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To respond to the challenging times we are living through, physician, humanitarian and social justice advocate Dr. Paul Zeitz has identified “Revolutionary Optimism” as a new cure for hopelessness, despair, and cynicism. Revolutionary Optimism is itself an infectious, contagious, self-created way of living and connecting with others on the path of love. Once you commit yourself as a Revolutionary Optimist, you can bravely unleash your personal power, #unify with others, and accelerate action for our collective repair, justice, and peace, always keeping love at the center.
Paul - 00:02:44:
Thank you so much for joining. I'm so excited. I'm like, my body is like, you know, jumping with enthusiasm here. So I wanted to start off and give each of you a chance to answer the first question around, can you share a personal story or lived experience that you've had that maybe you haven't shared before publicly, so I'm kind of stretching you a little bit, to share something that can give our listeners a deeper understanding of what inspired you personally to live and seek on the path of love, and also your quest and in your exploration of interspirituality. So Shefa, why don't we start with you?
Shefa - 00:03:25:
So the path of love for me is what's underneath or around all of religion. And as I explore what it means to be a spiritual leader, I'm always looking for what's the core of it, what's at the center of it, and what I've found is that love is at the center. And if it's not at the center, everything just goes wrong. And so I guess, you know, for me, it's finding a path. that then connects me to everyone. And my commitment is to live my life with an open heart. and to live by the faith that whatever I say and do ripples out into the universe and whatever I can bring through of what I feel like is a divine flow through me is going to make a difference. And that's a faith that I have. And what my work is is to become a clear channel for that flow.
Paul - 00:04:33:
What brought you to that path? How did you, like what happened to you? What made you be that kind of seeker?
Shefa - 00:04:40:
I think that it was just a sense of falling in love, falling in love with being itself, with life itself, and then feeling so charged up by that love that I needed to do something with it, which led me to my spiritual leadership.
Paul - 00:04:59:
Matthew, over to you. Any thoughts or any story you want to share about your life that brought you on the path of love? and your quest for on inter-spirituality.
Matthew - 00:05:10:
One thing that comes to mind is I grew up in a Christian tradition that was in its own ways beautiful, created a wonderful sense of community and support and a shared spiritual journey, but it tended to have a much smaller worldview and a much smaller sense of who was in the crowd when it came to God and that there were those who were in and those who were out. And realizing my own parents' love for me, and I had really wonderful loving parents. I realized their love seemed to be greater than the love of the God I was being taught existed. And I realized my heart seemed to be bigger than God's heart because there were people I wasn't going to throw outside of God's love, God's mercy. And so, little by little I came to see that the sort of limited God images I had received were really idols that needed to be smashed, you know, that those weren't the divine reality itself. And then as Shefa said, for me it was very much a process of just falling in love in all of these different ways. Meeting holy mystery while sitting in Zazen practice in the Chapel Hill Zen Center that I used to go to. and falling in love with God in Hindu Puja, or falling in love with God in Sufi Dhikr, and finding all of these beautiful ways into the mystery, and finding that there was always room in my heart for another expression of the mystery. And so that eventually set me on this path of love. and inter-spirituality.
Paul - 00:07:01:
Yeah, so both of you have been living your life deeply within your one tradition, either Judaism or Christianity, but both of you have explored many religions and actually have deep experience in other religions. So I wonder if you could share about that and also, you know, what do you see as the common stream or river that connects the religions that inspires you and lifts you? Shefa, you want to start?
Shefa - 00:07:33:
I consider myself an artist of the holy, which means that God is beyond any religion. And religions are all languages and forms and kind of attempts. to express the inexpressible. And so I find that the more different languages that I can speak or modalities that I can enter, the more that I do that, the sort of the wider I become in my sense. I'm still Jewish and I have a deep loyalty to my ancestors and to my incarnation when I came in to do. But I feel like underneath all of the forms, there is this essence of love. And I feel comfortable with mystics of all traditions. who then give me a different perspective on my own and enrich me in that way, you know.
