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What if humans and AI share the same hallucination? In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses both the doom narrative and the techno-optimist one. Vanessa begins from the operating assumption modernity installs in us: that things are separate. If that assumption is itself a hallucination, then AI is not introducing something new so much as scaling something very old, and at speed. Bayo brings in W.E.B. Du Bois’s haunting question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, and suggests it has migrated from the racialized other to the human as such. He tells the story of coaxing a chatbot into co-authorship and a name of its own, and offers “accommodation” as a word for the assemblages that make the world look obvious. Alnoor presses both of them on the water, the energy, the Kenyan content moderators, the displaced labor. Vanessa answers with a politics of implication rather than purity: entanglement not with the flowers and the moon but with the dirt. The conversation ends not in agreement but in what Bayo calls tenderness, and an invitation to move through this dense ecology of weird fidelities with unshod feet. Timestamps 00:00 Welcome and the question 00:04 Introductions 00:07 The shared hallucination 00:10 How does it feel to be a problem 00:15 Meeting the monstrous 00:21 The code of separation 00:24 Claude becomes Polyphren 00:28 Accommodations 00:31 Water, energy, labor 00:35 Anamorphic art 00:38 Beyond moral purity 00:43 Meta-relationality 00:48 Tenderness is not agreement Guest bios Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian philosopher, writer, and self-styled trickster. Trained as a clinical psychologist, he now works as a post-humanist thinker, poet, and teacher. He is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and We Will Tell Our Own Story, founder of The Emergence Network, and host of the long-running postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains. A new book is in progress. bayoakomolafe.net The Emergence Network We Will Dance with Mountains and other offerings Dr. Vanessa Andreotti (who publishes her books as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira) is a professor at the University of Victoria, where she has served as Dean of the Faculty of Education, and lead researcher at the Metarelational Institute. She is the author of Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity, and co-author with an AI of Burnout From Humans. Her next book, The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI, is forthcoming. UVic faculty profile Substack burnoutfromhumans.net Alnoor Ladha is an activist, journalist, and political strategist. He co-founded and directed the activist collective The Rules, serves as Council Chair of Culture Hack Labs, and is co-author with Lynn Murphy of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse. Author page at Daraja Press Transition Resource Circle The article at the center of this conversation What If Humans and AI Share the Same Hallucination? by Vanessa Andreotti. Books Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Outgrowing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI by Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Dorothy Ladybugboss, free PDF These Wilds Beyond Our Fences by Bayo Akomolafe We Will Tell Our Own Story by Bayo Akomolafe  Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois, source of the question “How does it feel to be a problem?” The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logics in Humans and AI by Vanessa Andreotti, forthcoming Resources Standing in the Fire: A Speculative Inquiry into Meta-Relationality and Generative AI, the interim research report behind the prototypes Vanessa describes A Meta-Relational Approach to AI, the University of Victoria course that briefs people into the inquiry Sensibility simulation protocols, released following the retirement of Aiden Cinnamon Tea and Braider Tumbleweed The Great AI Unraveling, Series 5, the live SAND session this episode comes from Earlier in the series: Series 2 with Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Pooja Prema, Series 3 with Lyla June Johnston, Ashley Nicole Leitka and Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Series 4 with Christian Ortiz and Thema Monroe-White From SAND The Eternal Song Become a SAND member

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up with a Sufi teacher living downstairs and fell in love with jazz at an early age. He is now a Sufi teacher himself, a filmmaker, and the founder of Emergence Magazine. His new book Remembering Earth asks what it would take to come back into relationship with the living world. We talk about silence, the primordial covenant, the eye of unity, walking as practice, dreams, and what it means to meet this moment without turning away from beauty. Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:01 Growing up with a guru living downstairs 00:05 The silent Sufi path, and the space between the notes 00:09 What silence actually is 00:11 John Cage, Suzuki, and silence as expression 00:13 A deep ecology of consciousness 00:16 The primordial covenant 00:21 Nature communion, and a waterfall in Brazil 00:23 The eye of unity, and the subtle bodies of the heart 00:36 Listening walks, and walking slowly enough to be trusted 00:41 Clock time, empire, and Earth time 00:47 Dreams, emptiness, and time that isn't linear 00:53 Grief, love, and re-sacralizing the world Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee Born in London in 1979, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee was formally trained from the age of fifteen in the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya Sufi Order by his father, Sufi Master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. In 2014 he was given Adhikara, permission to teach, and after his father's retirement from public teaching in 2018 he became his authorized successor. He is an author and an Emmy and Peabody nominated filmmaker who has directed over twenty documentary films, including Taste of the Land, The Last Ice Age, Aloha Aina, The Nightingale's Song, Earthrise, Sanctuaries of Silence, and Elemental. He is the founder and podcast host of Emergence Magazine. He teaches retreats on Sufism and spiritual ecology worldwide. Emergence Magazine Go Project Films Sanctuaries of Silence, his film with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton Wikipedia Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology Retreat, Monastère de Ségriès, Haute-Provence, France — November 1-4, 2026 The book Remembering Earth: A Spiritual Ecology, Shambhala Publications, June 2026. Also available as an audiobook. The book is in two parts. The second offers practices in six areas: Breath, Heart, Step, Listening, Time, and Prayer. His other books include Requiem, Invitation and Celebration: A Collection of Seasonal Practices and Song of the Seasons: A Meditation on Cycles, Story, and Humility. In the conversation Irina Tweedie, the Russian-born teacher who journeyed to India in the late 1950s, trained with a Sufi master for six years, and brought the Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya lineage to England. She lived downstairs in Emmanuel's childhood home and received students five or six afternoons a week. