#78 Holding Love & Power (Without Losing Either) with policy advisor Jamie Bristow

Hey everybody.

This podcast is about seemingly impossible combinations and this one is the doozy of love and power. It’s about the politics of care. Or love in politics. Can you hold those words at once? Can we? We might be surprised by ourselves.

Jamie Bristow has spent the last fifteen years bringing mindfulness and contemplative practices into the British Parliament, the UN, and halls of power around the world. And now he’s decided love is the only answer. But what happens when you bring the language of love into spaces where we typically speak only of power via politics?

This episode, hosted by philosopher and cognitive scientist Andrea Hiott, delves into the intersection of love and power in political and personal realms. Guest Jamie Bristow, with his extensive experience in the British Parliament and the UN, explores how mindfulness, consciousness, and inner transformation can reshape politics and society. Through discussing concepts like Eros, resilience, and ontological meta modernism, the conversation examines how personal and societal change can be navigated, holding love and power together to create meaningful transformation. The episode also touches on Jamie's journey from a corporate advertising executive to a 'legitimizing agent' for contemplative practices in politics, highlighting the role of faith, trust, and the evolving nature of consciousness.

Jamie is a policy advisor working at the intersection of inner & outer transformation, resilience and sustainability

Find Jamie and his work here

00:00 The Sacred Nature of Power
02:05 Introduction to Love and Philosophy
02:25 Exploring Love and Power in Politics
03:14 Jamie Bristow's Journey
08:41 Mindfulness in Parliament
18:38 The Intersection of Inner and Outer Worlds
31:51 The Role of Love and Power in Society
43:45 Exploring the Concept of Eros
44:23 The Broader Implications of Eros
46:33 Love as a Cosmic Force
47:43 Resilience and the Role of Love
52:51 Trust and Faith in Personal Growth
55:43 The Politics of Love
01:14:06 Navigating Modernity and Postmodernity
01:19:18 The Middle Way and Superposition
01:27:50 Closing Reflections on Love and Philosophy

The System Within: addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability and systems transformation
Mindfulness in Westminster: Reflections from UK Politicians
Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out
The Conscious Food Systems Alliance (UNDP) 
Power & Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change by Adam Kahane
Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice - Martha Nussbaum

Transcript

    📍 Because power in some ways is kind of sacred. You know, it's, it, it sort of underpins this, our ability to create our no to, to, to, to channel our creative impulse into the world, to offer our souls gift, you know, what, whatever it is to be guided by Eros and to, to shape and create.
 and from that place I felt like, you know, resilience isn't enough.

Just getting through isn't enough. Like something deep within me. Want to just fully go there and talk about what are we doing here, guys? What do we, what do we love enough to put ourselves out of this nose dive only that is a, is a big enough conversation and a, and a strong enough interest ra psychic force for us to be able to overcome the fear and the hatred that happens when you're in a time between worlds and certainties collapse and, and helps you to, to move towards a different vision of what thing, how things could be.

eros is, the creative force that's in everything. Like as soon as you start to be fra framing it in that way, you see every, every act of will, every sort of intention, every image or you know, sort of deep motivating analogy or, or, or force all has eras woven through it.

By which I mean this sense of wanting to move towards something to. Isn't slightly sexual language, but, but, but it, but it's not, it's sort of like conceptually to move into something, to penetrate, something, to be, to be suffused by or penetrated by just wanting to kind of become closer, to be more intimate with.

  📍 When I talk about love, I'm also talking about some kind of cosmic divine force experience, that I sense in my deepest moments, which has no object. Eros always has an object, and there's always aist. There's always a me and a and a you or me and an it, or a thou. I want to move towards it, it's got beauty, it's got mystery, it's got, you know, some things attracting me to it, but there's also this kind of background.

It feels much more like a background field, like a background radiation of just beneficence or a desire for things to be well,   📍 

  

Hello everyone.  Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hiott and on this podcast we explore philosophical, scientific, technological. And even poetic spaces beyond the either or bounds. And today the paradox we're holding is love and power. So what happens when you bring the language of love and mindfulness into the halls of parliament?

In this episode, we are gonna explore that intersection of power in love with Jamie Bristow through this practice that he's started. Uh, as someone who has worked inside the British Parliament, the UN With policy makers all around the world to legitimize conversations about these topics, which  📍 are mindfulness, consciousness, love, inner transformation. He's bringing these ideas into the most unlikely places and he's finding ways to discuss these with both sides, with perhaps people in parliament, for example, but also people in mindfulness studies, to find ways that they could better communicate.

So. From his earliest days when he was a corporate advertising executive to becoming what he'd calls a legitimizing agent. We talk about that here for contemplative practices in politics. He's been part of this moving quiet revolution, evolution, whatever word fits there of thinking about what we imagine as the inner dimensions.

In relation to what we think of as the outer dimensions and in so doing, maybe holding those a bit like love and power, not as opposites, but maybe as ways we've sketched to understand a process that contains us and is bigger than us and is incredibly important for so many reasons, especially when we think about the ways we organize our society and structure it and.

What is politics? I mean, that's one question I was thinking about a lot talking to him. What is it really for? I, I think my version of it here, at least the first version I give when we're talking is pretty idealistic. You know, thinking, oh, it's about better societies communicating better,  📍 everyone flourishing.

Maybe it's also about structure and trying not to, create chaos and, you know, a lot of other things, which we do get around to in the end. But. In any case, it's these are, you know, urgent ideas, about society, about what matters, especially about love and power, how we hold power, and how we hold love together without one corrupting the other, I'm not sure if corrupting is the right word, but this way that the sentimental can become the opposite of, well, I shouldn't say the opposite.

How, how? We can talk about love in a way that becomes sentimental, which is not its power, it's not actually what it is, and vice versa. We can talk about power in a way that is about manipulation or something like that, which isn't actually real power. So you see the paradox. It's pretty hard. It's pretty confusing.

It, it's pretty important. So what, what would a politics of love look like? I mean, how do we even put those words together? That's something I bring up at the beginning and how might we think about what cognition and consciousness are in relation to power and love, and also just to our deep social ecological concerns and care, the care that we have for those things for one another, for our societies, for our countries, for all the creatures all around us.

So this is a conversation about, about all that, and it's also about meta modernism. We get to that subject. It kind of is about it already before we even get to it, but it's something I'll try to address more in other episodes or maybe in a substack. But we do talk about that here and Jamie kind of coins the term ontological, meta modernism.

So you have to listen to figure out what that is. But we also talk about just courage and having. An understanding of what matters and how to hold and stand with that, even as opposition is part of us and. How this has been an ongoing challenge for a long time. There's one quote that, uh, Jamie brings up and I'll just leave you with it here, and then you can hear it again later on in the dialogue.

 📍 But it's from Martin Luther King Jr. And he says, power without love is reckless and abusive. And love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. And justice at its best is power. Correcting everything that stands against love. So that's interesting right there.

yeah, power and love. I send you both right now in the best way possible, uncorrupted, sentimental, full and sensual. Hope you're doing well, and hope you enjoy this conversation. Thanks for being here. Bye.

You know, I didn't really say, but this usually, or the work I'm. Kind of obsessed with, so it becomes a bit of a lens, is this beyond dichotomy? 

Mm-hmm. 

Um, and yes, I noticed 

that actually, I, I picked that up from previous.

Oh, did you? Yeah. I mean conversations, I, 

I say it, but it's not, it used to be in the title, it's not always in the title anymore, but in Holding Paradox and different ways of thinking about it. And they're, so, your work is so rich with, with this in a lot of ways. So probably I'll be, oh, I'd love to talk 

about that.

Because actually a lot of what I'm doing at the moment is thinking about metataxis and the Middle Way. Oh, wow, okay. Between real, not real emptiness. but, you know, the Meta Modernism being a metataxi between modernism and postmodernism, you know? the language of power and love I see as shorthand to start talking about inner and outer, but also talking about needing to transcend the kind of modern postmodern cultural war, 

Oh, good. You know, since that's like new to me in a way, with your work, it's not what I really looked at That would be probably a good place to try to get to at some point. I feel like you could teach me with that, but Yeah, we'll just hold that because there's so much, right. 📍 

Inner and outer and, people and climate and like these things that seem opposites or seem Oppositional or polarizing or different that you're bringing into relationship in a different way that really, really inspires and fascinates me. So, just so you know. Great. That's probably a lot of framing going on, even unconsciously in me as we talk.