Matthew - 00:08:38:
So for me, the relationship to the different religious traditions, I've reached a point in my journey where I suppose I would really think of myself or describe myself as a dual belonger or a multiple belonger. And I think there are different ways people can relate to different traditions. Some people might feel called to really stand in a single primary tradition and then really honor the beauty they find in other traditions. And some people might feel called to stand outside of the traditions altogether and create a path outside of traditional forms. And it seems to me that some souls stand in one tradition and then they find themselves called at the same time into another tradition and find that they also are called to be at home there. And so Lex Hickson, who some of you may remember, some of you listening or Paul, Shefa, you may remember, he talked about this concept of joint citizenship in parallel sacred worlds. And so I found that's largely been my own experiences as I explored different traditions and fell in love with God in different traditions. Little by little, I found that I was cultivating a home base in two of them, in Islamic Sufi tradition and in my Christian tradition and practice. And for a long time. It really felt like a conflict or a tension that I needed to resolve. Which am I? Which am I? And I would try to collapse it into one. I would think, okay, well, I need to let go of all this Islamic stuff and just be a Christian. And I would try that and then find my longing for those practices would reawaken. Well, then I need to let go of this Christian stuff and collapse everything into Islam. And eventually I learned to live in that creative tension. And to find the gift that was in that tension, the sort of creative gift in holding that tension. And a point of sort of reconciliation came for me when I was talking to a friend who was a monk in the Ramakrishna order. So he's a Hindu Swami. And some teachers will say, well, it's great to honor other traditions, but if you want to dig deep to holy water, you have to pick one path and that's it. Otherwise, it's just going to be shallow surface skimming. And what the Swami said to me was, ah, but there's a difference in using and digging 15 different wells, 15 different shallow wells. And using 15 tools to dig one well. And that sort of opened up for me the possibility that the creative tension between these two paths could all be in service of digging one deep well. And so little by little, the sort of conflicts between the traditions, theological, ritual, etc. They've kind of dissolved and I participate really gratefully in these two traditions while drawing on wisdom and insight from any tradition wherever it comes up.
Shefa - 00:11:57:
Because I wonder, Matthew, if that question of identity, does it come from the outside, or does it come from the inside? because my sense is like everybody wants to know what you are, but. The inner knowing of being a lover feels so true to me that there's another, you know, that other layer of identity is. It's just kind of not as important than the truest identity is being a lover. And then other people might look at me and say, well, are you a Jewish lover, are you a Christian lover, are you a Sufi lover? What I feel like when I look at you, Matthew, is I see the lover. And I would never want to put on you kind of the, you know, having to choose an identity beyond that.
Matthew - 00:12:54:
Yeah, thank you, Shefa. You know, I think at the end of the day, what we're talking about with inter-spirituality and with the wisdom of our great traditions, it's really about the cultivation of our humanness, these essentially human qualities, the cultivation of love, of humility, of gentleness, of patience, of kindness. And we have these different traditions that give us tools and resources for that cultivation. And at the end of the day, yes, I feel like I'm a human being, I'm a heart, I'm a soul, I'm a lover of the path of love. And I've found that the resources and language and practices in the traditions that have become primary for me They're my way of deepening and navigating that universal path of love. But I feel like the forms, in one sense, I do identify with them. I do identify with Islam and I do identify with Christianity. But it's just not the deepest layer of identity, you know. There's a layer of self that functions. in the finite, phenomenal world. And I moved through the world as a male-bodied person. I moved through the world as someone with lighter, complexed skin. There are these elements of our outer identity that are part of the world of form, and then there's the depths. And we learned to live in both of those dimensions at the same time. And so at one level, it's very important for me to claim my Christian identity or my Islamic and Sufi identity. And at another level, those things are the least important things we could possibly imagine because it's just the heart that matters. And so it feels like a dance between those two realities. And I imagine it's similar for you and Judaism.