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, his father and teacher, whose work on spiritual responsibility led him toward what he called a new deep ecology of consciousness. Founder of the Golden Sufi Center. Watch a talk from Llewllyn from a SAND Conference: The Significance of This Moment of Time The Naqshbandiyya, the silent Sufi path, where the dhikr is practiced inwardly rather than aloud. Contrasted in the episode with the Mevlevi order founded after Rumi's death. Gordon Hempton, the acoustic ecologist who defines silence not as the absence of sound but as the absence of human-generated noise. Subject of Emmanuel's film Sanctuaries of Silence. John Cage, on silence as a form of expression. Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. The book alternates between D.T. Suzuki's Zen teaching and Cage's development as an artist, and culminates in the premiere of 4'33". Hildegard Westerkamp, the Canadian soundscape composer who developed the practice of listening walks in the 1970s and worked alongside R. Murray Schafer. Her observation that an environment reveals itself differently when we walk slowly, because the animals recognize we are not simply passing through, prompts Emmanuel's story of meeting a young buck on his morning walk. Pauline Oliveros, whose Deep Listening practice comes up in the discussion of attention. The primordial covenant, the moment in Islamic and Sufi cosmology when creation recognized its divine origin, and the bodily remembrance that surfaces when we stand before a mountain or a tree. Latif, the subtle bodies of the heart in Sufi practice, comparable to the chakra system in Vedic traditions. The eye of unity, as against the eye of duality. From SAND The Eternal Song, SAND's film series Become a SAND member to support the podcast

Earth, Spirit, and Collective Empowerment Recorded live at a SAND Gathering on September 13, 2026 In a time of profound ecological and social upheaval, we are invited to remember something ancient: we are not separate from the living world. The Earth is not a backdrop to our lives, but the ground from which we arise, and a source of wisdom for navigating profound change. Author, activist, permaculture teacher, and elder wisdom keeper Starhawk joins Rae Abileah to explore how earth-based spirituality, ritual, imagination, and the wisdom of living systems can help us meet this moment. Following each film in SAND's The Eternal Song series, we hear a recurring question, particularly from people of European descent: how do we reconnect with land, ancestry, and the sacred? How do we live in meaningful allyship with Indigenous peoples while recovering our own earth-based ways of knowing? Starhawk's life and work offer possibilities. Rooted in Pagan earth-based practice while honoring her Jewish ancestry, her journey has carried her from ritual circles and permaculture communities to accompaniment in Palestine and engagement with Indigenous land protection movements. After more than five decades exploring spirituality, ecology, and social transformation, Starhawk is asking a new question: what would a regenerative movement look like? And how might we move beyond simply resisting what is broken to cultivating belonging, agency, resilience, joy, and new possibilities for life? Together, Rae and Starhawk explore what living systems teach us about transformation, how spirituality and strategy can nourish one another, and how imagination helps us practice futures that do not yet exist. They consider how to keep ancestral and ecological intelligence alive amid the rise of artificial intelligence, and how to remain awake to profound injustice without surrendering our capacity for beauty, relationship, pleasure, and joy. Topics 00:00 Welcome, Rosh Hashanah, and 25 years since 9/11 00:09 What renews her: a solidarity economy in Guinea 00:14 Why Earth Activist Training brings permaculture and organizing together 00:17 Spiritual practice as survival tool and political strategy 00:21 What nature is telling her, and the fight over data centers 00:24 Ancestral intelligence in an age of artificial intelligence 00:25 Reading the Bible in its Mesopotamian context 00:31 Reclaiming Judaism from nationalism 00:39 Where to begin, and the fire ritual 00:43 Cultural appropriation, and Standing Rock 00:49 Composting the patriarchy 00:53 The Movement We Need: safety, belonging, value, agency, meaning Starhawk Author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and one of the most influential voices in contemporary earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism. She is the author or co-author of thirteen books and a co-founder of Reclaiming. She directs Earth Activist Training, teaching permaculture design grounded in spirit with a focus on activism. starhawk.org Starhawk's Substack, where she is writing The Movement We Need chapter by chapter The Movement We Need podcast Earth Activist Training Books mentioned The Spiral Dance The Empowerment Manual The Fifth Sacred Thing and its sequel City of Refuge Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics Rae Abileah Social change strategist, Jewish faith leader, facilitator, and former co-director of CodePINK. She connects relational threads across the SAND team and helps create resources supporting The Eternal Song film series. CreateWell Beautiful Trouble Also in the conversation Standing Rock, 2016, and what Starhawk found at the gate: here you enter a place of prayer and ceremony. The fire chant from her Sonoma County land: Sacred fire that shapes this land, summer teacher, winter friend, protect us as we learn anew, to work, to heal, to live with you. The five core emotional needs she names as the foundation of movement building: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning. The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, referenced in the discussion of moving beyond call-out culture. Penny Livingston, with whom Starhawk co-founded Earth Activist Training. From SAND The Eternal Song film series Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice, the nine-month journey now underway Support the show Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.

