[These transcripts, as with all aspects of Servicespace Pods, are created as a labor of love by an all-volunteer team located around the world. They are a collective offering, born from a shared practice of deep listening and service. Diverse and spontaneous teams emerge each pod to create and support these offerings.]

Sr. Elizabeth: Welcome, everyone, and welcome to our first week pod call. This past week we've been writing and sharing and commenting and hearting each other's reflection. But today is a time to be uplifted together and to go even deeper in our global interfaith experience. My name is Sister Elizabeth, and I've been involved in the pod, been reading so many beautiful reflections, and I'm happy to kind of help guide our call today.

The structure of our call is very similar to others. If you've been on a ServiceSpace or pod call before, we'll have some time of reflection. And really, the whole call is a lesson in reflective listening. And even a couple of surprises from our amazing graphics crew and, but we'll begin with our weather reports, checking out on the climate of the pod so far, we'll have a circle of listening, we'll be opened to The Sacred and the Holy with an invocation.

We're blessed today to have two wonderful speakers, Cynthia Lee and, Alnoor Lada, whom we'll be hearing more about through the call. There'll be an opportunity to reflect on a seed question to connect us to the experience of the past week.  And we want to make sure that everyone knows there's two options, two ways in which you can engage in that segment.

You can contemplate the seed question in the silence of the main Zoom room, or you may respond to the question by joining a discussion breakout room and sharing with other Podmates. So as the call goes on, you may want to consider for yourself which would be the best way for you to engage in that segment.

So before we begin anything, let's take a moment to silence ourselves and to use this time to center and open ourselves to the experience that we'll have together.

So let us begin.

As I've been pondering the experience of this global interfaith pod, I've felt dual reflections, and I know others have commented on this in their sharings as well. One focused on our interfaith aspect, the learning and the wonderment of so many ways in which the truth of the divine is experienced and expressed.

And the other is the compassion component, that sense of understanding the way in which we engage with all of creation. And I think so many of our reflections have shown us that that is both a challenge for Many of us, but also a welcome invitation to see our world as so much broader than just the people, but it's the whole of creation that we're called to show compassion and receive compassion from.

We've experienced seven faiths, each its own expression of the divine in and among us. And I have to admit, none of the faith traditions represented so far are the ones that I call my own. And I hope that each of you have experienced this:  each has given me pause to see an aspect lived in a story or a song or in the teachings of the elders or wisdom figures.

I thought maybe I would be comparing and contrasting mine and theirs. This is what we do. This is what they do. But instead, I feel like I've found the truths that are ours. The truths that are shared among us, each reflected and expressed in these abundant ways and sounds and images.  There's always a familiar note in the module description that invites me in.

They're prayers that I felt like I could recite and call on and use to call on my own God in a time of need. And then there's the compassion action, a time to join in a collective healing of the suffering in the world, which we know at this time is suffering greatly. So we're really just begun.

We're only one week in and I know that I'm anxious and anticipating these feelings of connection and global belonging to deepen and widen in all of us. So I'm just so grateful that we're all here together, that we're experiencing this pod in a way that really continues to open us to the divine that wants so much to engage with us as well and not be left out of our lives.

We want to start today with a little bit of a weather report that helps us to understand what the climate is like out there. What's happening in all of these? There have been 400 plus postings each day, which is so, so many, but each of them giving us a sense of our own emotions and our feelings and our expressions.

So today we have two ways for our weather report. One, we have some video footage of what's been happening out there. And then that'll be followed by a live report from our meteorologist and our pod mate, Eric. So let's check out the video first.

[Weather Report Video plays]

I don’t know how our graphics team does it. They just create the most exquisite videos, and this particular one I think really helped us to see that the weather is fine, that such beauty has been rolling in with clouds and sparks, and every comment that's made creates the climate and the environment of such richness.

But we'd like now for our meteorologist, our pod mate Eric, to give us a live report for himself of how he feels and how he sees the surrounding climate and how the weather's doing from his vantage point. So Eric, please join us.

Eric:  Thanks, Sister Elizabeth. I had to chuckle when you called me a meteorologist. Literally, my brother, Scott, is a meteorologist, a professional one in Bend, Oregon, and Scott introduced me to a meteorological term a few years ago called ground conditions, which I like very much. When meteorologists, they use these very highly sophisticated models to predict The weather, but there's times when the models just fail.

You predict bright sunshine, but it's coming down cats and dogs, raining. And so the object is, when that happens, you can't just rely on the model, you have to actually stick your head out the window and look at the ground conditions and take account for what's really happening out there.