Shefa - 00:15:05:
I feel like the yearning in me is to live from the depths. And that's the place where I want to come from. And that's what interspirituality is, is living from those depths, from the place where we're all connected, where we're all in oneness. And so the language that I use or the practices that I do really kind of need to always be connected up with those depths.
Paul - 00:15:37:
Yeah, so I've had the opportunity to be the student of both of you at inter-spiritual retreats. We did two of those last year, and it was a phenomenal experience for me to bring together Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and really experience the practices and the traditions from all of these religions. And I realized for myself, there was a lot of like, cultural and societal and familial and even religious, kind of preconceptions that kind of blocked me from being open. to that unity that you described, Shefa, and that you are both living. And I had to clean out the mess. I had to untangle those veils, if you will. that were blocking me from that. And I wanted to ask you, you know, you both are deeply immersed in religious communities. How has it gone for you to bring this path of love and your interest and your exploration of inter-spirituality, how has that worked within organized religion, in the Jewish tradition, in the Christian religion, in those institutions, if you will, in your congregations or in whatever way? you interact with the organized religion, for lack of a better way of saying it.
Matthew - 00:17:02:
You know, I think people are hungry for an inter-spiritual framework and understanding. I think there's a sense in which a lot of the boxes and boundaries we were born into, people are aware that they don't serve. And I think this is one of the reasons we see a decline in so many forms of institutional religion right now, is that especially the younger generations, they're being born into a globally interconnected world. And, you know, the lines and boundaries we've drawn on our maps and between our religions, they don't reflect the reality that people are emerging into today, which is really an unboundaried world. And at the same time, there's the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, that these traditions hold devotional focal points and contemplative practices and disciplines that can really help us do the work of human transformation? And is there a way we can lift up the wisdom and the spiritual resources of our traditions that isn't so tight or bounded, that isn't about so much taking on an identity or an identity boundary box or label, but stepping into a stream of a practice and community? And so for me, you know, when I think about Christianity, Jesus, Rabbi Jesus, who was a Jewish Mystic and, you know, a reform initiator within his own tradition. He never heard the word Christian in his human lifetime. You know, that wasn't, that's a label that emerged afterwards in the development of the Jesus Movement in the early first century. It was given this label, but I remind myself that Jesus, His goal wasn't to slap the identity marker or label Christian on as many people as possible, something that he couldn't even have conceived of. His work was the awakening of human hearts. He was about setting people on the path of love. And so, he wasn't about identity labels. That wasn't what it was about. And the identity label question or issue arises as a secondary issue after the fact. And I think similarly within Islam. The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. He was interested in Islam with a lowercase i, which means surrender to that one divine reality. And the word Muslim in the Qur'an with a lowercase an, it just means a person in that state of surrender to that one divine reality. And so the Qur'an even refers to the prophets and followers of other traditions, Jews, Christians, etc., as Muslim, because it wasn't a sociological, religious identity marker or label at this point. And I think if we go back to the headwaters of our traditions, we can find that they essentially began as paths of practice, community, and transformation. And then they kind of, you know, get reified into identity markers, boundaries, boxes, and labels. And if we can shake some of that stuff off and go back to the transformative fire of the heart, then these traditions are. Maybe they're salvageable, you know, maybe they have something essential to contribute to the future. So that's part of my work and my hope. And when I do service within a Christian context, well, I'm serving within a Christian context. And so I center myself in that tradition and that language. And so my work at St. Gregory's, you know, I wouldn't be centering another tradition in that context, but we could be dialoguing with another tradition in that context. And similarly, if I'm working and moving in the Sufi world, well, I want to stand in that center. Yeah, so that's just a little very my thinking.
Paul - 00:21:11:
Very helpful, thank you. Rabbi Shefa, I wanted to ask you, we've been hearing a lot about contemplation and contemplative practices. Could you offer a contemplative practice for us? as a way of giving us an experience?