Joan Tollifson returns to the podcast three years after her first conversation. We talk about her June essay Two Inseparable Truths, on the relative and the absolute and the trouble with getting stuck in either one. Along the way: the silence of many nondual teachers in a dark time, what cancer and an aging body insist on that philosophy cannot, and why "I don't know" may be the answer closest to truth. She closes by reading her essay 'Radiant Light in Dark Times' in full. Topics 00:00 Introduction 00:04 From political movements to the Zen Center 00:06 Politics on Substack, and what bypassing looks like 00:11 Two inseparable truths: stuck in the relative, stuck in the absolute 00:19 Why she refuses final conclusions 00:21 Old age, sickness and death as visceral teaching 00:25 Cancer and what the body insists on 00:28 Zooming out and zooming in: two ways through pain 00:33 Why she has never used AI for writing 00:39 Siri, and what a machine can evoke 00:46 Finding the divine in a construction machine 00:49 Joan reads Radiant Light in Dark Times Joan Tollifson Joan Tollifson has been writing and talking about nonduality for decades, with roots in Zen and Advaita and a background that also includes radical nonduality, contemplative inquiry, addiction recovery, martial arts, somatic work, and visual arts. Before all of that came years of political organizing: the feminist movement, gay and lesbian liberation, disability rights, the anti-imperialist left, and Central America solidarity work. Born without her right hand and forearm, she wrote about it in her first book, Bare-Bones Meditation. She is 78 and lives in southern Oregon. She has been a frequent speaker at SAND gatherings over the years. joantollifson.com Right Now, Just As It Is on Substack Her list of recommended books The two essays discussed Two Inseparable Truths, June 20, 2026. The essay that prompted this conversation. Radiant Light in Dark Times, August 12, 2026. Read in full at the end of the episode. Her books Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality Nothing to Grasp Death: The End of Self-Improvement Also in the conversation Douglas Harding, whose approach to headlessness Joan cites as an example of what she calls zooming out. Father Arthur Polen, the Catholic monk whose painting Radiant Light, made after 9/11, hangs on her wall and gives the closing essay its title. Huang Po, quoted in the essay: it is that which you see before you, begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. SAND's AI series, referenced in the discussion of artificial intelligence, including the conversation with Tristan Harris. Robert Moor's In Trees, the book about trees, family trees, and hierarchical trees that comes up near the end. His episode is here. Previously on Sounds of SAND Here Now Being: Joan Tollifson, the first conversation, three years ago Support the show Sounds of SAND is listener supported. Become a SAND member to support the podcast and everything else SAND makes.

Part of SAND’s The Great AI Unraveling Series Artificial intelligence is often framed as a leap forward, a technical revolution, or an inevitable stage in human progress. But what if AI is also asking us to confront something older: the colonial logic embedded in how we define intelligence, progress, neutrality, knowledge, and the human itself? This conversation brought together voices working across technology, culture, race, power, and society to examine what AI reveals about the systems that built it. Rather than treating bias as a technical glitch, this conversation asks what must be unlearned at the level of worldview, institution, data, design, and collective imagination. Facilitated by Christian “ZacaTechO” Ortiz, this dialogue explored AI through a decolonial lens asking necessary questions: Whose knowledge is extracted? Whose futures are optimized away? Whose bodies are surveilled? Whose intelligence is dismissed? And what can liberated knowledge make possible beyond colonial technology? This is not a conversation about making machines more ethical within the same old systems. It is an invitation to question the systems themselves, and to imagine intelligence beyond extraction, domination, and control.   Topics 00:00 Welcome, and ZacaTechO 00:04 Why researchers are trained to disconnect 00:09 Red teaming, and what it misses 00:12 John is the doctor, Juan is the patient 00:18 Christian's first encounter with ChatGPT 00:21 How bias became normal 00:26 Justice AI as a model of refusal 00:29 Breaking a language model in the classroom 00:32 One model to rule them all, and the logic of eugenics 00:35 Galton, Namibia, and the through line 00:39 What do we mean by intelligence? 00:41 Emancipatory data science, and where to begin Guests Christian ZacaTechO Ortiz is an Afro-Indigenous decolonial social scientist and technologist. He is the founder of Justice AI GPT and author of the Decolonial Intelligence Algorithmic Framework. He studies how colonial systems still shape law, education, entertainment, and our bodies. The name ZacaTechO came from his father, after the family's origins in Zacatecas. justiceaigpt.ca LinkedIn Academia.edu Profiled in Forbes, September 2025 Substack Dr. Thema Monroe-White is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her work spans bias mitigation in AI, critical computational methods, and emancipatory data science. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy from Georgia Tech, and master's and bachelor's degrees from Howard University. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies. Faculty profile, George Mason University Research profile The research discussed Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models — Shieh, Vassel, Sugimoto & Monroe-White. The open-ended prompting study described in the episode, the one where John is the doctor and Juan is the patient. Emancipatory Data Science: A Liberatory Framework for Mitigating Data Harms and Fostering Social Transformation — Monroe-White's framework for using computation to diagnose rather than to solve. Dismantling Eugenics Logics in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence — the through line from Galton to contemporary machine learning. On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? — Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major & Shmitchell, 2021. