On Powers, Great and Small

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. Hi, friends. This episode is part of a series of explorations that, over the next few episodes, will delve into animate visions of power and rethinking assumptions around power and nature and systems of power.

At a time when we see massive concentrations of power, shifting global powers, and a whole lot of spiritual talk about personal empowerment, I've been feeling like it's necessary to take this deep dive. And the series will also ask some deep questions about what I see as a reluctance to talk about power, a reluctance to really look honestly at how traditional systems work with power.

So I hope this is going to reroute the discussion, and I hope it serves well, and that it stirs a spark, stirs some latent power awake in you. A reminder here at the beginning that this podcast is fed by the power of community. I wouldn't be able to do this podcast if not for the power of community. And that means that many people... contribute a little bit each month and each little offering multiplies through the power of community and that feeds me and my family and allows me to

pay artists and book studio time and keep offering the podcast as I do. There's power in those small offerings and how they multiply. And so this is an encouragement if you feel fed, if you feel nourished by the podcast, if you feel that it kindles something in you. then the way to offer back is through becoming a patron at patreon.com slash the emerald podcast.

It costs as little as $6 per month to be a patron, and patrons get access to twice-monthly study groups in which we go deep into the topics that I explore on these podcasts, and access to an archive of past conversations. and access to a wonderful community of people. That's patreon.com slash the emerald podcast. And please consider becoming a patron if you're a regular listener.

Also want to give a big thank you to the Fetzer Institute who provides structural support for the Emerald and who sees the power in looking at spiritual solutions for the current crises that we face as human beings. This is a time of... deep spiritual crisis as I've talked about on the podcast many times and Fetzer is exploring systems of structural support that can help us navigate these times of spiritual crisis together.

You can learn more about Fetzer's work at fetzer.org. That's F-E-T-Z-E-R. Some of you have been inquiring about the next iteration of The Mythic Body. the year-long course that I teach that dives deep into the mythic traditions of the world. and looks at animate and ritual commonalities in global traditions in order to help us build a foundation for mythic animate practice that reconnects us to land and to each other.

And I'm happy to say that the course will be held again, and I'm in the process of doing some restructuring of the course in order to make it more accessible for people and to provide greater continuity for people who have completed it. These are exciting changes for me and I look forward to sharing info about it soon. If you want to be sure to receive info about the Mythic Body course when it's time, get on the mailing list at themythicbody.com.

and you'll get updates as soon as I send them. That's themythicbody.com, and you can find the mailing list there pretty easily. Lastly, a heads up for European and UK-based Emerald listeners. I'll be in London on June 17th doing a public talk with Alexander Beiner. And on June 22nd, doing an evening of song and story with Pia, who contributes incredible music for the podcast. If you do a quick search for Alexander Beiner, Josh Shry, London.

or PIA, P-E-I-A, Josh Fry, London, you'll find ticket links right away. And as always, you can join the mailing list to receive updates. All right, that's enough of the upfront stuff. Let's get on now with the episode. Good morning. This podcast is all about exploring the little topics, right? the nature of consciousness, the divine mother of the universe. You know, the little topics. You'd think I'd take a break and do an episode on, I don't know, something, what, smaller.

But power is on the mind these days, as this world grapples with shifting global power dynamics, old powers crumbling, new ones rising, archaic... 20th century power paradigms resurfacing. There are power struggles everywhere, it seems. Power struggles over federal funding, over borders, over the flow of goods and services, over strips of land in occupied places.

Power struggles over rights, over bodies, over who gets to live where and how they must tend to their own wounds or their own skins or their own bellies. Power dynamics run rampant in our world. They flare up in the halls of Congress and in corporate boardrooms. They're in full display at universities. They permeate Internet discourse. They are in activist meeting rooms and in communities that try oh so hard to get away from power dynamics completely, but just seemingly can't.

Yes, there are progressive power dynamics and neo-spiritual power dynamics, and even the most decolonized inclusive circle of well-meaning spirit tenders has its power dynamics. Humans just can't seem to get away from questions of power. Power. Can you feel it? Intoxicating. Attractive. Radiant, magnetic. Do your eyes light up when you hear the word? Or do you get kind of queasy and want to turn and run the other way? And what is it anyway?

Is it something we can hold in our hands like a tesseract or an infinity stone or a little golden ring of power? Is it something tangible, something inherent or actual to the nature of the cosmos? Or is it just an arbitrary fabrication, a human societal agreement on what has value, and therefore what can be seized or claimed, hoarded, coveted, walled off and guarded?

and bestowed upon the chosen few and held back from the many, until the many rise up and try to take it, and they're inevitably met with riot shields and billy clubs and tear gas. Power! Chuck D tells us to fight it. Rage says we've got to take it back. Patty says the people already have it. But wait, is it the people who have it? Or is it that Eurodance duo from 1990 that has it?

Pre-meltdown Kanye says no one man should have so much of it and forecasts his own meltdown in the process. James has got soul power. Huey's got the power of love. The songs and poems and religious texts. The movies and videos and 24-hour news samples are teeming with talk of power. In power ballads and pop anthems, we declare our own power. Neo-spiritual systems, in reaction to religious institutions of centralized power, focus on personal power, personal empowerment, and reclaiming our power.

as they imagine a state in which we are in our power, and often this process of claiming our power means speaking truth to other people's power, and clearly power is the common denominator. So focused on power have we become that when someone dies, we're no longer inviting them to rest in peace but to rest in power. Yes.

Power is on the mind, and in a world of such power imbalance, in which 1% of the population control half the wealth of the world, and decision-making power is getting increasingly funneled to fewer and fewer people. How could it not be? This entire modern play, this human life even, you could say, is an exercise in negotiating power. Which is why, with a topic like this one,

a topic as charged and fraught and heavy with the weight of history as power. It would be easy to immediately jump into social dynamics and painful histories and discussions of empire. and the rise in authoritarianism, and the problem of the paradigm of power over, and a seemingly unending list of how power plays itself out in oppressive regimes.

and in the revolutions that topple them and then themselves rise to power, it would be easy to speak in solely human terms about power. But this is part of the very problem with how we in the modern world treat power like everything else the discussion on power has been decontextualized compartmentalized abstracted ideologized and intellectualized power is a construct

Power is a function of the leader and the follower. Power is an illusion. And all that forgets something vital and essential, which is the larger reality of power. For there is a power to which all temporal powers are beholden, within which the dance of all other powers transpires. There is a fabric of reality that no matter what your ideological views on human power exercises its power continually. The power of nature. The power of time.

So popes die and empires crumble. And time lays waste to the best laid plans of despots and tyrants and tech bros. And discussions on power. that fail to start with a recognition of the deeper power at play in the cosmos, are incomplete. They lack the full picture of what is power. And so the ways of working with power that they enact and the systems they create are incomplete too. It can sound abstract to want to talk of cosmic powers in a discussion on power.

in an age when so many are suffering at the hands of repressive powers or reeling from abuses of power. But it's not abstract. The reason that it's vitally important to understand the larger framework of cosmic powers, ecological powers, and the cycles and patterns and intricate yantras in which these powers express. is that this understanding, this ritualized connection to deeper powers can offer insight and embodied understanding of what power actually is.

into how it expresses and manifests across all levels of reality, and therefore how to architect our communities, our ritual systems, our ecologies, our systems of governance.

in ways that serve and honor that power. In order to construct something that lasts and that serves the greater power even as it empowers those who honor it and continually reminds individuals who might be prone to overstep, who might be prone to think that the power is theirs to hold and wield as a weapon, to remind them what the power, the power of nature, the power of time, The power of light and water. The power of the spiral. And the power of the spacious breath actually is.

so that we can build a relationship with power that honors it, that receives it, contains it, distributes it, circulates it, but doesn't squander it, that honors powers great and small. This isn't as simple as saying power sucks or there's no such thing as power or that power is all human dynamics so we'll just flatten everything and that's our way of dealing with power.

Human constructs of power are reflections of the power of nature from which they spring, and we won't be able to successfully navigate power unless we understand the textures and ripples and nuances. and intricate leaf structures and distributive protocols of the power of nature itself. For power ripples in particular ways. It pools in particular places. It follows wave trajectories as all animacies do. It congregates around harmonic symmetries, around visions of beauty and charismatic voices.

and plays of vibration that hit the eye and ear in enchanting ways. It orbits, centers, and it radiates out even as it draws back into itself, and it rides upon sound waves. and its streams and streams of light, while hollow expanses give it space to germinate and to dance. Power. Power is real. It's all around us. Waiting to be recognized. Waiting to be summoned to. And so let's start this way instead.