As I was monitoring the pods and the feedback and the reflections this week, it seemed like for a lot of us in these pods, we have experienced, in life recently, or maybe for many years conditions in our own faith path that were not what we predicted. And where we thought there would be some bright sunshine we're actually experiencing a lot of turbulence, people wrestling with the implications of health conditions that have come upon them, or come upon a loved one, wrestling with deaths of loved ones, and kind of that classic, why bad things happen to good people.

Also a lot of people including in my own home based community of Christianity struggling with how to make sense of a religion that seems to be needing to progress into some other ways of thinking in the world that seems to kind of stuck in ruts and wondering how do we apply this ancient faith in a modern world?

And I think that's where being part of the interfaith CompassionPod is helpful because what we're doing is actually looking at what the ground conditions are, like looking at many faiths saying, if you're having trouble finding God or the divine in your life, well, Here's the ground condition.

The root condition is, you know, connect with compassion. You can connect with compassion in some way. you are likely to, to kind of re become reoriented. You'll find your way. and that's the kind of ground condition we need to be in. And, and so, from the Baha'is, to look at that faith path and note,, the, the really strong emphasis on taking seriously their assertion that there is an essential worth to all religions, and a unity of all people.

That might come as quite a shaking thing for somebody who's in a traditional form of Christianity, where many people believe that, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes unto the Father, except through me, as if. Christianity is the only way and everybody else's is off to really take the Baha'is seriously and that intuition and their notation of the ground conditions, one might say, think, well, wait a minute, maybe Jesus wasn't talking about himself or religion.

He's talking about a way of life that connects us to the divine and one that seems to be very fully present in these other paths, one that respects the unity of all people and does see religion as progressing as evolutionary, which is actually part of the Christian faith as well. Or to look at the indigenous traditions throughout the world and know that so many of them talk about the cosmos being alive with light, that it's completely alive, that all of life is Interconnected and to realize that when we face our difficult neighbor and try to find that compassion within ourselves to realize that we're all interconnected, including with those people who drive us crazy and to look to Jainism and that concept of, Anekantvaad, I may have been slaughtering that term, but it means the many sidedness of reality.

And it was that classic elephant that people, many people reacted to. They've heard that story before, but, but applying it in new ways to their own settings to realize that there are many. different ways that we conceive of reality, and some of them may be very different, and yet there is this kind of paradox that they all come together as one, and then to turn to Judaism which was really the, of all the religions, Judaism really deals well, I think, with paradox and the notion that two things that seem contradictory can actually come together as one, including that great paradox of the people who drive us craziest are in fact created in the image and likeness of God. And there was that wonderful story of the shards of the mirror that gets blasted apart and how we all have a piece of that within us. And if we're really trying to connect to compassion, sometimes we need to realize that it is actually when we're feeling broken you know, it is that broken heart that actually opens wide enough to contain the brilliance of the light.

so we can, we can claim our own brokenness and also not be so. Scared Off by the Brokenness of Others, but Connect a Broken Person to Broken Person to Connect the Light. And then Taoism reminding us that if we're having struggling with compassion for others, that really effortless action is a way that we connect to the divine and other people.

So instead of just opposing people and forcing diametrical ways, They offered ongoing protests, violent fight, delighted comrades, mechanically opposed ways. Maybe we can actually join together with those who we're in conflict with and bring the energy forward like the Taoist talking, this jiu jitsu and bringing the energy forward in effortless action.

And then the Hinduism like the Baha'is and indigenous traditions reminding us that there is an underlying unity. of all things. And so our sisters and brothers and other siblings who we may be in conflict with are very much a part of us as well. The sacred infuses all things in some way. And in that respect, I'm reminded of one of the posts,  by one of our Jewish sisters, I mean, our Buddhist sisters rather, who was struggling with taking the Buddhist tradition of really nonviolence and how do you apply this and doing no harm and how do you apply this was.

In more difficult situations and Grace Wu wrote To be loving is easy when others are in need or do things that accord with my values and needs. Being patient is also doable when they are not harming themselves or others profoundly. But how do I treat those who spread hatred or run with a gun?

Well, this was Grace's response to the study of Hinduism from the other day, and taking it, picking up on that. She said, well, maybe treating them as God, as God, will mean that I need to fight like a yogi. And I love that. I've got fight like a yogi now posted. Up in my office, and if you don't know what that means, well, you study that a little bit more, but the yogi, so many yogis in the Hindu tradition are just brilliant at being very aggressive and very effective and yet being completely nonviolent. And fight like a yogi was a brilliant insight.

