Oh Justice

Hi everyone, I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story, and imagination. The Emerald. All that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hello, friends. This is the first episode release of 2024, and I wanted to take a minute at the beginning here to say a couple things. So first, I want to thank everyone who listens to the podcast.

2023 was a year of really vibrant growth for the Emerald, and this is because of you, and your time and attention and participation. Thank you. I feel the power and potency of community growing here. And I want to acknowledge that. And I particularly want to thank podcast patrons for making all this possible. Your support is what allows me to do this full time.

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So there are a few things I want to say from the heart about 2023. Mostly that, as I think we all know, 2023 was a profoundly difficult year on the global stage. I know that we've all been feeling that. I've been feeling it acutely, and this has already made its way into podcast episodes, and it's a big part of this episode. I've been feeling the loss and the destruction.

and the trauma that's being inflicted on a generation of children. And it's been a lot to sit with. And there have been days when I've felt helpless about it, and days that I've shed a lot of tears. and I know that you can relate. This episode is about justice. It's from the heart, and it's my little attempt, I guess. to share some stories and perspectives that may be helpful in these times, and to allow others to share their stories too. And any time you talk about justice,

friction is going to arise. So there may be perspectives in this episode that resonate and those that don't. The invitation is to welcome that friction. In a world where none of us, and I mean none, have absolutely definitive answers on how to move us forward, in which there are dozens of perspectives, see what it is to simply invite that friction in.

The power of story is that it gets into places that rationalist logic can't. That even full knowledge of historical facts and larger rationalizations and justifications can't. There's a time and place for discussions based on historic fact. And there's a time to let story weave its magic. As I think you know from listening to the podcast, this isn't offering from the heart.

And my heart has been feeling a whole lot in the last few months. As I'm recording this episode, the United States has just vetoed a third UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The whole world, basically, is recognizing the need for a ceasefire. Because there are two million people in Gaza who are inordinately suffering.

at the hands of a military power that is using the full weight of its military on a civilian population. As one of my guests today says, there is a deep asymmetry in this situation. And I think, I hope, that anyone with eyes to see and a heart that feels, if they're being honest and can get beyond the language of justification, can see this and feel this.

This is an issue I've been very close to for a very long time. I've been calling for a ceasefire since this conflict started. And what that means in practice is that I've been actually calling. and writing my elected representatives consistently since October 7. I've been donating to relief organizations. I've been encouraging podcast patrons to donate. I've been speaking about the issue on the podcast itself.

And I'm doing this. I'm supporting calls for a ceasefire for a simple reason. I don't see how perpetuating large-scale violence on an entire population is going to result in security or safety. or in any type of positive change that we want in the world. I also believe that any nation, any nation that violates international agreements on human rights, and particularly war crimes, should be held accountable.

If what I'm saying is difficult for Israeli or Jewish listeners, I'll just say this. My position on opposing the use of state violence on civilian populations is consistent. In other words, I oppose it no matter who is doing it. I opposed it 22 years ago when it was the United States retaliating for 9-11. I was in New York on 9-11.

deeply affected by it. And in the days after 9-11, opposing military retaliation against Afghanistan was not a popular position to take. But I didn't see how it was going to lead anywhere positive. and 22 years later, we can see that it didn't. Right now in Sudan, for those that are paying attention, there are atrocities happening on a similar scale to what's happening in Gaza, and I oppose that too.

I'm always going to be advocating for a peaceful resolution that addresses deep structural imbalance. Just so you know that about me. I've always held international law as an imperfect but necessary barometer by which nations should be held accountable. And I'm always going to be encouraging looking at the historic roots of conflict rather than acting out of vengeance.

I'm always going to be looking at deeper systemic imbalances and how those imbalances can be resolved at the roots rather than in cycles of collective punishment. And at the same time, and I'll say this very transparently and very directly and honestly, I'm wary of the internet discourse around this issue and what it has become.

I think it's important to recognize that people aren't going to react in the same way to a crisis, and that whatever we consider the only way to act is not, in fact, that. Ultimately, whatever we want to create in this world... is going to be created in conjunction with people that we disagree with. This is true from the smallest communal endeavors to the largest global issues. And it's up to us on an ongoing basis as we take action the way that we feel is right.

To see if we can do some of the things that I talk about in this podcast. Holding uncomfortable paradoxes. Understanding deeper time frames and flows. Understanding the value of listening. the vibrancy and potential change that exists in spaces in between. We are in these challenging times together. I hold you with me in these times together, whoever you are.

I value what you have to say and I hope you value what I have to say, even if you don't always agree. And I'm asking, for whatever it's worth, I'm asking. I'm directly asking the larger forces of nature. The animate powers that govern these things help us find better days. Help us find better days. Help us small human beings' powers help us find better days.

For 2024, may there be better days ahead. May we know the spark of life and foster it. And may it come to light our lives and the lives of those around us. In recognition of the great power that moves all this, that is all this, may we find better days. There's a quote. I'm sure you've heard it.

Anyone who works for social or environmental justice has certainly heard it. It's given hope to many, uplifted many in the midst of the struggle. For me, when I was working full-time on human rights issues, it helped me on many occasions. It helped me hold the immediate pain and suffering of the world in the context of a broader vision. You know, those times when we need to be reminded that the road might be hard. It might come with setback after setback.

It might seem hopeless sometimes, but that there's a bigger picture also. So, as an activist, I quoted this quote many times. It was on pamphlets we passed out at protests. It became indelibly etched into my mind and heart. You know the quote. It's from Martin Luther King Jr. He said, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. It's a powerful quote. And yet, as much as it is quoted...

as much as it is inspirationally and aspirationally invoked, how often do we actually sit with the implications, the deep implications of it? For the implications are pretty big. The implications get to things that postmodernists and recovering religiosos don't want to ask themselves very often. The implications are ones that we tiptoe around all the time.

It suggests, in fact, it pretty much definitively states that there's an inherent justice to the universe, that there's an inherent morality, and that all this, all this confusion and ignorance... and the seemingly endless cycles of pain, the futility, the alienation, the suffering of the children, the grief, the horror, the violence. All this is somehow held within a greater justice.

And we as a world are making our way, however slowly, one day, towards a greater human justice that mirrors that larger justice. We are moving however slowly towards a justice that mirrors the great injustice of the universe, of the cosmos. You know, someday we'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun.

someday when the world is much brighter. And, of course, this idea of a greater justice rubs up against a lot of humanist and enlightenment tropes that would see no inheritance to the universe at all. and would therefore see justice as an entirely human invention. Justice, in this view, is something human beings create. It's what we make it. And quotes like MLKs might help inspire us to get there, but aren't an indication that there's actually a there, there, right?

The idea that the universe would self-organize around what are seemingly human feelings and values, love, equality, fairness, justice, seems like a stretch to the Enlightenment rationalist mind. And so, while it's a great quote for inspiring activists and reminding them, reminding us of the larger picture, for many it probably lives in the realm of the aspirational.

And the deeper question of the inherent justice to the universe is skipped over. But that question at the center, it's a really important one. It's important not to skip over it because it may be the deepest question there is. Albert Einstein supposedly said that each one of us has to ultimately decide if the universe is friendly or not.

Are we living in a universe of lifeless collisions in space? A world in which the cold brutality of nature cares nothing for the lives of individual beings? Are we living in a universe of impersonal forces? even as some see it randomness? Or is there something inherent? A larger law? Tell me, Bono, is love actually the higher law? Does love always find a way?

Does justice triumph in the end? Is there anything resembling a plan? And this isn't about coming to some immediate definitive answer. And I'm... definitely not going to spend this episode trying to convince you of anything. For me, it's about asking questions that stir the coals of an ancient fire away. A recurring fire that is necessary to stir a dialogue that opens up when I ask, straight to the universe, what is this place and where is it all going? Why, oh justice?

Why does it unfold the way it does? Who are you, creation? As opposed to this tiptoeing around it, ignoring it, pretending life is about something else other than getting to the heart of it all. Even if the heart is a great ruby-encrusted mystery. Do you feel the ruby-encrusted mystery at the heart of the question of what is the nature of this place? At the heart of the question... Why? Why these great cycles of joy and pain? Maybe so. Maybe not.

But ultimately, I don't have to tell you why this question is up for me right now, right? I don't have to tell you. I don't have to tell you of the heartbreak of the world. Of the child in the rubble. Of all the unnumbered tears. I don't have to tell you because I know that you are hurting as I am. And whatever nation you are from, whatever nation you are listening in from, I bet that you are hurting as I am at the state of this mad, mad world. I'm a parent.

You think a day goes by when I don't feel the suffering of the children in my heart. You think every time I look into my children's eyes these days, I don't see the children of Gaza. See their mud-caked faces, their tear-stained faces, their blood-stained faces. Oh, justice. The children. So small. amidst the great cold wheels of history turning. So small we all are, it makes me want to ask why. Why, oh justice? Why? Oh.

Just as if in the vastness of these great cycles, there is one who is listening. I ask you, lead us to better days. Lead us to better days. Oh, our Hyundai, our Hyundai, our Hyundai. Lead us to better days. Lead us to the sunflower fields of late summer. The pomegranates red and ripening. Lead us to better days.

Sometimes it seems laughable, right, the suggestion that there's a higher justice to all this. I mean, look at this place. Look at it. What did I say in the last episode? Billionaires gorging while children are bombed in the street. Some have everything, some have nothing. Who decides? Some never have to work a day in their lives, have everything handed to them on a plate. Some have to toil and sweat from the moment they're born till the moment they die.

As Theodore Parker wrote in the essay that inspired MLK's quote, Many a knave, many a scoundrel, is rich, sleek, and honored, while the just man is poor, hated, and in torment. The Silesian merchant fattens on the weavers' tears and eats their children's bones. Three million slaves earn the enjoyment of Americans who curse them in the name of Christ. In the North, capital is a tyrant over labor.

How sad is the condition of the peasantry of Christendom? How can there be a larger justice? How can there be any sort of higher law that would allow this? One of my guests on this episode has spent four decades in prison. He's still there. The last three decades, the last 32 years, have been for a crime that he didn't commit.

Another was imprisoned at age 13 for participating in a non-violent protest. She was thrown into solitary confinement, beaten, tortured. I can't even tell you some of what she suffered. And then we complain when, you know, it takes too long for our chai latte to arrive. That person took our place in line. That's not fair, we cry. As if the universe is supposed to be fair. Where's the justice? Where's the great divine design? Where is the light amid the oak leaves? If there is some...

Great turning of some great wheels at play here, Justice. Sometimes it is too big for me to see. Oh, mystery, some days it is too vast for me to see. If there is a great song that in its singing determines which ones live and die, which ones perish and which ones thrive, which ones laugh and which ones cry, some days it is too... comprehensibly vast for me to see. I just keep coming back to the children. Why them? Why not me?

Why this child and not the other? And the mind numbs and the heart shuts when we hear these statistics like 27,000 dead. Or even... 364 people slaughtered at a music festival. The mind seeks to categorize it. The mind seeks out useless terms like justified. But beneath the attempt to categorize as a raw wound, a raw pain, a raw terror, so simple, so deep, how, oh, how could it be? How could life mean so little? How could a just universe let this happen? Why justice?

So these are some of the big critiques of theism, right? Why would a just God allow all this suffering to happen to good people? Why wouldn't God intervene? And even though I don't see the great power of the universe as particularly interventionist, there have been times in this life when I have found myself calling out to justice, do something.

Do something about all this, like my mom yelling at Darth Vader in the movie theater when I was 13. Yelling while Luke is lying there getting zapped by the Emperor over and over again. Do something. Have you ever gotten just a... Tiny, tiny taste of this. Out in the wilderness with things not going your way. Suddenly terrified that nature's going to sweep you off the side of that mountain without even blinking.

I know that any mountaineers listening to this know what I'm talking about. And suddenly you're calling out to nature. Theists and atheists alike are calling out to nature, do something. Come to my aid, universe. But the only response is the whistling wind. The only response is, the mountain will go on being the mountain. Time will go on being time. And all we are, perhaps, is food.

for time. In the mountains, the impersonal aspect of nature presents itself just as often as nature's intimate personhood, and the steep granite, windswept faces as much as they sing the song of the beauty of nature, also reinforce the fact that nature doesn't care one whit about us. We'll snuff us out by the millions. Nature will kill us all in the end.

So, it's easy to see how people would come to feel that there's no justice to nature. The hyena sneaks into the den and devours all the lion cubs the whole litter. Eats them all, every single one. Apollo and Artemis, so blindingly bright like nature herself, so unfathomable like nature herself, so infinitely cruel like nature herself. Apollo and Artemis spare not one of Niobe's seven children. Not one. Arrow by arrow. Child by child.

Niobe on her knees pleading enough, enough justice has been done, at least just spare one. They spare not one. It's easy to say no. Nature is not just at all. And yet, is there not a justice to the way the waters flow? Is there not a justice to the swelling of grapes on the vine? Is there not a justice to the force that gives us everything and then takes away everything that I call mine? Is there not a justice?

To time. Is there not a justice to the movement of the wave? To how kingdoms gather and rise and crest and fall? Is there not justice to it all? Is there not justice to the way that verses depart and choruses resolve? Is there not justice to it all? Justice in the ebb. Justice in the flow. Justice to the times when we feel held in Providence's arms. And justice when we ask, where did justice go? Today, we're going to dive into this charged word, justice.

As much as it inspires hope and visions of a better world, these days it is fraught with doubt, with cynicism, with bitterness. So many tears it carries with it. So much anger, so much pain. Like everything else in the modern world, people try to own it, too. The right says this about justice, the left says that. The U.S. military says this, the preacher says that.

The Supreme Court says this, the Buddhist teacher says that. But does justice live in these temporal definitions? Or is it something greater than all that? Is it something far? Vaster, yet far more alive. Is justice alive? Strange question, right? Yet, whether we realize it or not, we treat justice as a living being. For sometimes we fall on our knees before justice. Sometimes we shake our fist at her. Sometimes we envy those who...

fortune seems to favor and ask, why them? Why not me? Who are we asking? Some great balance, some great personification of the way things are supposed to be. Intangible something that sometimes seems to hold us close and shower us with fortune, and sometimes seems so, so far away that we have to strain to even see. Without even realizing it, we treat justice as a living being. And for many traditions, justice, indeed, is a living being. And the veins of that being extend through the waters.