Let's start by taking a breath and pausing and remembering together that there is a power. There is a power. You feel me, beloved? There is a power that powers all this. Let's let go of fraught, temporal, anthropocentric visions of power for just a moment here. And remember, there is a power. The great power of nature. The power that, in scientific understandings, suddenly took all this from an infinitesimal point to a universe 94 billion light years across.

The power that pulses across eons, that funnels into galaxy-swallowing black holes and explodes as... krakatoic supernovas and sparks the spiraling orbits of an ungraspable number of planets. Yes, it drives the spinning orbits of the 200 sextillion planetary worlds. How great is the power. But that great power echoes in the tiniest of things. It rustles in the twilight reeds. It moves as a child's breath through dandelion seeds. Seeds.

Imagine the power in a single seed. Come springtime, there is a power that across half the world stirs all those tiny seeds awake. Imagine. In all the topsoil of all the forests and deserts and across the vast grasslands, trillions of seeds stirring awake. How do the seeds know that it's time to stir? What power sparks in them from within? What pulls at them from without? There is a power. You've felt it.

We've all felt it and we have sung to it. And we have raised our arms on high. And we have wept before it. And we've pondered it and wondered why. and questioned it and neglected it, as all the while the great power draws from the mother robin an egg the color of the sky. Oh, power. There is a power. Feel it. It's not an abstraction. It's imminent, tangible. It pushes and pulls. It bends and sways, it shifts, transforms, it moves, it does. The word power, like poder.

in Spanish or Portuguese or other Latin-derived languages, means to be able to. To be able to act. To be able to do. And so this universe is able to. This universe does. It births. It nourishes. It sustains. It destroys and births again. It creates boundary where it needs to create boundary. and opens up space where it needs to open up space. That's its power. The five powers of the divine, listed in the ancient Indian texts, are the power to create, to preserve.

to destroy, to reveal, and to conceal. And the power does all these things. All these things does the power. It births worlds and sustains them afloat on its great milk oceans. Sustains them on the buoyancy of the preserver's dreams. You know, the dreaming power. that suspends all the varied worlds in space. And should the dreaming cease, they say, all these worlds would fall. And fall they must one day.

So the power crushes worlds to dust, even as it recreates. But here's the beauty of it. This power isn't simply a formless ocean. It isn't simply oneness goo. It delimits parts of itself, conceals, forms boundaries of manyness. creates facets of separation so that individual parts of it can receive of the power, drink of that wellspring, and hold that power, and root it

and circulate it and flower it and fruit it and re-express and reveal it in an infinite spectrum of ways. It creates a vast and varied dance of limit and expression. of boundary and porosity that becomes the very medium of its exchange. So the red blood cell is porous enough to receive the oxygen power. the life-breath of the oxygen power, the eight-electron power of oxygen. It receives it, and it holds it within its boundaries, and it carries it, and when it's time...

It releases it and lets it go. Everything functions this way. The power of the cosmos exhibits itself in mandala structures of porosity and boundary. of limit and expression designed to receive, hold, circulate, alchemize, repurpose, and re-express the power. The dance of Shakti And what does Shakti mean? Shakti means power. The dance of the goddess, the dance of the power of creation, is the dance of arising architectures that receive and hold and pass on power.

Everything in the cosmos is a power structure. The orchid on your windowsill is a power structure. You've heard talk of flower power. Well, it's true. Flowers are instruments of power. They harness color and fragrance and the very real power of spirals, of vortexes to attract things to them, to draw attention in. That intoxicating drawing in power is tangible. It's real. So real that orchids, at one time, completely upended Victorian society.

sent hundreds of explorers across far seas where dozens and dozens lost their lives, enchanted by the allure of a flower. That's power. Everything in nature is a power structure. Your hands, your fingers, the opposable thumb that grasps and so can hold. That's a power structure because it can literally hold. power. In a world in which powers arise and powers pass and most animals can only keep as much as they temporarily hold in their jaws or their beaks,

The ability to reliably hold things in our hands over time and work with them and shape them and transform them, that's power. What cosmic power, the power of the hand. to move stone, to shape wood, to make a guitar, to hold a cord and pluck a string, and, like Woody Guthrie, write, this machine kills fascists on the front of the damn thing. That's power.

Ant colonies, beehives, these are great citadels of power, transforming nectar into honey all courtesy of the power of the sun. The sun radiates thermal and electromagnetic power. and that power is received by a trillion trees and a planet of one quintillion leaves. Imagine all those leaf mandalas, maple leaf mandalas, blackberry leaf mandalas.

banana leaf mandalas, all of whom are architected in their structure to receive and hold and pass on power. Do you see the broad, translucent elegance of the banana leaf? Do you see the power? And us, the waters of the world, team with power. And every living cell on the planet is alive with water, alive with vibration. Every cell dances the structural dance of porosity and limit so that it can receive and hold and transform power. Power. She's everywhere.

And when faced with this all present, all cycling, all replenishing, all creating, all destroying, all regenerating power, what have human beings done? Built communal and ritual and ecological systems to receive and hold and alchemize it? Yes. Danced our way to it. Sung our way to it. Storied our way to it. Yes. drummed in spiraling rhythms in celebration of it? Yes. And have we also failed to recognize it, run terrified from it?

Yes. Sadly. Yes. Created abstracted philosophies in which the true power was said to be everything but it. Yes. centralized it, monopolized it, claimed it, tried to crush it, restrain it, divorced it from the very vehicle of its expression, from form, from matter, from world. even as we forwarded a vision of matter enslaved. Yes. In the face of this world of thunderous powers.

Spiraling powers, we have forgotten that each of the powers is an expression of the great power. And that power unfolds eternal. and that our lives perhaps harmonize best when we embody what it means to be in service of it. So in the face of a world of profound, deep powers,

We scratch away at the immediate, obvious powers that we can grasp and claim and seize. But when we understand this world of kaleidoscopic powers, spiraling as an expression of and in service to the great power, when we understand that its medium is time, long, slow time. And its medium is the ongoing dance of light and shadow. And that its medium is harmonic resonance. And that in this dance of life and death, there's no immediate short-term power that can...

Resist the eroding power or the crumbling power or the dissolving power or the allowing power or the spacious power. or the latent power of life, the persisting power, or the ability of seeds to germinate in the midst of the ashes of what came before. then we understand that the recently dominant vision that human beings have had of power, power that is realized through brute force alone,

Power that depends on the rapacious extraction of rare minerals. Power that invades, that seizes, that captures, that walls off and hoards. powers that build of themselves seemingly unassailable towers and construct elaborate halls of mirrors, that these are actually, cosmically speaking, ecologically speaking, the weakest powers? They are the powers that are quickest to rise and quickest to fall, quickest to flare up and quickest to burn out. They are the powers that are most easily dissolved.

And so a big part of the ferocity and cruelty with which those obsessed with the immediate obvious powers exert their power is that they recognize. Deep down they recognize. They know that all this will slip away, and so they have to guard it all the tighter. All this will slip away. All of it will slip away. Because they've built their vision of power on the most fleeting of foundations. They've built entire empires on addictive urges, on impulsive waves.

on adolescent male hormonal cycles, which I don't know if you've heard, don't tend to have much lasting power. Yes, this is what we suffered for. This is what we died for. Millions rode to battle because the Kaiser's blood sugar levels were up that day. So transient, so fragile was the Nazi rise to power.

that it needed a whole lot of propaganda and a whole lot of meth to sustain. And those currently flirting with fascist visions of power would do well to remember how quickly that particular vision fades. And the hangover is a bitch. They've built empires on foam. And one deep breath, and that foam is swept away. Look at the successive waves of kings who, like Ozymandias, declared themselves rulers of all things. And then the sands came. And then the winds came.

And then the waters washed those earthly powers away. And then the sun set on the transitory powers. And only the stars remained. The sun never sets on the British Empire, they used to say. Well, it did. And only the stars remained. And in those ages of doom and gloom, in those long nights of tempestuous powers striving for dominance, what happened? Who triumphed? The sun still rose.

And the Queen of Tides washed it all away. Hear me, false leaders, fake preachers who triumphed. The Queen of Tides will wash you too. I mean, you live long enough to see leaders die and borders change and great houses grumble and Hiltons give way to Olsons and Olsons to Kardashians and eventually you're kind of like, what is the f***ing point?

Seriously, like, what a drag that vision of power is. And the tech bros trying to live forever, the hunger, the power that we could conquer Earth and be forever remembered? No. Thanks. Me, I'll dig my well deeper, my sister, my brother. For if that type of power brought any lasting happiness whatsoever. then tyrants and those in their inner circle would be the happiest of people. And, newsflash, they're clearly not.