And to me, all these reflections and traditions, connections between their traditions and also being inspired by other traditions just reminded me all the more that I really believe that all these paths are like a mountain. They are  paths going up a mountain. And further down the mountain, they may be very different from each other. They may even be on the other side of the mountain. But when you reach the highest level of where they're striving for,  they all come together, and they are all united  at their highest level of realization.  It's just further down that   we find the differences , and when we've discovered the storms, as we're coming up the mountain, it's really helpful to have a few paths alongside us, and looking at their paths and finding our next foothold may be provided by a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Taoist or so forth. It's been a deep pleasure to monitor and respond to your own posts, and to learn  about my next best  step up this great mountain.

Sr Elizabeth :  Thank you so much, Eric. You really helped us to see that the ground control  is working and, and that  in each of our reflections, we  create our own,  weather patterns and our own storms, so we  can find ways to calm the storms within,  as we begin, and are engaging in each of these traditions, which can bring us such comfort. 

Thank you so much. And  thank you to our  graphics crew for their magic ,that helps us to  connect with each other through these very short videos that pull together  thousands of posts. . To help really open our circle today, to make room for all our thoughts. I would like to introduce Brenda Salgado. You may remember that Brenda is the author of the content of our second day prompt. That is the day that we celebrated Indigenous wisdom and a connection to Mother Earth. She's a first generation Nicaraguan American, a healer, a teacher, an organizer, a movement builder. She's a wise elder of Indigenous wisdom, schooled by  and a reflection of the wisdom teachers in her life. She's beautiful in all ways, and  we welcome Brenda. Please open our call, widen our circle of sharing with the sacred invocation this morning. 

Brenda:  Thank you, Sister Elizabeth. It's an honor to be here today and just delighted by all the shares this morning.  Thank you for letting me be here. My first prayer, I'm being instructed, is to read from my teabag for you. “The world needs your unique gifts. Don't leave them still inside of you.”  I wanted to share that first. And secondly, I wanted to sing for you. What I'll be singing is the Algonquin Water Song. Some of the modules that you experienced from  me earlier, was connecting with Mother Earth and being in relationship with Mother Earth. And this song is about being in relationship with sacred waters that make up our bodies. that nourish us, that nourish our life. And, it's  a song of love and relationships. I'll be singing that. And I'll share a link that can be shared with the group if that's good afterwards, for people, if they want to go back and listen to it another time.

And I want to share  that this song came to me because I have a friend who's a woman  pipe carrier. And she asked me to come and do a circle with her, her women's circle, where we would go down to the waters and put our feet into this creek and sing to the water with our love. At that time, her teacher was asking for all the people he knew, all the pipe carriers she knew , on the same day, to sing with love to the waters. This is the song of love to the waters. And it's been shared online so that  more people can sing to the waters. I sing this one, I'm taking a shower, I bow to the water. I thank it for its medicines, for cleansing me, for helping me release what no longer serves me, for nourishing me in all the ways that it does. If that calls to you, you can listen to the song another time.

[Song in native language]

As I continue singing, think of a beloved waterway that's important to you. A lake, a river, an ocean, a creek, somebody of water that has brought you peace and joy. And think of that and send your love as I sing.

[Continues to sing]

And now see if you can connect with the sacred waters inside your own body, how it allows your blood to flow, your energy, your lymph, your food, everything it makes possible. We would not be alive if we didn't have the sacred water in our bodies helping us to function and flow in beautiful ways. Connect with the sacred waters in your body as I sing again.

[Continues to sing]

And for this last round, let's just think of all the people we love. The water in their bodies, in the waters that nourish them. All the people around the world, giving thanks to the sacred waters for how they make the lives of our beloved relatives Possible.

[Continues to sing]

Thank you so much. And I'll send the link to Nipun, so we can share with others. 

Sr Elizabeth: Thank you so much, Brenda. Thank you for reminding us  that life  comes because of water and that as it overflows and as it flows around us, it cleanses us  and brings us to new life. The beauty of your chant  prepares us to listen deeply to each other, and to  all those who speak to us today, including yourself. Thank you  for opening our call in such a sacred way. We would  like now to move to our first speaker. Cynthia Lee is our first speaker today, and I invite Arun to help us  introduce and welcome Cynthia to the call. 

Arun: Thank you, Sister Elizabeth, and it's an absolute joy to Introduce Cynthia Lee to everyone today. Cynthia is an inspiring physician, author, and speaker. From a very young age, when she was a little girl, she had this inner calling to ease the suffering of people, and this took her to the field of medicine ,very naturally. Besides her clinical practice  she also serves as faculty for the Healers Art Program at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School. Cynthia has modeled her clinical services on  integrative and functional medicine, on the gift economy, where patients contribute into a community fund according to their abilities, and giving and receiving from each other, based on trust.