And the hair of that being bristles in the grasses and moves in the wind. And the songs of that being are the songs of the land. And as the people attune to the songs and sing them, they guide the people on the right way to be. And so the movement of all this, all this according to some, is the movement of a vast and often imperceptible justice. And so for me, in times of deep challenge,

It's important to remember this and to pass this on. All the animate traditions I know of, from 65,000-year-old Aboriginal traditions to Tibetan Buddhist traditions to Native traditions across North and South America. to Chinese traditions, Celtic traditions, Christian traditions, all of them see a universe that operates within larger cycles of justice. A universe bristling with law.

unfolding within a larger pattern, spiraling not in chaos and randomness, but in order. And within that order, a deep justice present, a deep justice at play. Every tradition I've studied speaks to a greater law of nature, and what it means to live well within it, and what it looks like when people veer from it, and in times when humanity is reaping the consequences of veering from this alignment.

Understanding that amidst the pain and suffering and urgency of the immediate, all the immediate work we need to do, recognition of and reconnection to this greater justice, this greater law is vital. is necessary, is part of a reconnection to the living world around us. A world maybe, just maybe, teeming with the breath of justice. Oh. Justice. This time, on the Emerald.

justice. These are words that carry a lot of baggage, right? They conjure up images of sheriff's stars and the judiciary system and cop car lights in the rearview mirror and a whole lot of things that we'd rather avoid. Yet, tradition after tradition talks about the law of the land as something inherent, vibrant, alive, present. Present in the waters.

in the very support of the great dome of sky. Something inherent, a pattern, a way that things unfold. And it is the human being's task to learn to align to this law of the land. to this great interconnectivity, this web of life that longs to be recognized, that responds when sung to, that guides us on what it means to walk in harmony.

Imagine what an embedded sense of interconnected relationality would feel like. Can you? Of course you can. Because we all have a sense deep within us of what is aligned. There is a barometer in each being for alignment. This is inherent to human beings. It's gotten fragmented, abstracted, veiled, stunted with the rise of industrial modernity, but it's there.

I mean, it's right there in the words just and unjust, right? Like, just is the default setting. Just is the normative state. The very fact that we describe things as unjust... means that there's an implied justice that they have veered from. And this isn't just a human thing. Dozens of animal species, monkeys, wolves, elephants, dozens more. exhibit an agreed-upon sense of what is just, what is fair, what is called inequality aversion. Where do they get that from?

From the paper Wild Justice, quote, The literature of evolutionary biology is more and more speckled with the language of sociality. Cooperation, fairness, reciprocity, empathy, trust. consolation, altruism. A blossoming interest in justice is part of this larger trend. So, if all animate traditions have a sense of inherent justice,

And this sense of inherent justice is not limited to humans, but pervades the animal kingdom too? It suggests something, right? Something, you could say, fundamental to the design. And that's where maybe, again, we feel the cruelty of the world. And we want to say, how can this place possibly be just? And here's something that might be important to this discussion.

We're used to talking about justice as fairness. Like each individual is going to be treated fairly by the universe. And if we study ecology, we find really quickly that the priority of nature... is not on individual beings, but on ecosystems. Nature is forever balancing. And in its balance, entire populations, entire ecosystems rise and fall.

In a world that, as Sophie Strand recently reminded me, once spent a million years burning in what scientists call the Great Oxidation, and nearly all life on Earth was lost. A world that has gone through multiple mass extinction events and then risen again. Individual species, individual stories give way to a larger balance. And this is a key word.

Balance. You've seen, I'm sure, the image of justice personified. Justice holding in her hands, or in his hands sometimes, depending on the framework, scales. And justice, then, is seen as a cosmic force that perpetually balances. So despite all that we do, all the overstepping, all the excess, the overall equilibrium of the universe hasn't changed.

Despite it all, nature hasn't even blinked. Nature over billions, trillions of what we might now call years, over years beyond years, in and out of sight and mind, Nature self-balances, self-regulates, eternally unfolds in balance. And so, Earth... Ecology will replenish, will rise again. Even now it is rising in the midst of what we see as destruction. This is the justice of ecosystems.

If there is an excess too far in one direction, that excess will be curved. Like Franz Kafka says in The Castle, that is how the world itself corrects the deviations in its course and maintains the balance. And this is a tricky topic, right? Because looking around, we are acutely aware of environmental loss, and we must feel the grief we feel and take the action we need to take to help ecology.

And at the same time, a vision of nature as infinitely larger than the Anthropocene, larger than us, larger than our individual selves, is vital too. One can simultaneously hold grief over species loss. One can take action for the natural world and care deeply about every species suffering. And still hold that there is a larger movement at work. And that nature...

Holy nature, replenishing nature, birthing nature, in her great balancing act, has not been diminished one bit. This is the balance of nature. And are you not just nature? Are you not just mother? Do you not see to it that all things die and all things are born and all things ripen in their time? In many visions, nature and justice are one and the same thing. Nature is justice itself forever balancing. The Orphic hymn to nature.

The ancient Greek poetic invocation of nature itself speaks of what? Does it speak of birds, of sun rays, of fruit ripening on the vine, all those nature things? No, for some reason, the Orphic hymn to nature speaks about justice. It says nature is justice, supreme in might, whose general sway... The waters of the restless deep obey. Why would a hymn to nature be singing about justice? Unless justice were so embedded into natural systems as to be almost indistinguishable from nature itself.

unless the movement of waves themselves were a kind of justice. So when Indigenous Canadian Senator Murray Sinclair says, water flows downhill and that's a law, that's not just poetic, that's... a law water flows downhill and you know what goes up must come down that perhaps is justice too and here the rationalist mind jumps in and wants to say that's not justice that's

gravity. Those are just the laws of physics. And just for fun, let's add a comma to that sentence and see what happens. From those are just the laws of physics to those are just the laws of physics. See what we did there? The laws of physics are, in some strange way, just. And our deepest frameworks of justice are reflections of the laws we see playing themselves out all around us all the time.

And there is somehow a justice to the very foundation of nature. The justice of the ecosystem. Nobody can escape the laws of physics, says Tyson Youngaporta. So it's a good idea to adhere to first law whenever possible. Like, imagine if we lived in a world in which what went up didn't come down. If the billionaire could just hoard and hoard forever.

Like if Elon Musk actually were going to live forever and just keep accumulating and accumulating, growing and growing until he grew into kind of a... galaxy-gobbling trillion-year Jabba the Hutt-type interstellar man-boom monstrosity. And as he grows, everything he touches turns to X, like all the planets in our solar system are suddenly X.

And the Oort cloud is the X cloud and the Milky Way is Galaxy X. And it just keeps spreading and spreading and spreading. But no. Elon Musk is going to die. And all the other billionaires are going to die too. And that's justice. And they're not going to own anything more than anyone else when they're dead. And they're not going to look any better than anyone else when they're dead.

And all that talk of consciousness upload and gene modification and immortality is talk. Them billionaires going to die. And the skyscrapers they build, what's going to happen to all those skyscrapers? They're going to fall. And that is justice, too. And one ruler ascends the throne for a miserable, paranoid 13-year reign in which they constantly have to have one eye open so they're not poisoned by their own brothers. And then, whoops, they're dead, too.

And all that vying, all that jockeying for power, what did it amount to? As much as Mel Brooks might say, It's good to be the king. Probably not so much. Probably not so much at all. For all empires fall. All empires fall. Remember this, any empires who might be listening, any empires listening, you too shall fall. Oh, justice, the wave always crashes.

Everything is balanced within the great wave cycle of nature and time. And it's only impersonal, this great movement of waves across time. It's only cruel. if you haven't forged a personal relationship with it. So tell me, how is your heart relationship with time and with change? What is the state of your singing to the one who washes all this away? What are you offering to her who will devour you to one fateful day?

O Justice, tell us of how you arrive in waves. Waves of history, waves of action and reaction. That's one of the fundamental laws of physics, right? For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. This too is justice. For it means that we live in a responsive world. The fact that the universe is responsive... that actions ripple and reverberate according to harmonic laws, that's justice. The fact that there is environmental consequence is justice. This is nature responding.

When we dump plastic in the ocean, it returns to us on our pristine beaches. That's justice. Just as it is justice that bodies exposed to insane amounts of screen time will somatically rebel. and we'll have to re-evaluate our relationship with screens. The justice is in the somatics of it. Feel what I mean? In the actual vibrational movement of cause and effect. That's her purview.

That's her domain. As Tyson says, The land itself will administer justice when we fail to meet our obligations as a custodial species. It can take hundreds of years for the law of the land to terminate a community that continues to break the law, as can be seen in all the histories of the rise and fall of civilizations. Every civilization based on extraction, infinite growth, and expansion is terminated this way. And it is a punishment that's inescapable.

And in this great wave movement of rise and fall, of action and reaction, no amount of energy is either gained or lost. The universe stays in an overall state of equilibrium. And perhaps that's justice too. So one species might rise to dominance for a while, and then there's a change in the air, a change in the tide, there's the slightest movement in the stars, and all of a sudden, that species isn't dominant anymore.

And they die off and become food for what's coming next. And each strata, each layer of the earth tells a story of waves of justice, of the movement of bodies through time. of sunbeams captured and re-expressed as scales and feathers, feathers sealed in stone forever. Longing lovers, ancient tremors, oh, justice. The Egyptians say that each soul is measured.

Faint diamonds in a sky of treasures. And each passes on and gives itself over, turns itself over to something greater. Great movements, great crescendos, great rhymes. upon the unfathomable threshing floor called time, time, time. All that is dominant here on earth shall give up its place eventually, and something else will rise, and the lowest shall be highest, and the last shall be first, and that's justice.

Because the only thing actually dominant is the overarching balance. Yes, that's justice. Today's pauper will be tomorrow's king. And so the wheels of fortune turn and the bells of liberty ring. It might be a rags-to-riches story. It might be rags-to-riches and back-to-rags, like it was for Navin Johnson. Some might break free of the constraints of ancestral circumstance and climb their way to high yet lonely peaks.

And some might live their whole life in the town that they were born. Might never ever leave time. Some might listen to the wind and wonder what might have been time. And all who live, all who love, all who lose and love again. All who hope and all who regret, and those who turn away in bitterness, all who hoard and all who blame, and all who kill and all who maim, walk beneath the rays of the very same sun.

And that's justice. Oh, justice, as the alchemists say, the sun shines on the good and the wicked alike. The sun doesn't favor anyone or withhold its light from anyone. And the sun shines on the prisons and the battlefields and the gardens. It shines on our deepest failings and our most profound loves. And some will wake in regret, and some in sorrow, and some in stress.

Some will wake in danger and some will sleep in fitful rest. And the sun remains the sun. And each day there's hope that we might rise out of the rubble and grow again. Hope that perhaps the faintest light might reach the dormant seeds within us, and something might sprout and find its way towards the light again. The sun shines on everyone, and everyone longs for better days.

And all the ways we try to hide, and all the ways we defend, and all the ways we turn away, and all the ways we retract, and all the ways we shoulder vast burdens and then blame and then attack, are utterly transparent. before the light of the sun. Transparent. Have you noticed? It's not a world in which things stay hidden forever. It's not a let's just see what we can get away with kind of world.

Because no one really gets away with anything. As Tyson says, quote, you're part of the land, so its laws will always catch up with you. And that's one that doesn't just apply to them. It applies to each of us. You know, we're like shouting at other people, saying you're part of the land, so its laws will always catch up with you. Yeah, well, we're part of the land too, and its laws will always catch up with us. There's nowhere to hide.

And there's justice in that transparency. If you build a life on robbing and stabbing and looting and shooting, then one day, if the old song is to be believed, you're going to hear a voice say, come. And then, where are you going to run to? We can't run anywhere, and that's justice too. We are in this responsive self-corrective matrix together. We are in the sea of cause and effect together. There's no escape. Wall the have-nots out and you find you start to corrode from the inside.

We can try to hide from that growing, gnawing lack within us. We can put on a fake face, we can stuff it into Balenciaga shoes, we can try to soothe it by taking endless pictures of ourselves from all possible angles and obsessively counting likes, but we can't ultimately run anywhere. The hollow, superficial hunger of modernity plays itself out in bodies. The relentless stream of empty material and spiritual calories plays itself out in bodies.

Modernity gluttonous and malnourished at the very same time. Oversatiated and utterly empty at the very same time. The effects of consumption culture play themselves out in bodies through the living reality of cause and effect. bodies that stagnate, bodies that mope, bodies that obsess, bodies that come to realize that the side effect of downers is stress. The side effect of holding the river of feeling down is that the river bubbles up to the right and to the left.

This is the living flow of justice. Everyone suffers consequences in this great web of life. Do some suffer more tangible, horrible consequences? Absolutely. This is one of the most maddening things about justice. Why should the poor pay for the greed of the wealthy? Why should the most vulnerable face floods, become refugees, get cancer because 3M dumped forever chemicals into that river, into this fluid, responsive stream? Why?

Why should the populations that seem the least responsible for excess suffer the most? Why? Why, oh justice? I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I want to have a serious conversation with justice. And it's good to make it a direct conversation. For when we feel justice as a living force, when we bring justice close and personal, We can spark a dialogue. And I bet that all of us, regardless of circumstance, would have some pretty direct things we'd want to say aloud to justice.

For all of us, as Jarvis J. Masters reminds us, all of us have lost something. lost and looking out on this world of incomprehensible loss we can ask aloud why why is the world this way why do some suffer and some rise Why the widow and why the orphaned child? Why? We can let those bitter tears fall. Sometimes shake our fist and raise our heads to the justice above and ask why.