Their gnawed at, miserable, paranoid, bound to the hungers of the obvious powers. A life dedicated solely to the obvious powers. either their perpetuation or their overthrow, is a life in which it's easy to fall victim to hungry forces. What do I mean, the obvious powers? I mean the outward, forceful, loudly announcing powers. The trumpets of the civilizational powers. I mean that very human power that confuses itself for the power.

that has sought to create its own empires its own worlds when there is only one creator of worlds and her name is nature that has forgotten the power from which it comes and to which it is beholden and so has left itself out on a limb in the most precarious of states. We are... deep in the throes of the battles of the obvious powers. And in the midst of such battles for obvious power, it's good to remember that there are other powers. There are...

Other powers we must remember, and honor, and offer to, and sing to, and receive back from. And the waters of Zion Canyon sing that gentle persistence over time is a power. The eternal blue sky whispers that holding space and allowing... is among the greatest of powers. There are many powers at play in the world. And a culture that forgets that power

is alive and present in every facet of the web of life. And the smallest participant in that web has forgotten what power is. And that vision of power won't sustain. Look at the traditional stories and you'll find there's a power in the smallest of things. There is a green ant power. A caterpillar power. A spider power. For it was a tiny spider, some say, who weaved the vibrational web of creation itself. There are mouse powers.

Which is why from jumping mouse to reapercheap we tell stories of the littlest beings who do great things. Mice who find their way to the highest mountains and shape the very foundations of the halls of... Power. And how could I forget the hummingbird power? For when the world had been cast beneath a blanket of darkness,

Who was it who was finally able to break through to the other side? After all the eagles and hawks had exhausted themselves with their bold flapping of wings, who flew the final length? who pricked the darkness blanket with their tiny beak and let the flood of starlight shining in. Hummingbird. In a time of screeching eagles, may we remember the hummingbird power. The power of small things. Like the power of a single star.

Across all space, a single pinprick of light to bring hope and transmit dreams. There, J.R.R. Tolkien tells us. Peeping among the cloud rack, above a dark torre high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, As he looked up out of that forsaken land, And hope returned to him. For, like a shaft clear and cold, pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

There are things forever beyond the reach of the obvious power, beloved. Do you hear? Tolkien understood the nature of these differing powers. So the obvious powers of Mordor, these powers seem great, but they are like smoke. And the reason Sauron can't see his own imminent fall at the hands of who? Of little hobbits. Is because it never occurs to him once. That power could live in something so small. That there could be such a thing as gentle persistence. Or simplicity. Or humility.

or those over whom the desire for obvious power holds little sway. He understands one vision of power and one only. And that vision of power is not the full tale of power. Yes, there is the obvious power that rises in great might and tumult and forces things to bend to its will while it still can do the forcing. And then there is an older power. A gentler power. A power that lives deep in the old forest there by the withy windle. A power that lives right at the deepest.

sleepiest part of the dream. A power that busies itself gathering lilies and learning the song to everything. For this power. This listening power, this singing power, this harmonizing power, this power walked the hills and moors long before the first ash pit, and the first factory, and the first cell phone tower.

Its power is the power of the song, the choir, the refrain, the harmonic network in which all forest creatures are at the center of their own mandala of powers, and each is to be sung to. and engaged with. And together, that web of small, reverberant powers becomes great. This is the fairy tale power. The fairy tales have a lot to say about the obvious powers. Usually, those fairy tale protagonists who charge boldly into the forest with their obvious powers on display don't turn out very well.

Turns out you gotta bow your head a little bit when you enter the forest and seek to understand and listen and share a crust of bread with an old cave hermit or call out respectfully to a passing owl. The power in the old stories is never in the form of a protagonist by themselves, alone, overly confident, brushing foes aside and exerting their will upon a forest. It's not a conquering hero. But neither is it a modern neo-spiritual wellness vision of self-empowerment. Power is familial.

Power is relational. Remove the goddess from her mandala, and she's no longer the goddess. So Tibetan tantric powers emanate as elemental Buddha families. and every power has its retinue and is manifest through the structure of its retinue. This holds true whether you're talking about very sublime or very human manifestations of power, like...

Wu-Tang Clan has a posse. Like, remove Trump from his retinue? From his loyalists and his coalitions of evangelists and his surrounding family of energies? And what do you have? What is it that makes the godfather powerful? Power is relational, familial. It expresses in mandalas of families of powers.

In a modern individualist world, it's no wonder we focus on individualist visions of power. We say that we want to reclaim our power, as if power is something that we possess all on our own. We speak often of personal empowerment, but with little understanding that any power, literally any power in nature, needs a structural relational system of some kind to hold it and grow it.

We recognize this when we garden, but we forget it when it comes to our own lives. We imagine the empowered state to be a state of spontaneous individualism. We imagine the cathartic moment of self-expression of our power. That's me in my power expressing truth to power. We don't always look at the rest of the system. Or imagine that a capacity to hold power over time might need to be cultivated carefully, with a lot of attention to root and soil and boundary.

and integrity and relationship. When we internalize the dominant understanding of obvious power, It's easy to fall for a hyper-individualized vision of power that can be measured in likes and followers, and in how loudly it announces itself and in its ability to exercise its will freely. But this isn't the full scope and breadth of power. I can say that I've been on a long journey with this in my life. Looking back now, my...

loud proclamations of living in my power and being empowered fall a little flat. Because I hadn't actually grown of my life a network, a community, a practice. a vessel that could actually hold water. All of those pronouncements of power were like leaves scattered in wind. So perhaps claiming power... isn't about the immediate rush of shouting about power for all to hear. Perhaps it's about constructing a mandala of systems in our lives.

that are structurally capable of receiving and holding and transmitting power. Growing power. Healing power. Birthing power. Familial power. communal power, ritual power, artistic power, relational power. The heroes are only as good as their helpers. as their mirrors or their little balls of string. And the journey in those old fairy stories, the quest, is for what? It's almost always relational.

It's not I'm charging into this forest to find some personal power at the center, to climb a tower of individual achievement. It's often to wed. To wed oneself to the larger web of relational powers. Or it's on someone else's behalf. To bring light so that a whole family can see. Or to heal a relative. To heal Boldo Bayan's child stuck in the spirit world. To heal Anga's ailing mother with serpent medicine and bare skin.

Healing power. Remember the healing power? The obvious powers rip apart bodies by the millions. Patiently, the healing power stitches those wounded bodies together. The healing power brings tears and gentle resolve and softens hurts and in time, through the power of time, the healing power brings reflection. on why we rushed into the fight. And was it all worth it anyway? The power of reflection, over time, is a deep power.

which reminds us that it's far easier to destroy than to mend. And in the face of the destructive power, the mending power, in its ceaseless living pulsations, Its telescopic crystallizations, its weavings, its bridgings, the healing power persists. And who, who was triumphant in the end? Pele erupts in great demonstration. demonstrations of power. She destroys, she creates, she exerts her power. But when the lava cools, there emerges another power.

There, in all the little nooks and niches of the black rock, a power that silently, softly germinates, and sprouts, and takes root. Hiiaka. Patient, persistent. The younger sister, actualized. As Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Kanani Atan says, In the cracks and crevices of the lava flow, water will collect there. And from those kipuka, or those small circles of old growth forests that the lava did not cover.

You'll have spores come from the fern. You'll have seeds come from the lehua blossom and scatter into those crevices where the water is waiting. That's the role of hii. Hii is to hold close, but it's also that crack and that crevice. And hii yaka is in that shadow part because, you know, the sun can be unrelenting. on black lava, it can be like a frying pan, really like metal. So in that shadowed crevice, that's where the spores can take root.

And that's where the spreading and the growth of the forest again can happen from that central place that was not affected. And so that's the difference between Pele, which is the black lava that has created new land, and Hii Yaka, the sister who is cradled and coddled within that crevice of Pele to allow for this. Eons and eons of forest growth over time. Hiiaka, the one that embraces and holds in little nooks. That's a power.

And in the long run of time, the closer we look, we find that the world is shaped and transformed continually by small, invisible powers. The soft overcomes the hard, says the Tao Te Ching. The gentle overcomes the rigid. And sometimes we hear of these examples of small powers overcoming great powers, and we're like, well, sure, that's a nice story to tell ourselves, right?

That's a nice story to make ourselves feel better. And meanwhile, the tech bros are busy cashing in and the orc legions of the apocalypse are trampling fields of daisies for fun and the U.S. government is snuffing out any means of dissent. But it's not just a story. It's the actual nature of power. For true power is invisible, some say. And invisibly, the small powers persist and adapt and birth and sustain. And there is more power in a river over time.

than there is in a fleeting empire or a mountainous stack of legal paper. That's not power, Ray. That's paper. Christ. Ray! Power is a rainstorm. Power is that river right there. That river. Right there. Do you hear? The orchestra of small forgotten powers that even now are shaping everything. For the meek, it's been said, shall inherit the earth. And... I always had a problem with this one, because meek is such a meek word. Natalie Milonis tells us that the word in ancient Greek isn't meek.