Yeah. Great. 

Good to know. Okay. Yeah, 

and I also, I, I think love is a really beautiful way of holding all that stuff and, and looking at it differently, which I also see in your work. that's what's coming, you know, that I wanna say before we begin, but let's just begin and see what happens.

Okay. Hi Jamie. I'm so happy to invite you to love and philosophy. Thanks for being here today.  

Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited about this conversation. 

So the phrase that's coming to mind here is politics of love from the beginning, and of course that's from you because of your work. But I just wanna say that at the beginning.

But those words, politics and love aren't usually put together, and I definitely don't think we've talked about it on this podcast before. So just, you know, to introduce you to everyone, because you've done so many different things in so many different fields. When I bring up those two words, how can we explore your journey?

And those two words, what is, where would we even begin 

my journey in those two words? Well, I found myself in the world of. Mainstream politics working in the British Parliament initially, and, and through what we were doing there, um, generated interest in other parliaments that took me all around the world from Capitol Hill to the Sri Lach and doing walking meditation in the Sri Lankan parliament, um, to many parliaments in geographically and, and culturally in between.

And, and really, yes, of course guided by a feeling of, of of deep love and, and wanting to act in service of societal transformation, but also bringing something that I hoped would help politicians to who weren't very comfortable with the language of power to start bringing in the language of at least care receptivity, sensitivity and discernment that mindfulness and compassion training can, can bring into one's life and into one's work.

And so. as a, yeah, to fill a bit bit more detail onto that, I, um, had an instrumental role in, a really interesting development in the British Parliament. Started around 2013, so teachers from the University of Oxford Mindfulness Center started teaching members of Parliament, mps and, and peers, members of the House of Lords Mindfulness.

And quite quickly after a year or so, they started to become interested in how this could be shared with others. Like, you know, why don't more people know about this? It was sort of back in the times when mindfulness was still quite an exotic concept, you know, and, and so I was one of the volunteers and experts that came and helped them to think about the application initially of, of like secular mindfulness training in different areas of public policy.

Uh. I, you know, I, I could go on, but I guess that's one of the reasons why politics is, or has been quite close to my professional world for, for some time, and this deep commitment to interchange, you know, um, practicing diligently and with, you know, expert evidence-based guidance. We, we now know that, you know, quite transformative things can happen for individuals and for, and for everything, you know, that they interact with then.

That's wonderful. I think people will be sort of amazed, actually. I mean, for one thing, just to be that close to power is something that fascinates a lot of people to be really in, in the middle of, government in the, where things are happening. And you've also worked at the UN and you know, you've been in these very.

Concentrated areas, which one wouldn't necessarily think about those other words that you used alongside mindfulness and love. that's already very interesting, I think, to, to have that there. But how were you, how did you get called in as an expert, on, on these kinds of things on mindfulness? I know you've been working for, what, 15 years or something?

as I think the term was like a legitimizing agent. I'm not really sure. 

Yeah. 

You know what that is. But I think that's kind of what led you to that powerful, uh, vortex of, of people with this, you know, bringing this new thing, which really is not an easy thing to hold in such spaces for anyone, for you, for them, and so on.

So, so how did you end up being the person who was called into that, in that place at that time? 

Yeah. It's been, it's been quite a ride and such, you know, I have such a profound sense of. Of, of gift and gratitude. for many parts of the last, yeah, like you say, 15 years. The story I think we can pick up when I was working in climate change, getting disillusioned with the information deficit hypothesis, like many were around that time and thought, why did I suddenly, you know, start volunteering and then getting, getting paid to work in climate campaign communications?

Well, it was my own inner journey that made the same facts land differently rather than being told any killer stats, you know? And I thought, why aren't, why aren't we thinking about this? Why aren't we thinking about the inner dimension of sustainability, of the climate crisis, of the, um, of the bit of the issue which is cultural, which is psychological, and the ways in which we can work with that, um, to, to yeah, to shift the needle.

And so, yeah, I, I, I went on a I went on a bit of a mission to find a role. initially I found myself working at Headspace, the meditation app. And my theory of change was simply, you know, help to rebrand meditation and, and get everyone, get everyone practicing. 'cause that is what I felt worked for me. And now know that, you know, it's a lot more complicated than that.

I mean, I think the world would be a lot, you know, a better place if everyone did meditate, but it's not for everybody. Um, for, for, for, for, yeah. Good reasons in many cases. And. So when I was working at Headspace, I was, I just came across some of the people who are pulling together this policy inquiry on behalf of politicians helping them to form an all party parliamentary group on mindfulness.

And initially I helped out with the criminal justice bit of the inquiry, and then it turned out I had a real affinity work, um, for that policy work essentially. And so I was invited to be director of the, the think tank that supported, that was formed to support politicians to form this all party parliamentary group.

And, and yeah, I haven't really looked back. That was sort of 2014 15 and, um, has really, really flowered into, um, looking at not just mindfulness and compassion training. But in a development more broadly, all the skills and qualities that, you know, we can, we can cultivate in order to be more equal to our times or, you know, more able to show up in our lives.

And, and then beyond, even in, in a development framing, also thinking about mindsets and worldviews, paradigms, um, the kind of deep leverage points for cultural change and lenses like trauma healing and, and other dimensions of, of, uh, yeah. Our inner lives that we know now are really important to the health of societies and the trajectory therein of societies.

So, um, so along the way. I've helped to create policy reports, briefings and trying to plug this kind of, uh, missing middle. We often describe it as like the gray literature in between academia, which has quite kind of siloed and instrumental evidence. Stuff we can measure easily, as you know, individuals, um, often is much easier to, you know, measure individual benefit.

And then these more visionary statements from people like Professor John Kain, who was really instrumental in bringing mindfulness into society, saying that there's gonna be a global renaissance, you know, grounded in, in these practices of, of awareness and, and compassion. And I think he might still have a point, um, but that we needed.

Narratives where we could thread together the evidence base in me, meticulous ways to put flesh on the bones of those, of those intuitions. Um, and that's kind of the bit of the, the niche I guess, that I've, that I've found myself in over the last 10 years working in, like I say, broader and broader scope, but, but really thinking about.

Um, credible, legitimate narratives or rather, yeah, like I say, being a legitimizing force, taking stuff that's quite fringe and marginal or even considered woo or, um, initially sort of career suicide, you know, in, in, uh, for politicians they were like, oh yes, I, I've come along to a mindfulness course, but just don't tell anybody.

It was strict confidentiality, which changed significantly over time and you couldn't shut 'em up talking about it, like even on the front page of major newspapers. So, um, so yeah, that's, 

yeah. This is really fascinating to me. Even, I don't know what you might think about this, but where you were, I mean, it's almost hard for us to go, that's like 10 years ago where it was really hard to talk about a word like mindfulness in these atmospheres, and it's much easier now.

Um, but even you thinking about when you were doing climate or when you were focused on these other issues. The way you sort of set it up there was like, that was a outer or outside or physical or you know, whatever way we wanna think of it kind of activity. And that you started to realize it's not only that outer world, it's actually the transformation is somehow in the way that you're aware of your own self or, or how would you, how can we kind of get into the messiness of that a little bit of, Hmm.

Because I think that's related to the change that happened even in, you know, the way that now we can talk about mindfulness because in that legitimizing, there's something about the way we've separated something like climate and something like our human lives or something like mindfulness and something like politics that feels like it's changing, but we don't really articulate it yet.

So can you help me understand how you started to see that relationship, differently? 

Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, many of your listeners, I assume would be familiar with Integral Theory, the work of Ken Wilbur, and it's amazing to me that it's been 30 years since he proposed this kind of like very simple four quadrants. You know, you have like X axis, y axis, inner or outer on one axis, you know, individual collective on another axis.