So this is different than assuming justice is a set of abstract or impersonal laws handed down from above, or an arbitrary contract between human beings. This is opening up a dialogue to something living. A dialogue that has the potential to move some things in us. So instead of focusing on abstractions, like whether that person on the internet agrees with all my political points or not,

I can bring some depth and texture to my own relationship with the cosmos instead and say, Justice, today, you've got me all knotted up in my head. I can't see what's next. I don't know what this world wants of me. I can't see the sea for the waves or the waves for the sea. You've got me perplexed. Perplexed like the way that Ram Prasad shouts aloud to the Divine Mother Kali, to time itself, to the movement of the Great Wheel of Justice.

You confounding mother, the devotional poet cries. Sometimes you're closer to me than my very own heartbeat. And sometimes you seem like the farthest thing in the universe. Mother, says Ram Prasad, you lured me into this world. You said let's play, only to cheat my hope out of its hope with your playing. How many times, mother, he asks, are you going to trundle me on this wheel like a blindfolded ox grinding out oil? You've got me tied to this old trunk of a world flogging me on and on.

What have I done to deserve this? You ever been there? What have I done to deserve this? I mean, how confounding is the mother of the universe? How confounding is this life on earth? How confounding is time? Just like our own mothers confounded us, remember when we're little and sometimes she's right there crying along with us with a heart that pours with sympathy?

And sometimes she's so cruel she laughs at our pain. No lollipop today. And sometimes Justice says, there, there, my child. And sometimes Justice in her most maddening face says nothing but wait. And sometimes justice says, do what you please. And sometimes justice brings us right down to our knees. You felt it right when justice brings us to our knees.

And then we cry out like children, like maybe we used to cry to our parents. Why did you even have me? Why did you even bring me into this world? Look at this place, universe. Why even go on this journey at all? And then I think of every relationship I ever entered into. And I knew full well going in that there would be pain. I knew that there would be love and I knew that there would be loss. And I knew that there would be pain.

And knowing the pain, I chose to enter into that relationship anyway. I chose love anyway. I don't know, maybe the universe made the exact same choice. And knowing all that would come... The worlds, the oceans, teeming with waves. Knowing this would be a place of blood and sweat. Knowing the sweet salt sweat that would pour through the pores of lovers and laborers.

and those in the heat of the dance, and those in the throes of pain, knowing that blossoms would erupt from summer mountains just as rains of horrid bombs fall. Knowing the full scope of this maddening, beautiful mess. Knowing it all. She chose it all anyway. She chose it all anyway. Because love is worth it all. Every tear. Love is worth it all. Who knows, Justice? Who knows? I don't know.

Perhaps all we can do is feed her and remember her and sing to her and break bread when bread's aplenty and share bread in times of lack. I open my palms to the sky, says Jarvis J. Masters. He's a poet, an author, a Buddhist practitioner, and he's an inmate at San Quentin Prison. Surrendering my human hopelessness that it doesn't despair me. For life needs no more.

No more despair, I pray. And amidst all the despair, is there not a justice to the way that the winds blew? And is there not a justice to the grape swelling on the vine? And is there not a justice to time? Time is just one of the names of the living force of justice. In ancient Greece, before she was abstracted from her living body, justice had many names. Daiki, Themis, and others. Says Roberto Colasso, quote, Such are the names that embody necessity, and they are all women.

While Kronos dreams deep in Ambrosia, and in his dreams calculates the measures of the universe. These women keep watch, making sure that every being plays its part no more and no less so that nothing and no one may exceed their established bounds. Yet all life is excess. That is why we find these women on the prowl everywhere. The actual ebb and flow of cause and effect. This is justice. This is the goddess. The goddess and justice were once.

indistinguishable, says Donna Marie Giancola in her paper Justice and the Face of the Great Mother. Quote, As an original manifestation of the Great Mother, justice is not seen as separate from reality. nor as imposition, but indeed as the necessary limit measure of creativity, not fragmented as part of a social construction, but as the whole embodiment of energy.

As the primordial mother of all life energy, her justice is organic and alive. Do you feel it? Alive? A force in this universe that is ever-present? Ever near, that attends to everything? Every current and every ripple of action and reaction with what you could call responsive exactitude? What was her name in ancient Greece? This dark queen of exactitude. Do you know? Her name was Nemesis. Nemesis, whose name means the giver of what is due.

Nemesis Adrastea, she was sometimes called, the giver of what is due from whom there is no escape. Nemesis, stable and beautiful as Colasso describes her, with rich, thick hair. Nemesis, the living, breathing balance of ecosystems that reigns in kings, curbs empires, ensures that what goes up comes down and all amassed will be scattered and all scattered will be gathered again.

Have you heard of her? She had a sanctuary on the banks of the river Asapos at Ravnos. There, amid the buckthorn bushes. There, by the shores of the sea. Nemesis on the prowl everywhere. responding in her glorious responsiveness to the words we say, to each ripple we cast in this sea of vibration. Nemesis, quote,

directs human affairs in such a manner as to restore the right proportions or equilibrium wherever it has been disturbed. She is the cosmic rule that balances every excess. As the goddess of proportion, she carries a measuring rod. A bridle, scales, a sword, and a scourge, and she rides in a chariot drawn by griffins. Yes, she carries a bridle, as Mazamedes wrote 1900 years ago.

an adamantine bridle with which she reigns in the very universe. Nemesis, he cries, winged balancer of life, dark-faced goddess. The one who bridles the world. The one who reigns it all in. Thank you, Nemesis. Giver of what is due. Because this life is one of constant give and take. This life, as Colasso says, is one in which one thing is wounded, and then as it writhes in response, it wounds. I'll say that again. This life is one in which one thing is wounded.

And then as it writhes in response, it wounds. Ever see that play itself out on the global stage? How about within our own hearts? And in a world of such necessary balance and restraint, this life is not a blank check, not an open permission slip. There is what you could call debt. There is a debt that we owe.

We take from this world, we feed off this world. Beings die so that we might live, and so there is debt. And where there is debt, there is offering. There is ceremony. There is giving back. There is ritual acknowledgement. There is a mitigation that needs to happen. So to wake up to animacy is to wake up to responsibility, to accountability, to law.

Not as abstractions, but as living realities. To wake up to the living world and its cycles and its flows is to wake up to a profound responsibility. It's the responsibility of being alive. in a web of interdependent life. And that responsibility is to what? To honor? To thank? To align to larger cycles? To give back? All of which are names for love. The responsibility we have to the larger order of the cosmos is to love.

To be kind and joyful, to grieve, to feel, to not shy away from the pain of the world. To be in awe of larger cycles, even as we are awake to an immediate world that is full of pain and strife. and to be comforted, to be nourished. We have a responsibility before the great justice of the universe, perhaps, to love one another, to care for one another. and be nourished. I'm saying this because of deep-seated reactions that exist in a Puritan-descended culture around the word responsibility.

Acknowledgement of this living presence of justice does not merely offer a heavy-hearted Puritan responsibility with a capital R, a burdensome task list, aligning to what indigenous traditions have called law. The larger flow of nature, the way of things, the greater vision of balance, does not simply mean beating ourselves up and others up for how far human beings have strayed from this law. It also offers a profound comfort.

a deep relief, a balm for restless hearts and souls. It offers the opportunity for surrender. and realignment to the understanding that there are in fact deeper movements and cycles at play in this mysterious universe. It means opening ourselves up to the deep nourishment and gifts that such an alignment can provide as well.

Gifts that we see embodied in the elders of traditions from all across the world. That we see born by communities that sing out loud to these higher laws of vibrancy in sweat lodges and in southern black churches. A deep... peace and acceptance, an unshatterable foundation built on relationality, an unextinguishable spark of life that sees and recognizes the life within all things.

and a sense that while there are urgencies right before us that absolutely need attending to, there is also a larger picture. And I'm going into this piece because of the pain that's going on right now. The pain I'm feeling and I know that others are feeling. And very specifically, I see a whole lot of activists these days. A lot of people who care these days. Feeling so acutely the loss of ecology.

so acutely aware of the injustices, so acutely aware of all the suffering in the world, inundated with all of it, despairing at the sorry state of human justice, ecological justice, planetary justice, and I see people breaking under the pressure. Because it's also a function of fragmented modernity, perhaps, that there are people who are so acutely sensitized to the grief of the world, exposed to all the horrible things unfolding in the world at once.

but at the same time have no overarching context, no felt embodied sense of greater cycles at play. The combination of this hyper-awareness of all bad things... combined with the legacy of what you could call the Puritan Enlightenment Burden, a humanist individualist process-oriented vision that demands that we take all the pain of the world on our shoulders and process it all individually and assume it's ours to fix, and yet points to nothing greater? No larger animate forces or movements?

No justice within nature that operates far beyond us, that has no ceremony through which to anchor to this larger animate law. This is a recipe for brokenness. Brokenness is important. Brokenness means we feel. To let ourselves feel that brokenness is vital at times. But there's a point at which brokenness too reaches a breaking point.

There is a brokenness through which one is renewed and replenished and finds the strength to carry on, and there is a brokenness in which one is shattered, psychologically orphaned, a brokenness that can break people permanently. I know people who are so devastated by the destruction of the Anthropocene that they can't carry on a functional relationship. This is a real thing. And the modern mind jumps in here and says, well, then maybe it's my lot to be broken.

The world is breaking after all. The modern mind doesn't want to let us connect to a larger vision. We're afraid it's bypassing. We're afraid it would take us from the immediacy and rawness of the experience of simply showing up for the pain and grief and strife. We're afraid it's privilege that allows us to connect to that larger vision. And that's an interesting one.

Because I've seen over and over again, people with the least privilege, people in the worst situations, hold a larger spiritual understanding, a larger contextual view. It's not... Bypassing, it's not privilege to understand that there's a larger flow and to connect to that larger flow. It's fundamental to being a human being. You remember a human being? A human being who doesn't always have the right answers. Who doesn't always say the right things on the internet.

who has responsibilities before creation but also isn't personally responsible for all the crap going on in the world right now. A human being. in a world that unfolds in spite of all the human silliness, unfolds according to a greater law, embedded in the land, as the aboriginal traditions tell us.

sung out from the stars. Time and time again, I've seen how the cultures that are the most deeply embedded in this deeper vision have the most spiritual and communal support in the midst of these apocalyptic times. While we in the modern West play the isolation game yet again. Puritanically assign ourselves the role of being hung out on the margins to dry yet again.

Being punished and punisher because that's the only way we know how to embody what we call justice yet again. If the Anthropocene is calling on us to do something, it's calling on us to actually live alternatives. to embody alternatives to the fracture of modernity. Alternatives expressed in how we communicate, how we grieve, how we celebrate, and how we afford ourselves space to let go.

And that might mean opening up to grace. And that might mean surrendering to higher powers. And that might even mean a stubborn insistence on finding joy in the midst of it all. It might mean that this world is falling down around me, but hallelujah anyhow. I met CNN commentator and activist Van Jones at a conference on AI recently.

And I was really impressed with some of the things that he had to say. So even though this isn't often a guest appearance by a CNN commentator kind of podcast, I wanted to speak further with him. Communities of color, as he said, have lived with the end of the world for a long time now. They've lived with dire, dire consequences for a long time now.

They've lived amidst death and forcible relocation and the demolition of safety nets for a long time. And they've found a way. How? It's that hallelujah anyhow, spirituality. You know, you had black folks who were enslaved, black folks who were discriminated against, black folks who were lynched, black folks who were hung, black folks who were beaten, black folks who were raped, black folks who were castrated. All that brutality happened. And on Sunday morning, people still went to church.

and saying and move the rafters hallelujah anyhow no matter what you do to us you're not going to take our joy you're not going to take our humanity You're not going to make us feel that we're anything less than the children of a very high God. Hallelujah. Anyhow, you cannot take our joy. That spiritual inheritance, that spiritual...

power, that spiritual superpower that comes out of oppressed people is the fuel humanity needs to survive. A spiritual vision is the foundation of how people have actually survived times of cultural apocalypse.

Spiritual practice has been essential in times of crisis. Not just the recognition of a larger flow, of a larger justice, a larger balance, but that... day in and day out practice of connecting to it when times are tough, of being at times baffled by it, crying out to it, being nourished and replenished by it. sharing in communal revelation of it, breaking bread in its name even as we question its inner workings out loud, and then returning to its embrace anew.

This is an embodied relationship with the larger movements of the cosmos. It doesn't mean that we have to pretend to understand all of its workings. But it means that we're showing up. Even when showing up causes friction. And in that showing up, we are supported in deeper ways than we knew possible. Palestinian-American activist Nadia Ershad Gilbert speaks about the role that her spiritual practice has had in how she copes with the ongoing devastation of Gaza, of her familial homeland.

My spiritual connection, my faith has really been the continuous anchor and the most fundamental part of this experience. of the experience of life, but also and especially in a moment like this. I think that we are lying to ourselves if we think we can have all the answers without turning to something greater than us to guide us.

and to hold us through it. I'm so grateful for my faith because I was raised, and I know that this is not the case for a lot of people, but I was raised with faith in a way that made it a refuge for me and a place to return to, a return to truth and a return to love and the kind of love that is not blinding or ignoring or glazing over.

something which to me really isn't love at all, but the kind of love that really aims to witness and see in fullness. I think that talking about this and talking about, you know, the topic of spirituality is very... hot at the moment and there's many opinions about it and there's you know many perceptions of what being spiritual or spiritual practice means and perhaps in ways that make it seem a little bit

up in the clouds or a little bit disconnected from Earth. But I think it's the most grounded thing that we can do. is to recognize that we are both here on this earth and there's also something greater and something intangible that all of us experience in our lives. And a deeper wisdom we can tap into within our hearts that we know is there and that is just at the core of every human. And that deeper vision isn't to take us into a false sense of everything's all right or...

don't worry it's all happening for a reason, or it's all love ultimately so don't worry about what's right in front of your eyes, it's not to bypass. That vision is to simultaneously open one's heart to the brokenness of the world. and to find the trust in something greater. That vision is specifically four times of chaos, and it provides the somatic tools that we need that are necessary for navigating such times.