It's about humility, and walking with the head bowed, and standing in recognition, perhaps, of the greater power. Like those who don't go around thinking the power is all theirs. will inherit a greater power. And it's easy to take this teaching as like, be a good little servant and don't rock the boat or make too much fuss. Be meek and you'll get your reward someday in heaven.

And it's certainly possible to manipulate it into that, and it's certainly possible that it has been manipulated into that. But ultimately, originally, it's speaking about something far more animate.

and alive. It's speaking about energetic flows and the way that power actually moves. If we see ourselves as isolated individual beings, and see the power as ours to seize or hoard in a world in which we're ultimately out for ourselves and our own gain, if we wall ourselves off from this world of powers,

then we've immediately limited the actual relational power that we have access to. All the power we could ever hold is that which we grab with our hands. Yet if we hollow out this instrument, and empty and align and connect and offer back and turn it over to greater cycles, then powers flow through us. If we turn ourselves over to time, and to the seasons, to the weavings of the great power, then we are connected to those spirals, and their power becomes our power.

And we relax into their currents. And are held by their deep foundations. And know where the center of the world is. and know its glories are ours to bask in forever. For we've gazed hollow and empty into the night of stars, and let their bright melodies pierce us through. And we've surrendered. and allowed ourselves to be carried on the Earth's winding cloud roads and cooled by her breezes. To the point that here, now, we are inseparable from her. We are this world of power.

in expression. This is the inheritance and there's no temporal human power that can do much about that. This power. This gratitude power. This humble power. doesn't have to dream of some far-off day when it might inherit the world or dominate the world or seize control or get exactly what it wants. This power is here. Because the time and place of the small, invisible powers is now and here. Here is the inheritance of the earth.

The inheritance of the earth is in the bowing before the earth itself. Now and here. Let's do it together. Let's pause and touch our heads to the earth. And feel her rains upon us. And her warm nectars feed us. And we are her. And she is us. This is our inheritance. Those who pause to actually recognize the pulse of the living power. It's hard to remember the small powers sometimes.

It's tempting to shake our fists and ask why the small power hasn't triumphed over the great power. Why haven't the invisible powers won out over the obvious powers? Because that's not their power. Their power isn't in triumphing on the terms of the obvious powers. Because they aren't obvious. They're invisible. Time is invisible. The movement of time, this is her triumphing. The goddess Kali is time. The movement of time is her triumphing.

The rising moon, the swelling waters to which everything returns, the ashes returning to the river. This is the power. This is hard to feel when you're in the thick of it. When you're in the stress pit of the rise and collapse and the incessant jockeying of human powers. And in such times, should we meet the obvious powers on their terms? in legal battles and very upfront and visible social movements and in protest? Of course. But in our efforts to topple or reform the obvious powers?

let's be careful not to internalize their definitions of power, because there are many, many powers at play. And this is part of the difficulty in the modern Western discussion on power. So, historically... Western religious institutions have seen the power as something abstract and far away. a removed god that occasionally willfully intervenes, reduces cities to rubble or floods the whole world from above, but is not present in or located in the world.

And this becomes a model for systems of top-down, hierarchic and oligarchic and monarchic rule. With the rise of humanism comes the rejection of that vision of power and the forwarding of a people-centric vision of power. But because it's centered completely around people, there's a sense of it being a human invention, not inherent to the cosmos, somewhat arbitrary. There's no such thing as power except for what human beings decide is powerful.

And from there, you get a hundred quotes like this. Power exists because we believe it does, says author Cassandra Clare. Power lies in the eye of the beholder, says Gustavo Rossetti. People are not powerful, we see them as such. And this isn't exactly what animate traditions have said about power. That vision of power keeps us trapped in a discussion around power that revolves around either accepting or rejecting power as an arbitrary human construct or as a detached, bodiless force.

It ignores the power of nature within which all of this operates and manifests and limits our ability to model power structures in a way that actually hold and distribute power. It limits our understanding of the fractal patterns in which power manifests in nature and therefore in us and our communities and our structural systems. So first...

If we want to reroute our discussions on power, we have to understand from an animate perspective that power is real, and its patterns of manifestation are inherent to the cosmos. This universe is tangible, palpable power. And this power is not simply an amorphous energy. It is structural in nature. Structural.

in the way that galaxies are structural, and musical scales are structural, and water molecules and human hands, and all the way to every grain of sand, which, if you've ever looked at sand through a microscope, You know that every time you step barefoot upon the shores of the sea, you're walking upon a galaxy of crystalline structures. Yes, the power of nature is structural.

So when I said all of nature is a power structure, this is what I'm talking about. Yes, the whole universe's power is energy and ultimately in its pristine non-dual state, All of that energy is one and available to everyone everywhere, but the important part for any traditions or cultural subgroups that are interested in actually working meaningfully with relational power... is how it expresses, how it delimits itself, what its waveforms are.

where it gathers and congregates, what makes it dissipate, what helps it coalesce, and how can we call it into our ritual spaces? How can we create architectures that hold it and alchemize it and embody it over time? The discussion on power can't end at there's a great power to the universe and I'm one with it and that's that. Nor can it end with power is a human construct and it sucks so let's just flatten it. Check this out.

It's an outgrowth of the very mind-body dichotomy that has ruled the Western world for so long to suggest that the power of the universe is real, but the structures that hold it are false. The structures that hold it are the body of the power itself, are inseparably part of how that power manifests, just as the power of Shakti manifests as groupings and patterns of snowflake crystals.

and river tributaries and branching capillaries, just as it manifests as scales and songs through which it itself is invoked, and as dance steps and woven patterns on cloth. So the power manifests as clan structures, councils of eldership, as mystery schools, even as governmental structures. I hate to break it to you, but governmental structures are part of the dance of Shakti too. Part of the fractal play of the cosmos. This is Shakti too.

If we think that all this is concentric circles and spirals of animacy right up until the governing structure, Right up until the political interrelationality, we're not paying attention to how her architectures pervade everything.

Can those power structures careen out of balance? Can they be manipulated in order to oppress? Of course. If power structures concentrate too much of that power in one part of the mandala, among a particular few and fail to replenish the periphery, and there is too much focus on the center and not the periphery, then the periphery collapses in upon the center.

The dam breaks, the mandala is upended, and the whole thing has to start over again. Conversely, if there's no center at all, no sense of common vision or common ceremony, no place to hold anything and sustain it, The power does not stay, and the mandala dissipates before it ever fully forms. Ever experienced a circle of well-meaning people, but that circle had no deep center? And so it dissipated before it ever fully formed.

All of this is the actual fluid movement of power dynamics. So to celebrate Shakti, to honor Shakti, means going deep into how the power actually expresses. into all the relational details, into how it's given and received, how it's gained or lost. And that means understanding that while power is everywhere and everything. The power also doesn't just flow equally everywhere all at once. Yes, power concentrates. It concentrates in particular places and things.

Because of the nature of harmonic structure, certain confluences resonate with more vibrational potency. There are power spots in geography. I'm sure you've been to one. places where ley lines converge, rivers join. There are configurations of stone, it is known, that serve to amplify the power. There are marma points and meridian lines.

places of greater concentrations of power in any body and in the great body of earth and sky. Power spots are real. Traditional systems recognize these power spots. just as they recognize concentrations of power in objects, in substances, in works of art and art forms, in knowledge. And the power of this knowledge is held generationally and ancestrally. It's held by initiates in clans. And there's boundary around how it's held. And that boundary...

is part of the power expressing itself so that it can hold itself and pass on. In the Afro-Brazilian traditions, this power, this ashe, is in everything. but it also concentrates in certain places and certain ways. Here's Pai Hojni speaking of ashe. Ashe, the power of the cosmos. Ashe is everything, my son, and everything is Ashe. This is the principle of life. A force that emanates from everything that is alive.

Ashay is power, magic, gift. The hands that bless have Ashay. The word spoken has Ashay. The wisdom and tastes of the Teheru, that's the ritual space and the ritual community, the wisdom and tastes of the Teheru have asheh. power is energy that is given and received, gained and lost, accumulated and dissipated. And notice how he says accumulated and dissipated.

Power can accumulate or it can dissipate depending on how it's worked with and fed and honored. He goes on, quote, Beyond being the sacred force of each orisha, each force of nature, ashe also refers to the set of objects and materials. indispensable to worship, such as stones, trees, food, tools, and ornaments belonging to each deity and their respective sacred spaces.

