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Title: Mystical Anarchism
Author: Alnoor Ladha, Michael Lerner
Date: 2020
Language: en
Topics: spirituality, anarchism
Source: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/a-conversation-between-michael-lerner-and-alnoor-ladha/

Alnoor Ladha, Michael Lerner

Mystical Anarchism

This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on

September 21, 2019, between Michael Lerner, executive director of

Commonweal and Alnoor Ladha, the co-founder and executive director of

The Rules, a global collective of activists focused on addressing the

root causes of inequality, poverty, and climate change that existed from

2012 to 2019 inclusive.

Michael Lerner | You suggested we call this conversation Mystical

Anarchism. What does that mean to you?

Alnoor Ladha | Well, they’re two unlikely words in combination and the

two words most people are triggered by. I think that’s a good place to

start. Mysticism is really about the direct dialogue and direct

relationship to the Divine. In some ways, I think it’s a more palatable

word than spirituality which has been co-opted and abused. So, it’s a

noninstitutional spirituality, a nondogmatic pathless path.

Anarchism is equally polarizing, but for different reasons. As you know,

anarchism is not anarchy. Anarchism is actually a very sophisticated

political philosophy that is about subsidiarity of power: bringing power

to [the places] where decisions are actually made. It’s about

localization of power to communities. It’s about self-organization. And

it’s really about creativity and the human will to decide what is best

for [us]. So, it’s not outside of law. It’s more attuned to etiquette

than is the “law.”

Etiquette is pre-law. It’s pre-morality. It’s pre-literacy. It’s a way

of being that is in right relation to other human beings, to Nature, to

the spirits, to the more-than-human world that exists.

I like putting mysticism and anarchism together partly because the Left

has lost its spiritual center. God died for the Left in the 18^(th)

century. Marxism, dialectical historicism, socialism are all reactions

against institutional religion, and for good reason. As a result though,

they’ve thrown out the baby out with the bath water.

The New Age movement, for example, lacks a political analysis and an

understanding of power and the context we’re [living] in as a

civilization. They largely believe enlightenment is an individual

pursuit. And so I think merging the two ideals of spirituality and

politics, mysticism and anarchism, is a good starting place for

dialogue.

Michael | I believe that you come from a Sufi family. Is that true? And

you were born in Vancouver, is that correct? Tell us a little about your

family of origin—where were you born and what was your family like?

Alnoor | My family on both my mom’s side and dad’s side are from East

Africa. My mum’s family is from Zanzibar and Tanzania. My dad’s family

are from Uganda. They are a part of the same tribe—the Ismailis. The

Assassin Order is also what they’re known as. They migrated from Arabia

to Egypt. They were the Caliphs during the Fāṭimid period, and then they

migrated to Persia after the fall of Cairo. While they were in exile in

Persia for 500 plus years, some migrated to India, Tajikistan,

Afghanistan, and Pakistan. My dad’s family followed that migration

pattern. My dad was exiled [from Uganda] in 1972 by Idi Amin. And my mum

was a midwife in the UK at the time. They just randomly met in

Vancouver; well I guess not so randomly. And of course being of the same

community there were ways to meet. So we were all born [in Vancouver]

and socialized by Canadians.

Michael | How many children?

Alnoor | Three…three brothers.

Michael | The Ismaili community is an extraordinary community.

Alnoor | In some ways they are. In some ways they’ve calcified their

belief system. They went from being a very mystical Sufi sect to

becoming a sort of commercial sect. That happened slowly though an

alliance with the British empire [in the 1700s]. They’ve had a history

of living in exile. I think that creates a deep insecurity. So when

proximity to power happened in 18^(th) century Persia, they essentially

sold out their values. If you look at the Ismaili community today, most

of them are pursuing commercial interests. You know, there’s a fair

share in academia, etc. They’re very “successful,” in rationalist

materialist terms.

The Aga Khan of the time is their Imam, their Pope. If you listen to

what he says, he really pushes them to be successful in the countries

they live in because they’re mostly immigrants. There is no Homeland.

And so I understand the strategy, right? It’s a strategy of integration.

He understands that his people live in a capitalist environment. And if

you’re successful within that environment, you’re seen as worthy. But at

the same time, there is no point of view on climate change, our current

crisis, the context we’re in.

And the old immigrant ideal of pursuing wealth in order to have your

overlords approval doesn’t make sense in this context. We have 10 years,

maybe 20 years left of the Western way of living.

So I have a strong critique of them in that sense—both economically and

spiritually. If you come from a mystical tradition, which the Ismailis

do, the aim of your spiritual practice is to enter unity consciousness.

When the path to get you to that unity consciousness calcifies and

institutionalizes and creates a context in which you spend the majority

of your time within your own community—your alms and your charity and

your generosity is focused on that community—you are, therefore,

creating separation. And the initial intent of unity consciousness is

defeated by tribalism. And so, if our circle of empathy is not expanding

through our spiritual practice, then what are we doing?