As Islamic scholar and Duke University professor Omid Safi says, You know, sometimes when I think about just in my own lifetime, it sometimes used to feel like there would be periods. of chaos and then you would have like some smooth sailing and you know then it seemed like okay then the chaos was starting to happen a little bit more regularly and now

One would be excused if you thought that the whole damn thing is just a cycle of chaos. It's just a chaos within chaos, within crisis, on top of crisis. I think what that really calls for is cultivating a new practice which is learning to rejuvenate spiritually. physically, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, but especially spiritually. While in the middle of a chaos, we may not have, at least for some time,

those periods of smooth sailing. And one should always add that for some poor folk, Black folk, undocumented folk, maybe there's never been a period of smooth sailing, at least not. for a very, very long time. But that ability to tap into something, into a kind of spiritual practice that it's not just about happiness. It's not just about self-help. It's not just about helping you cope, but some notion of connection with something that is both

grander than you and more expansive than you. That your life, my life, our life is intertwined with trees and clouds and... The singing of birds and brooks. And what happens to my sisters and brothers, in a way, is also happening to me. So when you say... Many people are feeling despair. I think one of the first things that I would say is let's also be grateful for the fact that our hearts are breaking.

Because if the alternative is to be a cold-hearted human who closes their eyes to the suffering of others, or worse, sees it and chooses to... respond with cruelty or lack of concern a thousand times over give me heart-shattering pain. At least I'm reminded that I have a heart, I have a soul. I'm capable of love and compassion. And then to find that practice that does rejuvenate. So we've got to demand better of our spiritual traditions.

I think that that's the difference between a kind of self-help, individualistic, capitalistic model and kind of a genuine spiritual path that at some point says,

There's sacrifice involved. There is transformation that is needed. There's connection that we have to reestablish between us and the trees, us and the water, us and... our strangers and our neighbors, I think we deserve that kind of a more gritty, not smooth model of a spiritual life a religious life a gritty spirituality that does not turn its back on the suffering of the world

Even as it provides anchor for us in the most challenging of times. You feel what I mean? So, on the one hand, in the face of a world beset with strife, we have a post-modern self-help spirituality. that might even try to pretend that strife doesn't exist. Or if it does exist, it's just the way it is and has been forever. That would turn its back on it altogether in favor of blissing out. And so...

In response to this, people often reject spirituality as out of touch. But in the rejection of spirituality as any type of solution for times like these? we lose a fundamental lens through which to understand what's actually happening. Because what is happening can be seen as a spiritual crisis. So where does the spiritual practice and orientation come into play?

is I do not think that we're only and exclusively dealing with allocating finite resources. This is not only an economic... crisis though it is that every single one of them it's not only a political crisis obviously it is that we're watching the whole entire world community asking for a ceasefire And one country, which we happen to call home, three times vetoing a global motion for a ceasefire. That's a broken down system. So it is an economic crisis. It is.

a political crisis, but it's also a moral and spiritual crisis. Religion and spirituality are not just about sitting in your bedroom, kneeling underground with your eyes closed and hands clasped and whispering some magic phrases to the cosmic Santa Claus. At some point, the idea... behind almost any mystical tradition worth its salt. It's not so much that God is one, whatever one understands that deity to be. It's that there is oneness.

There is unity. The human self, the broader human community, what we think of as nature, even though we ourselves are nature.

the stars and the planets the angels and the demons and all the way out to the divine realm we're all interwoven together and part of the reason why these political crises are also spiritual crises is that it really betrays it's an apocalypse it reveals to us the limited understanding that many of us, particularly those with the most destructive access to power, have of not seeing themselves as connected.

of actually having a worldview in which fellow human beings are not even less than human, they are subhuman, they're unhuman. You hear these politicians using language referring to their fellow human beings, in this case Palestinians, as animal humans. And this is not said by people who have a great love for animals. I think one of the things that we need to do is how do we not become the mirror image of the very thing that we find so loathsome.

To use the language of the Sufi tradition, how do we respond? And we have to respond. You cannot be a witness to genocide and to the... catastrophic causes of human suffering that we're seeing without in some ways responding. How do we respond without simply reacting? How do we respond without just mirroring it back to them? Seeing the enemy, as it were, as being equally unhuman and subhuman.

I don't know how you do that without a serious spiritual practice. Because, you know, this is something that you get from people like Rabbi Heschel. You get it from the Sufi tradition that... You know, the opposite of good is not evil, it's indifference. The opposite of love is not hatred, it's indifference. That's a spiritual practice.

to make that decision to say, I'm not going to be indifferent to the suffering of my fellow human beings because I'm wrapped up in them and they're wrapped up in me. And if I am unmoved by their suffering, then in some capacity I have failed the test of being human. We can learn a lot from how cultures across the world have met. apocalyptic times. How have traditional cultures met the apocalypse? They've met it through ritual practice, through an even deeper commitment to relationality.

They've found it through the perpetual human ability to bring forth beauty in the midst of pain, through taking action, but also through recognizing larger agencies and through letting go. So what I feel gets us through is relationality, and that relationality is more than just communal bonds. It's relationality with the very heart of the universe.

It means that even as we weep for the state of the world, we are simultaneously coming to some deeper trust of the pulse of how things are. If we want to thrive in these times, or even to survive, we might have to come to some measure of trust about the workings of the universe. Trust in the universe, not just when things are going well.

It's one of the hardest things to do. Do I trust the overarching movement of the cosmos when things aren't going my way? And I can't say I pass that test all the time. But I've also seen time and time again people in the worst circumstances who are able to do just that. And when I see that, I feel for a moment lifted. on the wings of the possible. I feel flooded with hope. I will not be the first person to have said this, but we can look to the people of Rezze to understand what having faith is.

means and looks like you have so many examples of these people who when they lose everything when they see destruction happening around them The first thing that comes out of their mouth is praising God. And that piece is surely going to rub up against some modern Western minds. Praising God in the midst of the devastation. Praising.

the power, the love of the universe in the midst of loss. And if it rubs against your mind and heart, let it. Let that friction exist. It's important not to exoticize suffering people. to require them to be bastions of faith and determination and this kind of thing. But it's also important to recognize living examples of how people... Anchor to a larger vision in the midst of deeply trying times. How could I possibly sing your name, O Justice, even as you will one day take all this away?

How could I not feel abandoned, alone, hung out to dry in an uncaring world? How am I when things aren't going my way? Which is another way of asking how much actual pressure can my spiritual practice take? What are the stakes? What are the stakes? As the weird studies guys once asked of the spiritual but not religious crowd. What are the stakes if our practice is just about doing what we want to do? Because in the real world, the stakes, as Dela reminds us, the stakes is high. Stakes is high.

Like, people have not sung the name of the universe and the great powers aloud for hundreds of thousands of years, only when things were going their way. Stakes is high like I'm standing on a precipice of birth and death. Standing on the edge of the abyss. Don't know which way is next. Don't know right from left. Stakes is high. When do people call on you, O Justice? When have they cried out your name? They've cried that name aloud in times of devastation and loss, times of fear and pain.

They've cried the divine name huddled together in the cold, when the fires of hope were being extinguished one by one. They've cried it as they were cast from their homes and from the sides of bitter, lonely roads. Why? Because, oh justice, in a world beyond our reckoning or control, what choice is there but to sing your name? And because, oh justice, despite it all, amidst it all, you were right here.

You are right here, as the Quran says, closer than your jugular vein. Anne Frank, carted off to the concentration camp, writes, I still feel that people are inherently good inside. stakes is high. For Jarvis J. Masters, who was first imprisoned in 1981 and has spent 32 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit, finding Buddhist practice was a lifeline to a deeper vision that he needed to get him through. Well, you know, I found my way to Buddhism. 1885.

I opened it and they said, you know, you can get a free booklet, you know, and the name of the booklet was Life and Relationship to Death, you know, and I just felt like, you know, I can just read this and find out what the hell is going on. I was just needing that, you know. I was needing that because I was so stressed out, you know. So learning how to meditate, learning how to relax, learning how to keep my mind together was one of the things.

wanted to focus on because people who know me, they would tell you. The thing that I worry about the most is how much more mentally this can take, you know, I can take. Because I've seen too many people go crazy, you know. And it doesn't give no warning. It really doesn't, you know. Guys can be talking normal again the next day. He's gone. And he doesn't come back. That's scary for me. That's what scares me. I use my practice to keep me focused on... Mm-hmm.

takes two seconds just because if you say the hell with you to a guard and you sound threatening that's it you know so you got to guard those two seconds really really close In his book, written from his jail cell in San Quentin, Jarvis describes how, shortly after finding Buddhist practice, he took a handful of Tylenol pills and a little thread with a needle made from a staple.

and made himself a mala, a Buddhist rosary that he could use for his practice. There, in the dark of that prison, the name is whispered aloud again, again, again. Someone finds focus again, again, again. Speaking with Jarvis was beautiful, difficult, brutal at times. We spoke of consequences, of cause and effect. in the living movement of justice in a place where the ability to connect to center and to not react in anger can literally mean survival.

the people I know. You come to these ideas and these faiths because you're in trouble. You know? Come on now. I mean, because one thing about prisons, if you don't have that grounding... drift into trouble. And that trouble doesn't mean fights or stabbings or any of that stuff. It could mean that, but it also means, and this is what I was talking about, how do you live with yourself? Because at the end of the day, that's all you have is you in a cell by yourself. So how do you deal with that?

I'm not in prison for no reason. You know, I get a lot of rights. I never thought by coming here that I will find a path for my own spiritual liberation. And that just, you know, that tells me something. of the young people this. You can find Buddhism any place you want. to the supermarket, look for a piece of a loaf of bread, take you a few minutes. You look for hell, oh man, right there, right there in your face. A lot of these guys, they try to trap me.

They want me to be a contradiction. Let's say I start cussing at a basketball game and they say that's not Buddhism. You know, all right. You know, Buddhists, you know, you're faking, you know. And I always tell them, man, you know what, it's a practice. I mean, seriously, it's a real practice. I mean, that is the real word. word in the sense that it means something else. No, it means again, again, again, again. And that's where I come from. I come from again, again, again, again.

And one thing about my teacher, Represhe, was that he would say that again, again, again, again, you know? And for me, that's what I needed. I needed that rough stuff, you know? I needed that. thing. I needed that. That was right on time for me. I mean, I wouldn't have even listened to it if I didn't have that. And that's when something started.

to turn it you know and it was not no holy stuff it was just a shift in my thinking processing you know and I always thought that was that was the key you know it's a deep thing because you're someone given the the injustices that you've faced it's like you would have every right to be angry but then it's also like the recognition that like what good

would do, like what? You know, that dude, that would put me back in prison. That would put me right back in prison. I mean, can you imagine getting out of here being real You're just not looking at it. Imagine that. You get out of prison and you're so angry at what they did to you. I mean, how much freedom are you going to experience holding that... There's no way I can see myself being really, really preoccupied with the injustices that was done to me.

just can't spend that kind of energy. The connection to something greater, as Jarvis describes it, is for something incredibly tangible. There's nothing abstract about it. It's for sanity. for survival, to lift a person out of trouble. And when faced with the prospect of unimaginable lengths of prison time, Practice can at least mean some measure of peace of mind. When you appeal your taste at various levels that you reach, you know, you go to.

and you just go through these levels, you know. And what I did was I went out to the exercise yard. There's like 40 or 50 people out there. And I knew a lot of people. who had been at the level that I am, you know, who's in the same court process that I am in now, you know. And I went and asked him, I said, how long did it take for you to get a decision?

I asked about seven, eight guys. And it was like no one was under seven years. They said it all took every one of those guys. It took more than seven years. I mean, I almost cried when I fell. Damn. Seven years. You know, Josh, when you go from they're going to decide the case next week, a possible seven years already three years how do you get through that how do you sleep through that i mean really how do you make that

This is where I really feel like my practice has built me a lifesaver. It really did. It really told me not to even try to think of it. It's already passed, you know. What are you holding onto that for? Shit, I could have told the Buddha why I was holding onto it. That's seven years. that it's hard for me to even imagine, honestly. And for me, from the outside, just meeting you, I'm just glad that you found a practice that allowed you to at least have some.

You know, like you said, a lifesaver. Like being thrown a lifesaver. Yeah, I mean, I've had some life-changing experiences, man, you know. I thought I was going one way and I ended up going another way. And I feel blessed. I feel really blessed that I'm able to do that, you know. There's not so much to say after that. What I'll do in the spirit of Dr. Safi's spirituality of grit is ask a question.

is what Jarvis is talking about. The need for a practice to get us out of trouble, to give us some measure of focus in a world that is right up in our face. A world of... deep and profound consequences? The need for what he called the rough stuff? The no, I need to do this again and again and again in order to stay sane? The question is, does that only apply to people in prison? Or are we all in one way or another, acknowledging that the degree varies?

tremendously among populations. But are we all in one way or another in trouble? Stakes is high. This is what spirituality is for. Spiritual practice isn't a show. None of this is a show. Because spirituality saved my life. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean, it literally saved my life and I wouldn't be here talking about this if a great grace and mercy hadn't found me. When my mom found Buddhist practice, it's because her life was in an absolute shambles.

1968, the world falling apart, her fleeing from a broken home, dirt poor, single mom, aimless, not sure what to do. Stakes is high. This alignment to the deeper architecture of creation, to the mystery, to the greater flow, to the place beyond human agency, this is what keeps people sane.

If some traditions are to be believed, it's what keeps the very world turning. It's what keeps fire burning and water flowing. It's what keeps the sky above and the earth below. It's the very heart of the matter. It's opening ourselves up to spirit. The mystery of spirit. The breath of spirit. Remember spirit? Perhaps we need to return to a tangible relationship with justice as a living spirit. Justice returned to its breath, returned to its body, returned to presence.

is concerned with the actual movement of cause and effect, the actual reverberation of breaking bread, the actual relationship between you and me, the presence of what is here. now, rather than larger abstractions. For justice, too, has gone through an abstraction process.