This force is reinvigorated through rituals, offerings, and sacrifices. It's in the blood, in the sap of the leaves, in the powders of seeds and fruits. This is power. It lives in the pulse of blood, life-giving blood, which is why blood is at the heart of so many offerings, and so many of the goddesses love nothing more than to lap up blood. For blood is power, life-giving power. The power lives in milk, the all-nourishing power of milk, the high, high-frequency milk power.

The breast power. This is power. A single breast once transfixed Yukio Mishima's young character Mizuguchi, there at the Golden Temple. It paralyzed him. as he pondered the power of it. How the power was not simply in the fruit-like form of it, but in the universe of powers that it reflected, that it represented, that was pouring through it. The power pours through things. Yes, the power in spiritual traditions transmits. It passes on through transmission. Through Shaktipat.

or in Tibetan traditions through empowerments, in which nectars held in vases are infused with the power of chants and invocations and ringing bells. and initiates cup their hands and receive the nectar and drink of the power. It transmits through breath, through words, says Joana Albain dos Santos. The word is part of a dynamic process that transmits a power to make things happen. If the word gains such power to act, it is because it is infused with ashē, spoken with breath, with saliva.

Warmth. It is a breathed word, a lived word, accompanied by modulations, emotional charge, personal story, and the power of the one who speaks it. Yes. Power moves in saliva. It dances on tongues. It transmits through food. Food is power. Everything is food. Everything is power. Food is offering. Everything is offering to the power. And you eat food, my Stella Giyoshosi says.

You eat food with your hand. You touch it, feel it, pass it on to your mouth because, quote, food taken to the mouth by hand carries much more power, much more ashe. This world is a world of relational powers in continual transmission. There are elements, substances, plant beings of varying concentrations of inherent power. Like, the power of gold isn't arbitrary. The human somatic system is architected to revolve around shine, around light.

around that which does not tarnish but that stays eternal. In a crumbling world, the lasting power of diamonds is not arbitrary. These are real and actual powers. Many traditional cultures recognized the power of that which is in the ground beneath us and developed protocols around such deep earth powers.

Many specifically chose to leave those powers in the ground. Here's Nyungar researcher Jack Mitchell. There's a kind of an idea that Aboriginal culture or Indigenous cultures... generally they'll talk about aboriginal culture is kind of this idea of primitivity around the lack of technological advancement but people sort of seem to think that that is because of a

a lack of an ability to understand it or like you know as opposed to you know it's a conscious choice that's been made to maintain sustainability and sustainability of sort of like cultural So the idea, for example, that there were certainly clever people who could see into the power of... these minerals and see into the power of what lies beneath the earth and understand that if they were to go the dark sorcerer route and start to tinker with things that they could.

achieve a certain kind of material power but they did not go that route yeah exactly i mean i often think about this even from the perspective of mathematics like just like the way that numbers work like in a lot of aboriginal cultures the you didn't really count beyond five you know though you know maybe 10 but it was like you basically had numbers for like one to three to five maybe 10 or something but a small amount and then beyond that it was just

you know a lot sigma big number yeah that's once again that's not an inability to do that it's because beyond a certain point the impact that like quantification of the world can create greed and division and this kind of like other way of thinking you know like when there's not ownership and material possession it's cultural knowledge then numbers that that you know then they're just they're not necessary and i think that's also part of that not wanting to tinker not wanting to

yeah a recognition that you leave things in the ground it's like that's this law you know like uranium country makes you sick and so it was known that that's sickness country so you didn't you you know you didn't go there you knew that that had this like

incredible power and so the presence of minerals whether that was gold or diamonds or you know iron or whatever had a presence in the culture based on So if you have a story about diamonds that describes that country, like the Barramundi diamond story from the Kimberley.

that still has a presence as much of a presence in the culture as like digging up the diamonds and refining them and polishing them and i mean you look at what has happened when people started to do that you know blood diamonds and warfare and It's a madness that has accompanied the ownership of diamonds. But the story, the scales of the giant barramundi... The story becomes a vehicle for understanding country and understanding the power that exists in that country that you draw from.

By looking after it, you learn the story, you learn the lore of how you relate to the minerals that exist in that country via the story about that country. Imagine leaving those rare earth minerals in the ground. Imagine that honoring of the power. Traditional systems navigate the power dynamics of nature constantly. Dig deeper into egalitarian systems. And you will find that egalitarian doesn't just mean everyone is free to do anything all the time in a world with no limit.

It means a very sophisticated and deliberate way of working with real and tangible powers. Human beings construct delimitations and structures of power not simply to oppress or to gatekeep. but like any vessel so that the structure will hold water. We build mystery schools recognizing that unless there's some type of slow initiatory growth process, the humming truths at the center won't hold.

and all those seeds will scatter in the breeze. We construct conservatories and choirs and music schools dedicated to the power of song. and kung fu schools that hold those martial powers in an ecosystem of reverence and relationality, the power is in the organizing structure itself. The power, the ashe, the mana, the prana is not simply something that passes through the structure. It is the structure.

It's in the processes that initiates go through to slowly learn how to receive and hold that power over time. It's why, my Stella says, the initiates sit on the floor first, to receive more ashe from the ground. while the elders sit on stools. It's in the constant acknowledgement of protocol and in the greetings voiced aloud and in the verbalized honoring of eldership which gives wisdom a place to live and thrive.

Pai Hajni says that Ashe, quote, is the source of the elder's authority. To possess Ashe is to have respect, origin, lineage. It's the reference point for everything that endures and becomes eternal. It's what allows us to be and exist in this world. So the issue that we face as human beings around power isn't that there are structures of power. Every structure in creation is a structure of power.

The issue is how structures work with power. Shakti reminds us that if you want to understand power, you have to understand the mandala through which it self-expresses. The mandala shows us that power is in harmonic relationships. Harmonic relationships like songs are powerful. Certain intervals are powerful. Proportions that we consider beautiful are powerful.

And that power isn't arbitrary. It's mathematic. It's harmonic. Which probably means it's time for a digression on Ted Cruz's beard. You know Ted Cruz, the American Republican politician? Do you know why he grew a beard? He grew a beard to lengthen his face because research was showing that because of its particular proportionality, voters simply didn't trust his face.

Like, he could say the exact same thing as another politician with a more harmonically proportionate face, and voters would choose the other guy every single time. You can ignore that. pretend we're past that kind of way of seeing the world, say, oh no, nobody actually makes decisions that way. But that's not understanding Shakti, whose medium is the actual harmonic play of power.

of proportion, of vibration, of form. Form, like proportion, is powerful. Change the proportion, change the power. Like shapes are powerful. Triangles are powerful, pyramids are powerful, circles are powerful. Circles are very popular organizing structures these days, but the power of a circle In fact, the very thing that defines a circle is its center. A circle is, quote, a closed two-dimensional shape with all points equidistant from a center point.

Turns out that a circle with no center isn't actually, by definition, a circle. So organizing in a circle is a beautiful thing. There have been councils and mystery schools and paleolithic choirs and traditional structures for tens of thousands of years that have organized in circles. But what makes those circles hum? What makes those circles last is their relation to a center. What's the center? It can be as simple as a set of common communication principles or ways of working together.

Robert's rules of order, that kind of thing. But is that really strong enough to keep the circle? Or it can be years and years of sharing story together. sharing song together. It can be a shared understanding of the umbilical thread of song and story that tells us who we are and where the center of the world is.

and connects us back to 10,000 generations of ancestry. So that, despite all our differences, even when we want to do things one way, and that f***er over there wants to do things another way, We have synchronized and syntonized in that circle so many times that the center holds. We have a reference point that is somatically embedded, ritually embedded. And so all discussions and actions and decisions refer back to that center point and gain nourishment from that center point.

In the same way that a growing embryo draws sustenance right from the universe through its mother's body and through its own navel. A lot of organizing models these days are built on centerless circles. And a lot of these fail. Because you get a centerless circle of viewpoints and voices that share no common bond.

nor are they committed to the long-term replenishment and generational passing on of that circle. And then add to that that even though they share principles and ideals of interconnectivity and interrelationality,

They themselves are the product of the culture of individuality, and this makes it very difficult for those in the modern world to organize in a functional circle. The inputting of a Western psychological self says Maori author Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, which is a highly individualized notion to group consciousness as it is centered in many colonized societies. End quote. End quote. End quote.

Which is another way of saying that people in the modern world think they're doing group dynamics, and often what they're doing is individual dynamics in a group setting. So, how does your circle actually maintain its center? What common felt embodied practices reinforce that center? Who is entrusted with keeping the relationship with that center strong? To enact a truly functional circle takes more than just saying,

At this circle, all voices are equal. It also takes recognizing that while power flows through all people, it doesn't flow through everyone in the exact same way, in the exact same quantity, at the exact same time. what do we do with difference what do we do with geniuses with highly charismatic speakers charisma is power flowing through a person

Charisma is real and one of the primary driving forces of human history. What do we do with it? Try to pretend it doesn't exist, flatten it out completely, or work to recognize the gifts of the charismatic person and integrate them into the system so that that charisma works in service of the relational web instead of at odds with it. But that can take generations. That can take years. What do we do with pattern breakers?

with ones that want to disrupt or immediately institute a new system before they've even mastered the part about listening and waiting and learning. What does a circle of elders do with eager young ones? who arrive wanting access to the secret teachings at the center right away. It's work to stay open to the invitation of replenishment that new voices bring, while at the same time holding true to center.