Michael | We’re going to follow two threads here and dance back and

forth between them. Because I do, as I told you, want to do spiritual

biography here. And so we launched in that and to your family of origin

and the Ismaili tribe and its loss of its origin of seeking the Divine

in unity and becoming more commercial in exile. But since you’ve raised

it—your sense that we have 10 or 20 years left—what is your analysis of

where we are in this world today?

Alnoor | There are multiple ways to answer this. And maybe the way I’ll

go is through the historic lens. I think it’s important to preface I

don’t believe there was some homeostasis of Eden, some perfect place

that we left. But I do think that there was a time where we were living

in deep symbiosis with Nature. We were living in small hunter-gatherer

tribal communities. We know from cultural anthropology, evolutionary

biology, and evolutionary psychology that we were living in largely

peaceful tribes with very little hierarchy, living quite leisurely

lives. The average working time was 10 hours a week. From bone density

samples, we know we were having roughly 2000 calories a day. There was

no chief at the top that was the accumulator of all goods.

Marshall Sahlins calls this the “original affluent society.” The

discovery, if you want to call it that, of farming and the neolithic

revolution led to sedentary lifestyles, creating a situation in which we

ended up “taming” Nature, if you will. We extracted and we were not “of

place” in the same way. We didn’t go to the Mother for our nourishment

and bounty anymore. We started to believe it was our own ingenuity that

led to our being fed.

That disconnection—that original disconnection—that is the fall from

Eden.

This is not to say we want to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; we

don’t want to go back to the paleolithic. But we want to learn how to be

of the paleolithic in the sense that there were psychic powers we had.

There was a remembering we had. I think a lot of the grief we hold right

now is also a grief of being born into a culture where that no longer

exists.

We’re now in this place where we know our industrial activity—i.e.,

globalized capitalism—is creating climate change and poverty, yet we are

paralyzed to act.

One way to understand the climate catastrophe is through grief. We could

stay in the grief or avoid the grief, or we could say grief is a

necessary emotion in order for us to allow parts of ourselves to die. We

can also be in gratitude for the parts of ourselves that are being born

through the crisis. This is a nondualistic approach to collapse.

Michael | One of the things that struck me was that I thought it

strategically powerful that when you founded The Rules you didn’t do

what most people would do, which would be to select different NGOs

around the world to work with. You decided to work with popular

movements. I want to ask you to say a little bit about how you came to

the decision.

Alnoor | When people ask me, “what’s the most important thing I can do,”

I often say to people, especially in the spiritual community: to

understand how neoliberalism works. We must understand how capitalism

works because it is the very oxygen in which we are breathing. It has

intermediated every aspect of our lives.

If we look at what the logical outcome of capitalism would be, we would

all be wearing Nike shoes and having Apple computers and using Microsoft

Office and listening to Beyonce or whatever the corporate music world

wants us to listen to. And there’s a flywheel effect. It feeds itself.

So, the more power certain corporations have, the more they can buy the

political process, through money in politics. The more they can exploit

labor and environmental laws to find the cheapest labor wherever they

are in the world. The cycle just speeds itself up.

The antidote to monoculture is polyculture: many ways of being, many

ways of knowing, many tongues. When we start to understand that, we

start to see where there is a polycultural resistance. When you see the

world in this critical way, the place to look is the popular resistances

because that’s where the intelligence is.

Michael | There’s a wonderful quote from the science fiction writer

William Gibson: “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly

distributed.” So we have these countries that are clearly in complete

collapse now, whole regions, almost all continents in collapse. And then

we have other countries that are, or regions, that are degrading very

rapidly. And you know, they’re serious scientific debates right now

about whether of the 9 billion people on earth, 1 billion will be alive

in another 20 years. That’s being seriously debated, I mean, honestly,

seriously debated.

There are many questions that this raises. For one thing, it raises the

deep psychological and spiritual questions about not only how do we live

with this, but what do we tell our children? How do we speak the truth

about what is happening? And, at the same time, create an environment

where one can live with some hope and some peace of mind about what

we’re moving into without denying it away.

Alnoor | That’s a beautiful question. I feel partly what’s happening

right now at a cultural level is that we’re being initiated into

nondualistic thought. To be able to hold not just two, but multiple

perspectives simultaneously. In the Vedic tradition, they call this

period that we’re in the Kali Yuga, the dark ages. If you look at the

scriptures that refer to the Kali Yuga, it’s described as a point of

bifurcation—it is the point with the strongest amount of darkness and

psychosis and shadow, but it’s also the period with most amount of light

and the most amount of assistance from interdimensional beings and

spirits and guides and ancestors and all of that.

It’s being able to live and to be in relationship to multiple truths

simultaneously. What that is going to require is a very deep unlearning

and deprogramming of everything we think we know and everything we’ve

been socialized into being. That includes the things we hold onto

hardest like our religiosity, our belief in what the family unit should

be, our belief in what gives us safety, etc., because it’s actually

these desires that are creating the system we live in. It’s our desire

for the comfort of continuing to live the way we live. You know the old

line by George Bush about the American way of life is not up for

question. Well, if you’re negotiating with Mother Earth, I think it is,

whether you like it or not.