Like all else that is animated, it has been removed from its living body and turned into a set of symbols, edicts, faraway commands, so that justice, instead of being the law of the living land, that flows through our hearts and reinforces our precious connectivity to the web of all life, comes to mean something far away, enforced by an invisible authority, by a detached God that administers justice from above.

and the institutions of earthly power then interpret and administer that justice here on earth. And those laws, written on the pages of books, removed from the actual flow of the natural world, lose their connection to the laws of the watershed and the stream. They lose their connection to the very next breath. They lose their connection to what is immediately right in front of us.

And so conversations on justice center less on the actual flow of cause and effect, but on what instead is abstractly justified. Tell me, O Justice, what is... Justified. Because I'm hearing this word a lot these days. Have you been hearing this word? This was justified. That was justified. Killing children is justified. Bombing hospitals is justified. What is justified? When justice is abstracted, then each in our own way decides.

Those harsh words I spoke to you in that argument, those were justified. I mean, look what you did. You were a jerk. What I said was justified, right? Killing those people was justified, wasn't it? I mean, look at what they did. I get to kill those people, don't I? Don't I, Mother Goddess? I'm allowed, aren't I, universe? Aren't I justified? And the universe, like the mountain, gives no...

Answer. The universe waits. And in its patient waiting says perhaps. Go ahead. See what happens. See what happens over time. See what happens if you build an empire on violence. See how kingdoms rise and fall. See how tyrants are toppled and new ones installed. Oh, justice, tell me who is justified. Tell me, Nemesis Adrastea, the very force of nature, who is allowed to do what? Tell me, who gets a blank check, and who is held to account, and who is wrong, and who is right?

In the playground, my two kids screaming over that toy excavator, yanking it from each other, yelling, mine, mine, mine. Which one is justified? Adults scrambling over little patches of sand. Building castles made of sand. Defending our castles made of sand. Launching missiles across lines in the sand. Who? Who is justified? There, on the great battlefield.

the great battlefield of all the ages, the plain of Kurukshetra, where a billion people lost their lives amid the din of horns and the thunder of elephants and the roar of armies. Bhima rips Dushashana open with his bare hands like a lion ripping open its prey and makes his blood still warm just as he swore he would do. Draupadi, mad with the glow of vengeance,

drenches her unbound hair in Dushashana's gushing wounds. Draupadi soaks her hair in blood. Vengeance. It was justified, wasn't it? Dushashana had dishonored Draupadi, hadn't he? Wasn't it justified? But wait, Dushashana wouldn't have been in any position to dishonor her to begin with if Bhima's own brother hadn't gambled Draupadi away in a game of dice.

Gamble your wife into slavery and then you're surprised when she's dishonored. So, was it justified? Well, those dice were loaded, Bhima and the Pandavas could say. Shakuni loaded those dice. And he did. He carved magic dice out of his own father's knuckle bones. So perhaps what the Pontivus did was justified.

I mean, Dushashana's family tried to have them burned alive in a house of tinder soaked in resin. But the Pandavas escaped, and in escaping, they let six people of lower birth die in their place in order to fake their own deaths. Meet our heroes. Was it justified? These are the questions of justice that the greatest itihasa, the greatest epic ever written the Mahabharata asks us.

And it sure doesn't answer in one simple way. It responds with a multiplicity of burning, uncomfortable paradoxes and asks us to hold them all. Perhaps if Bhishma had never spurned Amba, then Amba wouldn't have undertaken terrible austerities for vengeance. Such terrible austerities that the river goddess herself came to Amba to grant her wishes.

But when Amba revealed that her austerities were all for vengeance, all that practice was for vengeance, the river goddess cursed her. You're crooked, she declared. and half of you shall live as a crooked and tortuous river dry for eight months out of the year. For Amba didn't know that Bhishma, the object of her rage, was the son of the very same river she was praying to. Offspring of the very same river. You feel what I mean? O sons and daughters of mitochondrial Eve, you feel what I mean?

Which of the sons and daughters of the very same river is justified in killing the other? Me? Your sister? Your brother? Are we justified? So half of Amba became a river, but the other half reincarnated as a warrior, Chikandin, who many, many years later met Bhishma on the battlefield. And across time and space on the battlefield, Bhishma recognized who this warrior was. Amba, from lifetimes ago. And he would not take up arms against him, against her.

for he saw him as Amba herself. And so the Pandavas, our heroes, saw this and they used Amba Shikandin as a human shield on the battlefield to get to Bhishma. Was it justified? Bhishma. Bhishma of the terrible oath, the great grand-uncle of the Mahabharata, was shot through with arrows and lay there on a bed of arrows in the middle of the battlefield, and as the great warrior lay there on his bed of arrows.

He spoke to Yudhishthira, his enemy, his nephew, his kin, the future king. He spoke to him of how to work for peace. It's important that the laws of kingdoms are aligned to a larger law, a larger dharma that exists within nature, he says. He says that righteousness lies in making decisions with the least of all people in heart and mind. There, on the battlefield, he speaks of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a force, Bhishma says.

Bhishma, lying there all shot up with arrows. He says forgiveness is a force that is stronger than revenge, more powerful than punishment. A mark of a true leader is their ability to forgive. A state founded on forgiveness knows durability and stability, he says. He says that forgiveness is a duty. If one wants to be in accordance with the law of nature, one practices forgiveness, he says. This is what Bhishma says there on the battlefield.

There, on the battlefield, shot through with arrows. Kin fighting kin. Sons and daughters of the same river. To some pause to ask, how did we end up here? Ah! Such are the winding paths of justice. If only it could have been different. If only, you know, if only Bhishma had never taken his oath. Or if the wording of the Balfour Declaration had been different.

or if the terms of World War I hadn't been so harsh, or if the U.S. had shown any interest in actually following the conventions that it itself authored after World War II. If we hadn't gone the way of Eisenhower's cross of iron? If, if, if, if oil wasn't so damn useful? If the Jewish people hadn't been burned and torched and driven from every village in Europe for a thousand years?

If only generational trauma didn't exist. If only the British had just stayed at home. That's a big one. If only the British had just stayed at home. If the UN had remembered at the time of partition that there were other people already living there. If, oh justice, if. How different would all this be? How different would all this be? How different would all this be? If the prison guard hadn't struck the Tibetan nun?

if he hadn't an arm with which to strike, if he hadn't a mind full of rage, if he hadn't been born into a house of rage, if his father had taught him loving respect. So who along the chain, who do you hate? Who do you hate? Do you hate the stick, the arm swinging the stick, the deluded ideology that drives the arm that wields the stick? Or amidst interminable waves of violence do we commit ourselves, if at all possible?

to avoid swinging sticks. Is that what we do? How do we uproot systemic violence? How do we find a way through? And I turn to my children and I look at my children and I ask, what is the best thing I can do? The best action I can take so that you don't grow up in a world of out-of-control violence. And I take a deep breath and I reconnect. And I remember that there are actions I can take. There are protests to attend. There are demands to be shouted in the streets.

There are letters to write. There are phone calls to make. All of which I do. I do and I have done for decades. And there are systemic changes, long-term changes that we can work for. There are gardens of alternatives waiting to be grown. This podcast itself, I hope in some way, is working to change systems thinking. influencing a generation of multifaceted thinkers and reconnecting us to the life breath that this world needs right now, I can only hope.

But I look at my kids again and I say, no, what can I do right here, right now, first and foremost, to work for justice? And I find myself simply saying, I'll show up for you, little loves. That's about the best I know how to do. I won't abandon you, my sons. Even before this war started, something about Being a father, I guess. I've been seeing these images of orphans in my mind. You know, my mind is pretty visual, as you can probably guess, so I see silly little things like my own sons and...

Oliver Twist-like scenarios. You know, like waiting in line for gruel in 19th century British orphanages and their little tweed caps. Like these... Classic images of orphans from the movies have been appearing in my consciousness. And these images make me feel the fragility of each being. What a fragile process it is to be incarnate. and how many souls across history have been left to go it alone.

And then I feel this fatherly impulse to guard them against this devouring world at all costs. Like, you'll never end up in a tweed cap asking for gruel if I have anything to say about it, son. Right? And then I feel... Just how deep in the human story the abandonment goes. How deep the abandonment goes. Spiritual orphans. Cultural orphans. Material orphans. I think of how many orphans are being created now with this horrible conflict.

And I wonder if we'll ever get ourselves out of this cycle of abandonment within abandonment within abandonment. Somewhere along the line, I feel someone who enacts violence on children. at some point in their journey, was abandoned. And if no one was abandoned, how different the story would be. How different would it be? You know, if...

Kunti had not abandoned Karna, had not set him in a basket and floated him down that river, how different would the story be? You remember Kunti, right? The mother of three of the Pandavas? Long ago, when she was still a teenager, still unmarried, she cared for an aging sage named Durvasa. The sage was pleased with her kindness, so he gave her a mantra that could invoke any deity.

and she would bear that deity's child. But Kunti got too excited. She was overzealous, full of youthful eagerness, and she decided to test the mantra out to see if it worked. And what was the first thing that came to her, the first presence that she felt? She felt the warmth of the sun on her skin. And so she invoked Surya, the sun god. And while still an unmarried teen...

Kunti gave birth to a child, Karna. Karna, born with golden armor and shining earrings. Karna, son of the sun god himself. Abandoned, sent... floating down the river. Kunti was too young after all. Karna abandoned and raised by a lowly charioteer. Karna. The impeccable archer, the bravest of warriors, a just man, but on the wrong side. Probably a lot of those in the world, if you actually pause to look. Just men.

on the wrong side. And how did this valiant man find himself on the wrong side? Because those who were supposedly on the right side, the good side, the Pandavas, teased him and mocked him. while the wrong side actually took him in. The Koravas, the proud boys of the Lunar Dynasty, they didn't abandon him even though he was uncouth and spoke differently and couldn't claim royal birth.

How many potential allies, I wonder, slip away because they are met with mocking, torn down on the internet, not welcomed in, or because, like Karna, they don't have all the right credentials. How do broad-brush statements of culpability and blame account for kind, just people who happen to be on the wrong side? If only, the mind cries, if only everything was reducible to black and white. If Karna hadn't been abandoned. If Umbaka hadn't closed her eyes at the height of lovemaking.

And so Dhritarashtra had not been born blind. If his wife Gandhari, in an act of empathy, had not filed to wear a blindfold till the day that she died, and sent her brother Shakuni into a vengeful rage, If that one fisher girl, Satyavati, hadn't smelled so pervasively, so alluringly of fish, that she tantalized that horny sage, and right back to the beginning, if only Janamejaya's brothers... hadn't beaten that dog. The first book of the Mahabharata, the Adiparva, tells of a little dog.

The great dynastic kings led by King Janamejaya were holding a sacrifice, you see, a massive multi-day ritual. And at a certain point, a little dog, a puppy, runs through the middle of the sacrifice grounds and knocks over the altar and spills the sacrificial butter. This is a big deal in a sacrifice-driven culture. And so some...

Overzealous brothers catch the little dog and they beat him. And the dog's mother finds the brothers and chastises them. He is only a puppy after all. Unsatisfied with their explanation, the mother dog... curses Jhanna Majaya that he and his family will know strife and conflict and fall upon bad days. That simple act sets the wheels of the whole epic in motion.

If only I had treated that dog. My neighbor, my brother, my enemy, my sibling, my offspring of the very same river. If only I had treated them justly. How different would this all be? I might think I'm enacting some great justice. I might think I'm in charge of some great turning of events and happenings. Or I may just be enacting a curse brought upon my great-grandfather by a mistreated dog.

Great wars in this vision arise from the tiniest of reverberations, the tiniest of disturbances of the flow of things. Who knows what battles and cosmic disturbances might arise from the words I speak tomorrow. or from a river god that I unintentionally snubbed, or from passing weather, or simply within the great balancing act of time. So, in this vision of reverberatory animacies and just flows,

Is there such a thing as the right side, like the right side of history? Yes. Action must be taken. There are times to take a stand, to align to the great law around us. to fulfill one's role. There is such a thing as action that is more aligned to the cosmic natural harmony around us, and action that is less aligned.

The great epic does not say, oh, it's all relative, and so who's to say who's right and who's wrong, and better just do nothing. Not at all. It lays out a vision of cosmic natural law and what it means to align to it. It speaks volumes about what it means to act justly, all the while acknowledging that battles will happen, that wars will come.

That in a world of dynamic ebb and flow, such movement is inevitable. But that such movements are not without deep consequence. And the story is never so easy as, I'm just and you're not. as you're wrong and I'm right. The story is full of characters who overstep, who think they are acting with injustice but set off chains of reverberation.

Such is life in a world of responsive waves that any action is not free from its grief and its tears and its somatic repercussions. No one in the Mahabharata emerges from the war unscathed. They emerge broken, weeping, not sure if it was worth it, not wanting to have anything to do with thrones or governance. They emerge wandering the battlefield the day after.

searching the wreckage for their fallen sons. They emerge bearing karmic somatic scars that have nothing to do with the overall righteousness of the cause. They emerge having to pay what is due. for individual acts committed that crossed the line within an overall framework of justice. So there is Kunti at last, the great mother of the Mahabharata, weeping on the battlefield.

picking her way through the corpses the day after. And the Pandavas say, what are you doing there, Mother? Those are the bodies of our enemies. We're over here. And she says, you don't know this. But Karna was your brother. Your long-lost brother. See now, my sons, your enemy was actually your brother all along. And so after the war, our heroes, the Pandavas, quote, overwhelmed by misery, wept like ghosts at the end of an eon, the end of a great age.

The sounds of the sobs of those weeping princes ricocheted off the walls of the palace and made heaven and earth weep in response. To hell with kingship, cries Yudhishthira after the war. To hell with heroism. To hell with the justice of the Kshatriyas, the warriors. For we who are alive now are dead because of it. Potent, right? Let's say you win. Let's say you annihilate your enemy.

Let's say you punish them for generations for what they did. At what cost? And how many, when this conflict ends, how many will owe a great debt of which they are unaware? and how many will walk the world dead inside. To me, the story says that whatever humans do, within this great mysterious flow of cause and effect, within this, we'll only be an approximation. We'll be a guess, a shadow of a greater justice. And so the best we can do is to limit excess.

Limit excess, like if it's going to come to fighting. There are perhaps even just ways to fight. All of this is the great wisdom that comes out of racial justice tradition. All this is the great wisdom that comes out of Ella Jo Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and then overseas, Nelson Mandela, Agostino Nieto, and Angola.

Samora Machel in Mozambique, Amil Kar-Kabral in Guinea-Bissau, these great, great leaders who, even when they had to pick up the gun, refused to go after civilians, refused to butcher civilians. refused to rape civilians or anybody else, refused to kidnap people's grandmothers, refused all of that. They went after soldiers and infrastructure and as limited as they could in order to get you some kind of a settlement.

If the story has a hundred lessons about justice, and it has more than that, one of them certainly is be very, very careful with what you think is justified. Be careful with what you think is justified. So yeah, the word justified has been flying around a lot recently. But, oh justice, do we determine what is justified? Or is it... Nature who has always determined consequences, and always will. Feel into this. Does the fact that a bombing is justified mean anything to the bombing victim?

Do higher abstract narratives stated objectives of freedom or democracy or self-defense? Higher claims of justice change the way that the person on the ground receives it? Those are narratives. But the great movement of cause and effect takes place in bodies. Bodies that die. Bodies that weep. Bodies that will be repatterned around that impact point. That explosion for generations.

bodies that will vow revenge, bodies that will turn their anger towards the perpetrators time and time again. This is the actual somatics of justice. Like, you can call 20 years of bombing operation enduring freedom you remember operation enduring freedom right you can call it that originally they tried to call it operation infinite justice but even the u.s military thought that that was a little too excessive

You can call it whatever you want. But after 20 years, did freedom reign? Were higher narratives served? Was justice done? Or is justice... still pulsing her way through bodies. Through the body of the Afghan woman orphaned in an airstrike. Through the PTSD tremors that shake the young veteran's body.

In the unhinged words he shouts at his wife because he can't process the waves of repercussion that are still echoing within him. And how she finally has no choice but to turn away from him. And how she picks up and leaves. in search of better days. Cause and effect. The actual reverberations of nature. This is the difference between the abstraction of justice as an ideal

as a story detached from body and the actual natural law of cause and effect. This is the difference between a detached God that proclaims edicts of justice from above and the living force of justice in the waters, in the patterns of rise and fall within ecosystems, in the way the sand buries old stone monuments and how skyscrapers tumble back to earth.

in how a war is supposed to neatly and tidily resolve itself on paper, and how violence and vengeance actually play themselves out somatically across generations. This is how the Earth... Not human narrative determines everything. The earth, remember her? Remember Bhumidevi? Remember how the earth determines everything? Remember how all this is the earth determining everything? Don't think that the earth determines everything.

Go back and check out just how many outcomes of how many historic battles were determined by the weather. Millions upon millions of lives in the balance of the weather. The United States itself exists. because of a fog. Check your history books. Everything is within the purview of the earth. Everything. Remember how the earth cursed Karna?

Karna, that just man on the wrong side. One day he saw a little girl by the roadside crying because she had dropped her pot of milk and it had spilled into the earth. And Karna felt sympathy for the girl. He wiped a tear from her cheek and told her not to cry. He would retrieve that milk for her. And he used his tapas as yogic powers and plunged his hands into the earth.

and withdrew the soil into his hands and squeezed the milk out of the soil handful by handful and refilled the little girl's pot. The girl was overjoyed, but the earth goddess... Bhumi Devi was not. I had already accepted that milk, she said. I had taken it into me, and you took it back. You can't take back that which the earth receives.

So she cursed him. Just as you held on to something that was mine, one day I will hold on to something that is yours. And there, on the great battlefield, on the 17th day... Karna's chariot wheel gets stuck in the mud. He can't free his chariot wheel from the mud. The earth holds it fast. And there he is, Karna, that just man on the wrong side.

trying to free his wheel from the mud. There he is, pleading for his life there in the mud, reminding Arjuna of the just laws of warfare. Karna standing there alone in the mud. And at Krishna's urging, Arjuna cuts his head off. He decapitates him. And that is how Karna, the just man on the wrong side, meets his fate. The Earth determined this, too, as she determines everything. The Earth is the determiner of everything. Everything.

Living justice moves through the earth. The earth. Hear that, leaders and soldiers? Every decision you made, you made because the earth let you make it. and every overstep you make is balanced by the earth. And if humans find, for a short while, harmony, it's specifically because they remembered how to walk upon the earth. And if they are plagued by disorder and chaos, It's because they have forgotten how to live upon the earth. Earth. Oh.

How far we have strayed, yet how chained we will always be. To you, Bumi. To you. And the best we can do, perhaps, is to align our own law so that it reflects the law of the land. If justice is a great natural balance, then we can work to create communities and social structures in alignment with that balance, aligned with the actual flow of the ecosystem, in order to ensure that whatever we are involved in creating in this world

is built upon a balanced foundation. If you want to understand systemic violence, look towards foundational roots. A huge part of the reason that the current tragedy in Gaza

is unfolding the way it is is because of what you could call foundational imbalance. The agreements at the very root of this conflict, the agreements in 1923 and 1948, were imbalanced and that imbalance was an overcompensation for another imbalance and that for another and at a certain point we have to seek to create structures that are aligned to the balance of justice

From the very start. The very start. Where's that? How do you mitigate, how do you lay balanced foundations in a world of infinite reverberation? in which every act or non-act is going to offend some passing God. The best you can do is take a deep, slow, careful view. understanding the web of relationality and what impacts it and how. You walk with your head bowed a little bit from the start. You do what you can to curb excess right from the start.

You walk with humility right from the start. You have reminders of the consequences of lawbreaking encoded into the very land and stars. You understand the root causes of systemic imbalance because you've been familiar with it for thousands of generations and have encoded its solutions into living tissues and landscapes. Cultures know, deep in their lore and their mythos, cultures know what causes systemic imbalance. Even modern culture knows it. What are the root causes of systemic imbalance?

The root causes of human excess if we take it all the way to its core? Greed. Envy. Pride. Violent rage. territorialism, which is really just people thinking that they're better than other people or that their lives matter more. All law-breaking, says Tyson Yonkaporta, comes from that first evil thought, that original sin of placing yourself above the land or above other people. So the return of justice to its living body means understanding cycles and seasons and limits and excesses.

understanding the breath pulse of nature and doing our very best to align ourselves and our social systems to that pulse. And it means something else, too. If law is all-pervasive, If it resides everywhere, then it also resides in me. And so how I walk through this world and how I treat others is a big part of the overall picture. Some might say it's everything.

It means that what I do every day, in alignment to the greater flow of cause and effect, matters. How I speak matters. How I act matters. You know. All the difficult stuff. All the challenging stuff. This is tangible living justice. And it's not an easy road. It's a hard road. To understand that my own resentments reflected out give fuel to the very dynamics that I'm supposedly trying to combat is difficult. Abstracted justice is a lot easier.

For a long time in my life, I was in love with abstract injustice. A justice that was easy to write of in manifestos, long dissertations about how it should one day be. It was easy to shout that justice at the walls of consulates and in the halls of power. At that time, I worked for social justice full-time. And I'm just speaking for me here. I had a lot of strong feelings on right and wrong.

and a lot of judgment for those who didn't see things exactly the way I did. I look now at the judgments that I had of people, and then I look at the way I was living my life, how I was treating those closest to me, and I see a pretty big... gap. And don't get me wrong, there are justices that must be shouted aloud. Protest movements are vital. But there is also a tangible, immediate justice right before us.

If justice is an animate presence, then how we treat the world right in front of us is everything. Like James Baldwin said, that person is you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you.

You could be that person. You could be that monster. You could be that cop. And you're deciding yourself not to be. Love has never been a popular movement. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of very few people. Justice isn't just about shouting down the unjust other. It's about understanding our own flaws, too. How we are in relation, what we need to work on, what we need to do. Thinking we're the just ones and everyone else is crap.

if the old stories are to be believed, is not quite the full picture. It's all them is not quite the full picture. People say it's a battle of good versus evil.

It's about good versus evil, man. We better make sure that we're good, then. Let's make sure that we're good. Because it would be quite convenient to assume... then a battle of good versus evil it just so happens i'm the good one yeah like that's kind of convenient funny how we always are yeah it's like funny funny once again i'm right yeah imagine imagine that

For the entire length of the Mahabharata, the assumption is that the Pandavas are on the side of righteousness and the Kauravas are on the other side of disharmony and evil. The problem is them. It's all them. And you'd be right in thinking that. The Kauravas are some bad dudes. Duryodhana is born to the howls of jackals. He lives in jealousy and spite and plots revenge and seeks power.

Like I said, the proud boys of the Lunar Dynasty. Surely they're wrong. The problem is them and they're wrong. And then, whoops, guess what? The Kauravas, the antagonists, end up in heaven. And the Pandavas, the protagonists, don't. Because the antagonists died as they were supposed to and they paid their debts. But the protagonists, the ones on the side of rightness, had not yet paid for their excesses.

So along comes the giver of what is due, trimming all excess, pruning them away. One by one, the main characters start to drop. After all they've suffered and endured, All the monologues about righteousness and duty they've delivered, they die, one by one by the side of the path, on the way up the mountain. Until the only one left is Yudhishthira.

There on the mountain, Yudhishthira, the reluctant king, walking towards the chariot that is going to take him to the god realms. After all that has been suffered and endured, All the millions upon millions that have died. All the great paradoxes of justice that have come and gone. Yudhishthira. Alone. With one scrappy, skinny dog. ambling along by his side. Indra opens up his chariot to receive Yudhishthira and looks at him and looks down at the dog. You are a king of kings, says Indra.

You may join me, but that dog is old and weak. It's done nothing. He can't come with you. Not all can attain heaven. Yudhishthira utters perhaps the most truly just line in the whole book. I'm not going without my dog. The joy of heaven will mean nothing to me compared to its grief. And so he turns away from Indra and starts to walk down the mountain. But Indra stops him and smiles.

It seems that was one last test. Do you know who that dog is, he asked. That dog is... Justice. Dharma, the god of justice himself. Justice is... That dog. That dog on the street. Not just that cute little pet that it's really easy for us to love so much. Justice is that mangy flea-bitten dog that no one wants to look at or acknowledge.

That beggar, that other, that enemy. That person who says things we don't like on the internet. Justice is how we treat that which we are averse to. The lowest thing. The littlest thing, the thing that shouldn't matter in our great journey, but in fact matters most of all, how I am with my neighbor. The thoroughness with which I approach my relationship with my children.

The thoroughness of my relationship with people who see the world differently than I do. After all the great trials and tribulations, the great risings and fallings of empire, O Indra. It turned out that justice was how I treated that dog. So the story of all the ages is set in motion with a dog's curse, resolved by a kindness to a dog. That's justice.

Accountability means that we all have accounts to settle. We all have accounts to settle. And what gets us towards systemic change is actual relationality. Accountability is not just about shouting others accountable it's about us together accountable to each other you can't hold somebody accountable if you're not gonna hold them that's the big um problem is that

people are talking about accountability but they don't want to hold people and keep them accountable they want to punch them accountable kick them accountable blame them accountable shame them accountable very little holding going on in this kind of cancel culture

And that's pretty far from the original kind of Dr. King vision. I think the key is, can you free the jailed and the jailer? Can you free... the oppressed and the oppressor can you can you achieve human freedom which is indivisible and there's no way to do that unless you take very seriously the humanity of the people who might be on the other side of some line of difference, who might be on the other side of some line of power. That's the challenging part, right? How to engage without...

Dehumanizing the other. Shaming the other. I think we're in a time when people are just, you know, hurting and they're wanting to know what to do. And that spills over often into... i guess like shaming and vindictiveness on the internet and this kind of thing and like you know holding that in a crisis such as this one people are going to have different ways that they act

while understanding that action is necessary. I mean, to me, this is an interesting balance and I'd be interested to get your thoughts on it. I think calling people in versus calling people out. is a really powerful framework that I like to think of. Because when I want someone to come in,

to my cause, when I want someone to come and share, to grieve with me, to be a part of this, to consider this their business too, I want to invite them in. I want to... I want to do so in a way that is open-hearted and that has hope that they have that heart, they have that core place of caring and empathy that wants to connect and come from that place.

While I, you know, I think that anger is incredibly valid, I feel that the best way to bring people in who feel disengaged is to really invite them in to be part of it. Like, like I'm extending a handout to just hold your hand in this moment and be with me in this present experience that we're in together and what we're witnessing together. The people who do have.

large platforms and who are actively using them, who are promoting themselves, promoting their work, sharing joy from their life. People who have significant influence in audiences. who have not spoken to this in any way, who have not acknowledged it, who have not expressed emotion of any kind toward it, this is what feels irresponsible.

to me it's about being present to the environment that we're in and and being a part of it the untruth here is that this is not everybody's business because it is It will touch all of our lives in some way. So there's a friction here, right? The friction of holding the necessity for action with the understanding of multiplicity.

and the holding of space for different ways of doing and being. The friction between immediate urgency and long-term cultural change. A friction that has always been present in activist communities. about what actually creates change in human hearts. I don't have all the answers to this, but I do know that if there's such a thing as calling in, it's going to require

A lot of heart and a lot of listening and a lot of patience. And can we hold the possibility that sometimes seeds are planted in the unlikeliest of ways through hearing a story? through feeling a space open where no space was possible before. This is the power of myth. This is why this podcast exists. For me, diversity means a basic understanding. that not everyone says things the same way I do, responds to horror the way I do, takes action the way I do. This is biodiversity.

If I actually want a diverse movement, not everyone is going to have the same talking points about the apocalypse or take the exact same stance on social media. True. Biodiversity understands the strength of different glands. There are those who are meant to take flight and see from afar, and those who are meant to look close up at the immediate patterns in the veins of each leaf.

