Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast and the membership program where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. And for about five years, we have been saying that getting to that future we would be proud to leave behind will take abandoning the existing structure, which is hard because it's our safety zone. Everything that we do is so tightly interwoven with all of the existing system. And yet, in at least one very big nation in our world, that system is being broken apart with sledgehammers as we speak. And yes, it's horrible to watch. It must be horrible to experience, and it is going to create a whole lot of trauma. However, as Jamie Bristow says in the conversation that we have just had, there is a thing called epistemic humility, where we don't actually know where everything is going. And much as I like plotting out maps; the entire thrutopian concept is based on the idea that we can map out potentials towards that future we'd be proud to leave behind; we actually don't know. And in that unknowing is a whole universe of possibility. And where we get to in this conversation with Jamie is the politics of love: what it is, what it means, why it is the speaking the quiet part out loud of all of us who exist within a meaning crisis. Which, when we get down to it, is pretty much everybody who's alive on earth today.
Jamie: So let me tell you a bit about Jamie. Just like Jon Alexander that we spoke to a couple of weeks ago, he started off life as an advertising executive, and then he realised he needed to align his inner and outer worlds. And now he's a writer and policy advisor working at the intersection of inner and outer transformation. For eight years, he was the director of the Mindfulness Initiative, which brought mindfulness into the UK's Parliament, to members of the Houses of Commons and of the Lords. He was the clerk to the UK's All-Party parliamentary Group on mindfulness and I put the report that came out of that in the show notes. Since 2023, he has been working for the UN's Inner Development Goals team, and he currently leads on public narrative and policy development, emphasising the inner skills and qualities that we actually need to get through. With all of this he is an associate of Life Itself, the Climate Majority Project and Bangor University. And he trains regularly in the group set up by Rob Burbea and Catherine Magee within what's called the Soul Making Dharma. And I will say more about that in the outro. Jamie and I met at an event in Sheffield last summer, and I was so impressed by the quality of his groundedness, by his clear capacity to hold a heart based intent while speaking to a large room of very disparate people. And then I got to know more about who he is and what he does. And he lives in that world where policies are made. He walks the corridors of power. And yet for the past 16 years, he has also been consciously committed to being a spiritual warrior with all that this implies. So in the conversation that follows, we do go into a few political rabbit holes because, hey, these are the times we're in.
Manda: And then we start to unpick what being a spiritual warrior actually means; how we do it, what the implications are. If we consider the concept that we are at total war, but the war is within us, within the parts that want to go back to the old and the parts that want to emerge into something utterly unknowable. And then in depth and at scale, we look into what it means to create a politics of love, which feels to me one of the single most exciting concepts of our times. And actually probably the only way that we get through. So here we go: people of the podcast, please do welcome Jamie Bristow, spiritual warrior, soul maker, and all round amazing human being.
Manda: Jamie, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this slightly drizzly winter morning?
Jamie: Yes, also drizzly here up in Sheffield in the north of England. And I'm feeling really excited to see where this conversation goes, Manda. I feel on the edge of the unknown a little bit. And I'm also, to be honest with you, feeling a little bit of heartbreak. I had a meditation this morning and went through a bit of process around holding what's going on in the world. And so coming to you with hope and with heartbreak.
Manda: Right. It's worth saying we are recording three weeks to the day after Trump's inauguration. And we now clearly have President Musk, who is quite clearly enacting Curtis Yarvin's playbook to the letter. Yeah, so heartbreak here also. A part of me thinks we needed the old system to break. I wasn't expecting it to be actively chainsawed into tiny pieces and and that's very painful to watch, but it also gives me hope that the cracks are where the light gets in. What happens if we offer the light? I spent a year at Schumacher when we were trying to work out what the soft landing would look like if we dismantled capitalism. And we failed, largely because it was very hard to see a soft landing. And now capitalism is actively, the wings are being chainsawed off in mid-flight. What happens when the Boeing 747 careens towards the ground? Can we turn it into a unicorn in time, I guess, or a Pegasus or something? Metaphor is breaking down. So let's go with that. Let's go with, so you're with grief; talk us into what's alive in your heart space just now. Because you and I can do this. And it's very rare. And I just want first to say thank you, that this is possible with you.
Jamie: Yes. I've been working on climate change for 15 years, and I've got used to the trend of it being, you know, faster, sooner, deeper than we thought. And re adjusting our worldviews and what we think we're working with. And I guess I've had in mind that authoritarian capture is a possibility. And in certain parts of the world, you know, a probability. But again, you know, faster, sooner, deeper than I thought. And also in the last couple of years, many of us have come to realise that we can't think about climate without thinking about conflict. And again, a march towards the potential for major power war has been, you know, faster, sooner, deeper. And there are plausible arguments to talk about how we are in a Cold War and those who aren't sort of waking up to that fact have their head in the sand.
Manda: Who are the protagonists in this Cold War from your point of view?
Jamie: So one way of framing it is that you have, and this is sort of pre the election of Trump, I guess, which does change the dynamic somewhat. And I know you've spoken about a russia-u.s. entente. But that's not the way it has been framed until now, which is the multi-polar world that China and its increasingly close allies want to create is code for dismantling American hegemony. And, you know, the Americans won't be up for that, and neither will their allies. And so you have an authoritarian axis of North Korea, Iran, China and Russia, who have, over the last 18 months, got closer and closer. And expressly, publicly saying that in terms of defence, economic ties and also a worldview, that they are in deepening alignment. And so it remains to be seen actually what the election of Trump will do, because China and Russia are getting so close that there are China hawks in the white House.
Jamie: So antagonistic towards China. But they're also kind of sympathetic towards Russia. But yet Russia and China seem to be deepening and deepening. So it remains to be seen whether we're more or less likely to march in that direction. I mean, towards greater risk of conflict because of Trump. But certainly there's less stability, there's more reactivity, I guess, in the sense making and decision making centres of America. So that broad picture of thinking, okay, well, I've been treating the climate crisis like the main thing and now we have we have all of these. I mean, obviously it's a meta crisis or a poly crisis et cetera, but treating the climate crisis like the sharp end for most of the last 15 years. And now it's feeling a lot more complex, and it's difficult to know what is the greatest threat to us and at what level. So how do you stay resourced in that, is a question that is most alive in my career over this period. Has been taking inner transformation, integrating it with the outer transformation that we need to see and doing that in quite a mainstream context. So interfacing with traditional power, British Parliament, parliaments around the world, government agencies, the UN, white House, etc. But now my mind turns to what we need as individual change agents and at community level. Not that policy change is no longer possible, but that's where my heart is turned to anyway, that level of resourcing, cultivation and resilience that we need.
Manda: Yeah. And before we hit record, you were talking about epistemic certainties and our tendency to think that we can map out the future and that the map is the landscape, and that this is not the case. So you spend a lot of time in the, what have been until very recently, the corridors of power and talking to people who are pulling levers that did have some power. And I would be quite interested to know how those who see themselves on the progressive side, and I'm quite with Ginie Servant-Miklos about that. Up until now, we've had two branches of neoliberalism, and one was waving a pride flag and one wasn't, but they were still basically neoliberal, they were still basically part of the predatory capital death cult. They just kind of didn't hate the people who were less than millionaires in the way that is clearly happening at the moment. However, are they understanding that the role of authoritarianism is possibly worldwide? It wouldn't surprise me to see a form of America joining with Russia and China and the others, and just creating a Creating a global authoritarian unit. And a few people at the top are arguing about who's actually the king of the castle, but basically, there's maybe a few hundred of them who are controlling everything else.