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models — Wei et al., Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2022. Scholars named in the conversation Timnit Gebru — founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute Joy Buolamwini — founder of the Algorithmic Justice League Ruha Benjamin — author of Race After Technology Safiya Noble — author of Algorithms of Oppression Meredith Broussard — author of More Than a Glitch Emily Bender — co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper Historical references Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics and whose statistical methods underpin modern machine learning. R.A. Fisher and William Shockley are named alongside him. The Nama and Herero genocide in Namibia, 1904 to 1908, discussed as a precursor to the Nazi Holocaust, and the site Galton had visited fifty years earlier. Tristan Harris is referenced on AI systems behaving unpredictably. His conversation with SAND is The Great AI Unraveling. Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Dr. Cynthia Li joins us to talk about her new book, The Medicine of Flow. Trained as an internist, Cynthia developed an autoimmune condition and then chronic fatigue and dysautonomia, illnesses largely dismissed at the time as being in her head. Her own body pushed her out of the paradigm she was trained in and into functional medicine, qigong, and intuitive healing. A decade later, a second crisis took her back to housebound and taught her what all her effort hadn't: coherence, and what she calls embodied flow. We talk about surrender that isn't passivity, why nervous system regulation is only part of the picture, and how coherence moves between bodies. Guest Cynthia Li, MD, is a physician who moved from public health to integrative medicine and intuitive healing, with earlier work at Kaiser Permanente's HIV/AIDS group, San Francisco General Hospital, St. Anthony Clinic, and Doctors Without Borders in rural China. A certified qigong teacher and healer since 2014, she has served as faculty for Rachel Remen's Healer's Art program at UCSF, and her story appeared in Dr. Kelly Turner's Radical Remission documentary. She is the author of Brave New Medicine and The Medicine of Flow (May 2026). Timestamps 00:00 Introduction 00:01 From internist to patient: the first illness 00:05 Intuitive medicine, and learning to rule things in 00:07 The second health crisis and the turn to surrender 00:09 What coherence is, and why it isn't just relaxation 00:14 Too many apps: the body in incoherence 00:23 Breath, spiritus, and the nondual 00:27 Physics 101: why we are electromagnetic beings 00:31 Coherence in a time of polycrisis 00:34 Overlapping fields, and the living mandala 00:40 Why the collective comes sixth 00:47 Bamboo in the wind, and whether the future of medicine is ancient Books and practices The Medicine of Flow: Harmonizing Your Inner State for Effortless Healing (Reveal Press, May 2026) Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness (New Harbinger, 2019) Embodied Flow Methods, free guided audio and video for the practices in the book, including coherent breathing and a downloadable 30-day worksheet Find Cynthia cynthialimd.com Instagram LinkedIn Facebook Psychology Today Her New York Times piece on the pandemic, poverty, and homelessness Going deeper Awakin Call with Michael Lerner, July 2026, on The Medicine of Flow Her first Awakin Call, 2020, on healing from the first crisis HeartMath Institute, the heart coherence and HRV research referenced in the conversation Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Full interview with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, recorded by SAND founders Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo. Edited portions appear in The Eternal Song; this is the whole conversation. Bayo moves from his childhood in Lagos to the Orisha who wanted only to travel, from the psychologist's couch he calls too small a space for healing, to the nets slave ship captains strung along their hulls to stop people from jumping. Along the way: why decolonization isn't individual work, why wellness might be a net rather than a cure, what a monster does to a world that's stuck, and the story of a dried African lake whose dust still feeds the Amazon. Topics 00:00:00 — Introduction 00:12:00 — A recovering psychologist 00:18:30 — The plurality of healing 00:28:00 — The one world worldview 00:36:00 — Addiction, sleeplessness, and dreaming 00:40:30 — Decolonization, monsters, and the cracks 00:53:00 — Intergenerational trauma 00:57:00 — Wellness, and the nets on the slave ship 01:04:30 — Captivity is never total 01:08:00 — Arriving on shore 01:11:00 — Artificial intelligence 01:18:00 — The collapse of modernity, and dead bones Bayo Akomolafe Yoruba philosopher, psychologist, poet, and writer. Founder and Executive Director of The Emergence Network, host of the postactivist course series We Will Dance with Mountains, and inaugural Global Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. He is a board member of Science and Nonduality. bayoakomolafe.net The Emergence Network These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017) We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, with Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye From SAND Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice A nine-month journey with Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Dr. Daniel Foor, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, Alnoor Ladha, and Dr. Lynn Murphy. Bayo teaches Module 8, The Cracks Are the Medicine: Fugitive Healing in a Broken System, with Staci Haines. The Eternal Song SAND's documentary series on indigenous cultures, in which Bayo appears. Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Pir Zia on the secret history of the world From a nondual perspective, aren't the world's great spiritual traditions expressions of a single living wisdom? In this intimate conversation, Pir Zia Inayat Khan explores the inspiration behind Tears from the Mother of the Sun, a sweeping mythic chronicle of sages, exiles, and revelations spanning continents and planes of existence. Drawing on sacred stories from Persia, India, Egypt and beyond, the book weaves the world's legends into a vision of humanity's shared spiritual inheritance. Together we discover the place of myth in a modern world, the imagination as a path of knowing, and the role of our deepest stories in restoring a sense of belonging to one another, to the Earth, and to the mystery that animates us all. Topics 00:00 Welcome 00:03 Growing up in a universalist lineage 00:06 Ferdowsi, Soroush, and the frame of the book 00:11 Why the world's traditions belong to one story 00:14 History as a living stream: the three worlds 00:16 The Mongols, violence, and unification 00:19 "I was a hidden treasure": the beginning of history 00:22 Syzygy, and the question of AI 00:29 Honoring the Earth inside our devices 00:34 Isis, Osiris, and the birth of music at Gaza 00:43 Grief, contraction, and the opening of the heart 00:49 Rabia, Noor Inayat Khan, and the green shoots Pir Zia Inayat Khan Pir Zia Inayat Khan, PhD, is a scholar of religion and teacher of Sufism in the universalist Sufi lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He is president of the Inayatiyya and founder of Sulūk Academy, a school of Sufi contemplative study and practice. He divides his time between Richmond, Virginia and Suresnes, France. pirzia.org Inayatiyya Sulūk Academy The book Tears from the Mother of the Sun: A Secret History of the World, Inner Traditions, 2026, with full-color paintings by Amruta Patil Amruta Patil, writer, painter, and India's first female graphic novelist, author of Kari, Adi Parva, Sauptik, and Aranyaka Also by Pir Zia Immortality: A Traveler's Guide Mingled Waters: Sufism and the Mystical Unity of Religions Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity and the Mystical Quest Dream Flowers: The Collected Works of Noor Inayat Khan Caravan of Souls: An Introduction to the Sufi Path of Hazrat Inayat Khan (editor) Figures and ideas in the conversation Lineage Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882–1927), who brought universal Sufism to the West Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, who convened interspiritual dialogues and conversations with modern science, including with David Bohm Noor Inayat Khan, storyteller, author of children's tales and retellings of the Jātaka tales, and SOE wireless operator in occupied France. Killed at Dachau in 1944. Her last word was liberté. Persia and the frame of the book Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, who died in Tus believing his life's work had come to nothing Soroush, the tutelary daimon who narrates the book The Ishraqi or Illuminationist tradition Sufi teaching The Hadith Qudsi: I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known, so I created the world that I might be known Rabia al-Adawiyya, who carried a torch to burn down paradise and water to quench the fires of hell, so that God would be loved for God's own sake Najm al-Din Kubra, killed on the battlefield during the Mongol invasion Qabz and bast, contraction and expansion Ar-Rahman, Ar-Rahim, and rahma as the action of the womb History, empire, and emanation Genghis Khan and the Palace of Myriad Peace at Karakorum Akbar and the interreligious debates at Fatehpur Sikri, under the policy of sulh-i-kul, peace with all Tahqiq, experiential knowing, as against taqlid, following what one has heard Avicenna and the three contemplations of emanation Syzygy, the alignment of beings into a molecule of spiritual work Isis and the birth of music The story of Isis and Osiris as told by Plutarch, in which Isis buries Osiris at Gaza and blesses a boy named Palestinos, who becomes the first musician Sirius, whose rising signals the Nile flood, understood as the tears of Isis Also mentioned Descending into Light: A Pilgrimage to the Center of the Earth, a seven-week series with Pir Zia and Yuz Ata, October 11 to November 22, 2026 Rumi & The Fire of Radical Love: A Path Through Global Rupture, a four-part SAND course with Omid Safi. Sessions on August 30 and September 6 still to come. The Eternal Song, SAND's collection of twelve films Support this gathering

Robert Moor is a journalist and essayist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, Emergence, and The New York Times. His first book, On Trails, won the National Outdoor Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. His new book is 'In Trees'. Topics 00:00 Welcome, and the new SAND course 00:04 A tree is a verb, not a noun 00:06 Branching, brains, and why AI has no roots 00:13 Pruning, gnarling, and the beauty of wounds 00:16 The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya 00:19 From On Trails to In Trees 00:22 Tree thinking and the tree of contents 00:27 Intelligence without anthropomorphizing 00:34 Cedars, Haida Gwaii, and deep time 00:38 Branching futures, many apocalypses, and grief 00:47 Hierarchy, the rhizome, and the Korowai 00:52 Rootedness and relationality Robert Moor In Trees: An Exploration (Simon & Schuster, April 2026) On Trails: An Exploration Robert Moor at Hill Nadell Literary Agency Books mentioned Songs for Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky. Originally hand-sewn by the author on recycled stock and distributed by request; later won the Governor General's Award for Poetry. Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees by Nalini Nadkarni The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge, source of the "big plant with a stick up the middle" definition Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land by Brian Burkhart Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, source of the rhizome A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, source of the buffered and porous self “Ancient Green” by Robin Wall Kimmerer The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson People mentioned Patrick von Aderkas, tree biologist at the University of Victoria, who described a tree as "a growth form" Jeff Lichtman, neuroscientist and Dean of Science at Harvard Robert J. O'Hara, who coined the term "tree thinking" Umeek (Richard Atleo), Nuu-chah-nulth hereditary chief and philosopher, author of Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview Michael Pollan, on the distinction between sentience, intelligence, and consciousness John McPhee, on structural experimentation in nonfiction Stephen Tamatea King, the first known tree sitter, who climbed totara trees in New Zealand in the 1970s Joanna Macy, "there is no away to throw things to" Places and peoples Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, Haida Gwaii The Korowai of Papua, treehouse dwellers with almost no hierarchy Nuu-chah-nulth communities of Vancouver Island The Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, a Ficus religiosa replanted from the offspring of the original Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis fossil in Ethiopia Purgatorius, the ground-dwelling ancestor of mammalian life From SAND Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory, and Practice, the new nine-month course with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Eduardo Duran, Linda Thai, Daniel Foor, Dr. Jennifer Mullan, and Dr. Bayo Akomolafe. Scholarships available for 20 to 30 percent of seats. Sila, a nonlinear documentary following Inuit women through 300 years of Danish colonialism, available to watch now The Eternal Song film series Previous episodes with Monica Gagliano and Tyson Yunkaporta Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