There are those who are meant to withdraw into cocoons, and those who are meant to re-emerge emboldened with wings. While some were busy tearing down others, some were busy being mothers. Some were busy being weavers. Some were busy planting food and planning poetic futures. And that, too, is justice. Some were grieving. Some were weeping.

Some were on the front lines shouting. Some were in the street and some were in the classrooms teaching. Some were taking a break and simply breathing. And that, too, is justice. True ecosystems. The ones that last are diverse. And there are many, many ways to work for justice. So... As I call for a ceasefire, as I phone and write every possible government representative and take action and encourage others to take action as I've been doing since October 8th, there's

Something else I'm asking of myself also. Am I willing to pick up my phone and call the person that I resent the most? The person who I have absolutely the hardest time with, am I willing to call them up and say, hey, let's work this out. And not only let's work this out, but I can see my role in this conflict too. Am I willing to do that?

If I feel fine asking others, asking governments to take particular action, but I can't find it in myself to take one tenth of that action, then I'm asking the world to do something that I'm not willing to do myself. It's hard. If the world we are truly wanting to create is one of love, justice, and equality, then it might very well be that the most pressing question of all is...

How are we going to create a better world with people we disagree with? Just ask Percival, who after years of wandering the wasteland, years of night's errands and individual quests, finally found that the only way into the Grail Castle was hand-in-hand with his lost Muslim brother, Farifiz. And the words that revealed themselves there in the Grail Castle... etched upon the grail itself, upon that cup overflowing with the water of life. Treat your enemy as you treat yourself.

Pray for the prison guard as you would for a friend. Gawang Sangdrol, a former Tibetan Buddhist nun imprisoned at age 13 for participating in a non-violent protest. Spent many years in prison. She was beaten and tortured and spent extended time in solitary confinement. I worked on the campaign for her release. and I got to work with her after she was released as well. She speaks of how she and her fellow inmates used to pray for the prison guards in Dropshie Prison.

When I was in prison, there used to be one guard who was particularly mean to all of us. Her name was Quan Zong. Everybody knew very clearly that she was a mean guard. But one day we heard that she was bitten by a dog, quite badly actually. And immediately all of my inmates, you know, everybody was praying for her. It might be hard for people to believe when we say we did not really harbor strong hatred or anger toward those people.

who were oppressing us, who were torturing us. But on a very basic level, when an incident like this happened, instead of rejoicing for her misfortune, we were actually everyone praying for her well-being. And on another occasion, in fact, when I was put in solitary confinement for some time, I was actually in a confinement cell next to Phumzopemala. And the...

The structure, the design of the solitary confinement cells were such that they were very tall, so you couldn't see each other. I was next to Prince of Emma. I couldn't see her. She couldn't see me. But we could talk to each other. We could hear each other. And one day, I remember very clearly when one of the guards, whose name was Pemaputi, she was bringing food to us.

Penzo Pemala told me after Pemapudi brought the food, oh, I felt very bad for Pemapudi, you know. And I was really confused why that was the case. And Penzo Pemala said, well, she has to do this. this terrible work for her own survival, just for her own personal survival to make a living for her own livelihood. She has to do this terrible job. And I just felt really bad for her. And it gave me this huge emotional kind of jolt. I had this huge feeling on my...

Like, you know, it's probably why I remember this story. So, you know, this was the condition in which, you know, many of us actually felt more pity and more. sorrow for those who were perpetrators in that kind of situation rather than for ourselves. You know, those who are bringing, inflicting suffering on other people, the very act of causing suffering on somebody else is very miserable.

feeling is a very miserable place to be. And then when we examine the outcome or the result, then of course there is negative outcomes that will be caused by that very action. The perpetrator, in a sense, is punishing himself doubly. So if a victim is suffering once, the perpetrator oversuffers twice. In the cases of people who...

do a lot of terrible things throughout their lives. At the end of their lives, we actually see the price that they are paying. Many of those people going through terrible process of death, how much they suffer.

in that moment at the time of death. It's really scary. I've seen some of those people. I've seen some of those experiences. And it's not pretty. It's very scary and frightening. And those are the moments that... gave me a sense of the idea that okay the law of karma doesn't have to wait until next lives it actually it's actually something that happens

that holds true very much even in one lifetime. So we don't have to look far to see that it's true. And in fact, that's one of the teachings and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad when he was asked at one point, by his friends, you know, to give them some ethical advice. And so his advice was, come to the aid of your sisters and brothers, whether they are the oppressor or the oppressed.

And he loved to speak in this, you know, somewhat paradoxical way. And so people answered in the way that they did back then. Oh, messenger of God, would that we could give our lives for you. Of course, we get it how to come to the aid of the oppressed. You feed them, you clothe them, you shelter them, you hug them. How do we help the oppressor? Why would we ever help the oppressor? And he said, you help the oppressor.

By stopping them. Because you're actually proving yourself to be of spiritual benefit when you prevent someone from promoting disharmony. Now, from one point of view... Yeah, to be a spiritually mature person, you have to realize that no one of us had a complete monopoly on goodness, on beauty, on evil, on cruelty, on justice and injustice.

That line zigzags in very subtle and sometimes confusing ways inside every single one of us and every single one of our nations and every single one of our communities. That's true. And... It's also true that in something like the present crisis that you see in Palestine and Israel, there is one side. that is trapped inside a 25 mile area walled off on three sides and the sea on the other without any means of protecting themselves and another side which is a nuclear power

with warplanes bombing them relentlessly for almost five months. So to simply insist... that no one of us and no one nation and no one tradition and no one community as a monopoly on justice and injustice does not mean that we have to turn a blind eye to the vast asymmetry that exists. So how can we help? You begin by stopping the oppressor, stopping the bombing, calling for a ceasefire.

You provide food for 2 million people who are in the middle of a famine. You give them water. 90 plus percent of the homes in many parts of Gaza have already been destroyed. You've got to find some way of providing shelter for these folks. So the immediate action is one of direct, call it compassion, call it love, call it service, call it what you will.

That direct action of you actually go and you stand with the ones who are hurting the most. And you also recognize that because we human beings are really complicated. Many of the people who today are on the oppressor side, they're acting out of historical fear and historical trauma, which the politicians... of their society and our society are masters at playing. And so in some ways, there is a recognition that since we're caught up together.

And I don't just mean Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis. As human beings, we're caught up in this together. And to insist on stopping the oppressor. It's also an act of love, compassion, and service for them to say, I actually want better for you too. I want you to be free from the fear and trembling. and trauma that has been handed down to you and which these politicians are manipulating. I guess today the cool kids would call it weaponizing. And I want a better life for you.

I want a life in which you can experience not only the love of yourself, not only the love of your community, the love of a neighbor, also the love of a stranger. That's at the heart of a prophetic tradition. It's not just the love of the people who look like us. It's also the love of the stranger. How many times in the Bible do we need to read, you know?

Be kind to the stranger for once you yourselves were strangers. I love Dr. King. I love Nelson Mandela. I love Amilcar Cabral. I love Benilu Hamer. I love... Bayard Rustin. I love Ella Joe Baker. I love all of these figures from our history for one reason. Mandela wasn't a pacifist. Mandela was a freedom fighter. Mandela picked up the gun.

Dr. King was a pacifist. He wouldn't have picked up the gun even to defend himself. But they both insisted on centering the humanity of the people on the other side. And that... gave them incredible moral authority and also gave their project universal resonance because it wasn't just about putting white people down or putting the white man in his place. It was about putting everybody in a higher place.

and recognizing we all need each other. Well, that's hard. It's a lot easier just to be mad and to punch back on the people that have been punching on you. So it's totally understandable. It's unfair, in fact, to ask. People who have been on the wrong side of the power equation for so long, centuries, to be nice, to rise above. When they go low, we go high, etc. It's unfair. It's just necessary. That's all.

It's completely unfair. It's just necessary. Because it is our experience of having been powerless that qualifies us to find a way forward together. with our sisters and brothers from other parts of society that's where dr king was coming from that's where nelson mandela was coming from nelson mandela told the africaners you know he was in jail for 27 years that's not a weekend you don't get those years back

He came out, he went in as a young man, came out as an old man. He could have burned South Africa to the ground if he wanted to. He had his own army. He was not a nonviolent person, Nelson Mandela. He had his own army. Um Comto was his way. Spear of the nation.

He never just banded up on Comptowice's way while he was in jail or afterwards, not before he became president. He never renounced the armed struggle. So he could have come out. And by the way, the South African economy had been crippled. The whole world was with him. He could have come out and just been a vengeful, wrathful man. And when he went and sat across from the Afrikaner government, the National Party government, they kept him in prison for those decades.

while his son died, while his mother died. They expected him to lay into him, and he wouldn't have the right to do it. Instead, in Afrikaans, he told them their own story of... the Afrikaner experienced, named all their great generals and all the battles they had won against the British, named their great poets, named their great cultural contributors, and said, with a people as great as you.

I know that a just peace is possible. That's how I do you anyhow. You're not going to reduce me to a victim of you. You're not going to bring out the worst part of who I am. to be in conversation with the worst part of who you are. Hallelujah. Anyhow, I am here and I represent the best of my people. And I'm only going to speak to the best of your people in you.

My great soul is going to speak to your great soul and we're going to find our way out of it. The great soul in me is going to have a dialogue with the great soul in you. And we're going to create a South Africa that's worthy of our children and our grandchildren. And that's it.

You know, never deny the pain of the past. Don't ask any oppressed person to do that. That's not fair. Never deny the pain of the past. But never let the past have the last word either. Because tomorrow is more important.

Our children are more important. Our ancestors didn't get us to this point just for us to then burn everything down based on what happened to them. Our grandparents wanted us to get here so we could make the world better for our grandchildren. You're not doing anybody any favor holding on to the pain of the past only. But it's the pain of the past as it propels us all to a better future. That's what you use the past for. Not to hold us into these conflicts.

To do that, to free us from the repetitive cycles of conflict, at some point you have to break the cycle of vengeance. And to do that requires taking, perhaps, a really close look at what is justice and what is vengeance. If I want your well-being, if I understand that ultimately the world will be better off with you being the best version of yourself, that perhaps is love. If all I want is to punish you...

to claim myself better than you, that drifts into what has been called vengeance. And whether we feel justified or not in taking vengeance, vengeance has ongoing generational

consequences. I was having a conversation with Nyungar elder Noel Nanup about traditional visions of law the other day, and a lot of our conversation is going to come into the next episode. But in the middle of our conversation, unprompted he dropped this we don't live long enough to fully understand every aspect of what it is to truly be a human being And as we grasp that and realise that every race of people come from this same place, let's not be too harsh on those that have...

railroaded us along the way. Let's remember that all we can do is be a true representative of our spiritual belief. The responsibility that goes with punishing those who've done the wrong thing is not ours as physical human. It is the responsibility of the spirit. never lose sight of that please because if you do you'll become a worry ward a worry ward and you'll wear yourself down it is not your responsibility

It's the creation spirit's responsibility because they don't miss it. Never, ever will they let you down. And from what I can tell, he's not in any way saying, Don't act. It's about the difference between action aligned with the larger flow of justice that seeks to address structural imbalance, mitigate excess.

return us to harmony with the law of the land, and ultimately wants the best outcome possible for all involved, the difference between that and vengeance, taking it upon ourselves to be the one who punishes.

who thinks themselves above the other person, and rather than seeking to remediate, only seeks retribution. How do we find positive ways forward that seek to address as much as we can because ultimately it may not be up to us but as much as we can to find that alignment to that harmonic balance

and at the same time to maybe avoid what can turn into vengeance, which just sets off more and more cycles of retribution and pain. Without idealizing and idolizing... historical religious traditions because every single one of them has got its own tribalism and sexism and lots of other isms that have been kind of woven into it but you know it's for good reason

that within the Hebrew Bible, Old Testament, you have this line that God says, vengeance is not yours. So you've got to be bigger than one human or one nation or one community or one race. to call for a kind of vengeance. I couldn't find myself being on the revenge type thing. You know, that's not... I can't... I don't have that kind of energy. Vengeance. Draupadi, wronged, calls for vengeance. In the forest with Yudhishthira, she says, why do you not seek vengeance?

And she lists every single way that they've been wronged. The whole litany. And she gets it. She gets vengeance. And then later... After she's lost her own sons in the endless cycles of vengeance, does she regret it? Does she weep for what might have been? Vengeance isn't just the drama that we see in the movies. There's envy and vengeance all over internet discourse these days, and not just coming from the other side. Look into it, maybe, into envy and vengeance.

Look carefully into who calls out whom and when and why. And then maybe take a feather to it and clear it all away. Maybe take a feather to it and clear it all away. Jealousy, the aboriginal traditions say, has catastrophic consequences. Why is it necessary at some point to break the cycle of vengeance? The great law of peace of the Iroquois Confederacy holds that nothing can be done ceremonially without clearing the deep hurts that lead to vengeance first.

No negotiations, no sacred activity, no law enactment can be done without ceremonial condolences. The resentments, the rage, the vengeance, as elder and activist Jose Barrero tells me. is clear from the eyes from the ears and the throats the vengeance is sent on its way there's a ceremony that relates to that the condolence ceremony where a person who's had a great loss

or is coming in from a long journey or has had some kind of issue, is condoled, is freshened. Their mind, their eyes, their ears, their throat are cleared in a ceremony that will do that. And so that all these elements come together to create this tradition of peace. I'm remembering a part of the story where there's like somebody's entire family is killed and they have to not take vengeance. Basically, they have to.

come to a place where they don't want to take vengeance anymore and uh to me what you're saying like the importance the the cycle of vengeance which we see playing itself out on the world stage so much these days it's like Ultimately, within the law of peace, right, like, vengeance has to be addressed. So it's addressed through the condolence ceremony and then the letting go of vengeances, or how do you see that process?

The ceremony kind of signals a principle, you know, and I think the first principle of it is to find a method by which extreme hurt is acknowledged. The particular pattern of the ceremony as it's done today. We take this feather and we clean the dust from your eyes so you can see again.