And you get get, you get these four quadrants of like roughly psychological, cultural behavior and sort of collective systems, you know, for the, um, and we're starting to see that human systems involve all of these things, all of these dimensions, interwoven and kind of, and, and co arising and conditioning each other all the time.

And. Back then, you know, I had that intuition without being aware of the work of Kim Wilber or any of this great, you know, body of work more broadly that's been done on this subject. And I guess my preoccupation there was the psychological change that I had made and therefore changed the direction of my life and thought other people could make that psychological move.

And now I realize, you know, that that is so interwoven with culture and we can't put the emphasis on individuals, et cetera. But, And then these, these things are so interwoven and actually, you know, it, it breaks down how much sense it makes to actually talk about, you know, separate, quadrants or like inner being different from outer.

we confuse that, don't we, that that we're trying to understand it, we separate it so that we can understand it. 'cause it's just everything and so much. Um, but it's not actually broken down into those parts.

Well, that's the case for all concepts and language and, you know, tokenizing the, the world, which is exactly, which is, um, you know, and the nature of it is, is, is kind of beyond all that. But particularly when there's something totally missing from our thinking and from our discourse.

It's very helpful to have quadrants, to have names for things that, that have been neglected and in the. Introductory segments of the system within addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability and systems transformation. That is a paper we put together for the Club of Rome last year. We have a whole section on, uh, enlightenment thought, scientific revolution, you know, Descartes.

Um, it's just a page or two, but, but it's, you know, we d didn't feel we could go on to try and address this missing inner without, without pointing out how unique this period of history perhaps has been. That has been, uh, increasingly exiled from public discourse, from, from science to, to the extent that, you know, behavioralists in the psychology that I was taught in university are almost like di denying consciousness, you know, that, that we were, um, denying the, you know, the, the evidence of our own experience.

Uh, so. So, yeah, I, uh, I've gone on a philosophical journey. I, I, I guess, and discovered that there's many others, um, who've been thinking deeply about these things and going on a sim, similar journeys. And I, I've seen my job legitimizing this whole space get easier and easier. Like we've, we've got traction, changes being made, language can be used that couldn't be used before.

And, and so yes, now we're having these conversations in, in the White House, or at least we were yeah. Uh, before November last year. And, uh, and across, you know, UN and other places where. It's okay to talk about consciousness, even though we're not really sure what that means. You know, for instance, the UNDP Conscious Food Systems Alliance, which is a really interesting development I've been sort of supporting over the last few years, which was founded on one.

You know, the guy who's in charge of food and agriculture in the UN is just like, we're not shifting systems have been trying to do this for 30 years. We're not seeing the change anywhere near deeply enough as we want to. We need a consciousness shift. But what does that mean? Like, I, I, I think that's right and, but um, we need.

To work on articulating that, like having, having a kind of, uh, yeah, a more legitimate conversation. And so again, he, he pulled together experts, much like we had in the British Parliament together to kind of think through how we frame this. And now it's grown into, into an initiative which is funding, you know, grassroots, uh, inner outer transformation projects with farmers in, in, in Egypt, or executives in Mondelez, you know, all these different levels.

So, um, so yeah, it's great to see this evolution. 

What do you think is, uh, since you've been on the inside of it and you've actually seen it with individuals and with groups and with yourself, what do you, how do you think about this? uh, you call it an intersection a lot, I guess, or this, but it feels very dynamic.

This, I think it has to do with attention and awareness and, and this legitimate legitimization. Almost it, it's okay to talk about what we've termed inside, as connected to the outside. if you're working with politicians, for example, or even when you're working with yourself, that area I think is so delicate and so.

Easy to make fun of or to feel like we're going to be made fun of. Uh, when we start looking at that, at that relationship that I almost, right now I'm thinking of it almost like as a, kind of like a, a spinning wheel or something where what's on the inside is coming to the outside and the outside into the inside.

And when we kind of stand at that place or surf that place and try to talk about it, it's such a vulnerable space. How have you noticed or, or found that you or others are able to, to be in that space differently? Or, 

I have to say, I, I think I initially underestimated the desire or ability for people in these mainstream contexts to go straight there. And I just, what comes to mind is, is, um, the time I invited Dan Siegel into Parliament to talk to a group of politicians. And Dan Siegel is a, um, psychiatrist interested, or has background in neuroscience as well, and writes a lot about, um, uh, children education, but also has a book called Intra Connected and some stuff, more stuff that's, um, a little bit more far out, um, far out there.

And he came initially I thought, to talk about meditation and, and, uh, you know, he talks about the integration and differentiation in the brain being sort of like characteristics of healthy systems. And, but Then he went like way off the deep end. and I was sort of metaphorically biting my nails there in the, in, in, in the kind of, what does that mean exactly, exactly.

Way off the deep end for, well, because you started talking in esoteric kind of ways or something. It kind of 

esoteric ways, but like, you know, talking about. The language of consciousness, the language of, you know, more pointing towards the phenomenology that we all share. even talking about like God and, the, the nature of mind and his own sort of theories about quantum consciousness and, and, and, uh, 

not something you see in political or, or pretty unusual to go there in political.

Yeah. Ally. Yeah, 

exactly. And, and I thought, oh my God, you've lost it. Um, or I let you know, like you've, you've burnt some of our, you know, relational capital with these, with these people. Like, even though this has been years into the parliamentary program by this point, and politicians are very happy just to get up and walk outta the room, you know, they, they, um.

I've had it where someone says the wrong phrase or something talks about social justice and you lose, you know, two or three conservatives. It's like, oh, this is one of those conversations, I'm out here. Um, and, but no, they stayed. They stayed and then they asked for the ri booking to be extended. So the quick, the q and a could go on for longer.

And it was like, like, like I think we lost a single politician. Um, but yet they wanted to spend another 20 minutes, another half an hour in the, in, in, in the room with him because he was giving them space for something that often people, we, we foster it, you know, these intuitions. We have private conversations around dinner parties or in corridors, and we often don't have spaces where we can, where we can really go there and, and, and talk about, um, the interaction of inner and outer and, and, and using some of this.

Yeah. Out there language. And it helps that Dan, Dan comes across it as a very sort of credible figure. And I, I think it really matters who's, who holds that space, who has that message. And what we heard about the mindfulness program more broadly, and this is what's really interesting, is that politicians felt that over time they developed relationships with other people they knew, had been on a mindfulness course and had different sorts of conversations brought in more of themselves into the parliamentary context.

More of them, you know, um, transmitting and receiving on more channels or like bringing more of their person in into that professional realm. And not just that, that they were modeling different sorts of conversations that those who hadn't been on the course would kind of adjust to. They, they, they'd join a conversation where more was, um, within limits, I guess within, within this, within, you know, allowable scope of, of, uh, discourse.

And they pointed towards this potentially being helpful or leading towards culture change within the political establishment. And we put the findings from semi-structured interviews and some of the anecdotes that we'd, we'd heard into a document called, um, mindfulness in Westminster, reflections from, from UK politicians.

Uh, and, and so yeah, that, that's, um, there's a, there's latent desire there, I guess in a way that I hadn't appreciated. 

Yeah. It's almost like you really tap into what we're all hungry for. Maybe even What's the source of politics itself in a way? I mean, it's, if you really think about what we're trying to do is, isn't it, connect with one another and explore potentials that we can't understand, which are.

Very much connected to consciousness and all of these things that we, it's almost because it's so important. We is why we haven't talked about it because it's that vulnerability or something. Have you, does that make any sense to you? Have you thought about that? 

It does make sense to me. I mean, it doesn't resonate in the con, in the parliamentary context that, that, that I, that I experienced.

You know, I had a self-selecting group of politicians who had been on the course and then were interested in really exploring it further through, through policy. And, and, and some of them, you know, connected within that container. And they found that remarkable because of its contrast to almost everything else they did.

And that often people Yeah. Come into politics and it isn't just put them in like parliamentary politics, but the body politic, you know, as activists or um, campaigners or whatever, often driven by feelings of deep love. And, and, and, you know, imagination, a kind of imaginal, uh, idea of, of what you think society should be like, but then you get kind of rigid and ossified around a particular program or a plan or, or a party, um, and you're not, you know, you're not still acting from, from the emergent future that needs to come through.