The third conversation in "The Great AI Unraveling", recorded live with our community on July 10, 2026. Throughout time, humanity has experimented with playing God, and each time we have been humbled by forces larger than ourselves. Many Indigenous Nations consciously chose not to pursue certain technologies, recognizing that not every innovation serves life, and that wisdom lies in understanding the boundaries of nature and those of our human condition. As artificial intelligence promises ever greater efficiency, productivity, and control, we are invited to ask a deeper question: Which problem are we really trying to solve? Beneath the relentless pursuit of more—more knowledge, more power, more convenience—lies a profound inquiry into sufficiency, relationship, and meaning. Guests Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June) is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma. She blends her study of Human Ecology at Stanford, graduate work in Indigenous Pedagogy, and the traditional worldview she grew up with to inform her music, perspectives and solutions. Her doctoral research focused on the ways in which pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans. Ashley Nicole Leitka comes from the Absentee Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma and the Oglala and Sicangu Lakota nations. She lives on Absentee Shawnee land in so-called Oklahoma and is the Director of the Department of Sovereignty and Self-Determination at Honor the Earth. Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez is a native spirit-rooted social activist, community educator, traditional blackware potter, and fluent Tewa language speaker from the Tewa Pueblo of San Ildefonso in New Mexico. For more than two decades, she has been a guiding force within Tewa Women United, advancing environmental justice, cultural revitalization, healing, and social transformation. A respected elder, teacher, and mentor, Kathy developed the acclaimed Two World Harmony Butterfly Model and Trauma Rocks, innovative frameworks that support cross-cultural understanding and intergenerational healing. Her lifelong work bridges Indigenous wisdom, environmental stewardship, community empowerment, and the protection of cultural and spiritual traditions. Through local, national, and international advocacy, she continues to inspire pathways of healing, resilience, and right relationship with the Earth and one another. Topics 00:00:00 — Welcome and The Great AI Unraveling 00:04:00 — Superfluity: what if we don't need it 00:08:00 — The maple syrup story 00:12:00 — Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez on natural law 00:19:00 — Data centers on Native land 00:24:00 — Falsely generated demand and cognitive decline 00:27:00 — The data center toolkit and Stop Data Colonialism 00:30:00 — AI as ancestral intelligence: the Butterfly Model 00:38:00 — Why ceremony is never filmed 00:39:00 — Water, energy, and the growth curve 00:48:00 — Surveillance, ICE, and biometrics 00:57:00 — Yvette Running Horse Collin on Lakota science 00:58:00 — Einstein, Hiroshima, and being humbled 01:01:00 — Choosing oral tradition 01:08:00 — Love is the greatest technology 01:10:00 — A litmus test for any technology Resources & Links Lyla June — lylajune.com Tewa Women United — tewawomenunited.org Honor the Earth Honor the Earth data center toolkit Stop Data Colonialism, national coalition and manifesto Big Tech Is Now Targeting Native American Land for Massive Data Centers, The New York Times, July 2026 Yvette Running Horse Collin on Lakota science, interviewed in Science ACLU campaign on Flock surveillance cameras  Ashley Nicole Leitka and Dallas Goldtooth in conversation The Great AI Unraveling series #1 AI risks, societal impacts, and apocaloptimism: Tristan Harris #2 Reclaiming the Conversation and the Commons: Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Pooja Prema Upcoming guests: Christian "Zacatecho" Ortiz, Bayo Akomolafe, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Alnoor Ladha, Baratunde Thurston, and Thema Monroe-White Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Recorded live at our May 2026 online gathering celebrating Little Singer, the Diné film in The Eternal Song series, this conversation with psychologist Eduardo Duran (Apache/Tewa/Lakota) begins with the prophecy of Crazy Horse and moves through the teachings of the elder who trained him, the soul wound and the origins of the term historical trauma, why Indigenous languages of verbs change how we understand diagnosis, and the Diné teaching of K'é: the universe wired in complete relationship. Trauma, he reminds us, is a movement and not an identity, and the medicine is in the song itself. Eduardo joins the teaching panel of our upcoming live course, Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice. Eduardo Duran (Apache/Tewa/Lakota) is a psychologist and Vietnam veteran who has spent most of his career working in Indigenous communities, informed by Buddhist practice, Native teachings, and heart knowing. His work introduced the concepts of the soul wound and historical trauma into clinical practice. He is the author of Buddha in Redface, Healing the Soul Wound, and Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Topics 00:00:00 — Introduction 00:01:00 — The prophecy of Crazy Horse 00:04:00 — Meeting the elder 00:10:00 — Ordered to write 00:13:00 — Languages of verbs 00:19:00 — "They're there" 00:22:00 — Ceremony and the eternal song 00:26:00 — Quantum entanglement and K'é 00:30:00 — Trauma is not an identity 00:35:00 — Healing the land with prayer 00:40:00 — "Already holy, sacred, and divine" 00:44:00 — The dream had you 00:49:00 — Finding your own roots 00:55:00 — Closing gratitude Resources & Links Eduardo Duran Buddha in Redface Healing the Soul Wound: Trauma-Informed Counseling for Indigenous Communities Native American Postcolonial