Michael | So I heard you say something significant. Please correct me if

I do not remember this. You said, this does not have to end in

catastrophe. You said that the grief about climate and everything else

is a necessary component, but we don’t want to be stuck there. And there

are parts of us that are dying. There are parts of us that are being

born and that if we hold it that way, that this period of the Kali Yuga,

which we think of only as the darkest age, we miss the equal power of

the light, that all kinds of miracles that are possible and happening

and that all kinds of forces, many of which we don’t have any notion of,

are there to come to our assistance. Yes? All right. So in your new

community, what do you say to the children about what is happening? And

in language a child can understand? Suppose that instead of us in the

room, you had a group of 8- to 12-year-olds, and they were saying to

you, “Alnoor, you have thought a lot about this. We see that over the

past few days children have been marching all over the world for the

climate crisis.” What would you say to the children?

Alnoor | I like to start with first principles. When you access reality

at the highest level of unity consciousness, there is only this one

divinity expressing itself in all these forms. But that doesn’t mean

there’s not agency, self-choice. That’s nondual thought. It’s why we

can’t spiritually bypass and say, well, there’s only oneness. Well,

there’s only oneness and some people are more responsible than others

for this crisis, and some people are benefiting more than others. And I

think that’s actually important to tell children. To not treat them as

children or not to treat them as students, but to bring them into the

initiation of nondual thought very early on. That’s what the great

mythologies always did.

There’s that old Ram Dass line where he says, “the universe is perfect,

including my desire to change it.” These things are not happening

outside of us. It’s the nature of oneness, playing out the cosmic drama

in multiple forms. So does that answer your question in a sort of

abstract way?

Michael | Yes, but it raises another question. You are suggesting to the

children that they understand themselves as both the separate entities,

but also as the oneness. And you have this yantra on your arm that is

the yantra of Kalki, who comes on his white horse with a light sword and

chops off the heads of all the capitalists. So my personal question to

you is, because this is a spiritual biography, do you experience the

force of Kalki or some other transpersonal entity within yourself?

Alnoor | I think there’s a time to pray to beings outside of yourself.

It’s not just all embodiment. So, do I pray to Kalki? Yes. And I also

pray to Kali because I also think it’s her time. I also pray to Allah,

i.e., to cosmic consciousness itself, and to the spirits and to the

elements and to interdimensional beings and extradimensional beings for

assistance right now.

Do I want to play the role of Kalki? No. I believe in nonviolence. Would

I observe Kalki chopping off the heads of those who benefitted from the

Kali Yuga, including myself? Yes. Would I take satisfaction in that?

Well, I don’t know what state of being I’d be in while I’m in observance

of that.

Michael | How do you pray?

Alnoor | I’m a big believer in contextual truth. This is why the idea of

a church or a mosque was always anathema to me. They were telling me how

to pray and that makes no sense to a mystic because in the Sufi

tradition, for example, we talk a lot about walking prayer. The point of

prayer is to not create a sequestered part of your life while you are

praying to something outside of you. It’s to be in awareness that you

are Allah becoming self-aware. You are consciousness becoming

self-aware. That is the process. One way to access that process can be

dance or music or tantra, and another way could be to pray for other

beings.

This is a very strong part of the Sufi tradition. How do you walk into a

room and pray for every being and their ancestors and their healing and

their lineages and their karmic redemption, and also the wind and the

moon and the stars and the ancestral forces in all the seen and unseen

and visible and invisible things? That’s the practice of Dhikr. That’s

the practice of being in the mantra and being in the devotion. And for

me, a big part of this practice is political work.

The animate, living universe is showing you a context in which we have

10 years left to live this way. And there are consequences to the way

we’re living. It’s not just that this is going to happen in 10 years,

like it’s out there as an external thing. Destruction is happening now.

Two hundred species a day are going extinct right now. And what are we

doing about that? The inner work is not enough. It’s not to say we

shouldn’t do it, of course not. It’s just that the meditation is the

prerequisite for the revolution.

And there’s also no way, no one way, to be a revolutionary in this time.

How could there be? Some people will do it through the existing

structure and some people will do it outside the existing structure.

Some people will do it just through embodiment. You’ll just be in their

presence and you will understand that their vibration is of such a

signature that that itself shifts you.

There is no right way to do this work. But what I would say is that the

evolutionary work happens through the inquiry of the consequences of our

action. And the most “awake” people I know are so deeply sensitive to

the consequences of their actions in every way, like the way they pray

on their food. They understand that the entire globalized supply chain

and fossil fuels and slave labor and carbon emissions from having food

shipped around the world came on this plate and, nondualistically,

they’re simultaneously deeply appreciative of it, to the point of

reverence. You can call that spirituality, or you can call that

awareness of consequence.

Michael | Alnoor Ladha, thank you for being with us for the New School.

Alnoor | Thank you, Michael. Thank you for having me here. Thank you for

your work in the world.

This is an edited version of the transcript. You can listen to the full

interview here:

soundcloud.com

And a video version can be found here: