52: Alnoor Ladha on Anarchism, Mysticism and Post-Capitalist Community

Alnoor Ladha – Post Capitalist Philanthropy
Transition Resource Circle
Culture Hack
Brave Earth
Mystical Anarchism
What is Solidarity
Tierra Valiente Reading List

Sufism
Fatimid Tradition
Hashashin
Ismaili
Hunza
Bernardo Kastrup – Analytical idealism
Dhikr
Daoism
Anarchism – Proudhon
Anarchism – Kropotkin
Marxism
Localism
The Rojava Experiment
Zapatistas
The Cascadia Movement
Anti-globalisation
1999 Seattle WTO protests
Vipassana
Shipibo-Conibo
Enlightenment – Buddhism

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] To this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today I’m very excited to have Alnor Lada. Alnor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, system thinking, structural change, inner outer mirroring, but I’m particularly interested in that, and narrative work. Alnor comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times.

So you might have a lot to say these days. His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, [00:01:00] Cosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and The Huffington Post, among others. He’s a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a cooperatively run advisory for social movement. He’s currently the co director of the Transition Resource Circle and co author of Post Capitalistic Philanthropy.

Healing wealth in the time of collapse. He’s also a co founder and steward of Tierra Valiente, a post capitalist experiment in the Northern jungle of Costa Rica. Welcome Alnor. Thank you for having me. Good to see you, Giancarlo. Yes, Alnor is a friend from old time. We did a Burning Man together in, I don’t know, 2010, maybe.

Speaker 3: Yeah. And then again, in 2018 as well, we ended up being in the same place. 

Giancarlo: In the same camp. Yes. So tell us a little bit, give us a little bit of the biographical data. Where did you grow up and, and, and when did you decide to, to devote your life in helping others? If there was any cathartic moment? 

Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.

So I grew up [00:02:00] in a, in a Sufi tradition. So I, you know, I grew up in a family where spirituality and meditation was kind of central to, to the worldview. And, and we, there were also immigrants. My parents are from East Africa. My mom’s family’s from Zanzibar, my dad from Uganda. They had very different migratory paths to Canada.

I wanted to interrupt you already, but the Sufi tradition is from Iran. Well, Sufism is the mystical impulse of Islam, and there’s many types of tariqas, they call them, sort of communities. So my, our kind of lineage traces itself back to Fatima, which is Muhammad’s daughter. So we were called the Fatimids.

From your, from your mother, both sides, actually, both sides, actually, so they’re, they’re diaspora. So they left Arabia and went to Egypt. They, they were, you know, the Fatimid Caliph in, in Egypt from 800 to 1200 AD. And then when [00:03:00] the crusades happened and the, the Seljuks sacked Cairo, they migrate to Persia.

So they were in Persia for like 700 years. And you know, there’s, there’s 72 different sects of Islam within Shia. So they’re just within the traditional sects. Then within Sufism, there’s dozens of various Sufi tariqas. And so my tribe were called the Fatimids. In Persia, we became what was known as the Hasha Sin.

Working with Hashish and Syrian Rouh and they abandoned nonviolent Sufism and went to war with the, with the Sunni Shah. And then they became the Ismailis. And so it’s, it’s a, you know, it’s a Shia branch. And in my family, my, my uncle my mom’s brother had a huge influence on me. Especially at a young age.

He was a, a Sufi scholar, Islamic scholar and historian at McGill. In, in Montreal, and he basically denounced Ismailism because he felt like it became too [00:04:00] institutional. And he went back to what he would call like you know, almost a pre Islamic Sufism where there’s a, there’s a, there’s, it’s almost like a desert animism you know, the, the kind of the original impulse of the Arabian Peninsula.

And he was very influenced by different types of Sufi traditions. And he spent a lot of time researching the Sufis of Hunza who are also from an Ismaili impulse, but you know, various Persian Tariqas of Sufism various Arabian tariqas of Sufism and, and sort of merge them. And so just to give you a sense of, of, of the, the school of thought, you know, one of his first teachings to us when we were young is Allah, God is a metaphor for the universe becoming self aware and it’s becoming self aware, not just through you in an anthropocentric way, but through all of consciousness.

And so in this sense it is a, a kind of philosophers would call it like Monas [00:05:00] idealism or something like that. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, yeah. Bernardo Castro. We call it metaphysical idealism. Right. Are you familiar with Bernardo Castro? 

Speaker 3: I love Bernardo Castros work. Yeah. He would call it analytical idealism or something like that, 

Giancarlo: which is 

Speaker 3: cosmic 

Giancarlo: consciousness.

Yeah. 

Speaker 3: We are in the mind of God, that consciousness is the, you know, what he would say is the ontological primitive. 

Giancarlo: Exactly. 

Speaker 3: It’s the building block of reality. It’s mind before matter, not the other way around. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was the tradition I grew up in. And, and yet because my family were immigrants, there, there was also a strong desire and pull to fit into Canadian society and to be quote unquote successful.