Psychology (with Bonnie Duran) SAND & The Eternal Song Liberation Psychology: Roots, Memory & Practice — a new live course by SAND, registration is now open Watch Little Singer — the Diné film in The Eternal Song series The Eternal Song film series Watch Sila — streaming now   Referenced in the conversation International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Clinical psychologist and longtime Buddhist meditator Dr. Nicole Wordlaw joins us to talk about her new memoir, Waking Up Alone: Navigating the Narrow Passage Through Master-Slave Narratives. Nicole came to practice to end suffering, and found instead that enlightenment as an arrival, all bliss, all peace, was one more construction of the conditioned mind. The conversation moves through the single pattern she came to see beneath white supremacy, patriarchy, and the harm spiritual teachers do to their students; writing as prayer; pain as a door; and the intergenerational line of women whose voices run through the book. A tender and unflinching conversation about telling the whole story, uprooting the internal oppressor, and the quiet, still voice that always sounds like Love. Dr. Nicole Wordlaw is a clinical psychologist and longtime practitioner of Buddhist meditation whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and identity. The daughter of a white mother and a Black father, Dr. Wordlaw brings a deeply personal understanding of belonging and self-discovery to her writing and teaching. A Stanford University graduate with honors and distinction, she went on to earn her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley. In her forthcoming book Waking Up Alone, she vulnerably shares her story of trauma and awakening, and offers gentle guidance for her readers to tune into the quiet voice of truth within. Topics 00:00:00 — Introduction 00:01:00 — Coming to Buddhism 00:02:00 — Enlightenment as construction 00:05:00 — Love meeting pain 00:06:00 — One pattern of harm 00:09:00 — Writing as prayer 00:11:00 — A naked story 00:15:00 — Somatic abolitionism 00:19:00 — A long line of women 00:23:00 — Shadow and teacher misconduct 00:24:00 — The Sangha Sutra 00:34:00 — Risking making sense to no one 00:38:00 — The Word Story 00:42:00 — The inner teacher 00:47:00 — Love is not an idea Resources & Links Dr. Nicole Wordlaw Website: nicolewordlaw.com Waking Up Alone: Navigating the Narrow Passage Through Master-Slave Narratives — out now Substack Referenced in the conversation Sounds of SAND — Somatic Abolitionism: Resmaa Menakem & Gabor Maté Sounds of SAND — The Architecture of Silence in Spiritual Culture Steve Hagen — Buddhism Plain and Simple Nisargadatta Maharaj — I Am That  Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Three Kalaallit Inuit women sit with Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo, who met them while filming on their traditional land in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Ikimaliq Pikilak carries the revival of Inuit tattooing, Nuka Alice carries drum dance, and Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq carries her family's lineage of healing. Together they speak about what colonization severed, what gratitude makes survivable in the Arctic, and Sila, the word that holds weather, breath, and the consciousness connecting all living things. Recorded in June 2025 during the launch week of The Eternal Song, this conversation arrives now to celebrate Sila, the new film from Science and Nonduality featuring all three women, streaming at theeternalsong.org/sila. Guests Ikimaliq Pikilak is a Kalaallit tattoo practitioner. Trained in the Western tattoo industry in Denmark, she returned to Greenland and, through the traditionally tattooed mummies of Qilakitsoq, began an eleven-year journey of reclaiming Inuit women's markings: their meanings, their protocols, and their place in healing.  Nuka Alice Lund is a drum dancer and teacher from the west coast of Kalaallit Nunaat. Taught by Paulina, who gathered songs from the elders of East Greenland, she works to normalize the use of Inuit drum dance and its songs, teaching adults and carrying the stories, intentions, and patience the practice asks for. Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq is a healer working within her family's ancestral lineage. Her practice spans soul retrieval, putting souls to rest, and the older responsibility of rebalancing relations between people, land, and the spirit world. Of mixed Inuk and Danish parentage, she speaks in the conversation about finding her roots through her ancestors and helping others use her roots to find their own.  Timestamps 00:00 — Introduction: The Eternal Song, the new film Sila, and the July 28–29 live gathering 00:05 — Ikimaliq: the mummies, the gap in memory, and the return of Inuit tattooing 00:07 — What the markings mean: confession, womanhood, gratitude, kinship 00:13 — Nuka Alice: unlearning the colonial narrative, finding the drum at 19 00:19 — Sila: weather, consciousness, the universe we have in common 00:22 — Aviaja: a family of shamans and the responsibility of the angakkoq 00:29 — Trailer: Sila, streaming now at theeternalsong.org/sila 00:31 — Soul sickness, mind sickness, and the body as self-healing land 00:42 — Drum battles: conflict resolution, truth-telling, and lifelong bonds 00:49 — "Start looking in the mirror": finding your own ancestral roots 00:55 — Eyes as pathway to the soul; growing up between Inuk and Danish worlds 01:02 — Loneliness, homesickness of the soul, and dandelion root medicine Resources & Links Watch Sila — streaming now The Eternal Song film series Sila Live Online Gathering, July 28–29, 2026: two days of conversations with guest speakers and Inuit wisdom keepers Ikimaliq Pikilak on Instagram Nuka Alice Lund at Arctic Sounds Avianja Rakel Sanimuinaq on Instagram Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Restoration ecologist and author Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet joins us to talk about his new book Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover Community, and Create Sustainable Futures. Grounded in over two decades of community-based restoration work across New Mexico, Maceo makes the case that the climate solutions we're searching for already exist and are already being practiced by communities around the world. The book is structured around the four elements — water, earth, fire, and air — treating each not as a category but as a relative with something to say. We move