Mutual Liberation

[At a recent Awakin retreat in California hosted by Servicespace, we asked participants to reflect upon "what perplexes you as you look at the world today?"  Below is Srinija Srinvasan's informal 13-min informal, near-spontaneous talk. While it was contextually offered to the retreat circle, but given its deep resonance, we're delighted to share it with our broader community too. If you'd like to dive more into her vision and work, also see this.]

The Paradox of What We Most Want

Thank you. Humble thanks for your kind attention. I don't take that for granted. And it means a lot. It's beautiful to be here. I'm going to consult this "contraband" [holds up cell phone] for my notes. I hope you'll forgive me.

What perplexes me is that I think what we most want is what we most fear. And that is mutual liberation.

To my understanding, in the main, none of our institutions, organizations, cultural practices, social habits, or norms—from the atomic relationship to governments—are designed with the project of mutual liberation as their purpose. Everything, in the main, is designed for the project of some version of control.

It's understandable because it's a scary thing to be airlifted into this universe not knowing how I got here, how long I'll be here, or what it's all about — and knowing the only one thing is — it will end. But I think every tradition keeps affirming, and each person I know keeps affirming, that what we think we want is freedom.

And I think we know here that individual freedom is an oxymoron, and mutual liberation is redundant. My freedom is bound up in yours. As Mark Epstein, the Buddhist author of Thoughts Without a Thinker, recently said, "love is the revelation of the other person's freedom."

Who Do I Need to Be?

I've been thinking about mutual liberation for so long, and I love that formulation. A friend and teacher, Orland Bishop—who many here may have also encountered—speaks of mutual liberation, or what I call mutual liberation, as the framing of: "Who do I need to be so you can be who you're meant to be?"

Another friend and teacher, Krista Tippett, would say, "we're in a species moment. I think the species is being called to act like a species." What would it look like if these technologies we've co-created actually allowed us to do that? If we took that seriously and did it?

The Gap Between Material and Spiritual Connection

I'm humbled that all the wisdom traditions and Indigenous cultures that we are lucky to still have—fragments, pieces, documents and living inhabitants of— still cannot tell us how to get from here to there. Because here is a new reality that is globally connected, materially connected in a way that has never been before.

So how do we catch up in spiritual connection? That calls us to do something apparently really hard for the human being: to relinquish the wish for control.

The Self-Termination of All the Isms

Uncertainty has always been the reality. It's just that this gift of exponential technology—that accelerates and amplifies everything—shows us that fast coming is the self-termination of all the isms. These wishes to control. These ingenious human inventions – imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, capitalism. You know, they are ingenious. They're ingeniously self-perpetuating. They make sense. I understand why someone would wish to control and predict the future.

But what we're seeing in an entangled universe is that any wish to control anywhere, is always a curtailment of freedom somewhere. If you are truly free, I can't know what you'll do next. And if I'm truly free, I can't even know for sure what I'm gonna do next.

Uncertainty as Possibility

So uncertainty is reality. The pandemic gave us a global practicum in uncertainty. Early in shelter-in-place, I thought, "Uncertainty is the new certainty." Then quickly I thought, "and uncertainty is just another word for possibility."

I can only love freedom as much as I love uncertainty—truly. So who can I look to for ideas for how to love it? And I'm a jazz fiend. Improvisers don't just tolerate uncertainty; they embrace it. They use it as their currency and medium for expression and for making collective beauty.

Improvisation as Blueprint for Mutual Liberation

Leadership's over, y'all. This paradigm of command and control—the thought leader, the ten-point plan for pollination ... it was all myth.

But improvisation! I grew up in a Carnatic tradition in my household hearing the improvisation over poly rhythms of classical Indian music. Improvisation is not at all unique to jazz. But is it any accident that an art form forged in the crucible of unfathomable dehumanization and oppression would give rise to a blueprint for mutual liberation?

Improvisation isn't casual or cavalier. It looks like a lot of people just winging it and having fun, but it demands severe rigorous initiation and preparation. To be a person who can show up on a bandstand and spontaneously collaborate with veritable strangers—without a blueprint—and make the whole greater than the sum. To make beauty every time. And that willingness to relinquish the wish to know is another part of relinquishing control.

Beyond the Intellect

Modern culture has emphasized intellect above all other ways of knowing. We've privileged this one narrow way of knowing that the human being can apprehend, but by itself it is severely impoverished and very dangerous, and we have so many ways of knowing, this is the great news. We have so many ways of knowing.

