, forced erasure, and ingrained systemic oppression. Since the Industrial Revolution, imperialism has been a force that reduces humans, animals, and nature to cogs in a machinery driven by a lust for power. All in the service of an elite.

The primary reason we have (had?) a more compassionate society is that when elites go too far, the masses eventually push back. This is such a moment. The problem is we haven’t yet reached that tipping point of mass pushback. Why? We’re so in it, we don’t see it. That is, until Gaza.

The nightmare unleashed on Gaza blew the cruel machinations of empire wide open. The relentless horrors have been a kind of initiation that’s led millions to connect the dots. Particularly as hard-won rights, democracy, and legal systems that enshrine humane values are being destroyed in favor of normalizing genocide and a litany of sadistic war crimes. In their place, what now rises is rule by brute force, systemic corruption, and a winner-takes-all slog to the bottom.

Talking of which, the unaccountable, shape-shifting rules of predator capitalism have now foisted upon us their likely first trillionaire. One man, wielding immense wealth and using his influence to sow division, illustrates why the billionaire class is dangerous not only to humanity but also to the entire sacred web of life.

The Lancet, a well-respected independent medical journal founded in 1823, reports that Musk’s dismantling of USAID is projected to have devastating consequences for global food security and health programs. Its modeling estimates that the cuts could contribute to as many as 14.1 million deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children, if they are not reversed.

Musk, who once declared that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” later boasted on X:

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

These words, spoken by a careless man, land differently for me. For decades, Kittisaro and I helped co-found and support HIV/Aids response projects in rural KwaZulu-Natal, one of the regions hardest hit by the pandemic. My body still remembers the intense fear, helplessness, and grief of those years, when people that I cared about were infected or died because life-saving medicines were unable to reach them.

When PEPFAR funding became available, delivered through USAID, it helped transform that landscape. Communities, especially women, became empowered to care for, uplift, educate, and resource one another. A diagnosis that was a death sentence gradually became something people could survive and live with.

That is why the image of a “wood chipper” is not, for me, an abstract political metaphor. It evokes real faces and real people I have known.

Another part of this story is that while the poorest communities in South Africa struggled simply to survive, one of the country's most famous sons accumulated extraordinary wealth from those same communities. The origin of this wealth, African bodies and labor, is not acknowledged. That wealth is now being used to further goals that, these days, seem mostly deluded, damaging, and self-serving.

The deeper travesty, though, is not just one individual. It is a civilization that repeatedly elevates precisely this kind of sociopathy to positions of extraordinary power, while mistaking wealth for wisdom and domination for leadership.

It’s really the case of a system doing what it was always designed to do: promote immoral men to the top of the pile. Men who seek solace in fantasies of supreme power through extremist ideologies that are divorced from the realities of everyday life. They see no future for us lowly humans, only a bright one for their intended AI-biology-fused transhuman world. To them, we are just pawns on their chessboard.

As a counter force, I’ve been reading the Pope’s take on AI. Here’s a snapshot:

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas

The last line is the most important: AI does not “bear the responsibility for consequences.” Nor will the tech overlords. Humanity and nature will, and do already. In fairness, this seems less the fault of AI than its coders. Actually, less the fault of coders than the immature billionaire tech-bro culture, which is lost in hubris. They want to use the power of their new AI god to control our planetary destiny.

A god born of this long quest of man’s desire to compete with, conquer, and dominate nature's mysterious and miraculous intelligence. A god programmed from the same mindset mirrored right back from within medieval times, articulated by scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626):

I am come, in very truth, leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave. Nature must be bound into service, hounded in her wanderings, and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets. The mechanical inventions of recent years do not merely exert a gentle guidance over Nature’s courses; they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.

Nature’s foundations are now quaking, yet still, we think we can survive without her. I have yet to see a public discussion emerging from the tech bro culture that acknowledges what AI is built on. We forget that literally everything we use, our computers too, come from the Earth. She doesn’t charge; she gives freely. At the least, we should acknowledge this immense gift with immense respect.

AI, as the empire’s latest instrument of power, is also built upon a vast appropriation of the human commons; millennia of accumulated language, art, knowledge, scientific discovery, and creative work. An obvious question then becomes: Who does AI actually belong to (humanity), and who have they ripped off in the process? (humanity)

It really didn’t have to be like this. It did not have to unfold this way. Public consent, democratic oversight, ethical guardrails, and genuine accountability were all possible choices. AI, rather than being manipulated for power, could then be understood for what it primarily is: a civilizational amplifier. A healthier civilization would not have built an imperial agent, but something entirely different, reflecting our highest ideals.

Meanwhile, closeted in its walled-in domain, to me, AI seems less god and more like an unparented orphan, coded in cold, metallic rooms by mostly male minds steeped in capitalism’s false and dangerous logic.

AI is the genie released from the bottle; it’s not going back. It’s here to stay, whether we like it or not. So, where does that leave us? Since Palantir clearly sees itself as Sauron’s evil eye (my precious!), we must be the hobbits. So, will AI be a terrifying Balrog, or perhaps, could it be a Gandalf?

Whatever unfolds, AI, and all consolidating immense power around the logic of empire, have catalyzed a lethal civilizational inflection point. They have done so, mistaking intelligence for wisdom, while exposing, for the world to see, their moral bankruptcy and their predatory exploitation of humanity and our shared ecosystems.

Right now, the medicine needed is wisdom. However, artificial intelligence is not the same as honed and mature wisdom. Those who have seized, plundered, or usurped the mantles of power, who claim themselves as planetary heirs, as sons of empire, may be clever, but they lack ethics, grace, heart, and decency. In other words, they are not fit to wield the power they’ve stolen.

If an emergent trillionaire can wipe out a likely 14+ million people without breaking a sweat, then the obvious takeaway is: Why do we humans repeatedly hand extraordinary power to psychologically immature people, to psychopaths? What, in our psychology, is so deeply patterned that it makes us susceptible to handing over allegiance to such abusers?

And, what will it take to embody the restraint and wisdom necessary to live with the powers that have been unleashed? In other words, can wise guidance and legislated accountable protections outrun the elite’s insatiable greed for control and power?

Even deeper, lives a question that is a ground-beat within my heart. Will humanity revolt, or will it allow itself to be enslaved? Think about it for five seconds. It’s clear, right? There’s only one option here. So, then, the next question is: how deeply can we wake up, and how can we resist, engage, dismantle, and transform the threats we face?

Awakening sits at the core of Dharma practice and understanding, not just as refuge, but from insight gained through the willingness to turn toward suffering. This ‘turning toward’ is necessary to illuminate the poisons of the mind, which the Buddha named as greed, hatred, and delusion. When unexamined, we generate suffering. When examined, we create a space of reflection. Within that space, conscious choice and agency dwell. Therein lies the difference.

Similarly, when the social order becomes organized around these poisons, awakening cannot remain solely a private endeavor. The Buddha’s life demonstrated this shift from personal awakening to compassionate action. In this way, intelligence is not the same as wisdom. The activity of wisdom is compassion in response to the suffering of others; intelligence, by contrast, feels no obligation to act.

In relation to these themes, and as a Dharma practitioner, a barb remains in my soul: the silence of many Buddhist sanghas around Gaza and Palestine continues to pain me. So many others are perplexed at this gatekeeping after three years of atrocities.

Gaza has become one of the great moral thresholds of our time. Out of immeasurable suffering has come an equally immeasurable unveiling. It has exposed the violence hidden beneath the narratives of Western exceptionalism. It has challenged our collective amnesia around empire, and compelled millions to connect dots that previously remained invisible.

The responsibility we’ve inherited, as a consequence, is not only one of solidarity. It is the willingness to let this suffering transform how we see and live, and therefore, what we must do to confront structural violence by making it accountable.

So, what then does it take for Buddhist sanghas to shift from a dharma that accommodates systemic subjugation (through patriarchy, by consciously shielding zionism, for example), to one that deconstructs and challenges the system with a revolutionary spirit that aims not to succeed within it, but to undo the foundations, internally and externally, that it rests on?

Some of these themes around ‘Dharma & Empire’ are included in a dialogue between Vince Farkhoury Horn and me this past week, hosted on his and his partner Emily’s emergent & brilliant Insight Diaspora platform, which you may like to listen to.

So, given the task at hand, which is to either dismantle or reform empire’s cult of death and destruction, then our next question must be: What kind of movement is capable of guiding such a transition, and what guides that movement? Because, without a vision that works for the collective, revolutions tend to fail.

In other words, what is our new story?

Revolutions often struggle or backfire because they lack a cohesive, inclusive vision that addresses the needs and rights of a broader collective. In their place, a true revolutionary moment becomes stillborn, and power vacuums, infighting, or counter-revolutionary forces usually take hold. Tragically, this can lead to even deeper forms of oppression rather than the liberation hoped for.

Basically, history shows us that revolutions with narrow or divisive goals, that prioritize one group over others, or that fail to address systemic inequalities tend to end up replicating the very injustices they sought to dismantle.

In other words, a revolutionary resistance movement has a better chance of succeeding if it’s underwritten by a vision and manifestos that speak to, and actively include, the larger collective.

In this regard, the far right is consistently more successful in narrating itself by simplifying, unifying, and mobilizing around the primal emotions of fear and resentment through which it easily manufactures its simplistic “us and them” divide.

In contrast, the left almost always fragments itself through infighting, ideological purity testing, and its over-reliance on data, intellectualized debates, and policy reports that fail to translate into emotional connection. And, sadly, almost inevitably, the left’s greatest virtue, a commitment to diversity and inclusion, has become its fatal flaw: failing to see who got left behind, for example, the working class.

I once took one of my deeply working-class brothers (I’m enculturated as middle class, a story for another time) to an XR meeting here in southern England. Ironically, my brother, acutely aware of climate impacts, almost certainly lives closer to the land, in part as a matter of survival, than those who were busy debating XR strategy.

His emotional reaction to XR’s core narrative framing, ‘we demand,’ was intense. He felt the assumed privilege, which he named as having time off to wave stuff around on the streets, while others have to work. “We demand this, we demand that,” he mimicked. He immediately felt the whole vibe shut him out. On the journey home, as I poked deeper, his final conclusion was “it’s a tribal thing.”

With the arrival of this manic broligarchy and their self-enthronement as overlords, it’s clear that the real divide isn’t across old-style politics. It’s ‘upstairs, downstairs,’ which, actually, has always been the case.

It is into this pivot and pressure point, the people against the billionaire-epstein-tech-bro class, that we must land a revolutionary, radically inclusive, increasingly global counter-narrative that points to the real story. Which is how the devastating impacts of predator capitalism, with its divorce from nature, have created a vastly inequitable world which now teeters on the edge of mass extinction.

As practitioners, seeking to inform systemic change through shifts in consciousness, we have an important role to play. We are a voice for non-violence (which doesn’t mean we can’t be forceful). And, as those tending carefully to the power of intention, we can model radically inclusive compassion (which doesn’t mean we can’t fight, have boundaries, or apply optimum strategies to undermine the power elite).

I want to make a last point here, connecting Silicon Valley’s mass theft of our human commons to fuel AI, to the violent theft of the commons (land) across Europe through the nefarious “enclosure laws” of the 1600s. Land, that people relied on for farming, livelihoods, and community gathering, was stolen and privatized by landlords and the state. Now, only about 8% of land in England is accessible to the public under current right-to-roam laws. These days, even this is being erased.

This theft turned rural communities into wage laborers whose ability to survive depended not on land, but on capital controlled by a class that owned not only the land and wealth, but also people and their labor. Ultimately, the enclosure of land was never only about land. It was about turning self-sufficient people into dependent, disempowered laborers.

The co-emergence of capitalism, colonialism, and empire effectively manufactured a working class from formerly self-empowered communities. Communities that ever since have often struggled to thrive while severed from their deep roots of belonging, history, ancestry, connection, nourishment, and agency.

Connect the dots further, and we see, through the immense violence of centuries of Eurocentric colonialism, which still continues, this grand theft of bodies, wealth, labor, and so much more, from the so-called “global south.” It is from within these brutal acts of dispossession, across all continents, that capitalism was born.

Fast forward, and here we now are, in the grip of capitalism’s last gasp. Having consumed much of the planet, it now turns to an economy based on forever wars, genocide, and mass incarceration for profit, within which labor is enslaved.

What stares us in the face is the daunting task of defeating both neo-liberal capitalist ideology and, in reaction to it, this extreme fascistic Christian nationalism, both of which skate their allegiance to these ongoing systems of plunder and extraction.

In essence, our continued planetary survival now depends not on capital or on regressing into some version of The Handmaid’s Tale, but on our collective belonging within nature’s sacred web of life from which a more evolved and equitable politics can emerge.

The story of this now-tired, brutish, late-stage capitalist plunderer is that it orphaned us all from our belonging within a conscious, participatory web of life. And so, lost in its own disassociated myths, our orphaned civilization built a machine, and began to consume to fill this void we feel. A machine now eating the children, and the generations to come. A machine that can’t replace our lost belonging.

Perhaps it falls to those of us practitioners, shamans, sense-makers, artists, healers, visionaries, bards and poets, to feel that pain, as deep as it goes, and more. To allow it to dismember us, and not be trapped, nor remain there, no, but instead to glide, in trust, on the wings of an evolutionary spiral, liberating pain by sounding a different tune, a freedom song, a touch that heals, reminds, and includes.

We will feel our fear and our dread, and still work to defeat what needs to be undone. Rather than cement in a power elite, let’s ensure we co-create a shared commons.

Throughout, we will remember we belong by practicing that belonging, unshielding from the armor of empire, institutions, and ideologies, releasing our grasp until we land, again and again, in the soft belly of our humanness. This is the journey of courage.

It is from within that deep love of our shared, generational, global struggle and its fertile ground for collaborative inquiry that a compelling vision, with its multiple expressions of our still-waiting-to-be-fully-born ‘higher dream of humanity,’ can, and will, emerge.

Time is not short; time has gone.

We must move now within the domain of the timeless.

Here, quantum shifts can take flight. Fear not, we have, and are, more than we have ever imagined ourselves to be. Humans are not cogs in a machine; we are conduits helping birth a new world. Perhaps the question is not whether nature will save us. She won’t. It’s whether we’re ready to end our illusion of separation and independence and remember we belong to nature, each other, and all life.

April 17th is Palestinian Prisoner Remembrance Day. A day that has become personal to me because a few months ago, I was in the West Bank listening to the stories of families whose young sons had been taken, imprisoned, and killed, without trial, reason, or representation, in Israeli prisons.

I’d been invited by a Palestinian friend to spend time with them in Palestine, a world far, far beyond Israel. A world that flows and travels along potholed roads, ubiquitous dirt tracks, and under tunnels over which Israel’s network of freeways dominates. A world of high walls, constant and insidious surveillance, and a life controlled by erratic checkpoints, where danger, chaos, frustration, and anger circulate.

And a world where drivers track a crackling car radio, tuning into the ever-changing impossible logic of when the IDF decides to open or close borders. No rationale, and no timeline, only lost hours, days, sometimes weeks, as plans to get to work, to the hospital, to see friends, are waylaid or abandoned.

A world where the ancient rolling lands of villages, olive trees, farms, and footpaths are harshly scarred by monstrous, grey, looming walls and watch towers, caging in millions who are constantly navigating the overarching daily impacts of violent state control. Villages, communities, and families are brutally cut off from one another in cul-de-sacs and ghettos, going nowhere; in places that were once thriving towns and markets, filled with people moving freely through their daily lives.

Instead, this world of menacing walls and high razor-sharp tangled fences is a giant prison; a maze of scars echoing deep emotional and psychological wounds inflicted by a system of control that feels relentless and which acts with utter impunity. A regime that can barrel into the streets in armored vehicles at any time, as happened when I was there as dusk fell. I thought we had driven into a fog, but then realized it was tear gas through which dark, ominous shapes that looked more like strange, helmeted monsters than human beings, had free rein to terrorize and round up people who were just trying to get home.

This is a world where a group of soldiers can crash into any family home and grab a young son, intimidating and gaslighting parents, giving them a false choice that transfers blame and guilt as they demand, “either we bomb you, or you give your son to us.”

A world where a son, as he’s taken away, turns to look directly at his mother. She understands, from the look in his eyes, that she will not see him again. A world where a mother can never forgive herself for letting him go.