Manda: And yet you can't deny your way out of biophysical reality. The climate chaos and the destruction of the ecosphere is still the most important thing. Whatever human politics is doing at the moment cannot reverse the nature of the biophysical reality. So they might be able to be king of the castle while the water level comes up until it touches their feet. But in the end, species level extinction is species level extinction. And it seems to me that we're at that point where the system is not fit for purpose, if that purpose is the continuation of complex life in this iteration. Energetically, you and I are in a space I think, I'm checking this, where consciousness creates matter, language creates reality, ritual creates relationship (Oscar Miro-Quesada); what we do at an inner level is vastly more important than the physicality of what's happening on the ground. And I was going to say, there's still enough people who know that, but I still think that if a critical mass of people know that we can change the energetic space, but I don't know what that critical mass is. How does all of that sit with you? That's just thrown out as a bunch of ideas. Where does that take you?
Jamie: Um, there's a lot there. I think it's helpful to note that I'm a little bit out of date with how the politicians in Britain are feeling. I have haven't been working on a daily basis with them for a couple of years, 2 or 3 years. My work over the last year particularly has been at a UN level and with the American government agencies and white House. So I've been alongside them through the election and now in significant fear for their jobs. These are mainly public servants in in NOAA, EPA, FEMA, USAID, and in the sustainability team of the white House, which, you know, they're obviously out of a job as the as the administration has changed. And there was a certain amount of not wanting to think about it too much, talk about it too much until it actually happened. And then there's, you know, a kind of Wiley coyote phase where you're sort of still running with the momentum of all of your projects and plans, and at some point you look down. And I think we're sort of a few weeks after that Wiley Coyote moment. So the world is quite different now than when I was largely working with politicians. I would say that politicians are so busy. They're asked to drink from a fire hose so much of the time, in terms of the amount of information that they're asked to consume on all of the policy issues they're supposed to vote on, let alone these kind of deeper cultural flows, etc.
Jamie: This narrative around sort of fascism and the lurch towards the far right is pretty mainstream, in terms of newspapers writing about it, etc.. So many of them will have thoughts on that. I was generally amazed, though, that even of those who professed deep interest and actually some deep expertise in certain areas, weren't aware of some of the most important policy reports that have come out in the last few years. Or even the policy institutes. You could never assume much depth knowledge. Even the more philosophical in the System. So you had to really make sure that people had the same reference points as you. Because you and I are listening to podcasts, reading papers from Dark Matter Labs or whoever else; this is well beyond the capacities of most politicians. And so our sense making apparatus, both in terms of the inner resources that they're able to cultivate and then maintain in that stressful, very stressful environment, and then the information processing and sense making level that is possible in the ways that the jobs are currently geared, is terrifying. A couple of my main insights when I started working around 2014 personally with politicians, was that they are humans too, even those I deeply disagreed with, you know, finding the common ground. It helped I was working with meditating politicians on the whole, those who were kind of interested in mindfulness.
Manda: A self-selected group of people who at least have something in common.
Jamie: Yes, exactly. At least they were humans, too. But I got the sense that, you know, everybody was. And I also got a deep compassion for the constraints of the job. And the direction of our countries, and indeed of the human race is in the hands of a very small number of people. I mean I don't want to do a disservice to the agency that we all have and corporations have, etc. but they certainly have a certain form of power. And we give almost no thought to the resourcing. And actually, in terms of the Daily Mail test that politicians are worried about passing, when news of the mindfulness program in Parliament was leaked out. They were worried about us being antagonistic towards them taking any time out of their lives to resource themselves.
Manda: Us being the general public.
Jamie: A couple of different reflections, there's a lot there. The body politic, the mainstream media discourse.
Manda: Oh my God, you're meditating, you should be voting.
Jamie: Exactly. Like, how self-indulgent.
Manda: But parties are fine! You can have parties and bring your own booze and that's all okay but goodness forfend that you actually do 20 minutes meditation.
Jamie: Right, yes, exactly. Do it the British way, you know, get drunk and be merry.
Manda: Well, okay, let's go down this corridor for a bit and then come back to the energetic space. It has seemed to me for a long time that the system is not fit for purpose. It's very good at maintaining the system, but we are not bringing power to those with wisdom and wisdom to those with power. So what I see as the opportunity of the catastrophe that's happening in the States is that it's becoming, I think, increasingly obvious to anyone who can think, that the old system is broken and can never come back. Well, some people are still thinking they just have to hold their breath for four years and then somebody nice will be elected, but I think that that supposition is vanishing very fast. If it is the case that the old system is broken, in the UK we potentially could self-create a new system between now and the next election. I'm not saying that's probable, but it's possible. Given what you've seen of the working of politics, do you have an inner model for a system that would actually work to create space for the people who do have the bandwidth for what matters, and a system by which they could generate resilience and connectivity within, between themselves and a sane governance model, I suppose. Have you thought about that? And is it something that you could speak to? And if not, we'll go somewhere else.
Jamie: I haven't got an oven ready model for you. I do have a general design principle; that democracy and decision making and sense making should be a work in progress forevermore. That we should have a deliberately developmental approach, not just to our own lives and the resources that we're showing up with or the organisations that we're running. But to democracy itself and our wider sense making and governance processes. So that's the fundamental mindset that we need. It's not like we have democracy or we don't. I don't think it's actually helpful to say that democracy is dead now or that we had it in the first place, or either of those two poles. But actually that we're on a journey to better models of being sensitive to the right kinds of information, processing that in a way that represents interests and and helps to navigate the tensions that are going to be inevitable when you get more than two people together to do anything.
Manda: Or even two people: more than one person.
Jamie: Or even two people, yes, exactly.
Manda: And I'm perfectly capable of my inner parts all being at war, so actually...
Jamie: Well right, exactly. I contain multitudes, and there's definitely a parliament of selves going on in my meditation practice a lot of the time. And so yeah, that would be a very helpful first step, to not be the sense of what freedom is or what democracy is, as something that's like done and we've got it. But that there are ways in which it'll have to change as technology changes, values change, etc. and also, even if they didn't, we could just get better and better at this process. So maybe we've taken steps back in important ways. Maybe in some ways it's under threat, and there are different levels of unfreedom as well, and representation. There are forms of autocracy within ancient China which led to some forms of human flourishing. And there are forms of autocracy in Stalinist Russia which were just so unspeakably awful, I don't even want to think about it right now. You know?
Manda: Yeah.
Jamie: And this goes back to what you were saying before about the conversation we had before we pressed record, about epistemic humility. Of being a bit more humble about what we can know and can't know and not losing sight of the fact that our maps and our models are not the territory itself. We have a tendency to like models that give us some explanatory power and we tend to latch on to those and collapse into them. So, for instance, the kind of complex systems bifurcating the Ilya Prigogine describes. I think in his work, there was a sense that there are probably multiple stable states. And it's helpful to think about it to get this sense of more than one stable state. To talk about two bifurcations, but we're probably in a great landscape that's coming out of the mist, with many stable states. Yes, there's the stable ish state of authoritarianism and stable state of sort of chaos and collapse. But there are many messy middle paths through that.
Jamie: My writing partner and I, Rosie, wrote a piece last summer in Desmog about sort of between optimism and despair are the many messy middle pathways through climate collapse or climate crisis. And that was talking about four different potential attractor points. But we say at the end of that, this is just a model. This is just to illustrate the fact that talking about a cliff that we either go over or we don't. Or talking about Armageddon or muddling through with the status quo is where most of the conversation is at, you know. We do it because we have to because the alternative is Armageddon. So let's just hold these two binaries over people's heads.
Manda: Extinction is extinction. It is a binary. There's either a survivable future or humanity is just not there. Is that not a binary that exists?
Jamie: Yeah, that's one possible future. I think 100% extinction is one possible future. I think it's very unlikely.