You're not acting through desire to connect or, or whatever. Actually your de there's a desire to win, win out over the other party and often out over people within your party in order to get more influence and, and be, actually be able to have. Mm-hmm. So you think more power though, you've actually, if you talk to ministers and, and, and, uh, you know, even people in the cabinet often, they feel quite powerless.

So, um, so yeah, no, actually what I saw was a great level of disconnect and suffering around that. Um, and you often see this, I think, in, you know, examples of, um, on the left and right, people who are still acting out a political program but have, but aren't acting out a love. They're acting out the, the kind of the power and the ideas that they've taught themselves is the right way to, to go.

Um, but in the cut and thrust of actually trying to get that program, um, acted on, they le they lose those, those, those original impulses and that, that feeling, 'cause it's, you know, this is one of the reasons why I'm very interested in power and love as a potentially a dichotomy or, or, or something that, you know, is held in tension with each other is it's very difficult to continue.

Holding the drive for power and the drive for love at the same time. That's, that's 

exactly what I was trying to bring up, is that, I mean, in my experience with people that I've met in these worlds, they seem to have, there's different ways to come into it. Some just want the power or the, like, want, you know, they wanna be seen, they wanna be important.

And I, I, I don't think that's disconnected from actual, you know, love actually. Um, not, not that there aren't extremes of it that are unhealthy, but, but then some come in and the way you said, you know, they really want to change the world in a good way. Or they see something that hurts them in the world and they wanna help help it.

And the messiness that I'm, I feel like you've probably seen that I wanna learn from is how it seems that can get so corrupted so easily that almost, um. I don't know if it has to do with the way that we've created these systems. I mean, you've written about systems in, in a new way and, and part of what you've been doing is sort of starting to change those from within right?

Through talking about the inner, but what is it like what, how, how is, how are we doing this in anyway? Like we come into these systems, political systems wanting to do what good. A lot of us and then the system itself just to survive it. We sort of have, we sort of have to narrow something in a way. Yes. Um, that tension feels really important to me and I don't really know how to get a good grasp it of it.

Have you gotten a better grasp of it as you've been so close to it? 

Exactly. And that's kind of where we started this conversation. It's just like, um, how can we help those? Empower who feel like they, they have been truncated in, in some way to open up that greater rate, that scope of, of sensitivity, you know, sort of re receptivity care to bring more of themselves in, into that role.

And, you know, Carl Jung thought that actually both of these drives couldn't be operating at the same time in the same breast. You know, like, uh, that at best you oscillated between them. I don't think that's the case. I think with, you know, particularly with spiritual practice, it's possible to show up, or even if it was the 

case at some point, I mean, we're trying to move towards holding those together, you know?

Mm. Yeah, exactly. But like, it's, it's rare and, and, um, 

it's rare, but isn't it so powerful? I mean, 

when you see it, yeah. There's 

such power in that for all of us that we haven't even begun to explore, in my opinion. 

Exactly. In mindfulness training, often teachers say that we are trying to develop. The ability to be strong in back and soft in front at the same time.

Mm-hmm. That means that we have the kind of, the rigor, the diligence, the discernment, the ability to show up and, and be, be clear and decisive with your mind, but, but at the same time being, being careful and compassionate. Um, um, and that relationship internally then enables you to express that better, that, that, that sort of balance better e externally.

So it's, you know, you train the mind, like you train the puppy, you say like, no puppy, this, you can't be over there. You really need to be here. It's decisive, it's clear, but also you don't, you know, you don't kick the puppies and it doesn't know any better. You know, you're, you are, you are, you are kind with it at the same time.

And, and this. This shows up in a number of different philosophies and sort of cultural backgrounds. I'm, I'm reminded of, um, like the Samurai Broido code, you know, freedom or code talked about like rectitude and uprightness, but also compassion and, and yeah, it's a, it's a powerful thing when we see it.

Martin Luther King, of course, is very famous for talking about love and power. Um, he did his PhD thesis on, um, on, um, Paul Tillek, the, um, Theo Theologian who also read a lot about love and power, and that's one of the reasons that comes through. And Martin Luther King's speeches and he said, you know, power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

And so we need. One needs the other to be effective rather than being degenerative. 'cause we were very familiar with the degenerative side of power, of course, of the many ways in which it's obviously reckless and abusive. And, and by the way, just, you know, yeah, going back to this on the, the left as well, you know, like, um, sort of communist ideology, you might be sort of si sympathetic with it, with its aspiration for, for, for a utopian society, but went so drastically wrong that it was responsible for tens, hundreds of millions of deaths.

You know? And

I wonder actually we, that's just putting a flag. I think that might just get, get, edit, edited out that little bit. 'cause 

of the socialism part. 

Yeah, because that, that, that raises too many questions. It's a bit of a, um, needs unpacking or, or dropping, I think Yeah. We can 

edit that out, but I think you're get, you're onto something that's really, really powerful in this.

What I'm trying to understand too is this, this the, it's not, uh, about sides. Actually. There's something about, gosh, I don't, let's just try to be messy a little bit, but when you, there's, there's this amazing power in connecting and in feeling, um, the inner, that can also be redirected to something negative in the same way that the outer can be redirected to something negative.

Do, like, there's something about this ongoing, I keep thinking about this will, right? Where, you know what, what really matters is somehow the presence as you're doing this. Because some, some of this conversation is still like linear as if we're gonna get someplace, and then we've gotten there, you know, as if, if you teach meditation and mindfulness then you've, you've, you've accomplished something.

But that's not actually what I'm seeing in your work. That is kind of the point. So yeah, I can 

definitely pick that thread out. So, you know, we're very familiar with the ways in which power can be reckless, erect, and abusive and degenerate, and we're less familiar, at least in some cu cultural circles, with the ways in which love can be limiting and, and degenerate.

So there are helpful, healthy expressions, but also if we tend to say, um, need love. Uh, because it's defense mechanism to be a people pleaser. I know that one, particularly in my, in, in my twenties, can really restrict your choice, making your sense of individuation. Um, you can be, um, passive or, um, like attracted to submissive peace in order to not ruffle feathers, um, displease people, you know, and.

Um, a drive to to, to unity, which doesn't appreciate the necessity of individuation, differentiation, healthy boundaries, uh, sense of identity within those boundaries. Like you need boundaried ness in order to have a sense of like, uh, yeah, a sense of identity that underpins collaboration and, uh, sort of healthy tribalism.

You know, we are inescapably, tribal, tribal creatures. And, and how, and how can that be shaped in a wholesome, wholesome way, you know? And also if you express love sort of too much without the sense of, of, of, of power, you can yeah. Lo lose your own self individuation, which, which can be disservice to, to you, but also to the, to the world because.

Because power in some ways is kind of sacred. You know, it's, it, it sort of underpins this, our ability to create our no to, to, to, to channel our creative impulse into the world, to, um, to offer our souls gift, you know, what, what, whatever it is to, to, to be dr, to be guided by Eros and to, to shape and create.

And there are some people in the world who are hyper agent, you know, Elon Musk has often talked about one, you know, and he can just like, create new companies, shape the world by whole media ecosystems and, uh, and enact, enact and act. And if we aren't developing our own ability to do, to do that, to to sense what is wholesome and follow that impulse in, into, into the, into the world, then yeah, it's a great disservice to, to us and, and to the, and to what the world more broadly.

So, so love. I think you know what, whatever your weaker capacity is, I think we need to, you know, one, one needs to, to develop either the, that strength and back or that softness in, in front. And there are ways in which, if now we need to legitimize love as a political force, as an allowable public message, then we don't just need to explain why love is also structural.

Why love, why love is also, you know, profoundly transformative. But we need to work at not discrediting it. And we did the same thing in mindfulness, legitimizing mindfulness. We had these like, you know, solid policy reports and also we kind of worked with the mindfulness sectors to, to help them nuance how they were talking about it, so they weren't continuing to be, in some cases, their own worst enemy.