Are our systems intricate enough? Are they founded upon enough foundation of song and story and embedded relationality that they can recognize the gifts that flow through everyone in the circle? but also recognize that power is not going to flow through everyone in the exact same way. You feel me? Power is real. And the study of the goddess... in the tantric traditions is the study of its ways. So when faced with power, when faced with a pattern, a way of being, a corrupt structural system,

We don't run screaming or simply try and upend it and put nothing in its place. We meet it with a deeper understanding and connection to the actual intricacies of power. A harmful pattern... A structural power dynamic isn't counteracted or repatterned if you only meet it with absence. It must be met with a deeper, more fortified pattern. This is understanding what magic is.

This is understanding power. Turns out there's an old story about this, and it goes a little something like this. Once, and you may have heard the tale. There was a great battle between Shiva, the ascetic, who had chosen to withdraw from the world, and Kama, the force of longing itself. Back and forth they battled, each unleashing their powers upon the other until at last, Shiva gathered and concentrated all of the reverberant residue of ten thousand years of meditation.

All that tapas. All that power. And beamed it out of his third eye and Kama was incinerated. Burnt to ash. Kama. The primal longing of the cosmos was burnt to ash. You've probably heard that part. But have you heard this? Have you heard what happened with his ashes? Have you heard what happened with the ashes of longing? Who knows how long they sat there, those ashes, alone abandoned to the winds.

until someone found them. An artist, Chitrasena, a sculptor who happened by the place where Kama had died. And he saw those lonely ashes and thought, I could make something out of this. So he fashioned the ashes into a being, a boy, made of the neglected ashes of longing, and he breathed the breath of life into that boy. And the boy awoke, his eyes smoldering with a hidden fire. Banda, Banda, said the gods. And that became his name, Bandashura.

And from the start, Bandasura was lit with the fire of longing. But it was a longing unhinged. The way that longing, with no one and nothing to guide it. Longing left to its own devices like still smoldering ashes. Longing disembodied. Longs for what? Bandasura longed for... So he performed great acts of tapas, designed to refine and amplify and open himself up to great powers. And so fierce was his tapas that the powers

The gods themselves were stirred and granted him great power. And so it is that power flows between things, between the cosmos and the beings that open themselves to that power and have a place to receive it. and it's what they do with it that is up to them. Yes, Bandashura was granted great power, the power to not be slain by man or god, and with that power he set about building...

A city. But it was a city of illusion. A city that played on false longings. A city of dissonant vibrations and shining apparitions and alluring lights. Have you seen it? The city of illusion and its alluring lights. And in that great city of illusion, I don't know, let's use some modern examples. Bandasura tells people that they can have whatever they want all the time. And he creates this luminous web, this trance-inducing web that drives people into states of ideological frenzy.

He takes mantras and he strings them backwards. He inverts sacred patterns and proportions and becomes a master of black magic. He takes that longing, that very essence of longing, which when in its deepest, highest expression is the artistry of the universe itself. And he turns it towards that which satisfies the most immediate impulse. That which comes out of the most addictive cravings. And he constructs his city of illusion. And in that city of illusion, he builds a great and powerful...

Beings far and wide flock to join this army, hypnotized by the sounds and the alluring lights. Ashuras and Rakshashas, Yakshas, gods and demigods drawn by Bandashura and his power. And there at the center of the great army is Bandashura with his smoldering... I am all-powerful, he proclaimed, and together we will conquer the three worlds. The whole universe will be ours. You know how power likes that kind of talk. And so he sets about conquering the world. His armies crush realm after realm.

Billions of beings across the worlds fall to the sword. Blood and tears flow like oceans, and cries of pain and lament echo across the realm of the rose apple tree. Cries of pain echo, beloveds, across the realm of the rose aperture. The Devas are in crisis. This Bandasura cannot be stopped. They go to the gods, and the gods are helpless. He cannot be slain by god or man, they explain. Who shall they turn to in their hour of need?

To whom do you turn when all else has failed? To her. To the power. With Bandasura's army closing in on them, the devas begin a great yajna, a great sacrifice to the goddess. They sing the name of the power and utter her mantras and pour ghee into the fire. and there's no response. They offer food, sweets, rice, and grain. They offer great works of art, and still there's no response. Distraught as Bandasura's forces close in.

They begin to offer themselves into the fire. The Devas cast themselves into the fire, and the flames of the fire burn red. And as the fire burns red, a dark smoke rises. And there... In the midst of that red fire and black smoke appears. A drop. A single red drop. Red with the color of life. The potency of life. The power of the red wound water. As if the force that moves the blood of all beings in the cosmos.

The fierce wave that moves the blood of all the beings in the cosmos was crystallized and consolidated into a single drop. Shakti. The power of time. The power of the spiraling cycles of light and darkness. The power that sees all kingdoms reduced to rubble and grows new green shoots from the ashes. The power. The ruby drop at the heart of creation. The power in a single fertile drop.

And from this drop emanates and radiates a form. And that form is of reverberant luminous ratios. Harmonic ratios, not arbitrary shapes. If you've ever stared into a yantra, you're not looking at arbitrary shapes. You're looking at the harmonic ratios of creation. You're looking at elemental ratios. You're looking at the music of the cosmos, the reverberant power of the ratios that exist in the architecture of fractal plant bodies and atomic bodies and elemental bodies all through the universe.

So from that drop, that single drop emanates this beautiful form of interlocking, reverberant, humming, pulsing, singing animate triangles. Each one pulsing with a primordial power. A goddess all its own. The directional power. The elemental powers. Each of these powers its own matrika, its own goddess, its own matrix of power.

A retinue of elemental energies, natural forces, potencies, confluences, mountain ranges, geographies, rivers, oceans of golden and red elixir, trees that pour forth with luminous flowers. And there, at the center of this wheel of blood and flowers, at the center of this reverberant song of birthing, living, and dying, of falling and rising again, there at the center of the consolidated drop.

There she sits. The power. The beautiful, spontaneous one of the three worlds. Sitting on a lotus the color of cindor powder. She arises, and there's a great tumult and clamor among the Ashura armies. There, around that primal fire pit, where the last of the devas are on their knees, their crowns of gold shining in the light of that red fire. There the goddess rises, blazing with her retina, her battalion of mandalic potencies.

Her patterned arrangement of sounds and energies and vibrations and practices. And what happens? A great battle. That's what happens. Between the forces of the illusory city and those of the great goddess, whose army is the elements themselves, and the animals of the forest, and it is sounds and songs and chants.

and forest growth patterns and expressions of the flows of rivers over time. Her army is time, and sound, and space, and light. And she brings with her an unending retinue of animate forces. Goddesses with sinuous bodies like dark creeper lines. Like spiraling monsoon clouds, they are described. Her army is the gathering of the powers of nature.

But it's not like a random Earth Day parade, for its power is in the clarity of its pattern, in its resonance, in its reverberation. The battle, first and foremost, is... Sonic. The battle is vibrational. The head of the goddess's forces is named what? Mantrini, the goddess of mantra. Power is vibration. And sonic powers are real, tangible. This is worth deeply understanding as we explore power. Sonic power is power. The power of voice to lift millions.

The power of John Lennon's voice to set a million high school girls screaming. The power of Martin Luther King's voice. Osho's voice. Obama's voice. Hitler's voice. Tucker Carlson's voice. Dasha Nikrasova's voice. Trump's voice. This is power. Take that. power of voice and vibration and amplify it through mass media and the power has just grown exponentially. The internet whose medium is light and sound has the power to sway minds by the millions.

That is real, tangible power. The radicalization of ideology, the disconnect of this age. and the real impact of that disconnect on brains and bodies, this is all happening through the means of sonic and luminous vibrational power. And it's happening to all of us. To the point that much of what we think and feel

Much of our worldview has been directly architected by transmitted sound and light through the internet. This is power. If we want to reclaim some vestige of power in the midst of it all... We have to recognize the profound implications of this real, tangible, terrible power. And we have to re-pattern it.

It's not enough in the age of world-bending powers to simply walk through life with an unboundaried consciousness, saying there's no such thing as inherent vibrational power, and therefore technology is neutral. Technology is not neutral. The human being is a somatic receptor site for light and sound and story and vibration.