And sometimes our tribe is called like the Jews of Islam. Because we’ve been in persecution and exile and diaspora and hiding, and, and they’re also materially quite successful and so they do well in the world and there’s a lot of, you know, jealousy directed at them and what have [00:06:00] you. And so there was a lot of pressure on us to be, you know, doctors and lawyers and CEOs and sort of do well within that existing system.

And part of me was always in sort of rejection of that socialization, and part of me, you know, went along and played the game. And. 

Giancarlo: What were your, what were your guests against? You felt you didn’t belong there? 

Speaker 3: Yeah, there was always a sense that this kind of live, work, consume, die paradigm was empty.

You know, and, and then I, I would see the people that I was supposed to emulate that became successful lawyers or business people. And I would look at their lives and, you know, it wasn’t even like arti, I wasn’t even articulate at that point about it. You know, there wasn’t even a, a sense of like, cognition around it.

It was more this visceral sense of a, the nuclear family just, it gave me a sense of deep angst and on we and so in some ways that was like. a big part of it. The other was [00:07:00] like the lack of service to something bigger than oneself. 

Speaker 4: Yeah, 

Speaker 3: it felt really small to me. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Speaker 3: And so I, you know, in some ways I had very little ambition 

Giancarlo: Yeah, because sorry to interrupt a normal because you know in Canada like, you know in North America like in the West the the the old ontologies about material scientific materialism.

So this idea that there is not cosmic consciousness with the universe, with the, with intelligent design is this idea that this old cosmos is a gigantic clock, very mechanical. So probably that’s the culture you, you were breathing there. 

Speaker 3: For sure. And I think it’s the culture, most of us who are living in the dominant.

culture of the West, whether that’s North America or Western Europe or, or, you know, even the geographical global South, like in Australia or New Zealand, or even. Japan as opposed to the more like geopolitical South, which is yeah, has, has sort [00:08:00] of different impulses, but this geopolitical North, this kind of Western occidental sensibility was infused everywhere.

And for sure, there was a part of me that was coming from a Sufi tradition that was in rejection with this idea of. The world can be reduced to its material parts. And all that matters is how much material acquisition we get that felt empty. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Speaker 3: Right. But then also the expressions of it, like what people did for a living you know, going to work and coming back you know, In the same cycle every day with very little variability also felt empty and then the way The nuclear family was organized, also felt very empty, you know, coming from a much more tribal multi generational integrated culture.

And so even though there was a lot of pressure, especially from, from my dad’s side You know, they were immigrants from Uganda. They were exiled in 72 by Idi Amin and, you know, lived in a refugee camp and came to Canada on a UN deal. And they really wanted to make [00:09:00] their way and, and, and be, you know, good functioning members of society.

And my mom’s side, which had a different trajectory from Zanzibar kept their kind of mystical roots intact. And, and they were like, you should question the culture. You know, you don’t need to assimilate everything that is happening here if you’re not okay with it, you know, and, and and that sort of critical lens that my, my mom and her brothers gave me was really part of my opening, which is, I don’t have to accept the culture hook, line and sinker.

That was good, good parenting. Yeah. And so, you know, I remember this moment very particularly where you know, I was forced to go ice skating and go to skating lessons. And then, you know, Canada, there’s hockey, right? People love playing their ice hockey. And I was this like skinny little Arab, Persian, you know, Indian, East African kid who just hated being cold, right?

Like all my genetic lines were either desert or tropical. And, [00:10:00] and I came back and I, and my mom said, you know, how do you feel about playing ice hockey? And I’m like, you know, I guess like everyone’s doing it. I’m just not very good at it. And she said, well, you know, they’re all a bit insane, you know, to, to be on like thin ice on blades, beating each other up.

It’s just. The Canadians, you know, they, they lack a deeper culture, so this is all they have. And, and her saying that to me really just opened something in me where I was like, oh, this thing that feels so inevitable and so universal and so big, which is the dominant culture of the West, does not have to be my culture if I don’t choose it to be so.

And, and actually my mom’s tacit permission in her critique of the culture opened something for me. How, how old were you at this moment? Más o menos? Seven or eight. Something like that. Yeah. And then the other big thing for me was my mom took a vow to the Sufi order to meditate every morning from 4 to 6 a.

1. in darkness and [00:11:00] silence. She, she took that vow when she was seven. So she just recently celebrated her 70th anniversary. Wow. And she was a midwife. And she did it for 

Giancarlo: 70 years. She did this two hours meditation. 

Speaker 3: She still does it. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. And, and she was a midwife. So she would work these 12 hour shifts.

You know, from, from 7 a. m. to 7 p. m., come home, make dinner, wake up early, drive to mosque, meditate from 4 to 6, come back, make breakfast, go back to work you know, 5 days a week back in the 80s and, and, and then that moved to 4 days a week, but her sheer dedication to this practice and, and my growing up in that environment where I saw the sacrifices my mom was making and how much she got, From this kind of two hours of darkness and silence and meditation in the morning also was such a primary influence on me.

So, you know, I would spend my summers when I wasn’t in school going to this meditation practice with her from as young as I can remember, you know, maybe four or five. And and, you know, I was really just going through the motions when you’re that [00:12:00] young, you know, I was sitting in just trying to be still and silent.