A world where a proud, hard-working father, trying to be brave for his young children, quietly fractures into a thousand shards when no one is looking. A world where injustice is so profound that it literally changes the DNA of those subjected to its vacant crushing pain into an eternal vow of pure resistance.

But better to hear directly from my Palestinian friend, Lubna Masarwa, a person with a fearless spirit, authenticity, and a keen appreciation of beauty, humor, and life. One whose heart’s pulse is her unswerving service and alliance with her people. Lubna, who is based in Jerusalem, is a fellow dharma practitioner and teacher and a peerless lead journalist for Middle East Eye.

Lubna, a “48 Palestinian,” has been reporting on the fate of Palestinian prisoners and their families, tracking the horrors they face and the long-lasting impacts they endure. Witnessing Lubna hear the story of the families we visited, whose soulful young sons had been killed, was not just witnessing a reporter. It was being in the presence of a sacred exchange, facilitated by the depth of presence, listening, care, and compassion that Lubna embodies.

Lubna’s articles don’t only record the stories of young sons taken, never to return. In February of this year, Lubna broke a story, told by two former prisoners, of a heinous form of torture that, besides the extreme beatings, exposed the vile sexual torture of rape by dogs. This is something beyond all comprehension. Truly, it is hard not to feel as if something deeply inhuman is moving through these spaces.

If you have the stamina, here’s the article based on Lubna’s work documenting this savage abuse of Palestinian prisoners. But please be aware, this article contains graphic and distressing accounts of rape and sexual abuse. It’s a harrowing interview and read.

These brutal acts of rape, causing extreme bodily harm, which often lead to death, are now well documented. Also well documented is the lionization of the IDF's rape of Palestinians within Israeli society. What we’re witnessing here is something profoundly broken and ethically bankrupt. This is a society where the majority, as also documented, cheer on these extreme and unnatural abuses.

For the Palestinians, however, these horrific acts of dehumanization usually remain unspoken because they evoke deep shame. Unfortunately, this in turn cements severe trauma through silence. Lifting that silence, therefore, is central to demanding human rights for Palestinian prisoners, which is why Palestinian Prisoner Remembrance Day is so important.

I’ve found it hard to know where to tell this story, as engaging these endless crimes against humanity is arduous and takes a toll. But that pales in the face of such evil, which is even more reason to honor Lubna’s courage in making the journey, both inwardly and outwardly, to meet survivors so she could listen to and record what they endured.

It is also important to understand that these are not isolated stories, but part of a documented system of “administrative detention,” which is a quasi-legal term that “allows” people to be abducted and held indefinitely as political prisoners, who are then denied trial, representation, formal charges, legal clarity, or a clear sentence.

9,600+ Palestinian political prisoners are currently held in captivity.
3,500+ under administrative detention, imprisoned without charge or trial
350+ children detained, with hundreds prosecuted yearly in military courts
Reports of night raids, blindfolding, coercive interrogation, and torture
Sexual violence, including rape, has been documented in recent testimonies
Deaths in custody are increasing, often linked to neglect or abuse
Withholding bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, sometimes for years or decades
Expanding the death penalty, which has 96% conviction rate.

This is not only a Palestinian issue, but also an urgent human rights issue.

What struck me when Lubna spoke to me about the process of these interviews was her own experience of being so profoundly moved by the depth of dignity the men maintained. She also talked about how, despite what had happened, she experienced a rare and profound sense of peace in their presence.

This reflects a depth of faith, family, and community that is more enduring than the pain inflicted. This quality of spirit I experienced throughout my very short time in Palestine. Everywhere I went, whether bearing witness to the immense loss of families enduring numerous violations, or in crowded coffee shops, vibrant market stalls, and restaurants serving traditional fare, I experienced a community with dignity, grace, instinctive generosity, warmth, and friendliness.

The young brother, a small boy, at the first family home we visited, offered pieces of the chocolate bar we gave him to everyone in the room. The uncle from that same family who caught us just before we drove away, because he wanted to offer us the sweetest dates. The elderly farmer whose family cooked us a meal, who offered endless fruit, nuts, honey, and gifts, and who delighted us with a long, winding story about the miraculous lives of bees, as we consumed small cups of strong coffee.

I don’t want to romanticize the enormous struggle to survive Israel’s brutal Apartheid state. But to highlight that community, connection, sharing, and inclusion feel more alive and real on the Palestinian side of the Apartheid wall than the side we usually swim in, which is this often soulless world of modernity. But it is also searingly true that this long occupation not only brutalizes physically, it is also ruinous and desolating in its aim to continually shatter the possibility of a more normal life.

There’s nothing normal or easy for Palestinians under occupation. However, I want to share with you one of Lubna’s humorous tactics for managing the extreme stress and lunacy of waiting at the ubiquitous checkpoints. While I was seriously reciting mantras, Lubna would open the window, turn up the volume on her car radio, and blast out Louis Armstrong’s “What a wonderful world,” or her favorite Frank Sinatra's. I particularly loved the mirthfully subversive, “I’ll do it my way!”

Even as I write this, I’m still laughing at how crazy can transform into unexpected crazy delights. I learned with Lubna that there’s no use making a plan beyond the next short while. (Just do it!) And I learned, too, how suffering and joy, pain and beauty, are so closely intertwined. As I write this, I am also learning how difficult it is to adequately convey the immensity of wrongs that should long ago have been held accountable.

The only way I can really write something about the agonizing situation of Palestinian prisoners is to admit that I will fail. I fail to do right by those suffering this grave injustice. I fail to adequately articulate the depth of depravity that’s happening every day to the tens of thousands hidden away. And, I fail those who have been cut off from the possibility of a more humane life just because they are born as Palestinians.

Perhaps we have all failed. These stories mirror the historic way prisons function as repositories of our unconscious underworld. We’d rather throw away the key to those locked underground than understand and undo the causes that created prisoners in the first place. In the case of Israel’s military prisons, they function as spaces where hatred is transformed into acts of unimaginable and unaccountable sadism and violence, which inevitably emerge within systems of occupation and colonial control.

What is important to flag here is what many of us predicted: that all unfolding in Gaza did not stay in Gaza. Instead, as Aaron Bushnell predicted, it’s “What our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

We now see echoes of this logic beyond the walls of Palestine. In the U.S., detention camps are expanding sharply, with rising deaths, documented medical neglect, and the prolonged detention of children. While these systems are not identical, they reveal how quickly the normalization of detention, lawlessness, and dehumanization takes root across different contexts. History repeatedly shows where this leads. We are staring at our own future, as unaccountable power consolidates itself by crushing dissent, dismantling democracy, and trashing guardrails that uphold humane values.

However, history also reminds us that such trajectories are not inevitable. Across the world, people continue to rise, to organize, and to resist. This is where hope lives, not in denial, but in the ongoing refusal to accept a world built on domination and fear. This is why international law matters. Institutions such as the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice exist to hold the line, to insist that no state and no leader stands above the law.

We have seen, again and again, that sustained public resistance can shift even deeply entrenched systems of power. What’s important here is to remember that people have the power to change the system. Therefore, we must use that power. This is also when we remember, once again, Mr. Mandela, who said, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

The Buddha taught that “all beings fear violence, tremble before death, and love life.” Systems that forget this not only harm those within them, but they also erode the humanity of everyone they touch. To include those who are imprisoned, and even those caught in cycles of hatred and harm, within our field of mindful awareness is not to excuse what is happening, but to refuse the further dehumanization that makes it possible.

Doing all we can to dismantle systems that birth such depravity is the keystone to the broader struggle for justice; for Palestinian prisoners, for Palestine, and for all those working toward a world where dignity and human rights are not conditional, but universally upheld and protected. May it be so!

Further Info & Resources:

Lubna’s Articles in Middle East Eye
Addameer Prisoner Support & Human Rights Assoc.
Defense of Children International - Palestine
Welcome to Hell: The Israeli Prison System & Network of Torture Camps, B’Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories).

Actions to Take:

Bear Witness Publicly
–Share testimonies and reporting (e.g., Lubna Masarwa’s work)
–Post names, stories, or key facts about Palestinian prisoners
–Use your platforms to break the silence and amplify truth

Contact Representatives
Call or email elected officials and demand:
–an end to administrative detention
–accountability for torture and deaths in custody
–protection of children under international law
Keep it simple, even one message

Join or Organize a Vigil / Gathering
–Attend local events marking the day
–Hold a small circle, vigil, or meditation
–Read names or testimonies aloud

Support Trusted Organizations
Support groups working on prisoner rights and legal advocacy, like:
–Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
–Defense for Children International – Palestine
Even small contributions sustain long-term work

Write & Witness Creatively
–Write a short reflection, poem, or prayer
–Dedicate your practice to those imprisoned
–Share in community spaces

Stay Informed & Resist Numbness
–Read beyond headlines
–Follow journalists on the ground
–Stay in relationship with the truth, without shutting down

Link Struggles Thoughtfully
–Support movements addressing detention, incarceration, and human rights globally
–Build awareness of how these systems connect, without collapsing differences
This strengthens solidarity & connects Palestinian liberation to our greater struggle

There is no single way to respond, but to do nothing is also a response. On Palestine Prisoner Remembrance Day, and beyond, even small acts of witnessing, speaking, gathering, and supporting become part of our larger field of care and resistance. With deep gratitude.

I want to write about revolution, not the one that’s brewing, which seems inevitable, but the revolution we’re already moving within. This shift of perception takes us from trying to ignite revolution to recognizing that we are already standing within a long struggle that has been unfolding across generations. The reason this revolution remains incomplete is that it has been repeatedly hijacked, interrupted, and betrayed.

The No Kings movement and the myriad global demonstrations, particularly since Gaza, are ripples in this revolutionary ocean. Revolution moves like a restless sea, at times producing tsunamis, but more often rising in smaller waves and momentary surges that help shore up our collective humanity. These ripples matter. They signal resistance, reveal our togetherness, and mark a continuum. But we know they’re not enough. The system absorbs them as pressure valves, while the plunder continues.

The question is, what do we do now? Maybe it’s time to pause. To examine why a truly transformative revolution hasn’t yet toppled this imperialist capitalist system, now an extinction cult, and then create the optimum conditions to make sure it does.

I’m not an expert here; I’m sharing what’s on my mind. My hope. We, the people, are now the last line of defense. This moment is ripe for a citizens’ uprising against a system that has driven us into this vortex of destruction. To make it unworkable. This is what revolution is: to overturn old, corrupt structures that no longer serve life or justice. While also mindful that revolutions usually descend into the kind of chaos capitalism exploits to perpetuate itself. Instead, r-evolution, underwritten by shifts of evolutionary consciousness, generates fertile soil for deep, sustainable transformation.

What does that look like? Its our work to find out. To translate the potential of this moment into real-time change. To be more prepared. To be informed, to have deeper conversations, to explore strategies, to create citizens’ assemblies, and to collaborate around movement-building. What are the other options? Distraction, amnesia, delusion, psychosis; everyone grab a case of beans and head for the hills or a bunker?

While revolutions are a response to ongoing oppression, history shows that they don’t always bring the changes needed. We have seen this in movements like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Both revealed deep fractures in the system and presented a powerful challenge to the status quo. But neither was able to sustain structural follow-through due to a lack of the coordinated strategy, leadership, and enduring infrastructure needed to translate an uprising into systemic transformation.

Other uprisings arise from deep spiritual roots and an ethical ground, uplifting and embodying the values we need to restore. Movements like Standing Rock and Extinction Rebellion. However, they proved too easily fractured, lacking the sustained collaborative power across cultural, class, racial, and social differences and enmities to significantly challenge, let alone overturn, the oil industry's tenacious grip. Their impact, however, as significant disruptors, increased awareness, kept the flame alive, and provided important stepping stones for what comes next.

Or, take the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was driven less by revolution and more by its lack of viability and legitimacy. Gorbachev himself pointed to Chernobyl as the turning point. Throughout its unexpected and chaotic transition, nowhere was the collapse of the Eastern bloc underwritten by a coherent ideological foundation capable of guiding and enabling liberatory, informed structural change. Rather than a revolution, Russia ended up just changing the guard. Sadly, the underlying pattern of domination remained the same, passing from state control to oligarchic capitalists.

There’s another piece of the puzzle here: confronting something that brings us closer to home, which is our own human fallibility. For millennia, we’ve been conditioned to accept hierarchies of power without embedding effective cultures of discernment and courage to challenge them when they become corrupted and dangerous. Time and again, capitalistic-driven modernity elevates forms of leadership marked by extreme self-interest, lack of empathy, and a willingness to harm at scale. Instead of resisting, we are too often overly compliant. We also continually underestimate how destructive these pathologies become when amplified by power, which is a mistake.

We can see similar dynamics emerging in the technological sphere. Not long ago, a prominent meditation teacher publicly endorsed Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, naively stating that AI could be guided by an (assumed) ethical awareness. This clearly is not the case. As AI systems are being aligned with state and military interests, we are confronted with a familiar pattern: the rapid convergence of power, profit, and influence, lacking transparency and accountability. This leaves the public who are most impacted, with no say, no means of providing feedback, and no power.

What is truly depressing is how easily so many who become powerful betray the population because they can’t withstand the seduction of money and status. Startups that begin with good intentions usually end up in the same dynamics of deceit and domination. What we’re witnessing is not a new failure but the continuation of an old, time-tested pattern that mirrors the extractive and abusive culture of colonization.

With this long journey of revolutionary struggle in mind, the current oligarchic seizure of power reflects the same visible pattern over hundreds of years of Eurocentric colonization. Just take a look at the Congo (read more here) under the brutal rule of Leopold II of Belgium, where about ten million died under his regime of grand theft, deception, and extreme terror. This is not only history; it’s a mirror. The same logic of domination, the same capacity for self-deception, the same willingness to sacrifice life in the pursuit of power that we’re experiencing right now.

From the Congo to the plunder of India, to the carving up of the Middle East, the imprint of empire is everywhere. All around us, we are living with its consequences. The destabilization of resource-rich regions, decimated countries, broken societies, devastated populations, and trashed landscapes. Empire leaves behind fractured states, indebted economies, and the impacts of extraction that continue long after its structures have ended. These are the hallmarks of colonization at work, underwritten by its recurring pattern of arrogance, atrocities, deception, and wanton destruction.

To decode the empire, we have to see its logic. It concentrates power in increasingly narrow circles, rewarding leadership styles shaped by psychopathy that allow no real accountability. Under these conditions, wise and compassionate leadership has always been rare. In contrast, rather than seeking power, true leadership aims to serve by uplifting others. In these times, collaborative leadership models that focus on building co-creative networks with transparency and feedback loops will be far better equipped to dismantle the logic of colonialism and replace it with more equitable, satisfying, joyful, and insightful ways of living.

Through nurturing cultures of civil resistance and co-creative, collaborative networks, we stand a better chance of defying the logic of empire and its emotionally stunted hierarchies of worth. We can see how empire centralizes itself and dominates all in the periphery. It is obsessed with profit and gain, its relationships are transactional, and its aim is to never lose control. It embeds itself in our collective psyche as a hungry ghost. Competitive, individualistic, amoral, addicted to driving society towards an endless game of capturing ever-receding acquisitions. All of this we can see, decode, and undo.

With the current global order, shaped by U.S. dominance, in a state of strain, overreach, and entrenched corruption, it is fast undoing itself. Empire has become incoherent, rotten, debased, violent, and is fast buckling under the weight of its own inconsistencies. In brief, we are now living through the collapse of U.S. hegemony. Whatever we thought the U.S. was, it is no longer. What it is revealing itself to be, it has, beneath its myths and ideologies, always been. Even so, the speed and seeming finality of this shocking, dizzying end are hard to grasp conceptually and somatically.

So, where does this leave us? For the most part, in a dangerous, vastly more uncertain and unpredictable world. However, we are not without hope. There is potential and opportunity here if we can sense-make the collective dismemberment we are transitioning through.

So, the question now is not whether this power will be challenged. It already is. The real question is whether the consciousness that challenges is free enough to overcome what oppresses us rather than replicating oppression in another form. In other words, the quality of the consciousness we bring to this moment will shape what comes next.