And anything that works in the space of vibration and story and image is charged with power, with inherent quality that is to be navigated carefully. Or we can live life asleep at the wheel. thinking we're in our power when we've turned over that power to those who wield, like Banda himself, weapons of sound and light.

These days there are many who pronounce their own personal empowerment on the very medium to which they themselves have handed over their power, to whose terms they have completely and unwittingly surrendered. in which they live fully at the mercy of consciousness-bending powers. But personal power isn't about me posting videos of myself dancing around saying, look at me, I'm so liberated.

Personal power comes from having a consciousness that can exhibit some measure of boundary and can hold what it receives as it maintains its own integrity. Personal power isn't the same thing as cashing in off legions of internet followers. Like, I must be in my power, I'm making three grand weekly off of wellness content, and I can live full-time in Bali on the beach. That's empowerment, right?

Sure, that attention, that money, that currency is an immediate surge of power. But wait for the full iteration of the story. See if the story has lasting power. See if there's any capability to hold that power and anchor it and grow it within a circle of true accountability. But back to our battle. For those who've just... filed this away as another battle story. Look deeper, for the playing field is consciousness, and in the details, in the detailed description of the actual forces at play,

There is much to be learned about power. It's no accident that Bandasura's weapons are sonic, that the battle begins with inverted mantras and spells and stories. For the battle... for your consciousness the battle is fought with story the battle is fought with story you hear So when Bandasura's backwards mantras and incantations of static and confusion are neutralized by the resonance of the goddess's invocations, he goes about harnessing the power of wrong story.

He launches the pakandastra, the weapon of wrong story itself, and a wave of gossip passes through the goddess's army, and mouths erupt with falsities and distractions. mouths proliferate the most outlandish stories. They vomit up streams of advertising jingles and memes and fake Buddha quotes and way too convenient spiritual aphorisms that reaffirm exactly what we want to hear about ourselves and biased news pieces from the left and biased news pieces from the right.

and they wrap up falsities and send them spewing out of the mouths of the experts and the long-form podcasters and the conspiracy theorists alike. Yes, conspiracy theories are part of the dance of power. Often, those drawn to conspiracy think they're regaining power by uncovering the truth of the story. Because knowledge, knowledge of what's really going on, that must be power, right?

And yes, knowledge is power. But there's only one problem. That's not knowledge. Knowledge is not something you read about on the internet and fit into an abstract worldview about distant, faraway powers. Knowledge is not a hot take or an aha moment about Jewish space lasers. Knowledge is something that's earned slowly, somatically. in context. And it's earned through a person's own commitment to being in relationship over time. Knowledge is a relational

embodiment practice. This is true for the experts and the broadcasters too. For the party officials wondering why no one trusts them anymore. because the disembodied medium of discourse is proving itself increasingly unworthy of trust. What's going to solve the trust crisis, as some have called it? The trust apocalypse? Shared breath. Shared breath, beloved. Time together in shared mutual exchange of the power.

Time cooking together. So that the ashe goes into the food and passes to each other. And we share it and then I know you and you know me. Shared gratitude. So the power flows from us to its source and back to us again. Shared story, shared ritual. So that as we stomp our feet together, or encant the divine name together again and again, we re-find the circle's center. Let us re-find the circle's center.

That's the power of a power structure that can actually hold water over time. Trust flows like water over time. is held in vessels time-tested. It's not going to be solved by an idea, a talking point, a profound conversation you tap into on YouTube from someone in the sense-making sphere. Trust is shared breath over time. And how does the goddess respond to all those weapons of wrong story? She responds by releasing Gayatri, the goddess of poetic meter.

All that frenetic, panicked wrong story is set right in a minute by good rhythmic flows. Feel how the flows set right the story. And the rhythm sets right the story. And we slow down the rhythm. And we slow down the story. And we re-root the rhythm. And we re-root the story. And soon the story pulses like moonlight. It rises at sunrise. And Gayatri calls the sun, so the goddess responds, you could say, with sunlight.

which is right story itself. Sunlight is right story. Now what could that mean? And so the battle goes on. When Bandasura releases weapons of confusion, the goddess responds with focus. When he raises great towering monsters, giants that stomp and crush all in their path, the goddess responds with... Vamanas. Little powers. Billions of little powers. Honeybees. Hummingbirds. Moments of rapturous attention. Invitations into listening.

whispers of right story that ride on the breeze. Hear them. The battle will be fought with whispers of right story that ride on the breeze. When Bandha strikes the goddess's forces dumb with the Mukastra, the goddess counters with Mahavagvadini. Great eloquence. Great eloquence. Great discernment. In each case, the pattern is met with a deeper pattern. The power structure is met with a deeper power structure. Agitated vibration is met with deeper harmonic resonance.

the battle. It's not just to empty or to get beyond power. It's to architect a citadel of spirit help. to gather vibrational patterns and architect power structures that are more deeply aligned to the deeper cycles. For it is the nature of the obvious powers, Tolkien tells us. that they can only mock, they cannot make. At last, when the battle reaches the ultimate fever pitch, and it looks like it could really go either way, the goddess.

draws on her final weapon. What is this ultimate weapon of the hosts of the goddess? The Kameshvara Astra. The Astra, the arrow, the missile. of the lord of longing. The force that restores longing to its true place, you could say. It turns out that all this was about longing all along, wasn't it? All this power stuff was really about longing. And what neutralizes Bandhasura, that force born of unhinged longing, what neutralizes it is the power.

of true longing. What balances the frenetic story of modernity, the story of fractured human power, the rush to progress, the deluge of wrong story, is... remembering what we're actually longing for. Remembering that we exist to serve the power at the center, and to build our lives around it, and that it flows through every facet of the web of ecology.

and through the whole wheel of small and great powers, and that compared to it, we are little, but in alignment with it, we are everything. What does it mean to enact this vision? to truly build a system that honors power, that holds power, that distributes it well. First, we have to recognize that human life and human culture

have always been an exercise in navigating power. There's no idealized time in which people did not have to navigate the very tangible and textural and qualitative flows of power. Really look closely at traditional story. People have been navigating this from the beginning. And the successful cultures, perhaps, are the ones who understood the power.

the realness of the power. In contrast to modern visions of claiming individual power, traditional visions ask us, do we know our place in the relational web of powers? Are we tuned to the orchestra of powers in a way that allows us to harmonize?

power comes from context really and in the same way that like with humans in relational existence with each other like if you're a human being on their own with no relational networks or accountability or people to cut it's a similar kind of similar thing right it gets to a big thing really around ownership ultimately which is you know that the celebration of the beauties of the world ultimately really to try to own that or possess it or hoard it as a futile endeavor. Yeah. When we recognize.

time and how quickly things change and quickly things fade so like what are you going to do in this universe of infinite power and beauty what are you going to do in this world of powers pouring through everything constantly are you going to try to marshal or put borders around or fences around that power or are you going to build contextual systems that honor that power yeah that allow you you know have the gratitude to like recognize how lucky you are to be able to sort of exist within that

context and as a part of that and to sort of live in a way that honors that and allows that to continue as long as possible. And that means neither claiming power, seizing power, hoarding power. But it also doesn't mean denying power, ignoring power, flattening power. It means enhancing existing systems, says Kanani. It's not about getting rid of form.

she says. It's about following form. All of our discussions around power must be around what it means to honor the power at the heart of it all. Because this human life is a life of navigating powers. The ritual systems of cultures, the rituals that mark passages in life, are all ways of navigating power. Right from the start. Right from the most fundamental power of all. The birthing power.

What do we do with the birthing power? When faced with the red power, the bleeding power, the womb power, the power that reshapes worlds in its swelling belly, that rips open with the promise of new life, With that continuity of life that arrives in a shower of blood and red womb water, what do we do with that power? So powerful, so deep is the birthing power that men in certain traditions have architected their rituals of power around the birth cycle.

imitating it, passing through painful birthing rituals themselves so that they too can have access to that power. What do we do with the birthing power? Do the support systems of the culture orient around it? Is it held by unbroken lines of midwives? Or is it hidden away, controlled, measured, automated, monetized, medicalized, incentivized? And then...

What do we do with the killing power? The hunting power? You start with the fact that you actually want hunters in your society. You want warriors. You want a certain amount of Eros intensity. You want people willing to go into deep hunting trance and run for miles and shed blood and bring back game. carry 150-pound carcasses on their backs across canyons. The killing power feeds everyone. It keeps the culture sustained.