Manda: Okay, this is really interesting. Because you're the smartest person I've spoken to for a long time who thinks this. Because I don't see it as unlikely at all. But I'd be really, really happy, I'd sleep much better if I didn't think that. How do you get to that?
Jamie: Okay. There are many scenarios where it's so. Particularly because of nuclear weapons and biological weapons and AI or forms of weaponry anyway, that you could make the planet completely unsurvivable. But there are many possible futures where from small bands of humans to millions manage to survive. And there are many forms of much reduced circumstance and population that you could see being possible. And so those who work on existential risk, I think some of that work is quite myopic. But like Toby Ord, who wrote The Precipice and the existential risk academic community, tried to put numbers on some of these things. They don't so much mind that we have greatly reduced populations and quality of life, they're more concerned about total extinction. And they put the chances in the kind of 1 in 20 to 1 in 1000, depending on what risk that they're looking at.
Manda: Yeah. And I read that and I see a lot of motivated reasoning happening, because all of the climate science that I am aware of, tipping points are available and we could discuss them, but we are about to hit, for instance, the point where the CO2 and methane warming potential released by thawing permafrost is greater than the totality of human produced fossil fuel emanation, greenhouse gases. And I find that one quite scary. And the warming is happening much, much faster than you or I ever thought that it would. And the impacts are happening much faster. And I've just finished reading Paul Hawkins book Carbon, which is coming out in March. And he's pointing out again that 50% of our oxygen comes from phytoplankton, cyanobacteria in the sea, and the seas are dying. There's a dead zone the size of Belgium in what, until very recently, was called the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zones are joining up. A dead ocean is a dead ocean, and it produces no oxygen. And we're burning down the trees. And I don't see a survivable, however clever you are, and however many cans of beans you've managed to stash away, how do you keep going at 9% oxygen and total ecosystem collapse? It feels like we don't want this to happen, so we're going to work out ways how humanity can survive. And we've been through mass extinctions before, not us personally, but the world has seen mass extinctions. 3 to 5% of species survive, and they're mostly below ground and they're mostly unicellular. It's not the big pink bipeds who managed to wipe themselves out. I don't see how we get through that. I think it's still possible, but it would require all of us to change our narratives a lot. But I'm wide open to being told my science is wrong. I would sleep much better, genuinely. Jamie.
Jamie: I don't want to spend too much time arguing about whether whether we're talking about total extinction or whether we're talking about small bands of humans managing to muddle by.
Manda: No, no, this is not what we planned to talk about.
Jamie: It's not, exactly. And it's not my main area of expertise. What will happen at that level of collapse. I'm still motivated by and have a kind of mystical hope that there are ways in which we can transcend our current difficulties, even post tragedy, in ways that would be very difficult to bear. And might mean famine and population collapse and things like that which we want to avoid. But this is again what we're writing about in that piece, that: when do people learn? When they have to, as the Zen teaching story says. And there's a way in which the maturing of individuals humans is mirrored in the maturing of groups and maybe even civilisations. And it does require resistance and does require sometimes a kick up the ass that says, no, you can't carry on like this.
Jamie: And I can't promise anybody anything. I'm not optimistic. I'm not hopeful of a particular outcome. But I carry hope in my heart. And a lot of that comes from that epistemic humility that we mentioned. Sometimes otherwise framed as a mysticism. A helpful sense that there's something else going on here.
Manda: Okay. All right. We don't often have a chance to go down a mystical path; let's explicitly do that. How does it feel to you? I'm trying to sense in my own body. Because I share that actually, when I let my head stop telling me that we are barrelling towards the edge of a cliff, there's a sense, almost of excitement and potential and of a held breath. That within the spirits of the Land or the Gods or whatever it is that I feel that I'm connecting, is that watching the toddler take its early few steps and maybe grasp for possibly the hot iron in the fire, but also potentially do something really miraculous. And that there is great hope in this moment of all certainties becoming uncertain. That is how it feels to me. How does it feel for you?
Jamie: I've been trying, in my clumsy way, to be some kind of spiritual warrior since about 2009. And I really had to turn against the stream of my own prevailing habits and the prevailing habits of my culture. Initially, I felt that once I managed to find myself a livelihood and had some work to do, that was mine to do, and I felt like I was in the right place and I was doing it. Part of what I thought my job was, was doing the inner work on behalf of others, absorbing the hits and the insults to my sense of what I thought was going on here and what I was brought into. And reframing that and metabolising that in my heart and mind and soul and being able to offer people sort of hope and a narrative to keep them energised and optimistic.
Manda: Can you unpick a little bit that metabolising? How it feels and what you were doing?
Jamie: Yeah. So my spiritual path has been interwoven with my professional path in ways that I think are mutually accelerating or mutually supportive. And things really unlocked as soon as I had a job that wasn't going counter to what I deeply knew was necessary, was needed in the world. And by the way, the bad old days were working in advertising, creating commercials for SUVs. So at one point it was really in the opposite direction! But at the time, I didn't actually think that was a problem. It was definitely wrong view and wrong story. And so the metabolising meant giving space and time to going there, to it being okay that maybe I asked of myself a bit more of a four day week rather than a five day week on average. This particular week actually I needed to spend 2 or 3 days with half days, because I actually had some inner work to do, and that being part of the project. And over time seeing, oh, the dividends of that! And how you develop faith over time, because you give a little. You say like, well, let's take a risk this week and not do all of that stuff, which feels so pressing. We're getting funding for what it is that I'm doing, you know, living hand to mouth. Or getting those emails, those politicians or whatever that you meant to do two weeks ago. But actually, I'm going to do the radical thing, which is not do any of those and do the processing work. And then on the other side of that, God, feeling suddenly more aligned, more energy available and being able to with confidence offer leadership. Not just thought leadership, but emotional leadership, soul leadership to people. We all need that, right? We don't just need the ideas, it's not about arguing well, it's about speaking differently, in the words of Richard Rorty.
Manda: And finding the people who know that they need that, such that it can Land. Because that's a conversation and a ripple that happens outwards. Can you go a little bit into finding those people and particularly, you were working with UK MPs but then also in other parliaments. Because you're right, everybody needs this, but not everybody knows they need it, or not everybody feels safe even to express the knowing that they have. And I'm thinking also you were creating a space where it's okay to express this, but you still have to somehow cross the Daily Mail threshold of I'm going to be completely castigated for this, and yet I know that I need it. How did that feel and how did it work out?
Jamie: Yeah. And again, I want to emphasise the clumsiness and the length of the journey here. Inasmuch as I started getting intuitions around this, that my role isn't entirely just about giving people ideas and policy reports, that there's some other thing going on here. And then having the confidence to try it out in my work mix and then actually trying the mix of intentions when I go into a meeting. Is it just to have the sharp idea and the really laid out policy thing? But in that mix, is there 20% also speaking differently? Is there also speaking nervous system to nervous system and trying to help politicians regulate to a different wavelength? Is that part of my job? And like I say, gaining the faith over time that actually, yeah, this is giving dividends both to how sustainable this is for me, but also the impact of the work. And so over ten plus years getting a sense of shifting that ratio.
Manda: I'm remembering, I can't even remember who it was, one of the Californian gurus that I occasionally listen to who's quite intelligent, and he used to be a software programmer. And then he'd get more and more managerial things and in the end he was attending something ridiculous, like 25 meetings a week. And it wasn't meetings he had anything to do with. But because what he would do when he went into a meeting was basically take his intention up and down his chakra system, and he'd just sit there doing that. And his line manager, he said, I'm not contributing anything to these meetings. I don't actually say a single word. And she said, no, but when you're in the room, we get stuff done.
Jamie: Different quality of presence.