Um, and, and putting people off it or, or, or, or giving a too shallow a, a rendering of it. And in a similar way, I think those of us who would be guided by love Mu, uh, could show up in the world and talk differently about, about love in a way that doesn't discredit it, uh, and doesn't make it too, too woo and, you know.

Yeah. And 

isn't part of that holding it as almost a dangerous kind of thing in the way that you sort of touched on before in the sense that all these categories we have of good and bad and all of that, um, you know, we, we tend to put love in the good category or something, but it's actually much more powerful than that.

It's beyond those kind of categories, and we don't. Like that's hard to hold. And I think part of really bringing love into this in a new way is there's almost a, it's almost, you know, you're walking the razor's edge a bit when you're really feeling that. So that makes me wanna think about Eros a bit because you brought up Martin Luther King and that he's usually talking about agape.

And even that distinction that we make, you know, we put love in those kind of boxes so as to like necessarily, I think up till now, so as to get a grasp on this. Powerful force that is holding us or that we are. Um, but maybe we're starting to also realize that Eros isn't quite, you know, what, how we put it in that box.

It's not just sexual, for example. Um, and that there's, you know, I'm almost thinking of a tantric kind of feeling here of, of something that's not sexual, but that we're trying to begin to fill into together. No one person could handle that alone, which, you know, kind of gets into this too. So I don't know.

What, what does that bring up for you in terms of love? I guess it's, and, and, and how, because that's also not an easy word to bring into any of these contexts and 

Hmm, yeah. 

Much less to talk about in a different way than like romcom love. So how does that, how have you held all that space? Yeah. 

I, I forget the eros in many people's minds, it's still very much bound to sexual desire, because I come from a

relatively new practice tradition called soul making dharma, or at least that's one of the threads of my personal work. And that talks a lot about eros in, in, in very sort of broad terms. And eros is, is any, well, it's the creative force that's in everything. Like as soon as you start to be fra framing it in that way, you see every, every act of will, every sort of intention, every image or you know, sort of deep motivating analogy or, or, or force all has eras woven through it.

By which I mean this sense of wanting to move towards something to. Isn't slightly sexual like language, but, but, but it, but it's not, it's sort of like conceptually to, to move into something, to penetrate, something, to be, to be suffused by or penetrated by just wanting to kind of become closer, to be more intimate with.

And that can be this idea of, say you've never been to California, but you've been, you've seen all the commercials, you know, like, like from, from, from the tourist board. And you have this sense of like, what it's gonna be like to be there and uh, and, and you know, all the mythos around Hollywood or whatever it is.

And, and so you want to go there, you know, you, you, you, you want to, to know it, to, to, to nuzzle up against it, you know, I like to, um, uh, to be, to, to explore, to be intimate with it. And that, that force of, of eros is. Is a world creator, you know, it's, it's a fundamental generative force in, in human nature and perhaps in, in, in reality, in, in, in the cosmos.

And, and so familiarizing yourself with that, bringing the discernment in, the clarity that can come through meditative practice and, and, and, and contemplation to understand the forces of that within. Within the heart and mind, and to work with it in ways that shape it in wholesome and productive ways is Yeah.

Tremendously powerful. And, and, yeah. Is is a way in which love is a, is a form of power, like, to, to see that generative potential. 

Yeah. It's almost like that. Think of it as, you know, you're sort of on the portal looking into a comp. What we don't know what's possible really, if we can learn to hold that.

Mm-hmm. But also as you were talking, I was thinking in one of the reports, maybe the systems, I'm not sure, but I think you talk about how at some point after going through, you know, so much research into collapse, I think you're studying collapse and what's sustainable and what is resilience. That at some point you just realize like the only thing you can really talk about is love.

Um, does that relate here at all? Like mm-hmm. How did, how does that, how do I hold that concept with this way that we're talking about love here? That Eros. Yeah. Yeah. 

So I spent much of last year working on what I call the inner dimensions of societal resilience and occupying the future, like you say, like and, and from that place I felt like, you know, resilience isn't enough.

Just getting through isn't enough. Like something deep within me. Want to just fully go there and talk about like, what are we doing here, guys? What do we, what do we love enough to put ourselves out of this nose dive only that is a, is a big enough conversation and a, and a strong enough interest ra psychic force for us to be able to overcome the fear and the hatred that happens when you're in a time between worlds and certainties collapse and, and, and helps you to, to move towards a different vision of what thing, how things could be.

And part of that is eros. Yeah. Like that, that kind of like. Moving towards an imaginal future. And part of it is sort of, yeah, I guess love appreciation eras for humanity and it being, you know, va, you know, or civilization and it being worthy of saving.

But personally, I think when I talk about love, I'm also talking about some kind of cosmic divine force experience, um, that I sense in my deepest moments, which has no object. Eros always has an object, and there's always aist. There's always a me and a and a you or me and an it, um, or a thou. I want to move towards it, you know, like it's got beauty, it's got mystery, it's got, you know, some things attracting me to it, but there's also this kind of background.

It feels much more like a background field, like a background radiation of just beneficence or like, you know, a desire for things to be well, um, which hasn't got that quality at all. There is, there is no object of it. It's just, it's much more diffuse. And in my more mystic moments, you know, I have this sense of like, of a divine other God ground of being fusing with my own love, my love, and, and, and well wishing for others all becoming sort of in indistinct.

And there's that sort of tuna breaks down and, and that sort of love. Yeah. I, I, I think that the mystics of many different traditions, Sufism, Christianity and others talk about that sort of love, um, a lot and, and some, yeah. And, and where I'm at the moment is that it is in some sense and ultimate reality 

is that we can't speak of, um, that we try to speak of in a way.

But as you were talking, I was, I just had a talk with Parker Palmer and we were talking about, you know, when thing, things are really hard when you're depressed or something. And he was talking, we talked a bit about love maybe being what's holding us even when we don't fill it. And that just sort of came as you were saying that.

Um, but also what came was the idea of faith, because in your writing you also talk about how we don't necessarily have evidence for love, which I think relates to this more. Logical kind of, uh, side of us that wants to have evidence and studies and so on. And I know that's a big part of your work. Um, you know, you're doing a lot of studies and data and, and stuff, and when it, that's also part of the difficulty of bringing love into these environments mm-hmm.

Because of this word evidence. But as you were talking I was also thinking of that. Is it Hebrews where faith is the evidence of things unseen, or I'm, I'm probably not saying it exactly right. But that feels really potent here too, of, you know, of course we need data and tr we're trying to understand, but we're also, something's holding us, which we, of course it's holding us so we can't fully have evidence of it except that we are part of it, or I don't know.

This is a bit messy. Yeah. But what does that bring up for you? 

I mean, what it brings up is actually something very recent and timely. Um, because I had, um. It might be too disclosing too much here, but I'm a big fan of a particular form of, of a sort of hybrid body mind therapy called Rosen Method Therapy.

And it works with some real, sort of like primary shapes in one's, in one psyche in a way that I, I won't go into particularly 'cause I don't totally understand it, but it is like the, um, you know, it is well worth checking out. Let's put it on that. And I experienced yesterday this part of myself that desperately needed to develop trust, like it, like, like trust and faith that it will be held.

All manner of things will be well, that letting go and letting myself become a more and more emergent force and that my own, you know, um, that sense that I'm being moved through by, um, by a world that, that, uh, that wants to move towards the, the wholesome, um, is the kind of edge of edge of my practice. And that this session yesterday was really help helping me do that.

And this could be understood actually as a kind of the macro pattern over, over time. That the more I have let go, the more I'm able to create positive change in the world, the more powerful I seem to become, uh, in, in what I'm, what I'm hoping to do and help with, but the, the degree to which I let go and allow that to happen.

Is dependent on the amount of trust or faith that I have developed that, you know, that is kind of evidenced by, by, by life. Like, by having done that exactly. To, to your, to your point. And, and so that's powerful. And so I think it's iterative. I think you have to, you have to, you know, maybe start with a, as much faith and as trust as you can muster, let go see what happens.

And there's a way in which the world, I think, will win your trust. And in the same way that perhaps you win the world's trust as well. And, and, uh, uh, perhaps, you know, I don't know, uh, uh, enables, enables you to, to be more effective. Um, I don't know. I'm getting, I'm getting off the deep end myself now, but, um, no, you're 

not.