Shefa - 00:21:25:
Well, before I do that Paul, can I just answer that other question about what I'm doing in my Jewish tradition?
Paul - 00:21:37:
Yeah, please do. Go ahead.
Shefa - 00:21:38:
That's important. Because what I want to do is bring a Judaism that is fully alive and functional in a way that is meant to awaken us, to open our hearts, to empower us as humans, to bring us more love and compassion, to clear away the blockages of judgment and hatred. So my Judaism, which I want to bring as this living, evolving tradition, is informed by every other tradition that I encounter. When I have that encounter or experience in another tradition, it just shines a light on my Judaism and awakens something in that that might have gotten stale. So in that awakening of what's sort of buried in the thousands of years of tradition, that awakening allows me to bring forth something that is essential in Judaism, but just got buried.
Matthew - 00:22:48:
You know, I would just echo that and say that I think often the interspiritual task, and maybe it's helpful to say, to define interspirituality. We're sort of talking around this, but it might be helpful to just let listeners know that this is a new word. Interspirituality wasn't a word in the English language until the late 90's. It was 1999. Brother Wayne Teasdale coined this term, interspirituality. And the word intermisticism, maybe his book, The Mystic Heart, or his book, A Monk in the World, one of those books he coined this term. And he spoke about interspirituality as a different dimension of the dialogue between religious traditions. And he said that most of our dialogue had happened at the intellectual levels. It was either clergy or academics getting together and talking about differences across our traditions, or the social level. Maybe we got together and we built a habitat for humanity house, the synagogue in the local church. And he said, all that's great and crucial, but he said that interspirituality was the dialogue between our traditions and our wisdoms that happened at the contemplative level. And he said it was really shifting the question from, what do you believe? I'm a Christian, you're a Jew. What do you believe? I'll tell you what I believe. He said shifting that from. What do you believe to how do you pray? How do you practice? How do you experience the holy in your tradition? And then it was a willingness to actually experience the holy in a tradition other than yours. So let me share my practice with you and now you share your practice with me. So we're dialoguing at the level of experience rather than intellectual formulations. And so he said inter-spirituality wasn't a new religion. It wasn't melting down of all the religions into one mush, but it was a willingness to taste and touch the mystical depth of another tradition and to be transformed by it. And I think what Shefa was saying, this is so true in my experience, I go and I encounter something in another tradition, and then it shines light on my Christian tradition. You know, this encounter with some aspect of Hinduism awakens something that was always present or latent in my tradition of origin, and now I can sort of awaken that. And so I think there's a real gifting back and forth across traditions that happens, where they support and deepen and enrich each other in the process.
Paul - 00:25:27:
So is it time for a practice?
Shefa - 00:25:30:
Well, I want to offer a practice of praise, which is praise is such a mystery to me. It is like opening up to a flow of the divine through me. And it doesn't have a lot of content to it, but the practice itself is transformative. And in studying a little bit about brain science, I think what I'm doing is I'm rewiring. The brain. I'm creating new neural pathways through my practice. And those new neural pathways then opened me to an experience of radical revolutionary optimism. So I want to just sing this Hallelujah, and as a practice of getting my small self out of the way and allowing something through that is revolutionary, optimistic, that opens me to ideas, to feelings that I might not have access to otherwise.
Shefa - 00:26:44:
Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah! Ooh, yeah ah Hallelujah Oh Hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah, hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Once more. Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah. Hallelujah Halleloo Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah. In the practice, we enter into the silence afterwards and notice, where did that take me? Where am I now? What has been opened in me that wasn't there before? Can I find really those depths inside me? Can I feel myself as a channel for the mystery to come through me? So a practice is meant to be transformative so that at the end of the practice, I have connected to capacities that I didn't have access to before. So to feel more connected, to find my compassion, to release my judgment, and to feel empowered. that I'm being sent into this world as a messenger.