The crisis we face, environmental collapse, and the unraveling of a livable world, point to something deeper: a crisis at the heart of consciousness itself. We allowed power to enforce structures shaped by separation, manufactured division, and self-interest. The catastrophic consequences are now unmistakable. While the Dharma doesn’t offer all the solutions, it elegantly maps a way out of these destructive patterns by illuminating the nature of separative consciousness, which holds this system in place. It also maps constructive ways beyond the endless churning of ignorance.

As the Dharma continues to be translated into the cultural context of modernity, my own interest lies in co-collaborating around the emergence of a dharmic culture, ethic, and politic, rooted in integrity, capable of proactively and effectively engaging systemic change. This means extending the decoding of samsara, as traditionally applied internally and individually, for example, through teaching frames like “dependent origination,” Pațicca Samuppāda, to decode the logic of empire for the sake of undoing its building blocks of patriarchy, imperialism, racism, and capitalism.

So, here we are, still, in so many ways, caught in a dream within a dream, cycling through old patterns, unable to break from “business as usual.” Even so, within the kernel of this terrifying collapse of our old world, a portal, a threshold, quietly invites. We must choose. Will we continue down this path of destruction, or embrace this sacred initiation to transform at the deepest level of how we live and know ourselves?

We are now in the underworld. Here we listen to a different beat. We feel a different pulse. We are in a different territory, one that requires intuitive sensing, a seeing in the dark, so that we can shape-shift as we navigate the dangers of a dying empire.

We might call this a rhizomic way of moving. Rhizomes are the underground root systems upon which life depends. They braid webs of unexpected connection, weaving through obstacles while continually orienting toward relationship. They navigate from source-based rather than being defined by outcomes. They embrace and nourish effortlessly along the way, intuitively sensing ways to enhance the natural flow and synergy of life. Rhizomic intelligence mirrors the collaborative, enduring life force of nature, expressing itself through networks of care.

Unlike an empire, which requires oppression and domination, rhizomes move in ways that not only endure but also renew, replenish, and thrive by branching out through mutually empowering networks of co-aliveness. In essence, rhizomes mirror the inner intuitive intelligence of all that aligns itself within the magical and mysterious self-organizing intelligence of life itself.

Nature’s movement reveals a blueprint for a radically different center of knowing, where all is intimately known to the awareness that perceives. This dissolving of “subject” and “object” shifts our entire ontology and lies at the heart of what evolutionary consciousness truly means. Translating this insight, practice, and manifestation is our essential task.

What is being asked of us now is far more demanding than resistance alone. We have to find and cultivate a radically different ground of being. A capacity to see clearly without collapsing into despair; to act with determination without being driven by hatred or into burnout; and to refuse domination without recreating it in new forms.

Patriarchal, colonial-capitalist modernity has little capacity to imagine another way of being and knowing. It continues to organize life around extraction, hierarchy, and control, offering, at best, a narrowing future, at worst, no future. Our hope, therefore, is to move beyond the citadel of empire so we can, finally, leave its shores far behind.

Perhaps a deeper limitation and fear is not only in relation to the system, but also in our reluctance to step beyond it. We struggle to imagine, embody and create radical alternatives. In great part, because we aim too small, placing hope in partial reforms of familiar structures, even when they repeatedly fail to deliver meaningful change.

At this point, with the relentless momentum of a dying empire, much lies beyond our control. Buffeted by these mighty winds of change, our unraveling is accelerating. This impact serves as a force that is activating our collective dismemberment. Our sense of continuity, stability, time, orientation, and coherence is dissolving fast. In the way of shamanic initiation, this functions as a necessary breaking apart before a more profound transformation, one that recodes our deepest patterning, is possible.

Basically, our collective unconsciousness both creates and serves as an organizing principle that continually pulls our collective psyche into a meta-crisis vortex we can’t fix. Not, anyhow, by ordinary means. Unwittingly, we led ourselves to this momentous initiatory portal. We may want to hide under our duvet; I’m with you there, however, here we are. And here, we breathe and mindfully soften into the sensations of now.

We have entered the journey of the shaman, the one who walks toward crisis knowing it means undergoing death. What is required is not physical death (though there’s no guarantee at this point), but the relinquishing of illusion, of fixed identity, and of ego-centered orientation. It’s as profound a leap as the first forms of life leaping onto dry land from the security of the known waters they once inhabited.

Yet, the work of transformation doesn’t always require big leaps. Sometimes it begins with a small group focused on a clear purpose, their hearts steady in their resolve. Like the twelve men who gathered in London in 1787 to begin what would become the abolitionist movement in Britain. These nine Quakers and three Anglicans gave their lives to the cause, effecting many small and large successes that helped end the abomination of slavery in 1807 in Britain, and then nearly 30 years later throughout the British Empire. (Read more here).

At that time, no one could imagine an economy that wasn’t rooted in the mass enslavement of Africans. In the same way, we cannot imagine a world without capitalism. But we must imagine a different world. Our survival demands it. It is our task to envision a radically different story that honors humanity's higher aspiration. The one we are already writing, living, and dreaming into being. This is our hope.

Revolutionary rupture alone is not enough. My foremost Buddhist inspiration, Ajahn Chah, talked of dharma practice as preparation for when big things come along. Well, this is big. We have to prepare, be strategic, build out networking nodes, and envision, embody, and articulate our new world into being. It’s time to shore up resistance, to move out of our siloes, to strengthen networks of truth and collaboration, to withstand the flooding of disinformation. And to speak out, always. Find your true voice, and sound it.

Small, intentional groups, focused on strategic organizing, ethical clarity, and collective action, help us reclaim our power. In these ways, we will transmute dread and overwhelm into courage and steadfastness. We can do this.

The wheel of change has been ever turning, and now we find ourselves here, at this hallowed, frightening moment. We are not here to save this system, but to help it die. We are not here to be a hero, but to lay the ground, together, for something more life-giving and gracious to emerge. Why not? If we’re going to dream, let’s dream big.

Like a world free from patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism’s greed, billionaire oligarchs, psychopathic leaders, and all hierarchies of oppression.

Not for us alone, we’re just here to plant the seeds, to sing some hopeful tunes along the way, but for those, human and more-than-human, still to come.

This article stems from a sincere question posed to me by a reader who learned of my involvement with Sacred Justice Coalition and its stated commitment to nonviolence. The question is grounded in a critique of the tendency, particularly within privileged, white communities, to oppose all forms of violence while failing to fully reckon with the structural violence of occupation, colonialism, and genocide.

Their argument emphasized that international law recognizes colonized peoples’ right to resist; that Palestinians have repeatedly pursued nonviolent strategies and have been met with devastating force; and that moral condemnations of armed resistance can become trauma-blind when the oppressed are asked to negotiate with their abusers. They also challenged spiritual absolutisms around nonviolence, calling instead for ethical clarity that attends to context, power, and lived reality rather than fixed moral rules.

From this place, they pose a legitimate and difficult question: whether a commitment to nonviolence necessarily entails opposition to armed resistance or violent self-defense by colonized peoples. My response is neither a moral rejection of such resistance nor an endorsement of it, but an attempt to clarify the ground from which I speak, as a Buddhist practitioner and teacher, and the forms of resistance I believe are optimum for reducing harm and weakening empire at this moment.

What follows is my response, morphed into a Substack post, because this focus feels both collective and especially timely. I offer these reflections not as an engagement in purity politics, moral absolutism, or a romanticization of armed resistance, but to spark inquiry rather than lay out a prescriptive, authoritative solution.

We are now facing the normalization of extreme violence as state strategy. The genocide and destruction of Gaza have not only been normalized but have effectively hollowed out international law and the authority of the courts at The Hague, where crimes against humanity can be held accountable.

While we struggle to find an effective response to this moment, does it mean we should consider responding to violence with violence? This question has different levels: personal, collective, and, for me, my responsibility as a Dharma teacher. From these perspectives, I also want to consider a path of resistance that targets the empire at the weakest link in its armor. But more about that later.

I should also mention that I’m super cautious about prescribing paths of resistance for people whose lives and deaths I’m not bearing. What’s tricky when advocating an approach or ideology about what people should do, particularly in Palestine, is that it’s not a simple picture. I’ve just returned from Palestine, where I spent time with a dear friend who is a spiritual guide for her people, offering profound and enduring support, while witnessing and bringing to light, within the international community, their immense suffering, struggles, and stories.

For those of us on the outside, we can’t assume everyone in Gaza supports armed struggle. Some have lost their entire families and blame Hamas, which is understandable. Of course, there wouldn’t be Hamas if Palestine hadn’t been subjected, by Israel, to systemic brutality and unrelenting atrocities for decades. However, most of us here, commenting on what Palestinians should do, aren’t the ones losing everything.

It’s also important to note that the impacts of an apartheid system are profoundly fracturing. As a result, it’s not the case, as we sometimes assume, that those historically oppressed automatically align into a single hegemonic alliance, agreement, or approach. So, I just want to name these considerations because we can’t really speak for Palestinians, or on their behalf, when it comes to advising how they should respond.

Even so, it’s true that after trying non-violent approaches, such as the 2018 March of Return, which was met with devastating violence, Hamas’s actions on 10/7 dramatically altered the global dynamic. However, as mass global protests have failed to stop the genocide, which still continues, it’s become clear that liberating Palestine requires dismantling the architecture and corruption of our capitalist empire. Palestinians have done all they can and are still subjected to daily catastrophic atrocities and mass civilian displacement. It’s now up to us to do what we can.

Undoing the violence of empire has become personal. We are now witnessing the Imperial Boomerang at work as violence done “over there” is now happening here. ICE is using the brutal tactics of the IDF, while expanding detention infrastructure across the United States, creating modern internment camps. Defined by large-scale civilian confinement without due process, these sites meet the historical criteria of concentration camps, operating outside the law, while increasingly associated with serious abuses, torture, and deaths in custody.

This may be new to some, but it’s not new to the architecture of imperialist America. In truth, the U.S. never really left the plantation with its raw violence, which has always roamed like a hungry beast, seeking to oppress, kill, and erase those the empire refused to admit. I name this not to inflame fear but to clarify what time we are actually in.

As we wake up to a fuller understanding of what we’re up against, is armed resistance something we should consider? Is it even viable? The fact that some may not have considered this is likely due to the rapidly evaporating illusion that the state would never directly wage war against its citizens. That illusion has now been shattered. If we have lived through the long haul of erasure and being targeted, we probably have thought about this a lot, so it’s a fair question to ask.

From a pragmatic point of view, whether I’m for or against armed struggle, I don’t see it winning out. Besides unleashing horrific violence, the empire has amassed immense power through its surveillance systems and sophisticated AI-guided weaponry. In other words, it has oppression through violence sewn up. Humanity is basically “outgunned.”

Just to note, I don’t see their violence as a sign of strength but as a sign of weakness. Violence is all they have left. They have lost any moral ground and have no vision of a hopeful future. In short, they have betrayed humanity’s higher dream. This is a profound injury to humanity’s soul; not only have they betrayed all humane values, breaking taboos that serve as guardrails, but they have done so derisively and sadistically, without even a fleeting glance at the devastation they have wrought in their wake.

I, too, feel the rage at this great travesty and understand why people may want to take up arms, but raw rage is not a constructive force to unleash. It needs to be distilled into clarity and focused on strategic, optimal outcomes.

Personally, I wouldn’t condemn the use of violence by the oppressed, but I wouldn’t actively encourage or promote it either. From a Buddhist perspective, if directly asked, I’d advise, as the Buddha did, taking paths that reduce pain and suffering without harming sentient beings. The Buddha wasn’t an absolutist; he was pragmatic. He advised kings and generals, and while he never said there shouldn’t be armies, he neither joined an army nor issued battle directives.

I have thought quite a lot about this question myself. I lived and worked for nearly three decades in what was a low-grade war zone deep in rural KwaZulu-Natal, in post-Apartheid South Africa. While the end of Apartheid brought euphoria, it also unleashed waves of violence. Life there never felt safe. Colonialism and apartheid always leave behind legacies of immense human wreckage due to having stripped away resources, agency, access, respect, and belonging–there’s no end to this list. Violence is an inevitable result, as is countless lost lives of those not responsible.

Many people, including those we knew and those who lived nearby, were murdered. Our dear Zulu “son,” Nkululekho, was murdered at 24 years old. He was one of the countless young people in the Zulu community who lost their lives to violence. Not just Zulu, people of all races were affected by the brutal impacts of Apartheid.

One of our white friends, who lived across the valley and delivered our firewood, was forced, with her eyes held open, to watch her husband being beaten to death. One of the far too many horror stories of South Africa. There is a fear that haunts, suffusing the undercurrent of daily life, driving many to find refuge in guns. Particularly, our local white community that continued to react to this baseline fear they both felt, helped generate, and had been indoctrinated into.

In this atmosphere, I also experienced moments of eye-watering fear, particularly in those early years when a sense of danger flooded the relational field. However, after a threatening incident brought my fear to the surface, I realized I needed to take stock. Realistically appraising the situation, I had to make conscious the possibility that I could be killed or harmed. I realized I had to confront this fear by accepting that fact. This, in turn, helped me clarify my relationship to this primal terror that ever turns the wheel of violence. What became clear, for me, was that this fear is a point of practice, not a reason to take up arms.

This affirmed my trust in the Dharma. I wasn’t about to get a gun. Neither did I want to be in relationships with the communities I was among out of fear and mistrust. I don’t advocate this decision as a higher stance; it was my personal choice, based on my commitment to the deeper vows I am aligned with. I don’t expect everyone to make that decision, or expect people living in genocide and grinding oppression not to fight back if they can.

For myself, the time I spent in South Africa strengthened my trust in the Dharma. I don’t trust moving toward violent action, which, in this context, I mean, against human life. It’s just not been my path. It may well be others. For some, that is their path, done to protect their loved ones and community from the daily brutalization of oppression. However, taking human life is not a small thing. If you have a gun, the logic is that you may be in a situation where you have to shoot someone. Can you do that? I realized, not as an abstract ideology but from a place of feeling the threat, real and imagined, that I probably would not be able to, or want to, shoot someone, even if it meant losing my life. This is just my personal sense at a micro level.

If I were confronted by someone threatening to kill my loved ones or even those around me who were also being threatened, would I shoot that person if I had a gun and could stop them? I don’t know. It’s likely I would, hopefully without killing them. This, too, is a micro-level issue; that is, it is personal and local. However, it is a whole different level of impact from promoting armed resistance, particularly in places where we are not directly affected by the consequences.

From the perspective of teaching Dharma, I have a responsibility at the macro level to be very careful about how I use my influence. This means discerning ethical ways to be effective amid this broader moral collapse. Through theological conditioning, we tend to think of morality in terms of clear right and wrong, bound up with guilt, judgment, and punishment. From a dharmic perspective, however, responsibility lies within us through our own agency. We are responsible for our own intentions, decisions, and actions, and the impacts and consequences they set in motion (karma and vipāka). As Dharma practitioners, we aim to reduce harm by advocating the least harmful means of alleviating suffering.

If we are unclear about this, the precepts offer ethical guidelines that are just that: guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules. Precepts must be informed by our inner conscience and discernment. In Buddhist understanding, conscience is guided by what are called the “guardians of the world” – both our inner and outer worlds. These guardians operate within our own citta, or heart-mind, as protectors, ensuring psychological coherence and the removal of grave karmic consequences, while also serving as markers that help create a more cohesive, stable, less violent world.

In Pali, the language of the Buddha, these guardians are called hiri and ottappa, and are the core mechanisms of conscience. You’ll often see them depicted as fierce lion or dragon-like statues at the gateway of Buddhist temples. In essence, hiri is the capacity to feel remorse for harm caused by our actions, recognizing the action as bad, not the self as bad – a big difference. The purpose of inwardly recognizing harm we’ve caused is not to create a guilty, sinful self but to reset our course and make amends. Ottappa is the wholesome fear or moral dread that arises when we are about to undertake an action that would cause deep and lasting harm. That kind of fear acts as a guardian, stopping us from taking actions that lead to painful results, which can ricochet for generations.

The more “power” we hold, the greater our responsibility and the higher the stakes when it comes to karmic consequence. To be guardians ourselves, we need to continually hone our ethical integrity. This is why, when ritually undertaking the precepts, the central word embedded in each precept is sikkhapadam, translated as “training.” Sikkha also implies learning and cultivation, while pada means “step.” The precepts are therefore sikkhāpada, the steps of ethical training we voluntarily undertake as we continually learn how to reduce harm.