I, I think it's actually exactly the right. Place to, to think about all of this because it's nested. All that we've been talking about is nested in that. It's because, you know, we're talking about it with you and your communication with yourself, but we could also think, I was thinking about the story you told earlier of the politicians who were sort of finding community and how realizing there were others around them who were also feeling this way or able to talk about this or, you know, I think that's a similar like nested, uh, pattern to what you just described.

I mean, and what's happening between us and the world. Do you know what I mean? These aren't, we're helping each other maybe to be able to do what you just described on an individual level. There's a way in which that's not separate from what politics of love might be. Um, mm. In a really practical way at the same time that it has that really deep off the deep end quality to it.

Um, does that make sense? 

Mm mm Yeah. Does, you know, I, I really like the sense of it being, being nested that, that, that there are ways in which you, um, can put your toe in this water or, or, you know, experience the thin end of, of, of, of something and have, you know, deep experiences of the, of the same thing.

And that the conversations that we're having in parliament, you know, are, um, or the, 

or the groups that have helped you learn how to meditate. I'm thinking of Jamie when he is maybe in his twenties, and I think you were working in advertising and wasn't this still sort of that pattern of you starting to trust that you could look inner, that's now kind of blossomed into this whole other career?

I mean, is it not, it doesn't feel. Like that would be something completely different from this, or if I'm even remembering that correctly. But 

yeah, and actually there's, um, the big change and maybe that I had in my twenties was be what Robert Keegan, the Harvard professor might call the movement from the self socialized to the self-authored mind.

And that I, and I was really running the code that I had absorbed from society's values, from my family upbringing and what I thought a good life looked like and where happiness and satisfaction would, would, would arise. And, um, the break from that, the realizing I, I could just leave this career that I worked really hard to get into, um, and take my own room, become a dharma bum, essentially.

I kind of like went to Barcelona and with, you know, with no employment and meditated, it was, you know, a great, 

and just those, for those who know your sort of top ad executive, is that what. Yeah, 

I was a, you were kind of at the top of the ladder of the corporate world. Exactly. I wouldn't say I was top of the ladder, but I was running a global advertising account like I was, that's pretty top running at one.

At one point I was responsible for a billion dollar brand, so, so yeah, I did Well, yeah, that briefly. Um, 

and then you became a Dharma bum 

and then I became a Dharma farm. Yeah. And, and I remember that being a big psychic move, you know, and, you know, Robert Keegan's work points to like, sort of five orders of conscious, consciously say like first three very, very common.

Like basically level three is a socialized mind. That's the minimum level for a kind of a healthy, sort of somewhat realized adult that you might, you know, but then after that point, it's just like the authority for what a good life looks like becomes internal rather than getting this code from, from, you know, external sources and.

And yeah, God, there's a lot of faith you had to have to break from that. Like no income, um, break from that whole story. It's a big move. It's not, I mean, I definitely, I'm still very much scientific materialist, you know, like, um, uh, certainly didn't have any comfort with talking about the divine or the sacred or this sense of like, let, you know, letting go and, and, and trusting the universe, you know, you know, like that would be way, way beyond.

But there was a sense of having to trust. Um, myself, although I did read a book called Synchronicity in that Time, which is a, is a well-known sort of, uh, um, uh, a book. Again, a kind of corporate executive who, who self authors and then discovers that by trusting weird stuff happens, like synchronicity is maybe a thing, you know, like mm-hmm.

And that was actually, that's 

kind of what I mean, you know, that you we're helping each other with these messages. Um, what you're doing now, and even this podcast, someone who might hear it in, in, in the same way you heard that in your twenties, right? Mm-hmm. It opens up a possibility, 

right? Yeah. Yeah. 

It, in the same way that the meditative practice can open up a possibility.

I, I guess I'm just trying to get at how all these are sort of nested into each other, and when we think about something like Politics of Love and we think about what you are going through then and how it's nested into where we are now. I wonder, you know, when we. It might be too big, but to, to really think about what's going on right now in our societies and to us as, as a world, it's something's holding us and we're trying to learn something.

I don't know. Can we think of it like that? Or, or, or do we risk becoming too? I I mean that's the o that's, 

yeah. That's one of the ways I stay sane. Yeah. Okay. Thinking, thinking about it like that, you know, we, my frequent co-author, writing partner and life partner, Rosie Bell and I put out a piece called, um, between Optimism and Despair, the Messy Middle Paths through Climate Collapse for D Smog last year.

And we sketch a number of potential pathways for, for, for civilization, for society. Not to say these are the only pathways, but, but to try and open up the range of pathways we think about rather than we're just gonna, you know, just about do this in time or it's hot house earth. And you know, the end next time, extreme scenarios.

There are, there are pathways in between and, and one of those potential pathways is that, yeah, it gets really bad. Like there's a level of, of systems failure that we can't quite comprehend at this point, but that, that's almost required for the lessons that we need to learn. The mindset shifts, the mental models, um, that need to, to, to shift, require that discomfort and that that suffering to put it plainly, it's like the crack, you know that and you don't wish it on ourselves, but like, but yet I.

There is reason for thinking that might be the case that we are needing to learn something. And you know, the Zen, the Zen Masters asked, you know, when do people learn? And he said, when they have to, and we don't have to have to yet in, you know, individual lives that isn't felt in the most powerful parts of the world anyway.

So, uh, so yes, we are being, there are ways of talking about this in quite kind of academic terms about paradigms and deep leverage points for change and, and some of that quite academic and mainstream, increasingly mainstream way of talking about it is also woven in with the language of mindfulness and in sharma's language, the, you know, needing to have an open heart, um, an open mind and an open will and touching into a kind of a, a ground of potentiality where the emerging future can be allowed to arise.

Um, and so. But, uh, there's also this other way of talking about it, which, uh, which is about,

um, evolution of consciousness and, and, and that being interwoven with a, a world that in some way, um, we've got it backwards and maybe consciousness is primary. Not, not to deny the importance of what we current, you know, think of as, um, consensus reality. And that some things are, you know, are real and others are not.

Um, in, in, in some ways. But that. Yeah, consciousness is, is primary that there's something, there's something weird going on with it, uh, that doesn't, uh, ma match up to, um, Western scientific understanding of, of, of causality. Um, and perhaps there's something in there where we're being invited to learn about too.

Yeah. Is that also a, um. A sort of fulcrum in a sense, because I often think about, you know, kaleidoscopic cognition or constellation thinking, or trying to understand self and our own consciousness as more of a multiplicity. Mm-hmm. Which, as you were talking, I was thinking, okay, you know, for some people in the world already, the disaster that that scenario you described is their daily life.

They don't even have time, right. To talk or think about all of this stuff. So in a way, we're responsible for doing that, you know? Mm-hmm. Like if we start thinking of ourselves as multiplicities or even of, of consciousness in, in a way that we're here to share and open one another up, and kind of the ways we've been talking through this almost dialectical, uh, process, um.

Does that become a sort of fulcrum of what would be politics of love, a a shift of our awareness of what is possible in this, you know, conscious, this sense of what I think you mean by consciousness or, you know, how does that, how do you see that? Yeah, 

yeah. Well, some people are like, well, we need, we need a new religious movement.

And some people, some people think we need greater capacities for imagination. That we need to sort of work more actively with the clay of the public imaginary and, and that, that touches on interdependence with nature and, and into some of these, you know, territories of, uh, of, of faith and consciousness and, and reality.

Absolutely. And I'm thinking particularly of the work of my colleague Phoebe Tekel and, and, and Moral Imaginations on the one hand. Um. 

You also wrote a paper together, didn't you? Or something? Yes, 

she was a co-author. Exactly. On the, on the system within. And, and that might have limited appeal, however, because there are many existing faiths, you know, and that there are ways in which some of them might, those faiths might con contrast with, with what the kind of spaces and approaches that say new religious movements might invite, invite them into.

So I think we can have a politics of love, which speaks in spiritual terms, which is to say. It brings in what is most important into the public discourse. It really goes there about these, some of these, um, primary shapes and, and, and colors of that are existential in, in nature, but doesn't have any particular truth came woven into it.