And that was kind of the best I could do. And then, you know, I was given my mantras. We call them zikrs. And when I was like six or seven. And then had a kind of profound spiritual experience at some point quite young, seven or eight and the two things coming together where I had this kind of almost out of body DMT, psychedelic experience just from meditation at a very young age, and then also being given the permission to both critique the culture and not be so identified with this like energy stream that was taking everyone with it.

Yeah. You know, in, in, in ambition and the desire to, to fit in that combination of those two things were very liberating for me. 

Giancarlo: Do you mind, do you mind elaborate a little bit on this mystical experience? What would you, how would you describe it? 

Speaker 3: I would describe it as a dissolution of ego experience.

That just being in the silence and being with my mantra in this [00:13:00] kind of repetitive, patternistic way opened up a type of consciousness that I actually think when you’re younger, in some ways is easier because you’re, you’re less identified. with, with who you are. And I just had this flood of bliss in the body, very, very DMT in the sense of, you know, white overlapping chrysanthemums and visual patterns and a sense of joy and bliss in the body that I can only really explain as most likely some kind of DMT release.

And it was very hard for them to get me out of the trance. 

Giancarlo: Endogenous DMT release. 

Speaker 3: Yeah, like an endogenous DMT release. And, and it was very hard for them to get me out of the trance. I remember, you know, the local Imam basically who, who ran that mosque came and had to shake me out of it. You know, they were, they were almost kind of worried about me.

Thought I was having an epileptic attack or something like that. And so I would say like this kind of experience of growing up in the center of the empire. You know, in the dominant global north and also coming from a tradition that has [00:14:00] mystical roots and still had this kind of intact culture and this oral tradition and these practices of, of, of mantra of silence, of, you know, embodied practices that rooted back thousands of years and connected me to, you know, both my ancestral lineage, but also something transcendental.

You know, something beyond me really helped to shape my, my decisions, not to go in, chase money and be in the world of business and all of that. 

Giancarlo: Amazing. 

Speaker 3: I did have my, my, my kind of stint in that world for, for a couple of years, because that’s kind of what you, you do in some ways. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, no, amazing. You had an ego that 40 years before he was fashionable.

But so what happened with high school and college and university? 

Speaker 3: I was not a very ambitious kid. I was not very good at school in the, in the traditional sense. I was probably like neurodivergent in some ways, you know, not necessarily on the spectrum, but, you know, getting up in the morning was [00:15:00] like anathema to me, the, you know, sitting and sort of learning in the way that schools are designed made no sense to me.

I just felt like rote memorization, especially when I, I would be able to come home and read. You know, Sufi mystic poetry and philosophy what I would then go and read at school just felt so banal and uninspiring. And so I never really engaged that much. I was not a very good student. I would engage in substances.

You know, smoke a lot of weed and drink alcohol. And most of my friends dropped out of high school. So I had this whole group of friends who, you know, I was kind of the only one or one of a few who stayed. I was the only one of my friends who actually went to university out of a group of 30 or so boys, mostly.

immigrants from different cultures in this kind of melting pot of Vancouver. And I was studying philosophy and and Russian literature inspired by my uncle on the philosophy side and, you know, probably some weird past life proclivity around Russian lit. And then started reading through Russian lit [00:16:00] about 1917 and the revolution the Bolshevik revolution, and then got really interested in political thought.

And actually early on became, you know, a Marxist, some would argue, maybe a Trotskyites. And, and I was really interested in this idea of like less communism as a state structure and more like communalism. And then as my thinking developed in my kind of mid twenties and I started doing more political organizing work.

I realized I was not a Marxist at all, that I didn’t really believe in the state solution, that I was actually more of an anarchist. And I believed in localization and bioregionalism, and then really spent the last 15 plus years researching and writing and thinking about this intersection between anarchism and mysticism and how they’re the same impulse, really.

Giancarlo: Okay. I’d love to dive into. Anarchism and mysticism sounds fascinating. But just last question about, you know, personal development and growth. And so, you know, your sense of, you know, self [00:17:00] realization and self authoring, that was already clear from this. you know, young age mystical experience and, and this freedom that your mother gave me, gave you to, you know, not to identify with a specific culture.

So at that point you were free from your cultural conditioning because you didn’t have any? 

Speaker 3: No, I would say like, I’d say you’re never free from your cultural conditioning, right? I would say that, you know, maybe there’s these moments of transcension of subject object and complete dissolution that are momentary, but you know, I kind of, I’m a McKennaite in the sense where I think.

The role of these boundary dissolving, ego dissolving experiences is to step outside of the culture to realize that, you know, there’s aspects of the culture that are just collectively agreed upon delusions. And then you come back into the culture in order to change the culture. And I feel like I had a very strong culture in the sense that I come from this Sufi tradition, and that it’s a very [00:18:00] intact, strong, tradition with elders and ritual and ceremony and practice.

And so what that, the point though, of cultures that are, let’s say worthy of the word culture, mystical traditions, indigenous traditions, et cetera, is that they hold you in your ability to have these experiences and they contextualize you in, in, in the moment we’re in. And then the dominant culture, which is, you know, what I was calling the this comes from the work of Hakeem Bey, where he calls it the work consume die paradigm.