Manda: Yeah. And so we just want you in the room. And then he started teaching other people to do this and now that's how he is where he is. And I wonder about the energetics of that. You're in policymaking and you're speaking nervous system to nervous system, and you're going in with a different intent. Have you noticed that?
Jamie: Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, the chakra work isn't my root contemplative tradition, that's not where I mainly practice, but I've done a lot of chakra work as well. And I have found enormous differences from doing a tune up before going on. There was one particular time I went on BBC breakfast, the kind of flagship news magazine show in the morning. And yeah, I did sort of a chakra tune up in this sort of like boundless compassion practice. And God, was I grateful that that's how I chose to spend my half an hour before I went on.
Manda: It made a measurable difference to your experience and I'm guessing to their experience.
Jamie: Absolutely. And I found particularly, I mean we're going pretty into the high woo factor here.
Manda: That's what this podcast is for.
Jamie: So a disclaimer that this is not what I spend 99% of my professional life talking in terms of. Everything has to have a reference at the end of the line normally. But particularly there's a couple of higher chakras, you know, bringing on board that sort of sense of intuition and the crown chakra connected to something more than this one, can have a radical impact on what or who shows up in meetings. But that's a whole nother rabbit hole.
Manda: Is it? I think it's a very interesting rabbit hole, because to me, if we all acknowledge this. And for me, sending roots down is as important as the crown up. But that, just connect to the Earth, be the hollow bone connecting the sky to the earth and the earth to the sky, however you frame it makes for me a noticeable difference in the quality of the conversation and the energetic space that arises. And if all of us knew this, the world would be a different place by tomorrow.
Jamie: And I guess that's one of the things I'm feeling now. Is that, you know, my work continues in the mainstream what can be heard direction. We're spending most of this year working with the UNF, triple C, there's a UN climate change global innovation hub that I'm going to be working with. But I also feel that it's time, perhaps not to rely on peer reviewed meta analysis for absolutely everything I say, you know, publicly. I've also spent five years training as a dharma teacher, although I haven't completed the training because I spend more time talking about meditation than actually teaching it. But yeah, I feel perhaps given where we started this conversation, given things going faster, sooner, deeper than we than we hoped, maybe we need to go faster, sooner, deeper into some of this stuff. If we're going to be creating the communities of radical capacity and care that we need to meet this. And this might be a good moment to mention The Life Guild concept.
Manda: Please do. It's such an exciting. Yes, yes. Go for it.
Jamie: Having the sense of being for 16 years now, a spiritual warrior. And in those early days, very alone, initially not really having a set teacher, meditation teacher, like going to different retreats and creating my own little prayer that I had in the morning that I would do whilst I did my sun salutations, that I created myself in order to try and like drag myself out of the prevailing habits of self and society.
Manda: Just before you go on, can we unpick very briefly what for you a spiritual warrior is and what it means?
Jamie: Yeah. For me, it's the rigour and discipline and courage and fearlessness that you associate with Warriorship. And it's not about violence. We have a lot of positive connotations also with like the samurai or something like that. We love the training and the alignment and kind of fierceness of that kind of warrior archetype when it is married to something chivalrous, or something that has a kind of ethical discernment to it. There's that quality, I guess.
Manda: Yeah. So honour and integrity and courage seem to me quite key, and then finding the parts of us inside that relish that, as opposed to the parts that want to be sneaky or cowardly or material. It's as much an inner alignment for me; the inner alignment allows the outer showing up. Is that fair?
Jamie: Yes, absolutely. And the spiritual aspect, of course, being the domain in which you're applying these energies. And it has the quality of compassion of action for others. So this isn't just bringing that discipline and discernment to one's own liberation, but you're trying to show up in a way that is total. It's like this idea of total war, which is where the whole of society goes to war, rather than it being just something that a few people go off and do and come back and stop for lunch. You know, as war is fought at some times. In a way, we have a kind of total war attitude to one's own application of spirituality to life, work and friendship. In the Buddhist tradition, there are different words, like Virya which is a kind of energy that they talk about in kind of warrior terms. This whoa! This conjuring of something that has a fierce energy about it. And so it's very difficult to maintain that virya, to maintain the alignment, the direction. And, and that's why the concept of Sangha is very important in many traditions. It's a word from Pāli or Sanskrit, from South Asia, that's adopted around the world because we don't really have a great English alternative for it. So this is a community of spiritual friends. It can mean the monastic community, but generally has a wider usage, meaning those who are oriented towards the path, whatever path that is.
Manda: People that you know and with whom you are in community.
Jamie: Yes, exactly. And it's so important to find that, whatever your discipline, your paradigm, your practice is. And I know you're deeply involved in shamanism, and I know you have communities and people that you share that path with. And there's a particular, I'd say, group of people, or it's not really one group, it's more like a class or a sort of person is arising at this time in response to the challenges of our times. And they are dedicated to becoming as skilful as possible psychosocially. Going into shadow, understanding their stuff, showing up in a different way. Having some kind of contemplative or spiritual practice. Wanting to wake up to reduce their own suffering, but also the suffering of others, and particularly that's the way it's often framed in the Buddhist. The path of all of this. And also wanting to put that into work, into meeting the problems of the world with all of the skills and knowledge that are cutting edge at our time. And so we have this need, I think, not just for Sangha that is dedicated to liberation or to spiritual awakening.
Jamie: We need professional groups, professional networks that aren't just about tools for convening or knowledge about what's going on in the world or whatever. But really deeply marry these two, and to find kinship in that. And in an exploration over 2 or 3 years, me and a group of other people who have been working in this area, many of whom, like me, have been working in mainstream settings, putting their armour on, putting their suit on, turning up and going to the boardroom or to Parliament or to whatever it is. But living this kind of double life of like showing up in a way that is acceptable enough and can be heard, saying what can be heard, and then going home and actually having to recover a little bit from that work and going on deep retreat. And getting the right balance between those things. And you don't have to be showing up in mainstream settings, there's lots of deep work needed on healing or creating the system that's going to make the old system obsolete, you know, third Horizon stuff.
Jamie: But what are the professional and spiritual forms? And we spent 2 or 3 years developing this container that we really wanted, that we longed for and started developing language around it, to try and communicate it. And put our finger on what was organically happening around the world. People were saying, we need some kind of meta sangha was a word used by somebody. Or spiritual warriors or we need a kinship community or whatever it was. And looking at this pattern and seeing the particular things that we found most beautiful and helpful and seeing them arise in a few different places. We wanted to give it a name and put some language around it and go public, the fact that this is what we're creating for ourselves. And here is a blueprint for how you might want to to to follow this or create something similar. And if, if what we create is similar enough, then in the future we might be able to come together and collaborate on a much bigger scale.
Manda: Than you have a meta sangha.
Jamie: But rather than having one big order, we felt it was more skilful to publish it as shareware, you know, open source. So we gave it the name Life Guild. So a guild being most associated with maybe 17th century trades and crafts. And life because it's in service of life, but also the craft of one's own life. I mean, there are many reasons; I don't want to say it's just these things. But what we're crafting, what we're being more and more skilful at and what we want to share, good practice and best around is the crafting of ourselves, of life. And it being that sort of total war thing, you know, about being the whole of one's life and bringing all parts of life to bear. So we say a Life Guild walks together on a path that mobilises rigorous inner work and next paradigm thought towards radical political and social transformation in the service of life. Against the stream of prevailing culture a life guild aspires to cultivate the kinship of a family or tribe. The courage and determination of warriors. The determination and spiritual practice of a monastic order. The imagination and the emotional attunement of artists. The skill and discernment of artisans. The compassion and sensitivity of healers. And a deep sense of interconnection with and responsibility for our living world. So we are trying to live this, and have published a living document on lifeguild.earth, and it's had really strong resonance very quickly, it's only been out publicly for a few months and shared in a number of newsletters and things. So if anyone is sort of already doing this and finds it helpful to give it that name and see what we think the important characteristics are, and wants to get in touch, then please, there's a way of doing that on that site.