And I'm, I'm, you know, as I was saying things before, like this is new territory for me to go on record with talking about, you know, what is and or isn't happening in relation to, to, to God or consciousness or the ground of being, or whatever, however you phrase it. Um, because, uh, yeah, we, we, we, we need a politics of love that isn't grounded in, in truth claims like that, but invites a discourse.

That is happy to talk about love as a civic force or, you know, um, and that the fact there's its phrase civic religion, which is to say, you know, um, a religion actually is kind of atheistic or, um, but it's poss it's possible to have to think about love of one's country. You know, wholesome patriotism, which bends towards justice and, um, you know, international collaboration, which, which works with love, you know, whether it's through national anthems or plays or statues in public spaces or political speeches, uh, other forms of art that we, that we.

This is something of a, to acknowledge this is something of a spiritual project. This can't be purely, um, a secular, dry, dry thing. And the right is much more comf comfortable with, with, um, generating strong emotion with, with, with talking about or using some of these primary colors and have been much more squeamish about it on, on, on the left.

And that's been a serious imbalance. You know, the work of Jonathan Het and others pointing towards the fact that, you know, liberals are only communicating with to some moral taste buds, whereas the palette that conservatives use is much, much broader. Um, and that's partly because faith is, you know, a part of their project much more explicitly.

So, yeah. But how, yeah, how can we, rather than just being ecumenical as in having a coalition of different faiths, um, talk about, talk about something, um, which is. Which is unifying in some way, and that's to say not, not a particular ontological belief or claim about the existence of God or our relationship to them.

Um, but to, to say that love and these deep questions of what, you know, what, what is important and how we should relate to, to each other. What is. What is a skillful and wholesome way to live, um, should be part of our political discourse. It has been, it has been sort of banished from, uh, from the, from the, from the public realm and in, whereas I think it was at Gandhi, who said, um, we want our systems to be so good that we don't have to be, and that that's, that's something like the project we've been involved in.

We haven't had a conversation, a deep conversation about values, about who we really want to be as a, as a, as a, as a people. Instead, it's been a, a focus on, on systems, which we've been shown now are just, just ideas and people can just contravene them when they, when, when, when they choose. We're just seeing that that fiction, that our systems will be enough, um, evaporate.

I wonder about the advertising side of this. I mean, it keeps coming to me a bit that we're all at different places, you know, in, in all of these ways of talking about what we're talking about, whether it's the politics or the love, and feeling it on different levels and be able to express it at different levels.

And I remember someone way back telling me about, uh, about environmental issues or climate change that was gonna have to become, uh, like trendy or cool or something before, before it made a difference, which it actually kind of has in a way. But I wonder about that. That side of it. And I don't know how much time you have.

I think we only have like five more minutes, so, but this is coming up, so I'll just tell you and then we'll, we'll see. But, um, I wonder about that side of it, which I think relates back to where we were in the beginning of how this can be easily, um, manipulated to like, there's, there's a place there that I'm always trying to understand that I think relates very much to the way you have to, the way we, we try to find a sort of place where this is gonna catch on and people are gonna get it across many different spectrums and how when that happens, that becomes that power, that portal opens and there's so much power that the people who know how to shift it can use it in.

Negative way, like, you know, ways that aren't wholesome to use your language. Mm-hmm. Um, and that, that feels like something we need to talk about too, but, or, or, or notice that we haven't really, so I wonder, you know, you've seen that from a lot of different places and I wonder how, what that brings up or what you might have to say about that.

Do 

you mean how love in particular could be misused or like some of these energies? So if we're 

talking Yeah. A politics of love, right? Mm-hmm. That already feels like a paradox. Mm-hmm. Which for me is a powerful thing. If we can hold that, we can open up a lot. But I can also see how even I, I, I, we can see right now how things that were considered self-help or mindfulness 20 years ago have actually become ways that, um, people with traditional power right now, they use those.

Ideas and methods towards, um, just kind of keeping the more general mood, uh, believing that success and power is what they tell them Success and power is, if that makes sense. That kind of create your own world. What I say is true, as long as I say it enough. Mm. Uh, mentality. And I, I wonder in 20 years if a politics of love couldn't, with very good intentions, uh, end up in something like that just because of this Yeah.

New this way that we are all, you know, trying to get this from different levels at the same time. 

Yeah. AB absolutely. And I think any new movement, any new idea needs to be alert to ways in which it could be co-opted or go awry or be misinformed. And I'm a big fan of the work of, um, uh, the two philosophers who write under the pseudonym Handsy Fre Act.

And they have a book, the Nordic Ideology, and in that they propose six domains of a new politics. And, and one of them, uh, is essentially the politics of, you know, the

evolving, developmental, uh, conversation about how the rest of the, the other five could go wrong and be coopted and be, uh, and be damaging in the, the long term. I think that's a really interesting way of, of looking at it. You know, they have, um, one of the six is like basically bringing the inner into, into discourse.

Really focusing on, on the psychosocial as an, as a, um, an area that has been so little intervened upon that it's, it's, um, it's so little intervened upon that. It's discounting a whole area of action that could, could be, you know, really effective, um, very quickly. Um, the, the, so there, so there are many ways in which it can, it can be, it can be warped for sure.

I wonder, this wasn't quite what you're asking, but I, but I wonder whether it's helpful to think about power in the context of modernity. So like, I, I, I see Moderna, the, the modernist project really emphasizing agency and, and power in our ability to create change out in the world as being what is strongly valorized.

And, and then with the critique of modernity coming, you know, postmodernism through the 20th century. That becomes power becomes sort of projected out there and denied within postmodern spaces. Then activists, um, and communities and people in the kind of, um, postmodern left where love is more valorized, you know, sort of relationship connection, um, uh, prioritizing justice, healing and, and, and reconnecting where things have been disconnected, you know, uh, partly through indigenous worldviews and, and really helpful wholesome wisdom traditions like that.

But that perhaps it's either gone too, too far, not being comfortable with its own expression of power, um, and not not being comfortable as an individual. Stepping forward and being within power within those, within, within those spaces is very, very common for power to be in shadow and, and that one of the reasons we struggle to see what a politics of love could be.

Is because we are so some, some of us are. So within the sort of, uh, uh, so sort of saturated with that critique of, of how power works and how the modern system is, is causing us, um, untold problems and that actually we need to explore the middle way between those two, which is what really what I see that meta modernism or like, you know, this post-conventional, post post-modern, um, sensibility to be, it's not the step on from post-modernism.

It's sort of a kind of an adjustment where the pendulum swung away from that kind of modernist sense of like, we can discover things in the world and create it. We can build and fix and, and, you know, we'll be in this single, um, linear trajectory of progress to this critical, you know, relative, um, and sort of aloof.

Um, sensibility and for us to swing back halfway through and to be okay with, you know, um, the Greeks called Met Taxii. You know, that kind of like that, that, that, um, something that's like beyond the, beyond and through the dichotomy, um, of, of, of those two is a place where the politics of love makes sense.

That unless you swing, unless you swing back, power is either only seen as, as as destructive and oppressive or love is seen as woo woo. And, you know, and, and actually this conversation of power and love, although philosophers have been talking about it for time in immemorial, it's some helpful folk language for us to be able to talk about inner and outer like power is often thought about as outer and love is often thought about as inner, but also talk about this middle way.

Between modernism and postmodernism, uh, between what is sort of really real and held to be objectively true in modernism and this sort of, you know, um, paralyzing relativism where things are kind of like, um, uh, subjectively real only, and that actually this also chimes with Buddhism and the, the sense of middle wave between existence and non-existence being the nature of things emptiness and, and that, um, and that, yeah, there's a sensibility here, which, um, you know, I'm as a sort of a kind of card carrying meta modernist.

Um, you know, maybe it's no wonder that I'm sort of feeling into this, this in between. 

That's exactly where I was trying to go. Um, because we've, we've brought it up a few times, but yeah, not clinging to one side. Fully, even though that can be the way that we start to feel the power of it, um, you know, like I think there's something about joining groups and feeling the power of it that can then lead us into getting kind of rigidly on one side.