You know, the materialist paradigm, where there is no other meaning and, and in a sense is very nihilistic in its materialism. There’s a meaninglessness in it. That culture, it, I’ve always danced with it, knowing that no matter how free we think we are, we’ve always are internalizing aspects of it.

And there’s a constant practice of deconditioning and decolonization that the spiritual practices help with, but can never fully cure you [00:19:00] of, right? Because the hard wiring is within us. Right? The idea that we are separate selves, the idea that there is a you, Jean Carlo, and a me, Elnur, and you know, that and in some ways there, there, there is a material aspect.

And of course, non dualistically it’s true, right? We have to put food on the table and pay our bills and, you know, all of that. And so what a non dualistic approach like Sufism or, or Taoism, what they really helped me do was just to be able to navigate. Rather than transcend. And I think a lot of new age philosophy where I have issue with it is it’s trying to transcend the structures of the material world rather than to be able to navigate this non dual and dualistic simultaneous experience of being in the world and also not fully and solely of the world.

Giancarlo: I 

Speaker 3: understand. 

Giancarlo: So, so basically your Sufi practice was really, was, that was the anchor for some sort of mental stability and mental wellness. You never had moment [00:20:00] of being lost or anxiety and 

Speaker 3: No, of course, of course. And I still do, you know, and, and I think the world is a very destabilizing place. And, and I think any time, right, and 

Giancarlo: it’s confusing, it’s confusing for sure.

Speaker 3: And especially right now, right you know, we’re on this kind of accelerating like quickening that, that just feels more and more intense. Right? And I think any tidy, neat narrative of this is the way the world is and the way the world should be. And now I have this model, I can therefore make sense of the whole world.

I think that always breaks down at some point and, and has to, you know, in order, sometimes even just for your, your worldview and your faith to be tested at the very least. Most likely because it’s never a full and accurate picture because I don’t believe such thing exists. I don’t believe there’s one meta-narrative that will remove all angst [00:21:00] and anxiety and you know, discomfort and neuroses, 

Giancarlo: but maybe can alleviate them.

Speaker 3: Oh, oh, for sure. For sure. And, and I think there can be a practice and a alertness. And, and, and, and that’s what the, the aim of spiritual practice is. Yeah. And, and this is how, you know, masters achieve certain levels of, of achievement. 

Giancarlo: But so tell us a little bit about how did your exploration started and how is developing and most importantly, how has been applied this as for this intersection about anarchism and mysticism.

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Giancarlo: Maybe, maybe, maybe for our audience that might be a little bit less familiar with these terms. Maybe you can just remind real quick what is for you anarchism and mysticism and, and how this exploration then was applied to the several community you wrote about and also physically implemented.

Speaker 3: Yeah. So mysticism is the type of spirituality that is based on disintermediation. So there’s [00:22:00] no mediation, direct experience, you know, in the Greek tradition, they would call it Gnosis, right? And every, even all the major religious traditions have their version of mysticism, right? Judaism has Kabbalah.

Islam has Sufism. Christianity has Gnosticism. There’s esoteric Buddhism. Daoism is inherently a mystical tradition. Most indigenous traditions are, you know, and earth based traditions are direct wisdom traditions where you’re in relationship to the living world. And so it’s not always kind of transcendental God out there.

It is sometimes the, and often the imminent here. And so mysticism is about this direct Gnostic experience, this direct relationality to a power source, universal consciousness, Allah, God, whatever you want to call it, that is bigger than the individual ego and soul and storyline. [00:23:00] And then anarchism.

It’s not anarchy. This conflation is often created on purpose in order to discredit anarchism right? Anarchism is a very sophisticated political philosophy that’s 200 plus years old initially came out of Russia. And then other parts of Europe through people like Kropotkin in, in Russia and Proudhon in, in France and it has a very rich tradition and in many ways was vying against Marxist communism as, as the kind of.

central theory of the left and then lost and, and basically the communists did very specifically, especially in the second international made a, a, a strong effort because they, they understood the emancipatory potential of anarchism and were also scared of it and believed it couldn’t happen.

And at a very simple level, what anarchism is about is. individual and community [00:24:00] decisions about how we want to live our lives. And one of the central tenets of anarchism is this idea of subsidiarity. And very simply what it means is the people most affected by the decision should be the people making the decision.

Right. It’s, it’s, it’s so common sense. Anarchism in modern times is localism and bioregionalism people connected by watersheds and mountains and were forced to begin and end making decisions. So we have, for example, like the Cascadia movement that’s happening in the U S and Canada and Turtle Island, the Zapatistas in Mexico and Chiapas.

You have the Kurdish autonomous zone of Rojava, this 5 million person community in the Middle East and lots of small experiments in between. 

Giancarlo: These, these three communities you mentioned, how big are they? Because it seems that this is something that can work on a small scale, right? 

Speaker 3: Well, you know, Cascadia would be several million people in a kind of bioregional autonomous area.