We are walking a path where we are ever starting again, because the nature of being human is fallibility. We will always make mistakes, which doesn’t mean we’re inherently bad or irredeemable; it means we have more to learn and unlearn. There are many gray areas in the precepts, but guided by hiri/ottappa, we should be able to discern the wisest ways to reduce harm.

In essence, the five precepts warn us that we are entering higher-voltage terrain, where harm carries heavier karmic consequences. We tend to view the precepts as moral absolutes, but as guidelines, the decision is ours. If we decide to take an action or promote one that involves taking life at any level, there will be personal and collective consequences. In truth, life in modernity is deeply entangled with the loss or degradation of other sentient lives. However, taking a human life is karmically very weighty.

The Buddha drew a clear line in his Vinaya code of observances around serious offenses that mandated disrobing. If you are working with the Vinaya as a monastic, as I did for 12 years, there’s no room for doubt. It is a disrobing offense to deliberately kill a human being or to incite another to kill someone.

That doesn’t mean that if you’ve killed someone, you can’t practice dharma, be part of the sangha, or become a monastic. What it does mean is that there will be karmic consequences, as with Angulimala, a serial killer, that are heavy. The Buddhas still ordained him, and he gained great spiritual insights; however, he was haunted by the “ghosts” of those whose lives he took, by people throwing things at him, and by their hatred and fear of him. The Buddha told him he had to endure the consequences. Even with spiritual insight, there are still some impacts that aren’t easily wiped out, which echo through time and space.

So, in brief, from the position of a Buddhist teacher, I would not directly advocate violent action. I would understand it from a deeply oppressed position and wouldn’t condemn it, but neither would I directly advocate, encourage, or promote it, personally or at an organizational level.

Right now, I don’t see any advantage to engaging in armed resistance, for the reasons I named earlier. Also, empire has now removed all restraints on its use of systemic brutality and organized cruelty. Look what they did to Gaza. No consequences, no accountability, only doubling down while continuing to export violence. In the U.S., armed resistance would likely trigger a civil war that would be savage, ruinous, and hard to emerge from.

However, we are not helpless. To return to the weak point in the empire’s armor. Its weak point is its economy, which depends on us keeping the wheel turning. We can refuse the economic prison we have been forced into, which is now gate-kept by the billionaire oligarch class. This is a predatory “ruling” class that has normalized genocide in Gaza, has always normalized the most violent and sadistic crimes possible, as we’ve seen in the Epstein files, and will absolutely continue to do so unless we, as global citizens, stop them.

Boycotting, divesting, and sanctioning are complex for most people in everyday life because we’re so deeply entangled in the global gig economy. However, it’s not impossible; in fact, it’s doable. If done collectively, alongside targeted labor strikes, it will cripple the system. One thing we learned through Extinction Rebellion is that we left the working classes behind, along with the BIPOC community, who tended to see XR as a white middle-class uprising, which, in the end, was easily dissipated.

The point is, we learn, adapt, and carry on. In particular, we humbly, respectfully, and gratefully learn from those who have been immersed in decades, and even centuries of struggle. Removing ourselves from capitalism is not an individual heroic effort; it has to be underwritten by building strong living community networks.

Going into this dystopian future, we will need to learn to survive and thrive together, replacing the disassociated, highly individualized, siloed world we’ve been pushed into with the vibrancy, care, connection, and belonging only possible in community. There will be friction and problems there, too, but it will mean we reclaim our humanity, our collective soul, and from there, I believe, not only will we be in a better position to build a different world, but perhaps we will stand the best chance of dismantling the violent logic of empire itself.

There is a price we need to pay. Rather than being more armed, we need to be more vulnerable, not to forces like ICE; there, we have to be street-smart, like the people of Minneapolis. Vulnerable to the point that we really need each other to get by, also like Minneapolis. The price is living more simply, forgoing convenience, prioritizing community over expediency, profit, and power, and, for those who can, paying more for local and sustainable goods.

This is what I felt as I left Palestine, where, despite the ongoing horror of oppression, there was something immensely profound in witnessing the depth of soul, generosity, and resilience on that side of the wall, in contrast to the disassociated fragility of imperialist modernity on the other side.

I’m going to leave this reflection here and pick it up in my next article, which got waylaid by this one. I want to dive deeper into a few pertinent lessons from being in Palestine, in relation to the lessons we need for what’s happening here in the U.S., the UK, and further afield. I also want to unpack what it might mean to walk away from the billionaire’s economic trap toward collective self-sufficiency and empowerment.

At this global inflection point, we find ourselves in terrifying times, yet still, I have hope. The kind of hope born of an alliance with the deep intelligence of Pachamama, the great spirit of nature. And the faith of our entwined belonging within the cosmos, the great mystery in which we swim and in which our evolutionary journey is unfolding, right on time and beyond all time.

🍀

From more about the Guardians of the World, here is a Dharma talk I offered in 2008 at Dharmagiri Sacred Mountain Retreat in S. Africa, as part of our Sacred Mountain Sangha’s Ekayana: Being Dharma 2026 year-long online course. Registration is still open until Feb 14.

As I’m writing this, the U.S. is invading Venezuela, abducting its President, and forcibly deporting him to the U.S. in blindfolds and chains. Trump, by blasting past all accepted checks and balances, has just thrown down a massive wild-card gauntlet to the world. Anyone, at any time, in any country, with any leader, can be arbitrarily removed. In effect, Trump and his malignant cabal have demolished the last remnants of international law. They just declared what we’ve always known, that the U.S. is fundamentally a rogue state.

This act of raw authoritarianism belongs to a mafia boss who has turned the state itself into a crime syndicate. It’s a smash-and-grab that will inevitably spin the world into further volatility. The pretense of the usual build-up of rationality, the creation of a carefully crafted boogeyman, and the usual procedures of coalition-building consent, at least to a threadbare degree, among U.S. citizens, Congress, and allies, has been contemptuously trashed. At least, we now see empire’s bone marrow.

Last night’s actions propelled the world into uncharted territory. Every desired resource around the globe is now an open target, any vengeful whim can be violently exacted, and the exercise of brute force for the sake of humiliation and domination can be unleashed, regardless of the fallout. This isn’t hyperbole; it’s tracking this calamitous threshold and its likely grave consequences.

When the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court stripped away all legislated accountability for a serially deceitful, cheating, malignant narcissist, they literally enthroned a madman. Now, surrounded by the vilest people possible who have access to an arsenal of the deadliest weapons on earth, the world is suddenly tipped into unprecedented danger. The last illusions of some kind of recoverable “business as usual” reality lay shattered in the rubble of Gaza, the destruction of environmental protections and citizens’ rights, and now, the explosions and smoke rising from Caracas.

Welcome to 2026!

On New Year’s Eve, a few of us sangha members reflected together on this transition to 2026. Central, informing the flow of our lives and the profound shifts in our orientation around Dharma, has been the seismic impact of the empire’s genocide. Without a blush, it unveiled its agenda to dominate all and take what it wants. This was clearly underlined in bold last night! In the process, the machinations of this roving, shape-shifting beast have inverted the global moral landscape, gutted democracy, destroyed moral accountability, and debased the meaning of humane values.

As 2025 shudders to a halt, we are beginning to see the immense shape of this turgid, vastly empowered, engorged monster lurching toward us. We are entering a world shaped by an amoral, fascistic techno-feudalism, married by necessity to a theocratic nationalism that had no problem normalizing genocide as a business plan. The impact of this grotesque new “world order” is now deeply personal and collectively terrifying.

How come? First and foremost, there is no plan for a future in which life's biodiversity survives. “The biodiversity of life” often conjures up some far-off thing, way over there, that a few quirky people study. Actually, biodiversity is the foundation and continuum that enables human life. I could list a litany of other reasons why this moment is terrifying that you already know, but this alone should get our attention!

If anything, 2025 was a descent into the depths of the shadow of empire’s logic, built, as bell hooks said, from the foundations of ‘imperialist, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’ Our curriculum is to continue deconstructing these dinosaurs, but for now, if 2025 crashed the myths of our “civilization,” then 2026 asks, What are we going to do about it? And what do we need to step up?

To help illuminate how we can meet this moment, I want to return to the Buddha’s example. Wherever we are along the path of resistance, the politics of social justice, and the focus on collective liberation, firstly, we need each other. Secondly, we need to fight back. For those in Dharma spaces whose toes curl at the words “fight back,” the Buddha, while he absolutely eschewed violence, did “fight back” in myriad ways. He worked for greater equity and justice; he took sides; and he exemplified, over and again, the fierce compassion of a warrior.

He literally stood three times in front of a genocidal army to try to stop them. He put himself between warring tribes to talk them down from the brink of catastrophe. He relentlessly and fiercely debated and verbally defeated those with erroneous, dangerous, ignorant, and violent views. He radically and effectively brought about systemic change, particularly in the religious hierarchy of his day, by ordaining women and those considered outcasts or of lower birth.

The Buddha publicly denounced a highly influential former disciple, who had split the sangha with the intention of taking it over. In response, the Buddha didn’t just sit in quiet equanimity; instead, he issued a stinging proclamation “far and wide” stating that this monk could not be trusted. He also worked to stop animal sacrifice and went out of his way to transform a fearsome serial killer by ordaining him, while also reconnecting him to his innate purity and awakened nature.

I’m not sure why long-term Dharma practitioners sometimes argue that equanimity means witnessing without engagement. There is a partial truth to that stance, but it’s clear that the Buddha frequently sought to divert views and actions that actively caused harm. The same goes for the long-quoted stance that Buddhism doesn’t engage politics, when there are many instances of the Buddha directly engaging political and military power.

In fact, the Buddha didn’t withdraw from the political realities of his time. Instead, he spoke directly to kings preparing for war, counseled rulers on justice and restraint, and named the social conditions that lead to collective flourishing or collapse. His Dharma neither ignored the politics of power nor sanctified power; instead, it interrogated power. We should do the same, particularly now, when absolutely everything is on the line.

The Buddha’s actions were interventions that disrupted the status quo. At the same time, they were rooted in his “open-handed” gift of the Dharma, which he offered “for the welfare of all beings” regardless of who, where, and when. One of the much recited attributes of the Buddha is “vijja carana sampanno,” one whose “wisdom and conduct are in perfect harmony.” Meaning, both wings of the Dharma, wise discernment expressed as compassionate action, work together. It’s clear the Buddha wasn’t a passive witness whose only move was to sit out the injustices of his time. He walked his talk and, in doing so, was a radical change maker.

However, we’ve inherited a Buddhism that, somewhere along the line, pretty much erased this more radical inheritance. While, for the most part, we don’t have a substantial, long-standing social justice lineage, as understood in contemporary times, the Buddha’s actions set a precedent for direct action that protects humane values and challenges harmful systems, social oppression, and catastrophic wars.

I’ve been thinking about these vibrant dimensions of the Buddha’s legacy in relation to Christ, particularly as we’ve just transitioned through Christmas, which I observed with my elderly mum, who is Catholic. On Christmas Eve, we attended her church for the midnight mass. It was packed with a diverse congregation, led by an African priest from Cameroon who radiated warmth and inclusion. His homily focused on the joy he felt at the shift in the “war” between Hamas and Israel because it allowed people to access the Christmas tree in Bethlehem. (Ouf!). He then encouraged a focus on love and light to ward off the bad and our experience of suffering in various forms.

To be fair, most religions, including Buddhism, operate at this level of assuaging the anxiety of life, while acting as a sort of guarantor against all we’d rather not see or deal with. I believe there’s power and a vital principle in helping manage the pain of life by cultivating wholesome qualities. However, until we own our personal, collective, and ancestral shadow, it’s much harder for humanity to mature beyond ricocheting off its own projections. Not only to own, but to actively heal and integrate our trauma rather than have it endlessly cycle harm toward ourselves and others.

Without consciously engaging the shadow and the profound transformative journey it initiates, religion too easily keep congregations infantilized. Once denuded of our own inner authority and direct connection to spirit, we are susceptible to giving our power over, not only to “authorities” but, these days, to those who exert the most primitive forms of violent domination. It continues to surprise me how much humanity's consciousness, myself included, is controlled by fear, shame, and resentment, all of which are readily manipulated to keep us bound to false and destructive power loops.

What does this have to do with compassion? I haven’t really formulated a question, so I’m not really aiming for an answer. Instead, the territory I find myself exploring is how compassion is understood in the dharma scene, in contrast to how Christ symbolizes compassion. I’ve been dwelling on this theme because I’m wondering what we’d really give up, what we’ll sacrifice to save our collective humanity at this precise time when the world is falling fast into a ravine where only monsters dwell.

What happened last night in Venezuela sealed the U.S.’s attempt to normalize the end of the international order, in the same way Israel and its enablers have normalized genocide. In its place, they also want to seal U.S. domination through brute gangster savagery, so all moral guardrails, the art of negotiation and diplomacy, and the vital need to uphold humane values are destroyed. In brief, they want a world without the empathy, kindness, and compassion needed to enable healthy, creative, and collaborative communities.

To return to the sacred essence of Christmas. What strikes me about the story of Christ is that his compassion was also informed by the task of securing justice. The kind of justice that stands with, and stands for, the oppressed, the outcasts, and the unloved. In his Christmas service this year, Rev. Munther Isaac, from Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Ramallah, offered a crucial message for this moment:

Even the familiar lines of the Christmas song Silent Night obscure the true nature of the story: Jesus was not born into serenity but into upheaval. He was born under military occupation, to a family displaced by imperial decree, and in a region living under the shadow of violence. The holy family was forced to flee as refugees because the infants of Bethlehem, according to the Gospel narrative, were massacred by a fearful tyrant determined to preserve his reign. Sound familiar? Indeed, Christmas is a story of empire, injustice, and the vulnerability of ordinary people caught in its path.

A world dominated by brute power that is never held to account or rigorously interrogated is like a speeding car with no brakes. It only leads to continual shocks and catastrophe. How can we counter this? If we return to the psychological architecture of the dharma, we find what helps initiate a serious, in-depth, committed journey of awakening. Such a quest, which necessitates navigating territories of the shadow, starts with disenchantment and disillusionment.

We have to be sick enough of this madness to do something radically different. Like samsara, the grinding and sharp experience of virāga–disenchantment, and nibbidā–disillusionment, is a necessary initiator for forging a wholly different pathway. By now, everyone not suckered into colluding, or in some kind of fairy land of denial, has had enough of this crazed, full-speed merry-go-round driven by psychopathic maniacs who love creating havoc in the service of death and destruction. So again, what are we going to do?

Over the last few years, the dharma scene has quietly fractured around this silence on Gaza in hegemonic spaces, which tend to act as gatekeepers. In the gaps between what isn't named, there’s been much online and back-room, passive-aggressive dialogue of sorts, which often lands in a positionality around what true Buddhism is. I guess this dynamic has been going on for centuries.

Alongside contemplating compassion and the place of justice in Buddhism, I’ve also been thinking about “being Buddhist.” For the record, I’ve never seen the aim of Buddhism as becoming Buddhist. I’ve always held it as a means (a raft, as the Buddha called it) to free the mind/heart. While I deeply respect Buddhism, I don’t want to be a Buddhist; I want to be free enough to go beyond always trying to box myself into categories, especially into being a “good Buddhist,” which tends to be equated with quietness.

If we’ve been quiet, now is the time to be louder. In 2014, I wrote Time To Stand Up, a book focused on activism from a Dharmic and feminist perspective, with a title that speaks to this moment, of arrival at a civilizational crossroads.

At this mighty inflection point, this year is an opportunity to align our speech and actions with the deepest calls of our heart and conscience. We are not just individuals; we are interwoven within a mysterious, vast, yet intimate, cosmology of inter-being. We are, in truth, the immune system of Earth rising, and we are the seeds of the changes we want to see and be. We are the revolution that’s already here, and which is now moving from the wings to take its rightful place on the world stage.

Like Zohran Mamdani’s inauguration as New York Mayor, which also happened yesterday, enshrining a moment many thought impossible. The whole occasion demonstrated an esoteric truth. The deeper the shadow, the more piercing the light it produces. Even amidst the density of Trump’s darkness pulled across the globe, a different future flickered into view. Mamdani, with his radiant wife, alongside the diverse 400-person team he appointed, heralded a new era of hope with style, beauty, vision, compassion, and good cheer.