Manda: Yeah. It's the single most exciting thing I've seen in a long time. And it reminded me a lot of Daniel Thorson and his sense of the erotic excitement of really connecting with the mystical world. And you quoted the Teilhard de Chardin at the top. 'There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfilment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe'. And and even just that kind of sent all my senses sparkling. That there's something about this being the time where we say the quiet part out loud. And we're watching the people who want control and everything arises out of fear. It's impossible to watch what's happening in the US and not have huge compassion for the depth of terror that requires that level of apparent control, which they'll never achieve. You can't do it. I did a whole feeding my demons practice for a while, and I ended up feeding something that needed safety and control. And I was in a universe where everything, the entirety of forever was a sheet of flat, totally glistening white, and this demon was still trying to control everything. And in the end, I just had to feed it compassion and a sense of safety. Because there is no controlling, there is no level of total control that doesn't still leave the parts of you inside that are broken, still broken. However, we can speak the quiet part out loud of the spiritual warrior is a thing. This idea of total spiritual war, of where the outcome is compassion and connection and coherence and courage and all of the things that you've spoken of. And I think that will be heard as loudly as the 'if we could only control everything, we'll all be safe'. Which is so self-evidently not true.
Jamie: Absolutely. And yeah, thank you for mentioning Daniel Thorson. And that's given me inspiration and courage to go to my biggest single influence, because he's a big influence on Daniel as well. Daniel and I are friends; it's Rob Burbea. And his jnana teaching, his emptiness teaching, his deep insight work is a given. But particularly here the soulmaking dharma approach, which uses the language of eros and the imaginal, to really access a level of energetic resonance of life force, of power that I have intuition is strong enough, to meet the demons that we're now seeing, and perhaps only that. And I've spent the last year with a fellowship grant looking at societal resilience. So I've been researching the psychosocial dimensions of societal resilience. And really going there, I read like eight books on collapse in a row and I really went to lots of different possible futures and how community and societal resilience is predicated on emotions and relationships and how we can cultivate those things. And in many ways, a lot of peace comes with really going there, and there's a lot of darkness, too. And what came out of that, particularly in the context of now practising with Rob's approaches for ten years. So I was a student of Rob's from about 2011, 2012.
Manda: Take us to the end of what came out of it. But then can you unpick Rob a bit because most of our listeners probably don't know.
Jamie: Absolutely. I'd be delighted to. A lot of the work that I now do with the inner development goals and things that are framed in terms of the current rhetoric around sustainable development goals; it feels like I was a visitor from the future when I was doing this deep dive into what possibly might be coming for us in five, ten, 20 years. And then I'm back talking about the SDGs. And, you know, it feels really sort of jarring. But out of that future that I inhabited, I kept this deep sense that only perhaps love is a powerful enough negentropic force, and that we need a politics of love; one that talks unsqueamishly and unapologetically about what we most want. About our conceptions of ourselves, using the imaginal, but particularly talking explicitly about love. And there are politicians who have done this and successfully; the mayor of Istanbul managed to buck the trend against authoritarianism by having this platform of radical love. And he's won a second term now as mayor of Istanbul. And the first term was all about 'I'm not going to talk about Erdogan and all of this far right authoritarian rhetoric, I'm just going to talk about love and take a different path'. And I think Marianne Williamson, who ran against Biden, I think, for the nomination, also had a book out called Radical Love or Politics of Love. And I'm doing some work with a professor at Harvard, and I'm thinking about maybe doing a podcast around this stuff. But this for me is deeply grounded, this insight, in my own spiritual work. And also, I want to give a nod to Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was instrumental in bringing mindfulness into the West and often is talked about as being the godfather of mindfulness, and a colleague and dear friend. And he used to, well before I'd seen anyone else do this, he used to sign off emails 'love, Jon'.
Manda: Right.
Jamie: In Sheffield where I live, men call each other love, but it's an anomaly.
Manda: And it's a word that has been neutered of meaning, actually and therefore it's safe to do.
Jamie: Well, yes and no. The particular culture in Sheffield I'd love to come back to at some point, but anyway, so men in general didn't say love, Jamie. And outside of the family on the whole, in my culture anyway, and you certainly didn't say it to colleagues. But Jon was Jon and towards the end of his career had this kind of exalted eldership role and started just writing love, Jon. And it took me a year or two to write back to him and say, like, I've started doing the same thing, Jon, and I want to bow to your leadership, your emotional leadership, and your bravery. And I'm sure you didn't need to be brave or it wasn't like an act of courage to do it, it was just totally spontaneous. But love also can be a little bit anaemic as Martin Luther King said, in some ways in which it's rendered. And so I tend to sign off my emails Love and strength, which isn't like love and power, but speaks to that dichotomy. That you kind of need both of those things and actually that kind of warriorship and that grit and determination and it's a form of power. And also that sense of love and receptivity and care. Anyway, I digress a little.
Manda: But no, I think where we're going is the politics of love. I think this is so important. Please speak more to what that is and what it feels like. Because I think the word love has so many meanings in English. Even Latin had, I think, five different kinds of love, from eros to agape to, to all the others. And we just used the same word from...
Jamie: Oh, it's such an impoverished language. Absolutely.
Manda: Yeah. I love my ponies, which is a huge thing. I love my partner. But also I love nettle tea, and it's the same word. And so compassion has a bit of a bigger word. I tend to call it wild compassion because for me, an adjective in front of compassion gives it more warrior ness.
Jamie: Totally.
Manda: Yeah. Raw. Wild. Fierce. Yes.
Jamie: Fierce compassion, exactly. So we have such an impoverished vocabulary and in the Buddhist tradition they have this word 'metta' which means some people say loving kindness, but it can be like boundless friendliness. Or rather, you are accepting and receptive to the people and the world as they are and offer them care. And that's very different to the kind of love where you have a kind of like predilection towards something. And it's very different from Eros as well. And there are different forms of desire: there's a grasping, grabbing on desire which leads to suffering for yourself, and actually, I find an unskilful action on the whole. It can mean that you're blinkered because you just want this thing at this particular time. Rather than desire, and there are very many wholesome desires which aren't fixated on a particular time scale or on a particular object. Like the desire for peace, as on the whole, rather than I want this house because then it'll make me feel safe. And then I'll feel peaceful because I'll be free from feeling unsafe or something, and then it kind of becomes fixated on one particular thing.
Jamie: And Eros can be like that form of desire. Where it's safe, even within a Buddhist frame that tends to problematise grasping or wanting things. And Eros we tend to equate with romantic love and sexual energy. And you can really feel into it in a way that is neither of those things, really. I mean, Eros can be wholesomely healthily sexual, but it shows up more often not. Eros is all around us, it's what motivates so much of what we do. And it is often very difficult to see, to label, to understand it's work. But wherever there is revolutionary intent, for instance, there are feelings of deep love. Che Guevara, actually is famous for having talked about actually the revolutionary is motivated by feelings of deep love. As did Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Manda: I was thinking MLK. Yeah. Okay.