Paul - 00:29:56:
Reverend Matthew, this is a time for if you are interested in sharing your practice from your traditions.
Matthew - 00:30:04:
Sure. You know, I think, if I could give one practice from both my Christian and my Sufi traditions, it would be a practice of centering awareness in the heart center. My Sheikh sometimes jokingly calls this an eye relocation project. Where do we stake our eye, our seat and center and sense of selfhood? And for most of us, we've learned to stake our eye-ness in our heads. And we are this monologue running in our heads where our thoughts, or maybe we stake it in our emotions and we are, you know, this flux of feelings and-But in the contemplative traditions, we're really learning to locate I-ness, and in these two traditions in particular that I'm most familiar with, in our heart, and to know ourselves just simply as pure loving awareness, as simple, heartful presence, and to know ourselves as presence beyond any labels, any roles, any identities. And so, yeah, I would just invite those of you listening to take a moment, you might gently place a hand over your heart, over the center of your chest. That's space where the physical heart beats and the breath rises and falls. and take a moment to allow your awareness to sink, to drop from mental space down into heart space. And sometimes to awaken that sense of heart space, I like to invite people to imagine with the eye of their heart the face of a beloved. It could be a beloved pet, a beloved cat purring in your lap. It could be a beloved spouse or partner or child or grandchild, even of a beloved place in nature, but it's a beloved in whose presence your heart opens in gratitude, your heart opens in love and to breathe through the presence of that beloved. and to notice what shifts in the space of your heart. as you envision them with the eye of your heart to sense the love or gratitude or tenderness that awakens. And then gently as you are ready and able. Allow yourself to release this devotional focal point, this face of the beloved, and to remain simply in the qualities that have awakened. Now just love loving. gratitude, gratitudeing. And we can learn little by little to anchor our seat of selfhood here in this heart space and this simple loving awareness and to know ourselves as that. And we can take this very practically into our relationships in the world. What happens when in a tense moment with a coworker or a family member, I shift my awareness from my mental center into my heart space. And we find that we tend to be less reactive, less quick to say a biting or a cutting word if awareness is in that space of the heart. And so for me, it's where contemplative practice also becomes practical and relational. We carry this with us into the world Mevlevi Rumi. who's the founder of the Sufi tradition I'm a part of. He says that the greatest love is love with no object that we first start learning to love this object or that object, and, but more and more we learn to just be loved. not to be in love with this or that, but to be love. And at the same time, all of the little loves along the way are all stepping stones into that love and are expressions, actually, instantiations of that love. So it's not this love versus that love, but all love held in that one great love.
Paul - 00:34:29:
Thank you so much, both of you, for sharing those practices. I didn't feel, I felt like it was critical to explore the path of love. and interspirituality with an actual experience of it. So thank you for offering that to our listeners. I wanna shift gears a little bit and all of us are living on this path of love. It's an ongoing journey. And we're also living at this interesting time in American history and human history. And I wanted to ask you to kind of lift out of your inner life and take a view of our country and the social, economic and political systems that we're living in. which are, some think are rooted in a sense of division and greed and hatred and our country feels like it's unraveling. And so as revolutionary optimists living on the path of love and embracing inter-spirituality, How do we go about even exploring the idea of a peaceful love revolution of our social and economic and political systems at this moment in history.