About 15 years ago, Dr. Lee learned that she had Hashomoto disease, a very debilitating autoimmune disease of the thyroid condition and she struggled with it. Her inquiry and awakening led to a new book, Brave New Medicine. And in this book, Cynthia challenges contemporary medical norms and draws upon cutting edge science, ancient healing arts, and the power of intuition to offer a fresh, new opportunity, for doctors and patients alike, and even the whole healthcare system. Outside of her work, Cynthia enjoys gardening. urban farming, traditional cooking, playing the piano and ukulele, reading, hiking, and camping. She lives in Berkeley, California with her  husband, two daughters, their dog, a hamster, a fish, and  50000 honeybees. That's a lot of honey, I'm sure Cynthia. And to stay grounded, balanced, and continually growing, Cynthia practices Qigong. It's a form of healing Qigong every single day. We look forward to listening to you. 

Cynthia: Thank you so much Arun. You said that very well, Qigong, which I'll be talking about today. And I just want to express my gratitude for being in this circle with all of you. It's funny listening to that introduction because the word changes so quickly. Now that Brave New Medicine, which came out, as my memoir,  four years ago, feels like a past lifetime, What I'm going to be sharing is what has  happened since then, in my interfaith  journey.  I would start in 2017 , when I experienced a radical healing. I did not consciously choose this path, and I don't believe it happened because I was special in any way. It was as simple as life throwing me another triggering event. And it was so big that it eclipsed this ten  year healing journey that Arun had just referenced. And I thought  it was just completing this, I thought I was done. And then it was so big that it turned everything I had learned, up until that point, about internal medicine, integrative medicine, functional medicine, and intuitive healing, completely on its side. I  call this an initiatory moment.  An initiation  in a rite of passage to a new life stage, and initiation also as the beginning of something.

Once I was to enter this, my life would never be the same. This meant facing my greatest fears in the wilderness of my body and also just the great wilderness of the incredible invisible forces that govern death and rebirth. In 2017, I was teetering on a very precarious edge for days and then weeks and feeling very helpless, feeling very scared. The knowledge  I had accumulated really amounted to less than a speck of dust. And, at one point, I brought my hands in front of my navel and I envisioned holding a small sun between them and I began to just open and close them, leading from my elbows and my arms and my hands and trying to soothe and organize this disorder that was within me.

And as I began to just open and close  and focus there, the time and space began to become distorted. Minutes blurred into hours, hours into days, and physical boundaries began to blur as well. And soon, with each open and close, I was opening and closing from deep within my centre, and despite friends and family coming, doctor's visits, intuitive healer appointments, IV infusions, drugs, all I remember ,with any degree of clarity about that period, was this quiet and steady presence of this energy. And this method  as Arun had referenced is called Qigong. And this small sun was this Qi-ball. And Qi means life force energy, gong means to cultivate. Qigong is a very simple and effective moving meditation, and it's an embodied consciousness practice.

It's based on Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and it incorporates elements of modern science and philosophy as well. And I had already been practicing this for four years before 2017, and I had thought of it really as an obligatory rehabilitation exercise. It was very pragmatic  for my fatigue, for my disequilibrium. But as I would soon learn, it was  much more. So when I came to this moment of surrender, I surrendered into this energy field. I experienced complete quiet. There were no thoughts, no emotions, no sensations. It was just me observing my breath,  in this empty universe. And I would come to experience this universal Qi, nourishing my internal Qi, in this beautiful dance of flow.

And I would come to experience love not as an emotion, but really as a state of oneness with this big whole, W H O L E. And compassion not as an emotional response, but a state of reflecting that oneness out into the world. Essentially Qigong was bringing me into this integrated experience of mind, body, heart really merged as one, a three in one convergence.

Over the next few months, I often felt the need to ground, so I would lie on the earth in my backyard. I even camped in a tent for weeks in a row. My family thought I was nuts. I was so focused on living in the present moment that I didn't actually realize until I paused that I was healing, and I was healing  very fast. And before I knew it, I was not only back to where I was before the crisis,  my physical stamina would surpass its previous level, and I would also arrive at this enhanced internal flow of my systems, that I hadn't known was possible. And  just as you had recently learned in this Taoism prompt, about wu-wei, or effortless action, this was effortless healing. 