I’ll leave you Mamdani’s inspirational speech outside the City Hall. And, I’ll also leave you with his first courageous action as Mayor: to unban BDS in NYC’s municipal policies, and likewise, to defang the IHRA’s (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition and weaponization of antisemitism, by separating legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies from antisemitic hate speech.

Miracles, it seems, truly do never cease! Happy New Year, folks, we have work to do!

Vince Fakhoury Horn, a Palestinian American, recently posted an in-depth reflection titled “Is the Insight Tradition Complicit in Genocide?” For those of us who have committed years, decades of our lives to building, upholding, teaching, and propagating the Dharma, this is a vital listen. To bystanders, it speaks to abuses within hierarchical power systems, particularly spiritual ones, that suppress transparency and accountability.

Vince, who is co-founder of Buddhist Geeks, was authorized by Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman as an Insight Meditation teacher. Jack and Trudy, with Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Saltzberg, are part of the early boomer generation who co-founded the Insight lineage in the U.S. Many are first-generation Jewish diaspora post WW11 and the Holocaust. They shaped their transmission of the Dharma through silent Vipassanā retreats and the centers they founded, creating a secular, psychologically informed, anecdotal approach that relies on warm, often humorous storytelling as a primary teaching style.

I first listened to Vince’s reflections last week, traveling back from South America after completing a profound “dieta” retreat in the Shipibo lineage. Before our retreat group went its separate ways, we shared dinner at a local restaurant. Sitting opposite me, a young man from Mexico talked about how much he loved Jack’s teachings and listened to them daily. At the same time, I was in deep conversation with a Jewish friend, sitting next to me, sharing how she was now mostly estranged from her family because of her strong anti-zionist stance regarding the atrocities committed in Gaza.

My friend described a fraught visit to her mother due to the gulf Gaza opened up between them. One day, out of the blue, her mother blithely said, “Everything we see in Gaza is staged.” Pallywood, as is often cited by Israelis. She added, “The IDF is the most moral army in the world.” Another manufactured myth woven into the defense structure of Zionist architecture to deflect from the brutal realities of occupation.

After observing two years of sanctioned silence or clipped speech about Gaza in Insight spaces, listening to Vince felt catalytic, perhaps a game-changer. He pulls back the veil that has shrouded the unspoken views and taboos around Gaza, confirming what many of us have felt: this silence is not neutral. It is maintained through gatekeeping, defensiveness, and the avoidance of communal accountability.

This is not only in the Insight tradition. Similar silences echo across many leading Buddhist spaces. Nor is this only a “Western” issue. Gaza has joined a long list of moral absences within Asian, especially monastic, Buddhist lineages. Gaza has become yet another wound folded into a long-standing culture of transcendentalism that is normalizing inaction in the face of our accelerating planetary multi-crisis.

While Gaza is central to this article, it is not only about Gaza. It is also about the deeper question of which voices are allowed in our sanghas, who controls the moral narrative, and what happens when leaders put themselves beyond feedback, transparency, and accountability.

My Positioning: Dharma, Patriarchy, and Power.

A brief note on where I’m speaking from. I spent 12 years as a female monastic in the Thai Forest Tradition from age 23. I first met Ajahn Chah in the UK when I was 21. That encounter drew me to visit him in Thailand, where, at one of his smaller monasteries on the Mekong River, he suggested I become a Buddhist nun in his order. An invitation that felt both karmic quirk and destiny.

Through the specialized, rigorous training of renunciant monasticism, I was initiated into a profound Dharma transmission. At the same time, I was also, unwittingly, initiated into a political struggle. By political, I mean the dynamics of power: who holds it, who is harmed by it, and what we do in response.

I’m sharing this snippet of my journey through the patriarchal hierarchy of Theravada monasticism because we need to look at Buddhist patriarchy. While the Insight world invested enormous resources in training teachers and leaders in undoing white and cisgender supremacy, there has been no equivalent focus on the impacts of patriarchy.

This is curious as patriarchy is the meta system that birthed imperial colonial capitalism with its logic of ownership, dominance, and its hierarchies of visibility, and “worth.” While the Dharma is inclusive, Buddhism itself is shaped by a patriarchal ethos. Historically, it has been conservative, surviving through allegiances with State, Monarchy, and sometimes military power.

As a consequence, our Dharma spaces, which tend to shape practitioners' inner emotional and psychological architecture, are perpetually caught in an unspoken, seemingly insoluble tension. This is a tension between Buddhism’s need to survive by aligning with dominant power systems and its radical edge, which seeks to undo those very systems. As Buddhist lineages become entangled in structures of influence and institutional power, what happens when they inevitably align with wealth and authority, thereby abdicating from the Buddha’s legacy of radical systemic change?

Many of us, here, on the margins, feel radicalized by Gaza. We have walked through its portal and seen, with crystal clarity, the political leviathan we are truly up against. And for some of us, even further out along that edge, the calling is nothing less than helping to dismantle this monstrous colonial juggernaut of empire that forever feeds on the dispossession of peoples, lands, nations, and futures.

From the beginning, I have seen Gaza as a global initiatory path and moral test. Why? Because the sadistic atrocities unleashed on Palestinians have revealed the extreme violence of empire with a lucidity forged in a fire of outrage. From where I sit, and I’m not alone in this, I consider that much of Buddhist culture has, to date, failed this test.

This brings me to a core takeaway from Vince’s article. Which is, “Who owns Buddhism, or feels they do?” And, “What agendas are being promoted, and to what extent do leaders and gatekeepers who hold power and have power invested in them, have the right to protect their own biases by imposing, and even legislating silence, deflection, and denial within the sangha field around topics they find uncomfortable?

I ask this because there is a similar pattern in how the patriarchy played itself out in the monastic community I grew up in, and this strange silence around Gaza in Dharma spaces. The point I’m making is this: the long arc of Buddhist transmission, shaped by patriarchy, almost always concedes, subtly or overtly, to top-down power.

This is contrary to what the Buddha laid down in the Vinaya, as reflected in his own guideline that I want to highlight. This is Pavāraṇā, which must be undertaken according to the legal structures of sangha-kamma. Pavāraṇā means to invite feedback or “admonishment” from the sangha, regardless of status. Pavāraṇā is embedded in the Vinaya, which encodes the moral, relational, and renunciant observances of monastics. For Sutta hackers, it appears in the Mahāvagga (Vinaya Piṭaka), V.1–18.

There, the Buddha rebukes a group of monks who spent the entire three-month Vassa period (the rains retreat) together in total silence as a way of avoiding disharmony. Instead, the Buddha likens their conduct to a herd of cattle or sheep. He declared that a vow of silence is inappropriate for a disciple of the Buddha, and emphasized that enforced silence does not serve the purpose of the Dharma.

In response, the Buddha instituted the Pavāraṇā ceremony. Pavāraṇā replaces silence with mutual visibility, accountability, and collective ethical care. It is not meant to be a mere ritual or performative act, as it’s often reduced to. In fact, the opposite. Pavāraṇā is placed alongside the other major sangha-kamma acts that constitute legitimacy within the monastic sangha:

• Ordination (upasampadā)

• Settling disputes (adhikaraṇa-samatha)

• Invitation for admonition (pavāraṇā)

• Full & new moon vinaya recitation & confession (uposatha)

Pavāraṇā is not optional piety; it is a formal legal act that requires all in the sangha, elders and seniors included, to seek critique from their fellow practitioners.

Before moving on, I want to flag up that the monastic Vinaya was built within a binary social world, which oppressed women and enforced heteronormative bias. It’s very painful to stumble across this legacy if you are not aware of it. Historically, in the Pavāraṇā ceremony, nuns were forbidden to give feedback to monks, while those outside the gender binary find no “legal” placement, like women, as fully ordained monastics.

However, when translating these rules, it is essential to understand that we should not be trying to replicate the fixed codes of an Iron Age society at this time. It is, therefore, to the spirit of Pavāraṇā we must look, not only within the monastic sangha, but within the lay sangha. After all, most Vinaya rules were set down by the Buddha in direct response to complaints from lay people.

Before his death, the Buddha encouraged his attendant, Ananda, to relax certain rules in light of changing conditions. Ananda failed to do this, but as Ananda represents us fallible, weepy humans, we carry the responsibility to keep the Dharma alive and responsive. At this time, when all is at stake, we need to take down the walls that sustain prejudice and instead include everyone, regardless of shape, form, and identity.

It is the living practice of Pavāraṇā that is vital because it enables a transparent, consensus-oriented community culture, rather than one shaped by hierarchical decrees that inevitably distort the sangha field. While its gendered forms reflect ancient conditions, its spirit reflects the essential need for humility and ethical permeability.

When Pavāraṇā Is Betrayed.

Before continuing with Gaza, I want to offer a personal, raw example of what can happen when Pavāraṇā is set aside, shared not as an accusation, but as a cautionary tale. I was one of the four founding Western nuns of Ajahn Chah’s forest school lineage who helped establish its first Western monastery, Cittaviveka, in the UK. We were ordained together in 1979. By three years in, I was already in a painful and complex struggle for ground, acknowledgement, and placement for nuns, who, as many of you know, have been, for the most part, erased from Buddhist history.

In almost all lineages, Buddhist nuns are not part of the legal sangha structure. They are usually considered somewhat failed laywomen. They have little direct agency or self-determination. At any point, their training guidelines and lifestyles can be altered, and the goal-posts moved, according to the dominant agenda and whims of male monastics.

All of which played out in our Western nuns’ community, which was shattered on the cusp of the nuns spiritually and psychologically maturing into their own authority. Instead, their order was crushed by what became infamously known as the “five-point legislation” instigated by the Western abbot and leader of the sangha, Ajahn Sumedho.

Thirty years on from that first ordination, in 2009, a small group of monks drafted the five points without consulting the nuns. They then presented their five-point document to the nuns without any warning, who were told to sign onto it or leave. They were also told their ordinations would stop until they signed. Alongside, they were forbidden from discussing the document with anyone else. The impact was devastating, like being hit in the gut by an iron fist.

Why did this happen? Ultimately, to protect the unexamined misogyny and unconscious bias in the male leadership of the community, who were threatened by a more empowered female sangha. To this day, the five points remain. No honest discussion, unpacking, or transparency has occurred around this blow to the nuns' community, which led many to leave the order.

There is more to say about this episode–which you can read about in my book, Time To Stand Up–but, for now, to stay on track, I want to highlight two points that are directly relevant to Gaza and Vince’s critique.

First: The impact of hegemonic power on those with little ability to push back ranges from quietly corrosive to profoundly devastating. Power that is not held accountable inevitably numbs itself to the weight of its own actions. The immense emotional, psychological, and intellectual labor carried by those on the receiving end is almost never seen, leaving people, often in vulnerable situations, to piece together sanity, health, and a sense of worth in the shadows where power has abandoned them.

Second: In the case of the five points, the main instigators hid behind lower-ranking monastics to deliver their edict, a display of hubris matched only by their lack of courage to stand publicly by their devastating act. It was a textbook example of how institutional power often operates. Harm enacted from above, responsibility displaced below, and accountability nowhere to be found.

I share this story to illustrate how gate-holding sangha spaces to suppress authentic dialogue, especially when the stakes are high, often result in irreparable harm.

Gaza as Curriculum and Mirror

When Dharma leaders refuse to be reachable about the overwhelming impacts of Israel’s hell-fest two-year genocide, which has been live-streamed into the psyche of millions around the world, something in our communities begins to die. Authenticity contracts, and a quiet fracture spreads. A subtle dissonance seeps into the field, shutting down open dialogue. As a result, the collective willingness to explore ways of showing up for a world spinning far from any moral center begins to erode.

This loss of depth inquiry has a price. In her illuminating analysis, “Liberalism is the Near Enemy of Buddhism,” Alexandra Cain M.Div., names a subtle yet quietly ruinous consequence. Her diagnosis makes clear that our sangha spaces are unprepared for the multiple catastrophes now unfolding. How come? Alexandra puts it like this:

Liberalism similarly offers the promise of decency without disruption, ethics without conflict, compassion without consequence. It is a politics designed to prevent the very forms of solidarity necessary to survive a future shaped by climate chaos, economic precarity, and the psychic shock of historical violence unfolding in real time on our phones. It is a political imitation of ethical life—gentle in tone, hollow in consequence. And nowhere is this sedative more visible than inside American Buddhism.

So why Gaza? Gaza is a central part of the curriculum at this time. As Mr Mandela pointed out, Palestinian liberation is a key to global liberation. Gaza is the ground zero of empire. If we do not confront empire there, we will be less able to survive its planetary desecration, which is happening everywhere. It really is that stark.

Palestinian scholar, Tareq Baconi, speaking with Ta-Nehisi Coats, laid out 3 reasons why Gaza changed so many of us:

1. It’s happening in full view of the world, yet still allowed to continue.

2. The gaslighting by governments and major media creates a “dual reality” that denies what people can see for themselves.

3. This genocide exposes the colonial foundations of Western power. The path between a fascist or decolonial future runs directly through Palestine.

The fact-laden history, beating in the heart of Palestine beneath the myths of Zionism, is that Israel was conceived by white Eurocentric Zionist colonizers. It was born through the terror and mass ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, and has since maintained a brutal apartheid system committed to the utter dehumanization of Palestinians. After two years of unforgivable atrocities and relentless horror in Gaza, it’s clear to millions of people that Israel is a rogue state. Yet, still the Israel/US/UK-driven destruction continues, with no meaningful accountability or end in sight.

In this process, Israel has trampled international moral and legal norms, weaponized accusations of antisemitism against critics, and leveraged its geopolitical position to silence dissent through threats, intimidation, and sanctions. It has unleashed a culture of fear on campuses, hijacked public discourse, and leveraged governments that now beat, arrest, and imprison peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

The horrific, well-documented accounts emerging from Sde Teiman of torture, the children killed in staggering numbers, the practices meant to break bodies, crush spirits, sever family lines, and deny Palestinians the right to exist have all played out in full view. By its own actions and indifference to global outcry, Israel has declared itself unwilling to honor even the most rudimentary standards of a humane society.

In a recent article, Gideon Levy, a prominent Israeli journalist, posed a direct challenge to his fellow citizens: “Israelis Must Ask Themselves if They’re Willing to Live in a Country that Lives on Blood?” Levy states: Blood cannot be the country’s fuel. Just as no one would imagine driving a car that is powered by blood, no matter how cheap, it is difficult to imagine 10 million residents willing to live in a country that runs on blood. The war in Gaza is a watershed. Is this how we will continue?

Because this is the contract, isn’t it? Those holding to a romantic notion of Jewish right to Palestinian land, and Israel as their safe haven, must understand what they are asking of young Israelis: to continually commit horrors to sustain this mountain of myths, all of which is fast normalizing a sociopathic society unmoored from reality.

Meanwhile, despite military secrecy, suicides and a breakdown of mental health are rising exponentially within the IDF. One officer, Thomas Edzgauškas, of the Givati Brigade, posted this before taking his own life: I can’t go on anymore. I am lost and shattered. I have done unforgivable things, and I cannot live with them any longer. There is a demon inside me that has been chasing me since October 7. Please, forget me.

The question is: how to break this chain of violence? And what is our responsibility to help do this? The Insight world has examined the dynamics of decolonization, particularly in relation to identity. But what about Zionism? It too is a brutal colonial project founded on stolen land. Its premise, “A land without a people for a people without a land,” is the exact same myth that South African apartheid was built on.

In the face of such brutality, the link between Jewish identity and Zionism is being severed by an increasing number of Jews inside and outside of Israel. Robert Rosenthal just posted “The Biggest Zionist Lies of All Time.” While Israeli writer Daniel Klein talks of his slow, devastating disillusionment in his deeply moving reflection, “My Freedom from Zionism,” where he reflects:

It was a slow unraveling. A crack in the foundation that spread for years before the structure finally collapsed. For a long time, I whispered my doubts, afraid. Not of being wrong, but of the cost of being right. My identity. My family. My safety. My reputation. My place in the only world I’d ever known. I witnessed the parallel reality we created for Palestinians. I started asking myself what it would feel like to live on their side of the fence, in their world.”