Mm. 

And I really like what you just said, and I agree with it, but I've, I wonder, I've started to think like, middle way Yes. I, I get it. But we were talking about what's holding both, right? Mm-hmm. And part of me lately in this whole holding paradox beyond dichotomy isn't, I wonder what you think about this.

I, I've started to realize it's not about choosing one or the other or solving it somehow or, or, or to convincing one part of the other part, you know, which I feel like even if we don't say it, that's often what we're trying to do. From one side, we're trying to convince the other side. And that feels to me like that energy has become.

It's not that we wanna be a middle in between those energies. Instead we wanna let those energies be and explore what's holding them. I don't know if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Even in terms of climate and people or inner Totally. And out or, you know. 

Yeah. And, and this is where I get really excited about how my experience of meditation practice, of, of insight.

Um, there are different ways of coming at this, sort of exploring it from the angle of interdependence. 

An intro. You brought that up a few times, but Yeah. 

Right. Yeah. And or the kind of insubstantiality of things as, as, as Buddhists might, might frame it as primarily, often, um, that

there is a, um, there's a way in which. Yes, we can oscillate, you know, from one pole to the other. And that's one helpful way maybe of understanding met Taxii or middle, middle way. And there's another way which is really drawing on the analogy from quantum physics of superposition, of, of, of things being possible within a, you know, within a probability field.

You know, almost like a stack, and this is why I think Carl Young was ultimately wrong about, you know, not being able to have power and love in the same, you know, in the same moment. Because, and, and it might be a characteristic of a, of a post-conventional mind that you can hold paradox better because you're not collapsing things to, to real.

You can hold them as even weighted potentials. So like, maybe I'm a. Maybe I'm a 60% panpsychism or whatever the philosophical term would be for the, the, you know, what I was talking about earlier in terms of this intuition around the nature of consciousness and, and reality. But I'm still at least a 10% scientific materialist.

Um, and, and, and I, and, and actually I, I really like Christian mysticism. I like the language and the, and, and, and the image. And I, you know, have only the last few years really found, found, increasingly found a place in, in a more theistic, um, way of rendering things. And it's not like I swing between these, it's like.

They're in a stack, they're in a super position with each other, and they're all sort of influencing how I show up in the world and my intentions and, and sense making and discernment. Um, and certain conversations I have will sort of like upregulate or make one or the other more likely to, um, to be impactful and, and, and shaped by say and do.

But, but they're all kind of there and operating and, and it's that tolerance with ambiguity. It's that tolerance with there not being 1, 1 1 answer and being okay with the mystery around, you know, around all of this. Um, and it's not to say like, you know, it's true because quantum physics showed it or whatever, where it sounds kind of similar, but.

It is helpful that we, we, we inevitably scaffold our understanding of ourselves and our, our, the world based on what we know from physical sciences. You know, Newtonian physics has been shaping our, and limiting our thinking for, you know, centuries and now actually quantum physics is offering us some new analogies, uh, for how things could, you know, could shape, um, could be, and so, so yeah.

Super position of different ways of looking I think is, is one of the things that gives me hope and, and, and points towards again, the importance of inner development and being able to have the kind of mind that can, that can hold that complexity. 

Yeah. Thank you. Thank, I think that's very powerful and I agree, you know, knowing that things can be a particle, ano wave, and probably many other possibilities, just having that as a understanding and that's now become something most people understand is so helpful as a step towards being able to hold that maybe in one particular situation, whatever you've learned from the literature that calls itself, panpsychism will be more helpful for you to understand that situation.

And in another one, maybe it's gonna be even Carl Jung, maybe in another one, it's gonna be what you read in the Bible, you know? Okay. Like to be able to let, it's not even a percentage, even like I'm this percent of that, because that already says there's like one hole. But actually all those situations are different layers in the stack, right?

With different regularities and naturally, maybe wherever you are, you're gonna need different, you know, the particle or the wave. So I really love that. I think that's a new way of thinking that we're from many different areas all trying to get our, get away to, to explore together. So, and I feel like that's what you're doing with the Politics of love.

I don't know if you Yeah. Would agree with that, but it, it does feel like that's, that space is, is opening. 

Yeah, I think it, it definitely is close to all of this. It's an important part of all of this. I'd like to quite coin a term, if I may, um, please that there have, it's been said that there are different forms of meta modernism.

There's new, initially artistic than philosophical now sort of political movement. Um, at least three or four. the, the, the part of it that Hanzi Foreign Act is associated with is kind of developmental meta modernism, which is like, we need to be deliberate, deliberately developmental in all these different aspects of human systems and particularly.

Within, um, the psychosocial domain so that we can, um, better deal with the complexity of the world that we're facing. And I would like to point towards, you know, ontological meta modernism in the way that we've just started talking about here, which is, which is this, um, sort of real, not real. The fact that people, the, the kind of artistic sensibility of meta modernism is sort of playful and serious at the same time.

Ironic and, and sincere. Um, because I think it, it, it understands something about the shadow play going on here. Um, the kind of like, we need to take this deadly seriously, and there's an as if ness in any particular view, um, or provisional or the fact that it's just one part of the stack. And that I think, um, notions of, uh, of.

Ontologically, there's always a way of looking, operating and that things don't know concepts and, and things don't exist from their own side. Um, without that sort of, uh, no way of way of looking brings us into a meta modern sensibility and perhaps meta modern sensibility will give us insight into that.

And, and that that's what kind of fuses together to some extent my Buddhist background, my political, um, aspiration for society and, and this emotional sense their, you know, needing to talk about love. I think it all comes that legitimizing somewhere in that nexus. 

Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that brings us, I think in a, in a full circle to where we started with the legitimizing agents and, but also it opens it up and kind of explodes it in a way to where.

Yeah, we can sort of start to hold it all, uh, a little bit differently actually. I think that word or these words, even meta and, uh, yeah, the, it's almost like, uh, instead of thinking of it in a binary way, we're starting to realize that. That meta goes in many directions, is not up and down linear, and it's not only one and the, and, and there's a dyna, there's a dynamic movement going on there, which is maybe what this ontological is as a being beingness.

Um, so yeah, I like that, that term. And, and I'll just let it like hang open. Usually at the end of these conversations I ask people about love, but we've been talking about it the whole time. So, uh, I should ask you about philosophy probably, but you've been talking about that too. So, just to kind of close down or, or end it for now, I wonder if you have any experiences with love or philosophy that, you know, come up now that you wanna share or anything, you know, related to any of this that just, that you feel like you wanna share or, or express before we, before we go for now. 📍 

Yeah. I want to, I want to say thank you to my dad. Um, who, who was a, is a philosopher, you know, um, not professionally, but you know, he got introduced thought experiments at age, you know, 13. You know, how do you know you're not a brain in a jar? Um, you know, how do you know that any of this is real? And not just inputs into a thing, you know, what's the nature of of consciousness and reality?

And I've spoken on previous podcast actually about how I've been on a kinda spiritual journey and went from a, being scientific materialist to now feeling like the world is re enchanted and soulful and, and, and, and feeling interested in divinity and sacredness and contrasted that with the, with the kind of what my dad, my dad gave me in, in kind of like negative terms, but actually, uh.

Yeah. Being brought up essentially as a, as a philosopher and asker of questions and lover of learning is an enormous gift that, uh, that he gave me. And so I, I, yeah. I'd like to say thank you to him. 

That's beautiful. That really holds the love and the philosophy. 'cause you know, this holding you in love and out of love, sort of letting you be a philosopher.

Mm-hmm. Um, I almost think that's the place to start with everything we've been talking about in a way, whether as a parent or as just someone who cares about another person or in the world. To be able to do that, for, to have that space held for you or to have someone help you do that is just,  📍 yeah.

What's, it's so precious. So thank you for going there. I didn't expect that at all. And it's actually the beau most beautiful way to think about what we've been talking about. 

Hmm. 

And thank you, Jamie, for all you're doing and for, Pushing to these edges with yourself and with others, Well, thank you so 

much for, for this inquiry that you, that you, that you're on and for making space for this conversation. 

All right. 

Bye.