So since this is an interfaith compassion pod, I wanted to mention a couple of things about my own interfaith journey. Despite my being of Chinese heritage, I actually came to Qigong by way of two dear mentors, both of whom are of Jewish descent and both practitioners of Buddhism. And then there's another  actually came to Qigong by way of two dear mentors, both of whom are of Jewish descent and both practitioners of Buddhism. And then there's another invisible force that really merits mentioning is that my parents actually had met at a Christian fellowship in Taiwan, led by a Quaker woman. And after moving to the States, they co- founded a Chinese evangelical church in Texas. So there's multiple threads there and cultures there. My siblings and I grew up in this community and it was really our second home. As a teenager, I struggled deeply with this duality of heaven and hell,  and that most people, as I was taught around me, were going to suffer. I left home for college, I left the church, I left its teachings behind, and I entered the halls of medicine. I thought that  was  my new religion. During medical training, I faced a series of earth shattering heartbreak and loss, and the whole, where is God, where is Jesus. Really challenging the faith of the conviction of things not seen. Then, life goes on.  I became a new mother, health crisis number one hits.

I discovered a new, broader paradigm of health, and I think that this is the promised land. And then health crisis number two, 2017. As I find myself teetering on this edge, my hands begin to open and close this Qi ball. But something else happened. Something that was completely  unexpected that I could never make up.  I wanted my childhood Bible. It surprised my husband, it surprised my parents who had kept it all this time, but it surprised me most of all. So I began to read about Jesus, his healing of a man with leprosy by a single touch, his sensing of someone touching his cloak because he felt the power go out from him, His ability to harmonize the energies of this great storm. And the Bible felt like a completely different text from the one I'd grown up with.  This deep knowing arose, and it felt both novel and ancient.  And I realized, Jesus the man may have died on the cross, but wait, Christ is alive!. That was the teaching, that the living Christ is energy, and the living Christ is consciousness, and the living Christ is this universal heart.

And I just experienced bringing heaven to earth, which is another way of saying bringing these invisible forces into the visible,  bathing and infusing and embracing every form of matter it contains, without judgment, including me. I also saw that Jesus went through initiation after initiation, including the ultimate crucifixion and transcendence. What did he teach but embodied consciousness practices? When he broke bread and drank wine, inviting his disciples not to, he didn't invite them to analyze or think about him after his transition, but to consume his essence into them. A three in one act of this holy trinity of individual and communal Mind, Body, Heart. I saw that maybe initiations, including mine, were not punishment or penance, but served another purpose. And what purpose? I kept wondering, what purpose? And then these words of Jesus echoed in my mind.  Having life and having it more abundantly. As I continued to practice with the Qiball, I experienced it as the living Christ,and felt  for the first time, a personal connection with what had been an impersonal Qi field. This was a relationship, an intimate relationship with the invisible, and my body was somehow this meeting place between heaven and earth. As I was lying on the earth and sleeping in a tent, I felt like I was in direct touch with this living Christ.

The method of Qigong enlivened my natal religion, and my natal religion enlivened my Qigong practice, in this continual beautiful spiral dance, and I often remind myself, though, that neither of these methods are the same as what they are pointing to. For those closest to me, I call this animating force the Qi Christ, and there are many other spiritual names, and now there are scientific ones, too.  And each of us will just live into our own unique terms. And I don't experience this as spiritual, as in other worldly or out of body, but really spiritual in its Latin root, spirare, to breathe. Knowing how to breathe, the Qi of the small breath merging with this universal breath, and knowing how to breathe through life's initiations, and therefore stay in flow, keeping my heart expanded, and not just for myself, but for the collective.

And more than anything else, this journey has felt organic, meaning the invisible universe and its potentials are embedded in the very design of our bodies, which then brings me full spiral back, to why I chose to study medicine in the first place. As I see it now, what we call miracles  or radical healings,  they don't define nature's laws,  they are  immutable, but they are accessing higher laws, these subtler energies, that potentiate quantum leaps in transformation, even as life continues to honor the mysteries.

And for me as a doctor, this is the hardest part, is to let go of any of the attachments I have, to any desired outcome, even if it's well meaning, because to heal, which means to become whole, refers to the wholeness within ourselves, but also to become whole, big whole, and it means yielding to the big whole, above all else.  I have learned that healing and awakening don't have to be as dramatic as that health crisis, and  for better or worse, they don't end. They are  continuous processes, and that is really what it means to be alive. Alive means to be in life or on life. For all the times that I had dreamed of healing or had pondered what faith in things,  not seen means, it never looked anything remotely close to this. I just wanted to close this reflection with the words of the Godfather of Gratitude, Brother David Steindl Rast, who said, Another name for God is surprise. So, that's the weather report from here.Thank you all.

Arun: Thank you, Cynthia. That was absolutely delightful and really heart-warming.  I on behalf of all of us, I bow down to the pure consciousness  and infinite love that you are, and would like to hand it over to Sister Elizabeth. Thank you so much.