I don’t think the U. S. is going to concede [00:25:00] that, but, but it’s, but it’s interesting to observe the movement and also the, the kind of. cultural aspects of it. The Zapatistas are probably 1. 5 million person community. They run Chiapas, the breadbasket of Mexico. They declared independence from Mexico in 94.

Mexican government, with the help of the CIA, went to war against them and lost. And so they’ve been in this struggle. For yeah, almost 30 years now and run their own economy, their own currency, their own roads, their own education system. They grow their own food and Rojava is a 5 million person community.

It’s the kind of the largest of of these kinds of anarchist, I call it maybe post capitalist. 

Giancarlo: But so how does the governance work? How do you organize 5 million people? There must be some sort of leadership and representation. 

Speaker 3: Of course, I think this is also like a common misnomer that the idea that anarchism means no law.

What it really means is direct democracy. So, so there’s people deciding at [00:26:00] local levels, those local councils, then ladder up to a kind of regional council and those regional council then ladders up to a kind of autonomous zone wide council. So it’s basically you know, electoral democracy. The idea that you vote every four years and put someone in power to make decisions were completely disconnected is even in the U.

1. The, the kind of framers of the, the, the constitution, their belief was this would be a temporary structure and it has become this permanent structure. And so it’s not a sustainable model. And we see what happens with electoral democracy, right? Money hijacks the political process. Like capitalism and democracy are in conflict, right?

1, one vote and democracy tells you one person, one vote and capitalism always that dollar always will defeat the democratic process. And, and what anarchism and localism are about is direct democracy through [00:27:00] relationship. So you have a relationship with your local council through that local council, a person is elected and selected, who’s then brings the issues to a broader regional area of concern that then, you know, decisions get made at like a kind of supra.

level decision making. But anyways, I think how 

Giancarlo: is, how is the system protected and from, from, from money from candidate with more resources that can influence more votes. 

Speaker 3: Because it’s, it’s one person, one vote. There’s no lobbying machinery involved in it. And, and there’s, there’s deep relationships at a community level because it’s locally smaller.

Yeah, because it’s local. It happens at a smaller scale and then it, it, it ladders up and replicates. And so there’s a deep care and concern at its core. As opposed to the kind of, you know, media spectacle democracy that we have now in the West, you know, where it’s buying billboards and [00:28:00] advertising, right?

You know, the impulse of anarchism, one of its famous taglines was no gods, no masters. And mysticism is very similar. You know, no popes, no imams, no Qurans, no Bibles direct experience that these two kind of overlap in, in impulse because they, they’re really about direct relationship with something bigger than us and at its core being in service, right?

And so you and I had this discussion right before we started about is it self First, do we take care of ourself and then contribute to the, you know, the other or the other way around? And I actually think that this, this is an old dichotomy that is actually discursive, right? That they feed each other.

And so for me, what, what happened in my early twenties was my political organizing work really activated my spiritual experience. I would go to these protests, for example, Seattle 99 was a big influence on me, you know, I was 19 years old, tens of thousands of people in the streets protesting [00:29:00] the World Trade Organization and kind of the birth of the anti globalization movement.

And it sort of felt like almost festival culture. You know, all these other people who care about this huge thing and are willing to sacrifice their lives and go to jail and read books and be involved in ideas and understand political theory. And I kind of had found my tribe in some ways and what, what, what happened when we, you know, we’re doing a protest against Monsanto or.

Coca Cola or the World Bank or what have you was that I would, I would get to these almost like, you know, transcendental peak experiences and it would also test my ideology, you know, how much is this the other right? And how much is this the world I want to create? And what it did was, you know, you’d have these deep levels of disappointment as well because, you know, power will continue to do what it wants to do.

So you’d spend weeks on trying to yeah. For example, Monsanto was [00:30:00] doing these massive land grabs in Kenya, and we were working with some of the indigenous communities in Kenya to stop these land grabs. And you know, we lost campaign after campaign. And what this did for me was put me into this deep.

And this deep internal inquiry of what I was doing and why I was doing it. And I would find that the, the, the spiritual practice got supercharged. If you will, you know, I would go and I would do Vipassana, I would go and I would have a mushroom experience and. My whole lens was like, how do I be in deeper service?

And this is what sort of drove my spiritual practice, but it’s also what drove my political practice. It’s what drove me to be in deeper solidarity with people who were being and are being marginalized by the dominant culture. And that there’s a responsibility for someone like me who comes from a place of privilege and the education of the West and access to the things we have access to, you know, yoga and tantra and Ayurveda and [00:31:00] ayahuasca and festival culture and all of this is like my aim is not to go there and find some individual transcendence, but is to deepen my practice and to try to create a world where these things are accessible to everyone.

Giancarlo: Yes. You know, what, what a counter argument of this, you know, synergy, if you want between the personal work and the, and the societal work, people would say that, you know, unless, unless your shadows and, you know, your pain bodies and your demons are somewhat resolved, they might interfere. with the intentionality and also the nature of the action and, and might taint the activism with ego.

Speaker 3: Oh, for sure. For sure. That, that risk you know, that risk always exists, I would say, you know, and, and it’s, I don’t think it’s necessarily a counter. But it’s more [00:32:00] of a, this is the edge we have to walk. Here’s the risk on the other side. If we believe that we have to achieve some high levels of internal self realization before we are in service to the world, we will create a culture of spiritual narcissism.