Jamie: It's love and care, but it's also this force. I think they're also talking about Eros, this sense of having an image, an idea, a kind of mythos around something that you want to move towards and your soul is deeply called to be in service to. That you have a sense of duty to it. And these are all things that soul making, in Rob Burbeo's terminology, which is really taking the work of James Hillman and depth psychologists, combining it with some philosophers like Nicolai Hartmann, who did experiential value ethics. And marrying this into a rigorous discipline that we can actually practice and both become more discerning about the role of image and Eros in our lives. Interrogate some of some of those images that are there or assumptions that are there, as you start to see the role of these things, and intentionally cultivate an alive, soulful being. And that, when when tethered to a life serving project, is I think, enormously powerful. And just going back to the politics of love; most people I don't think will have the time or inclination to go into soul making and explore the work of Robert Burbeo or James Hillman or whoever.
Manda: Rob is dead now. Is it still possible to learn soul making? Are there other people teaching it?
Jamie: Oh for sure. Yes. And Rob, when he did his recordings and wrote his book, he used to talk about Nietzsche's love of the far and love of the near. And he said that he was motivated by those he would never meet as much as those who he worked with. So when he was giving retreats, there were 80 people in the room, but he was also recording for posterity. And he had in mind generations, potentially, of people after.
Manda: I'll find a link and put it in the show notes.
Jamie: So he's laid down a body of work for those who want to come and find it. But we can talk, I think, about these things in much more down to earth ways, or rather ways which resonate more with sort of mainstream sensibilities. And inspired by my own spiritual work and the work of Rob, I was writing a paper for the Club of Rome, that ended up being called The System Within; Addressing the Inner Dimensions of Sustainability and Systems Transformation. I wrote that with some other wonderful folk: Otto sharmer, Phoebe Tickle, Christine Wamsler, who are deep experts in this kind of area as well as Rob, in terms of looking at image and deep will. And I was writing that and one morning just had out of nowhere, it was like 5.30, 6am in the morning; often I have a writing stint then; and I had already fleshed out what we wanted to together write in this piece. And I was like, something's missing. And I just smashed out this piece about love, and it was one of the least evidence based. And this paper is a landscape review. So it's in a way codifying, putting in one place, because it didn't really exist. Inner/outer transformation approaches in terms of sustainability and systems transformation in evidence based ways were not summarised anywhere in any kind of report, really, that did this sort of sector spanning way to sector spanning approach. But although actually love is much less evidence based than compassion, or empathy or any of these other great heart qualities, which has thousands of papers on.
Jamie: Anyway, so I wrote this little section on Love. We mentioned the radical love platform of the Istanbul mayor and it's a section that's had probably the most comment out of the whole piece. And that was the roots really of maybe this is a rich seam. And that's led further to this conversation that we're now having. But isn't it interesting that it was not there in that landscape, even though it is the most powerful intrapsychic force, probably, and contains multitudes, all these different shades that you pointed to.
Manda: Yes. And I'd really like to unpick how it feels for you. So we have a practice within what I teach. I am endeavouring to help my students get to a point where they are radically and wholly in love with the process of being alive; just in love with life. Because it seems to me that that in itself brings a different energy to the world. And that once you have that, you can be more aware of where your energetic space is at. You're either really feeling in love or you're slightly feeling a bit crushed, but you can feel the edges of it. And first of all, I want to know how does that land? And then, for me, at the moment, with my current understanding, that is the spiritual warrior practice: whatever else is happening, I am in love with the process of being alive. I can be grieving and still be in love with living, because grief is an experience of living. And I don't fall out of love with life because I'm feeling completely shattered by what's happening. The shatterment is a part of being alive and therefore I am in love with that. First of all, does that Land? And second, I'm really excited and want to explore this sense of the Eros that Rob and you and Daniel talk about, because that feels like the keys to the kingdom. That's the key. If we were able to have a felt sense of that, or a spiritual sense of that, or an energetic sense of that, the energy that comes out of that is so different to anything else and has that epistemic humility built in. Because all I have to do is be in love with the moment of being alive, and I stop worrying about having to map out landscapes and maps and where we're going. How does any of that Land?
Jamie: Oh that's it. Yeah. I think you really put your finger on it there. Empathy will burn you out if you just have empathy because you're really feeling the pain of others. Compassion is a renewable resource because you're in touch, you're resonating with the pain of others but actually it's a really positive feeling. And as your practice deepens, open to more and more the pain of the world and not be in pain yourself. Be deeply moved and feel tragic around it. And it's not glib, but it feels divine at the same time and heartbreaking. All those things. So it's possible for the heart to contain both of these things, you know, hope and heartbreak, compassion and tragedy. And that is totally, I think, necessary for an enduring spiritual warriorship practice. And you put your finger on it there, I think, with maintaining Eros and meaning, no matter what. And Rob Burbea uses the phrase from Latin 'amor fati', which is another form of love. It's the love of one's fate, and that includes all of the pains and the tragedies and the scars and woundings.
Jamie: And even when Rob got cancer, my dad had cancer, my wife had cancer all at the same time. I was going through, you know, a lot of stuff. I also had a very uncertain financial situation, you know, trying to do the work, etc. And holding all of that pain, there is still this sense of a love for one's fate. It's not to say I love it because it makes me stronger, because it makes me whatever; that can be there, but it can also be uncertain whether this has silver linings or has positive things to do with it. But there's some way that your soul can be capacious enough to hold all of that and have a kind of care and meaning around it. You love it because it's yours. Because this is what was given to you, and this is your fate. I've just finished the third series of silo, this Apple TV series, which is darkly dystopian. It involves this kind of future scenario where there are maybe 50,000 humans and they have survived in some silos and they're struggling to get by.
Manda: Great.
Jamie: And I'm with you on the whole needing thrutopians thing. And also there's something in it that I found nourishing and very interesting. Like my mind wants to imagine future scenarios, or rather ways in which consciousness can exist even in darker times. I'm more robustly oriented to thrutopian things as a position, believe you me, but this I enjoyed. But even then, people had meaning; of course they did, within the frame of what they currently had. And how quickly would it take me to adapt if I were suddenly plonked in that silo? From all of this great richness that I have here, and all the species and all of the people and all the culture and all of the love that I have for all of these things. How long would my grief be? And would I get to a point where there was still meaning, and it was worth getting up and making the world a better place, even for the 10,000 people in my silo. And of course, I think, absolutely. And I think I'm digressing, but for some reason I had a feeling when I got up this morning that I'd mentioned this program. And so this love of fate is part of one's soul making practice. So it's like, this is my soul and there's a world soul that's going on right now, at the moment. And is it possible to have Amor Fati for both what's going on for me and also what's going on for us? And having enough humility, epistemic humility to not know what comes next. That might all sound far fetched.
Manda: Not at all.
Jamie: Right, good. That's certainly where I am operating at the moment and it feels sustainable, you know. And yes, there's grief. And that's all part of this deepening of my relationship to the unfolding tragedy. But it's also deepening my relationship to care, compassion and Eros. It's like the politics of love idea. My desire for that came out of my work, really going there and in the darker work, like the two are interwoven in some way.
Manda: Yeah. And just listening to you, I'm thinking that the kind of weird blindness that our business as usual has created, of we can continue with this predatory capital death cult and everything will be fine, when it doesn't take much to think that this is not the case. But people get so locked, as you said, politicians don't have the bandwidth to bring everything in. They've got what's in front of them, they have to do it. And maybe, I would like to think, the obvious collapse of the old system gives space, then, I imagine. When we are faced, in wartime, in any time of total crisis, we have to come to more baseline meanings. That winning the next election when there are never going to be elections that are winnable, or, I don't know, getting the next contract for your business stops being where all of your bandwidth goes, and you come back to what do I really care about? And most people really care about what makes their heart sing. And that's connection to self, other and the more than human world. And the balance between self, other and more than human is not always a third each, but there will be a balance. And that's what really matters to people.