Sr Elizabeth:  Thank you, Arun and  Cynthia. You've really helped us to understand the interconnectedness of each faith tradition that we experience, and how we can flow in and out of them to see how they can speak to us anew with the new information and the new experiences that we have. It helps us and leads us into our next segment where we will be joining, if we choose , to reflect with others who bringing their own traditions, their own experiences to this call and helping us,  in our own conversation about different faith traditions,  different ways in which we're experiencing this pod, and how this first week,  has been going with us. So, again, thank you, Cynthia, for joining us today.

We are about halfway through our call today and we've heard and seen much to uplift and inspire us and we still have more to come. But before we get to our seed question sharing, our graphics team has put together a very creative video. These people are just amazing. Please keep them in your prayers that they continue to share God's gift, that they are to us, each time we  experience this. This is going to help us to get to know one another a little bit more. So let's watch the video and see how we do with the question, Who am I?

[Video by the graphics Team]

Oh my goodness, I don't know if you know ,  each video just brings us to so much of a closer union among ourselves, a way of seeing each of us in these beautiful images. Just one note, the gift of the tech skills of our team are one thing, but also when the videos are posted after the call, you may want to run through that again to notice the exquisite drawings that were done, each of those hand drawings done by one of our pod volunteers. Just a beautiful way for us to move into our next segment. 

[Break out session and open-mic with Podmates redacted to honor the privacy]

Having had some time to connect with each other, we are ready now, to welcome our second speaker, Alnoor Ladha. And  Preeta will  introduce and welcome  Alnoor to the call, so I hand it over to you, Preeta. 

Preeta : Thank you so much. Alnoor is an amazing human being.  He comes from a Sufi lineage, and he writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times.

He is both a mystic and a deep systems thinker, as well as a sacred activist, bringing that wisdom and spirit compassionately out into the world.

What I love about Alnoor is, he does his work while experimenting with new conscious forms of social and mystical organization. He set up something called The Rules in 2012 as a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, and others, focused on changing the rules that create poverty and climate change.

And he set it up as a time bound organization consciously. He has also, since then, birthed a land based experiment in new forms of community called Brave Earth in Costa Rica. he co-leads the Transition Resources Circle, which is, focused on the broader transition from our current state of meta crisis to a number of possible post-capitalist futures.

And he works and, consults with social movements and progressive organizations around the world. Alnoor has just been a deep thinker and a beautiful writer, and his work has been published in leading global publications. Most recently, he co-authored a remarkable book, that's both brilliant and insightful, as well as just physically beautiful.

It's called Post Capitalist Philanthropy, Healing Wealth in a Time of Collapse. But above all, I consider Alnoor just a dear brother and a teacher to me. I put him in my very small pantheon of just a handful of people who I feel are gently shaking and changing the world in really profound ways.

He beautifully embodies and channels spirit, so there's really no division between his incredibly brilliant head, his expansive heart, and the prolific work he does in the world with his body and his hands. And all I can say is that his wisdom, his way of showing up in the world, and his healing work have personally transformed me.

So thank you, Alnoor, for being here and for blessing us.

Alnoor: Thank you for having me, Preeta.  Shukria. So, for this part, I think the proceedings are that I'm just going to share a little bit, about my experience with interfaith and, some insights and contemplations that I'm working with, in a short period of time.

And, I'm not sure if we're going to have time for, discussion or questions after, but yeah, am open to that. I know Preeta might ask a question or two. Yeah, gratitude to Preeta for the invite, to Nipun and the ServiceSpace team and this beautiful practice of interfaith dialogue in this way.

I come from a band of Sufis called the Ismailis, who are mainly diaspora peoples, who really changed their culture and even their religion for new contexts as they migrated over the last 1500 years.

And in some ways, growing up in this culture, I had this feeling that, my tribe had lost something as it adapted to what I would call capitalist modernity, which is a frame I'll use often throughout the next 10 minutes or so. It comes from the work of, who was the father of the PKK and the Kurdish independence Abdullah Öcalan movement and the autonomous state of Rojava.

And why I like it is It's not just capitalism as a socio-economic system, or modernity as some kind of cultural system. It's both. There's this kind of totalizing effect of capitalist modernity. And this is the kind of context in which all of our religions and spiritual practices have had to adapt over the last 5, 000 years.

And I was fortunate to have an uncle who also felt the same about our tradition and our culture. And he spent a generation before I was even born, gathering the original impulses of our tribe. And he was a philosopher and a historian of religion. He taught at McGill. He travelled extensively in the Middle East.

From the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. he spent time with the sages of Hunza and the Himalayas. He studied Amu, which was the ancestral lands of our people in Persia. And he extensively studied the Fatima Kapha, our ancestors in the 10th to 12th century Cairo. And so, he identifies as a, Fatima Sufi, outside of any Tika or set, Fatima after Muhammad's daughter.