You clean the obstructions from your ears so you can hear. You clean the obstructions from your throat so you can speak clearly. So the form is the form, the acknowledgement. We've got to stop here. Nothing happens until this happens. So people took it very seriously, that ceremony. So culturally, among the nations that might have been at war at various points, they took that ceremony very seriously. When most people went through it, it was supposed to...

You're supposed to quit the war, you know, quit the warfare. And everybody benefits from that. Everybody benefits from peace. Peace is abundance, you know. War is hell. Peace is abundance. So ultimately... people can come to that clarity. That really, if I can just get past this feeling of wanting to kill this guy because my son was killed, because something happened, as we see yourself playing out.

in the conflicts in the Middle East right now. Somewhere along the line, the fact that there's a strong, the strongest cultural precept is about the existence of peace as the normal. way of being clearing vengeance i wonder my sister i wonder my brother could we take a single feather to the eyes of the world

and clear it of vengeance. And could we take that feather to the world's mouth and to the world's throat? Maybe take a feather to it and clear it all away. Let us take a feather to it and clear it all away. If we want to change the cycle of vengeance as it plays out in individual hearts and communities and on the global stage, we might need to take a hard look at a few things. And we might start with really asking ourselves why.

The scene on the battlefield with Draupadi, soaking her hair in the enemy's blood, is the scene that everyone gasps at, but is secretly the scene that everyone wants to see. Do I really want to work it out with a person I don't like? Or does it feed something really deep to hold on to that nearly irresistible impulse to point the finger and blame?

And look, I bristle at be the change and think globally, act locally bumper stickers too. Part of me wants to raise a hand and ask, is that really the design? That in a world of great inequality I must also turn my gaze inwards towards what is mine? That in a world of obvious villainy I'm not allowed the space to point a finger at all?

That in a world in which it is easiest to shout at others at all they're doing, I must also turn the lens on me? And Justice says, What did you think the answer would be? Did you think this would be anything other than the only way to get there is hand in hand with your enemy? Did you think it would be eye for an eye without the part about the whole world gone blind?

Did you think I would say that the path is blame, and the problem is someone else who goes by some other name? But why, oh justice? Why do those who arrived six hours late to work in the vineyard get paid the same as those who have already been working all day? And why does the recently returned prodigal son get the welcome home party and I've been here all along and get nothing at all? and why me not you and why you not me and why us and why now and why here what

turning of great wheels or intricacies of merit or roll of fortune's dice brought us into this world at this time with all its strife and all its struggle. Why now? Why here? I don't know. All I know is justice flows. So, I don't know. This is my best guess here. Maybe ultimately if we want to look at if our actions are aligned with justice. then it requires looking at how closely aligned they are to love. For justice and love are very closely linked. As Omid says, justice is love itself.

If you love the other, you want to feed them, you want to clothe them and shelter them. So as we're working for justice and taking action for justice, it's vital perhaps that we remember love. For me, after many years of immersion in the intricacies of human rights issues and global injustices, it might sound trite to say, that I still see love as the only possible way out of the mess that we're in. Do you remember love? It's a hard, hard road.

And there are days that it seems like the furthest thing away. And it's exhausting, even for people on the outside. It's exhausting to see the same cycles repeat themselves. over and over again, exhausting even from a place of safety and shelter to see the suffering repeat itself. How can I find love in times like these? But this is the way. I know you're tired, Rumi says. I know you're tired. But come, this is the way. Remember.

remember how love is the way it's easy to forget these days remember how love is the way do you remember Do you remember the earth? The actual flow of cause and effect. And remembering. We can find our way forward from a deeper sense of context. connection. We can take action for the pain and suffering that is right before our eyes. And we can remember that there is a flow that is so much bigger than us that

is and always will remain a mystery. But from that mystery and within that mystery, there is somehow a balance that is kept. The balance of nature. That the cosmos transpires according to a great law. And that law is all around us. And it moves through us. And we are invited to connect to it with every word we speak. Every breath we take. With every breath we take, the arc of the universe is bending, perhaps, towards justice. And even as out of balance as things may seem.

Love finds a way. Love finds its way into the most calcified of hearts. Remember love. that force that turns slave ships around midway across the sea. Age after age, eon after eon, the force of love persists. Love, ever available. Love, imminent, clear. So that when we read 2,000-year-old texts about love, it sounds as familiar and close and real as the love we feel for our partners and our children.

the living earth around us. This is not an idea, not a concept, not a biological emotion generated from neurons firing within us. This is the presence of an actual force in the cosmos. So that when I pause and I connect to love, I feel as though I'm connecting to the thing that is at the very heart of reality. Try it. Pause now and connect to love. And if we really let ourselves connect there, we are connecting to something right at the center. Something primal. Primal love. You feel it?

Primal love. Primal because it's perhaps first. It is first. And it outlasts all else. And what is last shall be first and what is first shall be last and all the way through it, love. persists. And the fact that love is available to be connected to at any time, this is justice. Love isn't reserved for a few elites or for protagonists in Shakespearean plays.

This is justice. That there are political prisoners in the worst situations who are able to connect to love and forgiveness and center. This is justice. Light. streams down in the aftermath. Light streams down as the dust clears, and in the midst of great uncertainties we held each other close, not knowing what tomorrow would bring.

But love was there between us. Love was there. Love is here. And the fact that love multiplies, this is justice. Love spills over like loaves and fishes on the mountain. It grows when shared, reverberates when shared. When two or more are gathered in its name, there it is, humming. Shining like the silver gleam of multiple... flying fish, filling every basket. Love resounds. It is a source itself resounding.

Justice over eons silently resounding in the smallest, closest corners of creation. Love triumphs. And the fact that love triumphs, this is justice. What do I mean that love triumphs? How can I say that love triumphs in a world of war and strife? I mean that there is one force and one force alone that has the power to permeate the darkest places.

and find wretched souls in the midst of that suffering, and connect them directly to eternity. And that is love. But, Justice, are we at last heading somewhere better? Are we heading to a better place? Will we get it together? Will we get it undone? I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes the better place is forged together.

Sometimes it's found inside. Sometimes the world is coming apart and falling to shit. And yet, here by the fire, telling stories and singing, the hearth just glows and glows and glows. Does the arc of the moral universe bend towards justice? All the things that are going on in the world right now, is this a movement that will then work itself out through the movement of nature? And what is that?

look like the simple response to that josh is it's predestined like there was a plan b plan a is not working the people who were brought to the land of milk and honey are running out of the production of milk and the production of honey. Their time has come and gone. All we need to do is be mindful of that and to know that and understand that. And then from that, we can only conclude that Mumu's got knowledge of it and got it under control. So I find it easy to...

I wouldn't say easy. I'd say, you know, with some concern, being human, we have those tendencies. Mamu knows and knew before it even happened what would happen and how we would threaten this planet. But at no stage do I believe. Mahmood ever would afford people to destroy the planet. So I rest easy with that. And then I look at impossible situations that suddenly become possible. Throughout my own life, through experiential learning. And you know...

The responses and the outcomes can only be described as miraculous. Miracles. And I don't want to be like... The ones who saw miracles performed in front of them. And then a few moments after that they forgot about them. Yeah, nature will take care of it. Nature will take care of it. Purification, that's what they said at the beginning. They said, coming to a time of purification, nature will purify it. It can't help it. And if you...

If you step into ceremony, if you really concentrate in ceremony these days, you hear it. You hear it. You hear it. You hear it from nature. The simplified version of the question is, Does the universe bend towards justice? Yeah, I have no idea. I don't know. I know we all are going to die, even the sun, even the galaxy. At some point, none of it will be here.

And so what matters to me isn't the ultimate outcome because the ultimate outcome is entropy. What matters is who are we going to be anyway? Who are we going to be anyhow? Maybe it all works out, maybe it doesn't. I know there's not enough darkness in the whole universe to drown out the light from a single candle. So I just want to be a candle. I don't know where this thing's going.

But I know me being miserable and mean isn't gonna make it go better. I think me being you know joyous and kind probably Increases the odds of something good will happen But I don't know and I don't have to know All I have to know is I'm here. I'm here right now. I'm breathing right now. Someday, somebody will hit play on this if they want to. And neither me nor you will be here.

And this will just be an artifact of two guys that were talking at one point in time and both long gone. I don't know where this thing's going. But what I do know is that I'm here right now. And I've got a voice. And I've got a heart, and I've got a brain, and I've got some hands. And I'm going to do the best I can to just pass the torch along. Pass it along. And the people that we admire, that's all they were doing, too. They would have been loved.

delighted and appalled by how things have worked out. Unbelievably delighted and unbelievably appalled. And our kids will feel the same way. Obama, I think, put it best. He says, you know, it bends toward justice, but it doesn't bend by itself. We bend it. We bend it toward justice. And that's what I'm trying to do. And that's what you're trying to do. And that's all we can do. To go back to what Martin's close friend Rabbi Heschel used to say.

There's only one thing that's forbidden, and that's despair. Okay, to feel tired and beaten and exhausted and drained and all of that, but there has to be that message of hope. Not willy-nilly, not, you know, the sun will rise tomorrow, not that. But the universe is on the side of the good. Harmony is woven into... the fabric of our existence, if we can just get our egos out of the way, the goodness of the universe will make the arc of the moral universe tilt back to where it's supposed to be.

I really loved what you said about how if we get out of the way, then the goodness of the universe pours through. If we get out of the way, then the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. And this is interesting because I had another... interviewee quote obama and who said like we bend it towards justice right and you know there's a power and a beauty to that but i also really like this idea of if we get out of the way then the universe itself bends that way

I love the reminders that we as human beings can be agents of the good and we have a responsibility. But I also love... the kind of ancient chinese paintings where the human village is a tiny little corner of the painting and it's the mountains and the trees and the clouds that take up the whole landscape and you know there are more galaxies in this universe

than there are grains of sand on all of this earth. And so I want to try to maintain some semblance of what I can fathom as perspective about cosmic significance of my little action. It's not mine. to reorient the universe, but as the great world of mythology and the Talmud and others think say, nor is it mine to give it up.

First off, many, many thanks to my guests. It was really an honor to speak to so many incredible people for this episode, and I hope that the episode does their words justice. So many thanks to Jarvis J. Masters. Jarvis is an author, a poet, a Buddhist practitioner, and a death row inmate at San Quentin Prison in California. He's served 42 years in prison and is innocent of the crime that got him charged with conspiracy and sentenced to death.

If you'd like to find out more about Jarvis's case, check out freejarvis.org and please sign the petition for his release. Many thanks to Dr. Omid Safi. Really enjoyed meeting Omid. finding out that we had a lot of shared connections. And Omid is easily findable online and has a wonderful book out called Radical Love, Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. Many thanks to Nadia Ershad Gilbert.

Palestinian-American activist who can be found on Instagram at Najia Diaspora, and her Instagram page is highly worth checking out. Really appreciated the conversation, and there will be more conversations to come. Many thanks to Nyungar Elder Noel Nanup. There's going to be a lot more from Noel in the next episode on the much lighter topic of cosmic law.

Many thanks to Ngawang Sangdro. It was really a joy to reconnect with Sangrola after so many years. Many thanks to Van Jones. Really appreciated what he contributed to this episode. Special thanks to Van Jones. For those who don't know Van, he was the primary champion of the Green Jobs Act. He worked in the Obama White House as the special advisor for Green Jobs. He helped pass the First Step Act.

which the New York Times calls the most substantial breakthrough in criminal justice in a generation. And to Jose Barrero, who is an elder and author and editor and activist. He's been working on... Native law and Native sovereignty for decades upon decades. He's the author of The Indian Roots of American Democracy, and there's going to be more with him in the next episode.

Thanks also to Leah and Chloe and Duncan from Rising Appalachia, who contributed some beautiful music to this episode, and their music can be found anywhere that you find music. And Duncan has a website, wicklebuckle.com, w-i-c-k-e-l-buckle.com, and Duncan is musically inspired, so I recommend that people check out his work.

Many thanks to CD Bay, who also contributed some beautiful vocals for this episode. And you can find CD Bay's work anywhere where you get your music. You spell her name S-I-D-I-B-E.

Special thanks to Sonny Reinhart from Necrot for laying down some blues guitar. As always, this episode contains references to many books, articles, songs, movies, etc. These include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution speech given at the National Cathedral on March 31, 1968, some of which is based on an 1852 sermon by Theodore Parker called Justice and the Consciousness.

which is really good reading. Right Story, Wrong Story, and Sand Talk by Tyson Yonca Porta. The song Stakes is High by De La Soul. The book Meditations on the Tarot. The song Johnny Too Bad by The Slickers. The song One by U2. The song Ooh Child by The Five Stair Steps, one of the greatest songs ever written. The 1983 film Return of the Jedi. The Castle by Franz Kafka. The Orphic Hymns.

Grace and Mercy in Her Wild Hair, versions of Ram Prasad by Leonard Nathan and Clinton Seeley. Finding Freedom, How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart by Jarvis J. Masters. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Colasso. Justice in the Face of the Great Mother, Donna Marie Giancola. Ideas for Postponing the End of the World by Elton Krenak.

The Mahabharata, translations by Bibek Debroi, Ramesh Manan, R.K. Narayan, C. Rajagopalachari, and others. After the War, the final chapters of the Mahabharata, translated by Wendy Doniger. The 1998 film Free Tibet, about the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, directed by Sarah Perozek. Oliver, the musical, based on the book Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. The book What If? The World's Foremost Historians Imagine What Might Have Been by Robert Cowley.

Meeting the Man, James Baldwin in Paris, directed by Terrence Dixon, Percival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, The Indian Roots of American Democracy, and Thinking in Indian, a John Mohawk Reader by Jose Barrero, The Weird Studies Podcast. The book Law by Marsha Langton and Alan Korn. An article called Wild Justice Redux, What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters by Jessica Pierce at the University of Colorado. The Drums of Drakkar.

the 1981 film The History of the World Part 1 by Mel Brooks, and of course, the 1979 film The Jerk, starring Steve Martin. I always say that it's better karma to be born an American dog and an Indian cow than it is to be born an Indian dog and an American cow. I'm going to give you a chance to give you a chance. Very, very thank you.