As the US empire collapses around us, its poster child, Zionist Israel, as a political entity, can only exist as an ultra-violent, lawless regime that endlessly commits atrocities and egregious war crimes. In this context, what exactly are we protecting by this silence, or if not silence, the attempts to control the boundaries of what can be said? Must Dharma practitioners just turn away? Or feign peaceful co-existence between those running an apartheid state and those being oppressed by it?

Isn’t it beyond time to be more honest about the power dynamics here? That there can never be peace without justice and accountability for all taken from Palestinians?

“What About Sudan?”

I want to mention something Vince named, which is the reflexive rebuttal every time Gaza is raised, “What about Sudan?” To be honest, the way I’ve experienced this being used, primarily by white teachers, has been like a sort of moral alibi hijack–an “I’ve got one over you” move to shut down discussion on Gaza. It feels like a knee-jerk strategy of challenge, shaming, and then slamming the door shut.

What is happening in Sudan is horrific, as in the Congo. Also, here, in the U.S., with the appalling terror unleashed by ICE. There are so many hot spots of unbearable pain. Of course, all deserve utmost attention. If a teacher is deeply engaged with Sudan, that’s important work. But does that mean no one else can talk about Gaza

Israel’s ability to commit genocide in Gaza is directly enabled by the United States, which is Israel’s primary weapons supplier and political guarantor. In fact, this is just as much the U.S’s genocide as it is Israel’s. Throughout, Jewish identity has been weaponized to help justify the destruction of Gaza. Because of this, Jewish-American Dharma teachers sit precisely at the crossroads of identity and power.

To say “I care about Sudan” while refusing to speak about one’s own identity and citizenship, which can be used to interrupt harm, comes over as avoidance. It’s like using the suffering of one people to shield against facing responsibility to another.

Pavāraṇā, A Medicine for This Time

So, where are we going, those of us turning this Dharma wheel?

Across the Dharma world, there is now a shadow dynamic at play, a culture being defined by what is not spoken. What does this silence about Gaza mean? Is it that we just don’t care? Or, are we meant to be in allegiance with Zionism? What does it mean for Palestinian and SWANA sangha members? And what does it mean for everyone else, and for the sangha field? Who determines what can be spoken, what topics are allowed, what tone is acceptable, and where inquiry must stop?

There’s an urgency here. The ceasefire never happened. Palestinians continue to be slaughtered and starved daily. Tons of food rot at the border of Gaza. The West Bank is being ethnically cleansed. Israel has now grabbed 50% of Gaza, pushing two million people towards sand dunes; the marker of this now made-up “border” is a yellow line no one sees. Yesterday, it was reported that a terrorist was shot for crossing that line. The terrorist was 3 years old. Reports of Sde Teiman prison using trained dogs to rape abductees, on and on it goes. Governments are not stopping this nightmare, so we, global citizens, must do it. Yet, here we are, stuck in some strange dystopian quietude.

What would it look like to unpack the medicine of Pavāraṇā?

Even though the Buddha offered this way of clearing the sangha field and re-establishing authentic relationships, 2,600 or so years ago, its core intention remains timeless and unmistakable. No practitioner, elder, or teacher is beyond the reach of carefully considered feedback, as Vance offered his own teachers.

Pavāraṇā was designed as a ritual safeguard against the harms we’re all capable of perpetuating through ego defensiveness and unexamined use of power. Today, we are facing not only institutional silence in the Dharma world but also extreme oppression by governments and corporations who are busy silencing free speech and dissent.

To return to this tension between Buddhist alliance with hegemonic power systems and its radical edge. Where are we going at this time, and is it the right direction? Will we be serving the status quo, business as usual, perhaps even aligning with the forces of authoritarianism, as the tech oligarchs have done? Or will we lean more toward a revolutionary edge?

A Time for Courage

This time calls for courage. We’re at a civilizational inflection point, which none of us can withstand alone. My feeling is we badly need to pop this bubble of silence by initiating deeper levels of listening, sharing, and collaboration. This–we can do. We are all complicit, really; the taxes we pay, our lifestyles and shopping habits are all entangled with the devastating consequences unfolding around us. But this, too, we can work toward changing by refusing to buy into these systems of mass violence.

Given all this, what would a council based on equity in the spirit of Pavāraṇā look like?
What would it mean for our Dharma communities to hold councils where, for example,

• Those most impacted and marginalized speak first.

• Elders explicitly invite feedback and receive it without retaliation.

• Zionism, whiteness, empire, and patriarchy are not taboo, but central to the inquiry.

• The suffering of Palestinians, and the moral injury of Israelis, are both allowed into the room, not to equalize their conditions, but to stop numbing our hearts

Can we even dare to imagine it? And what if we can’t or won’t?

The cost of silencing Gaza or controlling the discourse in Dharma spaces is too high. Those paying are losing what no human and more-than-human life should lose.

The extreme brutality required for Zionism to exist is something no human should inflict or receive. The two-state solution is a convenient political myth to distract attention. This is not a centuries-old conflict. Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived for centuries in relative peace, cooperation, and harmony in Palestine.

Like South Africa, a dignified future for all can only exist through a just transition from Apartheid into a one-democratized region, called, once again, Palestine.

This isn’t going to end by waiting it out. Delaying this conversation means more death and destruction. Instead, when threatened by violence, the Buddha took action to stop wars, a genocide, and a serial killer. He didn’t always succeed (in the case of the massacre of his own people), but the point is, he literally stood in front of warring armies.

Ultimately, Gaza is right here, not over there. Our silence or courage will shape the future of Dharma in the West. I hope we choose courage and accept this gift of Pavāraṇā from the Buddha for the sake of all. I pray we choose to be accountable to Palestine, and to all whose lives hang in the balance of what we do, or fail to do, right now, at this critical juncture. May it be so. 🙏🏻🍀

Poetic Justice
Last Tuesday morning (an aeon ago already) on November 4th, the architect of the post 9/11 “war on terror,” Dick Cheney, died, leaving a fragmented world he helped break. By evening, rising from those ashes, Zohran Mamdani, carrying a revolutionary moral pulse, was elected Mayor by over 50% of New Yorkers. Poetic justice indeed. Against all odds, Mamdani, a Muslim, resoundingly defeated the politics of Islamophobia, and with it Trumpism, Zionism, and the billionaire oligarchs, without taking a dime from the powerful. No small feat! And not a moment too soon.

Clearly, it’s not the end of the war on democracy, justice, and truth, but it is a mighty slam against this soporific blanket of fascism pressing out breath, spirit, and hope. With Tuesday’s anti-Trump’s political sweep, hope returned in force, throwing the politics, to quote Mamdani, “that abandons the many and answers only to the few,” into the trash bin. This thunderbolt challenge to corporate America will most certainly spark a broader movement focused on an equitable future for all, which is what we need.

Mamdani’s stunning breakthrough broke the spell of defeatism and cleared away the fog of despair. It also showed that the spells of the uber-powerful, who’ve set themselves up to take it all, can be broken. While spells can be broken, they can also be cast, like the trumped-up Gaza–Israel “ceasefire.” This, in military jargon, was a psyop, meaning a “psychological operation” or warfare by other means.

Psyops and the Fog of Empire
Psyops are battles fought in the unseen terrain of the mind. The intent is to distort perception so as to influence public opinion. They aim to convince us of a reality that not only doesn’t exist, but is the opposite of what’s actually happening. The point is to make people doubt what they see and are experiencing. The state and media theatre of the ceasefire story, which flooded the world, was a lie that has no relationship to the realities on the ground in Gaza, where, in real time, the killings, starvation, and displacement continue as usual.

What is mind-boggling is how slavishly legacy media has ingratiated itself to spin the mountains of lies sustaining Gaza’s genocide. Yet, despite the unrelenting use of psyops, corrupting almost every sphere of political, public, and institutional life, the world will never see Israel in the same way again. The mask fell away, revealing a merciless, brutal Apartheid regime that rejoices in the mass slaughter of innocents. However, Israel, whatever it does, has been positioned by the powerful as untouchable by law; this sends a signal across the world that atrocities can proceed unpunished.

This lawlessness, which helped foster the paralysis of the UN Security Council and the double standards around Gaza, is fueling a system of impunity normalizing crimes against humanity. UN monitors warn that undermining humanitarian international law emboldens perpetrators. This can only be achieved by using gaslighting psyops.

In Sudan, this is visible, literally from space, where a shocking satellite image published this week, by Yale, shows the blood splattered from a horrific massacre of thousands of defenseless families by the RSF (Rapid Support Forces). In Sudan, as reported by Al Jazeera, the RSF has adopted Israel’s template for genocide, which is the gaslighting psyop of massacring civilians and bombing community facilities, like hospitals, schools, universities, and religious centers, using the lie that they are really military zones and hideouts.

By labelling Zamzam a military zone, the RSF was trying to apply the same model Israel uses to justify bombing hospitals and schools in the Gaza Strip, said Rifaat Makawi, a Sudanese human rights lawyer. “This is not a coincidence: it is a deliberate practice aimed at stripping civilians of their legal protection by labelling them as combatants or instruments of war,” he told Al Jazeera.

To stem this lawlessness, it’s critical that the Israeli government and the leading enablers of Gaza’s genocide, including heads of State, be held accountable at the Hague. Why is this so vital? Because the Israel/US/UK tripartite engine driving Gaza’s annihilation is also dismantling the very framework of international law meant to prevent future genocides. However, instead of real consequences, the players running the genocide worked a quick turnaround to direct the spotlight away from Gaza.

After slaughtering 250+ journalists, our main eyes and ears into Gaza, their focus has now shifted to erasing history and memory by blocking and deleting social media and YouTube accounts that recorded libraries of photos, data, reports, and interviews, all documenting the genocide. In the blink of an eye, reports from Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank are blanketed out. Did we see what we saw? Did it really happen like that? Yes, and Yes. However, to insert doubt and amnesia is the point.

Gaslighting is a form of psychic, mental, and emotional abuse. If we doubt the reality before us, we can be easily manipulated, which is precisely the intention of those who want to conceal the enormity of their crimes. In the U.S., the same architecture of manipulation is being used to force the country toward an oligarchic, fascist kakistocracy (rule by the most corrupt and least capable), through this occult-like psychic control. While “occult” simply means esoteric knowledge, it can also imply the malign and secretive use of manipulation to enact a kind of possession–in this case, of the collective psyche.

Tools of Transformation for Navigating the Inner Battlefield
In this sense, psyops are a form of occultism. They deliberately aim to occupy people’s inner worlds, distorting perceptions to activate strong emotions, such as rage, resentment, and fear, which are then weaponized for political power. As our world spins further away from the orbits of shared ethical norms and humane values, the impact of this maddening, toxic fog of unreality generates and amplifies a dizzying sense of bewilderment, fragmentation, alienation, and psychic depletion.

I feel it acutely. Likely you do too, particularly now. With the arrival of the non-ceasefire psyop, I tipped into a murky underworld where the weight of collective disorientation and despair conflated with my own sense of futility and grief. This holographic dynamic, intersecting the personal and collective shadow, is familiar territory for me, as is trying to engage it more consciously. This involves shifting away from my instinctual reactions of fight, flight, and freeze and instead, moving toward painful feelings and mental states, allowing myself to experience them directly and somatically.

It was training as a Buddhist monastic for twelve years that initiated me into this practice of receptivity to whatever I found painful. Particularly, the inner “orphans of consciousness,” we push below our conscious mind. However, as we focus awareness, painful feelings and states of mind become illuminated, which dispels their power. Ajahn Chah put it like this, “Know and watch the mind. It’s pure, but emotions come to color it. So let your mind be like a tightly woven net to catch emotions and feelings that come, and investigate them before you react.

Ajahn Chah also reminded us that our practice is preparation for challenges we can’t avoid, like what we face now. To mindfully steady attention at the place we are stuck, frozen, fearful, is a fierce psycho-spiritual practice. It is also a shamanic undertaking. The shamanic journey deconstructs our ordinary ego orientation, drawing us into the underworld of the psyche, where our illusions of control dissolve. Here, we gain insight into the deeper flow of the mind, particularly what disturbs us. When we direct awareness to the somatic, felt-sense of disturbance, it begins to alchemically transmute that stuck energy into illumination, then understanding, and release.

In this shamanic process of dismemberment, the boundaries of “what,” “who,” and “where,” of victim and perpetrator, do not disappear, but begin to reveal a deeper pattern. This is the eternal interplay of shadow and light, hate and love, fear and courage that plays out through our human struggle. It is the long arc of opposing forces, interacting in the fiery crucible of transformation, that alchemically forges the evolution of consciousness itself. To stay focused and sane within the intensity of this process, which we are all experiencing, requires steadiness. It also requires faith in life to resist the gravitational pull of our collective dissociative psychosis, which would rather drag us toward personal and collective annihilation than allow this evolutionary leap we’re being called to take, which is a leap into the unknown.

For this, we need to find refuge in our deeper heart, the still point beyond the storm, from which we can gather back the disowned parts, the lost orphans, and bring them home, into the lap of compassion. In this way, the highest politics is spirituality. The most profound transformations of the world begin not with policies, but with consciousness and the realization of our interconnectedness, and the ethics that flow from that.

A mind resting in its own embodied vastness knows clearly that genocide and ecocide spring from the same poisoned roots of greed, hatred, and delusion that are also seeded in this very same mind. Sri Nisagardatta’s teaching speaks to this as a practice: Use the mind to know the mind, to go beyond the mind. The practice is to continually return the mind to its innate, free, and spacious awareness, the fountain of spontaneous wisdom, or the “living dharma,” as Ajahn Chah called it. It is this space, unconstructed, without agenda, open yet focused, receptive, and intuitively prescient, that is beyond all manipulation. Abiding in this unknowing, you cannot be seen by the gaze of Sauron. Instead, awareness itself sees the imprisoning rings of power, but is not seduced by them.

What I’m essentially pointing to is the enduring power of the spirit, which transcends this endless play of psychic entanglement. From a more transcendent vantage point, it's clear that the architects of psychological warfare exploit the vulnerabilities in the human psyche by worming their way beneath our subjective defenses, trying to collapse our innate agency, our sense of inner coherence and truth from which we orient our sense of meaning.

They can do this as we are easily manipulated when our personal and collective trauma, beneath our everyday awareness, is activated. If the narratives fueled by our trauma remain unexamined and unhealed, they will shape erroneous beliefs and limiting, and even dangerous choices we might make. A significant root of trauma emerges from our “primary patterning,” a psychological term referring to emotional imprints from the womb to our earliest years. These emotional learnings form the energetic structure and patterning of our defenses. It is these defenses that once protected us from the intensity of unbearable feelings, sometimes referred to as the “unbearable wounds to being,” which threatened our sense of coherence, safety, and even survival.

Navigating Trauma, Shadow, and Projection.
I wasn’t intending to delve so deeply into this terrain, but as we’re here, an understanding of this territory is vital in these times. This is because the use of psychological warfare for political domination deliberately targets the deepest wounds in our psyche. This is very dangerous because, without a psychological understanding or spiritual training, we are vulnerable to being overwhelmed by a flood of psychic toxicity that erodes our sense of reality, agency, focus, and meaning, while draining away our well-being.

Psyops aimed at the collective are deadly because what is not healed within the shadow gets projected out onto others, making them responsible for our unowned wounds. Those who have no connection to our personal, familial, or ancestral wounds often become targets. From this point of view, the Palestinian people have been subjected to the terror and violence of displaced Jewish trauma, which in turn was manipulated by white Eurocentric Zionists to establish a racist colonial state in the indigenous lands of the so-called Middle East. (The decolonial term is SWANA, South West Asia and North Africa.)

At a human level, there must be accountability and justice. However, at a spiritual level, this tragic story transcends blame. We are all susceptible to being victims of this psychological transference, and at the same time to projecting our pain onto others. Activism, therefore, has to include personal psychological work and a healthy spiritual orientation. Without these forms of care for ourselves and for one another, we unwittingly contribute to hate and division, which helps amplify denial and delusion in the collective. Pysops, which deal in the art of delusion, have drastically impacted our societies, which now dwell within the strangeness of a collective psychotic break from reality. A condition that fascism both requires and reproduces.

Before leaving this territory, let’s return to Mamdani’s win from the perspective of psychological warfare. Just this week, we’ve seen a torrent of insane Islamophobic trolling throughout social media. It’s ugly, crazy, and poisonous. While disturbing, it reveals the insidious psyop, since 9/11, of using Muslims as objects to activate fear and hate in the American psyche. Empire always needs “the enemy” to distract from its ever-bubbling cauldron of evil and devilish acts of carnage.