And this work is never ending. And people will be in this never ending shadow process and you know, never ending ceremonies and going to ayahuasca weekends and they’re like, Oh, we’re, we’re getting ready to do something. Right. And then it never. And then on the other side, you’re right. What happens is, and I’ve of course seen this a lot on the left, is like there’s these people who want to change the world, but they have not even started their inner development work and they end up replicating a lot of the traumas and projected out into the world and it makes activism not interesting anymore, right?

And it makes it not appealing and it reinforces identity politics. And us versus them. And, [00:33:00] and I think activism has got a bad rap partly because it has been led for so many years by a very strong materialist rationalist culture, right? And so this is why I think that the kind of traditional self development, self realization, human potential movement of the sixties and seventies, which kind of fell on its own weight.

In some ways, the kind of bankruptcy of that movement led all these, you know, radicals and hippies of the sixties into then just becoming like the next power elites of Silicon Valley. Right? Because they didn’t have a deep rooting in service. They didn’t have a deep critique of the dominant culture and the political economy of capitalism and on their watch, this kind of supercharged.

Techno fascist neoliberalism got created. Now on the other side, traditional activism is also dying, right? Because the, the kind of materialist lens just got reinforced. And the, and the belief was that [00:34:00] if we just take over the organs of power, somehow there’s going to be this revolution. But what happens is you, you end up replicating those same structures, right?

Because there’s that same level of consciousness is producing it. And I think what we’re seeing now is this, this synthesis happening where We, there’s a beginning to be an understanding that we have to do the deep internal work and simultaneously we need to apply that work into the world with the lens of service.

And then through that work, there’s this discursive, you know, reflexive feedback loop, the world we want to create, right? Like, if we’re going into an ayahuasca ceremony with the intention of, please give me counsel, and direction on our collective healing and collective co liberation. I think the plants are going to be much more responsive than us going into ceremony being like, you know, help me manifest that new job or that new car or whatever, this personal [00:35:00] security that these are such low ambitions for.

these deities, these gods, these plants that, you know, have an agenda for us and want to see human evolution happen. 

Giancarlo: This is so interesting. So I know you have to go soon, but let’s, let’s, let’s go back to you know, how did this aspiration, this, how this is the integration of anarchism and mysticism then look like?

I know you’ve been consultant or even, you know, been part of, of many community building. How, how does it look practically? The mysticism, what to believe and who to pray to and the practice that is very experiential and is personal to every individual or there is some sort of temple center where people would then get together and share this moment of, of mysticism or not.

And then how this mystical practice then interact with the anarchic framework in an anarchist society, [00:36:00] everybody’s encouraged to participate politically. So practically, how do you, how does it work on the ground? How is, how’s a typical day of an anarchic mystic person in a community like that? 

Speaker 3: That’s a really good question.

You know, part of the kind of Both, I would say, the anarchist impulse and the mystical impulse is truth is a pathless land. You know, that there, there is no one way to do it. You can’t be an anarchist or a mystic and, and try to hold dogma of there is a particular way to do it, right? And so what we say is that there’s these kind of three orienting inquiries, let’s say.

And we, we call it polis, eros, enosis. And so for all 

Giancarlo: these eros and noses, 

Speaker 3: so polis is rethinking the political economy. So the type of content we have at our gatherings the, the, the type of just facilitators we bring in often have this lens and even the way we organize as a community. So we say [00:37:00] we don’t believe in private property.

One person should not benefit from the labor of everyone else. There should be no speculation on land. And so we bought the land and we put into a trust. Nobody owns it. We run it as a not for profit cooperative. Of the surplus, there’s a small pool allocated to profit sharing, no distinction between labor and capital.

So it doesn’t matter if you put in the initial money that is now a gift or you’re a full time Costa Rican working on the farm or the kitchen or what have you, you get equal profit sharing and that there’s a direct democracy model in terms of decision making. And so that, that, the, the kind of political aspect then is really embedded into the core of it and very, you know, no one’s going to sign up to that unless you’ve done some kind of political work and you have a bend towards, you know, this type of more democratic, decentralized approaches that’s also requires, you know, more time than just living in an apartment [00:38:00] in Brooklyn or what have you, and you know, paying your, your monthly condo fee there’s interaction that’s required.

There’s. Yeah. Discourse that’s required. The second part of Gnosis is we also organize around deep spiritual experiences together as a community. So for example, on Sunday, I go into silent dieta for two weeks. We have a Shipibo teacher coming from that tradition in Peru. Where for two weeks, the whole community goes into silence and no eye contact and one meal a day and works with one of the various Shipibo plants, which are mostly non psychoactive plants, these kind of healing plants in the dieta Shipibo canon.

And the 

Giancarlo: vegetalism, 

Speaker 3: yeah. Yeah, the kind of vegetalismo culture. But we also will have a Vipassana maybe once a year, you know, we have Tantra teachers coming. We have various Buddhist teachers, Taoist teachers, Sufi teachers come. And we bring kind of all the streams together for people to decide what they think is interesting.