In our tradition, the divine is incarnation of the feminine. And in this sense, our tradition has kind of become an esoteric feminist tradition, which is what I also identify with. And my Uncle became this oral lineage carrier for our tribe, and of course was considered a heretic. And you'll notice that I will extol the virtues of heresy from time to time.

And so maybe the appropriate starting place is to share the first teaching he gave me on Sufism, which was this sort of trinity, these three premises. His first line was, Allah, God, is a metaphor for the universe becoming self-aware through you, but also through all of consciousness. The second premise was, act accordingly, and the third was, all are voluntary.

So, Allah is a metaphor for the universe becoming self-aware, through you, but also through all of us. It's not about spiritual bypassing, or an ascension narrative, but really about radical responsibility and also radical hospitality to the world as it is. And that's what act accordingly and all the rest of this commentary, the second and third premises really refer to.

He also went on to say to me that if anyone tells you they understand Sufism, they're not a Sufi, including himself. So, it's sort of very Daoist in this sense. And part of the practice is to retain the ancient principles, but update them for the current context. As yours is not only individual responsibility, but communal responsibility, a responsibility to your body, to your epigenetics, to your ancestors, for your particular incarnation.

And I, reinterpret this as becoming more contextually sensitive, in order to become more contextually relevant. And, for those of you who know about, this book, Postcapitalist Philanthropy, that's kind of the starting inquiry to become more contextually sensitive in order to become more contextually relevant.

To be in service to the living world and to our living religions, our evolving spiritual practices, what is the context of our time? Scientists would call this current period the Anthropocene, the period of time where this geological epoch, where human behavior has affected every aspect of the biosphere.

In the spiritual traditions, there's various interpretations of this moment in this context. In the Vedic tradition, this moment would be described as the Kali Yuga, the fourth of The Grand Yuga Cycle, the Fourth, Smaller Yuga, which is the Dark Ages. The alchemical tradition calls this the Time of the Underworld.

The Buddhist, call this the Time of Degeneration. The Iroquois call this the Time of the Seventh Fire, the Hopi, the Time of the Sixth Sun. So, all of these spiritual traditions have this deep understanding of cyclical time, and that we are in this deep moment of transformation, but also an amnesia has set upon human culture.

When we look at this context of the Anthropocene, we start to see that everything is entangled, in a state of interdependence. And we're learning that more and more. you know, every dollar of wealth created, about 93 cents ends up in the hands of the top one percent. So just by the very act of being embedded in the political economy, we are actively creating inequality and poverty.

Every dollar of wealth created is heating up the planet and creating ecological collapse. Because we have a fossil fuel extractive system that we're all complicit in. And not necessarily to our own fault, you know, it's not our fault, but I would argue it is our responsibility. And in this sense, spirituality and politics are intertwined.

Because capital mediates every aspect of our lives, from where we grow up, to who our neighbors are, to what we do for a living, to what leisure time we have, to the racial makeup of those around us. This is all being mediated by the system.

There's a line in this book that says, if you do not have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. But if all you have is a critique, you are spiritually and creatively impoverished. So, I'll say that again. If you do not have a critique of capitalist modernity, you are contextually irrelevant. But if all you have is a critique, you are spiritually and creatively impoverished.

So, the first part of that line is really towards those who believe that they can be apolitical or neutral. You know, the new age, for example, that we actually have to understand the water that we swim in, the oxygen that we breathe.

And the second part is to the leftists and to activists, that if all we have is a critique, we become spiritually and creatively impoverished. And part of our task, I would call it a spiritual political praxis, is to actively build embodied cultures of transition. And when we talk about post capitalism, we're not referring to some state that comes after capitalism, but more in the sense like postmodern, how academics talk about post modernism, where the post is informed by. So, we have to be informed by the impoverishment of the dominant culture, how it's colonized our mind, body, heart, soul, spirit, psyche, complex, in order to actively create and build from new values. Let's say new ancient emerging values.

Solidarity, generosity, reciprocity, cooperation, and also the spiritual values that have been spoken about in this interfaith, challenge, compassion, conviction, and even rapture. We've all benefited from the political organizing work of those who came before us, the suffragette’s movement, the civil rights movement, those who challenged the dominant structures of power because these structures, affect our spiritual abilities today.

And therefore, in this new climate, in this new context of the Anthropocene, we have new responsibilities. Right? We're in this moment of peak inequality, peak ecological destruction, peak patriarchy, peak white supremacy, but also peak possibility. And in this sense, there is no inner and outer distinction.

And this becomes really the core of compassion in the modern context. We can argue that there's a one percenter that lives within all of us. There's a Donald Trump that lives within all of us. And non-dualistically, Trump exists, and, and there is agency, and there is responsibility for certain behaviors.