So let's let the super intellect of AIs—and the zeros and ones—do the cognitive load, and let us free up a lot of attention to nourish, nurture, explore, and expand all our other ways of knowing. To complement the super intellect and become superhuman—to meet the moment of a "species moment" of what is collective, emergent wisdom.

The 95 Percent

This 95:5, you know academia and industry— these worlds, all of it is just in the five. It's like the knowers knowing. And I'm so tired of the knowers. You know, I'm not even angry anymore. I'm just bored. I'm just bored. It's like y'all are missing the show.

The ninety-five percent—that's where it's at. It's unlimited potential, it's awesome. And we don't even begin to know how to talk or relate to it.

So what would it mean if we paid attention to the quality of inner life, and took it as seriously as the quality of outer life?

It's no accident that we're in an attention economy, because the one thing that's in our control is the quality of our attention and intention.

And we can do that. And it's really fun to do it.

The Improviser's Way

So the improviser isn't thinking about solutions and outcomes and deliverables. They're thinking about questions, inputs, and what creates conditions for this collective, emergent wisdom. They take inner-life as seriously as outer-life, and they're starting there with the initiation and preparation that is demanded of somebody that can come to the bandstand ready.

More Yin, Less Yang

All of those things – outer life relegated to inner life; to be in improvisation instead of command and control; to be in flow, to be receiving, to be allowing, to be in the darker, murky, or mycelial places instead of in the light and the doing; to be in the being – all of these are the yin of the yin-yang, and it was so gorgeous to start our opening circle around that beautiful yin yang.

And you can see this is a big thing in my life. There's hours and hours and hours to just study what this very seemingly simple symbol reveals and instructs us about the nature of this gorgeous paradox of the human condition, to be simultaneously in an underlying unity, but each distinctly consequential. And how do we hold both of those things and how do we dance between both of those realities in the human being?

So more yin y'all. We're so over-indexed on the yang. We're so over-indexed on the yang.

Reimagining Money

We talked about some of those things with improvisation, but money – our currency is yang. It's super yang. It's centrally command and control, militarily backed by hegemonic state forces.

Bernard Lietaer, was a brilliant finance dude. He has all the credentials in finance and he was one of the co-creators of the Euro, when a new organization wanted to create a new currency for a new era. He wrote an exquisite book before he passed away titled The Mystery of Money before he passed away, that is available freely in PDF online, and the contents alone are magic. It's about cultures in different places and times in human history that still had a tradition of worshiping the sacred feminine.

From that place, they could create complementary yin currencies along with the yang currencies—where it wasn't interest-based. It wasn't profitable to hoard and keep, but it was actually demurrage-based, where you're charged when you store it. So that money needs to flow, flow, flow. Where does money need to go?

We can do these things—it's not an accident that we are now in this position. We've co-created the facilities for all kinds of new currencies, but we don't yet have the consciousness to meet those facilities with new questions – not how do we control and predict what's next, but how do we create the conditions to love each other more?

Bringing Wholeness to the Zeros and Ones

How do we become those superhumans? What if we… and so technology is the next human-created thing. We invented art—that guides us. Improvisation is one tiny example; art is a great technology of humans. We invented money; we invented technology. But if we allow the consciousness that knows what art is—that creates the conditions for an artist—that's the ground of consciousness from which we can reimagine money to actually protect what's sacred and not destroy it.

We can use the zeros and ones to become more fully human—not to let the zeros and ones compress us to becoming more binary, which is what's happening now.

Digital technology, by definition, is binary. It reduces everything to zero or one. That's a hard separator—no nuance, no contradiction, no paradox, no and.

Humans swim, live with and in paradox. It starts with the gorgeous paradox of being distinctly consequential in underlying unity.

So, what is called for us is to bring our wholeness to the zeros and ones, instead of passively allowing the zeros and ones to compress us. And mutual liberation looks like the improvisation of a collective, emergent wisdom—each of us giving our gifts in sacred reciprocity toward mutual flourishing for life on Earth.

Consciously Evolving Consciousness

The final thing I'll say is that "species moment" where we now are in the position—with AI, biogenetics, etc. to determine what it means to be human. Not just what we want it to mean, but what we are doing. We're making it. We get to wake up every day and participate in the project of consciously evolving consciousness itself.

That's a pretty good reason to get up. And can we consciously evolve consciousness itself to learn how to love each other more?