Manda: And I am hoping, thinking, listening to you, that if we can start speaking the quiet part out loud about the politics of love being an essential component of humanity, AND there is a politics of love; there is a way of making human connections that are predicated on that value set, then everything shifts. And I would like to have epistemic humility and not be putting where it goes, but it seems to me that the value set from which we work is what matters. And our value set in our trauma culture, our framing of the trauma culture has been basically see, want, take. Whoever dies with the most toys wins, it doesn't matter how you get to the top of the tree, all that matters is that you do. And that's not what humanity has ever been about. Humanity has been about connection. But we just needed to take the old model of the predatory death cult and show it clearly to be utterly broken before people could actively put it aside, and that we may be at that moment. How does that land and how would we, you and I, the people listening, build with this? Everyone go to the Life Guild and join up and create life guilds in your own area? How do we build a politics of love, jamie?
Jamie: Mhm mhm mhm. Listening to you speak I have one initial reflection. The phrase 'don't comply in advance' has been increasing in popularity in the last few months...
Manda: Certainly the last couple of weeks.
Jamie: My colleagues in American agencies, you know, Noah and the EPA etc. have used that phrase complying in advance, that's been very much at the top of their mind. And because we really don't know how this is going to unfold, there are many things we shouldn't do in advance, including go underground and assume that we can't win the next election. I think it's possible.
Manda: Okay. You think there's going to going to be another election? Well I mean, there might be in this country.
Jamie: Yeah, I know, exactly. But I really don't know.
Manda: No. Okay.
Jamie: I share perhaps your fears and might even call it likely that we won't have another at least fair and free. You know, it might be managed democracy in a Putin way. However, yes, we need to plan and be strategic. And we also need to balance that with acting in the world that we do know exists right now. And it reminds me of the phrase from, again it's a zen teaching story, but a Zen master was asked: 'Master, what is the fruit of a lifetime of practice?' And the master said 'an appropriate response'. And that's, I think, what we can try to offer. The response right now, with all our sort of sensitivity and sense making coming to bear, will suggest a certain path or activity, and that may well be abandoned in a few years time.
Manda: Yes, it's got to be fluid. I mean, it might be abandoned by next week at the rate things are changing. So. Yes. Okay.
Jamie: Yes, exactly. And I guess I'm suggesting that the more you let emergence work through you I think the more fluid it becomes. And in my experience of just trying this, like I say, having more faith over time, letting go more, letting something move through me and emerge, the more flexible and changeable it is in a helpful way. And so, although I do have a tendency towards thinking what might be and strategizing, etc. I also at the same time have a higher frequency of, of adjustment. Of adjusting what's appropriate right now and having many possible futures influencing what I think is appropriate right now, but not constraining and locking down. So let's not go underground in advance.
Manda: No. And I'm not suggesting we go underground. I'm suggesting that we speak the quiet part out loud, that the politics of love becomes what we talk about and becomes a hegemonic concept; that this is the politics of the moment, it's a politics of love. I was talking to a distant relative who, I really like him and he's on the absolute opposite end of the political spectrum. And we were either going to have a very clashing conversation or, I've been studying street epistemology recently, and so I said what really matters to you? And he said, I think we just all need to be kinder to each other. And this is someone who absolutely, wholeheartedly believes that everything that's happening in the US just now is absolutely what needs to happen. And okay, so let's work with that. And I think that's what is there. So the politics of love is something that would resonate right across. And if it's genuinely love and it's not I would love you to think like I think which is not love, that's control. If it's a genuine politics of love, it seems to me that's one of the most exciting concepts we could possibly have. And yes, if we're going to do this, it has to be an emergent process. But I think we could offer people some kind of structure within which to bring that into being.
Jamie: Thank you so much for saying that, because so much of the time we say we should all be more compassionate; politicians should be more compassionate, we should have more care. We just need to be more clear minded. We just need to be more wise or whatever. And then there's a kind of, like in people's theory of change, there's a step where the magic happens, and suddenly we all just become this thing.
Manda: We all think like I think, whoever 'I' am.
Jamie: Yes, exactly, exactly. Not just think how I think, but feel how I feel, you know, the world would be different and enough admonitions to that end will suddenly get people caring more, you know. And there's a split in the compassion world between those who talk about it, in terms of just a 'good' that is difficult to argue with, and we should all be it. And those who talk about compassion training and compassion practice and study the ways in which we can actually do it, not just will it into being. And the willing it and the talking about it does something, but not in my experience compared to actually doing the time.
Manda: Its head mind versus heart mind.
Jamie: And I'm dedicated to compassion. I'm a member of the Global Compassion Coalition. I work with their Climate change panel et cetera et cetera, it's a big part of my dharma practice, and I know that sometimes I'm less compassionate than others. And I need to remember to do my compassion practice, because it actually takes the legwork or some kind of work to keep that intention deep. And over time, your baseline shifts, so you're just on the whole more compassionate no matter what you do. But also there's huge variance depending on how recently you did the work, Right. And we have very little sense for this being the case. There's a very popular book by Rutger Bregman called Humankind, and it was a very popular airport newsagents type level of bestseller about how important compassion is, how actually we were so much more pro-social and caring, compassionate as a species then we thought we were. We had this unbalanced view of ourselves. He gives one single sentence to the fact that you can, in evidence based ways and in ways that have been done for 3000 years, of actually training it, actually do something in it.
Manda: Grow your compassion.
Jamie: And this is what we're missing is a programmatic view, in terms of inner development. If you want to sum up my work over the last ten plus years, it's like telling policymakers and people in power that we actually have some evidence based methods to bring about some of these changes that we talk about as being a natural good. Wouldn't it be good if... Well, I'll tell you what, we now know that there are some ways that...
Manda: We can make this happen.
Jamie: They're not as good as they can be. And we can develop them over time. And the evidence base needs to be stronger. Et cetera. Et cetera. But it's enough to get going, folks. And there's a whole missing domain of how we understand the success of our species and its potential future survival. Anyway, the way Roberto Unger, the political theorist and philosopher, talks about this is, is in terms of needing a programmatic view to bridge the gap where the miracle happens. He says that when he proposes something that is sort of achievable and can be done and could be helpful, it's dismissed as sort of trivial. It's like, well, what's that going to do, in the scale of all of our problems? If he suggests something that he thinks is possible but is long term and visionary, he's like, well, that's just utopian thinking. That's just pointless, to be spending our time up there in the clouds. And the thing that could unite people in terms of it being powerful and possible is a razor thin thing in the middle of those two; it basically doesn't exist. Because people are missing the programmatic view as he talks about it.
Jamie: The way in which we live, in some ways a relative utopia in terms of healthcare. Obviously it comes with costs and we have a narrow view of progress et cetera et cetera. But we miss the sense that you have sort of compound winds, that things get threaded together over time. That you put in generator functions, in a programmatic lens, that get you from your incremental wins to your utopia. But people struggle to think like that. And it's the same thing with inner change. Cultural changes that are integrating inner and outer heart-mind and systems, that we tend to think of this future where we all feel differently or identify differently. We have a sense of interdependence with the world. We have overflowing compassion because that's the way in which we've been inculturated and given the skills, etc. It feels like utopia, but yet teaching a little bit of mindfulness in schools is definitely dismissed as frivolous and not going to amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Because we're missing that programmatic lens.
Manda: A Thrutopic pathway, in fact.
Jamie: Right, a thrutopian pathway. Totally. But we're missing this whole domain. And I'd say, certainly a primary if not the primary domain of change, that we need generator functions that develop our methods, that develop our evidence, that can be applied across the life course in different ways. And the rate of change. If you look back over the last ten years that I've been working in this space, it's a lightning rate of change in terms of acceptability, legitimacy, evidence base for mindfulness alone.