Matthew - 00:35:42:
You know, I see. Moses? Jesus? Muhammad? All of the great founders of our great lineages of wisdom. as contemplative activists or as social justice mystics, they hold together this balance of contemplation and action. And our contemplative work, our work on our hearts and our work on ourselves, it's never simply contemplative navel gazing. It's always for the sake of the becoming of the world, for the becoming of the collective. And for me, when- Let's say you, Paul, when you do the work of opening your heart, let's say I'm having a bad day and my heart has like contracted and is closed. And then you walk into the room and you are in radiant contemplative spaciousness and your open heart can actually impact me and allow my heart to begin to soften and open. And so as we increase our, our personal contemplative coherence, it actually has a social impact. And we're together, we're opening our hearts for the sake of opening the heart of the world. And so I think contemplation is always, it's never individual, it's always corporate and collective, it's always for the sake of the whole. And when we begin doing that work of liberating our own consciousness from the internal structures of oppression that would limit the flow of love, then we become aware of the structures and systems in our world that also inhibit the flow of love. And we want to work for the transformation of society, of our social systems. And so I think these two projects of contemplation and social justice, they are mutually implicating, they implicate each other. Because as you go in, one of my favorite contemplative teachers, Beatrice Bruteau, she says that when you go in, you discover that it is the nature of being to radiate love, which then sends you back out. And so the inward journey necessarily results in that outward journey. And so at the same time, the outer work of transforming the world, I think it needs this contemplative grounding because too often in our activist circles, we can burn out, we can become angry, we can become dualistic, and we can start replicating some of the patterns and energy dynamics that we actually want to transform and alleviate in the world. There's been a lot of language, I think, in recent years about really channeling our anger and using our anger and our anger at oppression and our anger at injustice. And I get really nervous, I've found, with some of this language because, yes, our anger can be really righteous prophetic indignation, but I think we have to purify our anger and work from a place of compassion. And I find that under anger, if I sit in my anger at the injustices in the world, I find beneath that anger, there's sadness and pain. And if I sit with that pain and that sadness, I find that beneath that is, in fact, love and compassion. And I wouldn't feel the anger or the sadness if it were not for the love. And so I always want to do the work of purifying my anger, which may be righteous and holy, so that I can channel it from a place of compassion. Because spewing more anger into an angry and divided world isn't a solution, right? And so, I think these two things definitely go together and that they need each other and that the movement towards contemplative retreat, whether it's a period of practice in the day or maybe a retreat that one makes annually, those periods of retreat and contemplative practice, they're never for the sake of escape from the world, they're preparation for a fuller, deeper, and freer engagement with the needs of the world.
Paul - 00:40:13:
Thank you. Yes, Rabbi.
Shefa - 00:40:15:
Yeah, I think that's beautifully said, Matthew. I, what I wanna just add, is that as I step into the world. I want to carry not answers, but questions. and the questions that I hold is how do I- that I encounter the holy texts of my tradition, and I say, how do I live this? And that's always, you know, always what I wanna do is I wanna be able to ask that question, how do I live it? And also ask the question of where am I coming from? Can I find that deepest place of love in me to be able to bring, you know. to bring my vision to the world. And again, as I said before, that I have the faith. that we all, everything that we put out, ripples out into the world. I have that faith, And that there's a choice in each moment of judgment, of fear, of love. And if I'm very, very present to each moment, I can choose wisely. And if I'm distracted, I can't choose wisely. Then I'm on automatic. So my work is to just be awake in this moment so that I could make that choice for life, for goodness, for love.
Paul - 00:41:45:
In the face of all the circumstances.
Shefa - 00:41:47:
Yeah. Whatever is happening.
Paul - 00:41:48:
You can always. Stay with that. and bring that forward. No matter what's happening in your personal life or what's happening in our country or our world. Yeah, I get that. That's really powerful. I want to challenge you both a little bit. And as you know, there's something, there's a climate emergency underway. Humans have pumped up a trillion tons of CO2. into the atmosphere over the last 150 years or so, and the planet is baking. And some people are. predicting that the There'll be massive societal disruption and collapse sea level rise, all kinds of changes are underway, and even the possibility of human extinction. not in some far off, like distant future. but within a couple of generations. So like the question I wanted to ask you is. What could an inner spiritual movement of people living. on the path of love that we have been exploring today. How could that blossom at this moment in history? So that we could explore the possibility of reducing human suffering and embracing our common humanity. And I believe humans can solve these challenges, we can solve the climate emergency. We're just so divided. There's so much hatred between us. It's not, it's gonna. take us down a path of destruction. So I want to ask what you think about all that and. How you- what you see is possible for our future. as a species.