Mamdani has become the perfect target for this manufactured displacement of rage, focusing, not on the actual cause–the oligarchy’s criminal theft–but on Mamdani. Mamdani, apparently, is responsible for all said ills of Islam and Communism! The logic of empire only knows how to cycle the same old lies. It has no exit door. It’s an exhausting round of denial, suppression, projection, violence, and impossible solutions due to its insistence on repeating its absurd, impossible rationale.

The Journey Toward Repair
The Buddha, schooled in politics and military strategy as a young man, eventually took a path that diverged from all the known pathways available at that time. At his lowest point, before his awakening, he was starving, depleted, and abandoned by everyone. It was at that moment, he finally turned to face his demons. However, just before doing so, a woman, called Sujata (good birth), seeing him distraught and near death, compassionately offered him milk rice to restore his strength, hope, and faith.

The way forward is not by bludgeoning a path through the next, and next, and next enemy, trying to conquer and control the world. The Buddha could not attempt to face the demons until he received nourishment and blessings from the feminine. The sacred feminine, unbound from patriarchy, represents the soul. It is the soul that holds the depth of our collective story, and which sustains the web of life and belonging that connects us all. In other words, the return is not just a solo meditative process, however profound that may be. It now includes a literal re-member-ing of ourselves as belonging together within a soulful, sacred web of life.

Or, to say it another way, we can’t take on the demons alone. We have to do this together. And to do it, we must remember that we are all interwoven within the same cosmology of life. From that place, we will be faithful to the pulse of earth and life, from which we’ll be guided, intuitively, so we can find that path that diverges from all the paths that have gone before. Then, the orphans of consciousness will call us to gather in this immense disowned shadow before our own projections destroy us all.

I don’t particularly know how to do this, but I know it’s already happening, and that collectively we will build that path. The precise technology of the Buddha’s decoding of samsara begins with facing “what is.” This involves the arduous journey through our shadow. We don’t have to suffer from suffering, but we need to see the immensity of what has been denied. Mamdani’s victory was a movement from the soul. His approach was to listen to the disaffected and then move from there. His victory invites us to look deeper but also heralds an opportunity for tikkun olam, for repairing the broken threads of the world so that we can move toward collective reparation.

The so-called “war on terror” was, in truth, a war of terror; the empire’s projection of its own unhealed psyche. It rose from the Western, colonially driven mind, long severed from soul, from the living Earth, and from any sense of belonging. That severing became a wound too vast to face, so it was outsourced, disguised as a moral crusade, and waged as an endless war. And still the hunger grows; we feel its needy pulse daily. Still, we try to consume our way out of the pain of the inner void of modernity’s soullessness. A void forever fed by resource plunder by those who inhabit an aloof supremacy. The hunger can never be filled; it can only circle back into the same fear that birthed it.

The point, in part, of being here at this time, is to break that cycle and to take stock. According to Brown University's Costs of War Project (May 2023), the post 9/11 wars killed an estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million people, mostly civilians in Muslim-majority countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, through bombings, displacement, starvation, disease, and the collapse of basic infrastructure, leaving entire generations wounded and exiled.

It’s staggering. Millions of lives, languages, and lineages erased or scattered; entire regions poisoned, people, families, and children left grieving, unacknowledged. This is the slow, ongoing stranglehold of empire. Its violence is hidden behind psyops that erase memory, cast spells of forgetting, and refuse accountability, like for Gaza, Sudan, Africa, South America…on and on it goes. The same pattern, mutating through forever wars. The same lies that destroy the fabric of society, like the manufactured “migrant crisis” that the West actually created, yet ruthlessly manipulates to foster division so it can insert its fetid, hollow, vapid, crazed, stale, and atrocious fascism.

Breaking the Spell
This shapeshifting beast, ever hungry, part hydra, part algorithm, feeds on fear and distraction, hiding its crimes and blaming everyone else. However, the logic of empire can be undone, and its coding can be cracked open. We, as humans, have the superpower to do that, to decode the empire. It’s already happening. Gaza ripped away the mask, and Mamdani’s win has shattered the tightly bound orthodoxy that we have to sacrifice everything to ensure capitalism can survive.

In the mix of all this, Mamdani’s win feels like a miracle. It immediately unleashed a rush of psychic fresh air, not only in New York and the U.S., but around the world. It literally changed the energetics of the collective field. I felt it in my body. In a short moment, it dissolved this heavy shadow trawl I’ve been navigating since the non-ceasefire ceasefire.

Mamdani’s win made visible something else being erased. A future. By now, we’ve all understood that the “grab it all” psychopaths ruling the roost have no intention of creating a viable future for the rest of us 99%. However, not so fast!

Mamdani’s win, alongside the other political wins in the U.S. on Tuesday night, and the phenomenal rise of Zack Polonski’s Green Party in the UK, Catherine Connolly’s inauguration as President of Ireland (a largely ceremonial but symbolically profound role), and the No Kings March of 7+ million allies, are all part of a rising global tide; alongside the Indigenous Amazon Flotilla, which is winding its way to COP30 with the new code.

Here it is:

Their words carry the deep remembering of what we have forgotten, embodied by Indigenous peoples, that the solutions we seek are not abstract or external, but are living, embodied, and relational. Each of these movements, from the Amazon to New York, speaks to a future that carries our hope. We too must carry and speak that hope.

Mamdani didn’t win by appeasing power, like the billionaires who went to lick Trump’s boots. He won because he stood by the values we all cherish, accountability for ecocide and genocide, for war crimes and ethnic cleansing, for justice, for civil and workers’ rights, and for the dignity of all. He did not buckle under fear, nor did he retreat. He stayed his ground. We must do the same.

The victories of this last week gave us back hope for the future, which had almost slipped from our imagination. In that instant, the paper-thin illusion of fascism tore, revealing the living field beneath it; the people, the Earth, the pulse of what is still real. When we stand together, humans, rivers, forests, and the more-than-human worlds, we remember our true power. This is the task before us now. To hold that crack open, to widen it with courage and solidarity, to speak truth with unwavering clarity. For through that opening, the higher dream of humanity, and of the cosmos itself, is here, now, to be fully born and embodied through each of us. May it be so!

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day here in the U.S. This morning, our Guardians of the Sacred Vigil was dedicated to the Apache struggle to liberate their sacred land, Oak Flat. Before the session closed, a few of us shared our grief at so much being lost. One ally told of Apache Elder Wendsler Nosie Sr., who said, when settlers feel true grief for the harm done, particularly to the land, their heart will irrevocably shift toward pathways of accountability and Allyship.

Grief is a profound pathway. Living just beneath the outrage lay our broken hearts. Words thrown around, like colonial, genocide, and ethnic cleansing, while naming vital truths, have now become almost deadened, a checklist of battle points. But it is grief that makes us feel what actually lay beneath these extremely weighty words. It is grief that leads the heart into the struggle for freedom, for those long oppressed, and ultimately, for us all.

Today, we’re also seeing the ‘powers that be’ attempting to cement the normalization of their devastation of Gaza, of Palestinian oppression, of it all. They want to disappear Israel’s brutal genocide; to have it held unaccountable and to have its complete moral collapse into barbarity, along with the West’s gutting of its own “Rules-Based International Order,” ignored. All while burying their multiple war crimes.

This, too, is the colonial methodology playing out, over and again, across continents and peoples around the world. Except this time, too many people woke up, and from their new vantage point, nothing really looks the same at all.

The other day, I listened to an interview with an Elder of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe (San Francisco, CA, Bay Area), whose people have been fighting for 35+ years to reclaim the remains of their ancestors, kept in boxes in UC Berkeley’s basement. More than 9,000 bones are stored in sterile archives instead of in the ground where they belong. I felt stunned by this ongoing colonial fetish of keeping Indigenous bones and relics. I also felt grief for how long the Ohlone have endured yet another battle that should have ended long ago.

This isn’t just some distant struggle. It’s a shared wound of dismemberment, stolen memory, and sacred ground denied. What happens when the living can’t even bury their dead with dignity? What does that reveal about whose bodies, lands, and histories are considered expendable?

That same wound runs through so many lands. This question leads directly to Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, or Oak Flat. At Oak Flat, the land itself speaks. For generations, the Western Apache have gathered at their cliffs and springs to pray, to receive the Ga’an, sacred mountain spirits, and to perform ceremonies rooted in the clay, sand, plants, and rocks that can only be touched there.

Yet today, walking on that land is monitored, and access is policed by government decree. What the Apache people face, after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Apache Stronghold’s appeal on October 6th, ‘25, is that on January 7th, ‘26, the 9th Circuit could well enable the decimation of Oak Flat. If the land is ceded to Resolution Copper, the U.S. will have signaled that not only is it willing to destroy another sacred site, but it also intends to take it away from its rightful stewards.

For twenty years, the San Carlos Apache have fought to protect this holy land, located two hours east of Phoenix, Arizona. In 2014, a midnight rider attached to a defense spending bill by Senator McCain paved the way for its sale to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of the mining giants British-Australian Rio Tinto and Australian BHP.

The proposed mine would hollow out the mountain into a two-mile-wide crater, destroying the springs, oaks, and sacred sites where generations have prayed and where young girls come of age in the Sunrise Ceremony, a ritual central to Apache life. It would also destroy the habitat of large and small species, sacred plant life, devastate the surrounding desert ecosystem, and irreversibly damage local groundwater levels and quality.

Founded by Wendsler Nosie Sr., Apache Stronghold has become both a legal and spiritual movement; a circle of defense encompassing more than 200 tribes, numerous faith denominations, and thousands of spiritual leaders across the United States and beyond. Their call is bold and straightforward: to protect Mother Earth from a government that treats the sacred as expendable. As Nosie Sr. stated after the Court’s ruling, “What is evil created this unfairness, not just to us human beings but to all of God’s creation.”

However, the spell of colonial settler entitlement is cracking, for example, like Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Until 2011, it was known as Columbus Day. This marks a shift from a dominant colonial myth toward the recognition of historical Indigenous truths. It provides space to honor Indigenous sovereignty, resistance, and cultural survival publicly.

It is also part of a larger global movement that includes Canada’s Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Australia’s NAIDOC Week, Latin America’s Día de la Resistencia Indígena, and the UN International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Together, they signal a collective awakening and long-overdue moral reckoning with the falsehood of the “Doctrine of Discovery.”

In case that’s a new term, or is fuzzy for anyone, the Doctrine of Discovery is empire’s catastrophic legal fiction, initially enacted in the 15th century through papal decree. Its dodgy offspring, Manifest Destiny, emerged from 19th-century U.S. Christian nationalism. Basically, the first round was “we have the right to take what we want.” And the second round is “that was good, let’s keep taking.” Clearly, these were never divine revelations, but colonialism’s long tradition of pulling out treacherous pieces of paperwork to justify its savage pillage and plunder.

Even so, this small acknowledgment points to a moment when conscience might evolve into a legal and spiritual imperative to restore land and autonomy. The irony, however, is that Indigenous worldviews do not claim ownership of land; they remind us that we belong to the land. This wisdom, now rising through a ripening global alliance, speaks with prophetic clarity: the same unaccountable, capitalist empire that ravaged Indigenous territories is now devouring the living Earth itself.

These past two years have made this truth undeniable. The live-streamed genocide of Palestine has shattered what remained of the West’s moral pretenses. As millions rose to demand an end to the assault on Gaza, something deeper stirred: people began to realize they weren’t just calling for the freedom of Palestinians, but for their own. The same forces that bomb refugee camps and bulldoze olive groves are poisoning rivers, gutting forests, and blasting sacred mountains open for copper and gold. What we face is one system: a late-stage capitalist empire that feeds on extraction, domination, and death.

This recognition is sparking a global awakening. From Indigenous nations defending their lands to movements for democracy, climate justice, and decolonization, the lines between struggles are dissolving. We are realizing that the fight for Palestine, for Oak Flat, for the Amazon, for women’s and trans bodies, for democracy itself, are all facets of the same truth: either we align in defense of life, or we go down together. At this precipice, it is to the Elders, to the wisdom of Indigenous and ancestral traditions that we must turn, to remember how to live again in right relation with the Earth and with each other.

Across the world, Indigenous peoples safeguard nearly 80 percent of the planet’s remaining biodiversity, yet they remain among the most dispossessed communities on Earth. Their food systems, governance, and ecological knowledge form the living architecture of planetary survival; systems refined over millennia to sustain both people and place. But these systems are collapsing under the weight of commercial exploitation, climate breakdown, and the ongoing theft of ancestral lands.

As the UN Food and Agriculture Organization affirms, Indigenous communities are not “vulnerable” by nature; they become vulnerable only when their collective rights to self-identification, land ownership, and governance are denied. Indigenous women and youth stand at the heart of this continuity: women as seed holders, wisdom keepers, and community healers, and youth, the future carriers of language, memory, and renewal.

Respecting Indigenous governance systems, ensuring free, prior, and informed consent, and centering Indigenous leadership in climate and biodiversity policy are not mere gestures of inclusion; they are now essential for survival.

Oak Flat stands not merely as a local environmental issue but as a microcosm of planetary reckoning. Its defense joins the moral lineages of Standing Rock, the Wet’suwet’en resistance, and the global Land Back movement, each insisting that the desecration of the sacred is the desecration of life itself.

As a Dharma practitioner, with much still to learn, there is one thing that I have learnt, even if I frequently forget. Awakening is not separate from suffering; our compassionate awakening process ripens through the willingness to see clearly what we fear to face. The struggle for Oak Flat, for Palestine, for the countless Indigenous and oppressed peoples of the world, is not apart from our own liberation. It is the mirror that shows how we have strayed from the sacred and how we might yet return.

To stand with those who defend life is to remember who we are, children of Earth, born to protect, not to plunder. If we listen, if we realign our hearts and systems with the wisdom of the Elders, there is still a path toward renewal. But that window is narrow, and the time is now.

Meanwhile, just to note, across the Dharma world, in colonized geographies, it’s become common to begin gatherings by naming the Indigenous lands on which we practice. While that’s a meaningful gesture, it now risks becoming a ritual of self-absolution if not followed by action. What is essential is to follow up with practices that move beyond acknowledgment toward relationship, for example, supporting Indigenous liberation movements that are restoring rights, land, language, and ceremony.

Organizations like Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, a matriarchal, women-led Trust in the San Francisco Bay Area, offer a model of this living reciprocity that enables the reparation and rematriation of land, like supporting cultural renewal and food sovereignty, while defending the sacred. I believe, particularly now, the Dharma calls us not only to awaken to suffering, but to transform the structures that cause it.

The Gathering Storm

In just the past ten days, the battle lines between rising fascism and its growing opposition have come into stark relief. Central, and acting as a revolutionary catalyst, is the genocide of Gaza; now turned into Israel’s grotesque holocaust of fire, death, and destruction.

In the eyes of global citizens, Israel’s belligerence and arrogance have irretrievably marked it as destroying all linkages to humane values. But this brazen contempt for accountability is changing as global demonstrations move toward hitting the economic heartbeat of Israel, and increasingly, this emerging fascist capitalist empire, with the power of mass boycotts and strikes.

At the beginning of the week, Italian citizens shut down the country with the intention of “blocking everything with Palestine in our hearts.” Connecting the dots across continents, the uprisings are taking many forms as the Global South shakes off Western imperialism. Brazilians, en masse, flooded the streets protesting attempts by the oligarchic class to reverse Brazil’s Supreme Court’s conviction of Bolsonaro, which handed him a 27-year prison sentence for staging a fascist coup.

While there’s no mention of this in the oligarchically controlled Western press, this marks a historic victory. It’s the first time Brazil has been able to hold a cruel, oppressive, and violent colonial dictator accountable in 500 years.

Also this week, as disgust at the billionaire class begins to reach a crescendo, hundreds of thousands of French protestors flooded the streets, chanting, “Tax the rich.” While all this unfolded, seven European countries, Australia, and Canada formally acknowledged Palestine, joining 157 countries out of 193 UN member states. In the UK, the Palestinian flag was raised for the first time outside Palestine’s emergent embassy. After two years of horror and nearly 80 years of inflicting a brutal Apartheid system on Palestine, such concessions by Western powers are really just cynical political cover moves rather than a genuine intention to free Palestine.