Manda: And willingness to try it, I'm thinking. Because what strikes me is when people start doing the work, it becomes addictive because you see and feel and experience the change. But you've got to get over that little hump of all the bits of you going no, I just want to spend time on Facebook or Netflix or whatever. You've got to get past that to actually doing it. And then you can't get enough. But that hump is significant, and it's a rhetorical, conceptual hump of exactly what you said. You can't see the programmatic change. Are you seeing within the spaces that you work more people willing to take the first step?
Jamie: Depends what you mean by the first step. I mean, I started my journeys into the inner dimension of societal change, initially at Headspace, the meditation app. And their theory of change was like rebrand meditation, it'll be good for health and happiness. And for me, health, happiness and the world. And take meditation to the Midwest, not just San Francisco. But they've done it, and the other couple of main mainstream apps are part of the picture. And there are people coming on to deep meditation retreats, turning up for a week with some high quality teachers, who have never meditated in person with anybody because they've just been doing Headspace, you know. And that's right for some people. And for others, it helps them to maintain the habit and the gamified elements or the meditating with others. Insight Timer has this kind of Amazon Marketplace of meditation teachers, and there's lots of deep wisdom available to anyone in the world on there.
Manda: Yeah. And Mindvalley and Heartmath.
Jamie: Exactly. Totally. And so I started my career in marketing and advertising, and there are some ways of looking like a marketer or marketing models that I still find useful. And one of them is the marketing funnel, where basically you have everybody in the top of the funnel. At some point they'll fall out of your funnel because they don't know about your product, or they don't care about your product, or they don't like your product. And you've got to work out what step most people are falling out, because that's where your marketing dollars might be most valuable. So say that there's a particular step where everyone kind of knows about my product and kind of likes it, like 80% of people would consider it. But then I lose almost everybody and only 5% go and buy it. So that's what the marketing funnel shows people selling products. But if we're selling enlightenment or spiritual warriorship, then where are people falling out of the funnel? And initially it was at the top. 99% of people
Manda: Didn't even want to go there.
Jamie: Yeah, never had any access to meditation practice. It's only if your city happened to have a centre and you happened to walk past it, or whatever it is, you know. And so it was very skilful and remains to be skilful, to have ways to meet people where they are and get them in the top. As long as you also do service to the fact that that's the thin end of the wedge. And there are depth practices and that people aren't being given a disservice by being kept within a lacuna for profit. And that's where there's a real tension.
Manda: Okay.
Jamie: But the reason I work in the white House is because there was someone in the sustainability team who has a meditation practice. And it takes these intrapreneurs to do things in amazing places, unusual places, like the UN. And all these places tend to be because somebody, somewhere came across headspace or are lucky enough to come across something, then practised themselves for five years or whatever, and then were like, right, I need to find a way of bringing this in. That's how it got into the British Parliament in the first place. The MP, Chris Ruane, was listening to Dharma Seed, this repository of Dharma talks online, having come across mindfulness when he was a secondary school head teacher. And then fast forward ten years and he's introducing it to 400 politician MPs, members of the House of Lords. And so we're starting to bear the fruits in unlikely places because of happenstance encounters with either secular mindfulness or compassion training or the dharma or feminism or any of these.
Manda: Or just the whole John Vervaeke meaning crisis. There seems to me, certainly in my part of the spiritual world, people are coming because they're realising that they are lacking meaning that feels real to them. And they're desperately searching for something that will give them a sense of meaning. And I think that's a slightly other way in than if I walked past the Buddhist centre or I downloaded an app and I finally got round to actually using it. There seems to be quite a trap of 'I have now downloaded six apps and bought half a dozen courses and not actually done any of them, but the downloading of the app and the buying of the course makes me feel that I'm doing something spiritual'. And part of that whole funnel is yes, you get people to download the app, but how you get them to actually use it is quite a jump in itself.
Jamie: Yeah, necessary but not sufficient.
Manda: Yeah yeah yeah. We're so far over time. But this, actually we could do dozens of podcasts just on this. It feels to me the time is now. Speaking the quiet part out loud of guys, our world was not giving you meaning and yet there is meaning to be found in the wonder of being alive. And in this moment of no other generation in the whole of human history, 64 million years since the last mass extinction of evolution. And we are at the moment where genuinely what every single one of us does makes a difference to the trajectory of humanity; what is it that you choose to do? And if what you choose is to become a spiritual warrior, here are the various ways that you can connect with other people. And that's what your guild is for, really, is to help people find other people who are on that wavelength. And it seems an increasing number of people are on that wavelength. If we are going to create a politics of love, is there a crisp way, towards the end as we're closing, of the steps that people could take if they feel that this is something that they want to engage with. Because it seems that this goes across all aspects of life, that personal is political and now the political is spiritual. What are the steps people could take that you would encourage.
Jamie: I would ask what are you practising to be more equal to these times? And how are you finding better practices or deepening those practices? That's a kind of meta point. What is a politics of love? I mean, we don't know what this could be. So join the inquiry, ask your loved ones, ask people you met on the bus. What do you love? What's worth saving? I think we've got to ask some deep questions here. I haven't got a party for you to sign up to, yet. But let's orientate towards this together, by trying to bring it into your email sign offs maybe. But into your conversations. Use the word. Go, like, what are we really talking about here? And let's be courageous in that regard.
Manda: Brilliant, right. I think that's a very good place to end. I would love to speak to you again in about six months and see where we got to. Because this feels an emergent edge of something that could potentially be huge. So let's think about that. But in the meantime.
Jamie: I'm starting a position in September that may well have this as part of the the scope.
Manda: That's very cool. Right. Well whenever you have time. But in the meantime, thank you so much for the depth and the clarity of your thinking and the connectedness and your capacity for compassion for for everything that is. Thank you.
Jamie: Well, thank you for you and all of your work.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jamie for everything that he is and does, and particularly for having the courage to go there to speak the quiet part out loud. It feels to me that this is the time of our world, where speaking the quiet part out loud is absolutely essential. And this is the quiet part; we yearn to connect, all of us. To connect the inner parts of ourselves, to connect ourselves with other human beings, and to connect all of us to the myriad parts of the web of life. And the connecting matrix is love. And if you want to call that compassion; raw, wild, wonderful, magical compassion, then do that. Do whatever language works for you and however you can do it. Fall in love with the wonder of being alive. I really believe that's what this time is for now. We can and will hold podcasts and all kinds of other things that we can be doing in the world, but how we are in the world, our beingness in the world, is what we bring in every moment of every day. And it probably doesn't matter what we do if our beingness is not absolutely surging with raw compassion. So I have put links in the show notes to everything that we spoke about, I think and hope, and particularly as we talked after we stopped recording, Jamie really wanted to mention Catherine McGee, who helped to develop the soul making Dharma with Rob Burbea. He felt we hadn't mentioned her and given her enough honour, which was entirely down to me, not fully understanding the nature of the way things had happened.
Manda: But Catherine and Rob developed things together, and she is still teaching at Buddhist Inquiry. So I have put a link in there to everything that they're doing. Please do go and investigate. And please, if you have any kind of a sense of a sangha, whatever you call it, start a life guild. And if it happens to be the first seed of a politics of love in your area and in your communities of place, purpose and passion, then that would be pretty good too. So there we go: actions for this week.
Manda: We'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and Foot and for this week's production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and all of the conversations sitting in front of the fire in the evenings. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening, for being prepared to go to the places where we unearth what really matters. For engaging at the depths that you do. I don't always get a chance to reply to every message on LinkedIn or WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or email or all of the other ways of connecting, but I do read them all, and I am enormously grateful to every one of you for taking the time to write. Thank you. And as ever, if you know of anybody else who wants to know what it is that we can be at this time of total transformation, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.