And one of the inquiries I grapple with is: what archetypal role do I want to play at the end of time? Who do I want to be? And that we can build these new ancient emerging cultures, and in some ways, we have to build them at a superstructure level. In other words, like changing the rules of the operating system, being politically engaged at a community level, creating bioregional sovereignty, creating strong local resilient communities and economies, and at an individual level, what we would call our spiritual practice, our inner development.

Because our healing is bound up with the healing of all beings, especially and including the animate ecology, the living landscape that holds us.

And this nested hierarchy then gets reflected back to us through our spiritual attainment. So, what I'm coming to understand is that there's no pre destiny, as many Eastern traditions have taught, including my own, but there's also no pure agency in the Western sense. The quantum physicist and philosopher Karen Barrage talks about meeting the universe halfway.

As we become increasingly self-aware of our role in the greater cosmos and the animate field of this planet, we also awaken our ability to be in dialogue with consciousness and self. We open up our possibilities for expansion and renewal. And perhaps even redemption, to purposefully use a religious term.

We're being asked to declare to the living cosmos who we are through our actions and behaviors. And this is applied spirituality. Non dualism or non-separation or interbeing, these are not simply spiritual concepts, but they are universal laws of animism. There's a great Buddhist line where they say, enlightenment does not happen in a cave, it happens in the mouth of the lion.

And I would argue we are in the mouth of the lion. We are in the Kali Yuga. We are in the Dark Ages. We are in the Anthropocene. So let us act accordingly.

Maybe I'll stop there.

Preeta: Thank you so much, Alnoor. There's so much in what you said. I just want to reflect on a few things. I don't think we're going to have time for further questions, but I really encourage you, I draw you to Alnoor's work, which is all over, just Google him. Amazing talks, amazing seminars, webinars.

But what, you know, this notion of applied spirituality, this notion that if all you have is a critique, you are spiritually and creatively impoverished. This notion of both creating new cultures of generosity and service, but also transit, like building transition pathways to those. So, it's not enough to just kind of be off in our little world, creating this new beautiful world, but that our healing is bound up in the healing of all beings.

And these are, these are themes that have been reflected in all of our calls and all of our pods. I also really love this idea that there's no predestiny, but there's also no pure agency. just so much wisdom there, and I, you know, every word, every line from Alnoor has just tonnes and tonnes of wisdom. I just really, am excited to introduce you to our ecosystem, and I'm excited, for all that you bring.

And I think, ServiceSpace and all that we're trying to do is trying to create a little bit of those new cultures of generosity, and I love the work you're doing in terms of the bridging. So, thank you.

Sr. Elizabeth: Thank you, Preeta, and thank you Alnoor. You know, you've really helped to remind us that, in all of our reflections and in all of our time together, that we really are grappling with the inner and outer systems, that affect and have effect on our spiritual development. And then that grappling opens us to the possibility of awakening, not just our inner soul, but the soul of the cosmos, the soul of all creation.

So really, thank you for that. I'm also so grateful knowing that after this call, we'll be receiving an email with the links to each segment of the call so that you can go back and watch Alnoor's talk, as well as Cynthia’s talk and Brenda's chant in the beginning. All of it will help us to kind of relive what has been an amazing, hour and 30 minutes.

We will be ending our time together this time, but we are really moving into the next phase, right? We're moving into the second week, rejuvenated, maybe challenged in a new way, by what we've heard and what we've experienced in our call today. This shared wisdom, that brings both the comfort, the cozy hug, but also the challenge to face down, the uncertainty.

To be the lion in a world that needs to be roared into, out of its complacency and into a new development of goodness and compassion, all of that is happening in this call. So, I'd like to close our call out today, with a video.

This is offered to us by, Bhumika, one of our, pod mates and a volunteer who couldn't be with us. You know, network is what it is and so, she couldn't be with us, but she has provided us with this closing chant, which I think will help to ground us again. help to quieten us and to help us move into our second week of journeying together in this global interfaith pod.

[Video plays]

May the love we're sharing
Spread its wings and
Fly across the earth
And bring new joy
To every soul
Who is alive

May the blessings of your grace,
My lord
Shine on everyone
And may we all see the light within
Within, within

Lokah samastah
Sukhino bhavantu
May all the beings
In all the worlds be happy

May all the beings
In all the worlds be happy

Sr. Elizabeth: What a beautiful way for us to end. May all the beings in the world be happy. And so let us now unmute ourselves and just give a big thank you, a goodbye, a see you later.

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Thank you for tuning into Servicespace Pods. We are grateful to all speakers, participants and volunteers who made this gathering possible.