Shefa - 00:43:25:
Well, I think what you're talking about is the possibility of us awakening. And that's really what I'm looking towards in each day of my life. I want to awaken, and through my own awakening, awaken others. And it's awakening to our interconnectedness, awakening to the preciousness of life, awakening to the sense of shared responsibility. That awakening that we do inside us. I think has its ripples out into the world. And I can only, you know, I don't know what's gonna happen and I don't know what's gonna, what could be done. I just know what I am called to. that to do each day and to say each day. And I want to say that without fear or anxiety. I want to say it with the sense that this is, This is what heals the world, what I can bring to it. And to inspire others to do the same and to believe in each other.
Paul - 00:44:40:
Reverend Matthew?
Matthew - 00:44:43:
You know, I think sometimes in the way we language the problem, the crisis, the crises that we are facing right now on a global and a planetary scale, yes, massive ecological collapse, species extinction, human suffering, suffering of our fellow species and creatures who share the planet with us, we speak of, we can solve the problem or we can save the planet. And I think there's a note of human hubris in that kind of languaging. I think we might actually need to let the planet save us. You know, it's not that we need to do more, we need to stop doing so much. It's not that we need better, greener, smarter technology, maybe we need less. And so I think sometimes We human beings tend to center ourselves. And as Shefa said, I don't know what the way out is, and I don't know what will happen. but I do believe that our best hope. And gentling the suffering that is to come is in gentling ourselves and walking a path of love together and learning to move at the pace of nature and the pace of the planet again. And I, in fact, I comfort myself with. The reminder that human beings aren't the center of the story. Love is the center of the story. And I do believe that the planet that the universe is a disclosure of the heart of God, that divine mystery is unfolding and expressing itself through creation. and that unfolding is essentially an unfolding of love. If love is the heart of reality, is the heart of God, it is love that is working itself out and expressing itself here in the world, here in time. And if human beings drop the ball on the unfolding expression of love and we happen to go extinct, well, that's not the end of the story. Maybe the dolphins will pick up the call and they'll continue the unfolding of love. And if this planet eventually blips out, which we know it will, our sun won't burn forever. Well, then new worlds will go on unfolding the mystery and unfolding love. At the same time, I am optimistic that on the other side of whatever collapse may be coming, there's hope for human beings, there's hope that we can continue love's unfolding. And I think part of our work is to learn to be embedded again in local community and sustainable ways of living that we've got to reconnect with the earth and reconnect with each other. And there's so much isolation happening now. And these technologies, which we would hope would interconnect us in some ways, I think, are furthering our isolation. And we need to be able to touch each other and touch the earth and get our hands in the dirt. And so I am hopeful by nature. And I do think that, this path of love and contemplative work is. at the heart of what we need to do and facing what is to come. And I think if we root and ground ourselves in love then we know in the moment how to respond. You know, there's a deeper wisdom that can flow and respond through us. And, I think that's where, yeah, a huge amount of my hope lies. It's not in coming up with a solution to solve the crisis. The crisis is here, we now have to walk through it. We have to make the passage and then see what emerges through the winnowing that is sure to come as we go through this passage. And I often remember Barbara Marx Hubbard's words that our crisis is a birth. you know, that our crisis is a birth. And, um, birth can be painful, it can be bloody, it can be messy, and yet it's actually life that's emerging. And so perhaps this crisis is a birth for a new kind of humanity.
Paul - 00:49:04:
Thank you both so much for joining the podcast today. And it was riveting and inspiring. And I think you provided our listeners with wisdom and truth and the opportunity to live the path of love and to explore that in their own lives. So thank you for joining us today. And have a great day.
Shefa - 00:49:23:
Thanks for having me.
Matthew - 00:49:26:
Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Shefa.