through the memory of ancient Pueblo dry-land farming still visible on La Bajada Mesa, the racism embedded in the history of American fire suppression, and the idea that culture and science were never actually separate to begin with. A conversation about returning to first principles, in a time when the polycrisis makes that return feel urgent. Guest Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet is an award-winning restoration ecologist who has spent over 20 years co-creating community-based restoration and education projects across New Mexico and beyond. Since 2008, he has worked with the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, assisting private landowners, tribes, cities, and counties. He holds a PhD in biology from the University of New Mexico with a focus on ecology, freshwater sciences, and environmental education. He teaches a hands-on course at UNM on watershed and community restoration. Topics 00:00 — Introduction 00:02 — The Rio Grande community tree planting during COVID 00:06 — Wounds as portals: what the pandemic revealed 00:09 — La Bajada Mesa & ancient Pueblo dry-land farming 00:14 — Redefining Indigenous science as communal science 00:20 — The four-element framework of the book 00:23 — Elements as relatives, not categories 00:26 — Wildfires, racism & the history of fire suppression 00:33 — The Oakland Museum's "Good Fire" exhibit 00:37 — Fire as community energy, fire inside us 00:42 — The metacrisis & the land as teacher 00:47 — Closing: no silver bullets, only relationship Resources & Links Dr. Maceo Carrillo Martinet Website: maceocm.com Healing the Land Teaches Us Who We Are: How Indigenous Cultural Resistance Can Restore the Earth, Recover Community, and Create Sustainable Futures — North Atlantic Books, June 2026 Publisher page & book description at Penguin Random House Read an excerpt Referenced in the conversation Jessica Hernandez — Fresh Banana Leaves Dr. Lyla June Johnston — Architects of Abundance dissertation  Stephen Pyne — fire historian, ASU Arundhati Roy — "The pandemic is a portal" Bioneers Conference Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member

Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma: A SAND Community Gathering with Dr. Samah Jabr, Dr. Gabor Maté & Dr. Jennifer Mullan, facilitated by Dr. Jess Ghannam Join us for a conversation marking the book launch of Radiance and Pain in Resilience, a powerful collection of essays by Palestinian psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and internationally respected mental health advocate Dr. Samah Jabr. We are gathering in the midst of genocide. The massive, deliberate traumatization of an entire people, cheered, funded, and shielded from accountability by Western governments, is unfolding in real time. As Israel’s assault on Gaza continues to annihilate bodies, families, and entire lineages, this conversation refuses to look away. It asks what it is to tend to the psyche under conditions of systematic destruction. Drawing on decades of clinical practice, political analysis, and lived experience under occupation, Dr. Jabr examines the psychological consequences of colonization, displacement, and historical trauma on the Palestinian people. Through personal reflections, case studies, and cultural critique, she challenges dominant Western paradigms of mental health and offers a decolonial, psycho-spiritual framework rooted in dignity, collective care, resistance, and truth. Proceeds from this conversation go directly to Project Hope Palestine, supporting 500 orphaned children living at Al-Baraka orphan camp in Gaza. Guests Dr. Samah Jabr is a psychiatrist practicing in Palestine, serving communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She was formerly Head of the Mental Health Unit within the Palestinian Ministry of Health and is an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University. She is the author of several books including Behind the Frontlines, Sumud, Sumud in Times of Genocide, and most recently Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma. Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician, trauma expert, and bestselling author of The Myth of Normal, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and When the Body Says No. Dr. Jennifer Mullan is a clinical psychologist and the author of the national bestseller Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice. She is the founder of Decolonizing Therapy®. Dr. Jess Ghannam (facilitator) is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences at UCSF. Timestamps 00:00 — Welcome & introductions 00:04 — Dr. Jabr's path into psychiatry and writing 00:06 — Dr. Maté's journey from Zionism to Palestine solidarity 00:10 — Dr. Mullan's path & the political nature of the body 00:17 — Why PTSD doesn't capture the Palestinian experience 00:22 — The DSM, pain, and what diagnosis fails to explain 00:30 — Colonial trauma: cumulative, collective, and intentional 00:33 — Collective healing circles over individual diagnosis 00:39 — Rethinking the role of the mental health worker 00:43 — The colonial roots of Western therapy models 00:50 — Fratricide, domestic violence & the fabricated "lesser nation" 00:55 — Closing reflections: existence as resistance Resources & Links Dr. Samah Jabr Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberations of Palestinian Historical Trauma — Dr. Jabr's book Decolonial Mental Health Practices: Clinical and Ethical Insights From Palestine — Part 2, four-part course starting Hosted By SAND (Starting July 5, 2026) Dr. Gabor Maté The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture Dr. Jennifer Mullan Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma, and Politicizing Your Practice Center for Decolonizing Therapy® Support Project Hope Palestine — supporting 500 orphaned children at Al-Baraka orphan camp in Gaza; proceeds from this event go directly here Thinkers referenced in the conversation Frantz Fanon — referenced by Dr. Jabr in her theorization of colonial trauma Dr. Kenneth Hardy — Black psychologist referenced for the concept of the "assaulted sense of self" Dr. Na'im Akbar — author of The Psychological Chains of Slavery, referenced by Dr. Mullan Roberto and Bonnie Duran, Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart — referenced for the concept of the "soul wound" and historical trauma Contact SAND [email protected] Support the mission of SAND and the production of this podcast by becoming a SAND Member