But how do you temper that power so it doesn't spill over into unchecked conflict, into chaos and rage? The idea that this martial iteration of power is wrong? or entirely a product of culture, isn't looking at the somatic reality of this power. How this power has been acknowledged in traditional systems forever. Traditional cultures from the smallest hunter-gatherer tribes have always had to enact deep systems, often painful systems, to keep this hot aggression at bay. And this power too...

is the goddess power. From a tantric perspective, it's not separate from Shakti. For she whose medium is blood manifests in all phases of the dance of blood. the dance of life, the power that pounds hot when uniting in passion, that gushes forth in the blood of birth, that grows and thrives in the tissues of the child. the power that spills blood through hunt and sacrifice. This is her. Red seal blood spilt on the ice is celebrated by the traditional seal hunters. Wade Davis tells us,

This is continuity. This is life. It's not something to be shy of, to hide away from. Go spend time with traditional cultures who hunt. Yes, always the animals are honored. Always there is offering back. But don't fool yourself. They celebrate the hunt, and the blood, and the power of it. The power of life. The idea that the violent power...

needs to be weeded out entirely? That, for example, there shouldn't be competitive sports or any emphasis on those societal spectacles like MMA that are built around violence? That it's all meaningless? that it's all a distraction, that it's all the testosterone-driven manosphere and therefore it's toxic and bad, this is not recognizing the inherent power that lives there, the very real martial power.

This is not recognizing Shakti in all her mandalic expressions of power. It simply needs healthy systems through which to express. For this too is Shakti. Shakti has been right at the heart of martial power in many traditions for a long time. Who did the kings of Rajasthan invoke as they prepared for battle? Her, Shakti, the power.

Oh, this paradoxical world of powers. The question is not how do you get rid of that martial power, it's how do you temper and distribute that power through ritual, through channeled intensity. through creative capacities so we don't have to unleash it on each other. Feel me? All this is easy to intellectually solve when power is an abstraction. Once we get into actual navigations of actual powers, into actual relations, the conversation isn't as easy.

and conversations that just want to talk about some magical transition to a world in which these powers aren't real, or don't hold sway, or don't inform relational dynamics from the halls of Congress to pre-K. aren't actually conversations. This is the real conversation. What do you do in this world of power? How do you navigate it? What does a culture do with the Eros power? Eros.

desire, longing, that sexual fire. Different cultures have managed Eros in very different ways. It's tempered in initiation rituals, it's given container. But one way or another, for better or for worse, Eros power is managed by cultural traditions. It's never just a complete free-for-all. Are there more or less empowering ways of doing so? Of course. Certainly Eros is not in its power when it is repressed, constrained, held down, and demonized. But here's a question.

Is Eros truly in its power when it's squandered, spilt, thrown around like nothing, passed out to strangers we don't even trust yet who haven't done anything to earn access to that power? Is Eros in its power, parading for all to see on the internet? Like, is soup only in its power when it's spilled all over the table? Look at all this half-cooked soup. I can spill this anywhere I want, is that?

Power? Or is the power rather sometimes in the lidded cauldron or in the slow, deliberate simmer? Everyone's going to navigate this as they like. These are just some energetic... pranic considerations I'm throwing out there. In the modern individualist world, we tend to assume that for something to be in its power means only that it's been freed up.

But the freeing up power is not the only power. There is the holding power, the keeping power, the cultivating power, the drawing inward power, the power of integrity. Like Lakshmi, beautiful bodacious Lakshmi, whose true power, Shivani Hawkins from Living Sanskrit tells us, is in her integrity. I've seen people get dressed up beautifully and then go to dance and be like, oh, I'm channeling Lakshmi. And I was like, Lakshmi is integrity and dharma. That energy of Lakshmi cannot abide a moment.

of a lapse of integrity if you think that Lakshmi can exist without integrity she's gone like out of all the goddesses there is nothing sensual or beautiful available to you when you are out of integrity it is all false Beauty is powerful. But tell me, what makes that power stay, if not integrity? So Eros is met with initiation.

What do you do with that power that wants to know it all, seize it all, love it all, destroy it all, and wants it now? This is why cultures everywhere have initiation rituals and deep protocols around knowledge. And while they're still learning, pre-initiates and new acolytes do not get equal say in everything. Even in egalitarian societies, they don't get access to everything.

They have to show that they can hold teachings and put them into practice in their lives in a meaningful way. This is an actual, natural way of working with power. Power is not immediately passed on to everyone. Flatten that and you've just gone against how natural systems actually work. You've flattened what the growth of butterflies and coral reefs has to teach us.

What elephant mothers have to teach us. What grandmother trees have to teach us. The surge of power that thrives off of immediacy and access, this is only one small face of power. True creative power comes into full expression through hours at the potter's wheel. Hours on the mat, hours playing scales, hours singing her songs and chanting her name. This power...

is real. How do we hold it? How do we distribute it? How do we honor it? So that when we pass on, we are absorbed back into the power, held by the power, breathed again by the power. Oh, power, I believe it's something about returning spirit to the center. Something about finding the small powers, the invisible powers, the timeless powers.

in a world obsessed with fast-paced and obvious powers. For in an infinite universe, there's really no such thing as great and small powers. What we've been calling the small powers... The hummingbird powers. The pausing to acknowledge the eyes of my child powers. The whispers of right story powers. In an infinite universe. Each power reverberates and ripples in the vastness forever, and therefore is infinitely powerful itself. It might sound like a cliché to say that when I pause,

to lovingly acknowledge my child, and for a moment we breathe together, that this is infinitely powerful. If it's a cliche, it's a cliche because it's true. One moment in service of love is powerful. In fact it's the most powerful thing there is. Love is the most powerful of forces. Because it's most closely aligned to what the heart of this place actually is. Think of it. Think of the power.

All the manufactured hatred, all the incentivized outrage can't destroy love. But love can dissolve hatred in an instant. Have you heard, have you sung the victory song of the small powers? The song that says, love, invisible love, reigns triumphant. And the last shall be first, and the small shall rise, and the infinitesimal is inseparable from the cosmic ocean.

Some pitch love and hate as equal and opposite forces on the wheel of powers. But this is wrong story. Love, as Coltrane says, love is supreme. Love is the power. And if you're looking for a different conclusion, you've come to the wrong place, for this is the emerald heart of it. Love is the power, and the power it is. Thine love is the kingdom.

The power and the glory. Forever and ever. As the waters tumble and the thunder rumbles. And the summer forget-me-not explodes in tiny flowers. And across the hours the wet morning rain. The little shaman bird warbles and the infant blinks and the air moves and the whole world cries, victory, victory, victory to the primordial mother.

Many thanks to my wonderful guests for this episode. These include Shivani Hawkins from Living Sanskrit, and you can find out more about the courses that Shivani teaches at livingsanskrit.com. Jack Mitchell, friend. Nyungar researcher and all-around bardic storyteller down under, Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner Kanani Atan. This episode featured wonderful music contributions from...

a variety of artists, including beautiful viola music from Althea. And you can check out Althea on Instagram at Althea Music. That's A-L-T-H-A-E-A music. Maria Stark and Travis Puntarelli contributed beautiful vocal tracks. And Maria and Travis just released a self-described weird little folk album this week. It's called Fairy Wheel, F-A-E-R-Y, and you can find it on the streaming platforms. And also look for Travis on Patreon at Balladeer, B-A-L-L-A-D-I-R.

And Drupad's singer, Victor Sokshin. You can find Victor on Instagram at Victor Sokshin, V-I-C-T-O-R-S-A-K-S-H-I-N. Marina Alves did research for this episode. Thanks, Marina. As usual, this episode contains reference to many books, movies, articles, etc. These include The Avengers and the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

And yes, I know a Tesseract is an Infinity Stone. No need to write me angry emails, you Marvel nerds out there. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. The song Fight the Power by Public Enemy. The People Have the Power by Patti Smith. Take the Power Back by Rage Against the Machine. Power by Snap. Power by Kanye West. The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. Soul Power by James Brown.

The poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The story of Jumping Mouse. There's a great version in the book Seven Arrows by Himios Storm. The book A Branch from the Lightning Tree by Martin Shaw. The story of the Nisan Shamanas, the Lalito Pakyana, the Lalita Sahasranama, the song Ogum Beramar, the song Sikuri by Chatalkaya, the book Pele and Hiiaka by Nathaniel Emerson,

The Tao Te Ching version by Stephen Mitchell. The film Thunderheart starring Val Kilmer. Rest in peace, Val. Matthew 5.5 in 2016 from the Holy Bible. Power is an Illusion by Gustavo Rossetti. the book Sword Catcher by Cassandra Clare, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima, Ashe, The Power That Makes Things Happen by Pai Hojni Jiyoshosi, Meotempo e Agora by Maestella Jiyoshosi, and...

Os Nago y Amorch by Joana Albendo Santos, the book Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the song A Love Supreme by John Coltrane, and of course, The Godfather. the 1972 film directed by Francis Ford Coppola.