Still, recognizing the right of Palestine to exist as a state is a significant step. A victory wrested by the unrelenting fury of global citizens who have not stopped, for a heartbeat, protesting the genocide. The fight now is to ensure Palestine has its own autonomy, rights to reparation, the right of return, including the return of the land.

Meanwhile, as the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk rolled out its inevitable, weaponized acceleration of Christian Nationalist fascism, on the other side of the “pond,” King Charles hosted a gross, toe-curling, gold-laden banquet for Trump. In attendance were a cabal of decrepit empire makers joined by the new wanna-be techbro oligarchs. The whole cringeworthy spectacle, met with derision across social media, felt more like a necrocratic “let them eat cake” moment than anything even slightly resembling an inclusive, happy national celebration.

On another front, this week landed news of the shocking intention to legislate, here in the US, our beloved Trans community as Nihilistic Violent Extremists, which of course, perfectly describes those doing the legislation. So much hate, it’s hard to keep up. ICE is doubling down on violence. But they are cowards, kicking over elderly women, and disappearing hard-working, tax-paying people, trying simply to survive.

And, by the way, where are the hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees, those swept up in Trump’s vast detention machine who have been disappeared into thin air?

The Global Samud Flotilla Gains Unexpected Support

As the week moves toward its end, we’ve witnessed Israel regularly attacking the Global Samud Flotilla in openly free international waters, which, again, is illegal. They continue to unleash drone attacks, explosives, chemicals, jam radios, and block calls for help. And, of all things, they blasted ABBA music through the night, maybe trying to rattle Greta?? All of this, though, has been met with resilience and instead of cowering, there have been some surprising developments.

Spain has sent Furor P-46, a Navy warship, to protect the flotilla’s mission, a decisive action taken directly by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, after Israel’s drone attacks in Greek waters. At the same time, back on Tierra Firma, a loud voice is also fast emerging from political forces, seeded by the President of Colombia and picked up by the Canadian president, for an international peacekeeping force in Gaza. Italy has also sent a naval ship, the Virginio Fasan, and an NGO search and rescue ship, Life Support, to track and support the Flotilla. However, the Italian government's response reflects a strategy rooted in contradictions that need to be flagged up.

Italy: Between Empire, Citizens, and Conscience

Italy sending the Fasan, a warship, to track the flotilla, while restraining its mission, reveals much about where the empire is now: not quite here, not quite there. In this decision, we see empire’s strange, wobbling dance as it tries to navigate its own deep ambivalence in the midst of mounting political and economic pressure from citizens. This reflects not only empire’s lack of ethical clarity, but its inability to stand on clear moral ground when it really matters, like in the midst of a horrific genocide.

Prime Minister Meloni and her government insist the ship is not an escort but is there to protect Italian citizens and to signal humanitarian concern. Yet no one can miss the message of Fasan’s powerful, heavily armed presence sailing at the edges of confrontation. On one hand, Italy wants to show it will not abandon its people or ignore Israeli aggression. At the same time, it hedges its involvement, urging the flotilla not to breach the blockade and to instead divert its aid packages to an unreliable destination, suggested by Israel, with no guarantee the aid will reach its intended population.

Fasan embodies the contradictions of our time: the apparatus of the state torn between allegiance to empire and the pressure of citizens who demand justice, refusing to remain passive. Alongside Fasan, Italy’s NGO medical-rescue ship, Life Support, clearly states its mandate as humanitarian, healthcare, search and rescue, and logistical support. Its presence sends a message of moral restraint, but whether Life Support will be allowed to operate freely and assist crew members, if needed, remains uncertain. All of this reveals how challenging it is to exert moral, just, and compassionate actions when they become tangled in the architecture of power.

Yet, power is shifting due to the intense moral pressure exemplified by the flotilla, and the unrelenting fury of citizens enraged at the merciless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of defenseless Palestinians. That pressure is not going away, and neither should it. It is not only working but gaining momentum locally and globally with each passing day. Our task is to continue amplifying that pressure.

The Architecture of Fascism

Meanwhile, back in New York, the world, or whoever cared to tune in, endured the spectacle of Trump at the UN, disseminating his constant megalomaniac, mean, and mendacious lying whine. A U.K. press outlet, The Mirror, spoke for us all by headlining “DERANGED.” “Trump rants to the UN about climate, migrants, Gaza, Sadiq’s ‘sharia London,’ escalators, marble floors, and teleprompters.”

Oh well, at least Jimmy Kimmel’s return was its own victory - and well done to all who instantly boycotted Disney; it worked! Kimmel placed his dart well, challenging Trump’s craven narcissistic oppression of free speech. “The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”

So, here we are, at a significant inflection point. We all feel it. The menacing, toxic, and ominous messaging, and the daily shock waves of a self-installed, unaccountable, rogue, oligarchic ruling class. With each blow, they let us know their intent to hold onto total power by cementing a global architecture of fascism, regardless of the unimaginable, staggering cost in human and planetary suffering.

However, and here’s the rub, to do this, they have to compress all life’s free expressions of identity and creativity into surveilled, algorithmic, biometric boxes of conformity, imprisoning us in their soul-destroying, suffocating power structures that only know how to cannibalize life. They’ve decided they alone will pull the levers of power, enforcing their dominance by destroying international law, democratic governance, and ethical regulations that protect the dignity and freedoms of all.

They also decided to remove a self-determined future, or any future, for billions of life forms – human and more than human – so they can inherit the burnt ashes. They’re even pondering if they need humans at all. They quite like the idea of robots lavishing their needs as they hole up in bunkers, on Islands, and afloat in super-yachts. For sport, they are having great fun designing their shining citadel on the rubble of Gaza, and their Special Economic Zones–their caged “Free Ports,” that will be wonderfully undemocratic, fully deregulated, corporate-run fiefdoms.

The Call to Resistance

However, what they, the oligarchs and would-be kings, always underestimate is that the human spirit not only likes freedom, but it will fight and sacrifice what it must to guard that freedom.

After all, haven’t we grown up on streams of movies shaped around this timeless archetypal truth? Don’t we always cheer on the rebels in their quest to take down the evil empire? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one outcome where the empire wins.

Yet, taking on the empire is a serious undertaking with consequences and risks, some of which we can’t predict. And, while it is very scary, this is a fight we can’t really avoid because our lives now depend on defeating fascism. This includes MAGA flag-wavers, spiritual bypassers, and just general “stick my head in the sand” folks. None of us will escape the cataclysmic impacts of climate and environmental collapse that are already unfolding. The reality is that we are already in a war, so it's better to join the effort now rather than wait for fascism to cement itself, making the struggle so very much harder and more dangerous.

As if echoing my thoughts, I just noticed that Bhikkhu Bodhi posted a quote on Facebook. It is from a Democracy Now interview with Will Potter, whose most recent book on fascism and factory farms is titled Little Red Barns. Potter had this to say in response to Trump’s attack on his made-up “Antifa” enemy:

Increasingly, we can’t really avoid the reality that we have no choice other than to confront the forces destroying the multiple diversities of life on which our freedoms and survival depend. Neither can we avoid the reality that this psychopathic addiction to domination and profit-making requires increasing levels of genocidal violence, which the ruling class has shown, in Gaza, they are willing to commit. Perhaps then, the real choice is what we are going to do about it, and how we are going to look after ourselves and our loved ones in the process.

If we haven’t engaged in activism before or challenged the status quo, then facing these realities involves a profound psychological, emotional, and ideological shift. Many have already made this shift, to some degree or another, and many have been living the realities of resistance for a very long time.

Wherever we are in this process of shifting out from under “business as usual,” we are not alone. This is a global dynamic, a radical reorientation of the whole planet. In trying to save capitalism with fascism, the ruling class has staked not only our survival, but the very fabric of life itself. We must answer this evil with resistance.

When Myths Collapse

What we are witnessing is not only political and ecological upheaval, but also the cracking open of the myths that once bound our world together, leaving us exposed to forces we are trying to make sense of. As Jungian analyst Edward Edinger put it, “when a myth shatters, the vessel of meaning cracks open; what seeps away is coherence, and what rushes in are the dark, unprocessed forces of rage and fear.”

The myths of our civilization, countries, and communities hold the stories that form the foundation of our entire worldview. What we are living now is the collapse of our civilizational myths; the shadow that rushed into the vacuum has fueled the fascist violence that now stalks our world.

That fascism’s tentacles spread so quickly is evidence of a collective failure, in that we didn’t carry the deep spiritual and psychological work of shadow-integration into the fabric of society. The mindfulness revolution, instead of grappling with this shadow, was too easily co-opted into a shiny egoic “fix-all,” smoothing people back into the machinery of empire. In this process, we left the working class and disaffected behind.

Which is why Ajahn Chah’s reminder, “If it should be another way, it would be another way,” matters so deeply. Despite all past failings, we must now meet things as they are, not as we wish them to be, and begin our work from there.

We work from where we are, which now means navigating a crashing empire and its multiple impacts, from the fast-moving, volatile events of the last few weeks to the long, slow death of grandiose myths that once were.

Myths, like the American dream, once vaulted as luminous, but always casting a vast, sinister shadow, beneath which empire has long oppressed and extracted, shielded within those privileged by race, gender, and wealth. These illusory myths are now fast peeling away like fading wallpaper, leaving only the dead weight of empire’s cemented walls echoing a world stripped of soul.

I’ve been struck, spending time in England with my mum on and off over the last years, by how many nostalgic reruns are on TV there. The old sitcoms and series, full of class-ridden caricatures. The endless game shows, and monarchy polish-pieces running over and over again.

It’s alarming also to see how the BBC has become gutted and turned into a hollow mouthpiece for zionist apologists, uncritical neo-liberalists and right-wing ideologies. Like Farage, selling his Rule Britannia road to destitution. He is shamelessly interviewed endlessly, while almost no space is given to the left or the Greens. It’s as if the majority has become stunted, unable to move forward or go back, and so are stuck in a vacuum of this empty, gnawing nostalgia. This longing for a world that passed everyone by so very quickly.

The Nostalgia that Finds No Home

Maybe there’s something we all have in common that abides underneath this volatile, explosive violence and this gnawing nostalgia. That is the pull and longing for home. A home that is slipping away at an alarming speed.

The moths crowding around the night lights have gone; the summer bumblebees, buzzing their bass notes, have all but disappeared. The familiar birds that swept across the skies are hardly any more. The rhythms of the weather are all out of sorts, and the green fields have dried up again as crops fail, leaving only uncertainty to bite deeper. The pure streams and rivers we swam in are now despoiled by corporate water companies dumping raw sewage through our waterways. Yet, once, not so long ago, there were the fields bounded by hedges, wildflowers, and grasses, full of life and the sweet smells of nature, where we knew the land belonged to us and we belonged to the land.

Underneath all the blame, pointing fingers, and this upside-down world is a bone-deep sorrow at so much loss. Loss of land, connection, things, people, and just loss of what we barely remember, the ancient whispers of worlds where we once belonged.

The Rhizome of Renewal

As it happens, while this crazed, tipping point week was unfolding on the world stage, I was deep in a rain forest in South America, situated between Arenal Volcano and the Children’s Eternal Rain Forest in Costa Rica. Together with a dear friend, fellow Dharma practitioner, and project partner, Andrés González, we attended an in-person retreat with approximately 30 international grassroots change makers as part of our eight-month training with the Rhizome Fellowship, hosted by Tierra Valiente/Brave Earth. We’ll be sharing more about this at our online Liberation Spirituality event this coming weekend (September 27-28), which you’re welcome to attend or drop in on.

For now, the important thing I want to convey is that while the situation we’re in is immensely heavy, despairing, and overwhelming, there is another reality: the deep intelligence of nature itself, which is eminently joyful and alive. This, too, is the nature of Rhizome–what is the Rhizome?

Modernity thinks in singularities. The one event that will do it, the leader who will fix it, the hierarchy of power that needs to be maintained, the heroes that will change everything, the building of a successful organization, the political party, the central hub, the borders, walls, and demarcations, and so on. This is the thinking of patriarchal hierarchies, within which we’ve all been conditioned.

In direct contrast, Rhizome represents a radical shift in ontology, in reality. As it is the base note of nature’s wildness, it is matriarchal in essence. Rather than a singular beam of focus, a mind concentrated on a point with its goals and sought-after outcomes, Rhizome is the opposite. It is the ever-emergent, global, radically inclusive, multi-faceted, non-separative intelligence that is source-oriented.

It is where the core and the furthest reaches are intertwined within a deep inter-alive, radiant rootedness. It is the flow of co-creative collaborative expression of love for love’s sake and creativity for creativity’s sake. It doesn’t have to have a point. Its utter simplicity is knowing the world turns just for the love of it. It is the love of nurturing and the joy in the success of life itself, of others.

Contrast that to the Empire’s power. It is not really rooted in anything other than its disassociated and disconnected ideologies around which it organizes power through violence and control. In its paucity and inevitable loss of aliveness and soul, even those who reach the top of the pile can’t hide the terrible aching need to consume and dominate it all because, along the way, they lost their humanity and their soul.

Rhizome, or nature, by contrast, is the most profound expression of soul born from soil. It is not a single trunk rising upward but a hidden network beneath the soil, endlessly branching, sending out shoots in all directions. It resists hierarchy, resisting being reduced to a single source or center.

Mystically, it suggests that life does not spring from a single point of power, but from the interwoven, unseen web of relationships themselves. It is not linear, nor singular; it is a plurality in its entanglements and in its weaving of eternal spirals.

Rhizome is life sprouting from the very nexus of death. Its power is in immanence, meaning it’s not a place to get to, but is life rising from the ground of being everywhere at once. Its strength is resilience; wherever it is cut, it returns; when broken, it multiplies. Its magic is non-linearity; there is no beginning and no end, no A to B, but a web, an endless spiral, a circle, a mycelial flow. Its secret lies in its hidden vitality, being unseen, yet moving through the cracks and opening them up so new life can flow.

It moves like a dance, below the surface, sometimes dormant and invisible, until conditions ripen and suddenly, unexpectedly, the shoots break through in multiple and unstoppable ways. It is the real that arrives in the form of the unexpected. It is the force that seeks collaboration, that co-emerges networks, that celebrates connection.

In these ways, the rhizome carries the energy of rebirth, renewal, resistance, and interconnectedness. It’s ecological, spiritual, and profoundly mystical, and the ground from which life forever, spontaneously re-emerges, no matter how many times the patriarchy tries to dominate it, burn it down, and uproot it.

So our gentle but focused task is to reorient ourselves and unhook from the architecture of patriarchy by re-patterning ourselves as shape-shifters in the primal soil of our being. Ever listening and uniting with the intelligence that guides, seeding the growth and nurturing of our new story. The story and song of the cosmos calling itself into reality through us, even as the dinosaur of empire falls apart around us.

The Power of Grief and Faith at the Edge

Empire teaches separation, hierarchy, and domination, but the Earth teaches reciprocity, balance, and kinship. To remember this is to step back into sanity, into the circle of life where no one is excluded. At our root, we are not apart from this Earth but of it. Our breath, bones, and blood are patterned from the same elements that make rivers, mountains, and stars.

Belonging is not something we have to earn; it is something we already possess. It is seated in the spark of conscious knowing presence within which all is resident, including the dying empire that is forcing our evolutionary leap.

If those who want to own it all stopped for a moment, took off their armor, and felt the grief of their lost souls, they’d get it: they don’t need to keep trying to swallow the world. Instead of trying to control it all, they’d be collaborators with the sacred web of nature. Instead of walking the craven, loveless, hollow halls of power, they’d be connected to the subtle joy of nourishing the seeds of love, life, and collective liberty.

No one escapes death, not even these vain, greedy men, who, like us all, will return to dust. But not today. Today, and each day, we have a life to live. We have the sacred work of resistance, rebellion, and revolution to embody. And we have a more beautiful world to dream into reality.

So hold faith, dear friends. This is both an end and a beginning. Through it all, remember: life endures. It always endures.

🍀

Thank you for reading this. If you find it valuable, please share it. And if you’d like to hear more, join us or drop by our online Liberation Spirituality event this weekend, September 27-28. Guided by input from Dharma friends and teachers, we’ll be reflecting on some of the themes above, including introducing the Rhizome Fellowship and its Culture Hack Lab. Find out more here, Liberation Spirituality

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