And we also speak [00:39:00] about it. So like we have a Polis. Council where we discuss the latest, most interesting stuff that’s happening in the political world. We also have this Gnosis Council where people who go out in the world and have their experiences, whether, you know, they go to an ashram in India or do a longer dieta in Peru or do an online course or whatever, come back and share with the community what they’re learning and what they’re practicing.

And that’s part of the discussion and the fabric of the culture. And then the last part is the, the, the Eros, which is, we’re not an open love community like Tamara or whatever, but we, we believe that your relationship is not your private affair, that it affects the field, and that we, we openly have discussion about our relationships.

There’s people who practice polyamory, there’s people who practice monogamy, there’s people who practice celibacy, and we just have open discussions on why we’re in this particular spiritual erotic practice right now. And there’s no kind of right or wrong to it. And we also think of Eros as the deeper relationship [00:40:00] with The, the living world and with animism.

And so there’s this kind of, you know, erotic kinship and relationality with the forest we live in, with the water, with the air, with the elements, with the food that we, we also want to be in contemplation and in service to. 

Giancarlo: This kind of, this kind of meetings and gathering, it’s, that’s what you’re referring to when you’re talking about from your bio, inner and outer mirroring.

Speaker 3: It’s part of it. Yeah. It’s like, look, the community experiment is, is one reflection of that. And of course, you know, there’s only 20 or so people. We’re all friends. We’ve known each other for a long time. You know, that, that practice is, is easier, but some of this work of the inner outer work is sometimes when we’re working with activist groups sometimes when we’re working with funders, sometimes with the social movements that, you know, part of what.

We are in practice of, and what we’re learning is that the external world is mirroring our internal world and our internal world is mirroring our external world. Like, you know, there’s this, this kind of [00:41:00] old Buddhist line that says enlightenment doesn’t happen in the cave. It happens in the mouth of the lion.

Right? That, like, enlightenment is not just about the individual going out and finding self enlightenment, but it’s, it’s when it’s messy. And when the, when you’re out in the world and being, you know, strangled by the context of capitalism and neoliberalism and, you know, a genocide in Israel and Palestine happening and you know, crises around the world and peak oil and peak patriarchy and peak white supremacy and peak stupidity and potentially also, you know, peak possibility, right?

All of it is happening at the same time. And so the grappling with what’s happening in the external world is influencing our internal state. You know, of course, we’re not separate. There is no such thing in a very real way as the separate individual. Right. We are a congress of beings from the bacteria that live in our body to our ancestors speaking through us epigenetically and vibratorially to you know, our relationality [00:42:00] and kinship with the ecosystem, the ecology, with all the people we interact with.

And so. This kind of inner outer mirroring is happening all the time. It doesn’t mean that simply we get our inner state in order and then the external world is going to shift and, you know, collapse into some superposition, right? Of our desire, right? But it’s also not that simply because the external world might even be in a moment of calm that our internal world reflects that, that we have to actively.

Be in dynamic response and relationality and responsibility with what’s happening both internally and externally. And there’s no goal, there’s no goal to say, I’m in this great internal state, I’m going to impose this on the external world. And there’s no thing of like the external world is in such a place of disrepair that I’m just going to find my solitude internally.

Part of the work is to be heartbroken by what’s happening, you know, to hold both the grief and the gratitude as two hands of the prayer [00:43:00] of what’s happening in this current moment and to be in this constant practice of awareness and recalibration and contribution through prayer and practice. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, it is very interesting.

But so did you mention that you guys are only 20 people? 

Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s about 20 people who live here and then there’s gatherings that happen, you know, often weekly where 20 to 30 new people come. There’s about 20 to 30 co workers on the land. So at any given point, there’s, you know, 60 people in the mix, 

Giancarlo: but that was a choice.

You guys didn’t want to grow. You think that’s a right number? 

Speaker 3: Yeah. I think for us, at least right now, it, it works. You know, we’re in the midst of building more housing, some small kind of residential cohort of tiny homes and and you know, maybe we’ll get to 40, but we probably don’t want to be much bigger than that.

You know, maybe 40 adults and 10 kids or something like that. 

Giancarlo: And for the kids what is the education? They all like community school. [00:44:00] 

Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s a mix, you know, there’s a lot of, definitely a lot of free range kids around who are not in the kind of box structure of a school. And then.

There’s parents who want to put their kids in the local school here and, you know, my, my brother and his partners, their two daughters, go to the local high school because they got to an age at, you know, at 12 and 11 that they’re, you know, kind of a small community is not enough stimulus for them anymore.

Giancarlo: Of course, of course, 

Speaker 3: some of the younger kids like don’t want to be out there right now and really enjoy having a kind of small community homeschool set up. 

Giancarlo: This is so interesting. So I know, I know you have to go. Let me, let me ask you just a couple of, of if people want to research the three anarchic community you mentioned.

The Java, the Zapatista and the one in British Columbia we’ll put it on the show notes. Would you recommend any books or documentary for people that want to know [00:45:00] more about those experiments? It’s not our experiment. They’ve been on for a while and they’re big enough. 

Speaker 3: Yeah. I can send you some links that we can, we can post on the show notes.

Giancarlo: Okay, great. And, and so, and personally, how, how, how are you feeling these days? You’re in a good space. You said you went traveling and now you’re back home. 

Speaker 3: Yeah. You know, I think I’m in this a place that many people are in, which is kind of a sense of disbelief that we’re still at the state, you know, that And really internalizing the impunity of empire, right, that the U.

1. and Israel can continue almost three months you know totally incommensurate, asymmetric, violent You know, extremist state policy of ethnic cleansing and, you know, at least we can argue an attempt at genocide and, and the fact that there’s even debate about that, you know, is, is so insane.

And the fact that there’s cancellation if you, you know, [00:46:00] and this kind of weaponization of the idea of anti Semitism is, is, is so insane, you know, that we can’t be critical of a state’s policy or that makes us racist somehow, right? Like the culture is degraded to such a place where the discourse is at such a low level and what we’re willing to accept is You know, the level of kind of violence and warfare and inhumanity and degradation of life that we’re willing to accept is so extreme that I think many of us are living in this grief of like, where do we even go from here?

You know, how does one move on? And that conjunction with the ecological crises and. Mass species extinction and the kind of ongoing rolling of like fossil fuel exploration and far right governments being elected and, you know, fascist autocracy on the rise. We are in a moment of like, what do we collectively do?

And I think we’re all in that, that, you know, anyone who’s like, I’m feeling [00:47:00] amazing right now. And, you know, in the kind of tech utopian crypto will save us or AI will save us. I, you know, I, I think those, those people are insane that we have to really take stock at this moment and realize that the, at least the dominant culture where it is leading.

So called civilization is into a very dark place. And this is a time to really deepen our practice, deepen our spiritual and our political practice, deepen our lines of solidarity. And, and really get straight with what’s happening and what’s ours to do and how we be in deepest service to the living world and the unfolding of consciousness.

And that’s really, for me, the only inquiry right now. 

Giancarlo: Yeah, but so what advice do you have for the young generation that might be out of college or maybe just out of high school and they want to help, they want to be an activist, be politically engaged, where, what advice do you have for them, where do they look, who should they join, where should they go?[00:48:00] 

Speaker 3: I’d say starting with being a good student of our culture, you know, if we spent a third of the time we do on self help stuff that we do, we would on understanding the political economy, we would already have a revolution on our hands, you know, and, and so to really be a good student of the culture, to really understand the impoverishment of the Western way of life.

And it’s imposition on the rest of the world. You know, I think if Westerners internalize that in some ways, that is the most important, we would do less harm, at least, you know, we wouldn’t be imposing our way of living and trying to get financial inclusion and so called development. In the geopolitical South and, and really trying to export the, you know, McDonald’s culture all around the world.

So I think trying to be really a good student of our culture. And then also the second thing I’d say is to disassociate from the culture. You know, for me, this was such a huge part of my spiritual political awakening is to realize that just because you’re part of the culture, it doesn’t [00:49:00] mean that you ratify to accept it.

Yeah. Right. Every aspect of the culture and the more critical we are of the culture, the more interesting alternatives will emerge. And then I would say maybe the third part is this spiritual political praxis that there is no outside and there is no inside in a very real sense that we have to deepen our internal work, you know, the meditation, the mantra, the silence, the dancing, the tantra, the psychedelic exploration, you know, of course, done with responsibility with intact Cultures that know how to hold, especially the psychedelic medicines and to find the elders, you know, who can, who can navigate these terrains, but then also just start to create embodied cultures themselves.

We can do this, you know, to create embodied post capitalist culture does not require millions of people. We could do that with three people. We could find two [00:50:00] other people and be in discussion about our disdain for the culture, what values we want to live by, start practices of, you know, gifting circles, of sharing and bringing values like generosity and altruism and solidarity with life and interbeing and co liberation into our spaces and start to really educate ourselves together as groups of people because these concentric circles, they spread out, they fan out and connect.

To other concentric circles, creating these like networks of possibility and these islands of coherence in, in, in this time of collapse. 

Giancarlo: Thank you very much. This is very interesting. Very well said. If people want to read your work, do you have a newsletter or a book, some articles where people can 

Speaker 3: hear more about you?

I’ll send you the links for the article, the few articles, the book, Post Capitalist Philanthropy, Healing Wealth in Time of Collapse. The book is out. It’s been out for about a year now. You know, there’s a focus on philanthropy, but philanthropy is really just the [00:51:00] foil. And, and in some ways, just one externality of the system.

So you could just read it in that way. And it has a lot of the kind of analysis on power and where do we go from here. embedded in that and kind of links the mystical and, and the political. 

Giancarlo: Amazing. Amazing. I’m going to come and see you then. And then I’m going to report from Tierra Valiente if you invite me.

Speaker 3: Please. Anytime you have an open invite, we’d love to have you here. 

Giancarlo: Thank you so much, Alnore. And congratulations for your work. Thank you. We’re all very grateful. 

Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you, [00:52:00] brother.